“And it means the world to Mike. I’m worried about him. He’s been really… angry. I’ve never seen him like this.”

“You don’t worry about Mike when he’s mad,” Shep said. “You worry about him when he’s quiet.”

Mike Wingate, the hero of You’re Next, by Gregg Hurwitz, doesn’t know his real last name. As a boy of four he was abandoned by his father at a playground, with a promise that he’d come back to reclaim him someday. Mike waited, but he never returned.

Growing up in a group home, Mike learned to survive. He and his friend Shep formed a simple code: “Endurance. Loyalty.” Shep becomes a criminal but Mike, after a brief term in prison, goes straight. He marries and fathers a daughter. Eventually he becomes a property developer. He builds a “green” community that gets his picture in the papers with the governor of California.

And that’s when everything starts to go horribly wrong.

Someone has been looking for Mike all his life. Someone who wants him dead, along with his daughter. Mike will see his perfect life shattered, and he’ll have to call on Shep to help him protect his family and solve a decades-old mystery involving land and bloodlines and merciless greed.

The plot is Hitchcockian, the stakes high, the tension tight enough to snap steel. Honestly, these novels by Gregg Hurwitz are almost more than I can handle (but I’m kind of a wimp, as you know). Just when you think the danger can’t get worse, it does. Just when you think the mystery is solved, a new wrinkle appears. I was scared and I was moved. When it was done, I bought a Bruce Beckham novel to read next. I can’t handle too much of this all at once.

Cautions for language and violence. There are a couple of political barbs, but they point both ways. Highly recommended, unless you have a weak heart.