Steal money, torch a hotel and ride off into the sunset with another man’s wife. The things we do for love.

The wayward hero of the brilliant Irish writer Kevin Barry’s first novel set in the United States is Thomas Rourke, who at 29 is “half a genius” and “a great scholar of debt.”

In 1891, having left “haunted days” and “bad nights” back in Ireland, Rourke finds himself in Butte, “the black heart of Montana,” a bustling town full of migrants, railroads, copper mines and pollution. As a side gig, the wannabe writer pens love notes on behalf of lonely men seeking mates in the expanding American West.

One such mail-order bride, Polly Gillespie, appears at the photo studio where Rourke works as an assistant. She is newly wed to a wealthy, religious mine boss. The spark between the two “hoodlums of love” ignites a scheme to run off together on a single horse, bound for San Francisco.

Their journey is a cold-weather picaresque, replete with psychedelic mushrooms and a goodhearted but homicidal backwoods reverend.

Here, as in his previous novels and stories, Barry’s inventive prose is a sentence-by-sentence pleasure, like an alpine hike with many turns. His ear for how certain types of people converse is uncanny.

Tom and Polly are by turns jolly, brooding, idealistic and fatalistic. When bounty hunters injure Tom and hogtie Polly, we learn more about her tough-cookie past. After they are separated by violence, Tom sets out again, determined to rescue his damsel in distress. And, “if death came in the way of seeing her again in this life, that was just how it was meant to be.”

More a chamber western than a John Ford epic, “The Heart in Winter” brims with terrific (and wonderfully named) minor characters. It is a heartbreaker of a romance. — Claude Peck, Minneapolis Star Tribune

English author Sarah Pearse’s bestselling debut, “The Sanatorium,” was a locked-room thriller set in a snowbound hotel in the Swiss Alps. In her follow-up, “The Retreat,” the scene of the crime was equally remote — a luxury wellness resort on an island off England’s southwest coast.

Pearse’s latest crime novel largely unfolds in a Portuguese national park, a natural space wide enough to wander and, seemingly, get lost in. “The Wilds” is the author’s third and final outing for Detective Elin Warner. It can be read as a last installment that ties up loose ends but also as a standalone story.

Pearse introduces Kier, an English illustrator who lives a nomadic life with her American partner Zeph, a once-famous — and now infamous — chef. Kier and her brother Penn endured childhoods marred by family violence.

When Kier discovers Zeph has been tracking her and photographing his ex, she weighs leaving a partner who has become both abusive and obsessive. Then, on a trip to a national park in Portugal, she vanishes.

Several years later, Elin is on a hiking vacation in Portugal, attempting to reconnect with brother Isaac and put recent troubles behind her. After learning of Kier’s disappearance in the national park she is trekking through, she swaps recreation for investigation.

Elin retraces the missing woman’s steps, and it isn’t long before she finds that those she encounters know a lot more than they are letting on.

The settings of Pearse’s previous books rendered the proceedings creepy and claustrophobic. The author tries to replicate that sense of disquiet,but what should be suspenseful is often just atmospheric.

However, Pearse delivers on other levels. Her book is elegantly crafted and neatly plotted. The twisty narrative is stuffed with cryptic clues and unexpected developments. It makes for a satisfying thriller and a fitting swan song for a compelling creation. — Malcolm Forbes, Minneapolis Star Tribune