Poor Frank Belanger. He has barely recovered from rescuing his now beloved Amanda from the sinister Paragon Hotel in Creepers when the two of them fall into the clutches of yet another madman in David Morrell’s superb follow-up, Scavenger (Vanguard Press. 368 pages. $24.95). “I think that might be what’s going on here,” he realizes at one point. “A game.” A kind of human video game, in fact, in which Frank and Amanda find themselves pawns on a sprawling board filled with clues and traps, and where actual death replaces the usual flashing “GAME OVER” icon.

The game is Scavenger, a high-tech quest in which Amanda is forced to search for something called the Holy Sepulcher while Frank searches for Amanda. Looming over both of them is the Game Master, manipulating their lives as if they were on the wrong end of a joystick.

That’s an especially fitting analogy given that Scavenger unfolds at the breathless pace of the latest offerings for X-Box or Playstation. But the book’s brilliance lies in the metaphor of characters who wake up one morning to find their lives hopelessly dominated by forces beyond their control.

Morrell has long been ahead of the curve. And with the blisteringly original Scavenger he again redefines the road for all thriller writers who follow.

“Stromsoe was in high school when he met the boy who would someday murder his wife and son.”

There’s a reason that T. Jefferson Parker is a multiple Edgar Award Winner, but in Storm Runners (William Morrow. 370 pages. $25.95) he outdoes even himself.

Like other recent Parker heroes, ex-cop Matt Stromsoe is broken on the outside as well as on the in. Injured badly in a bombing that killed his wife and young son, Stromsoe is just putting the pieces of his life back together as a private investigator when he’s hired to guard TV weather personality Frankie Hatfield. Turns out Frankie’s visions of following in her grandfather’s footsteps as a rainmaker has run her afoul of the Department of Water and Power. And the person the DWP enlists to fix the problem is none other than the now imprisoned Latino crime boss, El Jefe Tavarez, responsible for murdering Stromsoe’s family.

“Fourteen years of chasing these guys and I’m still at it,” Stromsoe reflects. “A wife and a son murdered, an eye lost and a body blown half to bits.”

Parker’s brilliance lies in his ability to create flawed characters who must overcome themselves before they can beat down the bad guys, and he’d better make room on his trophy shelf because Storm Runners is hands-down the best mystery of the year.