Both books hinge on children who go missing. For Pittard, it's Nora Lindell, a red-haired, golden-skinned high school junior who disappears on Halloween. For Braunstein, it seems like half her cast acts out a cascading multigenerational procession of recurring runaways and kidnapping.

Kevin Brockmeier's got a talent for a sucker punch, working quickly and carefully with a well-sketched character or a chance encounter before opening up and drawing blood.

After all, adventure stories provide easy structure.

Here are 10 novels — and moments in them — that pay off impressively.

The herd mentality, the state-of-nature bullying, the arbitrary cruelties of adults, a body that disappoints and betrays you — the only honest thing anyone can say is that you'll grow out of it, and grow into yourself.

Eric Gansworth's novel Extra Indians (Milkweed, Nov. 1) opens with the epigraph "THIS IS A TRUE STORY," which comes from Fargo's opening credits. It's important because Extra Indians starts out by telling the tale of a trucker who picks up a Japanese girl out searching for Fargo's missing treasure. Having taken the movie's fictional disclaimer as fact, she ends the night outside, in the northern Minnesota winter, dead from exposure.

Tom McCarthy's C | Nigel Farndale's The Blasphemer | Rick Bass' Nashville Chrome

Alejandro Zambra's The Private Lives of Trees | Scarlett Thomas' One Tragic Universe | Tao Lin's Richard Yates

The Wolves of Fairmount Park by Dennis Tafoya | The Thieves of Manhattan by Adam Langer | Savages by Don Winslow

David Nicholls' One Day | Alasdair Gray's Old Men In Love | Shane Jones' Light Boxes | Jean-Christophe Valtat's 03 | Alain Mabanckou's Broken Glass