Nobody wants to think there might be SOMEONE IN THE ATTIC (355 pp., Pamela Dorman Books). Andrea Mara’s latest book opens in Dublin as a woman named Anya finishes a bottle of wine, settles into her bath and hears an ominous rustling overhead. She doesn’t stand a chance. “Thirty seconds later, it’s over,” Mara writes.

Does this unfortunate episode have anything to do with the viral video campaign for a TV show called “The Loft,” in which shadowy figures hide out in people’s attics and then wander surreptitiously through their houses?

The internet is full of copycat videos, but it’s hard to separate the real from the fake, especially when you’re a parent and not skilled in the ways of social media. “I’m not even allowed on TikTok,” 9-year-old Luca says when his mother, Julia — a friend of Anya, the now-deceased woman from the bath — shows him a video apparently taken from inside their own house and asks him how it got there. “How would I know anything?”

But odd things keep happening, and it’s necessary for Julia to look to the unsavory episodes in her past — the long-ago death of a high-school classmate, a debacle at work, the reasons behind her family’s return to Dublin after two decades in San Diego, her toxic friendship with Anya — for answers.

Mara is a best seller in her native Ireland, and she lays out the pieces of the puzzle with diabolical wit, some good suspense and an unexpected note of sentimentality.

T.J. Newman’s latest seconds-from-disaster adventure takes place not in her usual airplane setting — although it opens as a pilot suffers a fatal heart attack aboard a Boeing 757 — but somewhere far more alarming: the Clover Hill nuclear power station in Waketa, Minn. (pop. 900).

The titular WORST CASE SCENARIO (317 pp., Little, Brown) is this: The plane plummets from the sky and hits the power station. Alas, all 295 people on board are killed, but that’s not the worst of it. I don’t know a lot about nuclear-plant technology, but when someone says, “Ethan, we got significant structural damage to the south side of the building housing the R2 fuel pool,” even I can tell that is not a good thing.

The stakes are high. If they can’t fix what they need to fix, one official warns, the entire plant will melt down, creating “an uncontrollable spread of invisible, toxic, cancer-causing radioactive particulates” that would contaminate “everything we touched, ate, drank and breathed for … for forever.”

To put it another way, “it would be an extinction-level event.”

Newman, who was a flight attendant before she became a best-selling author, stretches out the action in an almost painfully suspenseful way. At the same time, she expertly pulls at our heartstrings, focusing on a handful of characters making life-or-death decisions against this larger backdrop.

There’s Joss, a “nuclear-incident first responder” who lives in Waketa and who used to be in love with the guy who runs the plant. There’s Steve, the plant’s fire chief, a single father desperate to connect with his son.

And there’s Dani, who risks everything to save a 5-year-old boy trapped in a car dangling from a bridge shattered by a piece of the plane. (Trigger warning: Not all these people will survive.)

Was I weeping in a public place as I reached the end of this shameless act of literary manipulation? Well, yes.

Annie never thought she would find happiness, yet here she is marrying Mark, the man of her dreams. The wedding is a little weird — her mother is drunk; she and the groom barely know each other — but worst of all is the craggy-faced man gazing malevolently from the back of the room.

“He regards me now with a cool, detached stare, as though he is looking right through me and has seen something that he doesn’t like,” Annie thinks. When she confronts him, he claims to be a friend of Mark’s father, but nobody admits to inviting him.

A.E. Gauntlett’s THE STRANGER AT THE WEDDING (276 pp., Holt) seems at first to be a straightforward treatise on the foolishness of marrying a man in haste. “I think we need to talk,” Mark says to her on their wedding night.

Neither of them, it turns out, has been fully honest about the past. In Mark’s case, there are worrying details about his drinking, his violent tendencies and his past marriage to Hope, who walked out on him one day years earlier and hasn’t been seen since.

In Annie’s case — well, those details are murkier and perhaps more interesting.

The book moves forward between past and present, reflecting multiple perspectives. Don’t be put off by the sometimes breathless writing. Gauntlett is a master of misdirection, buffeting us around as he swerves around corners and makes sudden U-turns.

Is this book more like “Rebecca” or more like “Gone Girl”? More important, what’s wrong with Mark? (Is that even the right question to ask?) We won’t know until the truly chilling ending.