Let me now acknowledge having done what thriller writers love doing: burying the lead. It’s “Disclaimer” that turns out to be the “Gone Girl” of the season, even if every publicist with a thriller about a troubled marriage is making that claim. This debut novel by Renée Knight has a great opening hook: Filmmaker finds an unfamiliar book near her bed, then opens it to see it’s a barely fictionalized account of the worst thing she’s ever done. When she looks at the disclaimer page, the part about its being based on no persons living or dead has been crossed out. In red ink.

Beyond that, “Disclaimer” doesn’t begin all that well. It takes a while to show its real strength, which lies in plotting, not prose. As in “Gone Girl,” the author uses contrasting points of view, and we know somebody’s hiding something. Part of the narration comes from the spooky old widower who is using the book as a weapon. We don’t know how the book’s separate pieces and time frames fit together — until we do. Once the gears start moving, Ms. Knight switches her pace to a gallop and keeps the sinister promises her narrative made at the start.

“The Royal We” is for readers who prefer their love affairs straight up, without poison. It’s smart, funny fluff from the fashion-obsessed duo known as the Fug Girls — Heather Cocks and Jessica Morgan. (Their website, gofugyourself.com, is best enjoyed whenever any well-known person goes out in public with clothes on.) And it’s a roman à clef with inevitable role models: a certain heir to the British throne and his tall, beautiful, fun-loving wife. “The Royal We” makes her an American and has them meet cute on her first day at Oxford. He offers to carry her luggage. She gazes unawares at a portrait of one of his ancestors. “British monarchs do love their syphilis,” she says, and it’s not quite love at first sight. At the end of the book’s opening chapter, she watches him thronged by marriage-minded British aristocrats, waves her drink at one of them and declares, “Well, nobody has anything to fear from me.”

Image Credit... Aaron Byrd

The Fug Girls write like the pros they’ve become. Shanna Mahin’s “Oh! You Pretty Things” sounds more like a first novel, but it buzzes with hard-won wisdom. It describes the life of a personal assistant to Los Angeles celebrities, a line of work Ms. Mahin knows firsthand. This would be sheer voyeurism — which also has its place on summer reading lists, let’s face it — but the book is smarter than that. It’s insightful in illustrating how even a self-described “easy” star can get more and more difficult if given everything he or she wants. More specs on a Starbucks order than on a new kitchen? Sure, the joke’s been done to death. But it doesn’t get old because of the real, coddled craziness that lies beneath it, and because real people get paid to be on the receiving end of this treatment.

Let’s turn at long last to the sine qua non of beach reading: water. William Finnegan’s memoir, “Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life,” is the muscle book in this category. From a ’50’s boyhood in California and then Hawaii, when he managed to surf even before school, not to mention after, Mr. Finnegan knew this would be his abiding passion. But he cannot have imagined how far he’d be able to roam. “Barbarian Days” spans early years fighting off Hawaiian bullies to exotic adventures in Tavarua, Fiji, which he sees change from an undiscovered paradise to, later, a private resort for the rich touted on the cover of Surfer magazine.

Surfing is Topic A here, but it inevitably connects with politics (when Mr. Finnegan taught in Cape Town, South Africa, in 1981, students boycotted his classes to protest apartheid), environmental issues (he sees great surf spots both created and destroyed by human enterprise) and much more. Still, he has been in very few places with coastlines where he hasn’t found a way to surf, no matter what else is going on around him.