Breaking into the crime game isn’t easy, but every month, a few brave and talented souls make a go of the mystery racket. For readers, there are few experiences so thrilling as finding a new author whose career is just beginning and whose work promises years of enjoyment to come. But it’s sometimes hard to find those debuts. That’s where we come in. We’re scouring the shelves in search of auspicious debuts and recommending the very best for your reading pleasure.
Dervla McTiernan, The Ruin (Penguin)
Set in Galway, this searing debut brings together procedural and psychological thriller for a fascinating portrait of small-town Ireland and its big city problems. Addiction, suicide, corruption, and desperation all play their part in this intricate, unsettling noir. Ireland’s experiencing an incredible new wave of women crime writers, spearheaded by the indomitable Tana French, and Dervla McTiernan is a fine new addition to a growing scene.
Gale Massey, The Girl From Blind River (Crooked Lane)
In this debut rural noir, Massey takes us into a struggling town in upstate New York, full of sordid, small-town secrets. A young woman weighed down by her family’s history of petty criminality wants to escape to the big city, but when she makes a series of poor decisions to fund her new life, she ends up more trapped than ever before.
Zoje Stage, Baby Teeth (St. Martin’s)
Zoje Stage’s Baby Teeth is notable both for Stage’s uncomfortable portrayal of childhood amorality and for her ability to capture a child’s view of the world. A mother and daughter engage in a battle of wills when the daughter stops speaking, in a narrative that harkens back to such classics as The Bad Seed and We Need to Talk about Kevin.
Elizabeth Klehfoth, All These Beautiful Strangers (William Morrow)
Klehfoth’s debut effort is an exceedingly engaging read, a journey through a world of privilege, rivalries, and secrets. Years after a mysterious family tragedy, Grace Fairchild is sent to a New England boarding school and run through a ringer of cliques, clubs, and rituals, pressured into a complex, months-long game that becomes crueler and more psychologically troubling as the weeks pass. Comparisons to The Secret History and Les Liaisons dangereuses / Cruel Intentions are inevitable, but Klehfoth is telling her own, slyly subversive version of the story.
James Brydon, The Moment Before Drowning (Akashic Books)
Brydon’s The Moment Before Drowning is one of the season’s most remarkable debuts and the launch of a complex and truly memorable protagonist, Captain Jacques le Garrec, a lion of the French Resistance, now disgraced by his intelligence service in Algeria and returned to his hometown in Brittany, where he’s promptly charged with investigating a cold case murder. Le Garrec has stepped directly out of a Jean-Pierre Melville film and into a seaside murder mystery, a noir and ambiguous figure setting out to right wrongs in a world ever more unknowable.
Christopher Huang, A Gentleman’s Murder (Inkshares)
The first novel from Singapore-born, Montreal-based architect Christopher Huang is a locked room traditional mystery that does justice to its inspirations, even as it aids in the genres continuing evolution. Set in the 1920s, A Gentleman’s Murder takes place predominantly in a London gentleman’s club for soldiers only, patronized by haunted aristocrats trying to forget the horrors of the first world war. When a murder at the club is tied to a mysterious wrong from the past, then amateur sleuth and club member Lieutenant Eric Peterkin must uncover his fellow club members’ darkest secrets, and in the process, relive some of his wartime traumas.
Evgenia Citkowitz, The Shades (Norton)
This haunted tale follows a couple mourning the loss of their teenage daughter. When their son heads off to boarding school and a mysterious young woman strikes up a relationship the couple, they find themselves happily distracted from their loss, yet both the family and the new interloper have secrets of their own. This is a classic “dysfunctional family haunted by ghosts is disrupted by interloper” plot, and harkens back to such ghostly thrillers as du Maurier’s Don’t Look Back.
Ali Carter, A Brush with Death (One World)
A Brush With Death is the first in a charming new series about pet portraitist and amateur sleuth Susie Mahl, and the debut novel from cyclist and animal enthusiast Ali Carter. Based on some interviews we’ve read, Ali Carter shares a wicked and rather raunchy sense of humor with her protagonist.
Jennifer Wolfe, Watch the Girls (Grand Central)
Jennifer Wolfe’s debut joins (and complements) a host of other mysteries to explore the pitfalls of celebrity, although in Watch the Girls, Wolfe moves one step further and investigates voyeurism itself – both as a problem, and as a manifestation of curiosity. A former child star creates a webseries in which she plays a sleuth. As a publicity stunt, she heads to a small town with rumors of hauntings and a violent history, and she must put her TV skills to work in this playful and creepy meta-narrative that blurs boundaries between the real and the surreal.
Joanna Luloff, Remind Me Again What Happened (Algonquin Books)
Luloff’s debut reminds us why gaslighting stories are so very terrifying. In Joanna Luloff’s deceptively skillful debut Remind Me Again What Happened, a woman wakes up in the hospital with no memory of how she got there, and when her husband fills in the story, the details don’t quite ring true.Remind Me Again What Happened actually came out at the tail end of June, but we wanted to make sure we didn’t miss a chance to draw attention to a scintillating new voice in the genre.
