Summer is on us, and with it comes one of the best and busiest moments of the year for crime, mystery, and thriller readers. We’ll be here all season helping you sort through those TBR piles, and to start we’re bringing you our picks for the very best new novels coming out in June. Below you’ll find New York City noir, international intrigue, domestic suspense, and plenty of thrills to keep you reading through those long summer nights.
Patrick Hoffman, Clean Hands (Atlantic)
Hoffman is one of the foremost practitioners in crime fiction today, a skilled storyteller who weaves together complex narratives to give readers an illuminating look at the darkened links binding global crime and corruption together. (We named his last effort, Every Man a Menace, one of the ten best crime novels of the decade, so you know we’re serious about this.) In Clean Hands, he zeroes in on the world of big law, as a cache of lost documents ensnares a high-priced firm in a blackmail scandal and a young lawyer and an ex-CIA fixer try to fix the mess only to wade deeper into the abyss. This is a dark and nuanced novel that dissects financial crime at the highest levels. –Dwyer Murphy, CrimeReads Editor-in-Chief
Lucy Foley, The Guest List (William Morrow)
Worst. Wedding. Ever. When the guests begin to arrive at a remote Irish island for the fabulous wedding of a golden couple, things of course take a turn downhill. Old resentments emerge, new hatreds grow, and a storm traps everyone on the island until bloody resolution is achieve. For those who like Ruth Ware, Lucy Foley has a similarly intoxicating blend of psychological thriller and gothic funhouse. The Guest List is THE pageturner you need to get through this very long summer of our discontent. –Molly Odintz, CrimeReads Senior Editor
Robyn Harding, The Swap (Gallery)
A new book from Harding is always a treat, in part because she is one of the few crime writers I can think of who doesn’t only theorize her characters having sex, she writes actual sex scenes. Thus the swap of the title is exactly what you would think of if I said key parties or swingers: two women, best friends, sleep with each other’s husbands on a night they have also all indulged in some powerful psychedelic drugs. But while plain Jamie agonizes over her night with her glamorous best friend Freya’s husband, Max, Freya is not done playing games with Jamie and her husband, Brian. Closely observing the scene and obsessed with Freya is local teenager Low, who offers her photography skills to aspiring Instagram celeb Freya just so she can spend time with her. –Lisa Levy, CrimeReads Contributing Editor
Rosalie Knecht, Vera Kelly is Not A Mystery (Tin House)
Knecht’s Who Is Vera Kelly? was one of the most invigorating, innovative espionage novels in recent memory, following mid-century spies in Argentina and across the Cold War landscape. Now Knecht is having a go at the private detective novel, a development that should be extremely heartening to PI aficionados. In this follow-up, the CIA-trained spy is back Stateside without a job or a girlfriend and so falls into the private detective business, as one does. The usual globetrotting ensues, as well as beautiful startling passages that will stop you in your tracks. –DM
Gene Wolf, Interlibrary Loan (Tor)
Interlibrary Loan has a novel premise—in the distant future, you can check out not only books from your local library, but also flesh-and-blood clones of your favorite authors. Of course, such a system is ripe for exploitation, we soon learn, as the main character, the clone of a detective novelist, is checked out of the library by an unstable heiress who wants to use him as a private investigator to track down her errant husband, who has his own prurient and experimental plans for the clones in his care. –MO
Jessica Barry, Don’t Turn Around (Harper)
Barry’s Freefall was one of last year’s most promising debuts, and she more than delivers with the follow-up, a riveting thriller that starts tense and never lets up. Two women meet on a semi-abandoned stretch of road in New Mexico and come to understand that the lone car there may be hunting them, and that some dark secrets may bind them together. Barry crafts a truly unsettling, powerful story. –DM
Nicola Maye Goldberg, Nothing Can Hurt You (Bloomsbury)
As one of the bookseller blurbs attests, this one simply screams Netflix original series. It’s moody, it’s dark, and it’s full of the same kinds of tough, angry, scarred (and of course beautiful) women that made Sharp Objects so compelling. Well, not as scarred as the women in Sharp Objects….hard to be. Nothing Can Hurt You is loosely based on the real life murder of a college student by her boyfriend. In the book, the boyfriend gets off by being rich and using the fact that he was on acid as his defense—temporary insanity—and the book is told by a kaleidoscope of people on the periphery of the murder; one is a courtroom reporter, another is an agoraphobe who finds the body; another is in rehab with the killer; another is the former best friend of the murder, and another is a teenager obsessed with an imprisoned serial killer. –MO
Ameera Patel, Outside the Lines (Catalyst)
In this coke-fueled thrill-ride through the underworld of Joburg, characters face difficult decisions and try to find some humanity, even as the quest for money and the need to meet family expectations tear them apart. South Africa is one of the great hot spots for crime fiction these days, and we can’t wait to see more from Ameera Patel. –MO
Heather Young, The Distant Dead (William Morrow)
Young’s followup to The Lost Girls is a searing, powerful story about a teacher’s death in a small Nevada town and the sweeping reverberations of a community in grief. A middle school boy finds a burned body in the desert to start this story, and the remains are soon identified as belonging to a teacher who recently quit his university job to come teach math in this desert waystation. The teacher was a newcomer, but his death reveals several fault lines in the town, as Young paints a vivid portrait of a charged, ominous landscape and the intersecting lives carrying on in that desert hold. –DM
Lauren A. Forry, They Did Bad Things (Arcade Crimewise)
As we’re all learning during the pandemic, roommates can be the worst. I gobbled this one up (partially because, like all of us, I’m currently obsessed with books about lots of people crowded into small spaces), and man, is this one satisfying. Five former college roommates who once shared a party house gather together at a run-down mansion being used as a B&B. Things start to get weird as soon as they get there and discover that the mansion’s interior has been turned into an exact replica of their old college house, down to the cigarette burns in the ratty couch, and get even weirder as flashbacks slowly reveal the terrible events from decades before that bind them together. –MO
