August brings another bumper crop of excellent crime fiction, and we’ll be here all month helping you sort those reading stacks. In the coming weeks, thriller readers will be diving into enthralling debuts from the likes of David Heska Wanbli Weiden and Alex Pavesi while also enjoying new installments from established masters Denise Mina, Carl Hiaasen, and James Lee Burke. Below you’ll find our editors’ picks for the best new novels of the month.
You can find last month’s selections for best new fiction here, and if you want a full breakdown of the summer revisit our list of the season’s most anticipated books.
Lawrence Osborne, The Glass Kingdom (Hogarth)
Osborne is among the finest pure writers at work today, and at this point he’s more than earned the Graham Greene comparisons. In his newest, The Glass Kingdom, he returns to a scenario that will enthuse admirers of his The Ballad of a Small Player: a mysterious fugitive settles into uncanny, luxurious surroundings in an Asian city. Here, the city is Bangkok, and the fugitive in question is a young American woman with a mysterious source of funds and a new address in a tony Bangkok apartment building. She soon taps into an odd community of expats from across the globe, all confined to the building’s louche surroundings, with too many secrets to count among them. –Dwyer Murphy, CrimeReads Editor-in-Chief
David Heska Wanbli Weiden, Winter Counts (Ecco)
Winter Counts is one of 2020’s most exciting debut novels, the start of what we hope will be a long and many-volumed career in crime fiction. Meet Virgil Wounded Horse, the man who takes on the jobs traditional law enforcement can’t handle on the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota. He’s determined to find out how heroin is flooding the reservation, a crusade that takes him across the parched, corrupted landscapes of the American West and after organized crime figures fueling the systemic injustices already in place on the reservation. This is urgent, hard-hitting crime fiction that will keep you reading. –DM
Denise Mina, The Less Dead (Mulholland)
In Denise Mina’s latest, a doctor heads to Glasgow to meet her birth family for the first time. But her family doesn’t just want to form a bond. They need her help to solve her mother’s murder. Her aunt is convinced that the cops knew who did it and covered up the crime, and sets her hopes on the doctor’s ability to uncover the decades-old truth, no matter how difficult the task may be. –Molly Odintz, CrimeReads Senior Editor
James Lee Burke, A Private Cathedral (Simon and Schuster)
James Lee Burke’s novels have always had a spiritual side. That’s part of what makes the long-running Dave Robicheaux series so appealing to readers, that and Burke has the poetic gifts to match the otherworldly musings his Louisiana lawman occasionally finds himself dwelling on. The latest installment is the furthest yet Robicheaux has wanted into the other side, as he finds himself in the middle of a dark, generations-long feud between two criminal families, and also finds himself hunted and hunting a mysterious assassin who seems more specter than man. –DM
Araminta Hall, Imperfect Women (MCD)
Hall’s latest twisty psychological thriller takes us into the complex relationship between two old friends after one is found murdered. Hall’s narrator knows that her friend was having an affair. What else is she hiding? Imperfect Women is soon to be adapted into a tv series starring Elisabeth Moss, and you’ll want to read this spell-binding thriller first. –MO
Nelson George, Darkest Hearts (Akashic)
We’re big fans of music mysteries here at CrimeReads, so I’m psyched for the new Nelson George. George’s bodyguard-turned-talent manager D Hunter is living it up in Los Angeles after making the cross-coastal switch from NYC (and isn’t that what we all wish we’d done this year?) when one of his acts signs a sponsorship deal with a liquor company with a rather problematic CEO. Meanwhile, a dead body in Brooklyn turns up with connections to D and his hit man friend Ice, and a human trafficking ring in London being investigated by D’s sometimes collaborator takes things international for a complex mystery that should serve as the perfect quarantine distraction. –MO
Hank Phillippi Ryan, The First to Lie (Forge)
Reporter and crime writer Hank Phillippi Ryan weaves a crafty mystery in The First to Lie. I love cat-and-mouse thrillers so I loved this tale of big pharma and journalistic exposes. A pharmaceutical saleswoman, an investigative reporter, and an assistant producer are all trying to find out more about a pharmaceutical company’s plan to sell tons of drugs to women desperate to get pregnant. What is the company hiding? And what are the secrets motivating these women to take on a giant corporation? –MO
Alex Pavesi, The Eighth Detective (Henry Holt)
Fans of meta-detective fiction, this one’s for you! A detective novelist who one calculated the seven most perfect permutations of “murder + detective = crime story” now lives in self-imposed isolation on a private island. But soon enough, an interloper comes knocking—in this case, a young editor who’s determined to bring his work back into print, but soon begins to uncover dark secrets in the author’s past, hidden in the pages of his masterpiece. –MO
Sarah Vaughan, Little Disasters (Atria)
A worthy follow-up to Vaughan’s hard-hitting Anatomy of a Scandal, Little Disasters is the story of an ER physician who treats the child of a friend and finds herself drawn into a spiral of doubt, suspicion, and trauma. Vaughan is proving herself a master of suspense and an author willing to probe the darkest reaches of our psyches. –DM
Carl Hiaasen, Squeeze Me (Doubleday)
If he weren’t reigning king of screwball crime fiction, you’d wonder just what in the hell Carl Hiaasen was thinking with his new book, which takes on two great Florida scourges: the current President’s demented Palm Beach demimonde and the influx of invasive pythons in Florida’s islands and waterways. Then you think it over for a while and realize that it might just be the greatest collision of worlds ever dreamed up by an immensely imaginative and enjoyable writer, one who revels in capturing and skewering the absurdities of modern society. –DM
