Each month the CrimeReads editors make their selections for the best upcoming fiction in crime, mystery, and thrillers.
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Ashley Audrain, The Push
(Pamela Dorman)
In Ashley Audrain’s slow-burn suspense thriller about motherhood, Blythe Connor doesn’t have much of an idea of how things are supposed to go–after all, her own mother left when she was a young child. She’s determined to be the perfect mother she never had, but she can’t ignore the worries caused by her eldest’s many outbursts. Something seems…off, about the child, something that she’s never felt about her darling youngest. As her checked-out husband reassures her that everything is fine, Blythe becomes increasingly certain that things are far from okay. –Molly Odintz, CrimeReads Senior Editor
Paraic O’Donnell, The House on Vesper Sands
(Tin House)
O’Donnell has crafted a truly marvelous and beguiling vision of Victorian London, a mystery and a supernatural exploration, and a meditation on love and knowledge and the passage of time rolled into one captivating story about an unlikely pair of would-be sleuths driven by very different motivations to follow the connective tissue between a series of deaths. The House on Vesper Sands is poised to be one of the year’s breakout novels and confirms O’Donnell as a major talent. –Dwyer Murphy, CrimeReads Editor-in-Chief
Chris Harding Thornton, Pickard County Atlas
(MCD)
In the midst of a heat wave in 1978, the residents of Pickard County, Nebraska, are finding it hard to keep a cool head. When the family of a long-missing child decides to finally erect a headstone, it provides not comfort but catalyst to the townspeople, as long-simmering rivalries and resentments spark into full-size wars. Chris Harding Thornton has crafted a lyrical ode to a harsh landscape that deserves its place in the canon of rural noir. –MO
Una Mannion, A Crooked Tree
(Harper)
People have been raving about Una Mannion’s debut novel and, by the sounds of it, with good reason. Billed as “a portrait of a fractured American family dealing with the fallout of one summer evening gone terribly wrong,” it’s a suspenseful coming-of-age tale, set in rural Pennsylvania in the summer of 1981, that begins with an overwhelmed widow ordering one of her daughters to get out of the car and walk home… I have already pre-ordered my copy. –Dan Sheehan, Book Marks Editor
Victoria Gosling, Before the Ruins
(Henry Holt)
Gosling’s atmospheric thriller is centered on a fabulous, abandoned estate, where four strangers on the cusp of adulthood once spent a magical summer exploring, bonding, and playing increasingly dangerous games. Decades later, one is missing, and the others must reopen old wounds in order to track down their errant friend. Gosling uses her richly ruinous setting as a jumping off point to examine class, innocence, morality, and loss. –MO
Kwei Quartey, Sleep Well, My Lady
(Soho)
In Kwei Quartey’s second book to feature Emma Djan, the young private eye is hired to investigate the murder of famed fashion designer Lady Araba. The killing was pinned on her chauffeur, but the victim’s beloved aunt is still searching for answers, and she suspects both Lady Araba’s lover and father of knowing more than they’ve let on. Corruption and blackmail have prevented the police from adequately investigating the crime, and it’s up to Emma and her agency to find the true culprit. Quartey’s work brings vivid life to his Ghanaian characters and setting, while reminding us that no matter the setting, motivations for murder are the same everywhere. –MO
Rachel Hawkins, The Wife Upstairs
(St Martins)
A dog walker meets a brooding recent widower and gets involved in a tumultuous relationship, quickly becoming the subjects of the town’s gossip, where the wife’s disappearance is also frequently discussed, along with the disappearance of her best friend, both lost in a nearby lake. What are those thumps she’s hearing from somewhere in the house? And what really happened to her new beau’s former lover? The ending was genuinely surprising, and I don’t say that a lot. –MO
Eliza Jane Brazier, If I Disappear
(Berkley)
Sera works a dead-end job, has few friends, and spends her spare time obsessively listening to her favorite true crime podcast. When the host, Rachel, goes missing, Sera sets off to find her, and in the process, to shed her old self. She heads to the isolated California ranch that served as homestead and recording studio for the missing investigator, and gets hired on by Rachel’s creepy family to help out for the summer. Soon enough, Sera finds herself out of her depth as she begins to understand the dark secrets behind her bucolic new crash pad. –MO
Ellery Lloyd, People Like Her
(Harper)
Not since reading Gone Girl have I found such a satisfyingly furious speech tucked in the midst of a thriller. Ellery Lloyd is the pen name for married couple Collette Lyons and Paul Vlitos, and something about knowing this book was written by a loving couple makes the gleeful cynicism of People Like Her that much more delightful. In this snarky take on the influencer era, a mommy blogger is being stalked by an angry fan, but People Like Her is much more than a tale of obsession—it also lays bare the contrast between curated screen lives and the messy truth underneath. –MO
Josh Stallings, Tricky
(Agora)
Josh Stallings has long been one of the rawest and most authentic voices in crime writing, and his new work continues to use genre conventions to tell tough, emotional stories. In Tricky, a detective is assigned to a case with no easy answers. A man with brain injuries is suspected of a murder based on his violent past, despite having a child’s intellect, and Stallings grapples with heady philosophical questions in the course of the investigation, as we wonder if people can truly ever change. –MO
