Each month the CrimeReads editors make their selections for the best upcoming fiction in crime, mystery, and thrillers.
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Benjamin Wood, A Station on the Path to Something Better (Europa)
Benjamin Wood’s emotional noir about a young boy taken on a desperate road trip by his estranged father is as beautifully written as its title is long. The father promises to take his son to the set of a popular TV series he claims to work on, but the journey turns into anything but, as the father’s untruths catch up with him and he resorts to violence to salvage his self-worth. –Molly Odintz, CrimeReads Senior Editor
Melissa Ginsburg, The House Uptown (Flatiron)
In The House Uptown, Ava, a fourteen year old girl recovering from the shock of her mother’s death travels to New Orleans to live with her grandmother, Lane, a local artist who channels a good portion of the city’s more eccentric history. The intergenerational relationship is tense from the start, and soon the close quarters begin buckling under the weight of history, an evolution Ginsburg handles with real subtlety, bringing out gothic tones and hints of Southern noir that heighten and complicate the family dynamics. The House Uptown is a powerful coming-of-age novel and a thoughtful portrait of one of the world’s great cities. –Dwyer Murphy, CrimeReads Editor-in-Chief
Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Committed (Grove)
In Viet Thanh Nguyen’s highly anticipated followup to his brilliant novel of double agents and doubled identities, The Sympathizer, Nguyen’s hero has found refuge in a 1970s Paris roiling with rebellious intent and proliferating philosophies, as he finds himself trapped into working for a group of sartorially decadent gangsters and poring over the anti-colonialist works of Franz Fanon. A delightful, thrilling tale that sets us up perfectly for a third installment of the series (please please please let there be a third). –MO
Donna Leon, Transient Desires (Atlantic Monthly Press)
Make way for the thirtieth novel in Leon’s beloved, bestselling series about Commissario Guido Brunetti. Our hero is intrigued by a strange crime that falls just out of his jurisdiction, a boating accident that leaves two American women hospitalized, and causes their two male Italian companions to flee. –OR
Alexandra Andrews, Who Is Maud Dixon? (Little Brown)
It’s always hard to meet your idols, and when the bored, disenchanted young writer of Alexandra Andrew’s debut is hired to be the assistant for the famously reclusive author Maude Dixon, she’s bound to find her hero to be rather disappointing. What she doesn’t expect is the wild adventure she and her employer embark on as Maude tries to cure a stubborn case of writer’s block with some rather questionable behavior—and then disappears, allowing her protegé a chance to cast off her own identity in favor of a rather more prestigious name. But the twists and turns don’t end there… –MO
Femi Kayode, Lightseekers (Mulholland)
Lightseekers is a dynamic and feverishly excited thrill ride of a novel. Kayode’s psychologist narrator is headed to a small college town in the heart of Nigeria to investigate the murders of three students. Why were they murdered? Why did the whole town seem to participate in the killings? And what could possibly have been their motive? You will never expect the twist at the end. –MO
Emma Stonex, The Lamplighters (Viking)
In The Lamplighters, Stonex brings vivid detail and emotional weight to the story of three lighthouse keepers who disappeared in the 1970s. The novel was inspired by real events, but Stonex brings a complex fictional world to bear, filling out the inner lives of the three men and introducing a new strand with a journalist who, twenty years later, thinks he has finally solved the mystery, but needs new information from the survivors of the vanished. The Lamplighters is beautifully written and understated in its lyricism, qualities that serve to heighten the almost unbearable tension of the story, which is packed with quiet revelations and observations. –DM
Harlan Coben, Win (Grand Central)
Harlan Coben’s books are full of the thrilling, the unexpected, the twisty, and the memorable. Win introduces a new aristocratic detective, Windsor Horne Lockwood III, who’s ready to put his considerable fortune towards finding the culprits behind a long-ago robbery of the family home after some of the missing artifacts turn up next to a dead body. –MO
Nadine Matheson, The Jigsaw Man (Hanover Square)
In a gritty modern London, DI Angelica Henley gets a gruesome new case after body parts from two different people are discovered at the side of the river. Do the murders have anything to do with the infamous Jigsaw Man, who’s been imprisoned for years? Is it a copycat killer, or is the Jigsaw Man sending directives to an accomplice from the inside? I’m looking forward to tearing through this fiendishly clever thriller. –MO
Peter Swanson, Every Vow You Break (William Morrow)
Swanson follows up on last year’s Eight Perfect Murders with another taut, insightful psychological thriller, this time telling the story of a honeymoon gone terribly wrong when a man from the bride’s past turns up. The setting, an island off the coast of Maine, is richly drawn and serves to turn up the intensity on an increasingly sinister situation. Swanson brings the story’s natural gothic notes with great skill. –DM
