The CrimeReads editors select the month’s best new novels.
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Wanda M. Morris, Anywhere You Run
(William Morrow)
Wanda Morris burst onto the scene last year with her impeccably plotted legal thriller, All Her Little Secrets, and her new novel keeps a legally-minded heroine as one of its leads but takes us back to 1964. When Violet Richards is raped by a white man, she takes her revenge, then goes on the run, soon followed by her sister Marigold, who aspires to be a lawyer but first must make a decision about her unwanted pregnancy. A southern setting where voting and abortion are both increasingly restricted feels…rather like today, if I’m honest. Wanda Morris, too, has noted the parallels, and there is a sense of political urgency that helps speed this thriller along. –MO
Kaoru Takamura, Lady Joker
Translated by Allison Markin Powell and Marie Iida
(Soho)
I’m a big fan of big novels, and Kaoru Takamura’s Lady Joker is an epic for the ages. The first installment of 500+ pages took us into a fictionalized account of an industrialist’s kidnapping that captivated Japanese media for upwards of two years in the mid-90s. Now, we get to read the impeccably translated followup as Takamura continues to weave together elements of crime, social criticism, and literary epic. I described the first one as James Ellroy if written by Don Delillo, and I stand by that comparison. –MO
Joanna Margaret, The Bequest
(Scarlet)
This debut from art historian Joanna Margaret hopscotches across European art and academia hot spots and delivers on a wild ride with nods to gothic fiction and dark academia, accompanied by smart notes of Hitchcock to round out this exemplary thriller. With a doctoral candidate at the center of the plot, you can expect an erudite unraveling of the mystery, as well as some pressure cooker atmospherics from some of the grandest spots on the international intellectual circuit. –DM
Roger A. Canaff, City Dark
(Thomas and Mercer)
In this gorgeous and shattering novel from powerful new voice Roger A. Canaff, two young brothers must navigate their way through New York City during a blackout after their mother goes to get gasoline and never comes back. Something happens to the boys on their trek through the city; something that changes them irreparably. Decades later when the woman who abandoned them turns up murdered, it’s finally time to deal with the consequences of that terrible night. –MO
Lev A. C. Rosen, Lavender House
(Forge)
In the midst of an America under the sway of McCarthyism, a gay policeman gets caught in a raid on an underground club and finds himself at loose ends and newly a pariah. Rescued from suicidal ideation by the wealthy owner of a soap dynasty, he accepts a commission to investigate a murder in a house where everyone is queer, including the servants and the victim. Lavender House, an art deco mansion in a secluded area outside of San Francisco, is more than just a refuge for those who would live openly as gay, and as the ex-cop uncovers its secrets, his own life becomes more and more in danger. –MO
Scott Turow, Suspect
(Grand Central)
Turow is still mining the endless corruption and intrigue of Kindle County, Illinois, the longtime home of his sophisticated thrillers. In this new chapter, a police chief is accused of soliciting sex in exchange for department advancement, an accusation she vehemently denies and says is part of an insidious campaign against her. Her attorney and his private eye go on the search to find out just how deeply rooted the campaign is, and in the process expose a few dark new layers to the county’s underbelly. Turow, as always, provides lush prose and a heady mix of ideas amidst the hard-charging action. –DM
Erin E. Adams, Jackal
(Ballantine)
As Jackal begins, Liz Rocher has reluctantly headed home to Johnstown, Pennsylvania for her childhood best friend’s wedding. She’s prepared for the micro-aggressions from her friend’s racist family, but during the celebration something far worse happens—a beloved child goes missing, and the key to her disappearance stretches back over decades of missing children, all of them young Black girls last seen around the summer solstice. Meanwhile, a spirit in the woods is close to taking corporeal form and rejecting the bonds of its human master. A social thriller perfect for fans of Jordan Peele, Jackal also comfortably rides the folk horror wave. Like Bethany C. Morrow’s Cherish, Farrah, Jackal also asks compelling questions about who society values as worthy of protection, and the true nature of monstrosity. –MO
Adam Hamdy, The Other Side of Night
(Atria)
With The Other Side of Night, Hamdy has crafted an intricate, exhilarating mystery that makes it feel as though the ground is shifting beneath your feet. A man’s deepest regret, a note in a used book, a detective with unexpected links of her own to the case—this one will leave readers short of breath and eager for more. –DM
Marcie R. Rendon, Sinister Graves
(Soho)
A drowned woman in a drowned land: that’s how Marcie R. Rendon’s third novel begins, as water recedes from the Minnesota landscape after a huge snowmelt, and a young Ojibwe woman is found murdered. Cash Blackbear, an Ojibwe college student, decides to seek her own answers in the case, following the victim’s trail to an evangelical church that feels more like a cult than a house of worship. Once again, Rendon immerses us in the 1970s Midwest and gives readers a plot to carefully consider. –MO
Mur Lafferty, Station Eternity
(Ace)
This book is so much fun. What if Jessica Fletcher’s tendency to have people die around her had led to instructions to self-isolate for the benefit of society? And what if that isolation had taken place on a space station rather like Babylon Five? In Station Eternity, a young woman who has solved a suspicious number of murder mysteries flees police attention on Earth and heads to a space station with few other humans on board. Of course, someone on board the space station would have the temerity to be murdered, and once again, all signs point to Lafferty’s protagonist unless she can solve the crime herself. –MO
