At the start of every month, CrimeReads staff members look over all the great crime novels and mysteries coming out in the weeks ahead and make recommendations based on what they’re reading and what they can’t wait to read. Check back over the course of the month for more suggestions for feeding your crime habit.
Gary Phillips, The Be-Bop Barbarians (Pegasus Books)
Gary Phillips’ love song to the history of black comics is beautiful and moody, channelling the quiet desperation, simmering anger, and creative intensity of 1950s noir. The Be-Bop Barbarians follows several comics artists struggling to make it in the black press and get syndicated in the white press without having their ideas stolen or their work appropriated, in a story as beautifully told as it is illustrated.—Molly Odintz, CrimeReads associate editor
Harriet Tyce, Blood Orange (Grand Central Publishing)
Tyce’s debut is an excellent psychological thriller, so good it could be one of the best of the nascent year. Young lawyer Alison is defending in her first murder case. Her client, a quiet housewife accused of killing her husband, is indeed guilty of stabbing him, but as Alison investigates the case she finds there might be more to the story than a lover’s spat. Meanwhile, she’s having a blistering affair with a senior attorney at her firm which threatens her own happy family life—and someone bent on destroying her knows her secret.—Lisa Levy, CrimeReads contributing editor
Guillermo Saccomanno, 77 (Open Letter)
Not much is needed to turn a story of 1970s Argentina into a terrifying thriller, but it certainly raises the stakes when the protagonist is a gay man housing two dissidents and having an affair with a homophobic cop. Told through flashbacks and lyrical dreamlike sequences, Gomez recounts the everyday terrors of living under a violent regime at the height of the Dirty War as military raids seize unsuspecting civilians, fear pervades Buenos Aires, and an air of distrust seeps into households and between families. With western democracies on the descent, it’s not hard to read Saccomanno’s novel as a dystopian warning for the present.—Camille LeBlanc, CrimeReads editorial fellow
Jane Corry, The Dead Ex (Pamela Dorman/Viking)
Corry is good at so many things it’s hard to isolate what makes her books so compelling: it’s some combination of well-drawn characters, keen plotting, and realistic relationships. As in her excellent debut My Husband’s Wife, Corry puts her personal experience working in prisons to use in Dead Ex, which chronicles the lives of an eight-year-old girl, her drug addicted mother, and an aromatherapist with memory trouble whose ex turns up dead.—Lisa Levy, CrimeReads contributing editor
Ausma Zehanat Khan, A Deadly Divide (Minotaur Books)
Ausma Zehanat Khan’s Community Policing series has taken its politically astute Canadian detectives to Syria, Greece, and Iran in recent volumes, exploring a panoply of social ills through the wide-open eyes of Khan’s clear-sighted protagonists, ready to witness and act to preserve both human rights and human dignity. Her latest has her detectives Esa Khattack and Rachel Getty returning home to Canada to investigate the bombing of a mosque in Quebec amidst rising Quebecois nationalist sentiment and growing prejudice against Muslims nationwide. A Deadly Divide feels like a homecoming, but to a home that’s no longer a safe space. I can’t recommend this timely and urgent read enough.—Molly Odintz, CrimeReads associate editor
Cara Hunter, In the Dark (Penguin)
In this second novel featuring DI Adam Fawley, Hunter continues the fine work she did in her debut, Close to Home, which was a bestseller in the UK. The premise is promising: while renovating an old house, the new buyer finds the a young woman and a child locked in his basement. They’re in rough shape—starving, dehydrated, and unidentifiable. Fawley, though, has an idea of who the woman and child might be, and he pursues his gut instinct that this case is connected to the disappearance of another woman years before.—Lisa Levy, CrimeReads contributing editor
Lauren Wilkinson, American Spy (Random House)
While many of us might be inspired by classic espionage fiction to imagine the work of American spies abroad as glamorous, or at least not soul-sucking, Lauren Wilkinson’s American Spy is more along the lines of what to expect from the realities of American espionage. A young woman stymied in her government career by institutional racism takes an assignment to spy on the left-leaning president of Burkina Faso, and finds herself torn between ambition and justice, the personal and the political, and what is, versus what could be.—Molly Odintz, CrimeReads associate editor
David Swinson, Trigger (Mullholland)
Swinson’s PI Frankie Marr novels are more fun than a mountain of cocaine—which was Marr’s idea of a good time in the previous books in the series, The Second Girl and Crime Song. In Trigger, Marr has cleaned up his act and kicked the coke addiction, but he tests his resolve by breaking into the homes of drug dealers, flushing the drugs, and stealing their cash. Marr’s case in Trigger is a topical one: the shooting of a young African-American boy by his former police partner, who is facing down the anger of the Black Lives Matter movement as well as the wrath of the citizens of Washington DC.—Lisa Levy, CrimeReads contributing editor
Don Winslow, The Border (William Morrow)
Winslow’s latest is one of the most hotly anticipated titles in recent years, the final in the three-volume Cartel series, which began in 2005 with The Power of the Dog, continued with The Cartel in 2015, and now concludes with The Border. Together, Winslow’s novels make up an epic crime fiction history of the modern War on Drugs, an achievement that rivals Ellroy’s history of the Los Angeles underworld and goes as far as any work of fiction can in explaining how we’ve reached the current quagmire: a region engulfed in violence, the spread of an opioid epidemic, the militarization of police forces across the Americas, and the rise of opportunistic political regimes that capitalize on the suffering. All that, and Winslow tells a hell of a good story.—Dwyer Murphy, CrimeReads managing editor
Lars Kepler, Stalker (Knopf)
The American publisher Knopf has been releasing the internationally bestselling Swedish Joona Linna series in haphazard order, but they don’t lose any of their impact if you read them out of order. I’d start with last year’s The Sandman, a breakneck paced thriller where detective Linna, along with his profiler/hypnotist sidekick Erik Maria Bark, are in pursuit of two serial killers. This month’s Stalker keeps up the pace with super short chapters that build a sense of urgency. Plus, the premise is super creepy: the police receive a video of a woman being unknowingly videotaped, then find her brutally murdered.—Lisa Levy, CrimeReads contributing editor
Michelle Frances, The Temp (Kensington)
While a lot of psychological thrillers are, let’s be clear, about fears of being replaced, The Temp takes this fear to the next level, as Carrie, an executive television producer on maternity leave, finds herself dealing with the very real risk of being forgotten in favor of her temporary replacement, Emma. All is not how it seems, as Emma pursues her own agenda in the workplace, and Carrie’s marriage proves to be a poor foundation upon which to build a family. This twisty thriller will have you guessing the whole way through!—Molly Odintz, CrimeReads associate editor
