Breaking into the crime game isn’t easy, but every month, a few brave and talented souls make a go of it. For readers, there are few experiences so thrilling as finding a new author whose career is just beginning and whose work promises years of enjoyment to come. But it’s sometimes hard to find those debuts. That’s where we come in. We’re scouring the shelves in search of auspicious debuts and recommending the very best for your reading pleasure.
Francesca Serritella, Ghosts of Harvard (Random House)
Serritella’s debut will make you glad you never went the Ivy route, as her protagonist heads to Harvard to find out the truth behind her brother’s death at the school years before. But as she dives deeper into the secrets behind the stone facades, she begins to worry that the mental illness her brother suffered from may be appearing in her own mind—or perhaps, the school has it out for them both.
Elisabeth Thomas, Catherine House (Custom House)
And for those of you who missed out on graduation, here’s another academic tome to make you happy the halcyon days of university are over (at least for the next few months). Elisabeth Thomas’ lush academic thriller Catherine House takes place on in an exclusive private college where students receive free tuition, room and board, and from whence graduates go on to do great things—as long as they submit to the college’s notorious experiments with a mysterious substance known as “plasm.” Perfect for those who wish The Magicians had been written by Patrick Rothfuss as a gothic mystery!
Susan Allott, The Silence (William Morrow)
Aussie noir meets Hitchcockian thriller in Susan Allott’s chilling debut. A woman heads home to Sydney from abroad to defend her father, recently linked to a decades-old disappearance. She wants to stand up for family, but she too has her doubts as to what happened to their missing neighbor, so many years before…
Lisa Braxton, The Talking Drum (Inanna)
Lisa Braxton’s debut is beautifully written (perhaps why it’s being released by a press more known for their poetry), and transports us to early 1970s Massachusetts, where a predominantly black neighborhood is about to fall victim to the twin forces of gentrification and institutional racism, with a strong dose of corruption on the side. Braxton follows the residents as they attempt to fight back against their new reality, despite the city’s nefarious intentions of “urban renewal.”
Harriet Walker, The New Girl (Ballantine)
Fashion editor Harriet Walker wrote this page-turning suspense novel while on her year of maternity leave from a British magazine, and the book draws heavily from both her glamorous experiences in the high fashion world and the joys and stresses of new parenthood. In The New Girl, a woman goes on maternity leave after hand-picking her maternity cover, but soon begins to worry that both the woman covering for her and an old friend with a dark secret are conspiring to ruin her life. Of course, you’ll have to wait for the very end to find out what’s really going on…
