Greetings from the Great White North, where days are Hobbesian: nasty, brutish and short. The tides have turned as isolation continues and instead of seeing a bunch of writers complaining on social media about not being able to read, I’ve seen anecdotal evidence that people are reading more than they did in the before times. This does make your local book critic smile on the inside.
I’m here to help you on your quest for escape and/or entertainment that doesn’t involve bingeing (a word I am coming to loathe) or a YouTube tutorial—actually, tutorials, since who stops at just one? I am hooked on bullet journal videos, which are fascinating glimpses into how people think about and structure time. But you haven’t come to CrimeReads for my pithy observations on the way we live now, you came to find out about the best psychological thrillers coming out this month. Let’s go.
Christina McDonald, Do No Harm (Gallery Books)
Remember the opioid crisis? You know the one. It decimated lives and shattered communities, leaving broken people to feed their vicious habits. When the history of the 2020s is written opioids—though still devastating—will be on the other side of the COVID line which delineates this decade. Do No Harm is a cross between Breaking Bad and Kohlberg’s theory of moral development. A child has a rare and expensive disease. A mother who is also a doctor slides into the world of opioids, dealing drugs to fund her son’s treatment. Wrinkle: her husband is a police detective and much more familiar with the world our protagonist is trying to navigate.
Sarah Langan, Good Neighbors (Atria)
Langan’s sharply observed novel is a study of mob mentality with a healthy dose of dry humor and, of course, a generous side dish of murder. In a small suburban community—there is a map with each character’s house number and residence—secrets and gossip abound. Langan combines found documents like the map and newspaper accounts of the Maple Street Murders with scenes that propel the reader forward and keep them guessing. A delicious suburban noir for the Alison Gaylin-Laura Lippman-Megan Abbott crowd.
Alison Wisdom, We Can Only Save Ourselves (Harper)
Wisdom’s debut is a psychological thriller about a teenage girl who disappears—have I lost you yet? Okay, good. So Alice Lange, model student and all-around teen dream who has more than enough votes to be homecoming queen twice over, flees her stifling small town with a charismatic and sinister drifter (are drifters ever not sinister?) named Wesley. Alice ends up in a Manson-esque situation with Wesley and four other young women all living in the same house. But there can only be one queen, and the tension between the women quickly escalates until things get ugly.
Vendela Vida, We Run the Tides (Ecco)
Maria and Eulabee are the undisputed experts on their (pre-tech boom) San Francisco neighborhood, Sea Cliff—they know its homes, their residents, the beaches, and all of the gossip. One morning while walking to their tony girls’ school they witness a terrible scene, but they disagree about what happened. This rift is made deeper when Maria, um, disappears, shaking Sea Cliff up and leaving Eulabee with some serious therapy in her future.
Ben McPherson, Love and Other Lies (William Morrow)
I am just going to say it: a girl disappears in Love and Other Lies. She is the daughter of happily married Carl and Elsa, the eldest of their three children. But wait, we are not in suburbia! We are in Norway, and there was a shooting at a summer camp the girl was attending. The family doesn’t take it well: Vee, the younger daughter, definitely isn’t telling her parents everything. And Carl and Elsa begin to doubt each other, putting their marriage and family in jeopardy.
