Breaking into the crime game isn’t easy, but every month, a few brave and talented souls make a go of the mystery racket. 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.
Stuart Turton, The 7 ½ Deaths of Evelyn Castle (Sourcebooks Landmark)
This genre-defying debut has quite the original premise! Each day, Evelyn Hardcastle is doomed to die. And each day, Aiden Bishop wakes up in a new body, ready to try to save her. We can’t wait to read this bizarre mashup reminiscent of both Groundhog Day and Rashomon.
Jo Jakeman, The Exes’ Revenge (Berkley)
This wicked debut joins a long tradition of feminist revenge thrillers stretching back all the way to Antigone. Three women with one man in common team up to destroy him, after an woman trying to leave a bad marriage gets in touch with his exes. This debut also answers the question, “what happens with a bunch of women who’ve all dated the same shit guy actually get together and talk about it?” Vengeance. That’s what happens.
Amina Akhtar, #FashionVictim (Crooked Lane)
Amina Akhtar knows the fashion industry very, very, well, and in her darkly comedic debut, #FashionVictim, she gives it a sendoff for the ages. As #FashionVictim begins, we meet a young woman struggling to gain a leg up in an industry filled with breezy blondes who seem to succeed with no effort at all. When she applies for a competitive internal promotion, she finds her anger at the fashion world growing—and her sanity slipping. At times laugh out loud funny, this is a debut not to be missed!
TM Logan, Lies (St. Martin’s Press)
T.M. Logan’s debut looks at what happens when you find out your marriage is based on lies, and how far you would go to protect someone who is suddenly a stranger. A happily married man discovers his wife has dangerous secrets, and he’s now implicated in each and every one. This one is probably best begun on a weekend afternoon, in case you feel the temptation to stay up late to find out what happens.
Edwin Hill, Little Comfort (Kensington)
In the modern world, where tracking down a missing person is as much about your comfort with digital databases as the worn out leather on your shoes, librarians have the perfect bona fides to serve as private eyes. That’s the setup in Edwin Hill’s debut novel, Little Comfort, which features a Harvard librarian, Hester Thursby, who moonlights as a shamus for people with money to spend and a lost child or a lost love to track down. Here, Thursby tracks down a son of New England privilege who left his family behind and has been grifting his way around the country for years. Little Comfort has a dark story at its heart, but Thursby’s breezy odyssey through the New England elite makes for some quality voyeuristic fun.
Susanne Jansson, The Forbidden Place (Grand Central Publishing)
This debut marks the first appearance in English of a major new voice in Scandinavian crime fiction. A young woman returns home to her town of Mossmarken, hopeful that the terrible events that occurred there in her childhood will not repeat themselves. When a body is discovered in a peat bog, and other strange events begin to occur in the town, Jansson’s protagonist must discover if the town’s troubles are man-made or otherworldly.
