While the last month of the year tends towards fewer releases, this December brings a host of excellent new mysteries and thrillers, featuring new voices, old favorites, and several works in translation. Enjoy!
Darya Bobyleva, Village at the Edge of Noon
Translated by Yazhin Chavasse
(Angry Robot)
Welcome to Nightvale, but make it Russian! In a small village full of former Soviet vacation homes (dachas!), the locals wake one morning to find the road to town has vanished, with all communication networks completely cut off. Many attempt to escape their strange new isolation, but none can find a way through the dense woods surrounding the town. Most vanish entirely, but those who return come back….changed. Claustrophobic, horrifying, and a heck of a good story (or, set of stories, rather)!
Kristi Demeester, Dark Sisters
(St. Martin’s)
Dark Sisters takes place in a New England town in which patriarchs prosper while women are laid low by a mysterious disease. The community revolves around their evangelical church, a place designed to control women’s behavior and ensure continuity of tradition. The community believes their prosperity stems from secret rituals, performed on the eve of the Purity Ball, a night of dancing, merriment, oaths of virginity, and….some weird stuff at the end that no one quite remembers. A parable of feminist vengeance with a truly badass ending!
Con Lehane, Red Scare
(Soho)
Con Lehane has had just about every job, as is evident from his bio, and all of them come into play in his portrait of the Red Scare and those who defied the conformity of the 1950s. This book feels somewhat personal to me—it takes place during the exact time my grandfather was getting hassled by the FBI as a former communist, and my mother’s early childhood was being disrupted by surveillance and harassment.
The book’s set-up is simple: a PI is hired by union bosses to save a cab driver headed to the electric chair in just two weeks for a murder he didn’t commit. The obstacles to clearing the man’s name are myriad—the cab driver is Black, communist, and had personal beef with the murdered man. But the motivations to solve the murder are just as strong, and if the PI can get enough evidence gathered, he might just pull off the impossible (while romancing a communist organizer’s sister). If you haven’t checked out Con Lehane’s oeuvre before, this book is a great place to start!
Nadia Davids, Cape Fear
(Simon & Schuster)
In 1920s South Africa, a maid enlists her employer’s help in deciphering her loved ones letters, only to awaken something dark within the dilapidated mansion where she and her mistress reside. Suffused with gothic suspense and the insidious creep of decay, Cape Fever is a pitch-perfect psychological thriller for early winter eves.
L.M. Chilton, Everyone in this Group Chat Dies
(Gallery/Scout Press)
In this queer thriller with I Know What You Did Last Summer overtones, a group chat is the source of ominous warnings, sent from a dead friend’s number and sparking all manner of drama among the surviving members of the circle. A great read for all those who refuse to participate in the chat-group-industrial complex. Far too many notifications to keep up with…
Christoffer Carlsson, The Living and the Dead
Translated by Rachel Willson-Broyles
(Hogarth)
Christoffer Carlsson confidently straddles the literary-genre divide in this lyrically written and impeccably plotted novel, winner of several Scandinavian crime writing awards. Carlsson’s latest takes place over a quarter-century, split between 1999, when a rural town is rocked by a brutal murder, and a similar crime committed decades later, uncovering long-buried secrets and bringing new revelations. the Living and the Dead makes for a potent blend of page-turning thrills and sober social criticism, and paints a complex portrait of rural Sweden in a time of enormous change and even greater uncertainty.
Ace Atkins, Everybody Wants to Rule the World
(William Morrow)
Atkins’ latest is a departure for the Oxford, Mississippi-based writer, though certainly not the first in his large and growing oeuvre. Set in the suburbs of Atlanta during the 1980s, Everybody Wants to Rule the World follows an adolescent boy’s tragicomic attempts to unmask his mother’s new boyfriend as a Soviet spy. He teams up with a has-been writer and a legendary drag performer to uncover any nefarious intent, for a tale of unlikely friendship and international hijinks sure to please every reader.
