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.
Megan Collins, The Winter Sister (Atria)
Family and secrets go hand-in-hand in Collins’s impressive debut, The Winter Sister. The myth of Demeter and Persephone gives the story structure, and within that form Collins manages to explore the complicated bonds of family, guilt, and obligation, all while propelling ahead with a fine feeling of suspense, as a daughter looks after her sick mother while also trying to unravel the mystery of her sister’s death and investigating an ex suspected of involvement in one killing and perhaps implicated in another plot. There’s a lot going on, and Collins handles it deftly.
Andrea Bartz, The Lost Night (Crown)
A strong, atmospheric debut steeped in the lush details of Brooklyn in the late aughts. The story centers around a magazine fact-checker compelled to revisit a tragic night ten years before where a presumed suicide felled a well-connected scenester, a death that new video shows may have been something more sinister. Bartz weaves timelines together with style and offers up an insightful portrait of a time and place in recent New York history, a period that’s also a stand-in for heedless, fearless youth corrupted. Expect to read a great deal more from Bartz in the future.
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.
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.
Liz Lawler, Don’t Wake Up (Harper)
A startling, gripping debut about a woman who wakes up to find she’s being operated on by a stranger who is certainly not a medical professional, then can’t convince anyone that the attack was real. Don’t Wake Up is a penetrating, spine-chilling debut that explores issues of trauma, disbelief, communication, and power, all set within a genuinely page-turning story of suspense.
Christina McDonald, The Night Olivia Fell (Gallery Books)
An absolutely wrenching opening is just the start for McDonald’s psychologically taut, emotionally complex debut, about a mother who finds out her daughter has survived a fall from a bridge but is brain dead and pregnant. The events of that night come to consume the heroine, who needs to discover what happened, how, and who was involved in this tragedy. McDonald’s writing is swift and thoughtful, subtly unspooling the explosive premise scene by scene.
