A new year, a new you, and a whole new set of books to read! Check out the site later in the week for our full preview of the most anticipated titles of 2022, but in the meantime, here are 10 essential crime novels coming out this January. These will make you think, make you cry, and distract you from whatever you need distraction from (i.e., the entire world right now). You’ll notice we got pretty literary this January. It’s cold and we’re reading long books, okay?
Sara Stridsberg, The Antarctica of Love (FSG)
Stridsberg’s evocative new novel is a portrait of a young woman and her violent death, a powerful story that ripples through time and across generations and social divides. How many lives can one murder touch? Stridsberg takes on the project with extraordinary empathy and insight. –DM
Janice Hallett, The Appeal (Atria)
Okay, so this would be a great mystery novel whether or not it featured a community theater group, but the added drama makes The Appeal into a perfect follow-along caper. Told in emails, announcements, and other found texts, The Appeal has a charmingly meta set-up: two law students have been assigned all of these documents to analyze. If they misinterpret them, the wrong person may go to prison for a long time. And you, the reader, can interpret this fair play mystery right alongside them. –MO
John Darnielle, Devil House (MCD)
In Darnielle’s brooding, atmospheric new thriller, a successful true crime author in search of a new project decides to move to a Northern California town, into a house that was the site of a notorious murder decades before, connected to the so-called Satanic Panic. Darnielle’s storytelling is pitch perfect and the dread comes seeping through in measured portions until suddenly the weight of it overwhelms. –DM
Danya Kukafka, Notes on an Execution (Doubleday)
Danya Kukafka’s Notes on an Execution deserves to stand along Ivy Pochoda’s These Women, Nicola Maye Goldberg’s Nothing Can Hurt You, and Carolyn Ferrell’s Dear Miss Metropolitan as victim-focused narratives that call out the exploitation of women’s suffering in crime stories. In Notes on an Execution, serial killer Ansel Packer is counting down to his execution. And the women in his life are also counting down. They are also wondering: with a different life, who would Ansel be? More importantly, who would his victims have been, had they clung to life instead? –MO
Lisa Lutz, The Accomplice (Ballantine)
Lisa Lutz just gets better and better, and I know I say this every time, but The Accomplice may just be her best so far. Lutz’s latest explores a complicated relationship between Owen and Luna: best friends, confidants, and enablers. Owen is irresistible to women, except for Luna, who’s content to be his forever wing-woman, both living nearby each other in the suburbs. But when Owen’s wife turns up dead, it raises the specter of his ex-girlfriend’s death. The two must finally address old, unanswered questions about what exactly happened, and what part Luna played, the first time around.
Fuminori Nakamura, My Annihilation (Soho)
I read this one on the plane ride down to Texas from NYC. Maybe it was just the creeping doom of Omicron, and maybe it was the way that the guy next to me seemed to creep himself out reading over my shoulder, but My Annihilation is one hell of a ride. From the first sentence—“Turn this page, and you may forfeit your entire life”—Nakamura plays tricks on the reader, the narrator, and even the notion of existence itself. Perfect for those who like their noir obsessive and deeply philosophical. –MO
Eliza Jane Brazier, Good Rich People (Berkley)
In Eliza Jane Brazier’s sophomore effort, the set-up is king: a wealthy couple gets their kicks from renting a garage apartment to someone who can’t say no, then gradually ruining that person’s life. Only their new tenant isn’t who they think she is, and she’ll do anything to keep her new home and the status that comes with it. –MO
Marie Rutkoski, Real Easy (Henry Holt)
Real Easy is centered around the complex lives of dancers at the Lovely Lady strip club. When star performer Samantha sets out to drive a drugged-out coworker home, and the car never makes it back, homicide detective Holly is convinced that one of the dancers may still be alive. Set in the last year of the 20th century, and with an end-of-an-era feel to its glossy, suffering setting, Real Easy joins other crime novels in using noir poetry to tell the stories of sex workers.–MO
Nikki May, Wahala (Custom House)
Wahala is a classic tale of interlopers. Three Anglo-Nigerian best friends, each with their own secrets, find their lives turned upside down by a newcomer who seems to mean well, even as she carves a path of destruction. This one deserves all the Sex and the City comparisons! –MO
Peter Mann, The Torqued Man (Harper)
This book is so weird!! And also very good. It is possibly the strangest WWII-set crime novels ever written. Mann alternates between a rollicking, exaggerated shaggy dog story told by an Irish Republican recruited from a Spanish prison to carry out a mission in Berlin, and the reminiscences of a low level Nazi bureaucrat who finds a new courage to resist when he encounters the brass Irishman. –MO
