Breaking into the crime game isn’t easy, but every month, a few brave and talented souls make a go of it. 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.
Patrick Coleman, The Churchgoer (Harper Perennial)
Patrick Coleman combines evangelical malpractice, noirish cynicism, and seedy southern California underworlds in this debut novel. When Mark Haines, a former youth pastor who has succumbed to a more hedonistic life, meets a young drifter who seems inauspiciously connected to a failed robbery, he suddenly finds himself captivated by the young woman, following her trail into the depths of California drug trade and straight into the Evangelical megachurch of his past. With a palpable nod to Raymond Chandler, this forceful mystery is an exploration of religion, responsibility, and the inverted forces at play in the modern world.
Daniel Nieh, Beijing Payback (Ecco)
This self-assured debut is both a rollicking good adventure and a stirring meditation on the complexities of modern identity. When college basketball player Victor Li’s father is found murdered, he teams up with his father’s mysterious business associates to investigate (against the advice of his very practical and awesome sister who I wish was real just so we could be friends), and ends up on the trip of a lifetime.
Layne Fargo, Temper (Scout Press)
Temper is the kind of debut people are going to remember: intense, well-crafted, and emotionally blistering. Joanna Cuyler and Malcolm Mercer live and work together, running a small theater company in Chicago. They are sometime lovers, but more often Malcolm is scheming to seduce his latest leading lady–which is exactly what happens when Kira Rascher lands the plum role opposite Mercer in a dark drama called “Temper.” Mercer is known for pushing his actors to their limits, and Rascher is determined to shine in this intense and unforgiving role. Yet there are secrets among the three principals which change everything when they come to light.
T. Marie Vandelly, Theme Music (Dutton)
T. Marie Vandelly’s debut is concerned with the most gothic of crimes: familicide. When a young woman returns to the childhood home in which her father massacred the rest of her family before killing himself, she is soon beset by eerie remembrances and real-world dangers, in what promises to be one of the strangest and most enchanting works to come out this year.
Amanda Lee Koe, Delayed Rays of a Sun (Nan A. Talese)
In Amanda Lee Koe’s lush historical debut, a chance meeting between Marlene Dietrich, Anna May Wong, and Leni Riefenstahl, captured in a famous photograph, becomes a jumping-off point for a literary investigation of each woman’s life and the part each played in 20th century history. An empathetic and devastating portrait of women equally defined by their passions and their politics.
