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.
Daniela Petrova, Her Daughter’s Mother (Putnam)
One of the summer’s most buzzed-about debuts, Petrova’s thriller looks at the complicated relationship between two women, one of them an expecting mother and the other an egg donor, who meet on the streets of New York in a chance encounter that takes a dark turn when one of them disappears. Petrova has written a consummate page-turner that also manages incredible layers of emotional depth. This is one of the year’s most provocative and eye-opening novels.
Felicity McLean, The Van Apfel Girls Are Gone (Algonquin)
The publisher describes this one as “The Virgin Suicides meets Picnic at Hanging Rock,” and while it would ordinarily be a bit lazy of us to directly quote the marketing folks, this description is just too good not to include. When three sisters disappear over the course of a long, hot Australian summer, no one is sure if they chose to run away from their ultra-religious parents, or were kidnapped. Years later, a neighborhood woman who was a child when the sisters first vanished decides it’s up to her to reopen the investigation.
Ruvanee Pietersz Vilhauer, The Mask Collectors (Little A)
At a school reunion for an elite private academy, a journalist is murdered and the crime scene reminds anthropologist Duncan McCloud of a Sri Lankan ceremonial ritual. As those connected to the crime scatter across the globe, McCloud works to unravel a conspiracy with roots in the colonial past. Full of secrets, lies, and ceremonies, this gothic thriller is a mind-bending exploration of the power of tradition and belief, with a fraught marriage at its heart.
Caroline Louise Walker, Man of the Year (Gallery)
Walker’s debut is just in time for summer, with a razor sharp psychological portrait of a man, and a family, who seem to have everything you could want and everything in order, until a newcomer upends their world. The man at the center of the storm is Dr. Robert Hart, a physician with a snug practice in Sag Harbor, the wealthy enclave at the far eastern tip of Long Island. The good doctor invites his son’s college roommate to stay in their guesthouse for summer, but that one decision turns insidious as jealousy, manipulation, and a desperate unraveling of a seemingly perfect life ensues. Walker handles the chaos with discipline and skill, carefully building up the suspense to a steady boil.
Kelsey Rae Dimberg, Girl in the Rearview Mirror (William Morrow)
Dimberg’s debut is resonant with the clean arid air of the Arizona desert (and it’s a little sticky too). This is where Finn Hunt has been recruited into the world of Arizona’s most prominent citizens, with close ties to the government and the police—people with secrets they will do anything to protect. Finn empathizes, as she has a dark secret she’s hiding, and wonders if this is a business opportunity or something more sinister.
Ellen LaCorte, The Perfect Fraud (HarperLuxe)
LaCorte’s debut is the kind of thriller that ratchets up the suspense so slowly you don’t realize until somewhere in the middle how skillfully she’s plotted the novel. Told from the dueling points of view of Claire, a fake psychic in Sedona, Arizona (the gift runs in her family but she doesn’t seem to have it), and Rena, a mother desperate to cure her daughter of multiple ailments who is referred to a specialist in children’s stomach problems in Scottsdale, Arizona. It turns out both women are lying but unraveling why and to whom makes this a compelling and well executed thriller.
