At the start of every month, CrimeReads staff members look over all the great crime novels and mysteries coming out in the weeks ahead and make recommendations based on what they’re reading and what they can’t wait to read. Check back over the course of the month for more suggestions for feeding your crime habit.
Karen Lord, Unraveling (DAW)
Karen Lord’s latest is just as impossible to define as her previous work; Unravelling blends murder mystery, Carribean mythology, and archetypal journeys for what may just be the most original crime novel of the year. Dr. Miranda Ecouvo has just put a serial killer away after committing seven murders, each more bizarre than the previous. When she’s thrown into the spirit world after an unusual confluence of events, she soon realizes that the real killer is still out there, and teams up with two brothers, Chance and Trickster, to hunt down the true culprit before he can achieve immortality. (Molly Odintz, CrimeReads associate editor)
Daniela Petrova, Her Mother’s Daughter (G.P. Putnam’s Sons)
One of the summer’s most promising 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. (Dwyer Murphy, CrimeReads managing editor)
Caroline Louise Walker, Man of the Year (Gallery/Scout Press)
Man of the Year is unsurprisingly about a guy named Man of the Year in his small elite town, Sag Harbor (which is Hamptons adjacent). Dr. Robert Hart has such a good life as the novel begins–thriving medical practice, happy second marriage to a trophy wife, partial custody of his son who is finally doing better socially–the reader knows he’s going to destroy himself. But all students of the perverse know, there is voyeuristic and considerable pleasure in watching the machinations of his demise. (Lisa Levy, CrimeReads contributing editor)
Kate Atkinson, Big Sky (Little, Brown and Co.)
For us Jackson Brodie fans, this is a special moment: it’s been nine years since PI Brodie solved his last case, and Brodie is back in rare form. Big Sky is set in a bucolic village in North Yorkshire, a quaint home with gorgeous cliffs and a long drop into the river below. Brodie takes this case as a favor to a friend, the father of one of his previous cases: a search for a missing husband. He’s also hired by a woman who suspects her husband of infidelity to bring her some proof, The collision of these cases and Brodie’s past lead to Brodie becoming even more isolated, yet he’s determined to keep his community intact. (LL)
Cara Black, Murder in Bel-Air (Soho)
This year, Cara Black and her many fans will be celebrating the 20th anniversary of her protagonist Aimée Leduc’s first appearance as the most stylish dressed detective in Paris. In Murder in Bel-Air, the 19th installment in the series, it’s 1999, and Aimée’s mother has gone missing after failing to pick up Aimée’s bébé from day care. In the course of her frantic search for her only recently resurfaced mother, who was last seen speaking with a homeless woman found murdered soon after, Aimée discovers a web of secrets and crimes dating back to the worst abuses of French colonialism in West Africa. (MO)
Leonardo Padura, Grab a Snake by the Tail (Bitter Lemon)
Padura is one of the most celebrated crime authors in the world today, and rightly so. This novella, a standalone that the author has been tinkering with for decades, is a Mario Conde investigation, but it stands outside the author’s legendary Havana Quartet to tell a discrete story about a case in Havana’s Barrio Chino, where a particularly heinous murder illuminates a possible drug trafficking ring in the city’s old Chinatown. Readers can expect all the usual Conde charm—long meditations on the meaning of life and language and the trials of the Cuban people—as well as some new terrain, as he navigates a hidden pocket of the city and a community that holds itself apart. (DM)
Barbara Bourland, Fake Like Me (Grand Central)
Barbara Bourland, author of the wonderfully titled I’ll Eat When I’m Dead, is back in fine form with her new novel Fake Like Me, in which a struggling artist seeks to fill the shoes (and shows) of a drowned enfant terrible, in what promises to be the art mystery of the season (and if there’s anything you should know about the folks here at CrimeReads, it’s that we cannot resist a good art mystery). (MO)
Chanelle Benz, The Gone Dead (Ecco)
We’ve been eagerly awaiting Chanelle Benz’s debut novel after her ingenious short story collection in 2017, and it lives up; it’s exactly the kind of fresh and provocative Mississippi novel that takes the southern mystery to new heights, basking in its sense of place and infused with crimey intrigue. Thirty years after the death of her father, a celebrated black poet, Billie James returns to his shack in the Mississippi Delta, only to be confronted by a mysterious discrepancy between the locals’ recollection of her family history and her own faltering memory. (Camille LeBlanc, CrimeReads editorial fellow)
Sarah Gailey, Magic for Liars (Tor Books)
Magic, murder, sisters, family histories, and petty lies that have piled up and taken on the shape of something not so petty—Sarah Gailey’s genre debut bends fantasy and noir into the month’s perfect read (especially as summer rolls around and you get a pang of longing for childhood’s everyday magic). When Ivy Gamble, a sardonic, mildly alcoholic PI with years of resentment towards her brilliant and magical sister, is called in to investigate a murder at said sister’s magic academy, Ivy finds herself embroiled in the case, as well as in a lifetime of sisterly scars. (CL)
James Ellroy, This Storm (Knopf)
A new Ellroy novel is always cause for excitement amongst crime readers, but especially so with This Storm, which fills in some of the gaps of his epic and still evolving alternate history of L.A.P.D. corruption, West Coast development, and American greed. This one is set during WWII in Los Angeles, with a startling look at police profiteering, the rise of fascism in midcentury America, the internment of Japanese-Americans, and a generally mind-altering exploration of the ideological battles of good and evil fought contemporaneous to the famous battles of WWII. (DM)
Kelsey Rae Dimberg, Girl in the Rearview Mirror (William Morrow)
Yes, generally Girl books feel a little bit musty these days (really, that was the best title you could agree upon?). But 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 a business opportunity or something more sinister. (LL)
