Summer is here! The temperature’s rising, children are growing increasingly bored, and parents are at the end of their tether (or at least, will be by August). But nothing takes the edge off better than a good crime series, and we, like all of you, dear readers, cannot wait for the rest of the second season of Big Little Lies. In the meantime, since crime fans are very specific in their tastes, we’ve assembled a list of reading recommendations based on whatever aspect of the show and its source material you enjoyed the most, from books featuring neighbors with secrets, to investigations primed against a dramatic seaside backdrop.
Neighbors with Secrets
Joanna Cannon, The Trouble With Goats and Sheep
In The Trouble With Goats and Sheep, two middle-grade aged girls peer over fences and discover dark secrets in their bucolic small town. For those who enjoyed Big Little Lies’ emphasis on how adult crimes affect the younger generation learning about them, Cannon’s masterpiece of small town secrets is the perfect follow-up read.
Shari Lapena, The Couple Next Door
Shari Lapena’s riveting tale of voyeurism, reinvention, and domestic conflict takes us into the lives of a couple who are not at all who they pretend to be, and their snooping, rather-too-helpful neighbor. As in Big Little Lies, the reality behind the suburban facade is never as neat as it seems, and it’s up to meddling locals to find out the truth.
Women Team Up in a Crisis
Lynda La Plante, Widows
In Lynda La Plante’s twice-adapted Widows, three women resolve to pull off their murdered husbands’ last big con, and enlist a fourth to help pull off the heist. Perfect for those who enjoyed the semi-antagonistic but always-faithful friendships of Big Little Lies.
Natsuo Kirino, Out
When factory worker Kenji kills her nogoodnik husband after he gambles the last of their money, she recruits her shift mates to help her cover up the crime. What follows is a nightmarish descent of infighting and plans gone awry, but we’re sure that the women of Big Little Lies would still have been rooting for them.
Women Avenging Other Women
Flynn Berry, Under The Harrow
Berry’s debut is one of the most tales of female vengeance that we’ve ever seen. When Nora shows up in the Cornish countryside to visit her sister, she soon discovers that both her sister and her sister’s dog have been brutally murdered. As she investigates the murder, Nora uncovers the increasingly dark secrets of the town.
Melanie Raabe, The Trap
This is another one about sisters, but far more deliberate a tale of revenge than the previous. Raabe’s set-up is both simple and brilliant: a young woman lures her sister’s killer into a trap, to take her own carefully constructed revenge.
Women Leading Lives of Quiet Desperation
Judith Rossner, Searching for Mr. Goodbar
Looking for Mr. Goodbar is an insidious flâneuse novel, with wicked portraits of the insecure, abusive men who pass through Theresa Dunn’s life as she makes her way around New York’s singles bars in the 1970s. Rossner expertly captures the city’s nightlife, but from a woman’s perspective the scene takes on a deeply sinister tone; for all the supposed liberation of the era, sex could still bring about a kind of hell.
Laura Van den Berg, The Third Hotel
Van den Berg’s brooding, existential mystery is about a woman who travels to Cuba for a film festival and sees her husband waiting outside the cinema in a white linen suit, only her husband is supposedly dead. Tracking him through the city’s streets, the woman goes back through poignant memories of her life, many of which seem now to be thrown into question, or maybe it’s her perceptions of her current reality that are faltering. There are no simple answers, but plenty of searching questions in this book, which is a dark and haunting tale told by one of today’s most promising young novelists.
Investigation Against A Dramatic Seaside Backdrop
Kem Nunn, Dogs of Winter
The Dogs of Winter is a pure journey into nature from the godfather of surf noir, Kem Nunn. The book’s star is the secret break in California’s northern extreme, the lodestone that draws all its characters together. The plot involves a missing person, an unsolved murder and a tangle of obscure motives and manipulations. Come to this book ready to commune with maritime gods.
PD James, Unnatural Causes
This is the third in PD James’ beloved Adam Dalgliesh series. It’s also the archetype for the small-town seaside mysteries that have kept the BBC in business this last decade or so. Dalgliesh is a talented, driven investigator with social skills that leave something to be desired. (Sound familiar?) In Unnatural Causes, he’s planning to enjoy a vacation on the Suffolk coast, but the murder of a well-known mystery writer requires the detective’s services. Expect plenty of windswept landscapes, agonizing walks on the beach, and a cast of eccentric, supremely British characters.
Busy, Busy Parents
Megan Abbott, You Will Know Me
Abbott’s tale of a gymnastics prodigy should resonate with those who enjoyed a realistic portrayal of parents’ hectic lives in Big Little Lies, but we would like to say that it makes way more sense to put that kind of investment in someone training for the Olympics, rather than any old child. Perhaps we should add a disclaimer that the CrimeReads team has yet to include any parents, and therefore cannot properly weigh in on the relative talents of any child.
Leila Slimani, The Nanny
For those who enjoyed how the character of Jane Chapman stirs things up in the sleepy town of Monterrey, we’d recommend diving into Leila Slimani’s literary blockbuster The Nanny, in which a very different disruption occurs when a family hires a seemingly perfect woman to provide childcare, only to enter into a twisted spiral into degradation and violence.
Crime In Wealthy Enclaves
Ross Macdonald, Black Money
Nobody investigated more crimes in wealthy California enclaves than Lew Archer, Macdonald’s famed midcentury PI. Santa Teresa was his home turn, a fictional stand-in for Santa Barbara, but he made his way up and down the California coast, wherever attorneys to the wealthy were in the mood to hire him for their clients. In Black Money, a local scion hires Archer to look into the man who’s taken away the girl he loves, a Frenchman with a mysterious past that has the town buzzing. Archer’s work mostly focuses on a louche beach resort and the cloistered, wealthy community that frequents its seasonal idylls. (And like any good California noir, expect those idylls to be shattered.)
Stephen L. Carter, The Emperor of Ocean Park
A family drama wrapped in a mystery, the intrigue plays out in power locales up and down the eastern seaboard, especially on Martha’s Vineyard, where a group of upper class black families have summered for generations. At the book’s start, the patriarch, a federal judge, is found dead shortly after withdrawing his name from consideration for a Supreme Court seat. His children are tasked with deciphering and sorting his affairs, which include his shadowy ties to a spymaster.
Avenging Domestic Abuse
Jamie Mason, Monday’s Lie
Mason’s protagonist is skilled in the art of observation and deduction, having been trained by her CIA mother, but she’s deliberately ignorant (at first) when it comes to her husband’s nefarious plans, in this perfect metaphor for how we ignore the warnings that are most urgent—and most inconvenient.
John D. MacDonald, The Deep Blue Good-by
Granted, John D. MacDonald isn’t going to be to the taste of many fans of Big Little Lies, and the material, while brilliantly written, will seem to some dated in its views, but at the heart of MacDonald’s breakout classic, The Deep Blue Good-by, is a compellingly described quest to bring down a serial domestic abuser named Junior Allen who’s latching onto women in southern Florida and draining them of finances and spirits. Travis McGee is called in, but it takes the heroics of more than one woman to bring Junior down.
Well-Choreographed Party Scenes
Robyn Harding, The Party
Harding wrote The Party as an alternative to warning her teenage children of the dangers of unsupervised drinking, but adults, too, should take heed when it comes to the many risks (and occasional rewards) of partying hard.
Ruth Ware, In a Dark, Dark, Wood
Ware’s debut takes us into a wild hen do in a glass house in the woods, where the invitations hold more malice than affection, and a drunken weekend will turn into an epic reckoning. For those who enjoyed the perfectly choreographed denouement of Big Little Lies, the bachelorette party in Ware’s debut is just as deliberate—and just as shocking.
Sunshine Noir
Vicki Hendricks, Miami Purity
There’s plenty of grey days along the California coast, but for those of us who watch Big Little Lies yearning for more sunshine in their lives, you can’t find a better follow-up than Vicki Hendrix’s quintessential sunshine noir, Miami Purity. This literally steamy book takes place in a dry cleaners, where a woman starts an affair with the owner’s son and soon decides to get rid of his inconvenient and controlling mother.
Janna King, The Seasonaires
It’s a Nantucket summer, which means plenty of sun, beach, and an onrush of wealthy families with all their messy entanglements, business pursuits, life ambition, and scheming against one another. In King’s debut, a murder rocks the island community and shakes the bedrock of the very carefully calibrated social network there. King will give you many of the same thrills as Big Little Lies, just transplanted to the East Coast during a very special season.
