Each month the CrimeReads editors make their selections for the best upcoming fiction in crime, mystery, and thrillers.
*
S.A. Cosby, Razorblade Tears
(Flatiron)
S.A. Cosby blew us away with last year’s searing heist thriller/rural noir Blacktop Wasteland, and with Razorblade Tears he’s done it again. In a heartbreaking tale of love, murder, vengeance, and acceptance, two ex-cons, one Black and one white, team up to find those responsible for the death of their sons, who were married to each other. Both fathers are grieving not only for their lost loved ones, but for their inability to overcome their own homophobia while their sons were still alive. And as they seek revenge, they also find a new path towards tolerance. Shattering and beautiful, this is a must-read for genre and literary fiction fans alike. –MO
Ace Atkins, The Heathens
(Putnam)
The latest installment in Atkins’ Tibbehah County series focuses on TJ Byrd, one of the younger members of an outcast clan and a girl who’s about to get pinned with her mother’s murder. Byrd flees, but she has Quinn Colson, familiar with trouble, believing her story and launching an investigation into what really happened. Atkins brings the usual crisp writing and entrancing storytelling to The Heathens, a portrait of generational divides and the unexpected bonds that bridge them. –Dwyer Murphy, CrimeReads Editor-in-Chief
Andrea Bartz, We Were Never Here
(Ballantine)
Bartz’s latest, We Were Never Here, is a wildly entertaining, complex story of friendship, loyalty, and the corrosive reach of trauma. Emily and Kristen are best friends on a backpacking trip in Chile. Katie kills a man, claiming self-defense, but this isn’t the first time, and Emily grows suspicious, especially when the friends return Stateside and Katie seems to insinuating herself into Emily’s life in new, dangerous ways. Each chapter brings a new surprise and a new insight into what has to be one of the most insidious fictional friendships in recent memory. –DM
Samira Sedira, People Like Them
Translated by Lara Vergnaud
(Penguin Books)
Samira Sedira’s newly translated novel is inspired by a real case in France in which racism was an obvious factor but ignored by the media. In People Like Them, a glamorous mixed-race family move to a small rural community, where they proceed to befriend, then defraud, many of their new neighbors. One of those neighbors then commits a disproportionate act of monstrous violence sparked far more by his own racism and jealousy than any money owed to him. This is a tale of the violence and prejudice that rears its head in the form of exponential punishment for small sins—an unbearably familiar narrative across the world today. –MO
Carolyn Ferrell, Dear Miss Metropolitan
(Henry Holt and Co)
Carolyn Ferrell’s haunting novel of captivity and trauma is as lyrical as it is horrifying. Dear Miss Metropolitan tells the stories of three women held as sex slaves by a violent drunkard for over a decade, interwoven with narratives of their childhoods and their long path towards healing after finally gaining their freedom. Neighbors, nurses, and family all make their appearance as well, for a kaleidoscopic picture of fractured lives and the power of community. A gorgeous and essential work that earns its comparisons to Ivy Pochoda’s These Women and Emma Donoghue’s Room. –MO
Megan Miranda, Such a Quiet Place
(Simon & Schuster)
Megan Miranda’s latest psychological thriller is being pitched as Rear Window meets Amazon’s Ring, as a neighborhood grapples with the possibility that one of their own—strongly implicated in a murder through footage collected by doorbell cameras—may have, in fact, been innocent all along. Which means there’s another murderer lurking around their quiet neighborhood…and what will that do to the property values?!?! No one captures suburban suspense better than Miranda, and Such a Quiet Place may well be her best so far. –MO
Jeff Abbott, An Ambush of Widows
(Grand Central)
Jeff Abbott first made a name for himself with action-packed thrillers, then turned to the slow burn storytelling of domestic suspense. And now, for the first time, he’s united the two in his new novel An Ambush of Widows. When a cybersecurity expert and a multimillionaire tech genius are found dead together in Austin, their widows must team up to solve the crime, or be considered as suspects themselves. –MO
T.J. Newman, Falling
(Avid Reader / Simon and Schuster)
Newman’s debut, Falling, is about as intense and heart-pounding as suspense fiction can get. The story unfolds in the skies, as the pilot of a commercial flight learns that his family has been taken hostage and the kidnappers are demanding that he crash the plane. Newman, a former flight attendant, writes powerfully and with sharp observations about the closed confines of a packed airplane, bringing the many lives onboard into focus and ratcheting up the dread of what’s to come. This is sure to be one of the most talked-about books of summer. –DM
Daniel Silva, The Cellist
(Harper)
Few reading experiences bring me more joy than opening up the new Gabriel Allon novel every summer. This year, Silva takes us to a tony neighborhood in London, where Victor Orlov, Russian oligarch in exile, Kremlin dissident, receives a mysterious file from an investigative reporter, including documents which apparently carry the dose of poison that will kill him. The authorities are ready to call the reporter a Moscow agent, but Allon isn’t buying the story and sets off on the usual capital-hopping European adventure in search of the truth. Expect a sophisticated thriller with a few ripped-from-the-headlines plot twists and plenty of revelations into the modern-day world of intelligence maneuverings. –DM
Elisabeth de Mariaffi, The Retreat
(Mulholland)
The Retreat is a chilling reinvention of an old mystery favorite: the mountainside hotel, the guests from various backgrounds, and a storm that traps them all there, which is when the first murder happens, naturally. In de Mariaffi’s telling, the hotel is an arts retreat high up in the Rocky Mountains, and our protagonist is a dancer looking for inspiration in starting her own company. The atmosphere is richly drawn, a heady mixture of artistic ambition, oncoming claustrophobia, and adrenaline-soaked sleuthing.
