The CrimeReads editors select the month’s best debut novels in crime, mystery, and thrillers.
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Erin E. Adams, Jackal
(Ballantine)
As Jackal begins, Liz Rocher has reluctantly headed home to Johnstown, Pennsylvania for her childhood best friend’s wedding. She’s prepared for the micro-aggressions from her friend’s racist family, but during the celebration something far worse happens—a beloved child goes missing, and the key to her disappearance stretches back over decades of missing children, all of them young Black girls last seen around the summer solstice. Meanwhile, a spirit in the woods is close to taking corporeal form and rejecting the bonds of its human master. A social thriller perfect for fans of Jordan Peele, Jackal also comfortably rides the folk horror wave. Like Bethany C. Morrow’s Cherish, Farrah, Jackal also asks compelling questions about who society values as worthy of protection, and the true nature of monstrosity. –Molly Odintz, CrimeReads Senior Editor
Christopher M. Hood, The Revivalists
(Harper)
The Revivalists is the pandemic book I couldn’t have predicted but my short-sightedness just proves we are going to be under the spell of some very interesting (and frightening, and original, and depressing) fiction for the next few years or longer. Hood’s debut is a chronicle of Bill and Penelope, who were lucky enough to survive the Shark Flu—a result of the melting of Icelandic permafrost. But their daughter, Hannah, has weathered the pandemic in Bishop, California, and she just might have joined a cult. On their cross-country road trip, Bill and Pen will reckon with a new world while they chase what’s most precious: their errant child. –Lisa Levy, CrimeReads contributing editor
Joanna Margaret, The Bequest
(Scarlet)
This debut from art historian Joanna Margaret hopscotches across European art and academia hot spots and delivers on a wild ride with nods to gothic fiction and dark academia, accompanied by smart notes of Hitchcock to round out this exemplary thriller. With a doctoral candidate at the center of the plot, you can expect an erudite unraveling of the mystery, as well as some pressure cooker atmospherics from some of the grandest spots on the international intellectual circuit. –DM
Claudia Lux, Sign Here
(Berkley)
Looking for a fun Halloween-y book that feels like a mash-up between The Good Place, Succession, and The Office? Well, hopefully now you are, because there is one, and it is very funny. Sign Here features a white collar worker from Hell who’s working as hard as he can to sign away an entire family’s souls (once he does, he gets a bonus). But as his targets decamp to their lake house for a long, fraught, summer, the job may be more difficult than he imagined. –MO
Rita Zoey Chin, The Strange Inheritance of Leah Fern
(Melville House)
Extra points to this one for the beautiful cover. Rita Zoey Chin’s new novel is a beautiful, haunting tale about a young woman (who once made headlines as a child prodigy fortune-teller) who travels the world to learn what happened to her wonderful mother (a magician who vanished when she was 6). –Olivia Rutigliano, CrimeReads Associate Editor
