Looking over our list of our favorite works of psychological suspense in 2019, I count exactly one man (don’t worry, we’ll make sure Adrian McKinty has his own facilities at the upcoming CrimeReads All-Crime Writer Track and Field meet). This is not a surprise, as this particular wedge of the crime fiction pie has been dominated by women since its inception. But it is something to think about, as the books here are likely to reflect the preoccupations of contemporary women, and they do: there’s the precarious world of motherhood in The Chain, Freefall and The Perfect Fraud; the pernicious world of work in Blood Orange, Turn of the Key and The Whisper Network; and everything from the perils of the internet to the world of stand-up comedy in two other entries, Missing Person and Last Woman Standing. Lisa Lutz’s excellent The Swallows and Samantha Downing’s My Lovely Wife are both explorations of female power, the first at a boarding school and the second within a marriage. If I could extract one holiday gift from each of you readers it would be to spread the word about these books and our hefty list of Honorable Mentions. These books are not for women only. They are for everyone who likes a crime tale well told, sometimes served with contemporary issues on the side for you to chew on.
Jessica Barry, Freefall (Harper)
The fun of Freefall is in the thriller’s split point-of-view, with each narrator telling a story that gets more nuanced as the book progresses. Allison Carpenter, a young woman raised in Maine and now living in San Diego, is the only survivor of a private plane crash in the Colorado Rockies, which claimed the life of her wealthy pharmaceutical CEO fiancé. Her goal is to find civilization and stay alive. Ally is estranged from her mother, Maggie Carpenter, but as soon as Maggie hears about the plane crash she is determined to find out more about both her daughter’s life and her supposed death. This tightly paced thriller also deftly examines the complexity of the mother-daughter bond.
Harriet Tyce, Blood Orange (Grand Central Publishing)
Tyce’s debut is an excellent psychological thriller, so good it could be one of the best of the nascent year. Young lawyer Alison is defending in her first murder case. Her client, a quiet housewife accused of killing her husband, is indeed guilty of stabbing him, but as Alison investigates the case she finds there might be more to the story than a lover’s spat. Meanwhile, she’s having a blistering affair with a senior attorney at her firm which threatens her own happy family life—and someone bent on destroying her knows her secret.
Samantha Downing, My Lovely Wife (Berkley)
Given the popularity of domestic suspense it’s not surprising that writers are starting to subvert expectations of what the genre can do. To wit, we’ve seen a number of domestic suspense novels told from the male point of view, in which the couple is in cahoots or the woman—or wife—is gaslighting her man. My Lovely Wife takes this premise to an extreme, and it’s a fantastic read. Wife is a stunner of a book. Read at your own peril and pleasure.
Kalisha Buckhanon, Speaking of Summer (Counterpoint)
In this strong, atmospheric novel from rising star Kalisha Buckhanon, protagonist Autumn is searching for her missing sister, Summer, while living in a guilt-ridden relationship with her sister’s ex-boyfriend and contemplating the many missing and murdered women of Harlem. This is social justice noir meets psycho-noir, with an end twist you’ll never see coming.—Molly Odintz, CrimeReads associate editor
Amy Gentry, Last Woman Standing (HMH)
Amy Gentry’s cutting new thriller feels a bit like They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, but for the Austin comedy scene, as Gentry’s protagonist struggles to break out as a comedy star. There’s also a well-thought-out nod to Strangers on a Train, and I won’t say anything more, lest I spoil the fun. Also, much of the action takes place in my old stomping grounds of North Central Austin, and there’s even a shout-out to one of my favorite bars (I miss you, Lala’s, and all your beautiful year-round Christmas lights)! You know your hometown has made it when the dive bars start showing up in fiction. Now, who’s going to write the great American crime novel, Tiniest Bar in Texas edition? —MO
Chandler Baker, The Whisper Network (Flatiron)
If it weren’t so intelligent and thoughtful, the Whisper Network would be a perverse book, taking advantage of the #MeToo era in the service of telling a story about the mating habits of corporate lawyers. But Whisper serves as both evidence of our current sexual climate and as one of the few non-domestic suspense books to feature women and their relationships. Sloane, Ardie, and Grace are all corporate lawyers and close friends. The action of the book kicks off when the CEO kicks the bucket, leaving Ames, their boss, the natural successor. Yet Ames has done his share of dirty deeds, some of which the women know about and some they just suspect. When he starts paying too much attention to a pretty associate, the women decide they have to take action–yet in doing so, each is putting something precious at risk.
Adrian McKinty, The Chain (Mulholland Books)
American culture’s preoccupation with missing children shows no sign of abating, and crime fiction is one of the sites where we can see the scope and the intensity of this fixation. Northern Irish writer McKinty has said that The Chain is his American novel, in contrast to his sharp and funny series featuring rebel detective Sean Duffy, enmeshed in the confusion of The Troubles, and The Chain can be read as a chronicle of the troubles of contemporary America. The premise of The Chain is simple and horrifying: a parent is notified that his/her child has been kidnapped, and will not be returned until the beleaguered parent kidnaps another child. In constructing how these parents choose their victim—primarily through social media—McKinty points out how much we casually know about one another and how dangerous everyday people can be when the stakes are raised. When I first read The Chain last December I proclaimed it the thriller of the summer; but upon further reflection I think it could be the book of the year. Nothing else speaks as urgently to our desire to keep our families—the site of our most intimate feelings and desires—intact and safe in a world where it’s all too easy to destroy our closest bonds.
Ruth Ware, Turn of the Key (Scout)
Ware’s latest is more than a subtle homage to Henry James’s chilling The Turn of the Screw. Ware has tools James could have only dreamt about–namely, technology that can track the members of affluent family of a secluded house in the Scottish Highlands has trouble keeping a nanny. Enter Rowan Caine, an experienced childminder running from her past. With the book narrated by Rowan from prison with one of the children dead, her troubles are far from over—though she insists she’s not guilty, her story is full of moments which reflect poorly on the beleaguered nanny. And if she didn’t commit the murder, who did?
Lisa Lutz, The Swallows (Ballantine)
If you don’t love Lisa Lutz yet, either you have no sense of humor (The Spellman Files, Heads You Lose) or no love for a good woman-on-the-run story (The Passenger) or a David Simon drama (The Deuce). I don’t mean to chide you into reading Lutz’s latest, The Swallows, a boarding school saga which expertly critiques the student pecking order and dares to expose a rather disgusting pastime the elite boys impose on the previously unknowing girls. Lutz’s heroine, a creative writing teacher, is both a bolster to the female students who want to expose the folly of the boys and a woman stuck in a dysfunctional family drama that even the walls of the weird and quasi-elite Stonebridge can’t keep at bay.
Sarah Lotz, Missing Person (Mullholland)
Lotz uses several ingenious devices to tell the story of a “miss per,” a missing person who might be an unidentified murder victim. There are myriad websites that try to connect reports of missing persons with unidentified murder victims: Lotz’s is called Missing-Linc and run by a woman named Chris but known on the site as Ratking1. When one of the site’s members who lives in rural Minnesota connects a lost Irish national with a local corpse known as the Boy in the Dress, the repercussions ripple out from Minnesota to County Wicklow, Ireland. Lotz’s intelligent mystery explores how who we are online affects our real-life interactions as well as presenting a juicy novel.
___________________________________
Notable Selections
___________________________________
Erin Kelly, Stone Mothers (Minotaur) · Jean Kwok, Searching for Sylvie Lee (William Morrow) · Anna Pitoniak, Necessary People (Little, Brown) · Louise Candlish, Those People (Berkley) · Alafair Burke, The Better Sister (Harper) · Layne Fargo,Temper (Scout) · Allison Dickson, The Other Mrs. Miller (Putnam) · Alison Gaylin, Never Look Back (William Morrow) · Gilly Macmillan, The Nanny (William Morrow) · Kristin Innes, Fishnet (Gallery/Scout Press) · Caroline Louise Walker, Man of the Year (Gallery/Scout Press) · Michelle Frances, The Temp (Kensington) · Ellen LaCorte, The Perfect Fraud (Harper) · JoAnn Chaney, As Long as We Both Shall Live (Flatiron) · Annie Ward, Beautiful Bad (Park Row) · Nalini Singh, A Madness of Sunshine (Berkley) · Jo Baker, The Body Lies (Knopf) · Abigail Tartellin, Dead Girls (Rare Bird Books)
