The CrimeReads editors select the month’s best debut novels in crime, mystery, and thrillers.
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Nick Medina, Sisters of a Lost Nation
(Berkley)
Nick Medina’s debut is told from the perspective of Anna Horn, a young Native girl who works at her town’s local casino and starts to notice a pattern when it comes to the reservations’s many missing women. A gripping and timely novel informed by a rich tapestry of myth and legend, Sisters of the Lost Nation marks the entrance of strong new voice to crime writing. –MO
Vanessa Cuti, The Tip Line
(Crooked Lane)
A woman takes a job at a tip line thinking she’ll work alongside some local law enforcement types and find herself a suitable spouse, when she gets a disturbing series of tips about beach parties, missing women, and police officers suspected of murder. Cuti’s debut is an inventive and captivating thriller that consistently upends reader’s expectations. –DM
Disha Bose, Dirty Laundry
(Ballantine)
Ciara Dunphy is the queen bee of her small Irish village, whose ambivalence towards her own family doesn’t make it into her carefully curated mommy influencer persona. Her best friend, Mishti, misses her home in India and distrusts her psychologist husband and his reluctance to visit their relatives. Her sworn enemy, Lauren, has been picked on for far too long by the mean girls of the village, and she’s had about enough of Ciara’s fakery. And then, Ciara ends up dead….I tore through this delicious and insightful thriller, where plenty of plausible suspects and reveals keep the reader guessing. –MO
Alice Slater, Death of a Bookseller
(Scarlet)
I truly feel like this book was written for me, but also for all of you, dear readers, for it is creepy AF in the best way. Two booksellers, one obsessed with true crime and the other deeply uncomfortable with the medium, get ready for a deadly showdown when one discovers the other has a more personal connection to the genre than most realize. Also there are snails. –MO
Meagan Jennett, You Know Her
(MCD)
The thesis of You Know Her is that *everyone else doesn’t know her*! You heard me. Rookie officer Nora Martin is new to her small-town police department, but she knows in her gut that there is something going on with Sophie Braam, her new friend and the bartender at the local watering hole where a young man’s mutilated body is just discovered. There has been a serial killer stalking their tiny Virginia community. And Nora thinks it’s Sophie. And she’s the only one.–OR
Monica Brashears, House of Cotton
(Flatiron)
In this photography horror novel, Monica Brashears’ 19-year-old narrator is broke, working a dead-end job, and newly suffering the loss of her grandmother, the most important adult figure in her life, when she gets a strange offer from the owner of a funeral home: come model for him as he creates experiences for those who are having a hard time saying goodbye to the dead. What follows is a haunting and sly Southern Gothic with plenty of things to say about race, gender, and appropriation. –MO
