Here are five debut crime novels, thrillers, and mysteries, all worthy of your attention. Enjoy these first forays into the published world; the start, we hope, of many. As always, blurbs are by me unless otherwise stated.
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Leslie Bazzett, Mia
(Scribner)
Reminiscent of Chelsea Bieker’s Madwoman or Rachel Eve Moulton’s Tantrum, two recent tales of monstrous motherhood, the psychodynamics of Mia get queasy and nasty real quick. Bazzett’s debut, set in the American expat community of San Miguel de Allende, is aptly compared to Patricia Highsmith: the novel follows the obsessive friendship between a young mother and the older woman who begins to fill the role of her mother, triggering a cascade of terrible memories and even worse events. Mia takes a simple premise—be careful who you pretend to be—and carries it to extreme, and devastating, conclusions. –MO
Ryan Lowell, Freight
(Little Brown)
This exceptional debut is the perfect balance of voice and propulsion: a barreling forward, momentum-driven plot that never scrimps on finding the pieces of humanity that make up its sprawling cast. in Freight, a semi-truck is headed toward the US-Canadian border, and as it moves, we meet the many, many people who seem to be involved in a plot to capture it. Freight has all the markers of classic noir along with a very contemporary sensibility about American crime. –Dwyer Murphy
A.P. Thayer, Tapeworm
(Evil Twin)
An ancient evil dwells below the dried up lake that once filled Southern California, unable to escape its subterranean prison—that is, until climate change opens a way to the surface, and fractious vacationers soon become the perfect hosts to, well, a lot of worms. So many worms. And they are quite reasonable worms, with fairly achievable goals. This book is the first release from Zando’s new Evil Twin horror imprint, adding to the pantheon of new spinoffs celebrating the horror renaissance. –MO
W.H. Chizmar, Them
(Gallery)
This survival horror is epic, violent, and not for the faint hearted. Chizmar’s debut vacillates between the lead-up to an alien apocalypse, and the fall of civilization as we know it. In the first, a government bureaucrat in charge of a top-secret research institute discovers the hubris of playing god, while in the latter, a lone survivor searches for signs of life amidst the devastation, barely evading the scorpion-like monsters who now rule the landscape. A classic drama of pride before the fall, but with giant space bugs. –MO
Margrét Ann Thors, Freyja
(Spiegel & Grau)
I was blown away and knocked to pieces by Margrét Ann Thors’s ice-cold debut, about a mom in Iceland determined to keep her little girl safe from the strange past she has long kept buried, a past involving the disappearance of her otherworldly childhood best friend in a barren and frigid nook of the North called “the Dark Valley.” The narrative and plotting of Freyja are excellent, but Thors’s crystal-clear prose is magnificent, and its emotional capacity is positively unreal. This is a book that feels things (love, loneliness, self-reliance, anger, and peace) incredibly deeply.–Olivia Rutigliano
