With so many tours canceled, it’s more important than ever to do the work of discovering new authors at home. Lucky for us, we’ve been stuck in lockdown reading debut after debut, so we can report to you, dear readers, that it’s been one of the best years we’ve ever seen for debut crime and mystery fiction. Like Athena, the novels on the list below appeared to erupt from the heads of their creators fully formed and imbued with wisdom, except unlike Athena, each of these works is their creator’s first child. You’ll hear this again in the blurbs below, but it’s truly shocking that these books are debuts. Also, you’ll see an extra long list of other notable selections, since this year was so difficult when it came to narrowing down the list to our favorites.
John Fram, The Bright Lands
(Hanover Square)
Fram’s novel is one of the most assured, innovative debuts in recent memory. The Bright Lands explores American mythology, masculinity, sexuality, and storytelling, all through the lens of a compulsive mystery. The golden boy of a small Texas town goes missing, and his older brother, now living openly gay in New York, returns to his hometown to aid in the search. Traumatic memories long dormant return to the surface, and slowly elements of the supernatural are introduced into the story. The many and varied tensions driving the story forward are handled masterfully, making The Bright Lands a genuinely suspenseful novel that’s also brimming with ideas. –Dwyer Murphy, CrimeReads Editor-in-Chief
Deepa Annapara, Djinn Patrol and the Purple Line
(Random House)
Deepa Annapara’s first novel is incredible. At times wry, mature, playful, and haunting, Djinn Patrol and the Purple Line follows an adolescent boy and his friends, determined to play detective after one of their classmates goes missing. The children live in a tin-roofed slum at the end of the train line, where community is strong but resources are scarce and religious tensions are rising. As more children go missing, their investigation takes them farther into the city than they’ve ever gone before, and closer to the truths that only adults should know. The narrator’s innocent observations of the suffering of those around him are emotional gut-punches, and urban legends blend with mythology and surrealism to fill out a child’s vision of an adult world. This work will stay with you longer after you turn the last page. –Molly Odintz, CrimeReads Senior Editor
Richard Z. Santos, Trust Me
(Arte Publico Press)
Santos’s Trust Me is a subtle and sardonic debut that harkens back to the novels of Ross Thomas, a world of sun-baked western landscapes populated by hustlers and politicos of every stripe, everyone looking to make a deal. At the center of his story is a washed-out political operative who takes a job working public relations for a new airport project in Santa Fe, only to find construction halted by the discovery of a skeleton, a revelation that soon erupts into chaos when claims are made that the bones belong to the legendary Geronimo. Santos together brings the many outsized personalities swirling around the project with great skill, unfurling a story that manages to be a powerful social critique and also a delicate portrait of lives under the strain of monied progress. Trust Me is a novel that will stay with you for a very long time after reading. –DM
Nancy Jouyoun Kim, The Last Story of Mina Lee
(Park Row)
Nancy Jouyoun Kim joins a wave of authors exploring Korean-American identity through mystery fiction in this novel of homecoming and secrets. Margot lives far from her Korean immigrant mother and her impoverished past, but when her mother fails to answer the phone just before Thanksgiving, Margot and a friend head down to LA to check things out and find Mina Lee dead in her small home, seemingly of natural causes. Margot sets out to discover what happened, and ends up investigation both her mother’s past and her own identity. A gorgeous tale of family, trauma, and finding yourself. –MO
David Heska Wanbli Weiden, Winter Counts
(Ecco) DM
Winter Counts is the start of what we hope will be a long and many-volumed career in crime fiction for author David Heska Wanbli Weiden. Meet Virgil Wounded Horse, the man who takes on the jobs traditional law enforcement can’t handle on the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota. He’s determined to find out how heroin is flooding the reservation, a crusade that takes him across the parched, corrupted landscapes of the American West and after organized crime figures fueling the systemic injustices already in place on the reservation. This is urgent, hard-hitting crime fiction that will keep you reading. –DM
Brian Selfon, The Nightworkers
(MCD) DM
Selfon’s impressive debut chronicles the life and times of a family business in Brooklyn. The business just so happens to be money laundering, with Shecky Keenan the anxious paterfamilias channeling the bounty of the city’s underworld through his sprawling network of high cash flow businesses. The intricacy of the operation is part of the story’s appeal, no doubt, but primarily this is a family portrait, with father, son, and daughter engaging in a battle of loyalty and creeping mistrust. Selfon is a major talent with a gift for illuminating an imagined underworld and populating it with a vivid cast of characters. –DM
Steven Wright, The Coyotes of Carthage
(Ecco)
This one is like Ozark meets Miller’s Crossing. Steven Wright’s fixer protagonist is in trouble after his candidate loses an election, and his boss gives him one last chance to redeem himself before the political machine: he’s headed to the backwoods of Appalachia to convince the conservative residents of a natural paradise to turn their last bit of nature over to capitalistic exploitation. What follows is a grim and grimy primer on how to use dark money, straw men, and other dirty tricks to win yourself a ballot referendum. Shocking, funny, and deeply cynical, this is the perfect political thriller to close out a truly terrible year. –MO
Susie Yang, White Ivy
(Simon & Schuster)
As someone who reads A LOT of books, I often worry about forgetting a novel as soon as I put it down, but with Susie Yang’s White Ivy, the opposite is true—the more time passes, the more I think about this peculiar, haunting, and vicious thriller that owes much to Becky Sharp of Vanity Fair. At a young age, Ivy Lin learns to take what she wants, taught by her shoplifting grandmother. A sojourn as a scholarship student at an elite private school teaches her envy for the lives of her privileged classmates, and when she heads to China to stay with a wealthy relative and returns as a sophisticate, she’s ready to finally make her way into the American aristocracy. All she needs to do is seduce one childhood friend—and get rid of another. –MO
Emily Gray Tedrowe, The Talented Miss Farwell
(William Morrow)
Tedrowe’s debut gave me the same feeling as a David Mamet film—you find yourself sickened, yet unable to look away from the steadily unfolding plethora of betrayal. Becky Farwell is a small-town girl who finds her future stymied by her need to caretake for her father. As she settles into a job as a city accountant, she develops an expensive new hobby, and begins to siphon the town’s money into an account for her own purposes of building an extensive art collection. The townspeople know their government is in financial trouble, but Becky has a reputation as a genius for moving the numbers around to keep the town afloat. Unfortunately, she’s also the cause of their ruin…A cringe-worthy delight! –MO
Micah Nemerever, These Violent Delights
(Harper) MO
There’s been a lot of wonderful writing this year on anxiety and depression—thanks, 2020!—but to me, nothing comes close to the experience of reading Micah Nemerever’s intense and beautiful thriller, a tale of young love twisted by the heavy weight of chronic melancholy. These Violent Delights begins soon after the narrator Paul’s father, a Holocaust survivor, shoots himself in the family’s backyard shed. Paul meets the enchanting Julian at college, his rich family and bored affectations a direct contrast to Paul’s working class roots and taciturn speech, and the two are magnetically drawn together by a shared passion for each other and a mutual interest in the worst events of the 20th century. Paul’s raw hurt and anger ripple across each page, while Julian’s golden exterior shows more cracks as we learn of his hideous upbringing. When deepest in his depression, Paul turns to books about concentration camps and films about Hiroshima, and steels himself to never look away from what people are willing to do. Julian, meanwhile, needs more and more of Paul. Both Paul and Julian find their families growing concerned with the nature of their relationship, and as they fight against attempts to separate them, the two eventually set off on a path of mutually assured destruction. –MO
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Notable Selections
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Richard Osman, The Thursday Murder Club (Pamela Dorman Books) · Tiffany Tsao, The Majesties (Atria) · Halley Sutton, The Lady Upstairs (Putnam) · Nicola Maye Goldberg, Nothing Can Hurt You (Bloomsbury) · Ani Katz, A Good Man (Penguin) · Kate Elizabeth Russell, My Dark Vanessa (William Morrow) · Stephanie Wrobel, Darling Rose Gold (Berkley) · Sara Sligar, Take Me Apart (MCD) · Matthew Hart, The Russian Pink (Pegasus) · Alex Pavesi, The Eighth Detective (Henry Holt) · Christopher Chambers, Scavenger (Three Rooms Press) · Kate Reed Petty, True Story (Viking) · Elissa R. Sloan, The Unraveling of Cassidy Holmes (William Morrow) · Kate Weinberg, The Truants (Putnam) · Harriet Walker, The New Girl (Ballantine)
