The CrimeReads editors select the year’s best debut novels in crime, mystery, and thrillers.
Zakiya Dalila Harris, The Other Black Girl
(Atria)
Zakiya Dalila Harris’ scathing debut, The Other Black Girl, was inspired by the author’s chance meeting with another Black editor at the publishing company where she worked, the novelty of that experience sparking an inventive psychological thriller that pillories the extraordinarily white world of NYC publishing. Nella Rogers couldn’t be happier when another Black woman starts working at her prestigious publishing company, but she quickly finds the other woman’s extreme code-switching off-putting. Meanwhile, someone’s been leaving threatening notes on her desk, telling her to leave before it’s too late. While this book particularly resonates with those of us in the industry, the book’s glowing reception indicates that this one’s for everyone! –Molly Odintz, CrimeReads Senior Editor
Erik Hoel, The Revelations
(Overlook Press)
Hoel’s debut is one of the year’s most ambitious novels, a provocative and weighty exploration of nothing short of human consciousness. The story centers on a researcher fallen from grace but offered a second chance in an elite postdoctoral program, where his own search for the roots of consciousness come into a sudden clash with the the investigation into a colleague’s death. The novel is packed full with ideas, debates, scientific inquiry, and language that seems itself to come alive. This is a mystery novel you won’t soon forget and the announcement of a major new talent. –Dwyer Murphy, CrimeReads Editor-in-Chief
James Han Mattson, Reprieve
(William Morrow)
It’s hard to do justice to how awesome this book is without giving much away, so I’ll just tell you the set-up: in the mid-90s, in a small university town in the middle of nowhere, there is a haunted house. Not just any haunted house, but a full-contact mansion of horrors, where the well-heeled cliental can go in smiling and emerge screaming, and a few daring souls each year attempt to win a cash prize by completing an exceptionally disturbing challenge. Reprieve is a self-aware and furious deconstruction of the horror novel, contrasting those who seek out fear with those who face the ever-present dangers of prejudice. –MO
Carolyn Ferrell, Dear Miss Metropolitan
(Henry Holt & Co)
Carolyn Ferrell’s haunting novel of captivity and trauma is as lyrical as it is horrifying. Dear Miss Metropolitan tells the stories of three women held as sex slaves by a violent drunkard for over a decade, interwoven with narratives of their childhoods and their long path towards healing after finally gaining their freedom. Neighbors, nurses, and family all make their appearance as well, for a kaleidoscopic picture of fractured lives and the power of community. A gorgeous and essential work that earns its comparisons to Ivy Pochoda’s These Women and Emma Donoghue’s Room. –MO
Hannah Morrissey, Hello, Transcriber
(Minotaur)
Hazel Greenlee works the graveyard shift as a police transcriber in Black Harbor, Wisconsin, a rustbelt city plagued by addiction and hopelessness. Her days are filled with her husband’s hunting exploits, and her nights are taken over by clinically precise descriptions of lurid crime scenes. She tries to keep her emotional distance, but one case in particular—and the mysterious detective working it—takes her from observer to actor, as she begins her own investigation. With echoes of The Conversation and The Lives of Others, Hello, Transcriber is a statement to the eternal human impulse to Get Involved. –MO
Vera Kurian, Never Saw Me Coming
(Park Row)
Vera Kurian’s extraordinarily entertaining Never Saw Me Coming is one of a few books in a new trend I’m calling “yoga pants noir,” in which hot girls in athleisure wear are no longer the victims—and they might be the killers. College freshman Chloe has carefully cultivated her nonchalant Cool Girl personality, but she has a secret: she’s a psychopath, hell-bent on getting revenge against a boy from her past who’s also attending the same school. The problem is, she’s not the only psychopath on campus—there are at least six others, all part of a long-term study that comes with a scholarship—and some of them have been turning up dead. Will Chloe get her prey, before she goes from hunter to hunted? –MO
Alexandra Andrews, Who Is Maud Dixon?
(Little Brown)
It’s always hard to meet your idols, and when the bored, disenchanted young writer of Alexandra Andrew’s debut is hired to be the assistant for the famously reclusive author Maud Dixon, she’s bound to find her hero to be rather disappointing. What she doesn’t expect is the wild adventure she and her employer embark on as Maud tries to cure a stubborn case of writer’s block with some rather questionable behavior—and then disappears, allowing her protegé a chance to cast off her own identity in favor of a rather more prestigious name. But the twists and turns don’t end there… –MO
Chris Power, A Lonely Man
(FSG)
An apparently chance meeting in a bookstore launches the story of Chris Power’s intricate, searching debut. The meeting is between two Brits in Berlin, one a writer in search of his next book, the other claims to be a ghostwriter on the lam, hired to write a book for a Russian oligarch, a man who was shortly after killed. The bizarre tale connects the two, but in unusual ways, as both seem to be testing the other’s sense of reality, art, fiction, truth, and lies. A Lonely Man is an uncanny novel in the best sense possible. The mystery comes in readers’ efforts to untangle the many disorienting layers of narrative, asking themselves whether anything in this compelling world is authentic, and whether that’s the right question at all. –DM
Gabriel Krauze, Who They Was
(Bloomsbury)
Krauze was on the Booker longlist for this brutal and thought-provoking novel. Once you get used to the dialect—like Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings and Huck Finn—the dualities Krauze explores open up in an oblique but compelling way. The narrator goes by Gabriel at the university where he’s a thoughtful yet ordinary student (paging all autofiction fans). In his other life, the narrator is deep in the world of London’s gangs, dabbling in all of the fun stuff: guns, drugs, robbery, even a stabbing. There is something reminiscent of A Clockwork Orange here—praise I do not give out lightly. –Lisa Levy, CrimeReads Contributing Editor
Wanda M. Morris, All Her Little Secrets
(William Morrow and Custom House)
This book is so good! Wanda M. Morris takes the traditional legal thriller and gives it a high-concept twist that you’ll never see coming. As All Her Little Secrets begins, Ellice Littlejohn arrives for her usual liaison with her boss, only to find him deceased in her office. Things quickly get worse from there, as Ellice, one of the few Black attorneys at her firm, finds herself the target of a menacing Old Boys Club. –MO
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NOTABLE SELECTIONS
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LaTanya McQueen, When the Reckoning Comes (Harper Perennial) · Robert Justice, They Can’t Take Your Name (Dafina) · Emilya Naymark, Hide in Place (Crooked Lane) · Sarah Pearse, The Sanatorium (Pamela Dorman Books) · Nekesa Afia, Dead Dead Girls (Berkley) · Zhanna Slor, At The End of the World, Turn Left (Agora) · Caitlin Wahrer, The Damage (Pamela Dorman Books) · Abigail Dean, Girl A (Viking) · Carole Johnston, Mirrorland (Simon & Schuster) · Erin Mayer, Fan Club (MIRA) · Chris Harding Thornton, Pickard County Atlas (MCD) · Amanda Jayatissa, My Sweet Girl (Berkley) · Ava Barry, Windhall (Pegasus) · Catherine Dang, Nice Girls (William Morrow) · Gus Moreno, This Thing Between Us (FSG x MCD) · Caitlin Wahrer, The Damage (Viking) · Mia P. Manansala, Arsenic and Adobo (Berkley) · Yasmin Angoe, Her Name is Knight (Thomas and Mercer) · Rachel Hawkins, The Wife Upstairs (St Martins) · Eliza Jane Brazier, If I Disappear (Berkley) · Jonathan Parks-Ramage, Yes, Daddy (Mariner Books) · Ashley Audrain, The Push (Pamela Dorman) · Ellery Lloyd, People Like Her (Harper) · A.E. Osworth, We Are Watching Eliza Bright (Grand Central) · Femi Kayode, Lightseekers (Mulholland)
