The CrimeReads editors make their selections for the year’s best debut novels in crime, mystery, and thrillers.
Paz Pardo, The Shamshine Blind
(Atria)
Paz Pardo’s The Shamshine Blind is a heady mix of high-concept speculative fiction, alternative history, and hardboiled detective fiction. In an alternate 2009, a new chemical compound that can elicit targeted human emotions has been weaponized in war and made ubiquitous for recreational purposes, upending the global and social orders. Amidst the new chaos, a small city enforcement agent gets put on the trail of a new product, a trail that points in the direction of a much broader conspiracy. Pardo’s novel is full of wit and wild invention and is sure to leave readers wanting more. –DM
Margot Douaihy, Scorched Grace
(Zando, Gillian Flynn Books)
Margot Douaihy’s chain-smoking nun Sister Holiday may be the most original character you’ll come across for quite some time. Douaihy wanted to reclaim pulp tropes for a female protagonist, and I have to say, Sister Holiday is punk AF. Set in New Orleans, Scorched Grace takes place at a Catholic school where an arson attack has harmed several students. Sister Holiday, a fan of detective fiction, is ready to solve the case (or else face suspicion herself). –MO
Clémence Michallon, The Quiet Tenant
(Knopf)
Clémence Michallon’s new novel is worth the hype!! It is a beautifully and thoughtfully written book with a pitch-perfect premise, about a man named Aidan, who, after he loses his wife, must downsize. He must move to a new, smaller home with his teenage daughter… and the woman he’s secretly had captive on his property for five years. He is a serial killer, and she is the one woman he has ever spared. Narrated by the three women in his life—his daughter, the woman who falls for his cultivated charms, and the woman whose very existence is the only clue to his vicious true self. This book is fantastic.–OR
Michael Bennett, Better the Blood
(Atlantic Monthly Press)
Michael Bennett is a much-lauded Maori screenwriter and director, and this, his debut, brings his skills of storytelling to a new medium and introduces a compelling new heroine. Hana Westerman is a Maori CID detective with a rebellious teenage daughter, uncooperative colleagues, and now a truly puzzling case—someone’s been killing the descendants of a group of men responsible for an early 19th-century lynching, and it’s up to Hana to track them down while proving herself once again to her department. –MO
Polly Stewart, The Good Ones
(Harper)
Stewart’s debut is a powerful novel about a woman, recently returned to her Appalachian hometown, who grows obsessed with a friend’s disappearance twenty years prior, and with other cases of missing women. What emerges is a sprawling tale about a town’s secrets and lingering traumas, as well as one woman’s reckoning with life’s darkest turns. Stewart is a writer to watch. –DM
Ana Reyes, The House in the Pines
(Dutton)
In this deeply unsettling and atmospheric debut, a woman in Boston watches a YouTube clip of a young woman’s sudden collapse and death, an event that eerily mirrors incident from her own youth – right down to the man standing at the edge of the frame. This begins a journey back to her Berkshires hometown and into a mess of old secrets and family mysteries. Reyes has an unerring grip on this suspenseful story, full of barely suppressed adrenaline and shocking twists. –DM
Nina Simon, Mother-Daughter Murder Night
(William Morrow)
A woman recuperating in a coastal California town takes up murder investigation in her spare time, when her granddaughter becomes a suspect in the crime. Simon writes a keen mystery that combines swift prose and incisive characterization. This is a winning page-turner that marks a major new voice in suspense. –DM
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
Rachel Cochran, The Gulf
(Harper)
Set in 1970s Texas in a conservative town amidst the rise of the feminist movement, The Gulf is one of several thrillers that show that the Third Coast has come into its own. The Gulf follows a young queer woman searching for answers after the murder of a powerful woman she’d admired greatly, but who was hated by most of the men in town—and her own children. A refreshing read and a strong debut from a powerful new voice. –MO
Vibhuti Jain, Our Best Intentions
(William Morrow)
The characters in Our Best Intentions are immigrants under the powerful sway of the American Dream. Babur Singh—call him Bobby—is a single dad who owns a rideshare business, Move with Bobby, which would also be a good name for a man with a van or a dance class. Bobby dotes on his daughter, Angie, and they live in a wealthy suburb where Angie never feels comfortable. When she stumbles on a body, a classmate named Chiara Thompson, on her way home from swim practice, the news rocks the town and sheds light on the issues of privilege and morality. Jain’s debut is an impressive feat, nuanced and unafraid to tackle some thorny issues. –LL
