The CrimeReads editors select their favorite debut novels this month.
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Raul Palma, A Haunting in Hialeah Gardens
(Dutton)
Palma’s debut is a sparkling gem of a novel, a world-weary portrait of cynicism and despair upended and upended again. A recent widower in Miami with an indefatigable debt collector on his trail gets a bizarre offer from his antagonist: cleanse his house of unwanted spirits, and the debt will be forgiven. The trouble is, our man, though with a certain expertise, doesn’t actually believe in the spirits himself, and so undertakes an elaborate con job instead. Palma writes with precision and wit, bringing out a story that’s genuinely compelling and insightful. –DM
Yomi Adegoke, The List
(William Morrow)
Yomi Adegoke’s debut thriller is sophisticated, complex, and smart, posing an uneasy question: what would you do if your partner was accused of a heinous act? And how would you go about finding out the truth? The List follows Ola and Michael, two Black British professionals whose status as #couplegoals is threatened by shocking (and anonymous) revelations about Michael’s behavior towards another woman. –MO
Amanda Peters, The Berry Pickers
(Catapult)
The Berry Pickers is a sensitive and devastating saga of families broken, children stolen, and fierce reckonings with the traumas of history. As the novel begins, a 4-year-old Mi’kmaq child goes missing, her disappearance sending her loved ones into their own private hells. We’re then introduced to a girl growing up with a paranoid mother and an aloof father, dreaming of another family and wondering at her parents’ reticence when it comes to her earliest years. The novel starts in 1962 and spans over 50 years, with an emotional climax that will leave most readers with at least a tear in their eye. –MO
Adriana Chartrand, An Ordinary Violence
(Spiderline)
In An Ordinary Violence, a young Indigenous woman who is living in Toronto, reckoning with the violence and trauma of her past, receives uncanny messages and soon goes back home looking for answers. Her story is offset against her brother’s, recently released from jail and mixed up with something supernatural. Chartrand weaves together an unsettling tale that interrogates cross-generational pain. –DM
Sam Rebelein, Edenville
(William Morrow)
A novelist has a very vivid dream. He wakes up and writes a novel. That novel comes across the desk of a mysterious researcher who curses her discovery. She doesn’t want to kill the author—perhaps, she can hire him as an adjunct creative writing teacher instead? And so the author and his girlfriend head to a small liberal arts college where the English department has a strangely otherworldly agenda. This book was a wild ride from start to finish, with a heavy dose of humor thrown into the mix. –MO
Anna Biller, Bluebeard’s Castle
(Verso)
Anna Biller’s sly feminist dissection of gothic tropes is as lush and layered as her cinema (Biller is the director of the cult classic The Love Witch). A young romance writer is seduced by a handsome ne’er-do-well who makes himself out to be a wealthy gentleman. Soon, he shows himself to be a brutal lover and more concerned with borrowing from her dwindling savings than making any money of his own. And yet, she has fallen in love with him…or so she tells herself, but Biller skillfully portrays the gaslighting and abuse that reduce her heroine to making excuses for her boorish husband. –MO
Olivia Worley, People to Follow
(Wednesday Books)
10 influencers head to a remote location for three weeks turned off from their phones, convinced they’re the stars of a new reality show—but not long after they arrive, influencers start dropping like follower counts, as their darkest secrets are revealed to their legions of fans. I’m really enjoying this trend of “books where annoying people who are internet famous kill each other.” –MO
Ritu Mukerji, Murder By Degrees
(Simon & Schuster)
If you like gaslit mysteries and intrepid lady sleuths, this one’s for you! I was entranced by Ritu Mukerji’s spooky, exacting mystery set in late-nineteenth Philadelphia. It is about a woman, Dr. Lydia Weston an anatomist and professor at Woman’s Medical College, who suspects foul play when the body of a young woman is pulled out of the river, while also investigating the disappearance of a young patient. –OR
Dan McDorman, West Heart Kill
(Knopf)
With this ultra-clever and teasingly metafictional debut, Dan McDorman has both created a perfect locked room mystery and exploded it. Set in the 70s (or is it so meta as to only have the setting of Now and the character of the Reader?), the story follows a cast of bored, drunken rich people at their elite summer club, where two interlopers have arrived for the weekend: the first Jewish applicant for membership, and a poetically weary private detective who (in my mind at least) definitely pulls off his blonde mustache. After everyone sleeps with everyone else, some murders happen. So yeah, basically The Ice Storm as if written by Borges, then solved by Chandler. –MO
