The CrimeReads editors select the month’s best debut novels in crime fiction, mystery, and thrillers.
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Paz Pardo, The Shamshine Blind
(Atria)
Paz Pardo’s The Shamshine Blind is one of the more exciting debuts to hit in early 2023, 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
Johnny Compton, Spite House
(Tor Nightfire)
Eric Ross and his two daughters are on the run and looking to settle down somewhere where they won’t be too scrutinized. Enter the Spite House, a haunted house on a hill overlooking an abandoned orphanage, whose owner is looking for a new caretaker to help prove definitely that the house is occupied by ghosts. If Eric can stay in the house long enough to get proof of paranormal activity, he and his daughters will receive enough funds to go completely off the grid. But given the home’s propensity to rob its previous caretakers of their sanity, it’s a toss-up—will Eric find safety for his family, or has he placed them in more danger than ever before? –MO
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
Rachel Koller Croft, Stone Cold Fox
(Berkeley)
Koller’s debut deserves to be big—Ruth Ware’s In a Dark, Dark Wood big, Samantha Downing’s My Lovely Wife big, Liv Constantine’s The First Mrs. Parrish big. Of all those books, it resembles Constantine’s most closely: the story of a poor girl on the grift in a rich man’s world is embodying a universal truth (see William Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady, or Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth for the high-class version of this story). Croft gives us a delicious heroine in Bea (definitely not her real name), whose ambitions in her job at a much-feared PR firm are only outmatched by her pursuit of Collin Case. Case is high born and bred, the member of a circle of elites who look down on marrying outside of the clique. Will Bea defeat the machinations of her boyfriend’s childhood best friend, the frumpy, nosy, and wily Gale Wallace-Leicester to keep her from her beloved and his bank account? Don’t bet against Croft’s stone cold fox. –LL
Robin Yeatman, Bookworm
(Harper Perennial)
Bookworm is catnip for a book critic—it’s a shiny gift with a big bow; it’s free shrimp; it’s your tenth cup of coffee on the card so you order the most decadent and least coffee-like thing on the menu. It’s a book about a woman, Victoria, who likes to read books. She really likes to read them now, as her life is less than ideal. Her husband is a workaholic lawyer. Her job blows. She hates her in-laws and isn’t too crazy about her best friend. A man she spots in the cafe where she goes to read and daydream becomes a fixation, and Victoria is faced with the challenge of getting rid of her husband. But books will surely show her the way to the happiness she deserves, won’t they? –LL
Julia Bartz, The Writing Retreat
(Atria)
Part publishing satire, part haunted house tale, part classic mystery, part snowstorm-set thriller, The Writing Retreat promises an ideal cocktail of twisty, spooky, gripping entertainment, as well as hefty catharsis for anyone who’s ever published anything. –OR
