The CrimeReads editors select the best debut novels in crime, mystery, and thrillers.
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Laura Picklesimer, Kill For Love
(Unnamed Press)
The bored college fifth-year narrating Kill For Love has always been good at suppressing her appetites—you can see it in her carefully counted calories, svelte figure, and attempts to mask her sociopathy from her sisters. But when she kills a man in the act of coitus one night—then devours a meal of greasy meat for the first time in years—she realizes she’s found the one hunger impossible to ignore. Of particular note is how Picklesimer’s language reverses the male gaze as her killer objectifies the frat bros around her and tries to keep from mauling their drunken flesh. –MO
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
Carissa Orlando, The September House
(Berkley)
Carissa Orlando’s The September House uses hauntings as a brilliant metaphor for abuse, and what people can get used to, as well as a prescient comment on the tight housing market. Orlando’s narrator loves her home, and if she needs to ignore some ghostly children, be served tea by a taciturn housekeeper with a gaping face wound, and scrub the blood off the walls once a season, then so be it. Her husband isn’t so good at tolerating the house, but then, she’s learned how to tolerate much more from his treatment of her than she ever expected. When her daughter comes to stay, and her husband goes missing, it’s up to Orlando to continue saying “everything’s fine” for far too long. But the ghost in the basement may finally spur her to action…I found myself cheering at the end of this book, and I really hope it gets picked up as a Ryan Murphy production (post-writers’ strike, that is). –MO
Alicia Elliott, And Then She Fell
(Dutton)
A young indigenous woman is going stir-crazy at home after giving birth, and her husband, a white professor of Native American studies, seems so supportive. But her husband keeps succeeding at her expense, the neighbors are beyond suspicious, her impostor syndrome is overwhelming, and it’s up to Elliott’s heroine to listen to the warnings of her ancestors and find the key to survival in the Haudenosaunee creation story. Creepy, thoughtful, and immersive! –MO
Tomi Oyemakinde, The Changing Man
(Feiwel & Friends)
Get Out meets Ace of Spades in this boarding-school horror. A young scholarship student at an elite academy notices some of her classmates of color have been exhibiting remarkable, and unnatural, changes in behavior. What does the school want? And what is it willing to take? An excellent horror thriller that you’ll speed through in less than a day. –MO
John Manuel Arias, Where There Was Fire
(Flatiron)
In 1968 Costa Rica, a fruit plantation burns after a family argument. Decades later, the family is still riven by their secrets. What caused the fire? What happened to the family’s patriarch? And what truths will characters learn about themselves, trapped with their thoughts and unpredictable company during an epic hurricane? –MO
Lisa Springer, There’s No Way I’d Die First
(Delacorte Press)
Influencers! Halloween games! And a KILLER CLOWN!!!! There’s no way the narrator won’t make it to the end of this book, with all her Final Girl brilliance, which means there’s no way that you, the reader, will not also make it to the end of the very fun, very campy slasher novel. Springer’s heroine is trying to get attention for her horror film club and invites her prep school’s most influential students to an exclusive Halloween party at her parent’s mansion. Unfortunately, the party entertainment she’s hired has their own agenda, and it’ll take all her knowledge of horror tropes and household chemistry to outwit the clown’s righteous fury and grotesque gags. –MO
Anise Vance, Hush Harbor
(Hanover Square)
Hush Harbor is an epic novel of utopian hope in a dystopian world. When another Black teenager dies at the hands of the police, an armed self-defense movement establishes an intentional community in an abandoned housing project in New Jersey. How far will the revolution be able to go, before the unjust status quo is imposed on them? I loved this book’s pragmatic take on revolution and occupation, and kind approach to collective movements. Anise Vance demonstrates the thin line between utopian, dystopian, and thriller, in this genre-bending novel of ideas and action. –MO
