This month’s debuts are as varied as the genre itself, featuring a noir coming-of-age story set in late 20th century Scotland, a cat-and-mouse thriller with supernatural elements, a missing persons mystery revolving around the podcast industry, two satirical take-downs of romantic norms, and a literary tale of lives stopped short and revenge served cold.
Without further ado, the books.
Frances Crawford, A Bad Bad Place
(Soho)
Frances Crawford’s noir debut is as nasty—and darkly comic—as its 1980s Glaswegian setting, the gloomy backdrop to a reluctant murder investigation conducted by a disillusioned teen and her dog, Sid Vicious. Crawford’s assured voice, sharp observations, and unique characters all shine in this first novel, and I look forward to reading many more.
Lai Sanders, The Plans I Have for You
(Simon & Schuster)
After a humiliating encounter on the subway results in public cancellation, Shelley Hu retreats to Florida, stuck working the desk same motels as her mother once cleaned, and fuming over the injustice. A path out of her dilemma comes from an unexpected source: a woman with a young family claims to recognize Shelley while checking into the hotel, and offers her the chance of a lifetime: change her name, change her appearance, insinuate herself into the lives of those responsible for her humiliation, and destroy them. The Plans I Have for You functions perfectly as both classic tale of revenge and haunting meditation on modernity.
Tiffany Crum, This Story Might Save Your Life
(Flatiron: Pine & Cedar)
Podcast hosts (and best friends) Benny and Joy are on the cusp of a huge new syndication deal when Joy and her husband go missing, and Benny quickly becomes the prime suspect in the disappearance. With dark rumors swirling and suspicious circumstances piling up, the only chance to clear his name seems hidden in the pages of Joy’s unfinished memoir, kept hostage from the cops by Joy’s sister-in-law and Benny until they can scan for clues (or bombshells). Crum alternates between Joy’s manuscript and Benny’s investigation, teasing out slow reveals amidst wider character-building, for a carefully plotted thriller full of keen insights and plenty of surprises.
Georgia McVeigh, Sorry For Your Loss
(Dutton)
The most fucked up support group since Fight Club! McVeigh’s twisty thriller follows two damaged souls who meet in a bereavement and cautiously form a new romance. Both are not who they seem, and both pose more threat to the other than either could have imagined. Sorry For Your Loss feels like the platonic ideal of psychological suspense: you can’t get truer to the spirit of the genre than this book.
Kirsten King, A Good Person
(Putnam)
This book was incredible. Kirsten King’s love-to-hate narrator thinks she’s found the perfect man, at least until he dumps her unceremoniously then turns up dead the next day. Even worse, her boyfriend had a fiancee she’s just now learning about, a pearl-and-twinset brahmin who she fixates on as the ultimate foil, the respectable WASP who could never allow herself the mistreatment that King’s protagonist has endured. Who is a good person? What treatment do they get that allows them to remain that way? While the unlikeable female narrator has had its day as a trend, A Good Person reinvigorates the trope for a new era of complicated antiheroes ready to rage against the patriarchy.
T. Kira Madden, Whidbey
(Mariner)
T. Kira Madden’s heroine is headed to a remote location to work on her novel and hide from the world when she meets a stranger, one who makes her an offer she can’t refuse: he will find the man who once hurt her as a child, and kill him. As the narrator of Whidbey reads, writes, and rages, another victim of the same pedophile publishes a memoir, one full of blatant exploitation of the narrator’s experience. When the man who harmed both women is found murdered, suspicion does not fall evenly, and the case threatens to send the central characters into a spiral with no return.
