This month’s psychological thrillers are divided between white-knuckle tension and laugh-out-loud social commentary. Some are close to horror in their high stakes and visceral violence; others use murder as a jumping off point to explore ordinary emotions in a dramatic environment. You’ll see old favorites mixed in with new and rising voices, each worthy of your appreciation as they contribute to a subgenre at the peak of its popularity, and showing no sign of slowing down any time soon.
Tracy Sierra, Nightwatching
(Pamela Dorman Books/Viking)
Tracy Sierra has done the impossible: changed my mind about the home invasion thriller. In Nightwatching, a young widow is shocked one night to find an intruder in her home, and spends several desperate hours using all her wit and wiles to protect her children and find a way to seek help. While much of the story is about the night itself, just as gripping is what happens afterwards.
Rachel Kapelke-Dale, The Fortune Seller
(St Martin’s)
This book combines so many things I enjoy….Really, just horse girls and tarot readers, but who doesn’t want to read about horse girls and fortune tellers? In Kapelke-Dale’s delightful forthcoming novel, the elite members of Yale’s equestrian team welcome a new girl into their midst, one who comes with impeccable riding skills and a surprising talent for tarot. Not everyone is as happy with her presence, or her fortunes, as the narrator, and soon enough, murder and sabotage mar the collegiate halcyon days of the privileged characters (such a pity…). This book also fulfills my theory that people at Ivies are way too burned out from trying to get in to enjoy their time there. So glad I went to a state school (Hook ‘Em.)
Kobby Ben Ben, No One Dies Yet
(Europa)
In 2019, Ghana declared a “Year of Return” and welcomed tourists from across the diaspora to visit the country. That is the backdrop for Kobby Ben Ben’s psychological thriller featuring four American tourists and their competing guides—one religious and humorless, hired to take the Americans around the official sites, and the other queer and cynical, brought in through a dating app to give the tourists a taste of Ghana’s gay underground. This may be one of my favorite novels ever. It’s so funny. It’s like Patricia Highsmith traded her self-loathing for a decent sense of humor.
Amina Akhtar, Almost Surely Dead
(Mindy’s Book Studio)
A new book from Amina Akhtar is always a treat (if by treat, I mean, bitter, humorous explorations of modern ills…so I guess, like, Sour Straws as the treat specifically). In Almost Surely Dead, we go back and forth between two time frames: the days leading up to the disappearance of a seemingly ordinary woman, Dunia Ahmed, and the ongoing investigations in the months after, as Dunia becomes the subject of a true crime podcast with a bizarre hook: before she vanished, Dunia was subjected to not one murder attempt, but many.
Megan Nolan, Ordinary Human Failings
(Little, Brown)
A visceral, knowing exploration of human misery and the ways we fail ourselves. Also, I’ve never seen a better description of my own attitude towards dating (which should….probably worry me). In Ordinary Human Failings, set in London in 1990, a toddler is murdered, and the suspect is the 10-year-old daughter of a family that’s been cast as Irish ne’er-do-wells by the salivating tabloids. When an unscrupulous newspaper reporter puts the accused child’s family up in a hotel, he’s hoping to bleed them for lurid details to feed to the eager public, but Nolan uses these interviews as a way instead to explore how people become trapped in patterns that cannot hold, despite the best of intentions. My god, this book is good.
Amanda Jayatissa, Island Witch
(Berkley)
Another gothic tale helping to decolonize the genre! Set in 19th-century Sri Lanka, Amanda Jayatissa’s Island Witch follows the outcast daughter of the local demon-priest as she tries to find answers in a series of a disappearances rocking her small community. Jayatissa’s novel is steeped in folkloric traditions and sumptuous landscapes for a thrilling, feverish read.
Vera Kurian, A Step Past Darkness
(Park Row)
Vera Kurian is back with another crackerjack premise; it’s the summer of 1995 and six high school students with nothing similar between them are attending a secret party in a mine when they witness a horrible crime that binds them together for life. Until twenty years later, when one of them winds up dead. I’m gonna pregame this one with I Know What You Did Last Summer.–Olivia Rutigliano, CrimeReads Editor
