A look at the month’s best reviewed crime, mystery, and thriller books, from Book Marks.
Morgan Richter, The Divide
(Knopf)
“Ms. Richter’s novel starts as an offbeat mystery and turns into an emotional tour de force. The redoubtable Jenny strives to redeem her disappointing life by accomplishing something exceptional. Darned if she doesn’t do just that.”
–Tom Nolan (Wall Street Journal)
Gabino Iglesias, House of Bone and Rain
(Mulholland)
“Ferocious … It is in Iglesias’ stark, authoritative, sometimes surprisingly beautiful descriptions of the grit and pessimism of urban Puerto Rico that his prose turns electric.”
–Christopher Bollen (New York Times Book Review)
Peter Heller, Burn
(Knopf)
“He excels at nature writing…with lush, sensuous descriptions of beautiful rural landscapes that are illustrative of an author clearly at home in the outdoors.”
–Lillian Dabney (Booklist)
Kailee Pedersen, Sacrificial Animals
(St. Martin’s Press)
“Pedersen maintains a sense of doom, building suspense and expectation … Pedersen weaves eerie sentences together from archaic language, and the novel builds with a gruesome, anxious energy as the author reveals its connection to Chinese mythology … The novel’s final pages are a wild frenzy of beauty, vengeance and viscera.”
–Heather Scott Partington (Los Angeles Times)
Fiona McFarlane, Highway Thirteen
(FSG)
“McFarlane is a master at just about everything: dialogue, setting, comic timing … I had to resign myself to reading each story from beginning to end without leaving my chair. They are that gripping, though not in a thriller kind of way. You have to know what happens to these people, and how they confront losses that no one should ever have to suffer.”
–Mary Ann Gwinn (Los Angeles Times)
