A look at the best reviewed crime fiction, nonfiction, mysteries, and thrillers, from Book Marks.
*
Nicola Yoon, One of Our Kind
(Knopf)
“Warm … The affection and care she has for all her characters and the reasons that have taken them to Liberty deepen the novel’s stakes and heighten its terror … [A] powerful ending.”
–Kashana Cauley (New York Times Book Review)
Paul Tremblay, Horror Movie
(William Morrow)
“Excellent … So much of the power of this novel, like the power of the best found-footage films, emerges from the belief that we’re experiencing something we were never meant to … Landing the climax of a horror plot is one of the most challenging literary feats, and Tremblay has to stick the landing three times over. Somehow, remarkably, he manages.”
–Jim Coby (Los Angeles Review of Books)
Jacqueline Winspear, The Comfort of Ghosts
(Soho Crime)
“Readers who snapped up every Maisie Dobbs book as it was released will find great satisfaction in seeing long-standing characters achieve some measure of peace at the end of a terrible time.”
–Amy Stewart (Washington Post)
Walter Mosley, Farewell, Amethystine
(Mulholland Books)
“As always with Mosley, the prose is succinct, nearly mathematical in its precise balance, with sudden moments of restless beauty … But within that studied, memorable prose, there’s an underlying loneliness. Rawlins has his companions, but much of his torment is designed to be dealt with alone. As Farewell, Amethystine winds to its conclusion, that solitude is devastating.”
–E.A. Aymar (Washington Post)
Tracy O’Neill, Woman of Interest: A Memoir
(Harper)
“O’Neill elevates the subgenre, producing a memoir that is simultaneously an investigation, a noir with a femme fatale, and a darkly humorous tale of what happens when one meets the person who has everything and nothing to do with one’s life. Woman of Interest is searching, yes, but more attuned to language and paranoia than others of its genre … Although O’Neill’s memoir is essentially concerned with her mother in Korea, the titular woman of interest, we also get a sense of the other mother in a gorgeously melancholic recounting of O’Neill’s upbringing by her adoptive family in New England … Instead of the reparative gestures of a traditional adoptee memoir, Woman of Interest offers something darker, colder, more fraught, and ultimately, singular and transcendent.”
–Patrick Cotrell (Bomb)
