A look at the month’s best reviewed new novels in crime, mystery, and thrillers.
From Bookmarks.
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Elizabeth Hand, A Haunting on the Hill
(Mulholland Books)
“An exciting and risky venture … Fans of Elizabeth Hand…will want to hear her particular voice, and her uncanny ability to combine the edgy and the ethereal. It’s a difficult high wire to walk. Bringing these two heavy-hitting novelists together could alienate fans of both authors … I’s thrilling to find that A Haunting on the Hill is a true hybrid of these two ingenious women’s work — a novel with all the chills of Jackson that also highlights the contemporary flavor and evocative writing of Hand … Many terrifying pleasures.”
–Danielle Trussoni (Washington Post)
Jonathan Lethem, Brooklyn Crime Novel
(Ecco Press)
“A crime novel because there’s crime in it, but it’s also a novel that explores relationships between the cultures and races that make up Brooklyn. It is also a novel about parenthood, friendship, what it means to be a local, growing up, and politics. In fact, trying to break down everything Lethem injected into this narrative would be impossible. The important thing is the end result; a kaleidoscopic, dazzling (hi)story that is at once wonderfully engaging, informative, and one of the most complete and honest love letters ever written to Brooklyn.”
–Gabino Iglesias (NPR)
Marie Ndiaye (transl. Jordan Stump), Vengeance Is Mine
(Knopf)
The characters in Marie NDiaye’s novels are an unsettling brood … A master at agitating, probing and upending expectations … She presents a new litter of misfits and constructs one of her most beguiling and visceral tales … NDiaye deals in impressions and captures a particular kind of emotional delirium in Vengeance. She leans into jaggedness, twisting her narrative to mimic Maître Susane’s fraying psychological state as she searches for a kind of truth.
–Lovia Gyarkye (New York Times Book Review)
Tim O’Brien, American Fantastica
(Mariner Books)
“O’Brien returns with more cynicism about his country’s lies than ever before … The novel is something between an absurdist satire and a bitter lamentation of that national diagnosis … Antic, hammy, caustic and very often funny, America Fantastica is a different kind of fiction than the novels and stories for which Mr. O’Brien will likely be remembered. But as a travesty of the American dream of reinvention, it has an essential point in common with his war novels. It, too, appreciates the addictive pleasure of spinning a story, of making things up. What’s notable about the novel’s host of liars and thieves is how much they seem to be enjoying themselves.”
–Sam Sacks (Wall Street Journal)
