A look at the month’s best reviewed crime, mystery, and thriller books, from Book Marks.
Richard Osman, We Solve Murders
(Pamela Dorman/Viking)
“A more ambitious series … Not that Osman has deviated entirely from his winning formula. While offering more in scale and scope, the British author continues to play to his considerable strengths by serving up a fiendish mystery and rollicking adventure suffused with warmth and wit … A busy book … As the cast grows and one plot strand gives way to another, we begin to worry that the book will sag under its own weight. But Osman knows exactly what he is doing. His multiple characters and many layers lend variety and vivacity to the proceedings … Both an auspicious start to an entertaining new series and a perfect stopgap to tide us over until Joyce and her friends beguile us all over again.”
–Malcolm Forbes (The Washington Post)
Attica Locke, Guide Me Home
(Mulholland)
“A scathing critique of the Trump administration that provides an emotional, insightful account of the effects of unfettered racism. Locke has no time for the subtlety that often accompanies objectivity, and her unapologetic forthrightness is refreshing … Tremendous skill … Fearlessly blends the political with the emotional.”
–E.A. Aymar (The Washington Post)
Kate Atkinson, Death at the Sign of the Rook
(Doubleday)
“Atkinson is an expert choreographer of parallel plots and narratives … The charm of Death at the Sign of the Rook lies not in its ingenuity—the dual mystery is somewhat hurriedly solved—but rather in its atmosphere and its characters.”
–Anna Mundow (The Wall Street Journal)
Rachel Kushner, Creation Lake
(Scribner)
“Sinuous and powerfully understated … Consolidates Kushner’s status as one of finest novelists working in the English language. You know from this book’s opening paragraphs that you are in the hands of a major writer, one who processes experience on a deep level. Kushner has a gift for almost effortless intellectual penetration … Pointed comic observation in this novel blends with her earnestness in vinaigrette harmony.”
–Dwight Garner (New York Times)
Chelsea Bieker, Madwoman
(Little Brown and Co.)
“Bieker explores the nexus between patriarchal control, environmental contamination and women’s bodies, here found in Clove’s focus on corporeal purity as a rejection of her chaotic past … A thoroughly modern addition to feminist fiction about mental illness and motherhood … As the cadence of the book quickens from commonplace to catastrophic, Clove goes off the rails in a spectacular series of bad decisions that make no sense except within the frenetic constraints of her desperation.”
–Kristen Millares Young (Washington Post)
