It’s time to close out 2018 with some mystery. That’s our thinking anyhow. It may not feel like it yet, but the year is starting to draw to an end, and as the weather gets cooler and the nights longer, opportunities to curl up on the couch with a good book abound. You’re going to need plenty of opportunity, too, because there are so many great crime novels, mysteries, and thrillers (not to mention some great true crime) coming down the pipeline this fall. As we’ve done throughout the year, we reached out to friends, accomplices, and co-conspirators throughout the book world—book sellers, authors, critics, librarians, and more—to gauge which are the most hotly anticipated books of the season. That’s a matter of taste, of course, and each niche within the crime community has its eagerly awaited releases, but we tried to get a fair sampling across the board and to present them here in one handy guide to what crime lovers will be reading over the next few months.
So, here they are: The 75—yes 75!—Most Anticipated Crime Books of Fall 2018.
(Read Part 1 of our Most Anticipated Crime Books of 2018 here.)
(Read Part 2 of our Most Anticipated Crime Books of 2018 here.)
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SEPTEMBER
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Sara Gran, The Infinite Blacktop (Atria Books)
Sara Gran’s Claire DeWitt series has been picking up new devotees for years with a deeply felt take on addiction, detection, existential despair, and the point where all these ideas converge. In The Infinite Blacktop, DeWitt is in the West, between LA, San Francisco, and Las Vegas. After a life-threatening encounter with a maniac driver, she slowly regains her memory of the incident and sets about tracking down the assailant. It’s the perfect job for DeWitt, and for Gran, whose trippy, searching prose blends the modern-day thriller style with the voice of a 70s PI road trip pilgrim PI.
Leye Adenle, When Trouble Sleeps (Cassava Republic)
I’m greatly looking forward to reading Leye Adenle’s second mystery, and his second to feature human rights campaigner Amaka Mbadiwe, who serves as our guide to the vibrant world of Lagos, and the many faces of the city. Adenle had me hooked from the first page in his debut Easy Motion Tourist, and I can’t wait to read more of his perfectly choreographed action sequences and loving descriptions of Lagos.
Kate Atkinson, Transcription (Little Brown)
I sped through this droll new espionage novel, chock-full of 5th columnists, surveillance, and strong cups of tea. Atkinson lovingly channels le Carre and Helen MacIness through her descriptions of drab spies, pathetic Nazi sympathizers, and secretaries who know far more than they’re letting on. There’s an ongoing misconception that women don’t write traditional espionage fiction, and Transcription should clear this up once and for all.
George Pelecanos, The Man Who Came Uptown (Mulholland)
Few writers have charted the epochs and evolution of an American city as closely and as intimately as Pelecanos has for the nation’s capital. His Washington D.C. is alive and of the moment but still possessed of a rich history: all the characters and small-timers and dive bars that came before. His latest novel is also a deeply felt portrait of the prison library system and the power of reading. Any Pelecanos novel is not to be missed, but this one feels like it carries special weight for the author.
Sarah Pinborough, Cross Her Heart (William Morrow and Co)
There are those who believe in the fair play mystery, and feel strongly that a reader should be given all the same clues as the detective and be able to guess the solution to the mystery. Then, there are those who like Sarah Pinborough. The mistress of the twist returns with Cross Her Heart, after last year’s Behind Her Eyes changed all our expectations about what a twist even was, and we can’t wait to see how she upends the world anew in Cross Her Heart. Pinborough’s latest explores the dynamics between a single mother, her daughter, and her best friend, and involves an inevitable reveal of shocking secrets.
Craig Johnson, Depth of Winter (Viking)
In Craig Johnson’s latest mystery to feature Wyoming sheriff Walt Longmire and Co., Walt travels to Mexico to rescue his kidnapped daughter, Katie, before she can be handed over to whichever of his enemies pays her kidnappers the most for the privilege. Over a dozen books into the series, Walt’s got a lot of enemies by now, and rest assured, as the action heats up, the suspect list only gets longer.
Walter Mosley, John Woman (Grove/Atlantic)
Not a crime novel per se—unless you count history itself as a kind of metaphysical crime—Mosley’s latest is a lively and searching meditation on the passage of time, family, and the struggle to be free of the sins and crimes of the past. If that sounds heady, it’s supposed to. Mosley, an icon of crime fiction, is wrestling with lofty ideas here. There’s still plenty of mystery to be had, but come to this one ready for some epistemology noir.
Anne Perry, Dark Tide Rising (Ballantine Books)
The River Thames police are called in to assist with a ransom exchange after a wealthy woman is kidnapped and removed to an unnavigable slum known as “Jacob’s Island.” Perry’s latest to dive into the literally murky Victorian landscape does so with aplomb, rich with both detail and adventure. You can read an excerpt here.
Mary Kubica, When The Lights Go Out (Park Row)
Insomnia underpins the action of When the Lights Go Out, a novel of psychological suspense where Kubica, the unofficial queen of fertility noir, explores new territory. Twenty-year-old Jessie Sloane is left alone and bereft after her mother dies. Her sleeping problems started during her mother’s decline but after her death her insomnia intensifies. Jessie has serious problems thinking straight because of her sleep deprivation, so when she discovers she has no birth certificate and an invalid social security number she’s plunge into the mystery of who she really is, and why her mother felt compelled to keep Jessie’s identity secret.
S.M. Thayer, I Will Never Leave You (Thomas & Mercer)
Tricia and her husband, James, have been trying to have a baby for years. They’ve exhausted every medical option, and doctors don’t have a good reason for their inability to conceive. Enter Laurel, James’s mistress, who he impregnates, promising he will leave his wife to start a family with Laurel and their baby, Anne Elise. When Laurel finds out James was cheating on her, she’s livid, but after he brings her to the hospital to see the baby Tricia starts plotting how to take the baby since she would be best with her and James. Thayer, a pseudonym for a prize-winning writer, creates memorable characters faced with an impossible dilemma.
Amy Stewart, Miss Kopp Just Won’t Quit (HMH)
Amy Stewart began as a botanist, but given that she wrote works on poisonous plants and creepy critters, we should be so surprised that she switched over to the world of crime writing a few years ago with her historical series based on one of the first women police detectives. Her third to feature her feisty crime-solving protagonist, Miss Kopp Just Won’t Quit, promises to be just as entertaining as the rest in the series.
Reed Farrel Coleman, Robert B. Parker’s Colorblind (G.P. Putnam’s Sons)
Reed Farrel Coleman has admirably taken over the Jesse Stone series and continues adding new layers of depth to the ongoing adventures of the ex ballplayer turned big city cop turned small town police chief. In Colorblind, Stone is back from rehab just in time for a string of racially charged crimes in Paradise, MA, coinciding with the Paradise PD’s hiring a black woman officer. Alcoholism and the rise of racist forces in unexpected pockets of the country take center stage, a worthy addition to a series created by an author who always went for the human mysteries over the formulaic ones.
Vince Flynn, Red War (Atria/Emilly Bestler Books)
Kyle Mills continues Vince Flynn’s best-selling Mitch Rapp series, this time with higher stakes than ever, as a Russian oligarch with a brain tumor clings to power while his deteriorating condition brings Russia and the United States ever closer to war.
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True Crime Spotlight
Sarah Weinman, The Real Lolita (Ecco)
Sarah Weinman’s highly anticipated work of narrative non-fiction on the kidnapping of Sally Horner has its origins in an article Weinman wrote for Hazlitt a few years ago, tracing the development of Nabokov’s Lolita and how the titular character was inspired by Sally Horner’s real-life kidnapping. The Real Lolita is marked by the same quality research and gorgeous prose that distinguishes all of Weinman’s writing, and is sure to be a new classic of true crime.
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T.M. Logan, Lies (St. Martin’s Press)
T.M. Logan’s debut thriller looks at what happens when you find out your marriage is based on lies, and how far you would go to protect someone who is suddenly a stranger. A happily married man discovers his wife has dangerous secrets, and he’s now implicated in each and every one. This one is probably best begun on a weekend afternoon, in case you feel the temptation to stay up late to find out what happens.
Stephanie Gayle, Idyll Hands (Seventh Street Books)
Stephanie Gayle’s taciturn series character Thomas Lynch returns, this time in a case that gets personal. We’ve been enjoying this series from the beginning—it’s one of the few ongoing series with a gay male protagonist published by a mainstream mystery press—and we’re looking forward to diving into the Thomas’ past and learning more about the character.
Volker Kutscher, The Silent Death (Picador Press)
Picador Press continues to bring us the series that inspired the hit TV show Babylon Berlin. In Kutscher’s second Gereon Rath novel, Rath encounters the German film industry at the height of its creativity—and just before its disastrous dissolution. When an actress is nearly killed by a spotlight, Rath immediately suspects attempted murder, and must go his own way to find the truth.
Teresa Solana, The First Prehistoric Serial Killer (Bitter Lemon)
In this new collection of short stories from Barcelona-based writer Teresa Solana,The First Prehistoric Serial Killer, events occur as bizarre and darkly humorous as the title of the collection itself. You can read an exclusive excerpt from the short story “The Son-in-Law” here.
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OCTOBER
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Joe Ide, Wrecked (Mulholland)
October means the release of Wrecked, the third novel in Joe Ide’s widely celebrated IQ series, a modern answer to Sherlock Holmes, with a tinge of the midcentury noir knights errant of Southern California. Ide’s hero is Isaiah Quintabe, a hardscrabble genius living and working in East Long Beach, alongside his now partner, the streetwise businessman, Dodson. In the new novel, IQ is carrying the torch for a young painter named Grace who convinces him to go on a search for her mother, a mixed-up quest that puts IQ on the wrong side of a paramilitary force of Iraqi veterans. Ide is one of the brightest lights of the mystery world, and Wrecked more than proves that the IQ books are poised to become a long-running and much adored series.
Jeff Abbott, The Three Beths (Grand Central Publishing)
Jeff Abbott follows the pattern of many of his peers in his recent transition from action-oriented thrillers to more psychological thrillers, except he’s doing it better than most, garnering rave reviews for Blame, his tale of secrets and consequences in an affluent neighborhood loosely based on his own neighborhood of West Austin. His new psychological thriller, The Three Beths, promises to be just as entertaining and emotionally astute.
Michael Connelly, Dark Sacred Night (Little, Brown and Co.)
This one needs no introduction. It’s Michael Connelly, and it’s a crossover with two of his principal ongoing characters. Last year’s The Late Show introduced Renee Ballard, a hard-charging, quick-thinking detective making her bones at the LAPD. Connelly has her teaming up with old Harry Bosch, his longtime hero, now working cold cases for the department, as well as sorting out demons. The young and old detectives team up on an old case, the unsolved murder of a fifteen year old girl, and go after a local kingpin in the process. Expect all the dark, brooding LA neo-noir you’ve come to appreciate from Connelly’s superlative procedurals.
Joseph Fink, Alice Isn’t Dead (Harper Perennial)
Welcome to the living nightmare of unspeakable, oozing flesh, ancient beings, hidden other worlds, and creeping things that is Joseph Fink’s new weird fiction masterpiece. Alice Isn’t Dead follows a woman searching for her long-presumed-dead wife as she encounters conspiracies and secrets both ancient and nefarious, and also learns to drive a big rig truck. If you want this description to make sense, you can catch up on Fink’s podcast oeuvre while waiting for the book’s release—it comes out, appropriately enough, on October 30th.
John Grisham, The Reckoning (Doubleday)
Three decades into a blockbuster career, John Grisham still has a few surprises up his sleeve. In The Reckoning, he takes on historical crime, with a story set in the immediate aftermath of WWII: a local eminence kills his good friend and pastor, but refuses to speak to anyone about why he did it. Grisham’s small-town Mississippi setting takes on thick gothic tones, accented by flashes to the jungle battles of the South Pacific during WWII. The Reckoning is at once an epic story and a claustrophobic one.
Lou Berney, November Road (William Morrow)
Berney’s November Road has a solid claim on being the most anticipated novel of Fall 2018, at least (anecdotally) amongst other crime writers. And with good reason, too. Berney’s story starts with the JFK assassination and morphs into a relentlessly moving (and relentlessly engaging) fugitive story, as two figures on the run find their lives intersected and set toward a common fate. Berney’s voice is strong and human and his characters have rich emotional lives of their own. There’s an incredible momentum to the story, a true thriller punctuated with moments of brilliant humanity.
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Anna Waterhouse, Mycroft and Sherlock (Titan Books)
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar has oft-credited his athletic prowess to his Sherlockian inspirations, and made waves with his mystery debut a few years ago in which he reimagined Mycroft Holmes as a swashbuckling figure ready to fight for justice and solve mysteries the world over. Abdul-Jabbar’s vision of Mycroft returns in a new adventure, this time with his famous brother in tow, and we can’t wait to read it!
Tana French, The Witch Elm (Viking)
Tana French’s new book is her first departure from her beloved Dublin Murder Squad series, and we were, needless to say, quite nervous and excited to read it. Luckily (and we know, everyone says this with every new Tana French) but this may be her best yet! The Witch Elm is vintage French, with her signature touch of unreliable narration, where the truth is masked in a cloud of confusion and the reader must decipher the interior chaos of the narrator as well as the larger murder plot in order to find the answers.
Michael Harvey, Pulse (Ecco)
With 2016’s Brighton, Harvey made a name for himself as one of the heir’s to a long and storied tradition of Boston thrillers, and he’s back this year with Pulse, a strange and compulsive detective story about a mysterious murder and the young boy who seems to know all the answers. Harvey conjures up the grit of 1970s Boston perfectly, but without succumbing to any false nostalgia. Pulse is a truly weird novel—full of spiritual yearning, half-seen conspiracies, and unexplained bonds.
Lisa Unger, Under My Skin (Park Row Books)
After a woman’s husband is murdered during a morning job, she disappears into a haze of grief, emerging days later with a spotty memory of her time gone. As she begins to have vivid nightmares about the day her husband died, she begins to wonder what she knows—and why she’s keeping it to herself. This is internationally best-selling author Lisa Unger’s 16th book, and is sure to please both long-term fans and those new to her work.
Felix Francis, Crisis (G. P. Putnam’s Son)
Even before taking over his father Dick Francis’s famed horse mysteries, Felix Francis was already an avid racehorse enthusiast and ready to assist his father in researching each meticulously crafted plot. In his latest, a crisis manager from London heads to sort out a mystery involving murdered racehorses (and one murdered human who we don’t care about quite as much) and a high-stakes derby.
Kate Kessler, Dead Ringer (Redhook)
The aptly-titled Dead Ringer takes us on a journey with FBI agent Rachel Ward as she investigates the Gemini Killer, a sadistic serial killer whose trademark signature is to send pictures of his victims to their twins. 18 years before, the Gemini Killer murdered Ward’s sister Hannah, and Rachel’s finally close to getting her revenge.
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True Crime Spotlight
Fox Butterfield, In My Father’s House: A New View of How Crime Runs in the Family (Knopf)
In My Father’s House is a family portrait and a study in big ideas that begins with a provocative point: that a large percentage of America’s crime can be traced back to a relatively small number of families. Butterfield, a Pulitzer Prize-winner and a New York Times stalwart, dives into this insight with a close study of one Oregon family that has sent generations of its members to prison. This is the book that’s going to be posing difficult questions about mass incarceration, cultural marginality, and persistent communities of lawlessness.
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Frederick Forsyth, The Fox (G.P. Putnam’s Sons)
Frederick Forsyth has been forever in our hearts ever since The Day of The Jackal dropped in the 60s, and we’re pleased to see that he’s still producing high-octane thrillers. In his latest, The Fox, a 17-year-old tech-savvy genius becomes the greatest danger the world has faced, combining teenage sociopathy with a deadly knowledge of weapons systems.
Ed Lin, 99 Ways to Die (Soho Crime)
Ed Lin’s culture-rich mysteries set in Taiwan’s night market are brimming with food, music, and a Taipei’s thriving counterculture scene. His third in the series, 99 Ways to Die, takes his amateur sleuth protagonist into the Taipei halls of privilege when his long-time frenemy gets in some trouble in the capital’s cut-throat business world. We can’t wait to put on some Joy Division and pig out on street food while devouring the whole book in one sitting.
John Sandford, Holy Ghost (G.P. Putnam’s Sons)
Sandford has a knack for mixing humor and crime in just the right proportions. In his latest Virgil Flowers mystery, Flowers is off to Pinion, Minnesota, a nowhere town out on the frozen prairie, where a small-town mayor and businessman has turned to a religious hustle, aiming to transform their town into the site of a holy miracle. Flowers, naturally, has to sort through the chaos when a dead body is discovered.
Sara Paretsky, Shell Game (William Morrow)
Decades in, Paretsky’s legendary VI Warshawsky series is still as fresh and as powerful as ever. The Chicago PI’s newest case requires piercing the veil on a multi-layered corporate scheme involving stolen art and antiquities and the many companies built to move these assets through the black market to the legitimate ones, as well as the many deaths along the way, and some run-ins with none other than the Russian mob. Warshawsky is an iconic sleuth, and in the recent novels she’s proven a savvy vehicle for exploring changing social (and criminal) currents in the Windy City, a city she’s come to define as surely as Marlowe once defined L.A.
Erica Wright, The Blue Kingfisher (Polis Books)
When she’s not at her poetry day job, Wright is crafting charming mysteries featuring private investigator Kat Stone. As always, Stone has plenty of opportunities to don her many disguises and infiltrate intriguing communities—here, she takes on the insular Manhattan art world and the high-pressure world of deep-sea diving, where jellyfish are just some of the cold-blooded killers she encounters.
Nic Joseph, The Night in Question (Sourcebooks Landmark)
Nic Joseph mixes mirth and menace in her new Chicago-based mystery, in which an artist by day and ride-share driver by night encounters a famous musician engaged in secretive behavior. Joseph’s protagonist, in possession of information and a left-behind phone, decides to embark on a path of poor decision making and attempted blackmail—we might be shouting at her to stop and turn around, but (pardon the pun) we’re just along for the ride.
Sherry Thomas, The Hollow of Fear (Berkley)
The Hollow of Fear is Sherry Thomas’ third work to feature Charlotte Holmes, the well-dressed gourmand detective who goes by the name of “Sherlock Holmes, consulting detective” to hide her gender. Most enjoyable on our end is the Thomas’s willingness to chip away at Sherlock’s puritanical fanaticism in favor of a woman who is not afraid to indulge in pleasant things. In this latest in the series, Charlotte must solve the murder of a friend’s estranged wife and clear her friend’s name of suspicion (while taking on a few side cases to pay the bills).
Mick Herron, The Marylebone Drop (Soho Crime)
Mick Herron is a master at crafting intricate tales of espionage, and his latest, the Marylebone Drop, promises to be just as full of intrigue and mayhem as his previous works. When a retired spy witnesses some secretive behavior on the street, he knows he’s a witness to espionage, but when he brings in his old spymaster, the two have little idea how big their investigation will get.
Camilla Way, The Lies We Told (Berkley)
Way’s follow up to the excellent Watching Edie is one of the twistiest novels I’ve read this year (fans of Claire Mackintosh, Shari LaPena, and Ruth Ware should definitely check Way out). Where Edie was a claustrophobic story of wounded women trying to get their lives back, Lies is a more expansive and very carefully told tale of two families whose lives intersected in the past. The connection between them, slowly revealed, is spurred by the disappearance of Luke Lawson, a young, charismatic man it seems no one would want to harm. But Luke has an enemy he does not know about who is determined to destroy his family’s happiness.
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True Crime Spotlight
Susan Orlean, The Library Book (Scribner)
Readers inevitably and happily plunge themselves into the stories Orlean weaves, whether she’s writing about Rin Tin Tin or the eccentric world of orchid collectors. Here, Orlean both explores the aftermath of a 1986 fire at the main branch of the Los Angeles Public Library which burned for seven hours and consumed 400,000 books. But Orlean’s book is more than an examination of a possible case of arson: it’s a love letter to libraries and the people who populate them.
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Masako Togawa, The Lady Killer (Pushkin Vertigo)
This is the second of Pushkin Press’ ongoing project to reissue the crime fiction works of writer, actress, nightclub singer, and gay rights activist Masako Togawa. In this, her most famous work, a man dressed as a woman is killed by a passing bus, and a mysterious woman waits for years for his return. Flashbacks to before his death gradually reveal the outlines of a terrible tragedy, while commenting on a gendered landscape.
S.L. Huang, Zero-Sum Game (Forge)
This science fiction thriller, set in a near-future dystopia, features math genius Caz Russell, whose ability to rapidly determine risk and potential outcome in her head make her one of the world’s most in-demand mercenaries. When she encounters a more mentally invasive version of her own power—a nemesis who can reach deep into the human mind and twist thoughts to his bidding—she must make a choice between her profession and her sense of right and wrong.
B. Lyle, The Red Ribbon (Quercus)
Lyle first introduced his series protagonist in last year’s The Irregular, which follows Wiggins, a former Baker Street Irregular, as he embarks upon a new career in international espionage. The Red Ribbon continues to evoke the Edwardian era with both nuance and a sense of adventure, and we’re looking forward to another addition to the ever-expanding Sherlockian canon.
Anika Snoekstra, The Spite Game (MIRA)
Anika Snekstra, one Aussie noir’s leading lights, has a new suspenseful psychological thriller out just in time for Halloween. The Spite Game features a long-bullied schoolgirl’s gleeful plan for vengeance, in a plot described as “Mean Girls meets Stephen King.” That’s a combination we can get behind here at CrimeReads.
Classic American Crime Fiction of the 1920s, edited by Leslie S. Klinger (Pegasus)
Weighing in at 1,152 pages, this collection of 1920s crime fiction is the heftiest volume published to date by Pegasus Press, and its content is as impressive as the packaging, containing all the quintessential American detectives of the 1920s, plus annotations, illustrations, an introduction by Otto Penzler, and a foreword by the collection’s editor (who also just so happens to be one of the world’s foremost experts on the history of mystery). We can’t wait to page through this beautiful volume!
The Big Book of Female Detectives, edited by Otto Penzler (Vintage Crime/Black Lizard)
Black Lizard continues their omnibus series, this time with an enormous collection of stories featuring women solving crimes, whether they be Pinkertons, amateur sleuths, hardboiled PIs, FBI agents, or cops. This brick of a book will keep us happily reading for quite some time, and also doubles as a work-out tool for your forearms. Trying reading this one for an hour straight while holding it above your head….betcha can’t. Or at least, we couldn’t.
Lauren Doyle Owens, The Other Side of Everything (Touchstone)
Lauren Doyle Owens’ The Other Side of Everything is ostensibly about a murder, but an old woman’s death is merely a catalyst to investigate the larger problem of loneliness and isolation plaguing a small, wealthy town full of miserable artistic residents. We can’t wait to read this novel of human foibles, and the mysteries of life itself.
Mary Roberts Rhinehart, The Red Lamp (Penzler Publishing)
With an introduction from Otto Penzler, and published as part of Penzler’s new series of reissues, American Mystery Classics, this reissue of The Red Lamp is a labor of love, and a fine tribute to one of the pioneers of American mystery fiction. The American Mystery Classics series will also include reissues of classic works by Ellery Queen, Clayton Rawson, Dorothy B. Hughes, Craig Rice, and many more.
Graeme Macrae Burnet, The Accident on the A35 (Arcade Publishing)
Graeme Macrae Burnet first made waves with American audiences for his poetically titled take on Sherlock, Art in the Blood, but here, he returns to the small French town of Saint-Louis, which provided the setting for his charming first novel. Burnet splits his tale between two investigations of the same suspicious car accident, one conducted by Burnet’s series character Detective Gorski, and the other pursued by a young man overly fond of Sartre.
L.A. Chandlar, The Gold Pawn (Kensington)
Chandlar’s lush historical novel follows Mayor LaGuardia in 1936 as his political future stalls under the weight of a missing persons case. Chandlar sets out to capture the complexities of the 1930s, a time of great art and culture as well as a time of great suffering.
Michel Bussi, Don’t Let Go (Europa)
Bussi has established himself as one of the most prominent and exciting voices in French crime fiction, and now his reputation is spreading quickly in American mystery circles. In his latest to come to the States, a family travels to France’s favorite far-off holiday destination, Réunion island in the Indian Ocean, and a baffling disappearance soon throws the family idyll into havoc. Bussi is a master of suspense and knows exactly how to shatter a seeming paradise.
Michael McGarrity, Residue (W.W. Norton)
McGarrity’s Kevin Kerney novels are nuanced and deeply felt procedurals, but the real thrill comes in the atmospherics, as he sketches out the harsh and beautiful landscapes of the desert Southwest’s mountainous region. In the new installment, bones are dug up in the outskirts of Las Cruces, New Mexico, prompting an investigation in a decades-old cold case that implicates Kerney and forces him to prove his own innocence.
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NOVEMBER
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Allen Eskens, The Shadows We Hide (Mulholland)
Allen Eskens has been steadily making a name for himself as a master of quiet, minimalist, and menacing noirs, and has recently made the lead from paperback original releases to hardbacks, a sign that he’s one of the genre’s rising stars. The Shadows We Hide should cement Eskens’ reputation as excelling at small town noir; Eskens’ new work follows a man on a quest to learn the truth about his recently deceased father, who just so happens to be the most hated man in his hometown.
Jens Lapidus, Top Dog (Vintage Crime)
Jens Lapidus is known as the poet of the Oslo Underworld, and his latest has an almost Ellroy-esque scope, with interweaving narratives painting a rich portrait of Stockholm’s underworld. Lawyer Emelie and reformed criminal Teddy once again pair up to investigate the Swedish capital’s secrets, as the criminal underground is turned upside-down in a search for missing drug money.
Anthony Horowitz, Forever and A Day (Harper)
The incredibly prolific Anthony Horowitz took a break from his television and series commitments to release the excellent meta-fiction stand-alone The Word is Murder earlier this year. This November, he returns to one of his many side projects, authoring a new installment of the long-running Bond series in his position as official continuer of the character. Forever and a Day takes Bond to the French Riviera, where dark secrets lurk in the Marseille waters.
David Baldacci, Long Road to Mercy (Grand Central)
The latest from internationally bestselling author David Baldacci introduces a new character, FBI agent Atlee Pine, whose loss of her twin sister to a serial killer in childhood has inspired her to spend her life as a criminal profiler, hunting down killers.
Lee Child, Past Tense (Delacorte)
Past Tense is the new Jack Reacher novel and, frankly, that’s all most of us readers need to know, as this long-running and beloved series keeps on moving, just like its hero. Child is at the top of his game, and Past Tense is one of the more personal novels in the series, as Reacher delves into his family’s past, looking for answers about his father in a small New England town.
Jonathan Lethem, The Feral Detective (Ecco)
Although he’s tapped into veins of the genre, Lethem hasn’t written a proper detective novel since Motherless Brooklyn, so right away you know the publication of The Feral Detective is going to be one of the most anticipated events on this year’s book calendar. But then the novel actually delivers. Lethem’s latest is a bizarre, poignant, mind-bending journey through the desert landscapes of California’s vast and arid inland regions, in particular the reclusive and eccentric communities that have sprung up there. In short, this is not Marlowe’s Los Angeles or Lew Archer’s Santa Teresa. This is the Southern Californian detective’s fever dream, and worth every page.
Oyinkan Braithwaite, My Sister, The Serial Killer (Doubleday)
My Sister, The Serial Killer is looking like one of the year’s most hotly anticipated debuts, a dark, scathing, insidious, and wickedly funny novel about an embittered young woman who has come to realize that her sister—the good child, the one who seems to be so perfect—is actually killing her boyfriends, a fact that solidifies the sisters’ bond, as they need each other to cover up the crimes. The story is at once uproarious, shocking, and packed with emotional poignancy.
Mary Higgins Clark and Alafair Burke, You Don’t Own Me (Simon and Schuster)
Of all the long-running series collaborations, the partnership between Mary Higgins Clark and Alafair Burke is one of our very favorites. In their latest, TV producer / sleuth Laurie Moran investigates the killing of a celebrity doctor and soon finds herself in mortal danger. The Higgins Clark books, influential to several generations of authors and readers, are always relevant, and always enthralling from start to finish, but especially so now.
Susan Hill, The Comforts of Home (Overlook Press)
Before Peter May ever started writing haunting tales of Scottish islands, there was Susan Hill and her effortless ability to terrify, astonish, and implicate us all in just a few sentences. Her new novel, The Comforts of Home, will provide no comfort at all, taking us into the chilling world of a remote Scottish island, and displaying Susan Hill’s trademark talent for the grotesque, the macabre, and the stunning.
Louise Penny, Kingdom of the Blind (Minotaur Books)
With each new installment, Penny’s Chief Inspector Gamache novels bolster their case as an iconic mystery series. This latest, with Armand Gamache on suspension from his place at the helm of the Sûreté du Québec, is no exception. Kingdom of the Blind is the perfect blend of cozy, gothic, and procedural. Gamache is summoned to an old farmhouse where he learns that he, along with a local bookseller and a contractor, has been named executor of the will of a woman he’s never met. With that setup, Penny proves herself a true heir to Agatha Christie, and readers will be thrilled at all the unexpected twists as the secret history unspools.
Janet Evanovich, Look Alive Twenty-Five (G.P. Putnam’s Sons)
The funniest woman in crime fiction is back! Janet Evanovich returns with a new Stephanie Plum mystery, in which her heroine is hired as a manager for a deli, after the previous managers all mysteriously disappeared. Is it alien abduction? Or is there something else at play? Stephanie’s ready to investigate, before she herself disappears.
Vancouver Noir, edited by Sam Wiebe (Akashic)
The rain-soaked Pacific Northwest may not be a tradition setting for “noir” but with a city in flux, like Vancouver, there’s no shortage of incisive, mysterious, violent stories, touching on the city’s housing crisis, its thriving movie industry, and many more mysteries. Contributors include Nathan Ripley, Sheena Kamal, and the collection’s editor, Sam Wiebe. This is the perfect balance of captivating page-turners and hard-hitting social noirs.
Oakley Hall, So Many Doors (Hard Case Crime)
Oakley Hall, if he’s remembered at all these days, is generally thought of as a literary western novelist along the same lines as Charles Portis, a perception bolstered by New York Review of Books’s reissue of Warlock, Hall’s brilliant (although strangely titled) historical retelling of the Battle at the OK Corral. Hard Case Crime aims to change this idea, or at least bolster the memory of Oakley Hall, by reissuing So Many Doors, Hall’s salacious, hard-boiled journey through Southern California during the Great Depression.
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True Crime Spotlight
Chris McGreal, American Overdose (Public Affairs)
The latest book about America’s crippling opioid crisis examines not only the familiar yet heartbreaking stories of the present and the recent past but proposes a theory about how the epidemic happened. McGreal, an experienced reporter now writing for the Guardian, elucidates three main causes of the epidemic: the doctors who fudged research about the potential of addiction in commonly prescribed opioids; Big Pharma, especially Purdue Pharma, the manufacturer of oxycontin, which blocked the FDA and Congress from taking steps to curb the epidemic; and drug cartels who exploited addicts who turned to street drugs to feed their habits when the legitimate pills were no longer available.
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Lars Kepler, The Fire Witness (Vintage/Black Lizard)
Kepler’s Joona Linna novels, which are worldwide bestsellers, are slowly being released in the U.S. There are six novels in the series and three have been published in America: The Sandman (2017), The Hypnotist (August 2018), and now The Fire Witness. Though the series bears the marks of many of the Scandi noir, Kepler (actually a husband/wife writing team) keeps an almost frenetic pace in his books, seriously ratcheting up suspense and making it hard to stop reading the brief chapters. In Fire Loona is drawn into a gruesome case: the murder of a teenage girl living at a group home.
Ken Bruen, In The Galway Silence (Mysterious Press)
There’s a lot of great crime writing coming out of Ireland these days, but when it comes to noir, you can’t get more hardboiled than Ken Bruen. Former cop Jack Taylor is actually doing well for a change as Bruen’s latest begins, but those of us familiar with the series know that won’t last for long, and soon enough, Jack is up against a rogue vigilante.
Katrina Carrasco, The Best Bad Things (MCD/FSG)
In this richly detailed historical mystery, a former Pinkerton detective, fired for dressing too often as a man, takes up with a smuggler named Delphine and begins tracking down stolen goods for her new employers. On the quest for some stolen opium, she must use all her skills of subterfuge to put her old Pinkerton pals off the track. Another wildly creative take on the genre from newcomer imprint MCD.
Simon Mawer, Prague Spring (Other Press)
This work of historical espionage takes us inside the Prague Spring of 1968, the greatest moment of possibility for democratic reform within the Soviet system, and brutally put down by Brezhnev. Told from the outsider’s perspective of an American student traveler, Prague Spring promises to be both a good introduction to a complex epoch and a fantastic spy novel.
Hye-young Pyun, Sora Kim-Russell, City of Ash and Red (Arcade Publishing)
Hye-young Pyun won the Shirley Jackson Award for last year’s The Hole, a work described impeccably by the publisher as “Misery meets The Vegetarian” and her new work promises to be just as bizarre. A renowned ratcatcher in a future dystopia is sent to a country to assist in the battle against a mysterious plague, only to return home and discover his wife’s been murdered, and he’s prime suspect. Everything you could hope for in a dystopian thriller!
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DECEMBER
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Hong Kong Noir, edited by Jason Y. Ng and Susan Blumberg-Kason (Akashic)
Hong Kong is a city of breathtaking highs and earth-shattering lows, luxury and poverty, excess and want, and this new collection of 14 tales from Hong Kong’s best crime writers showcases the extremes of one of the world’s capitals. From ghost stories, to historical thrills, to underworld brutality, Hong Kong Noir, like the city it captures, is as endlessly fascinating as it is impossible to define.
For the Sake of the Game, edited by Laurie R. King and Leslie Klinger (Pegasus)
Laurie R. King and Leslie Klinger continue to breathe new life into Sherlockian tales with a new volume of short stories inspired by Conan Doyle’s classic works, some of which only recently entered public domain. Their latest features original tales from Rhys Bowen, Reed Farrel Coleman, Gregg Hurwitz, and many more.
Ezekiel Boone, The Mansion (Emily Bestler Books/Atria)
Ezekial Boone, author of such creepy-crawly masterpieces as The Hatching and Skitter, returns with a new tale of horror and thrills, The Mansion. As the tale begins, we meet a software analyst who’s installed himself and his wife in a remote, high-tech retreat in order to restore their marriage, which sets off all our red flags right away—I mean, hello, isolating his wife from her community while their marriage is already struggling? Either the husband kills the wife, the wife kills the husband, or the high-tech house kills both of ‘em, but either way, we’re happily along for the whole ride.
