Even if the temperatures are still high, the start of the school year and the first wave of Christmas promotional gift guide emails have combined forces to indicate that fall has now arrived (I’m not kidding about those gift guide emails. They start early). No matter that the brown leaves poetically falling from the branches were killed by the heat waves…They are still falling! And while I’m talking about the cycle of life, disrupted or otherwise—time to recommend some murderous fiction. Below, you’ll find a host of horror, a smorgasbord of psychologicals, a murmuration of mysteries, and a cabal of crime novels…Or, to put it more succinctly: 75+ books, all very good, and all coming out before the end of the year. Enjoy!
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SEPTEMBER
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Angie Kim, Happiness Falls
(Hogarth)
Angie Kim once again combines an intense character study with a searching mystery, this time after her narrator’s husband disappears, and police are interested in quickly pinning it on her nonverbal son. Kim uses the parallel investigations of police and family to explore the complex dynamics of interracial marriage, Asian and biracial identity in America, and the nuances of raising a child with special needs. You’ll want to savor every word as Kim plunges the depths of human action and finds love at the center. –Molly Odintz, CrimeReads Managing Editor
Lou Berney, Dark Ride
(William Morrow)
Berney’s new novel, Dark Ride, introduces readers to an immediately unforgettable character: Hardly Reed, a twenty-one year old stoner working at an amusement park, breezing through life’s various travails when he comes across a pair of kids he suspects of being abused. When Hardly, against all odds and his own inclinations, decides to get involved and try to help the kids, he soon finds himself pitted against a local lawyer who’s also at the helm of a dangerous drug trafficking operation. Berney brings a compelling human touch to a story that grabs hold of the reader early and never lets go. –Dwyer Murphy, CrimeReads Editor-in-Chief
William Kent Krueger, The River We Remember
(Atria)
Krueger delivers another powerful standalone, this one about a small Minnesota town, a prominent citizen murdered, and the traumas of war that still haunt so many in this little pocket of America. Krueger writes, as ever, with deep empathy and impeccable suspense. –DM
Eliza Clark, Penance
(Harper)
Eliza Clark’s Boy Parts stunned me with its grotesque grand guignol violence and reversal of the male gaze, and Penance is just as good, although somewhat kinder to its characters. Penance is a take on the infamous Slenderman case (a real-life case linked to the undiagnosed schizophrenia of one attempted murderer and the folie a deux madness that gripped both her and her friend), but with different motivations for the killers. When three high school girls murder their rival, the world is quick to condemn them for their monstrosity, but as we read the novel, we see that they are monsters made, not monsters born. Of particular note is a scene in which one traumatized character tortures her Sims. I then went down a rabbit hole of how people torture their Sims and…wow. –MO
Tori Eldridge, The Ninja’s Oath
(Polis)
Chinese-Norwegian sleuth Lily Wong returns, this time for a joint adventure with a cook and an assassin as she takes her martial arts skills and sharp mind to Japan to help a family friend rescue his kidnapped niece. Tori Eldridge has infused the series with her personal knowledge of combat styles and (not to be too dramatic but) Wong is one of the greatest heroines of the 21st century. I definitely recommend starting at the beginning of the series if you’re new to the character. Enjoy! –MO
Carissa Orlando, The September House
(Berkley)
Carissa Orlando’s The September House uses hauntings as a brilliant metaphor for abuse, and what people can get used to, as well as a prescient comment on the tight housing market. Orlando’s narrator loves her home, and if she needs to ignore some ghostly children, be served tea by a taciturn housekeeper with a gaping face wound, and scrub the blood off the walls once a season, then so be it. Her husband isn’t so good at tolerating the house, but then, she’s learned how to tolerate much more from his treatment of her than she ever expected. When her daughter comes to stay, and her husband goes missing, it’s up to Orlando to continue saying “everything’s fine” for far too long. But the ghost in the basement may finally spur her to action…I found myself cheering at the end of this book, and I really hope it gets picked up as a Ryan Murphy production (post-writers’ strike, that is). –MO
Ariel Dorfman, The Suicide Museum
(Other Press)
An unusual duo—a wealthy Holocaust survivor and a struggling writer—team up to understand the 1973 death of the Chilean president in this wide-ranging novel that’s both complex investigation and emotional history. Ariel Dorfman is best known as the author of Death and the Maiden, and The Suicide Museum once again uses a mixture of fact and fiction to process the trauma of Chile’s dictatorship. –MO
Adam Mansbach, The Golem of Brooklyn
(Random House)
An art teacher makes a golem. The golem is very confused. Why is he back? What dangers are the Jewish people facing? Why did G-d allow such an idiot to bring him life? And where is his penis? Luckily Miri, the Yiddish-speaking ex-Hasid clerk at the corner store, is ready to help them out, as is his weed dealer, Waleed, and a host of other colorful neighborhood characters, including a bodega cat. What follows is a picaresque misadventure, a dive into Jewish history, and a warning about the American present. If you want more golems, Aden Polydoros has a novel coming out in October called Wrath Becomes Her: a teenage girl is killed in the Holocaust and brought back as a clay creature, seeking vengeance. –MO
Alicia Elliott, And Then She Fell
(Dutton)
A young indigenous woman is going stir-crazy at home after giving birth, and her husband, a white professor of Native American studies, seems so supportive. But her husband keeps succeeding at her expense, the neighbors are beyond suspicious, her impostor syndrome is overwhelming, and it’s up to Elliott’s heroine to listen to the warnings of her ancestors and find the key to survival in the Haudenosaunee creation story. Creepy, thoughtful, and immersive! –MO
Juan Cárdenas, The Devil of the Provinces
Translated by Lizzie Davis
(Coffee House)
A strange, meditative work, The Devil in the Provinces follows a biologist back to his hometown in Colombia as he looks after his mother and is drawn into the mysteries surrounding his brother’s murder. The novel balances a compelling crime story with a willingness to delve into the unexplained phenomena of a life coming untethered. –DM
James Ellroy, The Enchanters
(Knopf)
Ellroy’s latest is another dark odyssey through the midcentury Los Angeles underbelly, this time with his hopelessly corrupt cops and fixers digging around the death of Marilyn Monroe: in part to solve the mystery, and in even larger part to make some money for themselves. Ellroy is, as ever, the bard of sullied Angelenos. –DM
Tod Goldberg, Gangsters Don’t Die
(Counterpoint)
Goldberg’s Gangsterland series has been one of the standouts in the world of crime fiction in recent years, and now the trilogy is coming to a conclusion with the publication of Gangsters Don’t Die. Sal Cupertino, the hit man on the lam, posing as a rabbi, is one of the more original figures you’ll come across, and now he’s making one last desperate gambit to get his life back. You won’t want to miss these books, so if you haven’t already, brush up on your Goldberg. –DM
Tomi Oyemakinde, The Changing Man
(Feiwel & Friends)
Get Out meets Ace of Spades in this boarding-school horror. A young scholarship student at an elite academy notices some of her classmates of color have been exhibiting remarkable, and unnatural, changes in behavior. What does the school want? And what is it willing to take? An excellent horror thriller that you’ll speed through in less than a day. –MO
John Manuel Arias, Where There Was Fire
(Flatiron)
In 1968 Costa Rica, a fruit plantation burns after a family argument. Decades later, the family is still riven by their secrets. What caused the fire? What happened to the family’s patriarch? And what truths will characters learn about themselves, trapped with their thoughts and unpredictable company during an epic hurricane? –MO
Lisa Springer, There’s No Way I’d Die First
(Delacorte Press)
Influencers! Halloween games! And a KILLER CLOWN!!!! There’s no way the narrator won’t make it to the end of this book, with all her Final Girl brilliance, which means there’s no way that you, the reader, will not also make it to the end of the very fun, very campy slasher novel. Springer’s heroine is trying to get attention for her horror film club and invites her prep school’s most influential students to an exclusive Halloween party at her parent’s mansion. Unfortunately, the party entertainment she’s hired has their own agenda, and it’ll take all her knowledge of horror tropes and household chemistry to outwit the clown’s righteous fury and grotesque gags. –MO
Laura Picklesimer, Kill For Love
(Unnamed Press)
The bored college fifth-year narrating Kill For Love has always been good at suppressing her appetites—you can see it in her carefully counted calories, svelte figure, and attempts to mask her sociopathy from her sisters. But when she kills a man in the act of coitus one night—then devours a meal of greasy meat for the first time in years—she realizes she’s found the one hunger impossible to ignore. Of particular note is how Picklesimer’s language reverses the male gaze as her killer objectifies the frat bros around her and tries to keep from mauling their drunken flesh. –MO
Adam Sass, Your Lonely Nights Are Over
(Viking Young Readers)
In this delightful YA homage to the slasher, a serial killer is targeting a school’s queer club, and two besties find themselves ostracized from the club after suspicion falls on them for the murders. They must clear their names, in between going to drive-in movies, settling scores, and occasionally hooking up. Will they solve the murders? Will they end up together? Do I even care who the murderer is when I’m desperate for these two to smash? Anyway, file this one under, Very Fun and Not at All Scary (at least, compared to other slashers). –MO
Laura Shepherd-Robinson, The Square of Sevens
(Atria)
In this lush gothic, a young girl who knows the art of predicting fortunes becomes ward to a kind intellectual, who raises her in safety and anonymity in 18th-century Bath. As she grows into a poised young woman, she finds herself increasingly curious about her fairy-tale origins, in which her fortune-teller father ran away with her aristocratic mother. When a chance comes to know more of her history, she takes it, even as a larger conspiracy threatens her found family. –MO
Clay McLeod Chapman, What Kind of Mother
(Quirk)
I was shattered by Clay McLeod Chapman’s grief horror Ghost Eaters, and in What Kind of Mother, Chapman revisits some of the same themes of loss and absence, this time in the guise of a domestic thriller with supernatural overtones. A palm reader heads back to her hometown with her teenage daughter, only to reconnect with an old flame who is struggling with the loss of his young son. After reading his palm, Chapman’s heroine finds herself convinced her lover’s son is still alive. But where could he be, and who could have taken him? –MO
Kaori Fujino, Nails and Eyes
Translated by Kendall Heitzman
(Pushkin Press)
I’m so looking forward to reading this literary Japanese horror that has earned comparisons to The Vegetarian and Tender is the Flesh (hint, hint). Narrated by a young girl with sinister intentions toward her stepmother, Nails and Eyes is a taught and entrancing novella, with additional disturbing stories rounding out the page count, all feeling very 90s-era Tartan video. The volume is part of a new series of Japanese short classics being issued by Pushkin Press, known on CrimeReads for their excellent Pushkin Vertigo series of classic detective fiction. –MO
Rachel Harrison, Black Sheep
(Berkley)
It’s hard coming home to your estranged family to celebrate the wedding of your ex to your childhood best friend. It’s even harder when your family, your ex’s family, and your best friend are all part of an insular Satanist cult. And when Satan himself decides to show up at the celebration, well, that’s when all hell breaks loose (get it?). An excellent addition to the “weddings-gone-awry” genre, and just as funny as it is creepy. –MO
Melissa Lozada-Oliva, Candelaria
(Astra House)
A badass Guatemalan grandma battles her way across a disaster-fallen city to find her granddaughters, fighting otherworldly creatures and strangely fixated on reaching the Watertown Mall Old Country Buffet. I’m psyched to read this bizarre, Lovecraftian take on disaster fiction. –MO
Anise Vance, Hush Harbor
(Hanover Square)
Hush Harbor is an epic novel of utopian hope in a dystopian world. When another Black teenager dies at the hands of the police, an armed self-defense movement establishes an intentional community in an abandoned housing project in New Jersey. How far will the revolution be able to go, before the unjust status quo is imposed on them? I loved this book’s pragmatic take on revolution and occupation, and kind approach to collective movements. Anise Vance demonstrates the thin line between utopian, dystopian, and thriller, in this genre-bending novel of ideas and action. –MO
Sheena Patel, I’m a Fan
(Graywolf)
In this deliciously creepy British novel, a woman becomes obsessed with the influencer who is sleeping with her lover. What follows is an intense meditation on status, social media, and discontent. Also, check out that cover design! –MO
Dan Frey, Dreambound
(Del Rey)
The real world and a fantastical one created by an author living in a mansion in the Hollywood Hills begin to bleed into one another in Dan Frey’s wild, genre-hopping ride, Dreambound. A dogged reporter is on the trail of his daughter, who’s gone missing, along with a string of children, and the trail soon suggests a crossing over of worlds, between the real and the presumed imaginary. Frey creates a fascinating mystery equal parts wondrous and terrifying. –DM
Richard Osman, The Last Devil to Die
(Pamela Dorman)
REJOICE, for the new Thursday Murder Club book has arrived!! (Actually, I should have said RE-JOYCE). I know I say every time how I’m so excited and “this one” is going the best but I mean it every time, and I mean it now. The Last Devil to Die is a delightful romp taking our four protagonists deep into the worlds of drug dealing, art forgery, and, worst of all, the antiques industry. I’ve been waiting for this book for a whole year and it didn’t let me down. I just wish, as with every installment of the Thursday Murder Club series, that it were about a thousand pages longer. –Olivia Rutigliano, CrimeReads and Lit Hub Editor
A.F. Carter, Boomtown
(Mysterious Press)
A.F. Carter returns to the depressed, largely lawless Rust Belt town of Baxter in this gritty, gripping new installment of the Delia Mariola series. In the middle of a drug war, police captain Delia is trying to wrangle the town into shape so the new Nissan plant won’t shut down and tons of much-needed jobs won’t vanish, a young woman’s body turns up on the streets. Delia is all too used to solving murders, but she doesn’t expect that two strangers will come to town, claiming to be family of the deceased, with a plans for justice of their own. Riveting and real.–OR
Joyce Carol Oates (ed.), A Darker Shade of Noir
(Akashic)
Yes, this isn’t a novel, but we’re bending the rules a bit to include it in this round-up because it’s a standout work of fiction and because it’s just such a provocative and incisive collection. Edited by Joyce Carol Oates, the book’s contributor list is a marvel in itself: Margaret Atwood, Tananarive Due, Joyce Carol Oates, Megan Abbott, Aimee Bender, Cassandra Khaw, Lisa Lim, Elizabeth Hand, Valerie Martin, Raven Leilani, Sheila Kohler, Joanna Margaret, Lisa Tuttle, Aimee LaBrie, and Yumi Dineen Shiroma. Prepare yourself for some truly unsettling stories. –DM
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OCTOBER
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Jessica Knoll, Bright Young Women
(S&S/MarySue Rucci)
Jessica Knoll is a careful writer, and this, her third novel, is a perfect match for her cold dissection of social mores and her fierce rage at misogyny. Knoll takes on the story of Ted Bundy, told from the perspective of a student who survives a horrific attack on a sorority house. She then must fight to preserve her sisters’ dignity and get the truths of their last moments as the world around them fetishizes their killer and attempts to make jokes of their deaths. Some may claim that the crime genre is rift with misogyny; those people have not read Jessica Knoll. She tears apart the restrictive world of women’s roles and lays bare the purpose of such hobbles: to keep women from making a scene, to keep them from seeking justice, and most of all, to keep them from seeking their own lives. –MO
Jonathan Lethem, Brooklyn Crime Novel
(Ecco)
Lethem’s return to the Brooklyn crime novel brings a wild, exuberant ambition that pays off and delivers to readers a true achievement: a book at once full of art and grace and mystery. The book’s backward-looking gaze takes up a half-century of history in one neighborhood, as we see the porous borders between what’s remembered and what was, with criminals and hustles providing all the misdirection needed for a truly astonishing effect. Lethem proves again why he is a master of the form. –DM
Marie NDiaye, Vengeance Is Mine
Translated by Jordan Stump
(Astra House)
In Marie NDiaye’s sinister and spellbinding new novel, a lawyer is hired by the husband of a woman accused of murdering her three children, despite her lack of experience in high-profile trials. Meeting him unlocks memories for her of a childhood visit to a palatial home, perhaps occupied by the husband’s family, and wonders if she perhaps met her new client when she was 10 and he was 15. But what happened between them? And why can’t she remember the details? Half suspense novel, half dark fairy tale, Vengeance is Mine is a literary tour-de-force. –MO
Ashley Winstead, Midnight is the Darkest Hour
(Sourcebooks)
Ashley Winstead’s new novel is a darkly romantic gothic tale of a swampy Southern town with too many bad men and too much fear of the devil. A preacher’s daughter and her best friend once covered up a crime, and now it threatens their precious, hard-won freedom from the oppressive mores and pervasive hypocrisy of their small town. What secrets will come to light as the investigation progresses? And who will cast the first stone of retribution? Winstead’s spellbinding prose ensnares the reader just as much as the eerie setting and driving suspense. –MO
Jean Kwok, The Leftover Woman
(William Morrow)
Jean Kwok established herself as a writer to watch with her stunning debut, Searching for Sylvie Lee, and her upcoming novel is just as emotional, beautiful, and haunting. A young woman leaves China and heads to America to search for her daughter, stolen by her husband as a newborn and trafficked to America for international adoption. Meanwhile, an editor struggles with motherhood and finds herself feeling shamed by the love her adopted daughter has for their nanny. Kwok has woven an impeccably plotted domestic thriller that culminates in a profoundly satisfying ending, and I must insist that everyone pick this one up. –MO
Raul Palma, A Haunting in Hialeah Gardens
(Dutton)
Palma’s debut is a sparkling gem of a novel, a world-weary portrait of cynicism and despair upended and upended again. A recent widower in Miami with an indefatigable debt collector on his trail gets a bizarre offer from his antagonist: cleanse his house of unwanted spirits, and the debt will be forgiven. The trouble is, our man, though with a certain expertise, doesn’t actually believe in the spirits himself, and so undertakes an elaborate con job instead. Palma writes with precision and wit, bringing out a story that’s genuinely compelling and insightful. –DM
Hannah Morrissey, When I’m Dead
(Minotaur)
When I’m Dead is bone-chilling. Not just because it takes place in October, but because it’s about a mom (and medical examiner) who discovers that her daughter’s best friend is dead… right before she discovers that her own daughter is missing. Read it while hugging a pillow to your chest. –OR
Yomi Adegoke, The List
(William Morrow)
Yomi Adegoke’s debut thriller is sophisticated, complex, and smart, posing an uneasy question: what would you do if your partner was accused of a heinous act? And how would you go about finding out the truth? The List follows Ola and Michael, two Black British professionals whose status as #couplegoals is threatened by shocking (and anonymous) revelations about Michael’s behavior towards another woman. –MO
Juli Zeh, About People
Translated by Alta L. Price
(World Editions)
At the peak of the pandemic, a woman splits with her boyfriend over his increasingly rigid commitment to environmentalism and heads to the German countryside. The new home needs unexpected work, she and her dog promptly clash with their menacing neighbor, and unexplained things are happening all around her. This literary thriller is an intense exploration of fear and isolation. –MO
Amanda Peters, The Berry Pickers
(Catapult)
The Berry Pickers is a sensitive and devastating saga of families broken, children stolen, and fierce reckonings with the traumas of history. As the novel begins, a 4-year-old Mi’kmaq child goes missing, her disappearance sending her loved ones into their own private hells. We’re then introduced to a girl growing up with a paranoid mother and an aloof father, dreaming of another family and wondering at her parents’ reticence when it comes to her earliest years. The novel starts in 1962 and spans over 50 years, with an emotional climax that will leave most readers with at least a tear in their eye. –MO
Adriana Chartrand, An Ordinary Violence
(Spiderline)
In An Ordinary Violence, a young Indigenous woman who is living in Toronto, reckoning with the violence and trauma of her past, receives uncanny messages and soon goes back home looking for answers. Her story is offset against her brother’s, recently released from jail and mixed up with something supernatural. Chartrand weaves together an unsettling tale that interrogates cross-generational pain. –DM
Tananarive Due, The Reformatory
(Saga)
Tananarive Due is one of the greatest living horror writers, and her new book blends her signature style with an exploration into a very personal trauma: Due’s great-uncle was one of many Black children harmed by the Florida reform school known as the Dozier School for Boys, and The Reformatory takes readers into the nightmare that was the school circa 1950. Sure to be as powerful as it is haunting. –MO
Gustavo Eduardo Abrevaya, The Sanctuary
Translated by Andrea G. Labinger
(Schaffner Press)
In what reads as a David Lynch take on Red Harvest, a couple is on their way to a remote cabin when their car breaks down, stranding them in the middle of nowhere. In a quest to find assistance, they find themselves in a sinister village ruled by a despotic mayor, a fire-and-brimstone priest, an insidious, lewd, police squad, and more strange denizens. Soon, the wife goes missing. None of the townspeople are interested in finding her. And her husband must search far and wide for any allies… –MO
Elizabeth Hand, A Haunting on the Hill
(Mulholland)
Elizabeth Hand is one of the coolest writers around, and I’m psyched to dive into A Haunting on the Hill, a Shirley-Jackson-estate approved continuation of The Haunting of Hill House (This time with more hauntings! And more hills! Actually probably just the one hill). Playwright Holly Sherwin and her girlfriend Nisa head upstate with a troupe of actors to stage and rehearse a new play. Sherwin is confident that the crumbling gothic manor of Hill House will bring out their creative sides, but instead, they are joined by their hauntings. I love a play-gone-wrong story and Hand’s promises to be one of the best. –MO
Helen Garner, This House of Grief
(Pantheon)
In this gorgeous reckoning with a shocking crime, Helen Garner recounts the trial of a man accused of murdering his three children by driving them into a dam. Garner attended the trial as a journalist, and her keen observations of not only the defendant but everyone in the courtroom elevate this to the highest levels of literary craft, even as the words she writes remain painfully, horrifically true. –MO
Jo Nesbø, The Night House
Translated by Neil Smith
(Knopf)
Jo Nesbo’s upcoming horror novel is a delightful contrast with the author’s usual work; in The Night House, classic horror tropes are reinvented as an unreliable narrator tries to block out terrible, knowing voices. One by one, his schoolmates begin to vanish, and he’s quickly pegged as the suspicious, angry outsider who must be behind the killings. Will he lose the girl he loves next? And is he, perhaps, the real danger? There are some wickedly clever reveals that I will not talk about here but you must read this book so you, too, can be properly surprised. –MO
Sam Rebelein, Edenville
(William Morrow)
A novelist has a very vivid dream. He wakes up and writes a novel. That novel comes across the desk of a mysterious researcher who curses her discovery. She doesn’t want to kill the author—perhaps, she can hire him as an adjunct creative writing teacher instead? And so the author and his girlfriend head to a small liberal arts college where the English department has a strangely otherworldly agenda. This book was a wild ride from start to finish, with a heavy dose of humor thrown into the mix. –MO
Caitlin Starling, Last to Leave the Room
(St. Martin’s)
A scientist is performing dangerous experiments deep inside the earth that appear to be warping the very geography of her city. Meanwhile, her basement keeps getting deeper….and deeper…until one day, a door appears where there was once a blank wall. On the other side of the door is the scientist’s doppelgänger, and her perfect complement—cheerful when she is morose, friendly when she needs solitude. This book has brought me a delicious sense of unease, and Starling’s signature intricate world-building is once again on full display. –MO
Anna Biller, Bluebeard’s Castle
(Verso)
Anna Biller’s sly feminist dissection of gothic tropes is as lush and layered as her cinema (Biller is the director of the cult classic The Love Witch). A young romance writer is seduced by a handsome ne’er-do-well who makes himself out to be a wealthy gentleman. Soon, he shows himself to be a brutal lover and more concerned with borrowing from her dwindling savings than making any money of his own. And yet, she has fallen in love with him…or so she tells herself, but Biller skillfully portrays the gaslighting and abuse that reduce her heroine to making excuses for her boorish husband. –MO
Aden Polydoros, Wrath Becomes Her
(Inkyard)
In this gorgeously written, brutally powerful take on the Golem legend, a teenage girl is killed in the Holocaust and brought back by her father as a clay creature, seeking vengeance. Her violence is effective, but soon channeled for more than vengeance, and she must take a stand against those who would exploit her for evil. –MO
Nat Cassidy, Nestlings
(Tor Nightfire)
A couple with a baby gains access to the perfect two-bedroom in Nat Cassidy’s ode to creepy New York legacy apartment buildings. Ana and Reid are struggling after birth leaves Ana paralyzed, and they worry about moving to a higher floor in terms of emergencies and accessibility, but the apartment is just too nice to say no to. There’s a reason they’re being welcomed into the building, however: their neighbors have sinister motivations. Of note is the novel’s take on antisemitism as horror, in the guise of a hateful former landlord echoing currently rising prejudices. –MO
C. J. Skuse, Sweetpea
(HQ)
This one might be the most misanthropic on the list. The narrator of Sweetpea is anything but; she hates her partner, barely tolerates her friends, and labors meticulously over a kill list of everyone who’s ever annoyed her, from the grocery clerk who mishandles her orders to the skinny 20-something sleeping with her husband. From bruised vegetables, to butchered humans, the violence in this one escalates quickly. Very Serial Mom vibes. –MO
Olivia Worley, People to Follow
(Wednesday Books)
10 influencers head to a remote location for three weeks turned off from their phones, convinced they’re the stars of a new reality show—but not long after they arrive, influencers start dropping like follower counts, as their darkest secrets are revealed to their legions of fans. I’m really enjoying this trend of “books where annoying people who are internet famous kill each other.” –MO
Anbara Salam, Hazardous Spirits
(Tin House)
This charming, evocative, and very well-researched book about Evelyn Hazard, a young woman in 1920s Edinburgh whose husband claims he can communicate with the dead, and the madness that ensues from their getting sucked into the wildly eccentric Spiritualist movement. Unsure if her husband is a fraud or if the entire metaphysical world she has come to know is a lie, Evelyn must guard herself and her life, especially after things begin to unravel and secrets come to light. If you need me, I will be reading this in bed with a flashlight. –OR
Lev AC Rosen, The Bell in the Fog
(Forge)
Lev Rosen’s Lavender House perfectly captured its 1950s setting while bringing queer stories to the fore. It also introduced a detective I’d follow through any number of books, Evander (Andy) Mills, so it’s great to see the private dick return for a new foray into the shadows of a repressed, but vibrant, era. In The Bell in the Fog, Rosen’s detective has set up shop above a gay bar offering investigative services to the queer community when he receives a visit from an old flame from the Navy. The ex is being blackmailed, and the further Andy digs, the more dangerous his sleuthing becomes. –MO
Laurence Leamer, Hitchcock’s Blondes: The Unforgettable Women Behind the Legendary Director’s Dark Obsession
(Putnam)
From the author of Capote’s Women comes about book about Hitchcock’s longtime fixation on a highly specific interpretation of womanhood and femininity. Essential reading for anyone interested in the great director and how his tastes were instrumental in creating the dense thriller and noir aesthetic we see today. –OR
Hye-Young Pyun, The Owl Cries
Translated by Sora Kim-Russell
(Arcade)
Hye-Young Pyun’s stunning psychological thrillers delve deep into the horrors of being human and the oppressive mechanics of modern society, and The Owl Cries demonstrates a writer at the top of her game. In The Owl Cries, a ranger has vanished from a mysterious forest and its secluded company town of loggers and researchers. His brother, a divorce lawyer, embarks on a lackadaisical investigation into the disappearance, but soon finds himself mired in the town’s corruption and enmeshed in its secrets.
Stuart A. Reid, The Lumumba Plot: The Secret History of the CIA and a Cold War Assassination
(Knopf)
Reid dives into one of the darker chapters in a century filled with them for the CIA, telling the story of the CIA-backed web of conspiracies to depose and ultimately kill Patrice Lumumba, Congo’s post-independence prime-minister. The history is a swirl of paranoia and Cold War machinations, and Reid does an admirable job bringing all the players together as the international disgrace spreads and the events careen toward their tragic conclusion. –DM
Mónica Ojeda, Nefando
Translated by Sarah Booker
(Coffee House Press)
Ojeda’s novel is a deeply unsettling mashup of genres and influences. With two young women at the center and a wide cast of eccentrics and seers, we’re brought into close contact with a warped vision of intensified youth and horror. –DM
Anne Eekhout, Mary and the Birth of Frankenstein
Translated by Laura Watkinson
(HarperVia)
Between Poor Things and this rich historical novel, there’s a lot of Frankenstein content coming out, this autumn. Hot Frankenstein Fall, we might say! I don’t know. I’m sorry. >grunts and drags self away< Anyway, I’m sorry to joke because I take Anne Eekhout’s wonderful novel extremely seriously. It’s about the strange, electric summer in 1816 Geneva when Mary Shelly conceived of Frankenstein, but also the even stranger, less-famous summer in 1812 Dundee when Mary made a powerful bond with a girl named Isabella. –OR
Laurent Petitmangin, What You Need from the Night
Translated by Shaun Whiteside
(Other Press)
What You Need from the Night captures the complex dynamics of a widower and his two sons, one of whom rebels against his left wing father by joining in with a far right crowd. The two grapple over the moral education of the younger son, and their conflict grows as the behavior of the right wing nationalists in town escalates. A fascinating portrait of politics tearing a family apart, and a haunting noir about the ways in which love competes with morality. –MO
Nicola Lagioia, The City of the Living
Translated by Ann Goldstein
(Europa)
I don’t think it’s possible to praise this book enough. The City of the Living is a novel, but it closely follows a real-life crime committed in Italy in 2015, when two young men, after a days-long drug binge, brutally murdered another young man in a senseless and bizarre crime. Nicola Lagioia teases out all the complex threads of the case, including the ambiguous sexual dynamic between the perpetrators, the homophobia that colored public response, the victim’s right wing sympathies, and the enormous class differences between the killers and their target. With obvious echoes of Leopold and Loeb, this novel also evokes the same sensibilities as Micah Nemerever’s These Violent Delights. Also, be warned: if you look it up, you will get the song Ciao Amore stuck in your head for quite some time. –MO
Dan McDorman, West Heart Kill
(Knopf)
With this ultra-clever and teasingly metafictional debut, Dan McDorman has both created a perfect locked room mystery and exploded it. Set in the 70s (or is it so meta as to only have the setting of Now and the character of the Reader?), the story follows a cast of bored, drunken rich people at their elite summer club, where two interlopers have arrived for the weekend: the first Jewish applicant for membership, and a poetically weary private detective who (in my mind at least) definitely pulls off his blonde mustache. After everyone sleeps with everyone else, some murders happen. So yeah, basically The Ice Storm as if written by Borges, then solved by Chandler. –MO
Alix E. Harrow, Starling House
(Tor)
Harrow has crafted an evocative and propulsive gothic thriller with Starling House. Opal is a young woman burdened young with responsibility for her brother. Each night, she dreams of her town’s mysterious and enormous gothic manor, until one day she convinces the manor’s reclusive (and rather handsome) inhabitant Arthur to hire her as a cleaner for the home. As Opal and Arthur restore the mansion to its former glory, those who would threaten it begin to close in on the home’s dark secrets, and a magical confrontation looms that is as devastating as it is satisfying. –MO
Ritu Mukerji, Murder By Degrees
(Simon & Schuster)
If you like gaslit mysteries and intrepid lady sleuths, this one’s for you! I was entranced by Ritu Mukerji’s spooky, exacting mystery set in late-nineteenth Philadelphia. It is about a woman, Dr. Lydia Weston an anatomist and professor at Woman’s Medical College, who suspects foul play when the body of a young woman is pulled out of the river, while also investigating the disappearance of a young patient. –OR
Lori Rader-Day, The Death of Us
(William Morrow)
There was a brief moment when I thought The Death of Us was going to be the death of me–in a good way! Disappearances, re-appearances, children with mysterious pasts, women when even more mysterious pasts… this novel will submerge you in secrets and twists until you can barely breathe. –OR
Lisa Unger, Christmas Presents
(Mysterious Press)
Christmas is coming early this year, and I can’t wait!!! And, in case you were wondering if anything could be better than a Lisa Unger mystery set at Christmas… it’s set in a bookshop!! I’m squealing like someone just handed me a puppy with a bow around it’s neck. Madeline Martin wants to forget the terrible events in her past and move on. She’s the owner of a lovely little bookstore in her quaint hometown of Little Valley. But then, one December day, true-crime Harley Granger comes to town and walks into her shop, and he has some questions about the night she was left for dead on riverbank. A man named Evan Handy was convicted for her attempted murder, and the murder of her best friend, and the disappearance of two more of her friends. But now, more than a decade later, young girls have started disappearing again, indicating to Madeline that the events she had thought were over might not have ever finished. And if you can believe it, this book is a little guy! 224 pages. A perfect stocking stuffer or the GIFT that keeps on giving…? Or both? –OR
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NOVEMBER
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Linda Cheng, Gorgeous Gruesome Faces
(Roaring Brook Press)
In this high-concept horror, Cheng’s narrator Sunny is a disgraced former member of a manufactured girl group that was meant for K-pop stardom—at least, until one of the members killed herself, and the other cuts off all contact with Sunny. When Sunny finds a chance to reconnect with her bandmate, and finally understand what went wrong, she leaps in without hesitation: there’s a new contest to become the next big pop idol, and she’ll stay in the program until she discovers the truth, no matter how dangerous. –MO
Delphine de Vigan, Kids Run the Show
Translated by Alison Anderson
(Europa)
Damn, this book got dark. Like, you think it can’t get any darker, then it does. In Kids Run the Show, the younger child of a prominent mommy vlogger is kidnapped, and as the search continues, the reader begins to wonder if the child might be better off wherever they are than at home being constantly filmed. De Vigan has written a blistering critique of influencer culture, the erasure of privacy, and the exploitation of children. The prophetic ending takes us decades into the future to contemplate the psychological wounds of a generation raised to perform on the internet, for a deeply unsettling experience. –MO
Charlotte Vassell, The Other Half
(Anchor Books)
Is the influencer at the heart of Charlotte Vassell’s new murder-mystery-of-manners truly passionate about brand partnerships and makeup? Or is it all an ironic scheme concocted to impress the art world? It’s up to the detectives to find out when she’s found murdered just after her wealthy paramour’s blow-out birthday party. –MO
Lee Matthew Goldberg, The Great Gimmelmans
(Level Best Books)
Sometimes, desperation can unveil new skills—at least, that’s what happens to the Gimmelman family after they lose their money in the Crash of 87 and find themselves surprisingly good at recouping their finances in a rather risky way. Specifically, robbing banks. Lee Matthew Goldberg has crafted an uproarious send-off of American capitalism in its greediest decade, and created a lovable bunch of outlaws to boot. –MO
Femi Kayode, Gaslight
(Mulholland)
Investigative psychologist Philip Taiwo is back in this gripping, splashy mystery about the pastor of a Nigerian megachurch accused of killing his wife. But, as Taiwo knows, as often with religious operations like this, nothing is what it seems. –OR
Christina Henry, Good Girls Don’t Die
(Berkley)
In this very satisfying thriller, three women wake up in strange versions of classic story set-ups—one is trapped in a domestic thriller, another in a tale of horror, and a third in a gladiatorial competition. Why are they there? Is there a way out? And can this please be turned into a Black Mirror episode? –MO
Paul Caruana Galizia, A Death in Malta: An Assassination and a Family’s Quest for Justice
(Riverhead)
In 2017, the journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia was killed by a car bomb in Malta, her home island, where she had long reported on endemic corruption. Now, her son, Paul Caruana Galizia, who has taken up his mother’s mantle along with his brothers and father, tells her story, and the story of their small nation with very big problems. –DM
Grace Elizabeth Hale, In the Pines: A Lynching, A Lie, A Reckoning
(Little, Brown)
Grace Elizabeth Hale is a scholar of white supremacy currently teaching at the University of Virginia. Her family had passed down a story about her grandfather, a sheriff in Mississippi who supposedly prevented a suspect in his custody, a Black man accused of rape, from a lynching. But when Hale decides to investigate the family lore, she finds a much darker story, hidden for generations. This is historical research of the most urgent, personal sort, and a powerfully told story. –DM
Ed Park, Same Bed, Different Dreams
(Ballantine)
Ed Park’s wonderful, kaleidoscopic new novel asks what the world would look like if the Korean Provisional Government still existed. Part imagined alternate history, part reflection on twentieth century culture, it tells of a former writer-turned tech worker who comes across a manuscript that seems to belong to the KPG that tells of an impossible world. A beguiling, bewitching novel. –OR
Lindsay Hunter, Hot Springs Drive
(Roxane Gay Books)
Two neighboring families become hopelessly entangled in Hunter’s viciously insightful new novel. Jackie and Theresa decide together to lose weight, but as Jackie sheds pounds, she’s consumed by a new hunger: that of feeling wanted, not as a mother, but as a woman. An affair with Theresa’s husband culminates in Theresa’s murder by Jackie’s eldest son, and Lindsay Hunter uses almost the entire second half of the novel to explore the lingering consequences of impulsive acts. This is sure to be considered one of the best psychological thrillers of the year. –MO
Katherine Howe, A True Account: Hannah Masury’s Sojourn Amongst the Pyrates, Written by Herself
(Henry Holt)
I’m going to be very honest—you had me at “pyrates,” Katherine Howe. But the book gets even better than that. It’s the story of Marian Beresford, a professor in the 1930s who comes across an account of a young woman living in eighteenth century Boston who disguises herself as a boy and joins a pirate crew, in hopes to track down a treasure in the Caribbean. But as she comes to identify with the woman—Hannah—she also suspects that she might have been hiding something. Shiver. Me. Timbers. –OR
Ausma Zehanat Khan, Blood Betrayal
(Minotaur)
Ausma Zehanat Khan relocated from Canada to Colorado a few years back, so it makes sense for her to have launched a new Colorado-set series with last year’s Blackwater Falls. Now, her new heroine, Detective Inaya Rahman, returns, in another high-profile case with protests on both sides. I can’t wait to dive into this complex procedural with a social justice lens. –MO
Nita Prose, The Mystery Guest
(Ballantine)
A meticulous maid in a five star hotel finds herself at the center of a murder mystery when a guest—a world famous author of murder mysteries—dies in the hotel’s very public tea room. Prose sets up a classic mystery with a few deft notes of psychological suspense to create a heady whirlwind of an investigation. –DM
Elizabeth Crook, The Madstone
(Little, Brown)
Elizabeth Crook is already a household name in Texas, but The Madstone should establish her as a national figure, evoking the works of Charles Portis and Larry McMurtry as we go on a harrowing (and sometimes humorous) ride through 1868 Texas. The Madstone follows a young German Texan as he travels from the Hill Country to the Gulf Coast trying to shepherd a woman and her young child to safety, and find his own way to maturity and understanding the world around him. –MO
Harry N. MacLean, Starkweather: The Untold Story of the Killing Spree that Changed America
(Counterpoint)
In this deeply empathetic take on the tale of 19-year-old spree killer Charles Starkweather and his 14-year-old girlfriend Caril Ann Fugate, all the assumptions made over the years about the two are questioned, and Caril Ann Fugate’s role in particular is reevaluated. When the two went on trial for the 1958 murders that made both infamous, Fugate was painted as either a murderous femme fatale or a heartless collaborator, rather than a victim of threats, domestic abuse, and terrible circumstances. MacLean rights the record and gets deep into the psychology of not only his subjects, but their claustrophobic and constrained time and place. –MO
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DECEMBER
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Caz Frear, Five Bad Deeds
(Harper)
Caz Frear’s new novel is deliciously wicked, following a mother and teacher who’s been receiving messages threatening to expose her past secrets. Unfortunately, she has no idea of what they’re talking about (or perhaps too many ideas). And as the disruptions to her life escalate, so too does her introspection—what could she have done to make someone so angry? –MO
Chris McKinney, Sunset Water City
(Soho Crime)
Finally we have the third installment of McKiney’s Water City trilogy, a sci-fi noir trifecta. In this volume, our anonymous ex-detective protagonist passes his responsibilities onto his daughter Ascalon, now nineteen and ready to see who among the ravaged human race she can save. –OR
Alexis Soloski, Here in the Dark
(Flatiron)
Everyone loves to hate a theater critic, as theater critic Alexis Soloski knows all too well, and Here in the Dark takes the beloved trope of the murdered critic and gets meta with it. The critic of Soloski’s novel is already stressed enough about her future job prospects, her past secrets, and the state of American theater today, when she gets involved with a missing persons case and stumbles across a dead body. In between sleeping around, drinking far too much, and reviewing dreck in terms cruel enough to secure death threats, Soloski’s heroine just may have it in her to unravel the complex mystery. But will she (or her liver) make it safely to the conclusion? That’s up to me to know and you to find out. –MO
Gemma Amor, The Folly
(Agora)
I cannot wait to dive into this twisted little novel. Amor’s heroine has always believed her father to be innocent of her mother’s murder, and moves with him to a remote location after his release from prison to start over. But when a stranger arrives who looks, dresses, and acts like her mother, the small family is disrupted, and the narrator may find new answers to old questions. –MO
