With Agony Hill, Sarah Stewart Taylor kicks off a thoughtful, thought-provoking historical mystery series set in a time with shocking parallels to the present.
In Alan Bradley’s 11th mystery starring preteen sleuth Flavia de Luce, the chemistry prodigy faces murder by mushroom and her own impending adulthood.
Gripping, disturbing and absolutely wild, The Sequel is a more than worthy, well, sequel, to Jean Hanff Korelitz’s The Plot.
Rough Pages, Lev AC Rosen’s third postwar noir starring gay PI Andy Mills, is as unsettling as it is vital.
Regency romance author Vanessa Kelly hops genres but not time periods for this series starter, which follows Emma Knightley (née Woodhouse) as she solves crimes in her little town of Highbury, England. Mysteries inspired by or starring Jane Austen are certainly common, but Emma is an inspired choice for a sleuth: She loves gossip, has a great deal of freedom thanks to her status as Highbury’s queen bee, and is in desperate need of a meaningful hobby so she doesn’t fall back into old habits and start matchmaking again. Equally inspired is Kelly’s choice of first victim: the detestable Mrs. Elton.
Taking up the mantle of the great John le Carré seems like an impossible task. The iconic espionage novel author’s style was unmistakable: seemingly simple sentences that were somehow stained with nicotine, le Carré’s gimlet-eyed cynicism seeping through on every page. Nick Harkaway, author of tech thrillers and essays on digital culture, might seem like a somewhat out-of-left-field choice. But Harkaway has another credential: He’s actually le Carré’s son. He might be the only writer in the world capable of not only continuing his father’s legacy, but taking it somewhere entirely new.
Attica Locke’s language is precise, refreshing and often beautiful in Guide Me Home, the final installment in the literary triumph that is her Highway 59 mystery series.
If Louise Penny’s Armand Gamache is anything, he is unfailingly kind. So why does a phone call on a beautiful Sunday morning in Three Pines, Canada, send him into a rage? That is only the first ominous moment in what promises to be a dark entry in Penny’s masterful, bestselling series.
A murder-mystery party blurs the lines between dramatic artifice and harsh reality in Kate Atkinson’s sixth Jackson Brodie mystery.
Ann Cleeves’ The Dark Wives is a standout entry in her Vera Stanhope series, a crackerjack mystery with a clear political conscience.
Rachel Kushner has taken the bones of the traditional spy novel and spun it into something that is as thought-provoking as it is fun, an intellectual thriller that deviously suggests there could be another fate for our disaster-bound species.
Juliet Grames’ expertise in Calabrian culture and eye for detail shine on every page of The Lost Boy of Santa Chionia, a historical mystery set in 1960 Italy.
Set at a televangelist’s compound as floodwaters rise, John Fram’s No Road Home is a darkly dramatic murder mystery-thriller hybrid.
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