Speaking of Mysteries

Tom Straw’s The Accidental Joe: The Top Secret Life of a Celebrity Chef, blends murder, mirth, high-stakes espionage, gastronomic highs and lows and killer locales for an appetizing thriller that launches a new series featuring peripatetic bad boy chef Sebastian Pike and his CIA handler Cammie Nova. Tasty, indeed Photo of Tom... Read more »

Fans of Don Winslow are—understandably—in denial that City in Ruins is his final crime fiction novel. But if it’s true, if Don has put away the keyboard to devote himself to political activism, City in Ruins, the third and final installment of his Danny Ryan trilogy, just might prove that he saved the best for... Read more »

In Past Lying, the seventh novel in Val McDermid’s series featuring Karen Pirie, the action—or restriction thereof—is in and about Edinburgh during lockdown in Spring 2020, as Karen and her team investigate whether or not a partial manuscript found in the papers of a recently deceased crime fiction writer is a roadmap to the disappearance... Read more »

Crime fiction fans rejoice: with The Spy Coast, Tess Gerritsen launches a new series featuring retired CIA Maggie Bird and her fellow former intelligence officers, all of whom now reside in Purity, Maine. And, while members of the Martini Club—as the ex-spooks call themselves—may be retired from active duty, their combined skills are formidable. And... Read more »

In The Last Applicant, Rebecca Hanover’s debut adult thriller, a parent desperate to secure her son’s admission to an exclusive Manhattan private school, in Rebecca’s words, “goes there” and stalks the school’s admissions director. To tell you anymore would spoil any one of the many twists and turns the story takes Photo... Read more »

The stakes couldn’t be higher for Junie Lagarde, the protagonist in The Beautiful Risk, Lynn Hightower’s new thriller. Her dog Leo—who, as Junie’s hearing dog, is much more than a pet—survived the plane crash in the French Alps that killed her husband. Nothing will stop Junie from finding Leo and looking into the plane crash... Read more »

In a case of Herculean wordsmithing, Denise Mina is scheduled to publish two novels on August 1, 2023: The Second Murderer, which continues the story of Raymond Chandler’s immortal Philip Marlowe; and Three Fires, the story of the late 15th century Florentine Dominican friar, Girolamo Savonarola—he of the original Bonfire of the Vanities—that has resonance... Read more »

Sheriff Titus Crown, the protagonist in All the Sinners Bleed, S.A. Cosby’s recently published thriller, is not a man to be trifled with. He’s a man who, when he ran and—surprising himself, won—the election for sheriff “had made a choice to live in a no-man’s-land between people who believed in him, people who hated him... Read more »

Fans of Robert B. Parker’s extensive crime fiction universe, rejoice! Alison Gaylin is continuing the story of PI Sunny Randall, in Robert B. Parker’s Bad Influence. And in Bad Influence, Sunny—who’s never had a digital footprint —jumps into the world of social media with both feet when she’s hired to protect two Instagram influencers and... Read more »

In Jordan Harper’s Everybody Knows, black-bag publicist Mae Pruett doesn’t worry about the truth, only The Story, because whether you call what she does picking up the pieces or placating The Beast, what she does is a nasty business. And Mae is great at it Photo of Jordan Harper ©Brian Hennigan

Part domestic suspense, part espionage thriller, Alma Katsu’s Red London—the follow-up to Red Widow—is all tension. Mildly disgraced CIA agent Lyndsey Duncan is working to rehabilitate her reputation by taking an assignment in London sussing out a potential Russian defector, until she’s loaned out to MI6 in an effort to befriend the wife of a... Read more »

Cara Black took a break from her book tour to talk about Night Flight to Paris, the follow up novel to Three Hours in Paris, which introduced us to Kate Rees, the Oregonian sharpshooter whose considerable skills are put to work by England during World War Two. Clandestine work can often go sideways as it... Read more »

While some things have changed for Margaret Mizushima’s protagonist Sheriff Deputy Mattie Wray—for one thing, Mattie has changed her last name from Cobb, the name of the man who kidnapped her, to that of her birth father—in Standing Dead, other things remain the same. People are turning up dead in the mountain forests surrounding Timber... Read more »

There is a decided “down the rabbit hole” sensation to City Under One Roof, Academy Award-nominated screenwriter Iris Yamashita’s debut crime fiction novel. When body parts wash up on the shore adjacent to the city-in-one-building, three female narrators—with varying degrees of unreliability—escort us over, under, sideways and down through the Davidson Condominiums, the one-stop shop,... Read more »

There’s nothing like a high school reunion to trigger buried memories—and make you question them. For example, did Cassie Fitzherbert—now a London police officer—kill a fellow student in high school? Bleeding Heart Yard, Elly Griffith’s newly published crime fiction novel, opens with Cassie asking herself if it’s possible to forget if you killed someone…Three unreliable... Read more »

In her just-published stand-alone thriller, Mother, Daughter, Traitor, Spy, Susan Elia MacNeal transforms the very real story of mother and daughter Grace and Sylvia Comfort—who risked their lives to infiltrate Nazi strongholds in Los Angeles during World War Two—into a story of treason and sedition that is as chilling as it is prescient ... Read more »

Four women, who happen to be sixty-something professional assassins, are celebrating their recent retirement in Deanna Raybourn’s new thriller, Killers of a Certain Age.The Killers of the title—Billie, Natalie, Mary Alice and Helen—are looking forward to pursuing all the things that being on-call for “The Museum,” as they called the organization who contracted them out for... Read more »

All Paris Peralta wants in Things We Do in the Dark, Jennifer Hillier’s new suspense novel, is to live a quiet life. Well, as the saying goes: make a plan and the gods laugh. Paris is arrested for her husband’s murder and even she has to admit it doesn’t look good, she’s found next to... Read more »

It’s been twenty long years, but Glaswegian auctioneer extraordinaire Rilke is back with his merry band of pranksters in The Second Cut, Louise Welsh’s follow up novel to her remarkable The Cutting Room. The times may have changed—tech-savvy Rilke is now meeting men on Grindr instead of in pubs—but remarkably, Rilke, Rose, Anderson and Les,... Read more »

In Winter Work, Dan Fesperman’s new thriller, it’s the winter of 1990, the Berlin Wall has fallen and the fall of East Germany has ignited a feeding frenzy among competing—think C.I.A.—and complementary—think K.G.B—intelligence agencies. And for the East German operatives who will soon be out of work, it’s a matter of who is buying and... Read more »