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 narrators ask that same question and the answers can be quite deadly
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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
Photo of Susan Elia MacNeal ©Noel MacNeal
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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 hits, prevented them from doing. Except when they board a luxury ship for a celebratory cruise, they realize that someone wants to retire them—permanently. The Killers are not amused…
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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 her husband’s body, holding the murder weapon and covered in his blood
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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, have defied the space-time continuum and are the same age. Other things are the same too, including the secrets that old houses chock-a-block with antiques hold
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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 how much are they paying
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In his debut novel, An Honest Living, Dwyer Murphy takes readers on an odyssey through time and space in turn-of-the-21st-century New York City, complete with its own Ulises, who just happens to be a Venezuelan poet. Along this journey with nods to past noir novelists such as Ross Macdonald and Raymond Chandler (think mysterious beautiful woman engaging a sole-practitioner lawyer to investigate her husband), are cases of mistaken identity, missing manuscripts and doses of wry humor about the nature of cabaret laws in New York City that prevent dancing in bars, even when there’s a Samba band
Photo of Dwyer Murphy ©Carolina Henriquez-Schmitz
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The last thing Hudson Miller, the protagonist in It Dies with You, Scott Blackburn’s debut crime fiction novel, wants to do is return to his hometown of Flint Creek, North Carolina. But when his father is shot and killed, it’s the first thing he has to do
Photo of Scott Blackburn ©Ross Fletcher Gordon
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If 99 Miles From L.A., P. David Ebersole’s debut crime fiction novel, sounds like it should be the title of a song, that’s because it is. Written by Hal David and Albert Hammond—and sung by everyone from Hammond to Julio Iglesias to Art Garfunkel (a decidedly disturbing version)—it’s Johnny Mathis’s take that inspired Ebersole, and consequently the novel
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When Kaveri Murthy, the recently married headstrong young woman in The Bangalore Detectives Club—Harini Nagendra’s debut historical crime fiction novel that takes place in 1921—witnesses the aftermath of a murder at a club where the cream of Indian society can socialize with members of the British Raj, she does what’s in her nature to do: she investigates. And the murder investigation is only one of the many situations that she must learn to navigate: there’s also swimming, learning to drive, conquering the kitchen and studying mathematics
Photo of Harini Nagendra ©Venkatachalam Suri
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