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Mystery & SuspenseMystery

Deadly Animals

Deadly Animals, Marie Tierney’s brilliantly plotted debut mystery, introduces readers to Ava Bonney: a 14-year-old English girl obsessed with decomposing bodies.
Deadly Animals, Marie Tierney’s brilliantly plotted debut mystery, introduces readers to Ava Bonney: a 14-year-old English girl obsessed with decomposing bodies.
Mystery & SuspenseMystery

Big Breath In

John Straley’s nonstop, high-octane Big Breath In introduces the unforgettable Delphine, a 68-year-old cancer patient-turned-investigator.
John Straley’s nonstop, high-octane Big Breath In introduces the unforgettable Delphine, a 68-year-old cancer patient-turned-investigator.
Science Fiction & FantasyNonfictionMystery & SuspenseTravelPop CultureMysteryLiteratureLifestylesFantasyCrafts, Hobbies & Home

5 gifts that will shoot to the top of any reader’s TBR

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Mystery & SuspenseMysteryCozy Mystery

A Killing in Costumes

Review by Jamie Orsini

A Killing in Costumes, Zac Bissonnette’s first Hollywood Treasures mystery, deftly balances a tightly plotted mystery with glamorous characters and a unique setting in the world of movie memorabilia.

Decades ago, Cindy Cooper and Jay Allan were bona fide celebrities. The married-in-real-life performers starred as a couple in a popular soap opera to great acclaim—until they decided to reveal their true sexual orientations to the world. Jay and Cindy lost their acting careers and ended their marriage but remained close friends. 

They now own Hooray for Hollywood, a movie memorabilia store in Palm Springs, California. Business is slow, and they’re in danger of having to close the shop for good until they’re offered a chance to represent retired silver screen legend Yana Tosh in the sale of her personal collection of film costumes and memorabilia. When a vice president of the auction house competing for Yana’s collection is found dead, Jay and Cindy become suspects in the investigation. To clear their names, keep their business afloat and win Yana’s collection, the friends must work together to solve the case—before the killer strikes again.

Bissonnette does an exceptional job constructing A Killing in Costume‘s central whodunit: Each entertaining suspect has believable motives and opportunities, and mystery fans are sure to appreciate his deftly hidden clues. But the heart of the story lies in Cindy and Jay’s close friendship, which has weathered the collapse of their careers, new jobs and relationships, and every success and loss along the way. Both are deeply funny people who are fiercely protective of each other, and their passion for and knowledge of the film industry will delight readers who are also movie buffs. Finally, Cindy’s struggle to find a new normal after the loss of her beloved wife to cancer provides a serious note that is both touching and authentic.

A Killing in Costumes has all the hallmarks of a great cozy: a unique setting, an intriguing cast of characters and an exciting mystery.

A Killing in Costumes has all the hallmarks of a great cozy: a unique setting, an intriguing cast of characters and an exciting mystery.
Mystery & SuspenseThriller

Just Like Home

Review by Mya Alexice

In Sarah Gailey’s latest thriller, a woman returns to her childhood home and comes face to face with the trauma of her youth.

Just Like Home opens with Vera Crowder returning to the house her father built to care for her ailing mother. Daphne Crowder—who insists Vera call her Daphne, not Mom—is barely alive, a pale imitation of the strict mother figure readers get glimpses of through Vera’s flashbacks: “The cold authority had drained out of Vera’s mother like brake fluid from a cut line.”

It is immediately apparent that something violent and bizarre, something far worse than standard mother-daughter tension, has ruptured Vera and Daphne’s relationship. When people recognize Vera in town, they react with horror, and when her past is revealed at work, she loses her job almost immediately. Just Like Home reveals the facts of the Crowder House tragedy early on but unearths the emotional fallout of the events expertly and slowly, meditating on the possible culpability of everyone involved.

In addition to being an excellently crafted thriller, Just Like Home is scary enough to satisfy horror fans, particularly those who revel in disturbing images and suffocating settings. Gailey lends the Crowder House all the intensity of a living being as claustrophobic scenes unravel within its dilapidated walls.

An excavation of tense and toxic family dynamics, Just Like Home uses atmospheric scenes of supernatural horror to unpack the impact of a traumatic event. And Gailey goes even further, observing throughout their terrifying tale that any of us could be haunted—whether by gender ideology, the weight of secrets or the actions of our family members—while bravely refusing to offer clear-cut answers about the nature of good and evil.

An excavation of toxic family dynamics, Sarah Gailey's Just Like Home uses atmospheric scenes of supernatural horror to reveal the terrors that haunt us all.
Mystery & SuspenseMystery

The Kingdoms of Savannah

Review by Linda M. Castellitto

George Dawes Green made a huge splash onto the literary scene with his mid-1990s bestsellers, The Caveman’s Valentine and The Juror. The release of his critically acclaimed third novel, Ravens, came 14 years later. And now, 13 years after that, Green is back with the intriguing and immersive The Kingdoms of Savannah, a darkly mesmerizing mystery that will enthrall readers with its original premise and characters as Green escorts them through the titular city’s glittering society circles, criminal underworld and extensive homeless community, all rife with terrible secrets past and present.

While Savannah, Georgia, has, as one character muses, “all the conviviality and the outrageous beauty and the characters and the sunlight and the aromas,” it also “rests upon a bed of history so vile no novelist could invent it,” as the author writes in a note at the book’s beginning. What Green did invent, though, is the wealthy and powerful Musgroves, a white family whose roots in the city reach back to the 1800s. When Luke, a young man experiencing homelessness, is found stabbed to death in a decrepit building and his friend Stony, a 43-year-old Black woman who works as a contract archaeologist, goes missing, Morgana Musgrove is hired to investigate. (One of her late husband’s many businesses was a detective agency, you see.) The owner of the building where Luke’s body was found is the mobster-esque Archie Guzman, and he’s offering a lot of money for answers as to what happened. But why does Guzman care about Luke and Stony? And why is he insisting Morgana play detective?

Morgana’s granddaughter Jaq, an amateur documentarian, and estranged son Ransom, who’s been living at an encampment under the highway, join her on the case. The trio pingpongs off one another in ways that are both entertaining and poignant, their different life experiences and painful histories affecting how they see both one another and the case. Family secrets bubble up to the surface even as the trio ignores ruffled society-people feathers and you’d-better-back-off threats. Green follows Morgana, Jaq and Ransom on their quest for truth, moving between marvelous mansions and homeless encampments, police stations and dive bars. All the while, ghost-tour carriages rattle by in the background, serving as chilling reminders of tragedy twisted into glib entertainment.

Green’s historical notes at the end of the book offer fascinating details about the real-life people and events that inspired him to write The Kingdoms of Savannah, which is a masterful and multifaceted work: finely crafted mystery, thought-provoking social commentary and an indelible portrait of a complicated city.

The Kingdoms of Savannah is a finely crafted mystery, a thought-provoking social commentary and an indelible portrait of the titular city.
Mystery & SuspenseThrillerHistorical Mystery

Natasha Pulley’s Cold War-set thriller was inspired by secret—and terrifying—Soviet towns

Behind the Book by Natasha Pulley

In The Half Life of Valery K, the titular Soviet scientist is released from a Siberian prison and transported to a town called City 40, which seems to be absolutely suffused with unhealthy levels of radiation. The most frightening thing? As Natasha Pulley reveals, towns like City 40 really did exist.

In the 1960s, across the Soviet Union, there were cities without real names. Instead, they had numbers that corresponded to P.O. boxes in towns miles away: Semipalatinsk 21, Chelyabinsk 40. Sometimes, even more ominously, they had code names like the Installation, the Terminal and the Lake. These cities did not appear on maps, the people who lived there couldn’t leave—many couldn’t even contact relatives on the outside—and they absolutely could not discuss what went on there.

These places were atomgrads: secret cities that hid the Soviet nuclear program.

It sounds like the plot of a Bond novel, but this system was actually an answer to the biggest problem the Soviet Union ever faced: how to keep the Americans from doing to Moscow what had been done to Hiroshima. The Soviet Union had a formidable nuclear arsenal, but the atomgrads made it so that very few people knew where all the parts were, how they fit together—or what the consequences would be if someone tried a hot war instead of a cold one.

 “The truth is so bizarre that it doesn’t sound like it can be right . . .”

I didn’t know about any of this until recently; I just stumbled over it. When the TV show “Chernobyl” came out a couple of years ago, I loved it so much I read Serhii Plokhy’s brilliant Chernobyl: The History of a Nuclear Catastrophe for background. In it, he mentioned something that nearly knocked me off my chair. One of the reasons the scientists at Chernobyl had some idea about what to do when the plant’s nuclear reactor melted down was that this had happened before, at a place called Ozersk. Plokhy didn’t say anything else about it in his book, so I started looking into it.

Ozersk is a code name, derived from the Russian word ozero, which just means “lake.” Its other name is Chelyabinsk 40, meaning City 40. It was—and still is—part of that network of secret atomgrads. In the ’60s, City 40’s speciality was producing weapons-grade plutonium.

Late in 1957, something happened in City 40. We still don’t know exactly what. But we do know that thousands of kilometers of land around City 40 were irradiated. We also know that hundreds of people in a city 90 kilometers away were admitted to the hospital with radiation sickness. If people that far away were that sick, the amount of radiation released must have been enormous.

But unlike Chernobyl, hardly anyone in the West has heard of City 40, even today. In fact, when Soviet scientist Zhores Medvedev broke the news of it to the Western press in the 1970s, nobody believed him. A lot of Western scientists outright rubbished what he said. Nobody could accept that there had been a major nuclear disaster that stayed secret. But it did.

Read our starred review of ‘The Half Life of Valery K’ by Natasha Pulley.

After I read Medvedev’s book about the disaster, and saw the declassified CIA documents he attached to it, I started writing. I started learning Russian and looking at archive footage and poking through the website for Rosatom, Russia’s current nuclear agency, which has plenty of information about City 40. I did a course on nuclear physics so I could actually understand the documents I was finding. The picture that emerged was so strange it could have been from a comic book, and I think that’s partly how it stayed secret. The truth is so bizarre that it doesn’t sound like it can be right: hundreds of thousands of people exposed to radiation and radioactive land that remains dangerous today; widespread health problems even now because of it; and at the heart of it, a facility called Mayak—the Lighthouse—that actually produced the polonium that killed Alexander Litvinenko, a prominent critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin, in 2006.

All this led to The Half Life of Valery K, which is about a scientist sent to work at City 40 in 1963, and what happens when he starts staring too hard at its secrets.

Photo of Natasha Pulley © Jamie Drew.

In the 1960s, the Soviet Union covered up a Chernobyl-level nuclear disaster. Natasha Pulley's new thriller, The Half Life of Valery K, reveals the truth.
Mystery & SuspenseThriller

The House Across the Lake

Review by Lauren Emily Whalen

A Riley Sager novel is a guaranteed wild ride, and the New York Times bestseller’s hotly anticipated sixth book, The House Across the Lake, is no different. Sager is the literary equivalent of a master chef, using a deft hand to configure tasty ingredients—a complex, grieving woman with alcoholism; a missing supermodel with dangerous secrets behind her dazzling smile; and the picturesque lake that brings them together—then adding a generous pinch of pulp and a delicious surprise at the end. The result is an addictive beach read that fans will devour in one sitting and leave feeling thoroughly sated.

Rear Window meets Lake Placid in the story of Casey Fletcher, a character actress with a complicated legacy. Her mother, legendary musical theater performer Lolly Fletcher, who prefers hoofing it on stage to providing emotional support, has shipped her off to the family cottage and ordered Casey to relax and reflect. Casey is also supposed to stay sober, which is all but impossible given her grief over the recent accidental death of her husband, Len, in the lake right next to the cottage. Enter Tom and Katherine Royce, a tech mogul and retired model, respectively, who are staying in the glass house across the lake. A tentative friendship between the women ensues, but soon after, Katherine disappears without a trace. Is Tom responsible? How about hunky handyman Boone? Or do the answers lie in the body of water that claimed the love of Casey’s life?

Sager (Survive the Night, Home Before Dark) balances the novel’s short timeline and limited setting with rich characterization for all, especially Katherine, whom the reader meets as she nearly drowns in the dark, freezing lake, and Casey, whose never-ending supply of snarky one-liners and wisecracks never quite camouflages the deep emotional turmoil that ended her once-successful acting career. The House Across the Lake is a psychological thriller that’s thoroughly personality-driven, following women whose motives, means and opportunities are as murkily fascinating as the titular loch.

Riley Sager’s latest thriller is an addictive beach read that fans will devour in one sitting—and leave feeling thoroughly sated.
Mystery & SuspenseMystery

Local Gone Missing

Review by Lauren Emily Whalen

Nothing ever happens in Ebbing—until one horrific weekend. Local Gone Missing follows a variety of residents in the tiny English seaside town, from an inquisitive cleaning lady with a dark past to vacationers with a secret agenda. It all comes to a head during a chaotic musical festival, one that ends with dual overdoses, a possible murder and a host of spilled secrets. Hopping back and forth before and after the incidents, New York Times bestselling author Fiona Barton spins a tangled web of dirty money, bloodshed and deceit.

For Dee Eastwood, a cleaning woman and wife of a recovering addict, it’s business as usual until one of her clients, the demanding Pauline, asks if Dee has seen Pauline’s husband, Charlie. The retired, formerly wealthy couple are living in a trailer until they have the money to fix up their crumbling estate, and Charlie has been struggling to pay the residential facility fees for his adult daughter, Birdie, who incurred a brain injury after a home invasion decades ago. Meanwhile, Detective Elise King, newly in remission from breast cancer, recalls seeing Charlie pre-disappearance at Ebbing’s first music festival—right before two young people overdosed on drugs of unknown origin. Are the two events related? When Elise finds Charlie’s decomposing body, even more questions arise.

Though Local Gone Missing‘s plot is wonderfully twisty with a surprising and satisfying conclusion, it’s the characters who stand out. Ebbing’s weekenders have their own complex motivations—especially a mild-mannered gay caterer and a middle-age father who are mysteriously connected to each other, and maybe to Charlie as well—but it’s the locals who will really draw readers in. Foremost among them is the compelling and well-drawn Elise, who’s struggling to adjust to life back on the force after returning from medical leave. Her retired librarian neighbor Ronnie, who’s eager to play amateur sleuth and surprisingly adept at sussing out clues, provides much-needed comic relief in this intense story of greed gone terribly wrong. Thanks to Barton’s airtight plotting and impeccable characterization, a minibreak by the sea will never seem relaxing again.

Using airtight plotting and impeccable characterization, Fiona Barton spins a tangled web of dirty money, bloodshed and deceit in Local Gone Missing.
Mystery & SuspenseMystery

Whodunit: August 2022

Feature by Bruce Tierney

To Kill a Troubadour

Everyone’s favorite French police chief Benoît Courrèges—aka, Bruno, Chief of Police—faces a new threat to his usually bucolic Périgord existence: Spanish terrorists protesting the Catalonia separatist movement. As Martin Walker’s To Kill a Troubadour opens, controversy swirls around “Song for Catalonia,” a wildly popular song that, because of its tacit support for the separatists, has recently been banned by the Spanish government. Les Troubadours, the music group that popularized the song, are gearing up for a free concert in Périgord that promises to be the best-attended event of the summer. Meanwhile, Spanish nationalist extremists have been observed crossing the border into France, intent on inflicting mayhem—or worse—on the assembled music lovers who have given voice to the separatist movement. Then a bullet is found in the wreckage of a recently stolen car, a bullet designed for a high-powered sniper rifle that can kill from several kilometers away. Bruno fears snipers will set their crosshairs on the crowd, on the band or on the songwriter, who openly sympathizes with the Catalonia movement, but the real scheme is much, much worse. But do not fear—despite the tenser-than-usual plot, all of Walker’s fan-favorite characters are present and accounted for, as well as all of Bruno’s treasured pastimes: sports competitions, gourmet cooking and, of course, his engaging basset hound, Balzac.

★ The Shadow Lily

Swedish author Johanna Mo returns with The Shadow Lily, the suspense-laden second book in her series featuring police detective Hanna Duncker, who, after years of working in Stockholm’s urban center, has returned to her small island homeland of Öland. Both Hanna and the other islanders have mixed feelings about her return, as her father was convicted of one of the most brutal murders the community has ever seen. In her latest case, Hanna is tasked with locating a missing man and his infant son, knowing that as the hours tick by, the chances of finding them alive grow smaller and smaller. Mo employs alternating perspectives to great effect, using them to deepen the reader’s understanding of the events and the characters involved. One arc covers the final day of a character who is killed off relatively early in the narrative; in the second, we observe the day-to-day police procedural; in the third, Mo reveals the backstory of the victim from the first arc and the decisions that led to his untimely end. But most compelling of all, The Shadow Lily sheds further light on what drove Hanna back home: the visceral need to know the whole story about her father.

Death Doesn’t Forget

Jing-nan, a dumpling stall operator in a Taipei night market, is not your typical food dude. He is a tech-savvy social media influencer, a born marketer—and an inadvertent sleuth. While Jing-nan is cursed with nefarious family members and cronies, Death Doesn’t Forget starts out with some good fortune: Jing-nan’s girlfriend’s mother, Siu-lien, wins half of a sizable lottery, which she must share with her ne’er-do-well boyfriend. But by the very next day, the good fortune has all dried up. The boyfriend has been killed, the winnings are in the wind and Jing-nan is on the hook for finding, if not the murderer, at least the missing money. Complicating matters further is the fact that Jing-nan’s girlfriend, Nancy, wants to get married. Barring that, she wants a proposal that she can consider, so that “the egg timer would be set . . . a countdown to either getting married or breaking up for good.” Siu-lien looks on this union with disfavor, but successfully returning her money would go a long way toward warming her chill toward Jing-nan. Author Ed Lin recounts all this cultural and familial interplay with good humor, peppering the text with Taiwanese bromides both old and new. (My favorite is this gem regarding prison terms: “Sentences handed down were longer than the gaps between Ang Lee films.”) With its great suspense and plot development, Death Doesn’t Forget is good fun all-round.

★ The Murder Book

Mark Billingham’s Detective Inspector Tom Thorne books are consistently excellent, but his 18th entry in the popular series, The Murder Book, raises the bar considerably. In a twist that will thrill longtime fans of the series, arch villain Stuart Nicklin, described as “the most dangerous psychopath [Thorne] has ever put behind bars,” is back for a return engagement. This time, Nicklin is serving as Svengali for Rebecca Driver, a female serial killer who mutilates her victims a la the dictates of the three wise monkeys: see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. For bonus points, she even honors a fourth monkey that is sometimes included in the traditional crew, along with the maxim “Do no evil.” (I will leave the details of Rebecca’s gruesome methodology to your imagination.) Nicklin’s own bad deeds were well chronicled in Thorne’s 12th adventure, The Bones Beneath, and suffice it to say that the intervening years have done nothing to mellow his penchant for brutality. Thorne turns to the ubiquitous British camera surveillance system to bring Rebecca to justice, but as Billingham takes pains to point out, surveillance cameras can be employed with devastating results on either side of the thin blue line. How, exactly? Thorne, and the reader, will soon find out.

This month's cleverest whodunits feature idiosyncratic, complicated gumshoes.
Mystery & SuspenseSuspense

Take No Names

Review by G. Robert Frazier

Daniel Nieh’s Take No Names is a blast from start to finish, a classic crime thriller that shifts into an over-the-top action romp.

Chinese American Victor Li is keeping a low profile in Seattle after being wrongfully accused of killing his father, who secretly worked for a Chinese criminal syndicate (the plot of Nieh’s 2019 debut, Beijing Payback). Drinking buddy Mark Knox recruits Victor to his security tech business for Victor’s computer skills and ability to speak Chinese and Spanish. But it’s not long before Mark enlists Victor in a lucrative side job: breaking into a government storage yard to steal and then sell unclaimed items seized from deported immigrants. It’s on one of these ventures they discover a painite, a rare gem worth a cool $250,000. The pair smuggle the gem to a buyer south of the border, where they are soon embroiled in a scheme by a U.S. military contractor to derail construction of a new Chinese-built airport in Mexico City.

Along the way, the two men form uneasy alliances with Victor’s estranged sister, Jules, and Sun Jianshui, who once worked for the same criminal syndicate as Victor’s father—and was the person who actually killed him. The interactions among all four main characters lead to both humorous and emotionally charged moments as they try to worm their way out of the mess they’ve gotten themselves into. Victor and Mark are particularly likable, a pair of outcasts who have forged a unique and unexpected friendship.

Nieh, who has lived in the United States, China and Mexico, maintains a steady balance of humor, action and thrills, while also making some barbed commentary on American capitalism and Chinese globalization. The twists and turns come often, keeping the intrepid Victor and Mark on their toes as they run for their lives from one chapter to the next. What starts as a Joe R. Lansdale-esque crime thriller morphs halfway into an espionage caper à la Mission Impossible. If it sounds a bit over the top, it is—but that’s what makes Take No Names such an irrepressibly fun read.

Daniel Nieh's Take No Names is a blast from start to finish, a classic crime thriller that shifts into an over-the-top action romp.
Mystery & SuspenseSuspense

The Lies I Tell

Review by Linda M. Castellitto

A decade ago, Kat Roberts was an L.A. Times rookie, part of a team working on a high-profile news story about a predatory high school principal. In hopes of jump-starting her career, Kat decided to conduct her own secret side investigation and wow her new boss with the results. But things went terribly wrong, and to this day, she blames the person who sparked her interest in the side story: a young woman named Meg.

Fifteen years ago, Ron Ashton rendered a teenaged Meg Williams homeless. Her mother fell in love with the successful real estate developer and was grateful when he agreed to help refinance their beloved home. Alas, he lied about the documentation as well as about his intentions; Meg’s mom died not long after, leaving her daughter alone to deal with unresolved grief and sudden housing insecurity. 

But an incandescently angry Meg determinedly clawed her way to solvency one con job at a time, with impeccably thorough research as her secret weapon and terrible men as her favored targets. She’s become very, very good at conning people: As she asserts in the opening pages of Julie Clark’s intricate and engrossing The Lies I Tell, “By the time you’re saying nice to meet you, I’ve already known you for months. Does this worry you? It should.” 

Why Julie Clark refuses to write unreliable female narrators.

In present-day Los Angeles, a Google alert lets Kat know that Meg’s returned to town, right in the middle of Ashton’s run for state senate. A strong researcher herself, Kat has some idea of Meg’s backstory, plus her current false identity as a real estate agent. Kat resolves to use that information to launch a con of her own: She’ll pose as a potential buyer, befriend Meg and twist trust into revenge. Or will she?

It’s an exciting premise, bolstered by intriguingly detailed descriptions of Meg’s various ruses, compelling character growth and lots of slow-building tension via complex manipulation. Clark, author of New York Times bestseller The Last Flight, has yet again crafted a fascinating pair of women who wrestle with trauma, sexism, identity and whether it’s ever okay to do bad things for good reasons.

Julie Clark's intricate and engrossing suspense novel is the story of a con artist, a reporter and whether it's okay to do bad things for good reasons.
Mystery & SuspenseThriller

Little Nothings

Review by Carole V. Bell

In Julie Mayhew’s Greek island-set thriller, Little Nothings, little cuts do lasting damage and friendships are as intense and heartbreaking as romantic relationships.

Thanks to her friendless childhood and dysfunctional family, Liv Travers never felt like she belonged. Even getting married to her husband, Pete, and giving birth to a daughter, Ivy, didn’t fundamentally change how she felt. But bonding with Beth and Binnie at a singalong music class for mothers and babies radically shifted her perspective.

So when an interloper comes along and rocks their happy triad, it’s intolerable. The new girl, Ange, is shinier and bossier than Liv’s other friends. Soon she has them all in her thrall, and the vibe shifts from supportive and homey to acquisitive and competitive, like a suburban London version of “Keeping Up with the Kardishians.” Regular group outings now take place at fashionable restaurants with bills totalling hundreds of pounds a pop. Every part of the group’s lifestyle gets an upgrade, and everyone is expected to conform. It’s hard to keep up financially, and even worse, Ange seems to want to run Liv off. Liv is excluded from group events with flimsy excuses, and no one else notices the manipulation. All the “little nothings,” the cuts and insults delivered so casually, add up, and the hostilities increase during an expensive group vacation to the Greek island Corfu. How far will Liv go to protect her found family, and what will she risk?

Rather than follow a chronological timeline, Mayhew uses flashbacks to reveal what pushed Liv and her friends to the brink. It’s an effective, psychologically driven structure, with each flashback being triggered thematically by an event in the present. As the full picture emerges, it’s easy to wonder if any friendship is worth all that drama, especially as neither Beth nor Binnie really seems to have Liv’s back. But to Liv, these women aren’t just friends, they’re soulmates; Mayhew even likens the intimacy of these female friendships to marriage. In a way that’s reminiscent of both Nikki May’s thriller Wahala and the novels of Patricia Highsmith, the intense relationships are vital to the women’s sense of their own identities. Vowing to not be that lonely girl again, Liv in particular hangs on with the fervor of a person in a rocky marriage warding off divorce.

Anchored by a deliciously layered and desperately unreliable narrator, Little Nothings enriches the familiar setup of an intruder shaking up a happy idyll with a compelling, creative structure and distinctive voice. It’s obvious that what Liv needs are better friends and a truckload of therapy, but singular obsessions make for seductive and fun reading, even if the depth of Liv’s interiority makes the other characters look thin and shabby by comparison. A good choice for fans of relationship-driven stories with a sinister edge, Little Nothings hits the same sweet spot as the works of Lucy Foley and Liane Moriarty.

With her Greek-island set thriller, Little Nothings, Julie Mayhew hits the same seductive sweet spot as writers like Lucy Foley and Liane Moriarty.
Mystery & SuspenseMystery

Miss Aldridge Regrets

Review by Linda M. Castellitto

When something seems too good to be true, it probably is. In her U.S. debut, Miss Aldridge Regrets, British author Louise Hare illustrates that idea with deliciously suspenseful, Agatha Christie-esque results. 

The year is 1936, the place is Soho, London, and the star of the show is 26-year-old Lena Aldridge. She has a regular gig at the Canary Club, owned by sleazy criminal Tommy Scarsdale. When she’s not singing, she goes on dates with her married lover and tries not to think about how much she misses her late father, Alfie.

Every day, Lena wonders: Will her big break ever come? The future’s looking bleak, but then a stranger named Charles Bacon appears with an astonishing proposal. His employer, an old friend of Alfie’s, is offering Lena a role in his Broadway play, and he’ll pay for first-class passage to New York City aboard RMS Queen Mary. Lena is thrilled and trepidatious, but then her boyfriend dumps her. And then Tommy’s murdered. After deciding that fate is urging her to exit stage right, Lena sets sail. 

Readers will be enchanted by the period charm of Hare’s ocean liner setting and will swoon as Lena gets to know Will, a Black musician. Will notices right away that Lena is also Black, even though she’s been successfully passing as white for years. Lena knows that being Black will be even more of an issue in America than it was in England, a big change she’s not sure she’s ready for.

She’s also not ready for what happens on the Queen Mary: Someone murders one of the Abernathys, a wealthy family that Charles insisted Lena spend time schmoozing. As the ship glides across the Atlantic, its posh sheen gradually dulls in the wake of destructive secrets and even more murders. Everyone’s a suspect, and the red herrings pile up as an alarmed Lena thinks, “I felt as though I were trapped inside my own detective novel.” Readers will enjoy playing sleuth, racing to figure out who did it, how and why, even as they ponder the ultimate question: Will Lena survive the trip to New York unscathed?

Miss Aldridge Regrets' 1930s ocean liner setting will enchant mystery readers even as author Louise Hare seeds disquiet and red herrings amid all the glam.
Mystery & SuspenseMysteryCozy Mystery

Death by Bubble Tea

Review by Jamie Orsini

Jennifer J. Chow kicks off a new culinary cozy series with Death by Bubble Tea, a delicious mystery that centers on a family-run food stall.

After Yale Yee loses her job at the local bookstore, her father talks her into running a food stall for the family’s dim sum restaurant at the inaugural Eastwood Village Night Market. Yale hasn’t worked for Wing Fat in years, not since her mother’s untimely death. Everything about the restaurant reminds Yale of the loss of her mom, but she still agrees to help out, even though it means working with her cousin Celine, whom she hasn’t seen in 20 years.

The women are polar opposites: Celine likes to flaunt her wealth and is a tech-obsessed foodie Instagrammer, and Yale, who doesn’t even own a cellphone, prefers to learn about the world through books. But Yale’s tasty drinks and Celine’s marketing know-how help their food stall, Canai & Chai, find success. Then one night, Yale literally stumbles over a body on her way home from the market. Police believe the victim, local foodie Jordan Chang, was poisoned, possibly by something from Canai & Chai. Yale and Celine are forced to work together again, this time to clear their names in a murder investigation that could also ruin Ba’s business.

Set in west Los Angeles, Death by Bubble Tea takes readers to real locations like the historic Gladstones restaurant and the Lake Shrine Meditation Gardens. Chow’s choice to set the mystery in a night market is a stroke of genius. Not only are there dozens of vendors, guests, witnesses and potential suspects, but the impermanence of the pop-up market makes it even more difficult for Yale, Celine and the police to solve the crime. Also, be warned: Chow’s descriptions of the food vendors’ offerings may make your mouth water. Luckily for readers, she includes a few recipes at the end of the book.

Death by Bubble Tea is a fun, fast-paced mystery, but the heart of the story lies in Yale and Celine’s deepening relationship. Though they grew up in different circumstances on opposite sides of the world, the women learn to trust and rely on each other, finding out what it’s like to have not just a cousin but also a friend.

Death by Bubble Tea is a heartfelt and delicious mystery that, in a brilliant choice by author Jennifer J. Chow, centers on a family-run food stall.
Mystery & SuspenseMystery

The Drowning Sea

Review by Elyse Discher

The Drowning Sea is an atmospheric procedural starring a detective at a crossroads in her life.

Retired Long Island homicide detective Maggie D’arcy is spending the summer in West Cork, Ireland, with her Irish boyfriend, his son and her teenage daughter. They vacation in the picturesque village of Ross Head, but the idyllic trip is cut short when human remains wash up on the shore near their cottage. The body is that of Polish immigrant Lukas Adamik, whose disappearance months earlier led many in Ross Head to assume that he had returned to Poland. But when the police determine that the body was only recently deceased and rule out an accident or suicide, the mystery of where Lukas has been—and what happened to him—consumes the small community.

In addition to that, Maggie’s hostess, Lissa Crawford, asks her to look into the disappearance of her childhood governess, Dorothea. The Crawfords were once the owners of the local manor, Rosscliffe House, which Lissa sold after her family was beset by unfortunate circumstances. Chief among them was her father’s tragic suicide on the cliffs, after which Dorothea vanished. As Maggie investigates what happened to Dorothea, she realizes her case may be linked to the murder of Lukas.

The previous two Maggie d’Arcy mysteries have been set in both Ireland and Long Island, but The Drowning Sea completely immerses readers in Ross Head. Author Sarah Stewart Taylor creates a rich and slightly gothic atmosphere, with the ocean beating against the treacherous, wind-swept cliffs as Rosscliffe House looms over it all. Despite this subtle shift in tone, The Drowning Sea continues the series’ exploration of the inner life of its main character: Maggie becomes increasingly obsessed with the case, her dogged detective work serving as a distraction from the reasons for her retirement and the question of whether to uproot her and her daughter’s lives by permanently moving to Ireland.

The Drowning Sea‘s gorgeous backdrop and stalwart sleuth will satisfy and impress mystery readers, particularly fans of traditional whodunits.

The Drowning Sea's gorgeous setting and stalwart sleuth will satisfy and impress mystery readers, particularly fans of traditional whodunits.

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