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“What do you do when the one true thing in your life turns out to be a lie?” Lee Cuddy, the main character in Augustus Rose’s debut novel, spends the book deciding whom to trust. At 17, she steals for friends, but when the friends who’ve been benefiting from her thievery betray her, she’s sent to a juvenile detention center for a crime she ironically didn’t commit. She escapes—into the hands of a nefarious Philadelphia network of Marcel Duchamp fans, The Société Anonyme. She trusts them until she links the glassy-eyed, obliging kids from the mental ward of her detention center to Société Anoyme’s raves. To escape the Société requires all her thieving skills, navigating the Subnet (Rose’s conception of a network akin to Silk Road or 4Chan), urban exploration and her own instinct. Lee becomes an artist herself, as defined by Duchamp: “a mediumistic being who, from the labyrinth beyond time and space, seeks his own way out to a clearing.” A true heroine, Lee forges her own path and finds her own truth.

The story is structured like the Duchamp piece at its center, the elusive “Large Glass.” Like the nine bachelors in the artwork, The Readymade Thief is composed of nine books, with multiple chapters each. Steadily linear in chronology, it manages to digress into quantum and philosophical exploration without losing pace. (Keep up with the discussion using the resources cited at the end.) While much of the action takes place in dark, dirty subterranean spaces, the tone is expansive; Lee’s voice soars, a testament to her male creator.

The Readymade Thief features ingenious, culture-altering teens resembling another recent debut novel, Rules for Werewolves by Kirk Lynn. Rose’s work entertains as well as invites us to think and imagine, as though we’re part of the conceit.

The Readymade Thief features ingenious, culture-altering teens resembling another recent debut novel, Rules for Werewolves by Kirk Lynn. Rose’s work entertains as well as invites us to think and imagine, as though we’re part of the conceit.

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When Stella Krakus, curator at a renowned Manhattan art museum, finds an unusual map among the possessions of a missing colleague, the strangest week of her life turns into an insatiable quest to discover the map’s origin. Through the smart, dazzling prose of a witty narrator, accomplished poet Lucy Ives creates a mysterious historical adventure sure to delight and inspire.

Thirty-something Stella is enduring almost more than she can handle. Complete with a fading workplace affair, annoying appearances by her almost-ex-husband, lunch with her glamorous and successful mother and a museum sponsor who wants to take over the world’s water supply, her week could not be more bizarre—until her coworker Paul is pronounced missing. As Stella begins to solve the mystery behind the map of a historical utopia, she is pulled into the museum’s origins and realizes there was much more to Paul and his work than she knew, with the potential to alter her life and her career as she knows it.

Impossible Views of the World is an original debut ringing with smart prose, engaging humor and cultivated taste. Similar to the brilliance on display in Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch, Ives’ genius is apparent in the intricate way she weaves ironic confession, romantic comedy and artful treatise with explorations into the historic art world. The novel is best read thoughtfully to fully capture the details of Stella’s academic discoveries and the playful writing style incorporated into the banter between the lively characters. Readers are invited into Stella’s mind as she navigates the plethora of emotions that come with an early-30s crisis. Full of intelligence and imagination, this relatable literary mystery will charm even the most apprentice art devotee.

When Stella Krakus, curator at a renowned Manhattan art museum, finds an unusual map among the possessions of a missing colleague, the strangest week of her life turns into an insatiable quest to discover the map’s origin. Through the smart, dazzling prose of a witty narrator, accomplished poet Lucy Ives creates a mysterious historical adventure sure to delight and inspire.

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Combining elements of Bill Clegg’s Did You Ever Have a Family with Dennis Lehane’s contemporary classic Mystic River, Danya Kukafka’s debut novel is an intricate, seductive murder mystery, in which a single awful crime exposes conflicts and traumas in an entire community.

“When they told him Lucinda Hayes was dead,” Girl in Snow begins, “Cameron thought of her shoulder blades and how they framed her naked spine, like a pair of static lungs.” Thus, Kukafka plunges us into the story: Lucinda is dead, though it turns out this high school beauty is not quite the angel everyone remembers her to be. Then there’s Cameron, the creepy kid next door, who peeked though Lucinda’s windows (and worse), making him a likely suspect in the crime. Told largely over the course of a few winter days following Lucinda’s murder, Girl in Snow unfolds through deftly alternating chapters, through the eyes of many different characters. There’s Jade, an angry misfit with an abusive mother who disliked Lucinda. And Russ, a police officer with secrets. And Lee, another cop and Cameron’s absentee father, accused of his own violent crime.

Digging deeply into each of these lives paints a vivid, compelling canvas. Kukafka makes it seem eminently plausible for several of these characters to have killed Lucinda. “Everyone’s looking for the truth,” Jade thinks at one point. “I’m so afraid I’ll have to pry open its grave.”

Girl in Snow may not quite be perfect. Some sections are a tad breathlessly overwritten, and one (or two) of the many secrets that spill out may stretch the bounds of credulity for some readers. But overall, Girl in Snow is not just an impressive debut but one of the best literary mysteries to come along in some time.

Combining elements of Bill Clegg’s Did You Ever Have a Family with Dennis Lehane’s contemporary classic Mystic River, Danya Kukafka’s debut novel is an intricate, seductive murder mystery, in which a single awful crime exposes conflicts and traumas in an entire community.

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Australian author Sarah Schmidt plunges readers into one of America’s most notorious true crime stories with her fiction debut, See What I Have Done. In August 1892, Andrew and Abby Borden were found bludgeoned to death by axe in their home in Fall River, Massachusetts. Who killed the Bordens, and why? Evidence pointed to Andrew’s adult daughter, Lizzie, but she was acquitted. Popular myth never let her quite off the hook (you’ve heard that eerie nursery rhyme). But was she really guilty?

See What I Have Done is interested in this question, but perhaps not as much as some readers might be. Schmidt eschews the “whodunit” format to focus on the warped relationships and deep resentments that hover over the house in Fall River. Told in the voices of Lizzie; her older sister, Emma; the family maid, Bridget; and a mysterious stranger named Benjamin, who comes to town with LIzzie’s sinister Uncle John, the novel turns that August afternoon around and around, examining it in microscopic detail from these four separate angles like a jeweler making an appraisal of a singularly dark gem. Lizzie and Emma have a codependent yet contentious relationship, and neither can stand their stepmother. Bridget can’t get over Mrs. Borden’s refusal to let her go home to Ireland. And Uncle John is holding a grudge against his brother, Andrew.

Schmidt sketches the motivations of her characters with subtle strokes, allowing readers to fill in some notable blanks—what is Uncle John’s deal, anyway?—but she leaves little to the imagination when it comes to their physical bodies. The damage done to the Borden parents is described with visceral relish; the scents of vomit, sweat and blood are almost palpable. Like her fellow Australian Hannah Kent, whose debut novel, Burial Rites, also centered on a real-life 19th-century crime, Schmidt conjures the explosive mix of claustrophobia and frustration that life in a small community with a rigid social structure can engender. See What I Have Done is a chilling summer read.

Australian author Sarah Schmidt plunges readers into one of America’s most notorious true crime stories with her fiction debut, See What I Have Done.

Best friends Izzie, Graham, Viv and Harry know their idyllic California town harbors secrets—specifically the cover-up of a teen girl’s murder five years ago—so they start a secret society intent on carrying out revenge and justice. Dubbing themselves the Order of the IV, the group tests the waters with small pranks until their antics bring the unwanted attention of the popular clique. But as the Order grows and the pranks dangerously intensify, the friends must navigate their love for one another amid the deep hatred they feel for their targets of revenge.

Alexandra Sirowy uses creepy imagery to peel back the layers of a quaint, coastal town to reveal its seedy core and to bring this twisty ride to its inevitable yet shocking conclusion. Narrated through Izzie’s haunting first-person point of view, the original Order struggles to remain true to themselves and the tight bonds they’ve formed, even as their plan to topple corrupt adults goes horribly wrong.

 

Kimberly Giarratano is the author of Grunge Gods and Graveyards, a young adult paranormal mystery.

This article was originally published in the August 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Best friends Izzie, Graham, Viv and Harry know their idyllic California town harbors secrets—specifically the cover-up of a teen girl’s murder five years ago—so they start a secret society intent on carrying out revenge and justice.

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We have an understandable human fascination with stories of underground societies. Homeless and often forgotten people have done what seems incredible and unnatural to humankind—a species that has always thrived in the open air and on high ground. Here are the people who choose to go underground; and much has been written about the individuals who shelter in the tunnels and abandoned human byways that exist under earth’s cities.

In her outstanding new Ruth Galloway novel, The Chalk Pit, author Elly Griffiths as usual has drawn on her extensive knowledge of archaeology and history, enticing readers beneath the streets of Norwich, England, on a dark journey that will yield some strange discoveries. Archaeologist and professor Ruth travels below ground to a series of abandoned thoroughfares to investigate the age and provenance of some human remains just discovered in an area where a local architect hopes to build a very modern enclave of shops and restaurants.

At the same time, DCI Harry Nelson is looking into the mysterious disappearance of a homeless woman named Babs, and he hears a rumor that she may have gone underground. Then, two homeless men who knew her are found brutally murdered. Soon Ruth, Nelson and his detective team are pursuing separate investigations in the eerie, claustrophobic yet fascinating caverns beneath the streets where they uncover a trove of unsuspected life and activity.

Readers new to Griffith’s stellar mystery series will soon become familiar with Ruth and Nelson and their singular relationship, as well as with the unconventional, extended family of friends and acquaintances who’ve been with the series since its outset, from the meticulous Judy and Druid-inspired Cathbad to Clough and his love, Cassandra.

Griffiths’ understated, dry humor invests her characters with a special humanity that’s a cut above the ordinary. Behind each character’s façade, their thoughts can be very funny indeed—mostly not too far off from emotions we’ve felt ourselves. Conversely, when the author wants to move you to tears, she can also do that very well indeed.

The novel wraps with a zinger of a final sentence (containing a suspicion that a few skeptical readers may have had earlier in the story), and it's one that guarantees the allure of the next Ruth Galloway book that is sure to follow.

In her outstanding new Ruth Galloway novel, The Chalk Pit, author Elly Griffiths as usual has drawn on her extensive knowledge of archaeology and history, enticing readers beneath the streets of Norwich, England, on a dark journey that will yield some strange discoveries. Archaeologist and professor Ruth travels below ground to a series of abandoned thoroughfares to investigate the age and provenance of some human remains just discovered in an area where a local architect hopes to build a very modern enclave of shops and restaurants.
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A worker finds tiny bones, the bones of an infant long buried, when excavating an East London backyard for a development project. Thus begins Fiona Barton’s second psychological thriller. After the success of Barton’s bestselling and finely wrought first book, The Widow, readers have high expectations for The Child, a story that once again features Kate Waters, a thorough and “old school” reporter who has a winsome way with people. In this novel Kate’s personality and background are more developed, though the mystery remains front and center.

Spurred by a small article mentioning the gruesome discovery of the baby’s bones, Waters decides to investigate. She wants to know who buried the baby and what kind of sordid, desperate circumstances would prompt such an action. Three other key female characters also see the article and Water’s subsequent reports detailing her investigation.

One of these women, Angela, gave birth to a child in 1970 who was kidnapped from her hospital room while Angela showered. The baby was never found, and Angela is convinced the recently unearthed child is her baby girl. She tells the police and Waters what she believes. While waiting for ultimate confirmation, the story undulates and ripples with frisson. Barton again uses multiple points of view shifting between Waters, Angela and two other women—a mother and daughter—to create a continuous story line.

The mother and daughter have a solid connection to East London, but seemingly not to Angela or the baby. With Water’s skillful, empathetic questioning, she begins to recreate the events of long ago, right down to a 1980s disco-themed reunion of the residents of the block where the worker found the remains. Barton’s stories ring with authenticity as she, like Waters, has 30 years of experience in journalism. Barton fulfills all expectations in this installment: The Child resoundly delivers.

A worker finds tiny bones, the bones of an infant long buried, when excavating an East London backyard for a development project. Thus begins Fiona Barton’s second psychological thriller.

Set in early 1940s New England, Emily Bain Murphy’s debut novel, The Disappearances, follows 16-year-old Aila Quinn and her younger brother, Miles. The two are struggling after the recent death of their mother, Juliet, and their father’s departure to fight in World War II. Left alone, they must travel to their mother’s mysterious hometown of Sterling, Connecticut, to stay with family friends.

When they arrive, Aila discovers the townspeople have been suffering “Disappearances” every seven years. These fantastical losses include the ability to smell, to see the stars and to see their own reflections. Aila and Miles don’t understand why everyone blames their mother until Aila begins to unravel Juliet’s mysterious past. Why was she able to break free of the curse? Why did Juliet leave notes in a book of William Shakespeare’s works?

Bain deftly weaves these threads together as Aila discovers not only her mother’s secrets but also her own identity. By setting the novel in a time before the internet, Bain thoroughly conveys the sense of strange isolation of Sterling’s residents and their troubles. In the end, The Disappearances is a delicious mix of mystery, fantasy and romance.

 

Jennifer Bruer Kitchel is the librarian for a Pre-K through 8th level Catholic school.

This article was originally published in the July 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Set in early 1940s New England, Emily Bain Murphy’s debut novel, The Disappearances, follows 16-year-old Aila Quinn and her younger brother, Miles. The two are struggling after the recent death of their mother, Juliet, and their father’s departure to fight in World War II. Left alone, they must travel to their mother’s mysterious hometown of Sterling, Connecticut, to stay with family friends.

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It’s Halloween night, and the K-Bar in Bolton, Montana, is well into its annual costume party. The bar is full of Elvis impersonators competing for top dress-up honors. Drinking with her friends among other costumed partygoers and over-imbibers is local college student Grace Adams, dressed up as a prom queen. She gets spooked enough by someone she has tagged as a stalker that she leaves the party to escape the real or imagined threat.

At the same time as hips are swiveling in the K-Bar, the nearby home of well-known local residents Peter and Hannah Granger is burning to the ground, leaving the remains of two unidentified bodies in the rubble as well as a heap of smoldering questions.

Enter Detective Macy Greeley, who arrives from neighboring Helena to investigate the fire and determine whether it was accident or arson. That it was an intentional act soon becomes clear, and Macy sets out to dissect the lives and relationships of the Grangers—Hannah, an artist and teacher at the local college, and Peter, a nationally popular author who teaches a popular writing workshop.

Macy must determine the identity of one of the bodies and unearth a motive behind the murder of Peter Granger, the second victim. As more becomes known about the coterie of female students who seemed to be Granger groupies, readers may begin to share Macy’s suspicions that a lot more than manuscript critique was going on in Peter Granger’s creative writing workshop. It turns out Grace was once very close to the Grangers—taking painting classes from Hannah and a spot in Peter's coveted workshop—until they had a mysterious falling out.

The detective casts a wide net to include the volatile, often troubled young women who formed the members of the writing workshop; Jessica, a despondent art department associate with mixed motives: the Grangers’ personal assistant, Cornelia; a disaffected boyfriend or two; and the malignant stalker, Jordan.

Karin Salvalaggio’s Silent Rain builds on themes in her earlier Bone Dust White (2014). Those who haven’t read the first book may find that Silent Rain involves some heavy sledding. Both Grace and Macy were front and center there, and that past influences the present in the new entry. Unfortunately it’s often referred to with roundabout, sometimes muddy allusions. The goal may be to preserve the suspense in Silent Rain, but the result for the reader is often confusion. This book is all arms and legs—presenting too many questions that dangle without resolution. This can obscure the author’s very real talent for intriguing police procedurals, a solid core that will hopefully emerge more strongly in future novels.

It’s Halloween night, and the K-Bar in Bolton, Montana, is well into its annual costume party. The bar is full of Elvis impersonators competing for top dress-up honors. Drinking with her friends among other costumed partygoers and over-imbibers is local college student Grace Adams, dressed up as a prom queen. She gets spooked enough by someone she has tagged as a stalker that she leaves the party to escape the real or imagined threat.

Scott Turow takes a bold step with his latest novel, Testimony, by moving the typical legal suspense his fans have become accustomed to out of the courtroom, as well as out of the country altogether. As the book opens, attorney Bill ten Boom’s midlife crisis is already fully underway: he’s left his job, his marriage and his home. He wants nothing more than to take a year off to “follow the sun around the world,” and “spend the evening reading everything I’ve always meant to.”

But despite his disillusionment with his former life, letting go of his quest for justice isn’t so easy. He is quickly talked into a new job as a prosecutor for the International Criminal Court in The Hague, a war crimes tribunal. His first case involves the disappearance of some 400 refugees during the Bosnian war, who are presumed to have been buried alive. The only surviving witness, Ferko Rincic, claims an armed force was behind the atrocity, and it’s up to ten Boom to bring the culprits to justice. In a classic fish-out-of-water scenario, ten Boom must negotiate the political and judicial legalities in a global arena while also contending with a lack of cooperation from all fronts. His investigation takes him from the streets of Bosnia to the secret halls of the U.S. government itself. No one is forthcoming, the lies are palpable, and his own safety is ultimately placed into jeopardy.

While it’s not necessary to have read any of Turow’s previous novels, Testimony is a natural progression in Bill ten Boom’s story and one that adds a deep complexity to his character. Rather than present just another case in the same old setting, Turow reinvents his protagonist by taking him out of his element. At the same time, Turow reinvents himself and reasserts his own mastery of the genre.

Scott Turow takes a bold step with his latest novel, Testimony, by moving the typical legal suspense his fans have become accustomed to out of the courtroom, as well as out of the country altogether. As the book opens, attorney Bill ten Boom’s midlife crisis is already fully underway: he’s left his job, his marriage and his home. He wants nothing more than to take a year off to “follow the sun around the world,” and “spend the evening reading everything I’ve always meant to.”

Arriving just in time for summer, Rosecrans Baldwin’s new novel, The Last Kid Left, is set in a New England beach town, where the bucolic, sea-swept terrain is smote by a double murder allegedly committed by a teenager, whose girlfriend’s foray into digital, private pornography ends up going viral. Indeed, readers best beware that Baldwin’s dark and brooding narrative is by no means a light and breezy “beach read,” and on the contrary, requires an appreciation for a murder mystery/love story in which the plot is inhabited solely by a cast of antiheroes, both male and female, who are not always easy to love.

Inspired by a true 1930s crime in New England and imbued with vestiges of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter—one of Baldwin’s favorite works—The Last Kid Left begins when a car, driven by 19-year-old Nick Toussaint Jr., crashes into a kitschy sculpture of a cowgirl, prompting police to discover the teen has two bodies in the trunk: a prominent town doctor and his wife. Nick is charged with the murders, thrusting his already fragile 16-year-old girlfriend, Emily Portis, into a media maelstrom fueled by a hungry pack of journalists, one of whom realizes her reluctant return to her hometown of Claymore is entirely serendipitous. Meanwhile, a recently retired veteran police officer, the beleaguered recovering alcoholic Martin, finds himself drawn to the case at precisely the moment his toxic second marriage implodes. As Baldwin writes: “The clock reads four. In less than twenty-four hours the department will throw him a retirement party. Going by previous nights out, everyone will get drunk, sing his praises, wake up the next morning, and hop in a radio car and resume routine. Everyone except him.”

When Martin meets Nick’s mother, Suzanne, a fellow alcoholic who has not yet hopped aboard the recovery wagon, their shared obsession with proving the troubled teen’s innocence sparks a relationship that proves redemptive for both of them.

Without spoiling the ending of this finely wrought thriller, Baldwin’s novel steers clear of tidy endings, remaining faithful to delivering a story that ebbs and flows with the messiness of real life.

Arriving just in time for summer, Rosecrans Baldwin’s new novel, The Last Kid Left, is set in a New England beach town, where the bucolic, sea-swept terrain is smote by a double murder allegedly committed by a teenager, whose girlfriend’s foray into digital, private pornography ends up going viral. Indeed, readers best beware that Baldwin’s dark and brooding narrative is by no means a light and breezy “beach read,” and on the contrary, requires an appreciation for a murder mystery/love story in which the plot is inhabited solely by a cast of antiheroes, both male and female, who are not always easy to love.

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“All this has happened before and will happen again,” President Roslyn said in “Battlestar Galactica,” and this sentiment informs Gian Sardar’s strange, beautifully written thriller. Abby Walters, a Los Angeles estate jeweler, is being tormented by nightmares—one nightmare in particular—that have returned after 14 years. They are so vivid and terrifying that she feels the need to get to the bottom of them, once and for all.

Abby believes her dreams have something to do with her grandmother’s ring, and something to do with what happened to her grandmother’s best friend, a woman named Claire Ballantine. Claire disappeared a few years after World War II, and her husband, William, killed himself shortly thereafter. Abby’s high school reunion is in the offing anyway, so she leaves her recalcitrant scriptwriter boyfriend behind and returns to her childhood home in Minnesota. She arrives just in time to learn there’s a serial rapist on the loose, and her former high school crush is one of the detectives trying to hunt him down.

Sardar titles Abby’s chapters “Now” and alternates them with “Then” chapters, which center on the unhappy Ballantines and Eva, the girl whom the wealthy and guilty William has turned to for solace. Eva is poor, from a Minnesota nowheresville that she longs to put behind her for several reasons. William may be her ticket out, but she truly loves him. Cleverly, subtly, even insidiously, Sardar shows how Abby’s life parallels the lives of the Ballantines and the hapless Eva. What happened “then” has much to do with the nightmares Abby’s having “now”; the author seems to suggest that some catastrophes can be impressed upon the genes as indelibly as they can on the mind and the memory of them passed on. No, Abby is not a secret descendant of Eva or the Ballantines, but she is a descendant of her grandmother. Readers won’t be surprised to learn that Sardar co-wrote a memoir called Psychic Junkie.

You Were Here will make you wonder about the nature of reality even as it gives you goosebumps.

“All this has happened before and will happen again,” President Roslyn said in “Battlestar Galactica,” and this sentiment informs Gian Sardar’s strange, beautifully written thriller. Abby Walters, a Los Angeles estate jeweler, is being tormented by nightmares—one nightmare in particular—that have returned after 14 years. They are so vivid and terrifying that she feels the need to get to the bottom of them, once and for all.

If John Hughes turned The Breakfast Club into a murder mystery, it would be this delicious page-turner. Five teens enter detention, but only four come out. Simon, who runs a gossip app, dies from a suspiciously timed allergic reaction. He has made a lot of enemies in his San Diego suburb, but none with more motive than these four: Bronwyn, the straight-A good girl; Cooper, the unassuming baseball star; Nate, the drug-dealing slacker; and Addy, the enviable pretty girl. At first glance, they seem like high school clichés, but each is hiding a life-altering secret they’d do anything to protect. Either they’re all innocent, or one of them is lying, and it’s up to readers to find out.

Told in four alternating points of view, One of Us Is Lying is more than just a feisty whodunit—it’s an insightful look at high school life. Nothing drags in this fast-paced story, so give it to even the most reluctant reader and dare them not to devour it in one sitting.

 

Kimberly Giarratano is the author of Grunge Gods and Graveyards, a young adult paranormal mystery.

This article was originally published in the June 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

If John Hughes turned The Breakfast Club into a murder mystery, it would be this delicious page-turner.

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