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