Our Reviews

At firstCLUE, we only review books we love, or at least like a whole lot—and the reviews appear months in advance of publication.

Newsletter Schedule

firstCLUE: New reviews every Thursday.
Monthly: Reviews of books publishing that month.

Our Database

Search our 400+ reviews by author, title and more.

Recent Reviews

For our latest reviews subscribe to the firstCLUE Newsletter
by Brian Kenney

It’s 1954, and most people in Great Britain seem happy to put the second world war behind them. Nora Breen, previously a nun and …

by Henrietta Thornton

It’s not easy being New Yorker Hazel Cho. Her parents, who are from Korea, find her private-investigation business brings shame on her family. Why …

by Willy Williams

It’s loathing at first sight when trained opera singer Kit (stage name Katerina) Margolis meets her understudy, the sexually alluring Yolanda Archambeau, on the …

by Jeff Ayers

Coben (Think Twice) brings back former Detective Sami Kierce from Fool Me Once (the book and the NetFlix series) as his past crashes into …

by Brian Kenney

Kudos to Jurczyk (The Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, That Night in the Library) for providing a closed circle mystery that avoids …

by Henrietta Thornton

On the surface this is a he-said, she-said crime tale, but there’s much more going on in this darker departure from Simon’s previous work. …