She ain’t lying! All the moms do hate her. Because Florence Grimes is quite the unrepentant good-time girl who gets all the side-eye from the moms and smirks from the dads. She has a collection of lovers that’s like a deck of cards. Her get-ups are designed to provoke, at the very least. And her last, and only, job—years ago—was in a girl band that ended in humiliation. The one ray of light is her ten-year-old son, Dylan, who is a radical environmentalist and attends a fancy London all-boys school. But when Alfie Risby, Dylan’s bully and heir to a frozen-food empire, suddenly disappears during a class trip, and Dylan is the prime suspect, Flo starts to wake up and realizes that she is the only one that can save Dylan. Rich in satire, hugely funny, with a running wink-wink to the reader, this novel is pure comedic gold.
Debut
A deep investigation into the lives of two women: a mistress and her maid. Maju is one of scores of the “white army,” maids and nannies in São Paulo; she cares for young Cora, whose parents pay the child little attention. Fernanda, Cora’s mother and a successful TV executive, is uniquely self-involved; even when Maju and Cora disappear one day, Fernanda can’t stop obsessing over an affair she’s having long enough to focus on her own daughter’s abduction. Dad, meanwhile, has pretty much checked out. But once Fernanda does realize her daughter is gone, her whole world begins to cave in. Maju and Cora, meanwhile, have boarded a bus for a multi-day trip that Maju barely plans—they have limited food and money—and that begins to unravel after the first day. Each woman is confronted by a harrowing series of events that forces them to confront maternal guilt, poverty, and society’s expectations.
Get ready to root for two women, strangers to each other, in this fast moving thriller. Madison, WI waitress Jasmine has readers on a knife edge as she sneaks out of her so-called boyfriend’s trailer in the middle of the night to escape his belittling and violence. Stephanie, news director at a TV station in Madison, has things easier, but is lonely. When she goes to San Diego for a conference she doesn’t return to work. Instead she texts her neighbor that she’s met a great man and tells her job she needs unexpected time off…go, girl! But the trip isn’t as it seems. When the two women’s paths cross each other and that of an odious man, things take very unexpected and thrilling turns, right up to an exciting ending twist. There could be less telling and more showing here, but readers will relish following Jasmine and Stephanie as they take the roads less traveled in this absorbing, tightly plotted debut.
Dead money is slang for wealth that’s held up by a clause in a will, and after Elon Musk-type Trevor Canon is found dead in his San Francisco tech-bro office, investigator Mackenzie Clyde finds that he recently had just such an amendment inserted into his will. A lawyer who now works as a sort of fixer at a venture capital firm, Mackenzie isn’t the most likely candidate to help the FBI with their case, but she’s ambitious and jumps at the chance when her boss wants to know what happened. Investigating Trevor’s associates is much more complicated than it should be. She’s also subjected to more exposed ankles in mens suits than she’d like, not to mention corporate babble like one associate’s drive to “leverage the leader that lays dormant within clients…to manifest a corporate identity in ways they’ve never crystallized” (snort). The FBI agent she works with, a rich kid who bucks the stereotypes of his upbringing, is having none of it, and together the duo relentlessly digs to the center of a technical and political tangle. Get ready for some startling revelations along the way. Lawyer and debut author Kerr was one of the first employees at Airbnb, and his absorption of the BS is our gain.
As the third son of a modestly landed family, James Willoughby has been told from an early age that he must earn a living befitting his station. Being of “a diminutive stature,” James decides the military is not for him. Nor is the Church of England an appealing option. Despite his family’s opposition, the young man abandons his clerical studies at Oxford and heads north to Edinburgh to become a physician. It’s 1828, the Age of Enlightenment, and the Scottish city is a “shining beacon of medical discovery.” But James quickly learns that if he wants to develop anatomical knowledge and surgical skills, he must join one of the private schools in Surgeon’s Square. Unable to afford the additional tuition, James makes a bargain with his professor’s secretary and dissectionist, the charismatic Aneurin “Nye” MacKinnon, to serve as a lookout to prevent possible grave robbing in the Greyfriars kirkyard (graveyard) beneath James’s chamber window. The naive student soon discovers that he is aiding a gang of body snatchers who steal fresh corpses from churchyards for anatomical study at the medical schools. Nye explains to a horrified James that he is a Resurrectionist: “Our motivation is not in the value of the bodies we steal, but in the second life we give them.” Bedazzled by Nye’s scientific passion (and his dark sexiness), James plunges into this illicit, gritty underworld. However, their rivals in the body-snatching game, the sinister Burke and Hare, will murder anyone to corner the corpse market. Mixing a macabre gothic mystery with a sensitive coming-of-age tale and a touching queer romance, Dunlap has written an exciting, well-researched debut historical adventure. Bizarre, authentic details, like the mortsafes, or cages, that grieving families installed to protect the graves of their loved ones, make for an unforgettable read.
Before heading to her evening shift as an investigator for Phoenix Seven, an Italian liaison unit that works with the U.S. military in Naples, Nikki Serafino is relaxing on the sailboat she co-owns with her friend, undercover cop Valerio Alfieri, when they rescue a woman who has been abandoned in the bay by her abusive boyfriend. As they head back to port, the Calypso’s keel strikes a decomposing body; Nikki notes the ligature marks on the man’s neck. The next day, while assisting a U.S. serviceman and his family in the wake of a traffic accident, she discovers another murder victim, this time one who’s been shot to death. After the bodies are identified as American naval officers, Nikki must conduct a tricky balancing act of partnering with both NCIS Special Agent Durant Cole and the Italian police in the investigation of possible links between the killings. Could the Camorra Mafia be involved? At the same time, Nikki’s intense family drama, involving the recent loss of her American mother, a loser brother in deep debt to local gangsters, and a tumultuous relationship with her controlling boyfriend, Enzo, threaten to derail her probe. Heider, who lived in Naples for several years and deployed as a civilian analyst aboard U.S. and European naval ships, makes an impressive debut with this engrossing thriller that captures both the baroque beauty and gritty danger of Italy’s third-largest city. It also introduces a tattooed, kick-ass female protagonist (“Nikki was short and compact and muscular with a dynamic, interesting face”) who may remind some readers of Stieg Larsson’s Lisbeth Salander but without that character’s severe asocial tendencies. If there is a minor flaw, it’s that the Heider’s vividly drawn Italian characters far outshine her dull American counterparts. An enjoyable summer read.
Any cozy reader will assure you that there are few places more dangerous than the community garden. And Maggie Walker—who helped create the garden in Marlowe, her small Berkshire town—is reminded of this fact when opening day arrives and she discovers a boot jutting out of the garden. Attached to a foot. Which is attached to a body. Yikes! To make matters worse, Violet, whose idea the garden was, has seemingly disappeared. Maggie has only recently returned to Marlowe, smarting after the death of her “not-quite ex-husband,” and taking over the home of her recently deceased grandmother. But one thing keeps happening after another, from threatening telephone calls to harassment from a cousin as Maggie tries to find out what happened to Violet. An engaging look at small town life and death, this book was the recipient of the Minotaur Books/Mystery Writers of American First Crime Novel Award.
Every book has words, is comprised of words, but this book is about words. The ones that 16-year-old Robert Johnson used when his charter school teachers, who treat optimism as a kind of hygiene, told him he should confess to the murder of Lillie Scott, a hero of the rebuilding of New Orleans, who hired at her restaurant those down on their luck. The words the boy can’t or won’t say about what really happened, which barely matters anyway since the system will drag him in now or later, formed as it is of “strange empty words in the shape of language but without any meaning.” And the words that are unsaid as Lillie “[lies] down in the street so noiselessly, slow like a sheet in the breeze flutters to the ground.” Shoulder to the wheel of all this is Ben Alder, a former rabbinical student and son of a linguist, and his dude of dudes, Grand Old Dude of York, Mayor Van Dude of Dudetown, Boris Pasternak. These public defenders ask for every case involving a child, and Ben becomes Robert’s lawyer. All the boy wants is to talk to his dad. But Ben doesn’t tell him that he’s also representing the father, who, unknown to the boy, is in the same jail. Ben has “no questions that are small enough for the courtroom,” but still wrangles his fear and his clients through the morass to a satisfying outcome, one that will leave readers with large questions of their own, mainly about this country’s treatment of Black boys. Debut novelist Perry, a former New Orleans public defender, has wonderfully distilled a world of hurt onto the page.
Jane Austen’s throngs of fans will adore this series starter that introduces the writer as a lively amateur sleuth; a treasured member of a large, loving family; and as a woman of her time—feisty but too often kept from her potential. The marriage market among Jane’s circle looms large, of course, with Jane hoping for a proposal any day from a young Irishman while those around her assess one another in terms of their potential as financial insurance. When an alliance is about to be announced by a local family, their façade of gentility is threatened when a young woman is found murdered in their home. Jane recognizes her as a milliner she’s bought from lately. The local magistrate seems content to blame “gypsies” for the crime, an accusation Jane disputes as no traveling people have been seen in the area lately, but she’s soon sorry when another is accused: her mentally disabled brother, George. It’s now up to our literary hero to find the real killer and bring George home. The large cast of characters here keeps things lively; there’s often humor too, both in Jane’s wry comments throughout and in her witty letters to her sister about the case’s progression.
Alering’s striking, dark debut novel mixes magical realism with crime and dire poverty. Sheila, 17, and Angie, 12, are sisters living on the absolute edge in 1980s Appalachia. Their father is dead, their brother in prison, and they and their mother live with an elderly relative, growing vegetables and keeping rabbits for food. Sheila keeps her side of the room neat, Angie very much doesn’t, and the differences only begin there, with the most significant being in their dubious magical gifts: Sheila is burdened and chafed by a rope around her neck, visible only to her, that grows thicker and longer over time. Angie draws sinister tarot-type cards that she carries everywhere, with figures like “A creature made of root and sinew [with] a crooked crown of worms” that give her frighteningly accurate messages. Outside the squalor the girls live in are the hikers, whom they think of as impossibly rich, trekking the nearby Appalachian trail with their fancy equipment and cluelessness. When two of them are killed, Angie takes on the investigation, much to her sister’s exasperation. This is one of those novels whose setting and characters take the front seat—readers won’t soon forget Sheila and Angie and the lengths they go to to survive and find peace.