Danielle Arceneaux
Glory Be (Pegasus Crime 2023) begins when Glory Broussard settles into her usual after church routine of running a small-time bookie office from her usual table the local coffee shop in Lafayette, Louisiana. Glory is stunned to learn that her best friend Sister Amity Gay, an activist nun beloved by the whole community, has been found dead, a presumed suicide. Glory’s daughter Delphine, a New York lawyer, returns for the funeral, meeting her mother at the service. When they return home Delphine finds a notice attached to the door: her mother’s house has been condemned by the city. Glory insists the notice is the work of her sister Shirley, who hasn’t forgiven Glory for inheriting the family house from their recently deceased mother, but Delphine is shocked by the state of the house — piles of boxes and bags cluttering all flat surfaces and the hallways. She is also concerned about her mother’s recent weight gain and lethargy, and her collection of prescription drugs for depression. Delphine has problems of her own, a recent affair with a married colleague that resulted in a temporary suspension, and decides to stay in Lafayette for awhile to help Glory clean house. Glory is certain Amity wouldn’t have killed herself, and agrees to spend the mornings sorting through her garage sale treasures if Delphine will help her investigate Amity’s death. Lieutenant Beau Landry, whom Glory used to babysit, listens to Glory’s concerns but tries to convince her to leave the police work to the police. Glory grew up in segregated Louisiana, used to being sidelined and ignored, but is motivated by her need to bring Amity to justice, and pushing the edge of her comfort zone to talk with rich white oil tycoons and their entitled wives. This engaging debut traditional mystery, the first in a planned series, is a finalist for the Lilian Jackson Braun and Agatha Awards.

Lucy Ashe
The Dance of the Dolls (Union Square & Co. 2023) features identical twin sisters Olivia and Clara Marionetta, rehearsing for the ballet Coppélia at the recently opened Sadler’s Wells Theatre in 1933 London. Coppélia is the story of a young man who falls in love with a life-sized doll that comes to life and dances for him. Both sisters are talented ballerinas. Olivia is hard-working and follows all the rules, dreaming of becoming a star ballerina, saving her paltry salary for a rehearsal tutu that might make her stand out from the corps de ballet. Clara is independent and rebellious, visiting clubs to dance and drink with pianist Nathan Howell while Olivia returns home to rest. Nathan was a child prodigy whose parents idolized him and catered to his every wish. But as Nathan grew into adulthood, the public adoration for his surprising talent faded and the concert invitations dried up, leaving him just another competent pianist. His mother left the family and his father lost interest in him. Samuel Steward works for the shoe shop of Frederick and Dora Freed, building the made-to-measure pointe shoes for the ballerinas. The huge but bashful Samuel has fallen under Olivia’s spell, stamping a rose onto the sole of her shoes and watching the rehearsals when he delivers the shoe orders. Samuel is impressed by the physical effort it takes for the ballerinas to float gracefully across the stage. He dreams of designing his own shoes and clothing, sketching beautiful designs in his lonely room. During the rehearsals leading up to the opening of Coppélia, both sisters have the uncomfortable feeling they are being watched by a menacing presence. In the basement of Sadler’s Wells is an actual well, the source of water for the theatre. For the dancers the well is a good luck charm, visited before every rehearsal and performance. Strange items appear in the dark water, beginning with one of Olivia’s pointe shoes and a single white rose. This suspenseful debut historical thriller by a former ballerina explores the magic and obsession surrounding the world of ballet.

Michael Bennett
Better the Blood (Atlantic Monthly Press 2023) introduces Hana Westerman, a Māori detective with the Auckland CIB. Hana is sent a video that leads her to a hidden room containing the body of a hanged man and a curved design drawn in blood. The next body is found with two of the designs, leading Hana and her partner to suspect New Zealand’s first serial killer. They track the design to a daguerreotype taken in 1863 of a group of six colonial soldiers posed in front of the hanged body of a Māori Chief. The two current murders are the descendants of two of the soldiers, indicating four more murders to come. Hana realizes the murders are utu, the Māori tradition of rebalancing a crime. Two decades earlier, when Hana had just joined the police force, she and other young Māori officers were sent to forcibly remove a group of Māori in a land rights occupation on the same mountain where the Chief was killed. At the time Hana didn’t feel she could refuse the order, and her actions caused her people to view her as a collaborator with the enemy. She hasn’t returned home since. Hana’s daughter Addison is an outspoken teen activist for Māori rights, and the killer’s release of the old footage threatens their relationship and causes Hana to question her future with the police department. Hana watches the recordings of the forcible removals of Māori elders, suspecting the killer may have been part of the protest and wondering why it’s taken so long for the killer to respond to the past. This debut thriller featuring the intuitive Māori detective explores the far-reaching psychological effects of colonization.

I.S. Berry
The Peacock and the Sparrow (Atria Books 2023) is set in 2012 Bahrain during the “Arab Spring,” anti-government protests to end the monarchy. Shane Collins (52) is ending his career as a CIA operative. He is assigned to Manama as the resident Iran expert, tasked with uncovering evidence of Tehran’s suspected move for regional dominance through support of the Shiite uprising against the Sunni monarchy. The value of his 25 years experience as a case officer and fluency in Arabic has been eroded by his drinking and diagnosis of early-stage liver deterioration. His new Station Chief is 28-year-old Whitney Alden Mitchell, a first tour officer who wears actual coins in his penny loafers. Collins has built a relationship with Rashid, a young Oxford educated engineer eager to help America learn more about the opposition. Rashid is a low-level officer in Fourteen February, an anti-government group who have been negotiating for the release of dissident poet Junaid for nearly two years. At a gala for the National Theatre and Opera House Collins admires a stunning large mosaic titled “Tree of Life.” A beautiful woman dressed in the traditional abaya and hijab, though bright paisley rather than black, introduces herself as the artist. Collins is struck by her translucent green eyes and wonders about the scar from eye to chin. Collins calls her Almaisa, after a Modigliani painting. Almaisa studied art at the University of Florence, turning to mosaic work, the art of her people, when she returned home. She takes him to visit the actual Tree of Life, a 400-year-old tree growing in the dry sand dunes, which is much less impressive in person. Determined to get to know the enigmatic artist, Collins initiates a friendship that gradually turns to love. Almaisa is involved with a local orphanage and Collins begins to see Bahrain through her eyes, which causes him to question some of the work he is doing. Pressures from Whitney to exact more information from Rashid put the informer in danger, and the tensions between the government and the dissidents grow worse every day. The author’s own experience as a CIA operations officer in Bahrain during the Arab Spring adds verisimilitude to this intense debut spy thriller.

Lina Chern
Play the Fool (Bantam 2023) introduces Katie True, a 29-year-old college dropout who retreated to the Lake Forrest suburb of Chicago where she grew up. Eight years later she is working at yet another dead-end job, this time at Firebird Imports, a Russian knickknack store in an aging shopping center, a disappointment to her wealthy parents and over-achieving sister. Katie’s younger brother Owen, a tech prodigy with no social skills, is her best friend. The brightest spots in her week are the three days her new friend Marley works at a neighboring store. One day a young guy who looks like a weight-lifter stumbles into Firebird Imports, breathing hard and bleeding from a gash in his forehead. Katie is dealing out her tarot cards in the empty store, her normal time-wasting relaxation, and Nico agrees to a quick $20 reading. Katie learned to read tarot cards when she was six from her Aunt Rosie, a carnival drifter who “babysat” Katie by taking her to casinos. Their favorite game was “What’s their story?” where Rosie pointed out all the signs you could pick up from people. The cards, Rosie explained, were just a vehicle for asking the right questions. The first card Katie turns over for Nico is The Fool, and then Nico visits the bathroom to deal with his bleeding head, leaving his phone unlocked. Hoping for some clues about what is bothering him, Katie opens his texts and finds a picture of Marley propped against the dumpster in the alley, a bullet wound in her temple. By the time Katie gets to the alley the body is gone, but the necklace with black beads and distinctive Ace of Spades charm Marley always wore is underneath the dumpster. Seeing Nico drive away, Katie impulsively follows him to the old part of town, where Nico breaks into a house. She sneaks in behind him and finds a photo booth strip of pictures of Nico and Marley, realizing Nico must be the deadbeat boyfriend Marley was about to break up with. A neighbor calls the police and Nico flees, but Katie is caught inside the house. Katie insists it is the home of a friend, but she doesn’t even know Marley’s last name. Luckily police officer Jamie believes her, though without a body there isn’t a crime for him to investigate. He does track down Nico, who is Dominick Battaglia of a local trucking and probable crime family, and murder suddenly sounds a lot more possible. Big-hearted Katie may not be good at adulting, but she does have an amazing ability to focus on a task and a talent for reading people, a combination that could make her a good detective if she were better at planning ahead. This enjoyable and funny series opener is a finalist for the Lefty Award for Best Debut Mystery and the Mary Higgins Clark Award.

Amy Chua
The Golden Gate (Minotaur Books 2023) is set in 1944 Berkeley, California. Homicide detective Al Sullivan is having a drink at the bar of the elegant Claremont Hotel when the night manager reports that shots have been fired upstairs. Wealthy industrialist and presidential candidate Walter Wilkinson is unhurt, but explains that a man was waiting inside his room with a gun. Wilkinson didn’t get a good look at the man in the dark room, but says he was young, had an accent that might have been Russian, and is certainly a Communist. The man shot, missed, and fled. Three hours later Sullivan is called back to the same hotel room: Wilkinson, his trousers around his ankles and his mouth stuffed with objects from his room, has been shot dead in the forehead. Sullivan finds an old doll with a porcelain face inside the hotel room closet, an empty Shreve & Co. jewelry box on the dresser, and a single yellow silk thread caught in the doorjamb. Sullivan asks for a room to get some sleep and to use to question the staff in the morning, and is given Room 422, unoccupied for years because of ghost sightings. Flashbacks to 1930 reveal the origin of the ghost story: eight-year old Iris Stafford who fell to her death down the laundry chute while playing hide and seek with her six-year old sister Issy. Sullivan interviews a maid who saw a young blond woman wearing a yellow silk skirt going into Wilkinson’s room. The maid is sure she was one of Mrs. Genevieve Bainbridge granddaughters but isn’t sure which one: Issy, Nicole, or Cassie. Another witness saw a young Chinese woman with long dark hair near Wilkinson’s room, presumably a prostitute. A jade seal is removed from deep in Wilkinson’s throat, embossed with the seal of Chiang Kai-Shek. Madame Chiang has purchased a house close to the Bainbridge mansion under the guise of receiving medical treatments. A reporter is chasing a story that Madame Chiang is really in town to seduce Wilkinson, their best chance for American support against Mao. Sullivan’s mixed race eleven-year-old niece Miriam stays with him when her alcoholic mother Rosemary, Sullivan’s half-sister, is having a bad time, but Sullivan is worried his lifestyle isn’t a good influence on Miriam either. Sullivan’s father was Mexican, but he took his mother’s last name before joining the police and is able to pass. Miriam’s father was Black, and she has a hard time with racial prejudice at school. The Bay Area is changing far too quickly for many, the shipyards like Kaiser’s in Richmond bringing in close to half a million people eager for jobs, many of them Black. As a police officer Sullivan was required to round up Japanese families for relocation. Historical figures like Margaret Chung, the first Chinese woman to become a physician in the United States, have important cameo roles in this intriguing historical mystery, the fiction debut of a Yale law professor.

Maria Dong
Liar, Dreamer, Thief (Grand Central Publishing 2023) is the story of Katrina Kim, a troubled young woman estranged from her Korean family, who has been haunted her whole life by a book she read as a child: Mi-Hee and the Mirror Man. Like Mi-Hee, Katrina is able to see hidden world, or at least thinks she can, and has developed a series of coping mechanisms to allow her to control her compulsions. To safely exit her apartment, she counts eleven steps and draws a sigil of an endekagram, a star polygon with eleven vertices, in the air. Katrina sees mushroom forests on the floor of her kitchen, and believes the local Cayatoga Bridge in Grand Station, Illinois, is a place of supernatural power. Katrina shares an apartment with Leoni, who is often out of town for months working as a traveling occupational therapist, returning home to discover that Katrina has let the apartment fall into disarray in her absence. Katrina works at a boring office job for a hospital billing firm, and has become obsessed with her co-worker Kurt, believing they have a special connection though they have only exchanged a few words. Over the past three years she has collected a series of clues about Kurt by spying on him at work, though she still doesn’t know much about his life outside the office. She discovers a postcard in his desk with a threatening message she believes is aimed at her. That night she is unable to resist the call of the Cayatoga Bridge, where she performs self-soothing rituals at midnight when her stress levels are out of control. She is startled to find Kurt at the bridge, and horrified when he shouts that everything is her fault before throwing himself off the bridge. This unsettling debut thriller is a powerful exploration of mental illness.

Margot Douaihy
Scorched Grace (Gillian Flynn Books 2023) introduces Holiday Walsh, a queer former punk-rocker escaping her past as a novice nun at Saint Sebastian’s School in New Orleans. The Sisters of the Sublime Blood is a small order, just three nuns and 33-year-old Holiday, younger by four decades than the older nuns. Sister Augustine and Sister Therese support Holiday, but Sister Honor is suspicious of her motives. Holiday is so heavily tattooed that she is required to wear a scarf at all times and gloves except when teaching guitar classes, though she is allowed to keep her bleached blond hair. Holiday is smoking a confiscated cigarette in the alley one hot afternoon when the flaming body of Jack Corolla, the school janitor, drops from the second floor of the east wing, which is ablaze. Hearing a cry from inside, Holiday rushes up the stairs to find two injured students. She binds the wound in one student’s leg with her scarf and drags him outside just as the fire department arrives. They rescue the second student while Fire Investigator Magnolia Riveaux tries to question Sister Holiday, but she collapses from smoke inhalation. Riveaux tells the nuns the fire was deliberately set, and asks about known firebugs. Sister Honor tells her about Prince Dempsey, who started two fires on campus the previous year, before Sister Holiday’s arrival. When Sister Holiday discovers one of her own black blouses in the rubble of the fire, she fears she is being framed, and begins her own investigation, trading information with Riveaux, who has a strange conversational habit of speaking punctuation: “Students hang out here on weekends, question mark.” Though incapable of controlling her bad language and self-destructive nature, Sister Holiday is sincere in her desire to make a new start with the Sisters of the Sublime Blood, especially when she realizes the male-controlled diocese is intent on closing the school so badly needed by troubled children like Prince Dempsey. This compelling noir debut novel is the first in a planned series.

Alex Hay
The Housekeepers (Graydon House 2023) is set in 1905 London, where Mrs. King works as the housekeeper for a grand Mayfair mansion owned by the de Vries. After Wilhelm de Vries dies, Miss de Vries summons Mrs. King to discuss plans for a grand costume ball, shockingly scheduled a mere six months after her father’s funeral. Mrs. King proves amazingly efficient at the task: ordering new linens, waiters, tents, entertainment; hiring additional staff including a sewing maid; closing off half the rooms and packing unneeded items into cases. Mr. Lockwood, lawyer for the de Vries, advises against the ball, explaining the de Vries empire is overextended, but Miss de Vries is determined to take her place in society and catch a husband. Three weeks before the ball butler Mr. Shepherd tells Miss de Vries that Mrs. King has been caught visiting the gentlemen’s quarters and must be let go. Miss de Vries agrees and oversees sending the invitations herself. The sudden dismissal doesn’t worry Mrs. King much, her plan to strip the de Vries mansion of everything of worth during the ball can proceed as planned. Partnered with Mrs. Bone, a black-market trader, Mrs. King has recruited five other women: former de Vries housekeeper Winnie Smith, who mentored her when she started as a young maid; Alice Parker, Mrs. King’s much younger sister and the de Vries new sewing maid, Hephzibah Grandcourt, a former de Vries maid barely scraping by as an actress, and two former circus performers both named Jane hired on as extra staff at the mansion. Miss de Vries doesn’t receive many acceptances to the ball and Hephzibah, posing as the Duchess of Montagu, visits to express her excitement about the ball and willingness to encourage her titled friends to attend. Invitations to those friends are intercepted, and Hephzibah trains her fellow actors and stagehands to become wealthy masked guests for the ball. Mrs. Bones’s crew acts as security, and the Janes recruit circus performers to provide entertainment. By the time the ball begins, Mrs. King has people on every floor of the mansion ready to evacuate the treasures out the windows of the upper floors. But like all best-laid plans, things don’t go exactly as planned. This clever debut caper novel highlighting the disparity between the serving class and their wealthy employers makes it easy to root for the seven women taking control over their own destinies.

Jennifer Herrera
The Hunter (G.P. Putnam’s Sons 2023) begins when Leigh O’Donnell returns to her hometown of Copper Falls, Ohio, with her four-year-old daughter Simone. Leigh was dismissed from her job as detective for the NYPD after aiming her gun at a fellow-police officer, and her marriage fell apart immediately afterward. Both of Leigh’s parents died when she was in high school, but her brother and the three uncles who raised them still live in town. Leigh left Copper Falls a decade earlier, determined never to return, but a call from her younger brother Ronan persuades her to take a temporary assignment with the Copper Falls police department where Ronan works. Three unemployed 25-year-old men have drowned in the waterfall, presumed suicides, but Ronan fears there is more to their deaths. Seven years earlier three high school seniors committed suicide in the same spot the night before their graduation, and Leigh is struck by the fact that if those students had lived they would be the same age as the new suicides. Leigh isn’t comfortable in Copper Falls — her mixed-race daughter is the only non-white face in town, and the residents of the poor part of town known as The Sticks clearly don’t trust the police. But the gun and badge make her feel like a whole person with a purpose after months of drifting, and she decides to stay for a few weeks and investigate. Leigh’s independent streak doesn’t go over well with her new boss Chief Becker, but she is too consumed by the investigation to care about his opinion. The autopsy photos are unusual. All three of the bodies are pristine: freshly cut hair, trimmed nails, no bruises or marks. This might be a sign of preparation for suicide, but Leigh suspects a ritualized cleaning in preparation for sacrifice. This character-driven debut is complex and compelling.

Ken Jaworowski
Small Town Sins (Henry Holt and Co. 2023) is set in Locksburg, Pennsylvania, a former coal and steel town with little to offer its remaining 5000 residents. Kate and Andy were heroin addicts until the day Kate discovered she was pregnant. Their daughter Angie was born with Down syndrome and a heart murmur. Other than Angie’s health problems, they were a happy family, Andy working several jobs to support them so Kate could stay home with Angie, who gradually became weaker. One day Andy returns home to find a note: Angie had died in her sleep and Kate deliberately overdosed. Searching for something to steal to buy his own overdose, Andy takes a briefcase from a car, discovering evidence of pedophilia, including a child with Down syndrome. Nathan works at an assembly plant, married to Paula, a nurse at Locksburg Hospital. For 15 years they have been hoping for a child and consulting specialists with no luck. Finally accepting there won’t be a baby, they begin to spend more time apart: Paula working more hours while Nathan devoted himself to fishing and joined the volunteer fire department. Returning from an unsuccessful fishing outing at Laurel Lake, Nathan responds to a fire alert on his phone leading him to an abandoned shack on fire. Inside he finds a huge trash bag full of crisp stacks of twenty dollar bills. A man in flames comes running down the hall. Rolling the man to extinguish the fire, Nathan throws the man over one shoulder and then grabs the cash bag, making it safely outside. He hides the bag in the utility box in his pickup truck while retrieving gallon of distilled water to cool the man before calling for an ambulance. Nurse Callie answers the hospital phone with the news to prepare for a burn victim in bad shape and then a second call from Police Chief Kriner that two bodies will be arriving, a child dead from natural causes and her mother dead from a drug overdose. Callie was born with a cleft palate. The surgery didn’t go well and she has a two inch pink scar that makes her very self-conscious. Gabriella, a 16-year old suffering from cancer, arrives with her father, the pastor at Shepard’s Staff Tabernacle who believes prayer is the answer to any problem. Gabriella’s doctor explains that her father gives her only the minimum of medication and admits her overnight. As they talk through the night, Gabriella reveals she knows she is dying and has only one regret, that she has never seen the ocean. Callie decides to risk her job by taking Gabriella to the ocean while Nathan tries to convince Paula that they should keep the money and Andy debates postponing his suicide to bring a pedophile to justice. This debut thriller focusing on the intertwined stories of struggling characters is mesmerizing.

Meagan Jennett
You Know Her (MCD 2023) begins on New Year’s Eve in the Blue Bell bar in the small town of Bellair, Virginia. Bartender Sophie Braam is usually able to ignore the constant advice to “Smile Sweetheart!” from drunk men who think it’s OK to pat and stroke but on this night her nerves are frayed. The final straw is when entitled Mark Dixon, best friend of the owner, sneaks behind the bar to drink the expensive glass of wine she has been saving as a final treat for herself after closing up. The owner and the rest of the staff have headed off to an after party and Mark begs for a ride home. Sophie very reluctantly agrees since she know there is no chance of getting a taxi in their remote location at that time of the night. But Mark won’t stop talking and then begins putting his hands down her pants and up her shirt so she pulls over and tries to kick him out of the car. Taking the stop as agreement for sex, Mark increases his advances, so she strangles him with the seatbelt. Instead of feeling guilt and remorse, Sophie feels powerful. Nora Martin is new to the Bellair Police Department and hoping to move up soon to detective, but most of her male colleagues won’t have anything to do with her since she is a woman with dark skin. Only Detective Murphy is supportive, promising to move her into his detective spot when he retires in a year. Mark’s body is found at the County Waste Center when a load of garbage is dumped. Nora is horrified by the mutilation of the week-old body — castrated and tongueless — and Murph recognizes Mark as a regular at the Blue Bell. Sophie tells them she saw him last on New Year’s Eve, heading out to the Tap House with the serving staff as she closed up. The owner and staff said they expected Mark to join them and don’t know where he went instead. At the funeral Nora and Sophie talk, finding an unexpected connection because of their jobs as women working in a man’s world and Nora wonders if perhaps she has finally found a friend in her new town. As the months pass another body is found with the same mutilation, but then nothing more, and no one is willing to listen to Nora’s concerns about a possible serial killer. This powerful debut thriller features interspersed chapters from the perspectives of both women reveal their struggles containing the frustration (Nora) and rage (Sophie) fermenting just under their surface mask of control.

Kristen Loesch
The Last Russian Doll (Berkley 2023) begins in 1991 London, when Rosie White, a postgraduate student at Oxford, applies for a summer research assistant position with elderly scholar Alexey Ivanov. Rosie was born in Russia, fleeing with her mother 14 years earlier after her father and older sister were murdered, leaving her birth name Raisa and nearly everything else behind except her mother’s collection of porcelain dolls. Waking her terminally ill mother up the next morning Rosie finds one of the dolls on her mother’s bedside table, the top of its head removed and a tiny brass key inside the hollow head. When asked about the key, her mother mumbles something about a chest and Ludmila in Moscow and then dies. Rosie decides to take her mother’s ashes with her to Moscow and scatter them somewhere near the Bolshoi Theatre, where her mother was a principal ballerina: Yekaterina Simonova, Katerina Ballerina. Interspersed sections narrated by Valentin Mikhailovich, a Bolshevik, beginning in 1916 Petrograd (St. Petersburg) relate his love affair with Antonina "Tonya" Nikolayevna, the unhappy noble young wife of wealthy factory owner Dmitry Lulikov. Dmitry gifts Tonya a porcelain doll dressed in an elaborate copy of one of her own gowns. The doll has her own long yellow hair and dark eyes, and Tonya feels she is looking at her own shrunken corpse. The Russian Revolution changes everything: Valentin is a prisoner of war and Tonya flees to the countryside, where she gives birth to a daughter. In Russia with Alexey, Rosie finds a map in the chest in their old Moscow home and begins a search for information about her own past, discovering more porcelain dolls with removable skullcaps. Rosie’s attempts to discover the motive behind her family’s murders puts her in danger, paralleling her grandmother Tonya’s efforts to survive the Bolshevik Revolution and protect her daughter. This engaging debut thriller is a finalist for the Edgar Award for Best First Novel.

Jessa Maxwell
The Golden Spoon (Atria Books 2023) is set at Grafton, Betsy Martin’s Vermont estate where an annual Bake Week competition takes place. Betsy, a celebrated baker with a line of cookbooks is known as “America’s Grandmother” for her on-screen warmth. Betsy has hosted the friendly competition herself for 10 years, awarding the coveted Golden Spoon award to the winner. But this year Betsy’s sponsors have forced a co-host upon her — Archie Morris, known for his macho cut-throat show The Cutting Board. The six competitors are the usual varied group: Stella Velasquez, a former journalist who has only been baking for a year; Hannah Severson, the second-youngest contestant in the show’s history famous for her pies sold at a diner; Gerald Baptiste, a math teacher who hand-grinds his own flours for scientific bakes; Pradyumna Das, a wealthy tech designer who loves improvising; Lottie Byrne, a retired nurse who loves to bake and has applied unsuccessfully for the show every year until now; Peter Geller, an architect who loves to bake for his husband and their young daughter. Each day the contestants are set a challenge, and the lowest scoring entry is sent home. The first day is Bread, one savory and one sweet. Lottie is very nervous and her breads aren’t too impressive. She expects to be sent home until Peter’s bread is tasted and Betsy spits the mouthful out. He has used salt in place of sugar. Peter is horrified, sure that he tasted the large container and it held sugar. The next day is Pie, again one sweet and one savory. Gerald has brought his own hand-ground pastry flour and home-made orange syrup and is sure he will excel until he pours in the syrup and smells gasoline. Shaken and angry, he leaves the room and the contest. It doesn’t seem that things can get any worse until a body is discovered. Interspersed sections from the viewpoints of Betsy and the six contestants reveal secrets and hidden motives in this clever and entertaining debut mystery.

Dann McDorman
West Heart Kill (Knopf 2023) begins when private detective Adam McAnnis joins an old college friend for Fourth of July weekend in the mid-1970s at the remote West Heart Club in upstate New York. McAnnis is surprised by the extensive acreage of the exclusive private hunting club, consisting of a huge lodge and private cabins owned by the members clustered around a lake. Though other members and their families are in residence, the action centers on six families who have been part of the club for generations plus a prospective new member. McAnnis quickly picks up undercurrents of resentment between the families, mixed feelings about accepting the Club’s first Jewish member, secret adulterous affairs, and strong differences of opinion about the possibility of selling the club. McAnnis is investigating something for someone, but exactly who or what is unclear. The narrator muses about the mystery fiction genre: the accepted rules of fair play clues for the reader, narration techniques, the locked room trope, the final reveal by the detective. There is a near-fatal hunting accident and a body is discovered in the lake. As tensions rise, a storm closes the only access road, trapping everyone at West Heart Club. This ambitious debut mystery is a finalist for the New Blood Dagger.

Ritu Mukerji
Murder by Degrees (Simon & Schuster 2023) is set in 1875 Philadelphia, where Dr. Lydia Weston is a professor and anatomist at the Woman’s Medical College. Anna Ward, a young maid in the household of wealthy industrialist Edward Curtis, misses a regular appointment with Lydia, and she is concerned since Anna seemed nervous and worried at her previous appointment. She asks her colleague Dr. Harlan Stanley for advice, and he volunteers to check with his police inspector friend. When Anna’s sister Sarah visits Lydia explaining that Anna didn’t visit on Sunday as usual, Anna volunteers to visit the Curtis residence and ask about Anna. Inspector Thomas Volcker and Sergeant Charles Davies are called to the Schuylkill River, where the body of a young woman has been retrieved from the water. Her face is bloated and unrecognizable after days in the water. The drowned girl is presumed a suicide, but Volker is troubled by the fact that her hands are unmarked though her face has multiple abrasions. Wouldn’t her hands also have been marred by the branches and rocks of the river? The next day her clothing is found on the riverbank as well as a small bag containing a diary with the name Anna Ward. Volker and Davies visit Lydia to ask if this might be her missing patient. Feeling guilty that she hadn’t yet found the time to visit the Curtis residence, Anna volunteers to be with Sarah while she identifies the body and also to help with the autopsy. Learning that Lydia often loaned books to Anna, Volker gives her Anna’s diary, filled with cryptic passages of poetry he hopes Lydia can make sense of. The Woman’s Medical College of Philadelphia is one of the first in the country devoted to the education of women physicians, and Lydia and her students face daily prejudice about their ability to think clearly and to master the rigor of medical knowledge. Sergeant Davies initially harbors similar suspicious that Lydia is not capable of providing useful assistance in the investigation, but comes to respect her talent for getting the truth out of the Curtis staff members, a skill very similar to the questioning techniques she uses while diagnosing patents. This fascinating debut historical thriller is hopefully the first in a series.

Jonathan Payne
Citizen Orlov (CamCat Books 2023) is set in an unnamed country somewhere in the mountains of central Europe at the end of the Great War. Citizen Orlov is a fishmonger, working at his friend Citizen Vanev’s booth in the market place. Vanev has been trying to convince Orlov for years to join the People’s Front to rebel against government oppression, but Orlov insists politics is not for him, that he is content with a simple job and a simple life. One day he takes a shortcut through the alley behind the Ministries of Security and Intelligence and hears a phone ringing through an open window. It’s a very cold day and Orlov is concerned both that no one is answering the phone and that the open window is possibly a security breach. After looking in all directions for someone else to answer the phone, he reaches in to answer it himself. The voice asks for Agent Kosek, and Orlov squirms through the window to search, but the hallway is dark and empty. The voice demands he memorize a “life or death” message for Kosek and deliver it in person. Wandering through the building in search of Kosek, Orlov finds a room full of people and is welcomed as a new recruit, soon entranced by a presentation by the very attractive Agent Zelle who speaks about midnight rendezvous, safe houses, and secret packages. The next day he receives a first-class train ticket to Kufzig with instructions to check into Pension Residenze where Kosek will meet him. Since the king is visiting the next day all the rooms at Pension Residenze are taken and he is advised to try Penzion Rezidence across the street. That night he finds Agent Zelle undercover as a dancer in the bar, and realizes she is not there to protect the king after all. Things only get more confusing for Orlov from there as he saves the king from assassination and then is blackmailed by the kidnapping of his elderly mother to do Agent Zelle’s bidding. The good-hearted Orlov has no skills as a spy, but does his bumbling best to do the right thing in this absurdly comic debut spy thriller.

Nilima Rao
A Disappearance in Fiji (Soho Crime 2023) begins in 1941 Fiji, where 25-year-old Sergeant Akal Singh, a Sikh banished after a humiliating mistake in Hong Kong, where he began his career is now assigned to the Fijian Constabulary Suva Division. Akal is unhappy in what he considers a "godforsaken island," bored in the tropical paradise, and longs to return to the exciting life in Hong Kong or his native India. Inspector-General Jonathan Thurstrom, head of the colony’s police force, gives him only the most menial assignments until the disappearance of an indentured Indian woman from the Parkins sugar plantation is described as a kidnapping by Chop Chop, an anonymous political columnist in the Fiji Times. The Inspector-General hopes assigning an Indian officer to the case might appease the Delegation for India’s Relations with Fiji, visiting to review the Indian indentured servitude program. The British have agreed not to interfere with the Fijian way of life, instead importing workers from India. The illiterate workers signed a contract with an X or fingerprint, promised they would be paid a daily rate and could easily work off the contract. In reality it was nearly impossible to complete the amount of work required to earn credit for a day, and the indentured workers are essentially slaves. Akal visits Father David Hughes, who shows him a picture of the missing woman Kunti, explaining he is taking photographs of the workers as he documents their terrible living conditions in the coolie line, a long rectangular building partitioned into small rooms with no privacy. Akal visits Mrs. Susan Parkins at their house in Suva, who is clearly displeased to be asked questions by an Indian. She suggests that perhaps their overseer Brown took the coolie woman when he left recently for the war in Europe, and then refuses to answer any other questions from a coolie officer. Dr. Robert Holmes, who knows Akal from the police cricket team, agrees to accompany him to the plantation to run a clinic. Henry Parkins refuses to interrupt the day’s work so Akal can talk to Kunti’s husband. While Holmes sets up his clinic Akal talks to a group of small boys, who tell him the sahibs are bad men who beat their parents all the time. The boys knew Kunti, and explain she would never have left her daughter Divya, who now cries all the time. Akal is horrified by the living conditions and the punishing physical labor required of the workers, becoming unexpectedly invested in figuring out the truth of Kunti’s disappearance for Divya’s sake. This character-driven debut historical mystery is the first in a planned series.

Brooke Robinson
The Interpreter (Harper 2023) is the story of Revelle Lee, a London translator for trials and criminal investigations. Raised by a neglectful mother, Revelle is fluent in ten languages learned during her nomadic childhood when she was often left to her own devices. Revelle has always wanted a child of her own, and is now close to adopting six-year-old Elliot who has been in and out of foster care most of his life. Determined to be the loving and reliable mother she never had herself, Revelle rents a two bedroom flat she can’t really afford in order to satisfy all the requirements for adoption. Elliot’s mother is a drug addict, and the social worker assures Revelle the adoption will go through without issues. Elliot has occasional meltdowns, but seems happy and has begun to call her Mum. Revelle’s work schedule is erratic, but she tries to only take assignments when Elliot is at school. One morning the school calls saying Elliot is sick, and she rushes to pick him up and then back to the courthouse. Luckily one of the guards agrees to watch him for a bit while she interprets for a foreign tourist who saw a wealthy woman back her Mercedes SUV into a pregnant caterer in the opera parking lot. The heiress drove off and the pregnant woman she hit lost her baby. A verdict of not guilty is returned. Sandra Ramos, who works as a live-in maid for the heiress, has helped keep Elliot amused and tells Revelle she is available for child-minding. Sandra and Elliot have a great day together the next weekend Revelle has to work. But Sandra doesn’t show up the next time, and Revelle learns she died falling down the stairs in the wealthy woman’s home. There are shards of glass next to her body, and the back gate was open, leading the police to believe it was a robbery gone wrong. Adam Birch, a young homeless man, is arrested. Revelle’s next interpreting job is for Mariusz Dodobek, a homeless Polish immigrant who insists Adam was with him in their shelter under the bridge all night. Worried that Adam will escape justice, Revelle deliberately misinterprets a few of Dodobek’s statements and Adam is charged with murder. Elliot’s brith mother opposes the adoption, and then strange presents begin arriving at Elliot’s school and their home, followed by blackmail threats to reveal Revelle’s interpreting errors to the authorities if she doesn’t follow precise instructions about specific mistranslations. This debut thriller explores the moral quandary of an interpreter who knows changing a single word may help prevent a miscarriage of justice.

Julia Seales
A Most Agreeable Murder (Random House 2023) introduces Beatrice Steele, a 25-year-old resident of Swampshire, a small English township near a frog-filled swamp. It’s the early 19th century, and Beatrice lives in Marsh House with her parents and two younger sisters Louisa, the family beauty, and Mary, who fades into the background. Her father Stephen is a confirmed practical joker and her mother Susan is determined to marry off one of her daughters. Louisa seems to be the best possibility. Marsh House, the Steele family’s only asset, is entailed, the deed dictating it can only be granted to a man. If Mr. Steele dies before one of his daughters marries, the estate will pass to his closest male relative, their disgusting cousin Martin Grubb. Beatrice has never quite fit the definition of a true lady according to the strict rules of decorum outlined in The Lady’s Guide to Swampshire, Volumes I and II: she is not musical, her needlework is atrocious, and her artwork so bad it frightens people. Beatrice’s secret passion is crime — she secretly reads the crime news in the London papers and sends her analysis to Sir Huxley, a private detective who describes his current cases in a daily crime column. A neighboring family, the Ashbrooks, are holding a ball at their estate Stabmort Park, in honor of Mr. Edmund Croaksworth, whose parents recently perished leaving him a vast sum of money. The Steeles understand the Ashbrooks hope Mr. Croaksworth will be attracted to their daughter Arabella, but hope Louisa has a chance. Just before leaving for the ball a parcel arrives from Mr. Grubb, he is petitioning for immediate transfer of Marsh House on the grounds that Mr. Steele is mentally unfit. If his petition is successful the family will be ruined and may even be forced to move to France. At the ball Beatrice realizes that Mr. Croaksworth’s companion is none other than Vivek Drake, Sir Huxley’s former assistant who left in disgrace. When Mr. Croaksworth drops dead in the middle of a minuet, poison is suspected. A storm traps the guests, and Beatrice and Vivek become uneasy partners investigating the death. No one trusts Vivek, the outsider who can’t be a gentleman since he works for a living, and Beatrice must hide her talent for crime investigation or risk banishment from respectable society for her morbid interests. A clever homage to the worlds of both Jane Austen and Lemony Snicket, this excellent debut comedy of manners and murder is hopefully the first in a series.

Ayesha Manazir Siddiqi
The Centre (Gillian Flynn Books 2023) is the story of Anisa Ellahi, who longs to translate great works of literature but instead writes subtitles for Bollywood movies in her London apartment, living on the generosity of her wealthy parents. Her boyfriend Adam has an uncanny affinity for languages and speaks several with native-speaker fluency, so she is puzzled when he is unable to remember even the simplest phrases in Urdu she tries to teach him. They begin living together and Adam agrees to travel to Pakistan and meet her parents, scheduling the trip after his upcoming work assignment in Berlin. On the plane to Pakistan two weeks later, Adam startles her by speaking to the flight attendant in flawless Urdu, explaining he learned the language the previous week. Anisa doesn’t believe him, and Adam finally confesses he spent the last ten days at the Centre, an elite top-secret language school. For $20,000, the Centre guarantees complete fluency in a language. Graduates of the Centre sign binding agreements to keep the Centre secret, only permitted to tell one person in their lifetime. Anisa is at first doubtful, but doesn’t see any other way Adam could have mastered Urdu, and decides to attend the Centre for a course in German. At the Centre she signs all the nondisclosure paperwork, and agreeing to give up all technology and follow the rules about meditation and silence. Her day begins each morning at 5:00 AM and consists mainly of listening to a male voice drone on in incomprehensible German. But the meals are delicious and she is allowed to talk to one supervisor, a woman named Shiba, who explains if she listens carefully to her storyteller Peter that the language will just seep in gradually. And it works. On the seventh day she begins to understand Peter’s recordings and by the tenth day she is completely fluent in German. Back in her flat Anisa is overjoyed to see their cat, but doesn’t feel the same way about Adam. Other things have also changed: she now prefers her coffee black and Peter’s words seem to have seeped into her dreams. Returning for a second session at the Centre to learn Russian, Anisa notices worrisome details she missed the first time, and begins to suspect the Centre has a dark side. This intense debut explores themes of classism, colonialism, and cultural appropriation.

Nina Simon
Mother-Daughter Murder Night (William Morrow 2023) begins when Lana Rubicon, a driven real estate developer, collapses on her Los Angeles kitchen floor. Tumors are discovered in her brain, and follow-up tests reveal additional Stage 4 tumors in her lungs so Lana reluctantly calls her daughter Beth for help. Mother and daughter became estranged when Beth refused to get an abortion, moving to a ramshackle bungalow on the Elkhorn Slough in Monterey County to raise her daughter Jack, now fifteen. Beth is a nurse at a local nursing home and Jack loves spending time on the water and leading kayak tours. Lana has surgery to remove the brain tumors and then moves into Jack’s bedroom while undergoing chemotherapy to shrink the lung tumors. Four months later Lana is going stir crazy with nothing to do but suffer through chemotherapy. Tourists on one of Jack’s kayak tours discover a dead body, identified as Ricardo Cruz, a naturalist working for the Santa Cruz land trust. Ricardo had been booked for a kayak tour the evening before, but never showed up. Detective Nicoletti suspects Jack had something to do with his death, and appears at the bungalow with his partner Detective Ramirez while Beth is at work. He accuses Jack of covering up a mistake which rouses Lana from her post-chemo lethargy in defense of her granddaughter. Relieved to finally have something to occupy her mind, Lana unpacks her couturier work clothes, buys a wig, and sets out to find the murderer. When a connection between Ricardo and Hal Rhoads, a recently deceased elderly resident of the nursing home, comes to light, Lana convinces Beth to do a little snooping herself, recalling their mother-daughter murder nights watching Columbo together when Beth was young. Those were the last times Beth remembers being close to her mother, right after her father left the family and before her mother discovered she loved the power of running her own business. Detective Teresa Ramirez doesn’t share her partner’s conviction that Jack should be the main suspect, and is even willing to listen to Lana’s thoughts about possible motives for the son and daughter of Hal Rhoads, who are uninterested in pursuing their father’s letter of intent to donate the ranch to the land trust. This character-driven debut thriller explores the dynamics between three generations of women trying to balance connection and independence.

Michelle Min Sterling
Camp Zero (Atria Books 2023) is set in a near future world ravaged by climate change. In December 2049, a young woman codenamed Rose has accepted a job at Camp Zero, the brainchild of Meyer, a trailblazing American architect in a remote area of Northern Canada. Along with the other five young women known collectively as the Blooms, Rose is given a room in a derelict shopping mall by Judith the madam. The accommodations are spartan at best, but the money is good for the three-month assignment. Meyer insists that the Blooms be pure and uncorrupted by technology, so Judith removes Rose’s Flick, the chip that was implanted when she was five, just before it became common to implant at birth rather than the start of kindergarten. Rose is startled to be without her constant feed of information, but then begins remembering things that happened when she was very young. The daughter of a climate-displaced Korean immigrant mother, Rose worked as a hostess, providing sexual intimacy and companionship to the ultra rich, in the Floating City, a secure city in Boston Harbor. Desperate to support her aging mother living in an unsafe area of Boston, Rose agrees to take the job in Camp Zero when her patron Damien promises them an apartment in the Floating City with a view of the ocean. In the far north of Canada, a group of eight scientists are dropped off by helicopter at White Alice, an old cold war radar station now repurposed as a climate research station. This group is the first all-women team, replacing the previous group of men. The team consists of a biologist, botanist, cartographer, engineer, geographer, meteorologist, computer programmer, and security specialist. The White Alice team is charged with continuing the station’s research while protecting American control over the rich mineral deposits below the ice and the future Arctic shipping route made possible by massive glacial melt. The third perspective is that of Grant, hired to teach introductory English to the Camp Zero workers known as Diggers, rebelling against his privileged status as the son of an ultra rich family who started in opium and rum, moving to textiles, then oil, then green energy and off-grid cities like the Floating City, and now investigating rare earth mineral mining. This intricate debut thriller explores motivations of love and greed in the dangerous landscape of the far north.

Steve Urszenyi
Perfect Shot (2023) introduces former Army sniper Alexandra (Alex) Martel, now an FBI special agent on secondment to Interpol. While working to prevent the transfer of weapons-grade plutonium and enriched uranium, Alex meets CIA agent Caleb Copeland, who wants to recruit her for his new squad: the Advance Counterterrorism and Counterproliferation Team. Then Alex gets a call that Krysten, an old friend she met during the International Security Symposium attached to the Paris Peace Summit. The only two women in a sea of men, Alex and Krysten bonded, each keeping a copy of a selfie in front of the Eiffel Tower. Krysten’s neighbor Cara found Alex’s phone number on the back of the picture and hopes Alex might have a way of contacting Krysten’s family. Alex learns that Cara doesn’t know Krysten was a MI5 agent, and decides to fly to London and look into Krysten’s death. Heading from the airport to meet Cara, Alex realizes her cab is being followed. She takes an evasive route through the streets, but is trapped by three men shooting guns favored by GRU, Russian military intelligence. She kills two but the third is closing in when he is shot by Caleb, who appears out of nowhere. Detective Inspector Kane of Scotland Yard, who is not pleased both Alex and Caleb were carrying unauthorized weapons, reluctantly agrees that the Russians may have a connection to Krysten’s death, and even more reluctantly admits he is also MI5 and was her partner. Using Cara’s spare key to Krysten’s apartment, Alex discovers a hidden encrypted message that leads her to a Russian plot to detonate a stolen American thermonuclear gravity bomb. This propulsive debut thriller, a finalist for the Thriller and Crime Writers of Canada Awards for Best First Novel, is the first in a series.

Colin Walsh
Kala (Doubleday 2023) is set in the small seaside tourist town of Kinlough on the west coast of Ireland, where three friends gather for the first time in 15 years. As teenagers Joe Brennan, Kala Lanann, Helen Laughlin, Aidan Lyons, Mush Lyons, and Aoife Reynolds were inseparable. The last time they were together was the summer of 2003, the summer when Kala disappeared. Helen, now an investigative reporter struggling to pay her bills in Québec, is back for her father’s wedding; Kala’s boyfriend Joe, now a famous rock star is visiting from Los Angeles to open a new club; and Mush never left and is still working at his mum’s cafe. Aoife married and left town and Aiden committed suicide years ago, leaving Helen, Joe, and Mush to try and re-establish a connection. Then human remains are discovered and identified as Kala, horrifying the three old friends. Memories of their 15-year-old selves begin to re-surface, forcing them to confront bad decisions, impulsive actions, and hidden secrets that may have contributed to Kala’s murder. Uncertain about trusting the Guards, who didn’t do a thorough investigation at the time, Helen and Mush relive Kala’s last few days searching for clues and asking questions. The plans for Helen’s father’s wedding to Aiden’s mother fall apart when her teenage twin daughters go missing, a horrifying echo of Kala’s sudden disappearance at the same age. Interwoven narrations by Helen, Mush, and Joe from both the past and the present reveal conflicting memories of the events that led to Kala’s disappearance in this haunting debut thriller.

Patrick Worrall
The Partisan (Union Square & Co. 2023; UK 2022) is set in the summer of 1961, when young chess prodigies Yulia Sergeiovna Forsheva and Michael Fitzgerald, the son of the Director of Naval Intelligence, meet at a chess tournament in London. Michael, a Cambridge University student reading Russian literature, is stunned by Yulia’s beauty and overwhelmed by her chess talent. Yulia’s scientist father taught her to play chess, her mother Anna Vladimirovna Forsheva is an important Politburo official. Wanting to see more of Michael, Yulia deliberately makes a fatal error so that they can meet again in the next round of the tournament in Berlin. Yulia’s father has recently disappeared, so she is under close watch out of the USSR. Yulia’s minder in London is Vassily, a powerful spymaster who has become disillusioned by the brutality of his comrades, especially sadistic Maxim Karpov, the chief administrator of the Soviet nuclear weapons program, and his faithful thug Oleg. Karpov has always had an unsavory taste for young girls. Stationed in Lithuania in 1941, Karpov killed most of the people in a small village, and then demanded a young girl bring him flowers that night. Instead Greta, herself little more than a child, appeared dressed in a school uniform to avenge her mother and her village, nearly killing Karpov before fleeing into the forest. That was the last time Karpov left Russia. Greta escapes into the forest with her two best friends, Lithuanian Jews Vita and Riva. The three girls lived in the wild, occasionally joining other partisan groups, where Greta was trained as a sharpshooter. Twenty years later Greta is the only survivor, traveling the world to assassinate Nazi fugitives, questioning them about the English double agent who betrayed the Lithuania resistance fighters, and hoping for another chance to kill Karpov. Sections from different viewpoint move backward and forward in time, filling in the history that molded each character. This character-driven debut spy thriller is masterful.

Iris Yamashita
City Under One Roof (Berkley 2023) is set in the former military base of Point Mettier, Alaska, accessible only through a single tunnel, where all 205 year-round residents live in the Davidson Condos, a single high-rise building known as Dave-Co. For eight months of the year Point Mettier is cut off from the mainland, isolated in the bitter cold that drops to −35 °F. Just after the end of summer season, 17-year-old Amy Lin is at Hidden Cove smoking pot with her friends, when she finds a severed hand half-buried in the sand. Anchorage Police Officer Neworth arrives in response to the report, and explains that several body parts have drifted to shore in Alaska as well as Washington and Canada over the past few years. None of the bodies have been identified and the theory is they are suicide jumpers or people who accidentally fell off cruise ships. Amy is relieved that no one has been murdered, and returns to her boring routine of working at her mother’s Chinese restaurant, drifting through her high school classes, and dreaming of escaping from her restricted existence into the outside world. A few days later Cara Kennedy, another detective from Anchorage, arrives to follow up, and is trapped when a blizzard closes the tunnel. Cara soon learns that just about everyone in Point Mettier is escaping from someone or something in their past, unwilling to trust anyone from the outside. Cara is welcomed by Chief Sipley, a long-time resident, and Officer John Barkowski, known as J.B., recruited from Montana a year earlier. Noticing her wedding ring, J.B. asks Cara if her husband is also in law enforcement, and Cara explains he was a biotech engineer who died in a hiking accident with their young son the previous year. They pass Lonnie Mercer, a young woman walking her pet moose Denny, on their way Hidden Cove, where they spot a shadowy figure spying on them from the tree line. Chief Shipley learns that Cara is on disability, unable to stop obsessing over the body parts found months after the disappearance of her husband and son, scattered over the ravine and only identifiable by DNA. More body parts appear at Point Mettier, and since Cara is trapped anyway, she continues investigating with J.B. until the sudden appearance of a snowmobile gang that has taken residence with a nearby native village throws the whole town into a panic. The gang is searching for something they don’t find, and Amy’s best friend disappears along with his mother and brother. Narrated by Amy, Cara, and Lonnie, this intense debut captures both the claustrophobic nature of the unique community and their willingness to accept others who have chosen to reinvent themselves.