Big books from major authors, impressive first novels, and unusual anthologies demonstrate the amazing diversity of this popular genre, which continues to dominate bestseller lists.
Top 10
The Big Book of Jack the Ripper
Edited by Otto Penzler. Vintage, Oct. 4
Penzler’s massive anthology devoted to the real-life Victorian serial killer offers both fiction and nonfiction, including genuine witness statements, autopsy reports, contemporary news articles, and astonishing theories from the world’s foremost Ripperologists.
Burning Bright
Nicholas Petrie. Putnam, Jan. 10
War veteran Peter Ash, the hero of Petrie’s debut, The Drifter, returns in a sequel that’s set on a grander scale, but still boasts fully realized characters, devious twists, and a breakneck pace.
The Dry
Jane Harper. Flatiron, Jan. 10
David Baldacci calls Australian author Harper’s first novel “one of the most stunning debuts I’ve ever read.” John Lescroart adds, “With The Dry, Jane Harper immediately takes her place among the elites in the mystery world.”
Echoes of Sherlock Holmes: Stories Inspired by the Holmes Canon
Edited by Laurie R. King and Leslie S. Klinger. Pegasus Crime, Oct. 11
This follow-up to the anthology In the Company of Sherlock Holmes features writers not known as Sherlockians, including Deborah Crombie, Cory Doctorow, and Hallie Ephron.
Fields Where They Lay: A Junior Bender Novel
Timothy Hallinan. Soho Crime, Oct. 25
Set in Hollywood the week before Christmas, Hallinan’s sixth novel featuring funny-man burglar Junior Bender arrives just in time for the holiday season.
Home
Harlan Coben. Dutton, Sept. 20
Bestseller Coben delivers his second novel this year with his 11th Myron Bolitar thriller, his first since 2011’s Live Wire.
IQ
Joe Ide. LB/Mulholland, Oct. 18
Ide, a Japanese-American, grew up in South Central Los Angeles reading Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories. High school dropout IQ, the culturally confused hero of this first novel, identifies with his fellow misfit Holmes.
The One Man
Andrew Gross. Minotaur, Aug. 23
Centered on the Holocaust, bestseller Gross’s thematically rich historical thriller marks a departure from his usual contemporary suspense. High praise has come from Otto Penzler, Barbara Peters, Steve Berry, David Morrell, and other genre gurus.
Razor Girl
Carl Hiaasen. Knopf, Sept. 6
This sequel to 2013’s Bad Monkey offers fans of bestseller Hiaasen’s Florida novels the usual mix of crime and screwball comedy, plus Gambian pouched rats.
Surrender, New York
Caleb Carr. Random House, Aug. 23
The author of The Alienist returns with his first major work of suspense in more than 15 years. The star is a criminal psychologist living in present-day upstate New York.
Mysteries & Thrillers Listings
Akashic
Mississippi Noir, edited by Tom Franklin (Aug. 2, trade paper, $15.95, ISBN 978-1-61775-228-5). With the most corrupt government, the highest rate of preventable diseases, and the highest poverty rate in the country, Mississippi is a natural fit for Akashic’s noir anthology series. Contributors include Ace Atkins and Megan Abbott, but where’s Greg Iles?
Amazon/Thomas & Mercer
Moral Defense by Marcia Clark (Nov. 8, hardcover, $24.95, ISBN 978-1-5039-3977-6). When a savage attack in a suburban home leaves a father and son dead, the family’s adopted teenage daughter is accused of the bloody crime. It’s a tabloid-ready case that has the nation in an uproar—and defense attorney Samantha Brinkman facing her biggest challenge yet.
Atlantic Monthly
Out of Bounds by Val McDermid (Dec. 6, hardcover, $25, ISBN 978-0-8021-2574-3). A teenage joyrider crashes a stolen car, ends up in a coma, and a routine DNA test reveals a connection to an unsolved murder from 22 years before. Finding the answer to the cold case should be straightforward, but it’s as twisted as the DNA helix itself.
Atria
Manitou Canyon by William Kent Krueger (Sept. 6, hardcover, $24.99, ISBN 978-1-4767-4926-6). PI Cork O’Connor vanishes just days before his daughter’s wedding, causing his family members to worry. At the campsite where he was last seen, they find a lot of blood. Not only is Cork’s life on the line but so are the lives of hundreds of others.
Atria/Bestler
A Time of Torment: A Charlie Parker Thriller by John Connolly (Aug. 2, hardcover, $26.99, ISBN 978-1-5011-1832-6). Jerome Burnel was once a hero. He intervened to prevent multiple killings, and in doing so destroyed himself. In his final days, Burnel tells his story to PI Charlie Parker. He speaks of the girl who was marked for death, but was saved—and of an entity that hides in a ruined stockade.
Ballantine
The Ice Beneath Her by Camilla Grebe, trans. by Elizabeth Clark Wessel (Dec. 27, hardcover, $27, ISBN 978-0-425-28432-2). A young woman is found beheaded in the Stockholm home of business tycoon Jesper Orre. Investigator Peter Lindgren and psychological profiler Hanne Lagerlind-Schön are unable to identify the woman—and Orre goes missing.
Bantam
Bryant & May: Strange Tide: A Peculiar Crimes Unit Mystery by Christopher Fowler (Dec. 13, hardcover, $27, ISBN 978-1-101-88703-5). In another impossible case for London’s Peculiar Crimes Unit, a woman is found drowned in the Thames after being tied to a pillar at low water—and only her footprints lead to the spot where she was killed. Octogenarian detectives Arthur Bryant and John May investigate.
Berkley Prime Crime
Crowned and Dangerous by Rhys Bowen (Aug. 2, hardcover, $26, ISBN 978-0-425-28348-6). In 1934, Lady Georgiana Rannoch, a distant heir to the British throne, and her fiancé, Darcy O’Mara, plan to elope, but the arrest of Darcy’s father, Lord Kilhenny, for the murder of a wealthy American, who just bought Kilhenny Castle, prompts Darcy to cancel his engagement in an effort to spare Georgie scandal.
Bitter Lemon
Chain of Custody by Anita Nair (Nov. 15, trade paper, $14.95, ISBN 978-1-908524-74-4). What does 13-year-old Nandita’s disappearance have to do with the murder of a well-known lawyer in a gated community in Bangalore, India? Inspector Gowda Gowda is soon embroiled in the investigation of a child-trafficking racket.
Bloomsbury
The Secrets of Wishtide by Kate Saunders (Sept. 13, hardcover, $26, ISBN 978-1-63286-449-9). Laetitia Rodd, the widow of an archdeacon, makes her living as a highly discreet private investigator. Her barrister brother, Frederick Tyson, brings to her attention a case that takes her to Lincolnshire, where she goes undercover as a family’s new governess.
Crooked Lane
These Honored Dead: A Lincoln and Speed Mystery by Jonathan F. Putnam (Aug. 9, hardcover, $25.99, ISBN 978-1-62953-777-1). In 1837, Springfield, Ill., merchant Joshua Speed becomes friends with a freshly minted lawyer named Abraham Lincoln. When an orphan is found murdered and suspicion falls on her aunt, Speed seeks to clear the aunt’s good name, with the legal expertise of his unusual new friend.
Delacorte
Night School: A Jack Reacher Novel by Lee Child (Nov. 7, hardcover, $28.99, ISBN 978-0-8041-7880-8). Set in 1996, Child’s 21st Jack Reacher novel finds him still in the army.
A jihadist sleeper cell in Hamburg, Germany, has received an unexpected visitor—a Saudi courier. A CIA asset, undercover inside the cell, has overheard the courier whisper a chilling message: “The American wants a hundred million dollars.”
Doubleday
The Whistler by John Grisham (Oct. 25, hardcover, $28.95, ISBN 978-0-385-54119-0). Grisham takes his irresistible blend of legal savvy and page-turning storytelling to a new level in a novel filled with an unforgettable cast of characters and the author’s trademark twists and turns. Readers will be kept guessing until the very last page.
Dutton
Home by Harlan Coben (Sept. 20, hardcover, $28, ISBN 978-0-525-95510-8). Kidnappers grab two boys from wealthy families and demand ransom, then go silent. No trace of the boys ever surfaces, until 10 years later when Myron Bolitar believes he has located one of the boys, now a teenager. Where has the boy been and what does he know about the fate of his missing friend? 1 million announced first printing.
Flatiron
The Dry by Jane Harper (Jan. 10, hardcover, $25.99, ISBN 978-1-250-10560-8). In this debut from Australian author Harper, federal agent Aaron Falk hears that his childhood best friend, Luke, has been found dead after committing a terrible crime. Twenty years ago, the boys were each other’s alibi when Falk was accused of murder. Can there be a connection? 75,000 announced first printing.
Forge
The Dread Line by Bruce DeSilva (Sept. 6, hardcover, $25.99, ISBN 978-0-7653-7433-2). A number of minor problems, including a cat that keeps leaving its kills on his porch, are distracting former investigative reporter Liam Mulligan from a big case—murder charges against a star player for the New England Patriots.
Gallic
The Eskimo Solution by Pascal Garnier, trans. by Emily Boyce and Jane Aitken (Sept. 13, trade paper, $13.95, ISBN 978-1-910477-22-9). A crime author writing a story about a man who decides to do his cash-strapped friends a favor by hastening their parents’ demise, finds reality and fiction overlapping during a stay in Normandy.
Grand Central
Sting by Sandra Brown (Aug. 16, hardcover, $26, ISBN 978-1-4555-8120-7). When Jordie Bennet and Shaw Kinnard locked eyes across a rundown bayou bar, something definitely sparked between them. Unfortunately, romance wasn’t in the air; Shaw Kinnard was there to kill her.
Grove/Atlantic/Mysterious
The Old Man by Thomas Perry (Jan. 3, hardcover, $26, ISBN 978-0-8021-2586-6). Dan Chase appears to be a harmless retiree in Vermont with two big mutts and a grown daughter he keeps in touch with over the phone. But most 60-year-old widowers don’t have multiple driver’s licenses, savings stockpiled in banks across the country, and a bugout kit with two Beretta Nanos stashed in the spare bedroom closet.
Harper
A Simple Favor by Darcey Bell (Jan. 10, hardcover, $25.99, ISBN 978-0-06-249777-2). Lonely widow Stephanie, the mother of five-year-old Miles, is happy to do a favor for sophisticated career-woman Emily by picking up Emily’s son Nicky, who’s Miles’s best friend, from the boys’ Connecticut school one afternoon. Emily promises to pick up Nicky that evening, but she never shows up.
Holt
Golden Lane by Benjamin Black (Nov. 8, hardcover, $28, ISBN 978-1-62779-517-3). Christian Stern, an ambitious young scholar, arrives in Prague in the bitter winter of 1599, intent on making his fortune at the court of the Holy Roman Emperor, the eccentric Rudolf II. The night of his arrival, Christian stumbles upon the body of a young woman in an alley hard by Rudolf’s great castle. Soon he’s in trouble.
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Hell Fire by Karin Fossum, trans. by Kari Dixon (Aug. 30, hardcover, $24, ISBN 978-0-544-63337-7). Insp. Konrad Sejer looks into the mysterious murder of a single mother and her five-year-old son. Who would brutally stab a defenseless woman and her child? Sejer begins a hunt for the killer that will eventually lead to a heartbreaking conclusion.
Kensington
Unpunished by Lisa Black (Jan. 31, hardcover, $25, ISBN 978-1-4967-0190-9). When a copy editor at the Cleveland Herald is found hanging above the grinding wheels of the newspaper assembly line, a wide strap wrapped around his throat, forensic investigator Maggie Gardiner has her suspicions about this apparent suicide inside the tsunami of tensions that is the news industry today.
Knopf
Razor Girl by Carl Hiaasen (Sept. 6, hardcover, $27.95, ISBN 978-0-385-34974-1). When Hollywood agent Lane Coolman’s car is bashed from behind on the road from Miami to the Florida Keys, what appears to be an ordinary accident is anything but. Behind the wheel of the other car is Merry Mansfield—the eponymous Razor Girl—and the crash scam is only the beginning of events that spiral crazily out of control. 300,000-copy announced first printing.
Little, Brown
Rather Be the Devil by Ian Rankin (Jan. 31, hardcover, $26, ISBN 978-0-316-34257-5). Det. Insp. John Rebus, as incapable of settling into his retirement as he is of playing by the rules, investigates a cold case from the 1970s involving a gorgeous and wealthy woman socialite who was found dead in a bedroom at one of Edinburgh’s most luxurious hotels.
LB/Mulholland
IQ by Joe Ide (Oct. 18, hardcover, $26, ISBN 978-0-316-26772-4). In this debut thriller set in one of L.A.’s toughest neighborhoods, a loner and high school dropout has taken it upon himself to help solve the cases the police can’t or won’t touch. They call him IQ. His unassuming nature disguises a relentless determination and a fierce intelligence.
Minotaur
The One Man by Andrew Gross (Aug. 23, hardcover, $26.99, ISBN 978-1-250-07950-3). In 1944, Nathan Blum, who works behind a desk at an intelligence office in Washington, D.C., is sent into Auschwitz to help one man escape: physics professor Alfred Mendel, one of only two people in the world with key knowledge that could make a difference to the success of the top-secret Manhattan Project. 125,000-copy announced first printing.
Mira
Only Daughter by Anna Snoekstra (Sept. 20, trade paper, $15.99, ISBN 978-0-7783-1944-3). In 2003, 16-year-old Rebecca Winter disappears. Eleven years later, a young woman, desperate after being arrested, claims to be the missing Bec. Soon the imposter is living Bec’s life, but she realizes that whoever took Bec is still at large, and that she’s in imminent danger.
Morrow
Chaos: A Scarpetta Novel by Patricia Cornwell (Nov. 1, hardcover, $28.99, ISBN 978-0-06-243668-9). On an early autumn day, a young woman is killed while riding her bicycle along the Charles River. It appears she was struck by lightning—except the weather is perfectly clear. Kay Scarpetta, the Cambridge (Mass.) Forensic Center’s director and chief, decides that this is no accidental act of God.
Oceanview
A Kind of Justice by Renee James (Oct. 4, hardcover, $26.95, ISBN 978-1-60809-213-0). Against the odds, Bobbi Logan, a transgender woman, has become one of Chicago’s most celebrated hair stylists, but she finds herself in big trouble after a hateful police detective sets out to convict her of the five-year-old murder of a sexual predator.
Pegasus Crime
Echoes of Sherlock Holmes: Stories Inspired by the Holmes Canon, edited by Laurie R. King and Leslie S. Klinger (Oct. 11, hardcover, $24.95, ISBN 978-1-68177-225-7). In this follow-up to The Company of Sherlock Holmes, expert Sherlockians King and Klinger put forth the question: what happens when great writers who are not known as Sherlock Holmes devotees admit to being inspired by Conan Doyle’s stories?
Penguin
Friday on My Mind: A Frieda Klein Mystery by Nicci French (Oct. 4, trade paper, $16, ISBN 978-0-14-312722-2). London psychotherapist Frieda Klein becomes the prime suspect in a murder after a bloated corpse turns up in the Thames, throat slashed, and the only clue is a hospital wristband reading F. Klein.
Permanent
A Taste for Blood and Ashes: A Jared McKean Mystery by Jaden Terrell (Sept. 1, hardcover, $29, ISBN 978-1-57962-435-4). When Nashville PI Jared McKean investigates a suspicious barn fire, he finds evidence of soring, the practice of using painful shoeing to affect the gait of a Tennessee Walking Horse. But the barn’s owners are known antisoring activists.
Poisoned Pen
The Singularity Race by Mark de Castrique (Nov. 1, hardcover, $26.95, ISBN 978-1-4642-0597-2). Rusty Mullins, ex-Secret Service, has never heard of the Singularity, the looming point of no return when Artificial Intelligence surpasses human cognitive abilities, but he soon learns plenty about it after taking on what’s supposed to be a routine mission guarding a Chinese scientist who knows its secret.
Polis
South Village by Rob Hart (Oct. 11, trade paper, $14.95, ISBN 978-1-943818-17-4). Ash McKenna, who used to be an amateur private investigator, ends up on a friend’s commune in the Georgia woods, binge-drinking cheap whiskey to keep the nightmares at bay, and waiting for his passport so he can flee the country. Then Crusty Pete, one of the commune’s residents, falls to his death from a rope bridge.
Prometheus Books/Seventh Street
Where I Can See You by Larry D. Sweazy (Jan. 10, trade paper, $15.95, ISBN 978-1-63388-211-9). Midwest detective Hud Matthews is still haunted by the disappearance of his mother when he was eight years old. He begins his own investigation to find out what really happened so many years before.
Putnam
Burning Bright by Nicholas Petrie (Jan. 10, hardcover, $26, ISBN 978-0-399-17457-5). War veteran Peter Ash seeks peace and quiet among the Northern California redwoods, but instead finds a woman on the run: investigative journalist June Cassidy, who escaped a kidnapping by men who are still on her trail. She suspects they’re after something belonging to her late mother, a software designer.
Quercus
Coffin Road by Peter May (Oct. 4, hardcover, $26.99, ISBN 978-1-68144-389-8). Homicide detective George Gunn crosses the ocean to a remote lighthouse on a rock in the North Atlantic to investigate a murder. More than a century earlier, three lighthouse keepers on the tiny island disappeared and were never seen again.
Random House
Surrender, New York by Caleb Carr (Aug. 23, hardcover, $30, ISBN 978-0-679-45569-1). Criminal psychologist Trajan Jones, who was fired from the NYPD, now lives in exile in upstate New York, where he teaches an online course in criminal investigation. But Trajan is called back to duty when a friend in county law enforcement consults him on the suspicious death of several local kids.
St. Martin’s
Damaged: A Rosato & DiNunzio Novel by Lisa Scottoline (Aug. 16, hardcover, $27.99, ISBN 978-1-250-09962-4). Mary DiNunzio, a partner at the all-female law firm of Rosato & DiNunzio, sues the Philadelphia school district to get help for a middle-school boy with emotional problems. As she becomes more involved in the case, she puts everything, including her engagement to her longtime boyfriend, on the line.
Scribner
Beyond the Truth: Hanne Wilhelmsen Book Seven by Anne Holt, trans. by Anne Bruce (Dec. 6, hardcover, $26, ISBN 978-1-5011-2345-0). Shortly before Christmas, Chief Insp. Hanne Wilhelmsen, chief inspector of the Norwegian Police, is called to the scene of multiple murders. Four people are found shot dead at the home of the wealthy Stahlberg family: shipping merchants notorious for family disputes and lawsuits.
Severn
Mr. Campion’s Fault by Mike Ripley (Sept. 1, hardcover, $29.95, ISBN 978-0-7278-8625-5). Margery Allingham’s Albert Campion returns in an adventure in which the accidental road death of a senior English master at the Ash Grange School for Boys has serious repercussions for Campion’s son, Rupert, and daughter-in-law Perdita.
Simon & Schuster
Fidelity by Jan Fedarcyk (Oct. 11, hardcover, $25, ISBN 978-1-4767-3386-9). This debut novel from “the FBI’s First Lady” (Vanity Fair) introduces a brilliant young special agent, Kay Malloy, whose assignment to the Counterintelligence Program in New York City has devastating consequences—both personal and professional.
S&S/Gallery
Insidious by Catherine Coulter (Aug. 9, hardcover, $27, ISBN 978-1-5011-5029-6). In Coulter’s 20th thriller in her FBI series, FBI agents Savich and Sherlock must discover who is trying to murder 86-year-old Venus Rasmussen, a powerful, wealthy society figure. They soon find out that the danger may be closer than expected.
Soho Crime
Fields Where They Lay: A Junior Bender Novel by Timothy Hallinan (Oct. 25, hardcover, $25.95, ISBN 978-1-61695-746-9). A Russian gangster hires burglar Junior Bender to look into a shoplifting problem at a Hollywood mall he owns. But Junior’s surveillance operation doesn’t go well: within two days, two people are dead. It’s obvious that shoplifting is the least of the mall’s problems.
Sourcebooks Landmark
A Deadly Affection by Cuyler Overholt (Sept. 6, trade paper, $15.99, ISBN 978-1-4926-3736-3). In 1907 New York, psychiatrist Genevieve Summerford is one of the first women practicing in an advanced new field of psychology. When one of her patients is arrested for murder, a murder Genevieve fears she may have unwittingly provoked, she seeks to clear her patient’s name and relieve her own guilty conscience.
Subterranean
The Authentic William James: A Sebastian Becker Novel by Stephen Gallagher (Sept. 30, hardcover, $40, ISBN 978-1-59606-779-0). In 1913, a fiery tragedy leaves dozens dead and England’s leaders maneuvering for an answer to stave off political disaster. Former police detective Sebastian Becker, who has a gift for determining such matters, must evaluate the confessed arsonist’s sanity.
Turner
The St. Lucia Island Club: A John Le Brun Novel by Brent Monahan (Aug. 9, trade paper, $18.95, ISBN 978-1-68162-041-1). In 1910, New York City detective John Le Brun and his wife set sail for a long-awaited honeymoon on the Caribbean island of St. Lucia, where, contrary to expectations, they encounter a land teeming with racial, social, and economic tensions.
Viking
The Trespasser by Tana French (Oct. 4, hardcover, $27, ISBN 978-0-670-02633-3). Det. Antoinette Conway and her partner, Stephen Moran, of Dublin’s Murder Squad have a new case that looks like yet another by-the-numbers lovers’ quarrel gone bad, but other detectives are pushing Antoinette and Steve to arrest the female victim’s boyfriend, fast. The pair soon learn that all is not as it seems.
Vintage
The Big Book of Jack the Ripper, edited by Otto Penzler (Oct. 4, trade paper, $25, ISBN 978-1-101-97113-0), centers on the historical enigma whose name has become synonymous with fear: Jack the Ripper. Among the 41 tales are contributions by such contemporary masters as Jeffery Deaver, Loren D. Estleman, and Lyndsay Faye.
