Major authors deliver a number of highly anticipated books this season, while talented newcomers demonstrate the enduring strength of the mystery/thriller genre with impressive first novels.
Top 10
Artemis
Andy Weir. Crown, Nov. 14
Weir follows up his bestselling debut, The Martian, with another science fiction thriller, this one set on the first and only city on the moon.
Bluebird, Bluebird
Attica Locke. LB/Mulholland, Sept. 12
Edgar-finalist Locke launches her first series with a timely thriller. Black Texas Ranger Darren Matthews investigates two racially charged murders in a small Texas town.
The Cuban Affair
Nelson DeMille. Simon & Schuster, Sept. 19
For his 20th novel, bestseller DeMille surprises readers with a new character and a new setting. In the fall of 2015, a beautiful woman persuades Key West charter boat captain Daniel “Mac” MacCormick to travel to Cuba on a dangerous mission.
Glass Houses
Louise Penny. Minotaur, Aug. 29
In the 13th novel featuring Quebec’s Chief Insp. Armand Gamache, bestseller Penny shatters the conventions of the crime novel to explore what Gandhi called the court of conscience—a court that supersedes all others.
A Legacy of Spies
John le Carré. Viking, Sept. 5
The Cold War past of retired spy Peter Guillam, a disciple of George Smiley, comes back to haunt him in this thriller, which looks back to its distinguished predecessors, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.
The Midnight Line: A Jack Reacher Novel
Lee Child. Delacorte, Nov. 7
The 22nd Jack Reacher novel finds the lone vigilante on the road in Middle America. Reacher’s efforts to locate the owner of a West Point class ring he discovers in a pawn shop lead him into trouble.
Origin
Dan Brown. Doubleday, Oct. 3
The author of The Da Vinci Code brings back Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon for another adventure that mixes religion, science, history, and art.
Sleeping Beauties
Stephen and Owen King. Scribner, Sept. 26
MWA Grand Master King teams with the younger of his two writer sons, Owen (Double Feature), on a supernatural thriller, in which women go to a strange place when they sleep.
Unraveling Oliver
Liz Nugent. S&S/Scout, Aug. 22
A #1 bestseller in the author’s native Ireland and winner of the Irish Book Award’s Crime Novel of the Year, Nugent’s debut will remind many of Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley.
The Widows of Malabar Hill
Sujata Massey. Soho Crime, Jan. 9
Agatha Award–winner Massey introduces a lady sleuth, Perveen Mistry, in a new historical series set in 1920s Bombay.
Mysteries & Thrillers Listings
Akashic
New Haven Noir, edited by Amy Bloom (Aug. 1, trade paper, $15.95 ISBN 978-1-61775-541-5). New Haven may be best known for Yale University, but its criminal dimensions run as deep as anywhere else on the Eastern Seaboard. Contributors include Stephen L. Carter, Chris Knopf, Karen E. Olson, and Jessica Speart.
Amazon/Thomas & Mercer
Close to Home by Robert Dugoni (Sept. 5, trade paper, $15.95, ISBN 978-1-5420-4501-8). Seattle homicide detective Tracy Crosswhite discovers that the suspect in a fatal hit-and-run is an active-duty serviceman at a local naval base. When a key piece of evidence goes missing and he’s cleared of charges, Tracy knows she can’t turn her back on this kind of injustice.
Atlantic Monthly
Insidious Intent by Val McDermid (Dec. 5, hardcover, $26, ISBN 978-0-8021-2716-7). Psychologist Tony Hill and former police detective Carol Jordan hunt for a serial killer who victimizes single women who attend weddings alone. Their bodies turn up in their own burned-out cars in remote locations in the north of England.
Atria/37 Ink
Lightning Men by Thomas Mullen (Sept. 12, hardcover, $26, ISBN 978-1-5011-3879-9). Officer Denny Rakestraw and other Atlanta policemen have their hands full in 1950 as color lines shift and racial tensions simmer. When black families move into Rake’s formerly all-white neighborhood, Rake’s Klansman brother-in-law launches a scheme to rally his fellow Kluxers to save their neighborhood.
Ballantine
An Echo of Murder: A William Monk Novel by Anne Perry (Sept. 19, hardcover, $28, ISBN 978-0-425-28501-5). A Hungarian immigrant is dismembered near London’s River Thames. As identical murders pop up around the city, Commander Monk confronts the unsettling options: could it be the work of a secret society? a serial madman? or is a xenophobic Brit targeting foreigners?
Bantam
Bryant & May: Wild Chamber: A Peculiar Crimes Unit Mystery by Christopher Fowler (Dec. 5, hardcover, $27, ISBN 978-1-101-88706-6). In London’s Regent’s Park, a man taking photographs early on a summer morning sees a girl walking her dog. Then the dog and the girl vanish into thin air—and suddenly the Peculiar Crimes Unit is investigating the most baffling case of its career.
Berkley
A Tale of Two Kitties by Sofie Kelly (Sept. 5, hardcover, $23, ISBN 978-0-399-58457-2). Librarian Kathleen Paulson’s two cats, Hercules and Owen, have helped her to solve mysteries in the past—so she has learned to trust their instincts. But she will need to rely on them more than ever when a 20-year-old scandal leads to murder.
Counterpoint
Gangster Nation by Tod Goldberg (Sept. 12, hardcover, $26, ISBN 978-1-61902-723-7). For Vegas rabbi David Cohen, who’s former Chicago hit man Sal Cupertine, everything is coming up gold: temple membership is on the rise, the new private school is raking it in, and the mortuary and cemetery—where Cohen has been laundering bodies for the mob—is minting cash. But Cohen wants out.
Crooked Lane
Nine Lessons: A Josephine Tey Mystery by Nicola Upson (Oct. 10, hardcover, $26.99, ISBN 978-1-68331-321-2). The discovery of a church’s organist in an opened grave, together with a photograph of a manor house and a cryptic note, leads Det. Chief Insp. Archie Penrose to Cambridge, where a series of vicious attacks against women in the university town are spreading fear and suspicion through the community.
Crown
Artemis by Andy Weir (Nov. 14, hardcover, $27, ISBN 978-0-5534-4812-2). Life on Artemis, the first and only city on the moon, is tough if you’re not a rich tourist. So smuggling in the occasional harmless bit of contraband barely counts, right? Not when you’ve got debts to pay and your job as a porter barely covers the rent.
Delacorte
The Midnight Line: A Jack Reacher Novel by Lee Child (Nov. 7, hardcover, $28.99, ISBN 978-0-399-59348-2). While traveling through rural Wisconsin, Jack Reacher comes across a West Point class ring in a pawn shop. A woman cadet’s ring. Why would she pawn it? Reacher’s search for the owner leads him to some surprising answers.
Doubleday
Origin by Dan Brown (Oct. 3, hardcover, $29.95, ISBN 978-0-385-51423-1). The author of The Da Vinci Code interweaves codes, science, religion, history, art, and architecture in his new novel starring Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon. An earthshaking discovery could answer humankind’s two most enduring questions.
Dutton
The Scarred Woman by Jussi Adler-Olsen (Sept. 19, hardcover, $28, ISBN 978-0-525-95495-8). Det. Carl Mørck of Department Q, Copenhagen’s cold cases division, meets his toughest challenge when the dark, troubled past of one of his own team members collides with a sinister unsolved murder.
Ecco
The Blinds by Adam Sternbergh (Aug. 1, hardcover, $26.99, ISBN 978-0-06-266134-0). In the Blinds, a rural Texas town populated by misfits who don’t know if they’ve perpetrated a crime, Sheriff Calvin Cooper keeps an uneasy peace—but after a suicide and a murder in quick succession, the town’s residents revolt.
ECW
Whipped: An Arthur Beauchamp Novel by William Deverell (Sept. 19, hardcover, $24.95, ISBN 978-1-77041-390-0). Montreal journalist Lou Sabatino is sucked into the quirky world of a conniving Russian dominatrix, who has secretly recorded herself putting the whip to the bare bottom of a high-ranking federal cabinet minister. It’s the scoop of the century, but does Lou dare tell all?
Farrar, Straus and Giroux/MCD
Safe by Ryan Gattis (Aug. 1, hardcover, $26, ISBN 978-0-374-25337-0). Ricky Mendoza Jr., a former gangbanger now working as a safecracker for the DEA, stumbles on an opportunity to repay the debts of his past. All he has to do is crack a safe and steal drug money from under the noses of the gangs and the feds without getting caught.
Forge
City of Saviors by Rachel Howzell Hall (Aug. 8, hardcover, $26.99, ISBN 978-0-7653-8119-4). LAPD homicide detective Elouise “Lou” Norton investigates the death of 73-year-old Eugene Washington, who apparently died of food poisoning from a holiday barbecue. But Lou suspects foul play and is convinced that the murderer is one of the church congregants Washington considered his only family.
Grand Central
City of Endless Night by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child (Jan. 9, hardcover, $27, ISBN 978-1-4555-3694-8). What begins as a manhunt for the missing daughter of a wealthy tech billionaire becomes something altogether different when the young woman’s body is discovered in an abandoned warehouse in Queens, the head nowhere to be found. Special agent Pendergast investigates. 250,000-copy announced first printing.
Grove/Atlantic/Mysterious
Wolf’s Revenge by Lachlan Smith (Oct. 3, hardcover, $25, ISBN 978-0-8021-2707-5). Attorney-detective Leo Maxwell seeks an exit strategy from his family’s deepening entanglement with a ruthless prison-based gang. Leo, his brother, Teddy, and the rest of the family are forced into a winner-take-all confrontation with men who don’t care how many innocents they harm in achieving their goals.
Hachette/Redhook
The Walls by Hollie Overton (Aug. 8, hardcover, $25, ISBN 978-0-316-26876-9). Prison counselor Kristy Tucker is serving her own life sentence—one of constant terror at the hands of her abusive husband, Lance. But Kristy is a survivor, and as Lance’s violence escalates, the inmates she’s worked with have planted an idea she simply can’t shake. 75,000-copy announced first printing.
Hard Case Crime
Quarry’s Climax by Max Allan Collins (Oct. 10, trade paper, $9.95, ISBN 978-1-78565-180-9). Evangelists, feminists, and local watchdog groups all want Max Climer’s all-hours strip club out of business. But someone wants more than that and has hired a killer to end Max’s career permanently. Only another hit man, Quarry, can keep Climer from becoming a casualty in the sexual revolution.
Harper
Fear by Dirk Kurbjuweit (Oct. 3, hardcover, $25.99, ISBN 978-0-06-267834-8). Randolph Tiefenthaler insists he had a normal childhood, though he grew up with a father who kept 30 loaded guns in the house. A modestly successful architect with a wonderful family and a beautiful home, he soon finds his life compromised when his father is imprisoned for murder.
Harlequin/Mira
Lie to Me by J.T. Ellison (Sept. 5, trade paper, $15.99, ISBN 978-0-7783-3095-0). Sutton and Ethan Montclair seem made for each other, but the couple are consumed by professional and personal betrayals and financial woes. As tensions mount, Sutton disappears, leaving behind a note saying not to look for her. 200,000-copy announced first printing.
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
The Blood Card by Elly Griffiths (Sept. 5, hardcover, $25, ISBN 978-0-544-75030-2). In the third Magic Men mystery, a threat of mass violence looms over Elizabeth II’s coronation. Can Det. Insp. Edgar Stephens and magician Max Mephisto crack the case and save the crown?
Kensington
Direct Fire by A.J. Tata (Dec. 26, hardcover, $26, ISBN 978-1-4967-0664-5). When Jake Mahegan receives a distress call from General Savage in North Carolina, he rushes to the commander’s home—and walks right into an ambush. When the smoke clears, Mahegan is alive, but the implications of the attack are clear: the terrorists are here—and no one is safe.
Knopf
The Girl Who Takes an Eye for an Eye: A Lisbeth Salander Novel, Continuing Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Series by David Lagercrantz (Sept. 12, hardcover, $27.95, ISBN 978-0-451-49432-0). Lisbeth Salander has never been able to uncover the most telling facts of her traumatic childhood. Now, when she sees a chance to discover them once and for all, she enlists the help of investigative journalist Mikael Blomkvist.
Little, Brown
Two Kinds of Truth by Michael Connelly (Oct. 31, hardcover, $29, ISBN 978-0-316-22590-8). Harry Bosch, now a volunteer working cold cases for the San Fernando PD, and the town’s three-person detective squad sift through the clues to a pharmacist’s murder. The trail leads into the dangerous, big business world of pill mills and prescription drug abuse. 750,000-copy announced first printing.
Little, Brown/Mulholland
Bluebird, Bluebird by Attica Locke (Sept. 12, hardcover, $26, ISBN 978-0-316-36329-7). Darren Mathews, a black Texas Ranger, travels to the small town of Lark, where two murders—a black lawyer from Chicago and a local white woman—have stirred up a hornet’s nest of resentment. Darren must solve the crimes—and save himself in the process—before Lark’s long-simmering racial fault lines erupt.
MacLehose
Three Days and a Life by Pierre Lemaitre (Nov. 7, hardcover, $26.99, ISBN 978-1-68144-178-8). In 1999, in a small French town, 12-year-old Antoine Courtin accidentally kills a young neighbor girl in the woods near his home. Panicked, he conceals the body and, to his relief, he’s not suspected of any connection to her disappearance—until more than a decade later.
Minotaur
Glass Houses by Louise Penny (Aug. 29, hardcover, $28.99, ISBN 978-1-250-06619-0). When a mysterious figure appears on the village green on a cold November day in Three Pines, Armand Gamache, now chief superintendent of the Sûreté du Québec, knows something is seriously wrong. Yet he does nothing.
Morrow
The Good Daughter by Karin Slaughter (Aug. 22, hardcover, $27.99, ISBN 978-0-06-243024-3). Decades after a horrific confrontation that left her mother dead and her sister traumatized, a New York lawyer returns to her hometown of Atlanta to assist her father in saving the life of a young woman accused of a school shooting. 200,000-copy announced first printing.
Norton
The Quantum Spy by David Ignatius (Nov. 7, hardcover, $25.95, ISBN 978-0-393-25415-0). A hyperfast quantum computer is the digital equivalent of a nuclear bomb: whoever possesses one will be able to shred any encryption in existence, effectively owning the digital world. The question is: who will build it first, the United States or China?
Overlook
A Whispered Name: A Father Anselm Thriller by William Brodrick (Sept. 19, hardcover, $27.95, ISBN 978-1-4683-1115-0). In the Larkwood Priory, Father Anselm is deeply dismayed by an allegation against Herbert Moore, one of the priory’s founding fathers. The claim is inconceivable, but Anselm soon learns that Herbert did indeed have secrets in his past that he kept hidden all his life.
Pegasus CRIME
Winter Warning: An Isaac Sidel Novel by Jerome Charyn (Oct. 1, hardcover, $25.95, ISBN 978-1-68177-348-3). Isaac Sidel thought he’d only be vice president, but the president-elect has been forced to resign or face indictment for his crooked land deals—and Sidel becomes the accidental president. A maverick who defies both the Republicans and the Democrats, Sidel has enemies who want him dead.
Penguin
The Pyramid of Mud by Andrea Camilleri, trans. by Stephen Sartarelli (Jan. 2, trade paper, $16, ISBN 978-0-14-312808-3). Sicily’s Inspector Montalbano investigates the murder of a man found dead on a muddy building site. Half naked and shot in the back, the victim seems to have fled into a tunnel formed by large pipes for the water supply system.
Poisoned Pen
Crossing the Lines by Sulari Gentill (Aug. 1, trade paper, $15.95, ISBN 978-1-4642-0916-1). A successful writer, Madeleine, creates a character, Edward, and begins to imagine his life: Edward is also an author, in love with a woman, Willow, who’s married to a man Edward loathes, and who loathes him, but Edward and Willow stay close friends. Metafictional complications—and murder—ensue.
Polis
Dark Chapter by Winnie M. Li (Sept. 12, hardcover, $26, ISBN 978-1-943818-62-4). One afternoon in West Belfast, Ireland, a chance meeting between Vivian, a cosmopolitan Taiwanese-American tourist, and Johnny, a 15-year-old neglected Irish teenager, results in a horrifying act of violence. In the aftermath, both Johnny and Vivian are forced to confront the chain of events that led to the attack.
Prometheus Books/Seventh Street
The Deep Dark Descending by Allen Eskens (Oct. 3, trade paper, $15.95, ISBN 978-1-63388-355-0). Homicide detective Max Rupert never fully accepted his wife’s death, even when he believed that a reckless hit-and-run driver was the cause. But when he learns that in fact she was murdered, he devotes himself to hunting down her killers.
Putnam/Wood
Y Is for Yesterday by Sue Grafton (Aug. 22, hardcover, $29, ISBN 978-0-399-16385-2). In 1979, four teenage boys from an elite private school sexually assault a 14-year-old classmate—and film the attack. The tape goes missing and the suspected thief, a fellow classmate, is murdered. Later, one boy turns state’s evidence and two of his peers are convicted, but the ringleader escapes without a trace.
Quercus
The Sons: Made in Sweden, Part II by Anton Svensson (Jan. 9, hardcover, $26.99, ISBN 978-1-68144-342-3). Recently released from prison, Leo Duvnjac plans to steal more than 100 million Swedish crowns from Sweden’s largest police station and then disappear forever. Detective Broncks quickly figures out that Leo is up to something and vows to stop him once and for all.
Scribner
Sleeping Beauties by Stephen and Owen King (Sept. 26, hardcover, $32.50, ISBN 978-1-5011-6340-1). In the future, something strange happens when women go to sleep; they go to another place. The men of our world are abandoned, left to their increasingly primal desires.
Severn House
Mr. Campion’s Abdication by Mike Ripley (Nov. 1, hardcover, $28.99, ISBN 978-0-7278-8735-1). Margery Allingham’s Mr. Campion finds himself masquerading as technical adviser to a very suspicious but glamorous Italian film producer and her crew hunting for buried treasure in the Suffolk village of Heronhoe near Pontisbright, which used to host trysts between Edward VIII and Mrs. Wallis Simpson.
Simon & Schuster
The Cuban Affair by Nelson DeMille (Sept. 19, hardcover, $28, ISBN 978-1-5011-0172-4). Daniel “Mac” MacCormick, a U.S. Army veteran turned Key West fishing boat captain, agrees to run a charter to Cuba, where he finds himself face-to-face with some of the darkest episodes in Cuban-American history.
S&S/Scout
Unraveling Oliver by Liz Nugent (Aug. 22, hardcover, $26, ISBN 978-1-5011-6775-1). Oliver Ryan, a successful children’s book author, assaults his devoted wife, Alice, one evening at home after dinner, leaving her in a coma. Why would he do such a thing?
Soho Crime
The Widows of Malabar Hill by Sujata Massey (Jan. 9, hardcover, $26.95, ISBN 978-1-61695-778-0). In Bombay in 1921, Perveen Mistry, one of the first female lawyers in India, checks the will of a wealthy Muslim mill owner, who has left three widows behind. When she notices that all three wives have signed over their full inheritance to a charity, she decides something’s fishy and investigates.
Sourcebooks Landmark
Homicide for the Holidays by Cheryl Honigford (Oct. 10, trade paper, $15.99, ISBN 978-1-4926-2864-4). In this WWII-era mystery, radio star Vivian Witchell gets a broadcast-worthy drama for Christmas when she discovers a dangerous secret regarding her late father.
St. Martin’s
Emma in the Night by Wendy Walker (Aug. 8, hardcover, $26.99, ISBN 978-1-250-14143-9). Three years after the Tanner sisters disappeared—15-year-old Cass and 17-year-old Emma—Cass returns, without Emma. Cass’s story is one of kidnapping and betrayal, of a mysterious island where the two were held. But to forensic psychiatrist Abby Winter, something doesn’t add up.
Viking
A Legacy of Spies by John le Carré (Sept. 5, hardcover, $28, ISBN 978-0-7352-2511-4). Peter Guillam, staunch colleague and disciple of George Smiley of the British Secret Service, is living out his old age on the family farmstead in Brittany when a letter from his old Service summons him to London. The reason? His Cold War past has come back to claim him.
Vintage Crime/Black Lizard
The Big Book of Rogues and Villains, edited by Otto Penzler (Oct. 3, trade paper, $25, ISBN 978-0-525-43248-7). This reprint anthology brings together the most cunning, ruthless, and brilliant criminals in mystery fiction, for the biggest compendium of bad guys (and girls) ever assembled.
