Spies abound this season, from a young Shakespeare who serves the English cause in Venice to a contemporary Syrian boy who has vital information for MI6. Detectives, notably the PI in Jonathan Lethem’s latest, are also flourishing.
Top 10
Devil’s Day
Andrew Michael Hurley. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Oct. 2
British author Hurley’s unsettling second novel after The Loney examines the uneasy relationship between rural traditions and religious belief on the Lancashire moors.
The Feral Detective
Jonathan Lethem. Ecco, Nov. 6
In Lethem’s first detective novel since Motherless Brooklyn, PI Charlie Heist ventures into California’s Inland Empire in search of a missing girl on the behalf of client Phoebe Siegler, encountering all sorts of off-the-grid intrigue.
Firefly
Henry Porter. Mysterious, Oct. 2
In Porter’s timely chase thriller, a Syrian boy flees the Middle East with information about an impending terrorist attack in Europe. MI6 must find the boy before ISIS does.
Forever and a Day: A James Bond Novel
Anthony Horowitz. Harper, Nov. 6
Horowitz follows his James Bond novel Trigger Mortis, which drew on some unpublished Ian Fleming material, with a prequel about the archetypal British spy before he became 007.
The Man Who Came Uptown
George Pelecanos. Mulholland, Sept. 4
Drawing on his experience teaching prison inmates to read, Pelecanos crafts a novel in which ex-con Michael Hudson must choose between the lifestyles represented by the shady lawyer who got him out of prison on a technicality and the virtuous librarian who introduced him to books.
The Other Woman
Sandie Jones. Minotaur, Aug. 21
In this first novel, a psychological thriller about a young woman who finds herself at odds with her new boyfriend’s mother, British author Jones delivers a shocking final twist.
Red, White, Blue
Lea Carpenter. Knopf, Aug. 21
This intelligent literary thriller eschews the usual genre tropes in charting the efforts of a young woman to learn about the secret past of her late father, a banker who also spied for the CIA.
A Shot in the Dark: A Constable Twitten Mystery
Lynne Truss. Bloomsbury, Nov. 6
The author of Eats, Shoots and Leaves brings her customary wit to her first detective novel, set in 1957 in Brighton, England, and centered on the murder of a theater critic.
The Spy of Venice: A William Shakespeare Mystery
Benet Brandreth. Pegasus Crime, Aug. 7
In his first novel, Brandreth, the rhetoric coach for the Royal Shakespeare Company, turns young Will Shakespeare into a spy in those unknown years before he became a playwright in London.
The Witch Elm
Tana French. Viking, Oct. 9
Edgar-winner French is at her suspenseful best in this standalone, in which an Irishman, who’s always considered himself a lucky person, has to reassess his past in the light of a gruesome find on the grounds of his family’s ancestral home.
Mysteries & Thrillers Listings
Akashic
Baghdad Noir, edited by Samuel Shimon (Aug. 7, trade paper, $15.95, ISBN 978-1-61775-343-5). Most of the 14 entries in what the editor believes is probably the first collection of Iraqi crime fiction to focus on the aftermath of the 2003 American invasion are by contributors, 10 of them Iraqi, who will be unknown to U.S. readers.
Arcade
Acts of Allegiance by Peter Cunningham (Sept. 21, hardcover, $22.99, ISBN 978-1-62872-953-5). Irishman Marty Ransom enjoys a comfortable, boring life working in the economics section of the Department of External Affairs in Dublin. Then he gets lured into keeping tabs on the IRA and must walk a tightrope of conflicting yearnings and loyalties.
Atlantic Monthly
Broken Ground by Val McDermid (Dec. 4, hardcover, $26, ISBN 978-0-8021-2912-3). When Alice Somerville finally digs up her inheritance from her grandfather, who buried it in a Highland peat bog at the end of WWII, she finds an unwanted surprise—a body with a bullet hole between the eyes. Cold case detective Karen Pirie investigates.
Atria
Desolation Mountain by William Kent Krueger (Aug. 21, hardcover, $26, ISBN 978-1-5011-4746-3). Former sheriff Cork O’Connor and his son, Stephen, join the team investigating the crash of a private plane carrying a U.S. senator and her family on Desolation Mountain in northern Minnesota. The mysterious disappearances of several first responders compounds the tragedy.
Ballantine
Dark Tide Rising: A William Monk Novel by Anne Perry (Sept. 18, hardcover, $28, ISBN 978-0-399-17991-4). William Monk of the Thames River Police agrees to assist a local businessman in getting back his kidnapped wife during a ransom exchange. But when Monk and his men arrive at the meeting place, they’re attacked from all sides, and Monk wonders who could have given away their plans.
Bantam
The Prisoner in the Castle: A Maggie Hope Mystery by Susan Elia MacNeal (Aug. 7, hardcover, $26, ISBN 978-0-399-59382-6). In late 1942, Maggie Hope is sidelined at a top-secret British facility on a remote Scottish island along with others who know too much about the Allied war effort. Then the island’s residents start getting murdered, one by one.
Berkley Prime Crime
Four Funerals and Maybe a Wedding by Rhys Bowen (Aug. 7, hardcover, $26, ISBN 978-0-425-28352-3). Lady Georgiana Rannoch wishes that she and her fiancé had eloped as their July 1935 marriage date approaches. What she thought would be a simple wedding has been transformed into a grand affair, thanks to the queen’s attendance. Meanwhile, a gas leak in her bedroom leads her to fear someone wants her dead.
Bitter Lemon
The First Prehistoric Serial Killer and Other Stories by Teresa Solana, trans. by Peter Bush (Sept. 5, trade paper, $14.95, ISBN 978-1-912242-07-8). A lot of odd things happen in this story collection: statues decompose, two grandmothers turn into vengeful killers, and a prehistoric detective who’s on the verge of becoming the first religious charlatan looks into a triple murder that has unsettled the lives of innocent cave dwellers.
Bloomsbury
A Shot in the Dark: A Constable Twitten Mystery by Lynne Truss (Nov. 6, hardcover, $27, ISBN 978-1-63557-055-7). In 1957, famed theater critic A.S. Crystal is sitting in the Brighton Royal Theater with Constable Twitten, about to reveal the secret he knows about the still-unsolved Aldersgate stick-up case of 1945, when he’s shot dead. Twitten must solve the mystery of the Aldersgate stick-up in order to solve Crystal’s murder. 40,000-copy announced first printing.
Canongate
The Way of All Flesh by Ambrose Parry (Oct. 2, hardcover, $26, ISBN 978-1-78689-378-9). In 1847, young women are suffering similarly gruesome ends across Edinburgh’s Old Town. In the New Town, medical student Will Raven joins forces with housemaid Sarah Fisher to look deeper into these deaths. 35,000-copy announced first printing.
Constable & Robinson
The Frangipani Tree Mystery by Ovidia Yu (Sept. 4, trade paper, $13.99, ISBN 978-1-4721-2520-0). In 1936, in the Crown Colony of Singapore, the nanny looking after the acting governor’s daughter dies suddenly, and SuLin—a local aspiring journalist trying to escape an arranged marriage—takes her place. After another suspicious death, she helps British-born Chief Insp. Thomas LeFroy investigate.
Crooked Lane
The Confession by Jo Spain (Sept. 11, hardcover, $26.99, ISBN 978-1-68331-620-6). At the start of this psychological suspense novel, J.P. Carney attacks disgraced banker Harry McNamara in front of his wife, who’s too horrified to try to intervene. When Carney later turns himself in to the police and confesses to beating Harry to death, he also claims that the assault was not premeditated and that he didn’t know his victim’s identity. What, then, was his motive?
Delacorte
Past Tense: A Jack Reacher Novel by Lee Child (Nov. 5, hardcover, $28.99, ISBN 978-0-399-59351-2). In rural New Hampshire, Jack Reacher stops at a town he has never been to, his father’s birthplace. When Reacher asks about the old family home, he’s told no one named Reacher ever lived in the town. He knows his father left and never returned. Now Reacher wonders, was his father ever there in the first place?
Doubleday
The Reckoning by John Grisham (Oct. 23, hardcover, $28.95, ISBN 978-0-385-54415-3). Early one October morning in 1946, farmer Pete Banning, the patriarch of a prominent family in Clanton, Miss., walks into the local church and fatally shoots the Rev. Dexter Bell. Pete’s only statement about it—to the sheriff, to his defense attorney, to the judge, to his family and friends—is, “I have nothing to say.”
Dundurn
No Place for Wolverines: A Jenny Willson Mystery by Dave Butler (Nov. 6, trade paper, $16.99, ISBN 978-1-4597-3983-3). When park warden Jenny Willson begins a covert inquiry into a proposed ski hill in Yoho National Park, she’s quickly drawn into a web of political, environmental, and criminal intrigue that threatens to tear apart a small British Columbia town.
Ecco
The Feral Detective by Jonathan Lethem (Nov. 6, hardcover, $26.99, ISBN 978-0-06-285906-8). Phoebe Siegler hires Charles Heist, who has a knack for finding people who don’t want to be found, to help locate her friend’s missing daughter, Arabella. Their search takes them into California’s Inland Empire, where they must navigate the enclaves of hippies and vagabonds who live off the grid. 200,000-copy announced first printing.
ECW
Cape Diamond: A Frank Yakabuski Mystery by Ron Corbett (Oct. 23, trade paper, $15, ISBN 978-1-77041-395-5). Canadian detective Frank Yakabuski investigates a gruesome crime scene near the Continental Divide. A body has been left hanging from a schoolyard fence, with a large diamond in the victim’s mouth. It looks like a gang killing, but could it be related to a little girl’s kidnapping?
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Seventeen by Hideo Yokoyama, trans. by Louise Heal Kawai (Nov. 13, hardcover, $28, ISBN 978-0-374-26124-5). After a plane crashes near the office of the Kanto Times, the paper’s staff, including reporter Kazumasa Yuuki, is united by unimaginable horror and a once-in-a-lifetime scoop. Seventeen years later, Yuuki makes good on a promise that he made back then—one that holds the key to the tragedy’s last unsolved mystery.
Forge
Trust Me by Hank Phillippi Ryan (Aug. 28, hardcover, $25.99, ISBN 978-0-7653-9307-4). When journalist Mercer Hennessey agrees to write a true crime book about the trial of the Baby Boston murderer, Mercer is convinced that manipulative Ashlyn Bryant is guilty of killing her two-year-old daughter. But when Ashlyn is acquitted, Mercer has to write a very different story.
Grand Central
Tailspin by Sandra Brown (Aug. 7, hardcover, $27, ISBN 978-1-4555-7216-8). Pilot Rye Mallett meets more trouble than inclement weather when he tries to fly into a fogbound Georgia town and deliver a mysterious black box to Dr. Lambert. Sabotage causes him to crash-land, and he and Dr. Brynn O’Neal, who meets him on the ground, are in a 48-hour race to deliver the box before time runs out. 300,000-copy announced first printing.
Hard Case Crime
Charlesgate Confidential by Scott Von Doviak (Sept. 18, hardcover, $22.99, ISBN 978-1-78565-717-7). In this debut, a group of criminals pull off the art heist of the century in 1946 Boston. The thieves are caught, but the art isn’t recovered. The last surviving thief gets out of jail 40 years later and goes hunting for the missing loot—and 30 years after that, a new generation of treasure hunters search for the still-missing art.
Harper
Forever and a Day: A James Bond Novel by Anthony Horowitz (Nov. 6, hardcover, $26.99, ISBN 978-0-06-287280-7). In this origin story, James Bond gets his chance to earn his license to kill after the body of the original 007 surfaces in the waters off Marseilles. But first he must take on the brutal underworld of the French Riviera.
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Devil’s Day by Andrew Michael Hurley (Oct. 2, hardcover, $26, ISBN 978-1-328-48988-3). John Pentecost returns to the farm where he grew up in the Endlands, where his grandfather—the Gaffer—has recently died. Each year, the Gaffer had redrawn the village’s boundary lines as part of an effort to keep the sheep safe from the devil, but this year the locals begin to wonder whether their attempts to keep the devil at bay have failed.
Kensington
Little Comfort by Edwin Hill (Aug. 28, hardcover, $26, ISBN 978-1-4967-1590-6). Harvard librarian Hester Thursby helps track down lost people. Her new case is finding Sam Blaine, who fled his small New Hampshire town with his friend, Gabe DiPursio, as a teenager and has no desire to be found. After a dozen years, Sam and Gabe surface in Boston, and their bond is about to be tested as Hester closes in.
Knopf
Red, White, Blue by Lea Carpenter (Aug. 21, hardcover, $25.95, ISBN 978-1-5247-3214-1). When Noel, a New York City banker, dies in a mysterious skiing accident in Switzerland the day before his daughter Anna’s wedding, she’s consumed by grief. One day on her honeymoon in France, Anna meets an enigmatic stranger who once worked with Noel and has information about parts of her father’s life that Anna never knew. Back in New York, she learns even more disturbing secrets about his hidden past.
Little, Brown
Dark Sacred Night by Michael Connelly (Oct. 30, hardcover, $29, ISBN 978-0-316-48480-0). Early one morning at the Hollywood Station, LAPD Det. Renée Ballard discovers a stranger rifling through old file cabinets. The intruder is retired detective Harry Bosch, researching the cold case murder of a 15-year-old girl, Daisy Clayton. Ballard joins forces with Bosch to find out what happened to Daisy and finally bring her killer to justice.
Midnight Ink
The Question of the Dead Mistress by E.J. Copperman and Jeff Cohen (Oct. 8, trade paper, $15.99, ISBN 978-0-7387-5061-3). “Is my husband having an affair with a dead woman?” asks Ginny Fontaine. For Samuel Hoenig, the proprietor of the Questions Answered agency, the answer is no, since there’s absolutely no evidence that apparitions exist. But Samuel’s associate, Janet Washburn, isn’t so easily convinced.
Minotaur
The Other Woman by Sandie Jones (Aug. 21, hardcover, $26.99, ISBN 978-1-250-19198-4). Emily Havistock thinks she’s found a real catch in sexy London IT recruiter Adams Banks, until she meets Adam’s meddlesome widowed mum, Pammie, with whom he seems hopelessly enmeshed. Emily soon realizes that Pammie will stop at nothing to split them up. 200,000-copy announced first printing.
Mira
Tear Me Apart by J.T. Ellison (Sept. 18, trade paper, $16.99, ISBN 978-0-7783-3000-4). In this sequel to Lie to Me, competitive skier Mindy Wright learns that she has leukemia and her only hope is a stem cell transplant—but when her parents are tested, she learns she’s not their biological daughter. In the effort to save her life, Mindy must unravel years of family lies. 250,000-copy announced first printing.
Morrow
Shell Game: A V.I. Warshawski Novel by Sara Paretsky (Oct. 16, hardcover, $27.99, ISBN 978-0-06-243586-6). PI V.I. Warshawski returns to Chicago to save an old friend’s nephew from a murder charge in a case involving a stolen artifact. As V.I. investigates, she tangles with the Russian mob, ISIS backers, and a shady international network of stock scams and stolen art.
Mulholland
The Man Who Came Uptown by George Pelecanos (Sept. 4, hardcover, $27, ISBN 978-0-316-47982-0). Michael Hudson, who’s developed a love of reading while imprisoned for robbery, catches a break when he’s suddenly released after it’s discovered that a private detective manipulated a witness at his trial. Michael encounters a Washington, D.C., that has changed a lot during his time locked up—and faces some tough choices between the temptation of crime and doing what’s right.
Mysterious
Firefly by Henry Porter (Oct. 2, hardcover, $27, ISBN 978-0-8021-2895-9). A 13-year-old Syrian boy, code-named Firefly, flees the Middle East for Europe with vital intelligence about an ISIS terror cell. An ex-MI6 agent tries to find the boy before terrorists get to him first.
Oceanview
Fugitive Red by Jason Starr (Nov. 6, hardcover, $26.95, ISBN 978-1-60809-314-4). Jack, who’s dissatisfied with his marriage, meets Sophie through a dating app called Discreet Hookups. But when Jack shows up one day for a rendezvous at her Manhattan townhouse, he discovers Sophie’s strangled body and becomes a suspect in her murder. Convinced that her husband is the killer, Jack sets out to prove his innocence and save his marriage.
Overlook
The Silent Ones: A Father Anselm Thriller by William Brodrick (Sept. 25, hardcover, $27.95, ISBN 978-1-4683-1683-4). The disappearance of Father Livermore, an American priest with a troubled past, is undoubtedly connected to allegations made against him by the family of an 11-year-old boy. Father Anselm investigates, but he soon finds himself on the trail of an impostor.
Pantheon
The Colors of All the Cattle by Alexander McCall Smith (Nov. 6, hardcover, $25.95, ISBN 978-1-5247-4780-0). Precious Ramotswe of the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency agrees to run for a seat on the city council in Gaborone, Botswana. She defeats her opponent, the scheming Violet Sephotho, but Violet appears to triumph after Precious resigns and Violet replaces her as the runner-up. 100,000-copy announced first printing.
Park Row
When the Lights Go Out by Mary Kubica (Sept. 4, hardcover, $26.99, ISBN 978-0-7783-3078-3). Jessie Sloane is on the path to rebuilding her life after years of caring for her ailing mother, until she applies to college and the college informs her that her social security number has raised a red flag. A shocking revelation forces Jessie to question everything she’s ever known. 250,000-copy announced first printing.
Pegasus Crime
The Spy of Venice: A William Shakespeare Mystery by Benet Brandreth (Aug. 7, hardcover, $25.95, ISBN 978-1-68177-798-6). In 1585, young Will Shakespeare leaves Stratford-upon-Avon for London, where he falls in with a band of players—and is recruited as a spy by the English ambassador to Venice. Once in Venice, Will must contend with Catholic assassins. 10,000-copy announced first printing.
Penguin
Death at Sea: Montalbano’s Early Cases by Andrea Camilleri, trans. by Stephen Sartarelli (Sept. 4, trade paper, $16, ISBN 978-0-14-310881-8). Set in Sicily, this story collection features the young Inspector Montalbano, who brings his brash yet clear-sighted investigative style to eight cases early in his career.
Poisoned Pen
Fogland Point by Doug Burgess (Aug. 7, trade paper, $15.95, ISBN 978-1-4642-1024-2). History professor David Hazard returns to his hometown of Little Compton, R.I., after his grandmother, who struggles with dementia, reports a death next door. Her fragile memories may hold the key to a bizarre mystery half a century old—and perhaps the murder of her neighbor.
Polis
The Blue Kingfisher by Erica Wright (Oct. 9, hardcover, $26, ISBN 978-1-947993-26-6). When PI Kat Stone spots a dead body atop the Jeffrey’s Point Lighthouse one morning, she recognizes the man as her apartment building’s maintenance man, Tambo Campion. The police assume that Campion tried to kill himself by jumping off the George Washington Bridge above, but Kat has her doubts.
Putnam
Holy Ghost by John Sandford (Oct. 9, hardcover, $29, ISBN 978-0-7352-1732-4). The mayor of Pinion, Minn., and a buddy come up with a scheme to put their obscure little town on the map. All they need is an image of the Virgin Mary to draw hordes of pilgrims. Then a dead body shows up, and their troubles begin.
Scribner
Elevation by Stephen King (Oct. 30, hardcover, $19.95, ISBN 978-1-982102-31-9). Scott Carey is losing weight. In addition, he weighs the same in his clothes and out of them, no matter how heavy they are. Scott, with his mysterious affliction, comes to sympathize with an ostracized lesbian couple next door and helps bring together the culturally conflicted people of Castle Rock.
Seventh Street
The Devil’s Wind: A Spider John Mystery by Steve Goble (Sept. 11, trade paper, $15.95, ISBN 978-1-63388-484-7). Former pirate Spider John at last has an honest seafaring job aboard the Redemption, but when the ship’s captain is murdered in his cabin, Spider John must again turn sleuth. But how could anyone kill the captain in his locked quarters while the entire crew was gathered together on the deck?
Severn
The Last Night Out by Catherine O’Connell (Sept. 1, hardcover, $28.99, ISBN 978-0-7278-8800-6). Maggie Trueheart drinks too much at her bachelorette party. The next morning, she wakes to find a stranger in her bed. Then she gets a phone call and learns that her friend Angie was murdered after they parted ways the night before. Chicago homicide detective Ron O’Reilly investigates.
Simon & Schuster
You Don’t Own Me by Mary Higgins Clark and Alafair Burke (Nov. 6, hardcover, $26.99, ISBN 978-1-5011-7166-6). In her fifth outing, TV producer Laurie Moran investigates an unsolved murder that leads to her becoming entangled in a web of long-buried secrets. She has to wonder whether her own life is in danger as a mysterious stalker plots revenge.
Soho Crime
99 Ways to Die by Ed Lin (Oct. 9, hardcover, $26.95, ISBN 978-1-61695-968-5). Jing-nan, who works in Taipei’s bustling night market, agrees to help Peggy Lee, a bullying frenemy who runs her family’s huge corporate bank and real estate company, when her father is kidnapped. The ransom the kidnappers are demanding is not money but intellectual property: a high-tech memory chip that they want to sell in China.
Sourcebooks Landmark
Dig Deep My Grave by Cheryl Honigford (Aug. 7, trade paper, $15.99, ISBN 978-1-4926-2867-5). At a garden party, Vivian Witchell catches the love of her life, Charlie Haverman, standing over the body of an old flames of hers she hasn’t seen in years with a pair of bloody scissors in his hands. Knowing Charlie is incapable of murder, Vivian sets out to prove his innocence.
St. Martin’s
Feared: A Rosato & DiNunzio Novel by Lisa Scottoline (Aug. 14, hardcover, $27.99, ISBN 978-1-250-09959-4). Mary DiNunzio’s old nemesis, Nick Machiavelli, is representing three men who are suing the Rosato & DiNunzio law firm for sex discrimination, alleging the firm refused to hire them because of their gender. Though false, the allegations will be difficult to disprove. 400,000-copy announced first printing.
Thomas & Mercer
River Bodies by Karen Katchur (Nov. 1, hardcover, $24.95, ISBN 978-1-5039-0239-8). A murder recently committed in the small town of Portland, Pa., eerily recalls a 20-year-old cold case involving a victim found in the Delaware River. Lead detective Parker Reed is intent on connecting the two murders, but the locals are revealing nothing.
Titan
Mycroft and Sherlock by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (Oct. 9, hardcover, $25.99, ISBN 978-1-78565-925-6). In 1872, 26-year-old Mycroft Holmes, a rising star at the War Office, persuades his brother, Sherlock, to serve as a tutor at the orphanage that a friend of his runs as a charity. When a boy dies of a suspected drug overdose at the orphanage, Sherlock decides to investigate and follows a trail of strange symbols to the squalid opium dens of the London docks.
Viking
The Witch Elm by Tana French (Oct. 9, hardcover, $27, ISBN 978-0-7352-2462-9). When Toby, a happy-go-lucky charmer, surprises two burglars one night, they beat him and leave him for dead. The injured Toby takes refuge at his family’s ancestral home, where the discovery of a skull in the trunk of an elm tree in the garden forces him to face the possibility that his past may not be what he has always believed.
This article has been updated to remove one title that is no longer publishing in the fall 2018 season.
