Top 10
Boom Town
Nic Stone. Simon & Schuster, Oct. 14 ($28, ISBN 978-1-6680-5627-1)
An Atlanta stripper plunges into the Big Peach’s criminal underworld while trying to track down two of her missing colleagues in YA author Stone’s adult debut.
Crooks: A Novel About Crime and Family
Lou Berney. Morrow, Sept. 9
($30, ISBN 978-0-06-344557-4)
Berney tells the sweeping tale of the Mercurio mob family, some of whom flee to Hollywood and Moscow, while others stay behind in Oklahoma City to either join the hustle or try to reform themselves.
Famous
Blake Crouch. Ballantine, Sept. 23 ($18.99 trade paper, ISBN 979-8-217-09156-0)
Lancelot Dunkquist, a 38-year-old deadbeat, often gets mistaken for movie star James Jansen. After losing his job, an unstable Lancelot heads to Hollywood with dreams of taking over the life and career of his doppelgänger.
Gone Before Goodbye
Reese Witherspoon and Harlan Coben. Grand Central, Oct. 14 ($32, ISBN 978-1-5387-7470-0)
The Oscar-winning actor and bestselling crime novelist team up for a thriller about disgraced Army surgeon Maggie McCabe, who starts working under the table as a plastic surgeon for the wealthy and soon finds the gig to be more dangerous than she expected.
The Killer Question
Janice Hallett. Atria, Sept. 23 ($30, ISBN 978-1-6680-8353-6)
Told through emails, text messages, and trivia questions, Hallett’s latest focuses on a couple who run a quaint pub trivia night that turns deadly with the arrival of an unbeatable team.
Mississippi Blue 42
Eli Cranor. Soho Crime, Aug. 5 ($29.95, ISBN 978-1-64129-697-7)
An FBI agent infiltrates a college football program involved in shady financial dealings, only for the star quarterback to die shortly after she arrives, in this comic caper from Cranor, an Edgar winner and former college football player.
Picket Line: The Lost Novella
Elmore Leonard. Mariner, Sept. 30 ($22.99, ISBN 978-0-06-338936-6)
In this posthumously published thriller, Leonard sets his sights on the complicated dynamics of a farmers’ strike in small-town Texas, which unites unlikely allies and highlights racial tensions within the community.
The Secret of Secrets
Dan Brown. Doubleday, Sept. 9 ($38, ISBN 978-0-385-54689-8)
Symbology professor Robert Langdon returns in Brown’s latest globe-trotting adventure. This time, Langdon searches for his missing paramour—a scientist who’s written a bombshell manuscript about new developments in human consciousness—across Prague and other European cities.
Simultaneous
Eric Heisserer. Flatiron, Oct. 28 ($27.99, ISBN 978-1-250-38429-4)
A federal agent tasked with predicting acts of terrorism joins forces with a therapist who practices past-life hypnosis to investigate a bizarre and possibly supernatural serial killer case.
Stillwater
Tanya Scott. Atlantic Monthly, Aug. 12
($27, ISBN 978-0-8021-6460-5)
Hoping to attend university and escape his and his late father’s criminal past, a young man returns from Queensland to Melbourne. Soon, an old mentor comes knocking, and he’s pulled back into the underworld.
Longlist
Akashic
Hamburg Noir, edited by Jan Karsten (Aug. 5, $17.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-63614-115-2). The latest installment of Akashic’s regional noir series features 14 stories that paint a “vivid and memorable portrait” of Hamburg, Germany’s seedier side, per PW’s review.
Atria
The Belles by Lacey N. Dunham (Sept. 9, $28, ISBN 978-1-6680-8486-1). Though she’s managed to thrive by worming her way into an elite clique, an outsider at a prestigious college begins to suspect there’s something sinister going on with its administration.
Bantam
Exit Strategy: A Reacher Novel by Lee and Andrew Child (Nov. 4, $30, ISBN 978-0-593-72584-9) finds Jack Reacher trying to decipher an ominous note slipped into his pocket by a stranger, which leads to a typically violent showdown.
Berkley
The Librarians by Sherry Thomas (Sept. 30, $30, ISBN 978-0-593-64045-6). Four Texas librarians, each hiding a sordid past, must band together to solve a crime when two people die during their library’s murder mystery game night.
Blackstone
North Country by Matt Bondurant (Nov. 11, $27.99, ISBN 979-8-8748-0936-2). After being kicked out of the Air Force, Tom Kaiser reluctantly returns to Upstate New York. He soon finds work as an enforcer for a shady landlord, then a Quebecois drug smuggler.
Crooked Lane
Bless Your Heart by Leigh Dunlap (Aug. 12, $29.99, ISBN 979-8-89242-163-8). The screenwriter of A Cinderella Story debuts with a gossipy Southern whodunit about the death of a small-town baseball coach and the sports moms who interfere with the investigation.
Dafina
Lost in the Garden of Eve by L. Divine (Oct. 28, $28, ISBN 978-1-4967-4999-4). An exotic dancer turned investigative journalist probes a spate of disappearances from the Honey Pot, her former employer. For help, she taps her detective ex-boyfriend, which threatens her current relationship with the club’s owner.
Doubleday
The Widow by John Grisham (Oct. 21, $32, ISBN 978-0-385-54898-4) follows small-town Virginia lawyer Simon Latch as he takes on the apparently straightforward case of an elderly woman hoping to draw up a new will. Soon, Simon is on trial for a
murder he didn’t commit.
Dutton
The Italian Secret by Tara Moss (Dec. 2, $29, ISBN 978-0-593-47475-4). A budding PI in 1948 Sydney unearths a box of files that recasts everything she thought she knew about her father and sends her on a trip to Italy.
Graydon House
The House Guests by Amber and Danielle Brown (Dec. 2, $18.99 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-5258-0990-3). A woman plagued by dreams of her dead mother takes a vacation to the Catskills, where she thinks she sees a killer in the middle of the night. But her friends don’t believe her.
Hanover Square
Old Money by Kelsey Miller (Sept. 30, $29, ISBN 978-1-335-00037-8). Twenty years after witnessing her cousin’s murder on the Fourth of July, a woman returns to her affluent hometown, only to find that her neighbors are still fiercely guarding secrets from that night.
Hard Case Crime
Supermax: The Max and Angela Trilogy by Ken Bruen and Jason Starr (Nov. 11, $19.99 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-83541-225-1). Across three novellas originally published in the 2000s, a bumbling businessman schemes with his secretary to murder his wife. When the plan goes sideways, the pair is launched into a picaresque involving the IRA, drug dealers, and an aspiring serial murderer.
Harper
Lime Juice Money by Jo Morey (Aug. 12, $30, ISBN 978-0-06-339926-6). A partially deaf woman loses her grip on reality after she moves her family from London to the jungles of Belize so she can be closer to her scientist father.
A Murder in Paris by Matthew Blake (Sept. 30, $30, ISBN 978-0-06-331419-1) finds a British memory expert traveling to France to see her grandmother, who insists she’s uncovered a long-repressed memory of killing someone at the end of WWII. Then more people start dying.
Hogarth
The Living and the Dead: A Novel About a Crime by Christoffer Carlsson, trans. by Rachel Willson-Broyles (Dec. 2, $29, ISBN 978-0-593-73305-9). In 1999 Sweden, police arrive at the scene of a gruesome car crash with no driver and a corpse in the trunk. Twenty years later, a similar crime occurs, and a retired detective comes out of hiding to investigate both cases.
Holt
The Once and Future Me by Melissa Pace (Aug. 19, $29.99, ISBN 978-1-250-35867-7). An unnamed woman wakes up en route to an asylum in the 1950s with no memory of how she got there. Subsequent visions convince her she might be a time traveler from a bleak future sent back to change the past.
Kensington
The Case of the Murdered Muckraker by Rob Osler (Jan. 27, $27, ISBN 978-1-4967-4951-2). The sequel to The Case of the Missing Maid sees lesbian junior detective Harriet Morrow trying to blend in with a conservative immigrant community in 1890s Chicago to solve a murder and expose government corruption.
Knopf
The Girl with Ice in Her Veins: A Lisbeth Salander Novel by Karen Smirnoff (Sept. 2, $29, ISBN 978-0-593-53671-1). In Smirnoff’s second Salander novel, the tattooed cyberpunk once again teams up with journalist Mikael Blomkvist—this time to track down a kidnapped hacker and Lisbeth’s missing niece.
Little A
Who Is the Liar by Laura Lee Bahr (Aug. 1, $16.99 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-6625-2903-0). A teen girl captures a pastor in her family’s cellar, telling her 10-year-old sister, Topaz, that he’s a child murderer. The priest insists otherwise. Who should Topaz trust?
Little, Brown
The Proving Ground: A Lincoln Lawyer Novel by Michael Connelly (Oct. 21, $30, ISBN 978-0-316-56382-6). Embattled attorney Mickey Haller agrees to sue an AI company on behalf of a family whose 16-year-old son killed his unfaithful ex-girlfriend after a chatbot encouraged him to do so.
Return of the Spider: An Alex Cross Thriller by James Patterson (Nov. 24, $30, ISBN 978-0-316-56956-9). This follow-up to Along Came a Spider recounts the first meeting of detective Alex Cross and the psychopathic Gary Soneji, which Cross recalls in the present as he suspects Soneji has reemerged.
Mariner
Everyone in This Bank Is a Thief by Benjamin Stevenson (Jan. 20, $30, ISBN 978-0-06-343438-7) continues the comedic, brain-bending Ernest Cunningham series with a puzzle in which he squares off against
a group of bank robbers.
Melville House
The Dancing Face by Mike Phillips (Aug. 12, $19.99 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-68589-171-8) follows a Black college professor who gets more than he bargains for when he plots to swipe an African sculpture from a British museum.
Minotaur
The Black Wolf by Louise Penny (Oct. 28, $30, ISBN 978-1-250-32817-5). Quebecois detective Armand Gamache realizes his last case may have been a setup when conspiracy theories emerge that he arrested the wrong mastermind.
The Killing Stones: A Detective Jimmy Perez Novel by Ann Cleeves (Sept. 30, $29, ISBN 978-1-250-35728-1). After detective Jimmy Perez finds his best friend murdered on an island off the coast of Scotland, he tries to fight through his grief and horror to get to the bottom of the case.
Mira
The New Year’s Party by Jenna Satterthwaite (Nov. 4, $18.99 trade paper, ISBN 978-0-7783-6868-7) follows a 30-something woman who reunites her friends for a New Year’s Eve blowout that ends in murder.
Morrow
Everybody Wants to Rule the World by Ace Atkins (Dec. 2, $30, ISBN 978-0-06-329344-1). In the mid-1980s, high schooler Peter Bennett suspects his scientist mom’s new beau is a Russian spy. When people at her lab start dying, Peter enlists a writer and a drag queen to help prove him right.
Mulholland
Gray Dawn: An Easy Rawlins Mystery by Walter Mosley (Sept. 16, $29, ISBN 978-0-316-57323-8). A group of shady power players hire L.A. private eye Easy Rawlins to find an enigmatic woman named Lutisha James, who turns out to have dirt on him.
A Particularly Nasty Case by Adam Kay (Sept. 2, $29, ISBN 978-0-316-59754-8). Young, queer physician Eitan Rose returns to work after a mental health break to find his brutish colleague has died. Eitan suspects the man was murdered, but no one else does.
Norton
The Persian by David McCloskey (Sept. 30, $29.99, ISBN 978-1-324-12319-4). Hoping to fund his dream of moving from Stockholm to California, a Jewish Persian dentist becomes a spy in Iran. Soon, he realizes he’s in over his head.
Poisoned Pen
Five Found Dead by Sulari Gentill (Aug. 19, $18.99 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-4642-1971-9). Two Agatha Christie–obsessed siblings take a vacation on the Orient Express, where their dreams of relaxation are dashed when their fellow passengers start dying.
Putnam
Revenge of Odessa by Frederick Forsyth and Tony Kent (Sept. 2, $32, ISBN 979-8-217-04465-8). In this sequel to The Odessa File, Forsyth, who died this month, pits journalist Peter Miller and his grandson against a new far-right German group.
Scout
Everyone in the Group Chat Dies by L.M. Chilton (Dec. 9, $19 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-6680-9417-4). A group of housemates thinks they’ve managed to put a tragic mistake behind them. Then their dead ex-roommate sends a text threatening to kill them all.
Simon & Schuster
Hot Wax by M.L. Rio (Sept. 9, $29, ISBN 978-1-6680-7002-4). When a 10-year-old witnesses a shocking act of violence while touring with her rock star father, she tries to suppress it. Three decades later, her father dies, and she sets out to confront the past.
Soho Crime
Clown Town by Mick Herron (Sept. 9, $29.95, ISBN 978-1-64129-726-4). The latest Slough House novel follows disgraced MI5 spy River Cartwright as he digs up family secrets, while current MI5 personnel try to foil a blackmail plot that would reveal dirty deeds carried out by the British during the Troubles.
Sourcebooks Landmark
Seven Reasons to Murder Your Dinner Guests by KJ Whittle (Sept. 9, $17.99 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-4642-4240-3) centers on seven strangers who meet for an anonymous dinner party, where they receive cards predicting the day they’ll die. Then one of the predictions comes true.
Union Square
The Ivory City by Emily Bain Murphy (Nov. 4, $18.99 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-4549-5782-9). In 1904 St. Louis, two cousins of different social classes must band together when the brother of one is accused of murder during the World’s Fair.
Viking/Dorman
The Impossible Fortune: A Thursday Murder Club Mystery by Richard Osman (Sept. 30, $30, ISBN 978-0-593-65325-8) finds the gumshoe retirees hopping back into action when a wedding turns deadly at the hands of a mysterious criminal.
Zando/Flynn
Divine Ruin: A Sister Holiday Mystery by Margot Douaihy (Jan. 13, $28, ISBN 978- 1-63893-198-0). Tattooed bisexual PI nun Sister Holiday returns to track down the drug dealers whose fentanyl killed her favorite music student.
This article has been updated.
