Webster’s gonzo second romp for L.A. PIs Stan Stein and Bud Randolph (after American Nonsensical) is a rewarding ride. Bud, envious of Stan’s engagement to the pair’s assistant, Melanie, decides to seek his own wife through a service called Russian Brides Unlimited. Meanwhile, their detective agency gets a pair of new clients. Emelia Clark, who works in a bank’s fraud department, wants photos taken of anyone entering or leaving a particular house between the hours of 8 a.m. and noon. She won’t explain, but the request appears to have some connection to a shadowy federal investigation. Then reverend Clem Dudas, a snake-handler, hires Stan and Bud to retrieve two of his beloved rattlesnakes, Dobie and Maynard, whom he believes were kidnapped by his wife. Dudas shares Bud’s devotion to Donald Trump, and he asks Bud to mail a letter to an unknown recipient once he’s in Russia to meet women. Webster manages to fit each of the story’s outlandish pieces together, largely thanks to his mischievous sense of humor (at one point, Bud states he was at the Capitol on January 6, identifying himself as “the one in the red cap”). Carl Hiaasen fans will hope to see more of Stan and Bud soon. (Self-published)

Reviewed on 05/30/2025 | Details & Permalink

New York Times culture reporter Soloski (Here in the Dark) delivers a heady, atmospheric thriller that underscores the dark side of art-making. Allison Morales arrives in New York City in 1972 “so hungry for experience that some days I could taste it like blood in the back of my throat.” She falls in with Theater Negative, a cultlike group of avant-garde performers living in squalor and clinging to their ’60s heyday. She’s utterly seduced, both by the group’s intoxicating notions of personal freedom and by their leader, Peter, who cycles through the young women who drift into Theater Negative’s orbit. After Allison is expelled from school, she joins the group on a hastily assembled European tour that quickly turns disastrous when an attempt at a pornographic film shoot leads to sexual assault and murder. Soloski braids together the ’70s timeline with one set 25 years later, when Allison is teaching theater in L.A. and reckoning with her days in Theater Negative. Eventually, she decides to seek out the group’s surviving members. The tone is pitch-black throughout, with the older Allison frankly assessing the harm she’s inflicted in response to the harm she suffered, but Soloski’s darkly seductive prose wrings harsh beauty from the characters’ pain. The results are grimly satisfying. Agent: Sarah Burnes, Gernert Co. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 05/30/2025 | Details & Permalink

Schillace’s sweet if underheated sequel to The Framed Women of Ardemore House finds autistic amateur sleuth Josephine “Jo” Jones continuing to rebuild her life in North Yorkshire while tending to her family’s crumbling estate. After surviving a fire in the property’s main house and struggling to get her freelance editing career off the ground, Jo decides to rent out a room in her cottage. She’s happy to take a secretive young man named Ronan Foley as a tenant, but a short time later, he turns up dead. Reluctantly, Jo is pulled into another murder investigation, which means more awkwardness and romantic tension between her and dreamy DCI James MacAdams, even as his colleagues remain largely insensitive to Jo’s neurodivergence. As Jo and James question suspects, they unearth a seedy underworld involving refugees and valuable artifacts being smuggled in and out of England. The semi-gothic setting and Jo’s ongoing quest for answers about her hazy family history tend to be more involving than the rote mystery plot, but Schillace’s characters remain a pleasure to spend time with. This isn’t quite up to the standards of its predecessor, but it’s still a solid cozy. Agent: Jessica Papin, Dystel, Goderich & Bourret. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 05/30/2025 | Details & Permalink

This outstanding mystery from Mina (Three Fires) centers on forensic scientist Claudia Atkins O’Sheil, whose work with London’s Metropolitan Police Department ensnares her in a high-stakes double murder investigation. In upscale Chester Terrace, Jonathan “Jonty” Phillips and his fiancée have been killed, with no clues left behind. Maura Langston, head of the Met, charges Stewart’s alcoholic son William with the murders, but Claudia believes him to be innocent. Claudia’s husband recently died in an accident, which she privately suspects was murder; when another victim dies in a similar manner before William’s trial, her suspicions lead her to believe the culprit behind all four killings is someone highly revered among London’s upper classes. Now, Cluadia must decide whether to lie about her theory of the case or compromise her job by revealing the truth during a speech she’s set to give. With her two sons safely ensconced in their exclusive school, Claudia prepares to make a decision that will affect the lives of all involved. Mina builds nerve-shredding suspense by toggling back and forth between the moments before Claudia’s speech and key pieces of the investigation. Here’s hoping a sequel is in the works. Agent: Henry Dunow, Dunow, Carlson & Lerner. (July)

Reviewed on 05/30/2025 | Details & Permalink

Icelander Jónasson’s top-notch sequel to Death at the Sanatorium takes inspiration from Agatha Christie’s still-unexplained 11-day disappearance in 1926. Set mainly in 2012, the action picks up where the last book left off, with young Reykjavík detective Helgi Reykdal planning a quiet future with his new girlfriend, Anita, after escaping his volatile relationship with the abusive, alcoholic Bergthora. Given Helgi’s fondness for 1930s and ’40s mystery fiction, his boss asks him to investigate reports that Elín Jónsdóttir, the most famous crime novelist in Iceland, has gone missing. Helgi interviews Elín’s friends and associates, and soon learns that there’s more to the story than meets the eye. Meanwhile, a vindictive Bergthora starts stalking Anita. As Helgi uncovers increasingly surprising details about Elín’s life, Jónasson flashes back to an enigmatic 1965 conversation between two robbers, a 2002 news story about Elín’s final book, and a 2005 interview with Elín herself, before braiding everything together in virtuosic fashion. Cleverly plotted, slyly humorous, and bursting with love for the golden age of detective fiction, this outperforms even its outstanding predecessor. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 05/30/2025 | Details & Permalink

Intrepid TV reporter Jolene Garcia investigates a deadly case of municipal corruption in Estes’s vibrant sequel to Off the Air. Jolene has long found her fluffy beat in Phoenix, Ariz., stifling. She yearns to cover serious news instead of investigating whether the cupcakes at local bakeries are really, as they claim to be, gluten-free. When community activist Carlos Rios offers to meet with Jolene about a controversial zoning proposal, she sees it as an opportunity to prove her chops. Shortly after they meet and Carlos hints at possible corruption in city hall, he dies in a suspicious car accident, leading Jolene to suspect he was murdered. Then a beloved community figure, whom Carlos implicated in the city hall plot, turns up dead, and Jolene again tries her hand as a gumshoe. As in the previous book, Estes’s experience as a broadcast journalist lends authenticity to the proceedings, but this time, she doesn’t get too bogged down in the details, and successfully crafts a brain-teasing, fair-play puzzle full of plausible suspects and interconnected treachery. After a shaky first outing, this suggests that Jolene might have what it takes to sustain a series. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 05/30/2025 | Details & Permalink

Edgar winner Hart (Or Else) delivers a tense domestic thriller about a pair of newlyweds who come unglued. Imogen and Lev Carmichael are on a Mediterranean honeymoon cruise when Imogen accuses Lev of being unfaithful, and then he falls overboard. Though Lev miraculously survives, he has no memory of the last few days. After the couple returns to their suburban Washington, D.C., home and Lev gradually regains full consciousness, Imogen fears what he will remember about the night he went overboard. Meanwhile, she tries to connect on social media with the Greek waitress she thinks he slept with, and peruses Lev’s profiles for other signs of infidelity. When she learns that one of his ex-girlfriends went missing and was never found, she reaches out to one of her own exes—a private investigator—whose plunge into Lev’s past reveals he may not be who he claims to be. Hart gleefully explores his characters’ dark sides while keeping questions about their capacities for violence wide open until the book’s explosive finale. With simmering suspense, slick sleight-of-hand, and a pitch-black view of modern relationships, this offers an acidic summertime thrill. Agent: Laura Rennert, Andrea Brown Literary. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 05/30/2025 | Details & Permalink

Bestseller Hiaasen (Squeeze Me) continues to romp through Florida’s looniest corners in this hilarious send-up of white supremacists, crooked politicians, and the quirky citizens who oppose them. Dale Figgo is a down-on-his-luck neo-Nazi who has been rejected by both the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers for smearing feces on the wrong statue on January 6, but it looks like his ship may be coming in. Congressman Clure Boyette has successfully solicited $2 million from racist philanthropists Claude and Electra Mink to fund Dale’s nascent far-right organization, Strokers for Liberty, laundering the cash through a Habitat for Humanity knockoff that uses child labor. Opposing those bozos are Viva Morales, the Mink foundation’s dissatisfied “wealth director” and Dale’s reluctant tenant; independently wealthy social justice crusader Twilly Spree, who meets Viva by chance on a flight; and underage sex worker Galaxy, who has dirt on Boyette. Viva uncovers much of what’s going on by fake-dating Boyette and snooping around Dale’s house and recruits Twilly to help her topple their scheme—but Dale and his crew fail mostly through their own incompetence. This funhouse-mirror satire offers welcome opportunities to laugh at the absurdities of 21st-century politics. It’s Hiaasen at his finest. Agent: Esther Newberg, CAA. (May)

Reviewed on 05/30/2025 | Details & Permalink

An amnesiac is either a time traveler or a hallucinating schizophrenic in Pace’s suspenseful if somewhat overstuffed debut. When the narrator wakes in 1954 Virginia at Hanover State Psychiatric Hospital, she can’t recall who she is or why she’s there. Though she’s wearing the patient ID of someone named Dorothy Frasier, the wisecracking voice in her head insists she’s neither Dorothy nor a patient. After a fight lands her in seclusion, the woman unexpectedly journeys to 2035, where “nerds” insist she’s a soldier named Bix searching the past for means to cure a deadly virus. Back in 1954, doctors deem the narrator delusional, a diagnosis she reluctantly accepts when a man identified as Dorothy’s husband visits the hospital and she recognizes him. Despite undergoing electroshock therapy, however, the narrator keeps returning to the future; either she’s truly Bix, or Dorothy is destined for a lobotomy. The sci-fi aspects of the plot are at once overcomplicated and underexplained, but the harrowing hospital scenes ground the proceedings and spotlight science’s historical mistreatment of “inconvenient” women. There’s enough here to hold adventurous thriller fans’ attention. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 05/30/2025 | Details & Permalink

Edgar winner Gentill (The Mystery Writer) pays homage to Murder on the Orient Express in this uneven whodunit. Mystery novelist Joe Penvale and his sister, Meredith—both superfans of classic detective fiction—celebrate the remission of Joe’s cancer by booking a cabin aboard the Orient Express. Secretly, Meredith hopes the setting will alleviate Joe’s writer’s block so he can begin his delayed second novel. Their fellow passengers include a handful of current and former police officers and two elderly women on the trail of a thief who’s made off with funds belonging to their community group. Before long, a passenger disappears from a locked compartment that’s drenched in blood—a puzzle that proves to be the first of five Joe and Meredith tackle as their train barrels from France to Italy. Gentill’s setup is intriguing, but the solution is underbaked, and the tone veers inconsistently from wry to sincere. Golden age mystery fans intrigued by the concept would be better off with Benjamin Stevenson’s Everyone on This Train Is a Suspect. Agent: Jill Marr, Sandra Dijkstra Literary. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 05/30/2025 | Details & Permalink