Pseudonymous romance author Lane (Rent to Be) makes her mystery debut with this quirky tale of small-town gossip turned deadly. At the outset, Dallas librarian Cordelia West learns she’s inherited the Chickadee Motel from a great-aunt she never knew. Unfortunately, the motel is located in Cordelia’s hometown of Sarsaparilla Falls, Tex., where she returns as infrequently as possible. If Cordelia refuses to take over the business, her untrustworthy mother will inherit it, so she reluctantly accepts. She soon discovers that the Chickadee is actually a brothel with a surprisingly sunny local reputation. Its residents include three “chicks”: Daisy, Arline, and Belinda Sue, all prostitutes in their golden years. One night, Daisy pounds on Cordelia’s door, panicked that she may have accidentally killed her client, Pastor James Reed-Smythe. Hoping to avoid scandal, the four women sneak the pastor’s body into his church. When an autopsy reveals that the pastor died from poisoning, his son, Archer—Cordelia’s childhood nemesis turned dashing FBI agent—suspects the chicks. As they seek to clear their name, Cordelia and the chicks develop a heartwarming bond, but Lane stumbles with her overuse of Southern idioms and a far-fetched conclusion. Still, this is an entertaining cozy with an edge. Agent: Rebecca Podos, Neighborhood Literary. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 01/02/2026 | Details & Permalink

Katz’s eerie sophomore novel (after A Good Man) centers a new mother who starts to fear her husband’s company is a cult. Caroline wants nothing more than to put her and her husband Adam’s financial struggles behind them. When prestigious tech company Corridor offers Adam a job, the couple’s fortunes quickly change. Their debt vanishes, their bank account swells, and Caroline gets pregnant with their first child. But after the baby is born, Adam’s long hours on a top secret project leave Caroline alone to care for the infant. When Adam suggests they join his coworkers on an exclusive island owned and operated by Corridor, Caroline hopes the vacation will bring the family closer. The locals aren’t especially welcoming, however, and as Caroline learns the history of the island, she realizes many of them resent the company for transforming their home. Rumors of rituals and cultish behavior among Corridor employees make her even more uncomfortable. After she wakes up one morning to find her baby missing, she spirals, eventually stumbling on a secret that Corridor’s elites will do anything to keep hidden. Tight plotting and smooth narrative sleight-of-hand set the table for a walloping final few pages. This dark glimpse into maternal anxiety and tech oligarchy enthralls. Agent: Julia Kenny, Dunow, Carlson & Lerner. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 01/02/2026 | Details & Permalink

A 12-year-old girl makes a horrifying discovery in this haunting debut set in 1979 Glasgow, Scotland. The action opens with young Janey Devine following her dog into a side street, where she comes across the mutilated remains of Samantha Watkins, the 22-year-old daughter of a local crime boss. Janey reports her find to police and tries to return to normal life in the hardscrabble Glasgow neighborhood of Possilpark, but anxiety about the killer is never far from her mind. The police, who are confounded by the crime, offer little help, leaving it up to Janey’s lone family member, Grandma Maggie, to help her move on. Janey, however, has a secret: she knows something about the murder that she kept from police, a detail that eats at her and fuels her desire for justice. Crawford shrewdly toggles between Janey’s viewpoint and her grandmother’s as the hunt for the killer slowly unfolds, capturing the fading innocence of a young girl and the complex social dynamics of a struggling but close-knit community. This marks the arrival of a promising new voice. Agents: Euan Thorneycroft and Oli Munson, A.M. Heath & Co. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 01/02/2026 | Details & Permalink

The apparent suicide of a young woman with a bright future tears apart the bucolic Irish village of Ardnakelty—as well as the painstakingly constructed new life of Chicago transplant Cal Hooper—in French’s atmospheric but sluggish final suspense novel featuring the ex-policeman (after The Hunter). Still regarded as an outsider despite living in Ardnakelty for three years and being engaged to local widow Lena Dunne, Cal has little desire to dust off his detective skills. However, with Lena feeling guilty about missing any warning signs when Rachel Holohan dropped by hours before her death, and Cal’s teenage foster daughter, Trey Reddy, convinced there was foul play, he gets sucked in anyway. He’s stunned when his discreet inquiries into Rachel’s life,­ beyond the well-known details of her imminent engagement to wealthy Ardnakelty heir Eugene Moynihan, ignite a dangerous firestorm. As dense with detail as the November drizzle that shrouds the Irish landscape, French’s plot doesn’t rev up until the halfway point. Though the serpentine final 100 pages are nail-biting, this will be best enjoyed by readers already familiar with Ardnakelty and its quirky cast of characters. Agent: Darley Anderson, Darley Anderson Literary. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 01/02/2026 | Details & Permalink

This evocative if unrelentingly grim thriller from Matlin (The Stranger Upstairs) follows Minnow Greenwood, a morning news anchor, as she returns home to a remote Australian fishing village and confronts her past after an on-air meltdown. A gruesome shark attack on the night of Minnow’s arrival signals that Kangaroo Bay has changed little from the violent enclave she fled years earlier. When a rival journalist arrives to investigate the shark attack and winds up chasing down details about other sordid episodes in the village’s past, Minnow’s hopes to privately reflect on the events that drove her from Kangaroo Bay are dashed. Instead, she’s forced to confront her memories of her abusive father and the violence she was involved with. The harsh poetry of Matlin’s prose makes palpable the ruthlessness of poverty and generational trauma, but she reveals the details of Minnow’s past too rapidly and confusingly in the novel’s second half, dulling the emotional impact and overcrowding the narrative with secondary characters. There’s beauty here, but readers may be reluctant to slog through the story’s excesses to find it. Agent: Naomi Davis, BookEnds Literary. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 01/02/2026 | Details & Permalink

Sullivan’s triumphant fourth whodunit featuring George Cross of the Avon and Somerset police (after The Patient) finds the neurodivergent sleuth investigating the suspicious death of an ex-mayor. Cross is called in after Peggy Frampton, the former mayor of Bristol, is found bludgeoned to death in her bedroom. His colleagues, including his boss, DCI Ben Carson, are sure that Frampton was the victim of a burglary turned violent, but Cross thinks otherwise, citing the absence of aspirated blood near Frampton’s head as evidence that she was methodically choked before being bludgeoned. On his own, Cross researches the politician’s many enemies—including a real estate developer whose project she’d thwarted—for clues about who had motive to kill her. In the process, he finds tantalizing leads buried in the controversial advice blog Frampton launched after leaving politics. Sullivan puts more suspects into the mix than in previous entries, encouraging readers to flex their armchair sleuthing skills, and he continues to mine charming comedy from Cross’s literal-mindedness (when meeting Frampton’s husband, Cross’s partner advises him to offer condolences rather than “comment on how much shorter than his wife the man is”). This series only gets better as it goes. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 01/02/2026 | Details & Permalink

Heath’s inventive debut centers on a charming contract killer who gets pulled into a dangerous job. Robbie McNeil has settled down in a “worn-out” Indiana city, where she runs a karaoke bar with her best friend and roommate, Dee Machado. The two are also hit women; Robbie—who’s been carrying out hits for 11 years to pay the bills—specializes in making her murders appear accidental. She dreams of staging an original musical, the expense of which leads her to accept a lucrative job offer despite her misgivings when the client provides scant details about the target. Robbie learns only that she’s supposed to find and kill Xavier Landerman, which she soon discovers is a fake name. As she pulls at the thread of who Xavier might be and who might want him dead, she fears she may finally be in over her head. Wry prose (“Robbie McNeil did not kill a single person for the first eighteen years of her life. After that, available records weren’t quite as clear”) and a fair-play but hard-to-solve mystery make this sing. Admirers of Rob Hart’s Assassins Anonymous will be impressed. Agent: Jenna Satterthwaite, Storm Literary. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 01/02/2026 | Details & Permalink

Former FBI agent Brigid Quinn is haunted by past mistakes as she’s ensnared in a troubling new case in Masterman’s nuanced sequel to We Were Killers Once. After leaving the Bureau, Brigid began volunteering at Desert Doves, an Arizona shelter for abused women. There, she bonded with resident Nicole “Nicki” Gleason, whom she trained in self-defense, only to wind up reluctantly testifying against Nicki after she was accused of killing her abusive husband. Four years later, the women’s paths cross again when Nicki moves into a residence for felons near Brigid’s home. After Nicki’s apartment is burglarized by a man who’s killed by police, the violence emboldens Brigid’s neighbor, habitual malcontent Dorita Gordino, to ramp up her campaign to shut down the halfway house. When Dorita’s partly burned corpse is discovered a short time later, both Nicki and Brigid, who’d feuded with the dead woman, come under suspicion. Guilt-ridden over her role in Nicki’s incarceration, Brigid sets out to clear her name by identifying Dorita’s murderer and their connection to the burglary. Well-shaded characters, genuine surprises, and a meaty moral dilemma elevate this soapy thriller. Lisa Unger fans will be pleased. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 01/02/2026 | Details & Permalink

Riches (The Silent Dead) shifts gears from gritty crime fiction to cozy mystery with this charming whodunit starring middle-aged widow Gillian Swanley, one of seven “senior lackeys” for England’s Chislehurst Green Insurance. Though Gillian hates her job, she can’t afford to quit, as she must provide for her neurodivergent son and cranky, fault-finding mother. Gillian’s therapist suggests she try gardening as a way of channeling her anxiety, which leads her to the Bromley Botanists, a ragtag group of home gardeners who are gearing up for the annual Golden Trowel competition—the most prestigious local prize in community gardening. As the crew ramps up their efforts, they decide to spy on their competitors. Their first stop is the home of Dotty Gloucester, member of the rival Southwark Secateurs and former presenter of BBC Radio’s The Lady Gardeners’ Hour. The group’s recon mission turns dangerous when they find Dotty dead in her garden shed, leading them to wonder if this year’s Golden Trowel might have deadlier stakes than usual. Riches nicely balances the focus between Gillian’s self-actualization and the Bromley Botanists’ investigation of Dotty’s death. The result is a diverting, feel-good puzzler. Agent: Caspian Dennis, Abner Stein. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 01/02/2026 | Details & Permalink

In Langsfeld’s elegiac debut, a lifetime of abuse and emotional neglect drives Tom Horak to kill his former childhood friend, Rust Hawkins. After the murder, Tom retreats from his small Colorado town to a cabin in the Rocky Mountains, where he endures a harsh winter with nothing but memories of his painful past and the moose meat he manages to hunt. Tom grew up in a house dominated by his alcoholic father, whose explosive rage and rigid ideas of masculinity prevented him from expressing his love in a healthy way. As a young adult, Tom entered a passionate, on-off relationship with the free-spirited Rose, who eventually married Rust and had his son, Gus, widening the divide between the two friends. Following Rust’s death, Gus, long abandoned by Rose, is taken in by Morris Green, a lonely Lutheran pastor grappling with his own existential doubts. Meanwhile, peace officer Marshal Tomlinson reluctantly pursues Tom, aware that the trauma of his childhood makes any hope of justice or closure an illusion. Like the novels of Tom Franklin and Willy Vlautin, Langsfeld’s meditative noir sanctifies lives steeped in pain and regret, yet still lit by the faint possibility of a brighter tomorrow. It’s an auspicious first outing. (Feb.)

Reviewed on 01/02/2026 | Details & Permalink