Hello, mystery fans! Mercury is in retrograde, and it’s retrograding hard, so I’m jumping straight in this week.
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Bookish Goods
Holographic Forever Reading Sticker by stuckonstickerss
This adorable marshmallow of a ghost will be your reading buddy! ($6)
New Releases
Six Truths and a Lie by Ream Shukairy
For fans of YA social crime novels!
On July 4th, an oil rig off Monarch Beach explodes. Six Muslim teens who are all from different backgrounds — from a soccer star to an influencer — become the suspects, accused of a terrorist act. With their basic rights denied, each can save themself by framing another as they are threatened with their own secrets being used against them.
The Unquiet Bones by Loreth Anne White
For fans of multiple POVs including a detective and a reporter, past mystery involving a group of teens, now adults, still hiding a secret!
Jane is a detective who is six months pregnant. Her fiancé disappeared while hiking before he knew she was pregnant. Her current case involves bones found during an excavation. A reporter not really inspired by ethics immediately jumps on the story and pressures her boss to let her run with it. This leads her boss to freak out, being a man who, in his teens, blacked out the night a friend of his went missing. It was always suspected the missing teen’s friends were lying about the night she disappeared, but when a local teen also vanished, they decided to blame him for kidnapping her. Now there’s a body, and it’s been 50 years since those teens decided to alibi each other, and not all of them are willing to continue lying…
(TW claustrophobia/ fatphobia, lesbophobia/ addiction/ incest/ suicide/ statutory)
Looking for more new releases? Check out our New Books newsletter!
Riot Recommendations
Guy Ritchie’s new series on Netflix, The Gentlemen, got me thinking about the inheritance trope, which has always been one of my automatic watch/read tropes. So here are two backlist titles with the inheritance trope!
Unnatural Ends by Christopher Huang
Alan, Roger, and Caroline return to their adoptive parents’ home from their perspective lives and jobs around the world. They know their father is dead, but not until they’re home does their mom note that they’ll be meeting a detective in the morning because their dad was murdered, and whoever solves it is the person who gets to inherit it all and null the previous will…
He Started It by Samantha Downing
Three siblings again! This time they have to recreate a childhood road trip to get their grandfather’s 3+ million inheritance. Problem? The Morgan siblings — Beth, Portia, and Eddie — are estranged a-holes, two spouses are tagging along, they have to take their grandfather’s ashes and not lose them, and no one can be jailed, deviate from the original trip, or drop out. What could possibly go wrong?
News and Roundups
Riot Roundup: The Best Books We Read January-March 2024
Liberty and Danika discuss new releases on All the Books! including The Murder of Mr. Ma by John Shen Yen Nee and SJ Rozan (and one of my favorite non-mystery reads this year The Husbands)!
5 Must-Read Crime Novels Set In Norway
Browse the books recommended in Unusual Suspects’ previous newsletters on this shelf. See upcoming 2024 releases and mysteries from 2023. Check out this Unusual Suspects Pinterest board and get Tailored Book Recommendations!
Until next time, keep investigating! In the meantime, come talk books with me on Bluesky, Twitter, Instagram, Goodreads, and Litsy — you can find me under Jamie Canavés.
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