Category: Unusual Suspects

If you’re in the mood for something unique, darkly funny, and with some chapters narrated by ravens, Amina Akhtar has got you covered. Ronnie Khan is not an aim-for-the-stars type of person and she’s a New Yorker who always imagines herself being a New Yorker, so it’s a huge surprise that Marley Dewhurst changes that. Suddenly Ronnie is in Sedona, Arizona and doing things like hiking, yoga, and cleansing. But when gurus start being murdered, maybe the wellness industry isn’t as well as is advertised?…

For fans of delightful Regency era murder mysteries, Lily Adler is back! Widow Lily Adler is excited to get out of London on a trip with friends to Hampshire. But peace is not in her future as it turns out there’s rumors of a ghost at Belleford manor — which Adler of course immediately wants to go seek out. Except she’s met with the news that the lady of the house has been murdered…If you want to start at the beginning of this entertaining series, grab The Body in the Garden.

This is one of my favorite covers of the year—you better believe I judge books by their covers. On the inside it’s about Minerva Gutiérrez who has quite a few things stacked against her at the moment: she hates her job at an ice cream shop, her boss is scum, her mother is ill, she’s been kicked out of school for fighting, and she needs money. So when the shop is robbed, with her and other employees inside, she’s not going to be a hero and fight. But afterwards she learns that there is a rumor that money is hidden on the property. So naturally she teams up with her neighbor friend CeCe to find and steal the money—bonus: revenge on her boss. What could go wrong?! I’m currently reading it and absolutely love Minerva’s voice from the start and think I’m going to switch formats over to the audiobook because it’s narrated by Frankie Corzo, who narrated Mexican Gothic.

This book is a walk-in closet bursting with bananapants. It’s the kind of nonfiction that focuses on very specific things that happened decades ago but that sadly are very much being repeated now (with the all the book banning, for example). The book takes you into how the ’70s book Go Ask Alice–a published diary about a drug addicted teen–became a hit, contrary to all the massive red flags about its publication. It’s about how publishing is an honor system with no real punishment for fraud unlike other products. It’s about the history of LSD. It’s the drug panics—the fear that people were lacing drugs in things for children based on absolutely nothing— and how people didn’t want to accept the reality of increasing middle class young white male suicides so blaming it on satan worship became the go-to. You watch journalist after journalist not do their very basic job and just repeat without question the most ludicrous theories until things like the game Dungeons & Dragons were being banned because people thought it was kids worshiping satan. It would be hilarious if it weren’t so true, and happening again right now in different movements built on creating a fear (panic) without any evidence. I highly recommend the audiobook (narrated by Gabra Zackman) and getting a reading buddy or someone you can shout “YOU WON’T BELIEVE THIS” at.

Now that’s my review for the book, and then I hit the author’s note at the end of the audiobook where he basically says he debated adding pages of sources and then just decided not to because the reader could just look up the stuff themselves. And exSQUEEZE me?! My dude, the book about the issues with fraud in publishing and the honor system should end with pages of sourcing. That’s how this works.

The whole story would make a great docuseries on something like HBO Max.

(TW suicide and everything related/ mentions rape cases and Manson cases/ mentions past baby death/ made up animal cruelty for satanic panic/ student abuse at school)

I loved this book! It’s perfect for fans of mystery books with a lead that works on cases in a job that goes to every crime scene. Rita Todacheene is an overworked crime scene photographer and her ability to see the dead sometimes helps in that she can get the info needed to know what really happened to the victim. However, as she’s been warned her entire life, seeing the dead comes with a very dangerous possibility of harm which she’s about to experience when one victim is hellbent on revenge and not letting Rita live her life in peace until she gets what she wants. I love Rita’s character and especially the back and forth of seeing her present life and watching her grow up with her grandmother on the Navajo reservation, getting to see how she got into photography (her grandmother had a box camera), and watching her grapple with learning that she sees ghosts. It has a mixed tone of being a dark-ish procedural and also a beautiful book about with her relationship with her grandmother. I would absolutely read another book following Rita and also anything else Ramona Emerson writes.

(TW okay I’m just going with everything — not so much because of dark, although it does graphically describe two crime scenes, but because so many cases and things are discussed that at some point it hits everything and this would have been a paragraph of notes.)

For fans of missing persons, small towns full of secrets, and Australian crime novels. Detective Sergeant Sarah Michaels is sent into a small rural town when 12-year-old Esther goes missing after school. From there a shocking arrest is made, fingers are pointed, and a woman tells her friend that the man she married assaulted her when she was a teen. We get to know members of this town as the POV changes from Esther’s friends, family, a Greek chorus, and detectives. Surely, someone must know what happened to Esther? This is a good read if you want to be sunk into a particular time and place as a missing person case is used to explore human nature, violence, trauma, victim blaming, and grief.

(TW discuses case with child predators/ ableism/ homophobia/ recounts past teen gang rape, details on the lead up not much graphic details on the act/ fatphobia/ alcoholism/ domestic abuse/ brief animal abuse recounted)

If you’d like to do some armchair traveling while sleuthing, here’s an amateur sleuth mystery set in Taipei, Taiwan. Jing-nan is the owner of a night market food stall who finds himself a murder suspect after agreeing to help get back lotto earnings from someone who’d promised to split the winnings but didn’t. And that’s just one of the murders! If you’d like to start at the beginning of the Taipei Night Market series, pick up Ghost Month.

For fans of mysteries focused on a neighborhood. Beth is a CIA analyst who his taken off her biggest case and has to move out of her home. Madeline buys the house and moves in and Beth can’t stop watching her, certain she has ties to the case she is no longer on. Being that everyone in the neighborhood is somehow tied to the CIA, it’s a treasure trove of secrets…

For fans of British procedurals! Detective Anjelica Henley is back, following the series starter The Jigsaw Man. Her current case involves a murdered preacher and a barely alive torture victim. Being that there are so many suspects this isn’t an easy case, and with more victims, it’s only a matter of time before Henley finds herself in danger…

I really enjoyed the start to the series, which I did in audio, and am looking forward to continuing.

For fans of secluded town, past missing person cases that remain unsolved, and an author with a substantial backlist to dive into. Set in a resort in the North Carolina mountains, Abigail Lovett will always be an outsider no matter how long she lives and works there. As much as she knows about the area, she also has much of the outsider curiosity of all the people who have just vanished from there over the years, one being a journalist whose brother has now shown up to get answers. Is the place Lovett has settled in filled with danger she’s ignoring, or does the terrain make it easier for random, unrelated vanishings to happen?…

(TW mentions past parent cancer death/ mentions past addiction, recounts intervention)

For historical mystery fans! This is the sequel to Murder in Old Bombay which introduced us to Captain Jim Agnihotri, who took up sleuthing while recovering in a military hospital. Now (1893) him and his wife have moved across the world to Boston, Massachusetts. It’s a good thing he’s been teaching his wife Diana all about sleuthing, and his hero Sherlock, because she’ll be charged with finding him when he goes missing… I really enjoyed the first in the series and am looking forward to the sequel on audiobook narrated by Safiyya Ingar and Vikas Adam.

For fans of YA mystery, and the new girl in town trope! Celeste is the new girl in Montana, having moved from Montreal, and is only able to befriend the town pariah. So they invent the life they want by writing fanfic involving the popular guy. The story seems to come true one night when Celeste kisses Joss. But unlike their story, he ends up dead and Celeste has no memory of it happening…

For historical mystery fans! This begins in London in 1936 with Lena Aldridge, a mixed-raced woman passing for white, singing in a Soho club. But that’s not her dream, so after a murder at the club, she accepts a stranger’s ticket on the Queen Mary bound for New York where she’ll get a role on Broadway. Things are looking up until another murder occurs, this time on the Queen Mary. Is murder following Aldridge?…

For small town legal mystery fans who want to follow a case from beginning to end! This takes us into the Federal courthouse of the Eastern District of Texas and patent law and lawsuits. Local lawyer James Euchre teams up on cases with outside council, which is how he ends up with a client in a patent case accused of murdering the federal judge, Euchre’s friend and father figure. Now Euchre finds himself on the defense of a murder trial hoping the accused didn’t really kill his mentor…

It looks like a standalone book at the moment but definitely reads as if it could be the introduction to a new character for the start of a legal series.

(TW past suicide, detail)

This is one of those books with a setup that immediately sucked me in: Paris Peralta’s famous comedian husband has been found dead (murdered or suicide?) and Paris’ biggest concern isn’t that she’ll be accused of the murder. Her biggest concern is that her past will be revealed, something someone is already blackmailing her over… In the present we watch as she has to build a defense to prove that she did not murder her husband, and in the past we watch a girl growing up with an abusive mother.

This is my third Hillier thriller (Jar of Hearts ; Little Secrets ) and she consistently gives me page-turners. I inhaled the audiobook narrated by Carla Vega.

(TW main case thought a suicide/ talks of past suicide attempt, detail/ addiction/ domestic abuse recounted/ child abuse/ child sexual assault, predators/ past parent death with dementia)

If you were a fan of the TV series Bones, and miss it, the book series it was based on has continued so you can keep up with Brennan. Also, it’s got a great cold North Carolina winter setting if you want to escape the heat. Forensic anthropologist Brennan and her daughter Katy, back from the Army, are meeting up for dinner. Except they find an unwanted package on the back porch. It has an eyeball in it with GPS coordinates which leads Brennan to another crime. Soon it seems someone is copycatting Brennan’s cases from early in her career…

I went into this knowing absolutely nothing about it and was really surprised by how it starts in one place and just unfolds layer after layer, ending in a totally different place even thought the present takes place entirely over the course of one night inside an apartment. It’s character-focused and felt as if it was trying to explore human behavior and our ties to each other more than just shocking with twists. I’m going to only give you what you learn at the beginning in case, like me, you’d like to not know all the reveals: Aki and Hiro have been living in a Tokyo apartment but will no longer be rooming together. The apartment is empty but they’ve decided to have one final meal together. It appears each one believes the other is responsible for a man’s death and they have a lot to talk about… Think this will particularly work for fans of indie films.

(TW discussions of suicide, including hypotheticals)

Ware has pretty much consistently put out a mystery/thriller a year since her debut in 2015 so if you’ve yet to read her and are looking for an author with a sizeable backlist, look her up. This time we have the trope “something bad happened in Uni and it’s about to fck up everyone who was involved’s life in the present.” Six best friends at Oxford went from having a great college experience to one of them being murdered. Ten years later the convicted murderer has died in prison, but rather than bringing any kind of closure, it’s brought a reporter asking questions, because there is evidence the convicted was innocent. If so, that means one of the original six friends would be the murderer…

Here’s a new mystery series starter for foodies and fans of the odd couple trope. Cousins who haven’t seen each other in decades, and are total opposites, reunite in LA. You can find Yale and Celine running an Eastwood Village Night Market food stall, until of course someone dies after drinking their bubble tea making them the prime suspects! I have the audiobook queued up and with all the food doc shows I’ve been recently watching, I’m especially excited.

If you’ve been waiting for a sequel to Conviction, it has arrived! Anna and Fin are back–having paired up in the first book to solve a true crime podcast mystery on a bit of a tense road trip. Now, with their complicated and personal baggage, they have a new mystery: an unsuccessful YouTube channel host disappears after breaking into an abandoned French Chateau and finding a priceless Roman silver casket—which later ends up on auction…