All The Crime, Horror, and Mystery Novels You Need to Check Out This Fall ‹ CrimeReads

Maybe it’s just because I got started late on this preview, but the following list leans HEAVILY towards horror. That doesn’t mean that fans of detective fiction will find themselves lacking in recommendations, however, especially if they are willing to go historical. Those interested in compelling romances and difficult family dynamics will also find many relevant works on this list—the human factor takes center stage this fall. Thanks as always for reading!

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SEPTEMBER

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Marcie Rendon, Where They Last Saw Her
(Bantam) -DM

Rendon delivers a powerhouse novel about a Native woman on the Red Pine reservation investigating a series of disappearances. The story highlights an underreported epidemic of missing women, a story told with heart and great poignance. –Dwyer Murphy, CrimeReads Editor-in-Chief

Mason Coile, William
(William Morrow)

This book is so creepy! And definitely full of more twists and turns than one would except from such a slim volume. In William, Mason Coile takes us into the dysfunctional San Francisco household of an agoraphobic robot-maker and his business-oriented wife, as they welcome mysterious guests into their home and confront the growing dangers of the robots in the attic. –Molly Odintz, CrimeReads Managing Editor

Kate Atkinson, Death at the Sign of the Rook
(Doubleday)

Yorkshire’s best ex-detective is finally back in this hotly-anticipated continuation of Kate Atkinson’s Jackson Brodie series. This time, he’s bored, with nothing but an art theft to work on… but it leads him down a dark and twisty path to Burton Makepeace, a dilapidated former estate that now hosts murder mystery weekends. Delightful! –Olivia Rutigiliano, CrimeReads Editor

Attica Locke, Guide Me Home
(Mulholland)

In the final chapter of the Darren Matthews saga, the Texas Ranger is drawn into the investigation of a Black woman’s disappearance, with her white sorority sisters claiming she isn’t missing at all. As with all the installments of this powerful series, history and family legacies and class divisions get all tangled up to produce something distinctly and disturbingly American. Locke has produced a fitting conclusion for one of the era’s defining mystery characters. –DM

Hildur Knútsdóttir, The Night Guest
Translated by Mary Robinette Kowal
(Tor/Nightfire)

Sleep disorders take center stage in this creepy AF Icelandic horror novel. In The Night Guest, a woman wakes up more tired each day, deeply confused about what’s going on with her body until she buys a step-tracker and finds out she’s been sleep-walking for miles each night. In order to understand her pathology, she must finally accept her past—and while the novel ends somewhat ambiguously, one thing we do come to comprehend is that this lady is truly messed up. Also, those poor cats… –MO

Kiersten White, Lucy Undying
(Del Rey)

Justice for Lucy Westenrea! Kiersten White finally gives us a version of the Bram Stoker character we can respect and love, in just one of the many excellent lesbian vampire novels coming out this year (is it hot lesbian vampire summer? Or perhaps, undead lesbian fall?). I loved Mister Magic, White’s strange and beautiful horror novel about childhood trauma and children’s television shows, and Lucy Undying is just as good—although waaay more gory. –MO

Richard Osman, We Solve Murders
(Pamela Dorman)

Am I said that Richard Osman is not publishing a fifth Thursday Murder Club this fall? Yes. Am so incredibly over the moon that he’s bringing us another indelible, incomparable sleuthing team? Yes. And they are former-investigator-cum-retiree Steve Wheeler and his private-security-working daughter-in-law Amy. I can’t wait to meet them. –OR

M.L. Rio, Graveyard Shift
(Flatiron)

M.L. Rio’s Graveyard Shift is a wonderfully eerie novella, reminiscent of the spooky, gothic tales of M.R. James. The premise is so good you’ll shiver: every night, the same five people walk by one another as they head home from their late shifts at their jobs, walking through the old cemetery in their old college town. But one night, they are shocked to stumble upon a freshly dug grave. And before they can continue on home, the gravedigger reappears. You shivering? I TOLD YOU!–OR

Alexis Henderson, Academy for Liars
(Ace Books)

Alexis Henderson once again proves herself one of the most virtuoso voices crafting genre fiction today in this gothic romance set in the cloistered world of dark academia. An Academy for Liars reads a bit like if Octavia Butler had written the Magicians trilogy, with a strong social justice message that forcefully reckons with a long legacy of stolen talent and cultural appropriation in the intellectual industries. A perfect story for those who enjoyed RF Kuang’s Babel or Elisabeth Thomas’ Catherine House. –MO

​​Vincent Tirado, We Came to Welcome You
(William Morrow)

Vincent Tirado’s YA thrillers have already made huge splash, and their adult debut confirms a writer at the top of their game. In We Came to Welcome You, a queer couple is granted a rare opportunity to purchase a home in an exclusive planned community. Soon enough, the town’s promises of inclusion start to sound a lot like threats to participate or else. What secrets are the residents hiding? And what dark agenda drives the town’s strict and bizarre policies? This one comes out in September, but you can start looking forward to it now. –MO

Chelsea Bieker, Madwoman
(Little, Brown)

Madwoman is a harrowing psychological thriller about a mother determined to keep her past a mystery; she’s forced to confront her darkest secrets when a figure from her childhood crawls out of the woodwork and threatens to expose all. Chelsea Bieker’s fierce literary style makes for a perfect match with the thriller form, and her careful plotting leads to a genuinely surprising conclusion. –MO

Alan Bradley, What Time the Sexton’s Spade Doth Rust
(Bantam)

Flavia de Luce is back and I’m losing my mind with joy!!! My favorite mystery character of all time, the precocious 12-year-old chemistry genius Flavia, is back solving a mystery in the beautiful English countryside. What could be a better way to welcome autumn? –OR

Kristina Pérez, The Many Lies of Veronica Hawkins
(Pegasus)

I have such a soft spot for the viciously status conscious and their baroque internecine disputes, and this Singapore-set thriller checks all the boxes. Perhaps it’s because she went to private school, or perhaps it’s just living in one of the wealthiest cities on the planet long enough to cease to become disillusioned, but Kristina Perez writes class like a mid-century Brit (but thankfully with the twists of an American). In The Many Lives of Veronica Hawkins, a close observer of the elite moves to the famously clean city-state with her finance bro of a husband, only to find herself welcomed into the upper crust by a charismatic heiress who then has the gall to go missing. Fabulous, and so closely observed as to be deserving of the word “gimlet”. –MO

Nilanjana Roy, Black River
(Pushkin Press)

This one received rave reviews when it came out in England, and I’m sure it will gain just as much praise on this side of the pond. Black River joins a host of great crime books coming out of South Asia, with a timely and urgent message about prejudice and injustice. At the start of Roy’s novel, a Hindu child is found dead in a remote village, and a Muslim man is soon chosen as a convenient scapegoat for the crime; the detectives assigned to the case struggle to keep the accused man from being lynched while they search for the true culprits. —MO

Stephanie Wrobel, The Hitchcock Hotel
(Berkley)

Sometimes, you come across a title that tells you you’re going to love what’s going on inside the book, and Stephanie Wrobel’s The Hitchcock Hotel is one such case. It’s about a Hitchcock superfaun who runs a themed hotel devoted to the Master of Suspense… who invites the members of his college Film Club to stay for a weekend. The thing is, no Hitchcock tribute is ever fully complete without a mystery. –OR

Sophie White, Where I End
(Erewhon Books)

I have recommended some truly twisted novels on this site (thank you, Lit Hub, for allowing me to live up to my creepiest potential!) but I think this may be the most disturbing one yet. White’s novel was first published two years ago, to much acclaim and little readership, and given that I was one of the many who remained ignorant when it first graced the earth, I’m so happy this sneaky little masterpiece got another shot at messing up readers. But what is it about? Well, quite a lot, actually, but the bare bones description goes thusly: a young woman lives on a remote Irish island, where she and her grandmother reluctantly care for her comatose mother, known as the “bed-thing”. The island’s small population is convinced the family is cursed, but it isn’t until White’s Shirley-Jackson-esque narrator meets a visiting artist that she begins to understand the full wrong-ness of her short life. –MO

Iman Hariri-Kira, The Most Famous Girl in the World
(Sourcebooks Landmark)

In this sardonic and witty take on the Anna Delvey Affair, Iman Hariri-Kira’s journalist heroine is thrown into a tizzy when the scam artist who she helped put in jail gets an early release—and seems like she’s bent on revenge. At least, when she’s not making insta posts about her new brand sponsorships. Hariri-Kira’s debut is snarky and self-assured, as sharp and biting as an autumn wind…Okay I know that sentence was hokey but this book is not! –MO

Lilliam Rivera, Tiny Threads
(Del Rey)

Lilliam Rivera cuts the fashion industry to shreds in this horror-filled take on late stage capitalism. At the novel’s start, Samara is just starting a new job for a legendary fashion house; she arrives optimistic but quickly becomes aware of the classism and racism underlying the business of couture. Tiny Threads takes us into the back rooms of fashion giants, showing us the stark differences between the haves and have-nots, but there’s more to unravel in this terrifying yarn. Okay, enough with the  needlecraft puns. –MO

Marissa Stapley, The Lightning Bottles
(Simon & Schuster)

With The Lightning Bottles, Marissa Stapley has crafted both a page-turning mystery and a love letter to the grunge era. The set-up is simple and compelling: what if Courtney Love set out on a road trip across Europe with her internet sleuthing neighbor to uncover the real truth behind Kurt’s death? The parallels to Kurt and Courtney aren’t that exact–the novel is actually about a disappeared rock star and his bandmate/lover’s search for him after she finds out he still may be alive. Still, we all know what we’re meant to be listening to while reading it. –MO

Rachel Harrison, So Thirsty
(Berkley)

The latest from Rachel Harrison is an utter delight and feels a bit like if Erica Jong had written a vampire novel; the bored and put-upon protagonist finds not suffering, but independence and self-actualization from her new life as a member of the undead. Maybe that’s because she’s turned by a quiet soul who—unlike the non-vampirical men in her life—actually appears to be listening to her. If I was bored at an orgy in upstate New York while fuming over my husband’s infidelity and met a handsome stranger who promised me eternal life, I, too, would be very interested in taking him up on that offer. –MO

Kelsey Rae Dimberg, Snake Oil
(Mariner)

Another wellness thriller, this one tied into the long con tradition of American capitalism—like gothic fiction for the goop era. Or perhaps, grand guignol for the goop erta? Anyway, his book is a prescient reminder that the modern beauty industry, just like my penchant for alliteration, makes fools of us all.  –MO

Alice Bell, Displeasure Island
(Doubleday)

I adored Alice Bell’s first novel, the uproarious cozy Grave Expectations, and I am in the midst of loving her follow-up just as much. In Displeasure Island, disheveled millennial Claire is back, and grumpily on vacation in Ireland, where she must once again use her talent for talking to ghosts to solve a murder. As the title indicates, there are, indeed, pirates in this one. –M)

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OCTOBER

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Kay Chronister, The Bog Wife
(Counterpoint)

This book will leave you thinking, wtf did I just read?!? As Brat Summer ends and we head into to #bogcore fall, you can pick up the latest from Kay Chronister and slowly sink into the peaty depths of a dense and inflammatory gothic (sorry guys, I’m just really trying to make some bog puns here)…Anyway, The Bog Wife is, basically, indescribable, but the general gist goes thusly: a family must reunited to bury their dying patriarch in the family’s ancestral cranberry bog, hoping to welcome the next generation’s “bog wife” from the peat in exchange for the patriarch’s soul—a woman made of mud and moss, who will bear the next patriarch’s children. When no such creature materializes, the assembled siblings must battle climate change, pollution, and other threats to the swamp to ensure their future and that of the earth itself. –MO

Del Sandeen, This Cursed House
(Berkley)

Jemma Barker is broke and newly single when a strange offer comes in: a lucrative position has opened up with a wealthy family on their Louisiana plantation, and Jemma needs to get out of Chicago, fast. It’s 1962 and the world is changing, but for the family on the plantation, things appear to be frozen in time, as the family is still stuck in the colorism that allows them to feel superior to the darker-skinned Jemma. Sandeen’s heroine soon learns that the family has summoned her for a very particular purpose: they are cursed, and they believe her to be the only one who can save them from future calamity.–MO

Tom Ryan, The Treasure Hunters Club
(Atlantic Monthly Press)

Tom Ryan’s delightful adventure story is an edge-of-your-seat, pirate-happy murder mystery, the kind of book you would hope for as a kid, and be thankful for, as a grown-up. –OR

Emma C. Wells, This Girl’s a Killer
(Poisoned Pen)

What if Dexter was set in Louisiana, and instead of featuring a dude who specializes in now-debunked junk science, it’s about a female pharmaceutical rep? So yeah: she’s got access to a wide pool of ne’er-do-wells who won’t be missed, and a whole lot of drugs with which to pick ’em off. I hope that it gets really meta and she kills some nasty insurance claim deniers. Fingers crossed. –MO

Jean Hanff Korelitz, The Sequel
(Celadon)

Fans of Korelitz’s literary thriller The Plot will (manuscript theft! identity theft! murder most foul! soup!) get excited for the sequel: The Sequel, in which a certain author’s widow decides to write her own book—and discovers that she’s not the only one who knows a few secrets after all. Fun. –Emily Temple, Lit Hub Managing Editor

Nick Harkaway, Karla’s Choice
(Viking)

Le Carré’s son takes up the mantle with a new Smiley novel, this one set in the period between The Spy Who Came in From the Cold and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, centering on the search for a missing defector. –DM

Lev AC Rosen, Rough Pages
(Forge)

Lev AC Rosen continues his 1950s-set series featuring queer cop-turned-PI Evander “Andy” Millsand his growing cast of friends and family; in the latest, he searches for a missing bookseller who had been organizing a mailing program for queer readers before his disappearance. –MO

Sofia Ajram, Coup de Grâce
(Titan)

A man on his way to commit suicide in the St. Lawrence River becomes trapped in an endless labyrinth in the tunnels below the Montreal metro. As he searches in vain for an exit, he comes to suspect this is no chance entrapment. Ajram handles the story with great skill and ingenuity. –DM

Hesse Phillips, Lightborne
(Pegasus)

A queer historical reimagining of the last days of Kit Marlowe! With spies and romance and an absolutely devastating denouement, Lightborne is as bloody and beautiful as the great Marlowe’s plays. You don’t need a dissertation on Elizabethan drama to understand this one, but the author’s academic research evolved in parallel with crafting the narrative, and the ease with which they incorporate telling historical details is an incredibly rewarding experience. Lightborne is so much more than its details, no matter how outrageously entertaining, for the soul of this work comes from its clear-eyed portrait of humanity: the best, the worst, and the somewhere-in-between. –MO

Lindy Ryan, Cold Snap
(Titan)

Like Gus Moreno’s This Thing Between Us, Ryan uses her cabin retreat as a method of exploring the isolation and claustrophobia of intense grief. The family at the center of Cold Snap has just lost their beloved patriarch, and Ryan’s newly widowed protagonist is taking her son and cat to their long-awaited cabin getaway over Christmas. She’s not totally sure of her grasp on reality—after all, she just lost her husband—but the metaphysical is about to get physical as the cabin visit goes violently awry. –MO

Mikaella Clements; Onjuli Datta, Feast While You Can
(Grand Central)

In a small village, two women form an intense connection as one begins to hear messages from the town’s resident monster. There’s a lot of amazing lesbian horror being published these days, but this one might be my favorite yet, partly because the two authors are married to each other, which lends extra credence to them writing a badass love affair that can defy any combination of prejudice and monsters. –MO

Alia Trabucco Zerán, Clean
translated by Sophie Hughes
(Riverhead)

A housemaid in prison narrates her tale of woe as a confession in this visceral exploration of class, privilege, and humanity. It is clear from the beginning that something terrible has happened to her employers’ young daughter, but we must wait for a complex story to unravel before learning exactly the nature of the tragedy. Heartbreaking, furious, and a modern masterpiece! –MO

Poupeh Missaghi, Sound Museum
(Coffee House)

Why should male torturers get all the credit? In Poupeh Missaghi’s parody of corporate feminism and the misplaced morality of professionalism, the women holding up a brutal regime would like their contributions acknowledged, too, thank you very much. And one has created a strange new archive dedicated to analyzing the sounds of torture, which she would love to tell you all about. Humorous enough to avoid feeling heavy-handed, Sound Museum may challenge the squeamish, but even if it takes several sessions to get through Poupeh Missaghi’s Kafka-esque tone poem, it’s well worth the effort. –MO

Evan Rail, The Absinthe Forger: A True Story of Deception, Betrayal, and the World’s Most Dangerous Spirit
(Melville) 

Rail explores the subculture of absinth aficionados and follows a trail to an eccentric collector who claims to have a stash of hundred year old bottles tracing back to an era when the spirit’s hallucinatory qualities were celebrated by the artistic vanguard. Rail’s reporting makes for an entertaining odyssey through the drink’s past and present. –DM

CJ Leede, American Rapture
(Tor)

Cheeky, obscene, and brilliant, CJ Leede’s American Rapture is a revelation. Leede’s sophomore effort lives up to the promise of her shocking debut, Maeve Fly, and then some. In American Rapture, Leede’s heroine is a good Catholic girl whose sheltered childhood comes to an abrupt end when a horrifying new plague begins spreading across the country—a plague of lust. As the tagline says, the end times are coming. –MO

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NOVEMBER

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Sarah Jost, The Estate
(Sourcebooks)

In this uncanny new novel, an art historian possesses a very unusual ability–she can transport herself into the world of an artwork. But with her career in tatters, she takes a dubious new job at a sprawling chateau and soon finds herself in an increasingly sinister and dangerous predicament. –DM

Christina Lynch, Pony Confidential
(Berkley)

This book is…kind of ridiculous, but in the best way! Christina Lynch owns a pandemic pony with a lot of personality, and that pony has now got a starring role in this bizarre reimagining of the Oddyssey as the story of a small horse with a big goal: he’s going to find his old owner, the one woman who ever truly loved him. He soon finds out he doesn’t just need to locate her: he’s also got to clear her of false accusations of murder. This book made me laugh, it made me cry, and it certainly kept me turning the pages. –MO

Marie Tierney, Deadly Animals
(Henry Holt)

A adolescent wannabe forensic scientist is the star of Marie Tierney’s noir ode to the North of England in its heyday as a grimey industrial hinterland. Tierney’s heroine, initially obsessed with scientifically observing roadkill as it decays, turns her curious eye to a mystery far more grotesque than any of her little experiments: why have so many young people vanished from her council estate lately, and who’s responsible for the disappearances? –MO

Kotaro Isaka, Hotel Lucky Seven
Translated by Brian Bergstrom
(Overlook)

I’m so excited for Kotaro Isaka’s sequel to Bullet Train, a book I loved (and, ahem, a movie I might have been the only person in the world to love). Our favorite unlucky assassin Ladybug is back, once again tasked with a simple job that, uh, doesn’t go off as planned. A perfect, propulsive, and fun thriller. –OR

Jordan Harper, The Last King of California
(Mulholland)

Readers in the US will finally get a chance to read Harper’s sunburnt tragedy, which arrived first in Britain. In The Last King of California, Harper channels the best of Kem Nunn and delivers a story of family rivalries and warring bikers, all set deep in the California desert. Harper’s pacing is pitch perfect, and his noir sensibilities infuse the novel with dark poetry. –DM

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DECEMBER

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Christopher Bollen, Havoc
(Harper)

This book was so effed up!!! And soooooo good. Like, so good I wanna study this in a literature class and highlight the crap out of it. Christopher Bollen has been a growing figure in the literary suspense world for a while, but this book should cement his place as one of the very best. In Havoc, an old woman who likes to travel and likes even more to meddle finally meets her match: an 8-year-old boy staying in the same Luxor hotel. As the two engage in increasingly violent games of one-upmanship, Bollen’s narrator’s emotional defenses begin to crumble, and she must finally come to terms with her own dark secrets. Bollen is particularly skilled at exploring the gap between who we want to be, and who we really are. –MO

Jane Pek, The Rivals
(Vintage)

 I loved Jane Pek’s The Verifiers, so I’m eagerly anticipating this sequel. The PI story and the spy tale entwine once again in this novel about corporate espionage and AI and chronically online New Yorkers, and I can’t wait to get off the internet and stick my nose into it. –OR

Herve le Corré, Dogs and Wolves
Translated by Howard Curtis
(Europa)

Dogs and Wolves is the bastard son of French existentialism in the best way. Herve le Corré won me as a reader with his hard-boiled political thrillers, but takes a bold departure in this latest, a carefully crafted homage to the seedy, sweat-drenched suspense of the seventies. Le Corré’s taciturn leading man, just released from prison, goes to stay with his brother’s femme fatale of a girlfriend in her slovenly family home, where the two begin a doomed affair. As he awaits his brother’s return, he finds himself with more questions than answers; of particular concern are the terrifying large dog and the even more terrifying small child. –MO

Gigi Griffis, We Are the Beasts
(Delacorte)

Gigi Griffis breathes new life and intrigue into the historical tale of the Beast of Gévaudan, the mythical monster blamed for a rural murder spree in Ancien Regime France, as two teen girls take advantage of the chaos to fake the deaths of their nearest and dearest and thus save them from more human terrors. Griffis has an eye for historical detail and a deft hand when it comes to plotting.–MO

William Boyd, Gabriel’s Moon
(Atlantic)

A travel writer in 1960’s London is lured into a dangerous game in Boyd’s latest, sophisticated spy novel. The writer is under the thumb of a charismatic MI6 officer and soon finds himself thrown into the middle of an international plot as the Cold War heats up. –DM