At Mystery Tribune, we’re on the constant look out for great mystery and thriller reads. And when it comes to getting recommendations, what source could be better than seasoned and notable authors and critics in the space?
That’s why in this edition, we bring you a list of 2023 releases in crime, mystery and thriller space, recommended by authors who we like and admire.
Note: Mystery Tribune’s coverage of the best crime and mystery books across different categories and sub-genres is available in our reading lists.
Richie Narvaez
In 2020, he won an Agatha Award and an Anthony Award for his novel Holly Hernandez and the Death of Disco.
The Screaming Child by Scott Adlerberg
As Megan Abbott puts it “The Screaming Child is a dark marvel. Both bone-chilling and moving, it excavates a grief so intense it sharpens into obsession. Swiftly told and full of surprises, it hums in your brain long after you reach its haunting final pages.”
The Detective Up Late by Adrian McKinty
Slamming the door on the hellscape of 1980s Belfast, Detective Inspector Sean Duffy hopes that the 1990s are going to be better for him and the people of Northern Ireland. As a Catholic cop in the mainly Protestant RUC he still has a target on his back, and with a steady girlfriend and a child the stakes couldn’t be higher.
After handling a mercurial triple agent and surviving the riots and bombings and assassination attempts, all Duffy wants to do now is live. But in his final days in charge of Carrickfergus CID, a missing persons report captures his attention. A fifteen-year-old traveler girl has disappeared and no one seems to give a damn about it.
Duffy begins to dig and uncovers a disturbing underground of men who seem to know her very well. The deeper he digs the more sinister it all gets. Is finding out the truth worth it if DI Duffy is going to get himself and his colleagues killed? Can he survive one last case before getting himself and his family out over the water?
Other Recommended Titles:
- The Weekend Retreat: A Novel by Tara Laskowski
- The Taken Ones by Jess Lourey
- Cheap Trills: A Cyd Redondo Mystery by Wendall Thomas
David Corbett
David Corbett is the author of seven critically acclaimed novels including 2023’s “The Truth Against the World.”
All The Sinners Bleed by S.A. Cosby
Titus Crown is the first Black sheriff in the history of Charon County, Virginia. In recent decades, quiet Charon has had only two murders. But after years of working as an FBI agent, Titus knows better than anyone that while his hometown might seem like a land of moonshine, cornbread, and honeysuckle, secrets always fester under the surface.
Then a year to the day after Titus’s election, a school teacher is killed by a former student and the student is fatally shot by Titus’s deputies. As Titus investigates the shootings, he unearths terrible crimes and a serial killer who has been hiding in plain sight, haunting the dirt lanes and woodland clearings of Charon.
With the killer’s possible connections to a local church and the town’s harrowing history weighing on him, Titus projects confidence about closing the case while concealing a painful secret from his own past. At the same time, he also has to contend with a far-right group that wants to hold a parade in celebration of the town’s Confederate history. Charon is Titus’s home and his heart. But where faith and violence meet, there will be a reckoning.
Say My Name by Joe Clifford
SAY MY NAME is a true-crime story about a crime that never happened—or did it?
On the heels of a divorce, a midlist mystery writer returns to his hometown in Central CT and is dragged back into a decades-old, unsolved case involving former missing classmates to expose the horrific secrets of a quaint, idyllic New England town.
Fusing the modern domestic psychological thriller with popular unsolved mysteries (Girl on the Train meets In Cold Blood), this meta blend of true crime and fiction plays with expectations and perspective before its mind-blowing conclusion.
Other Recommended Titles:
- Say My Name by Joe Clifford
- The Detective Up Late by Adrian McKinty
- What Never Happened by Rachel Houzell Hall
Erica Wright
Erica’s latest crime novel Famous in Cedarville received a starred review from Publishers Weekly. She is the author of three previous novels including The Red Chameleon, which was one of O, The Oprah Magazine’s Best Books of Summer 2014.
Death of a Dancing Queen by Kimberly G. Giarratano
After her mother’s Alzheimer’s diagnosis, Billie Levine revamped her grandfather’s private investigation firm and set up shop in the corner booth of her favorite North Jersey deli hoping the free pickles and flexible hours would allow her to take care of her mom and pay the bills. So when Tommy Russo, a rich kid with a nasty drug habit, offers her a stack of cash to find his missing girlfriend, how can she refuse? At first, Billie thinks this will be easy earnings, but then her missing person’s case turns into a murder investigation and Russo is the detective bureau’s number one suspect.
Suddenly Billie is embroiled in a deadly gang war that’s connected to the decades-old disappearance of a famous cabaret dancer with ties to both an infamous Jewish mob and a skinhead group. Toss in the reappearance of Billie’s hunky ex-boyfriend with his own rap sheet, and she is regretting every decision that got her to this point.
Becoming a P.I. was supposed to solve her problems. But if Billie doesn’t crack this case, the next body the police dredge out of the Hudson River will be hers.
Tobias Carroll
Tobias Carroll is Managing Editor of the literary website Vol.1 Brooklyn. He is the author of two books, Reel (2016) and Transitory (2016).
Tell Me I’m Worthless by Alison Rumfitt
Three years ago, Alice spent one night in an abandoned house with her friends, Ila and Hannah. Since then, Alice’s life has spiraled. She lives a haunted existence, selling videos of herself for money, going to parties she hates, drinking herself to sleep.
Memories of that night torment Alice, but when Ila asks her to return to the House, to go past the KEEP OUT sign and over the sick earth where teenagers dare each other to venture, Alice knows she must go.
Together, Alice and Ila must face the horrors that happened there, must pull themselves apart from the inside out, put their differences aside, and try to rescue Hannah, whom the House has chosen to make its own.
Cutting, disruptive, and darkly funny, Tell Me I’m Worthless is a vital work of trans fiction that examines the devastating effects of trauma and how fascism makes us destroy ourselves and each other.
Open Throat by Henry Hoke
A queer and dangerously hungry mountain lion lives in the drought-devastated land under the Hollywood sign. Lonely and fascinated by humanity’s foibles, the lion spends their days protecting a nearby homeless encampment, observing hikers complain about their trauma, and, in quiet moments, grappling with the complexities of their gender identity, memories of a vicious father, and the indignities of sentience.
When a man-made fire engulfs the encampment, the lion is forced from the hills down into the city the hikers call “ellay.” As the lion confronts a carousel of temptations and threats, they take us on a tour that spans the cruel inequalities of Los Angeles and the toll of climate grief. But even when salvation finally seems within reach, they are forced to face down the ultimate question: Do they want to eat a person, or become one?
Henry Hoke’s Open Throat is a marvel of storytelling, a universal journey through a wondrous and menacing world recounted by a lovable mountain lion. Feral and vulnerable, profound and playful, Open Throat is a star-making novel that brings the mythic to life.
Other Recommended Titles:
- Head Cleaner by David James Keaton
- Titanium Noir by Nick Harkaway
- The City of Unspeakable Fear by Jean Ray
