As 2023 is coming to the end, we wanted to take the opportunity to highlight 7 amazing crime reads by Mystery Tribune friends. Whether you’re a casual crime fiction reader or a die hard genre fans, this books make the perfect companion for your holidays.
The Screaming Child by Scott Adlerberg
Many people have loved this title and here are some examples of what others have been saying about it:
“When a mother’s son goes missing fresh off reports of a local murder, the sanctity of domestic routine is shattered, sending both our protagonist and readers into a quick-paced, mournful descent that only Adlerberg can conjure with such stark deftness.” —Michael J. Seidlinger, author of Anybody Home?
“[…] a haunting blend of horror and mystery that trails a woman marred by tragedy who buries herself in her work, only to find herself yanked out by the terrifying sounds of her own missing child’s torment.” —Alex Segura, bestselling author of Secret Identity
“Presenting itself as a run-of-the-mill missing-child thriller, [The Screaming Child] hauntingly transforms into an emotionally resonant portrait of grief, a psychological study of one woman’s attempt to come to terms with a horror that may never have resolution.” —Becky Spratford, Library Journal
The Devil Takes You Home by Gabino Iglesias
This genre-defying, Shirley Jackson and Bram Stoker award-winning thriller follows a father desperate to salvage what’s left of his family—even if it means a descent into violence.
Buried in debt due to his young daughter’s illness, his marriage at the brink, Mario reluctantly takes a job as a hitman, surprising himself with his proclivity for violence. After tragedy destroys the life he knew, Mario agrees to one final job: hijack a cartel’s cash shipment before it reaches Mexico.
Along with an old friend and a cartel-insider named Juanca, Mario sets off on the near-suicidal mission, which will leave him with either a cool $200,000 or a bullet in the skull. But the path to reward or ruin is never as straight as it seems. As the three complicated men travel through the endless landscape of Texas, across the border and back, their hidden motivations are laid bare alongside nightmarish encounters that defy explanation. One thing is certain: even if Mario makes it out alive, he won’t return the same.
Famous in Cedarville by Erica Wright
From one of the most original writers in crime fiction comes a diabolical mystery wrapped in Hollywood tinsel.
When reclusive, retired silver screen actress Barbara Lace dies in her bed, only the young widower of Cedarville suspects a crime. But Samson Delaware has always been something of an outsider, and his wife’s death hasn’t exactly improved his reputation. In fact, the local gossipmongers think he might be losing his mind. Their bless-your-heart manners can’t disguise their distrust, which makes his amateur attempts at an investigation even more difficult.
When Lace’s assistant is found decidedly murdered, the town starts to change its tune, though, and soon Samson finds himself in the thick of an improbable chase. Hollywood hotshots and small-town law enforcement make strange bedfellows―especially when secrets are getting women killed.
Sleepless City: A Nick Ryan Novel, Book 1 by Reed Farrel Coleman
When you’re in trouble, you call 911. When cops are in trouble, they call Nick Ryan. Every cop in the city knows his name, but no one says it out loud. In fact, they don’t talk about him at all.
He doesn’t wear a uniform, but he is the most powerful cop in New York. Nick Ryan can find a criminal who’s vanished. Or he can make a key witness disappear.
He has cars, safe houses, money, and weapons hidden all over the city. He’s the mayor’s private cop, the fixer, the first call when the men and women who protect and serve are in trouble and need protection themselves.
With conflicted loyalties and a divided soul, he’s a veteran cop still fighting his own private war. He’s a soldier of the streets with his own personal code. But what happens when the man who knows all the city’s secrets becomes a threat to both sides of the law?
Coal Black: Stories by Chris McGinley
Coal Black is unfiltered mountain crime. Set in the hills of eastern Kentucky, these tales lay bare the dark realities of the region. Sometimes the backdrop is the opiod epidemic and all the human detritus that comes with it. Other times it’s poachers or petty thieves who take center stage, people whose wild desperation invite danger everywhere they go. High in the hills the action takes place, alongside the rarely seen animals who hunt up there, and sometimes alongside the “haints” and spirits of popular folklore.
“And They Shall Take Up Serpents,” features two high school kids who set up a score on a strip mining site where they plan to make off with some tools and copper wiring. What they don’t take into account is what’s in the church van they borrow to haul off the goods, or what’s waiting deep in the forest on top of the hill.
“A Queen’s Burial” pits a pair of brutal, drug dealing brothers against a simple mountain man who’s buried something they want, though they don’t know what it is. When they finally decide they don’t want, it may be too late. A weary, middle-aged female sheriff searches for a lost girl in the hills that rise up behind the abandoned coal tipple where kids party and drop oxy contin in “Coal Black Haint.” But the search brings back memories of her own daughter who disappeared years ago. What happens next involves more than just some lost girls angry at their mothers. The search leads back to the story of a violated young nun who took to the hills decades ago and was never found.
These stories are full of action, twists and turns, and characters on both sides of the law who navigate the treacherous, often violent terrain that spares so few. Coal Black is a collection of gritty crime stories—cleverly drawn tales with sometimes savage surprise endings.
A Therapeutic Death: Violent Short Stories by J.B. Stevens
Crammed with twisted thrills, dark secrets, and elusive grasps at redemption, this collection of short crime stories will have you turning pages deep into the night.
In the opening story, we encounter two veterans struggling to resolve a problem that a haunting war crime started. Next, we read about a mixed-martial-arts fighter who makes a split-second decision and risks his soul in the process. This is followed by the tale of an assassin who must fight through a cabal of drug dealing circus clowns to keep her young daughter safe. Further in, we learn of two buddies who prove their friend innocent of homicide, despite being stuck in an 80s themed booze cruise. Later, in a true-crime piece, a rookie U.S. Marshal encounters the depravity of man in a dank basement.
These stories, and numerous others, present a series of characters in impossible situations, raging against the never-ending injustices of life. These people try to carve out a piece of happiness, often with disastrous results. The search for salvation brawls against life’s harsh reality and the struggle can be overwhelming, but it makes for great reading.
Egg on Her Face: Stories of Crime, Horror, and the Space in Between by Zakariah Johnson
Here’s how Zakariah explains this collection of 14 short stories: “I wanted the book to have a cohesive theme, in this case around the costs of staying true to yourself. This is reflected in the first story, “The Sculptor,” and to some degree in all the stories, like “One-armed and Dangerous,” “Between the Rocks and the Hard Place,” “Fireflies,” and one of my favorites to research, my 1629 Massachusetts western, “Ambuscade on the Aptuxet Trail,” about the enigmatic and fascinating true-life Thomas Morton and his free-love, pagan colony of Maremount that contended against the Pilgrims’ vision for our emerging nation.”
Man on the Run by Charles Salzberg
Master burglar Francis Hoyt is on the run. After walking away from his arraignment in a Connecticut courtroom, he’s now a fugitive who has to figure out what he’s going to do with the rest of his life.
And so, he heads west, to Los Angeles, where he meets Dakota, a young true crime podcaster who happens to be doing a series on Hoyt. At the same time, he’s approached by a mysterious attorney who makes Hoyt an offer he can’t refuse: break into a “mob bank,” and liberate the contents.
*****
To check out our Reading Lists, covering a wide range of sub-genres in crime, horror, mystery and thriller, visit here.
