The crisp air and longer nights make fall prime mystery and thriller reading time, and Addison Rizer has assembled a list of literary mysteries and thrillers with brilliant prose and a strong character focus. After looking through those, you can get meta with these books about books.
Also make sure to check out the dates for the Banned Wagon tour, which is hitting the road again now that Banned Books Week has started. It’s making stops “at libraries and bookstores in nine American communities across the Midwest and the South.”
Today’s mix of new releases is fuego.
You can read about how one woman’s imprisonment in Argentina sparked a women’s rights movement (something I can see getting a renewed boost in the US) in the nonfiction What Happened to Belén by Ana Elena Correa, translated by Julia Sanches. Still in the realm of reality, there are the memoirs Come By Here by Neesha Powell-Ingabire, which focuses on the author’s experience growing up Geechee in Georgia; and The Road Is Good by Orange is the New Black’s Uzo Aduba.
Literary fiction has the oceanic Playground by Richard Powers and the family trauma-based A Reason to See You Again by Jami Attenberg coming out. Romantically speaking, there’s the rocking and rolling The Lightning Bottles by Marissa Stapley, and the sapphic nod to tarot that is The Lovers by Rebekah Faubion. Getting more into the spooky mood of the season, there’s also the Salem witch magic-filled feminist horror Necrology by Meg Ripley; the gothic, Philippines-set Celestina’s House by Clarissa Trinidad Gonzalez; and graphic novel Final Cut by Charles Burns, a surreal ode to sci-fi and horror movies.
And then there are the books below!
Get ready for one of the biggest books of the year by mega-popular Irish author Sally Rooney, murderous angels, a Polish sanatorium in the 1900s, Knives Out meets holiday rom-coms, and more.
Intermezzo by Sally Rooney
I listed this as one of the biggest books coming out this fall, and if you’ve been anywhere near a bookstore the las few years, you’d know why.
Here, Rooney’s eye for interpersonal relationships is turned to two brothers, Peter and Ivan Koubek, who aren’t very much alike. Peter fits every bit of the confident and successful attorney stereotype there is—until his father dies, and he starts self-medicating to get to sleep. And, now his relationships with two different women—one his age and one in college—are starting to falter, too. Then there’s his younger brother, Ivan, who is a competitive chess player, and who has never been all that social. Since their father died, his life has changed, too, and he finds himself becoming more and more involved with an older woman.
The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story by Olga Tokarczuk
After reading Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, Tokarczuk’s books and I go together real bad. Here, she’s set her glittering and thrilling prose to a sanitarium in 1913 Poland. Mieczysław is a young man suffering from tuberculosis who arrives at Wilhelm Opitz’s Guesthouse for Gentlemen, where he will gather every day with other residents to discuss class, war, and the inherent value of women. But strange things are happening while Guesthousers do all this pontificating—something is watching them. And as Mieczysław investigates what’s going on, he realizes it may be too late. I am so ready for the humor, folklore, and horror this promises.
Devils Kill Devils by Johnny Compton
All her life, Sarita has been watched over by a guardian angel—or, at least, what she thinks is an angel—who she calls Angelo. But then, one day, Angelo kills someone she cares about, and suddenly, the darkness that’s been hidden in her shadows starts to come forth. She’ll have to embrace it if she’s to win against hell’s minions.
Adam & Evie’s Matchmaking Tour by Nora Nguyen
When was the last time you read a romance novel set in Việt Nam? Right, me neither, which is partially why Adam & Evie’s Matchmaking Tour sounds like so much fun. But let’s rewind a bit and get into Evie, who has just been fired from a poetry professorship by her secret boyfriend—which makes me want to hold her hand gently while I tell her some things. In any case, for a second, it seems like things are kind of looking up when her Auntie Hảo leaves her a memory-filled row house in San Francisco. But there’s a catch: to actually inherit it, she’ll have to go on a matchmaking tour in her family’s native Việt Nam. That’s where Adam comes in. He’s busting his you-know-what in order to prove himself as the CMO of his sister’s matchmaking business and joins the inaugural tour. It’s there that he meets Evie, and his grumpy uptightness is countered by her chaotic whimsy. As they keep getting thrown together in places like the busy streets of Hồ Chí Minh City and against the backdrop of the beautiful waterfalls in Đà Lạt, animosity turns into something sweeter.
The Burning Earth: A History by Sunil Amrith
In my opinion, too much of Western European culture situates humanity as being fundamentally disconnected from its environment, and here, Amrith bridges that gap. He looks at the last 500 years, honing in on how humans have shaped the world around us, and how that world has shaped us back. Agricultural innovations have fed billions, just as they have allowed us to exploit physical resources and other human beings. Imperialism is juxtaposed with the environment, as genocide is with ecocide. This is a vital addition to human historical texts and to climate nonfiction.
The Most Wonderful Crime of the Year by Ally Carter
Okay, so part of me felt physically repulsed by the general Christmas theme—I only just saw the first Halloween decorations of the year—but I have to say that the “Knives Out gets a holiday rom-com twist in this rivals-to-lovers romance-mystery” description lowered my blood pressure a bit.
In this locked-room mystery, the Queen of cozy mysteries, Maggie Chase, is not feeling thriller writer Ethan Wyatt, and he’s not too hot on her himself. But they both get an odd invitation to a Christmas house party from a reclusive fan. When they get to the English estate, they find out they were invited by thee most powerful author in the world, the Duchess of Death, Eleanor Ashley. Then Eleanor disappears, seemingly from a locked room, and as time goes on, Maggie isn’t sure if Eleanor is really in danger or if this is some elaborate ruse. What’s more, is Ethan trustworthy, or is he her competition? Or, more confusingly, is he someone she wants to be with?
Other Book Riot New Releases Resources:
- All the Books, our weekly new book releases podcast, where Liberty and a cast of co-hosts talk about eight books out that week that we’ve read and loved.
- The New Books Newsletter, where we send you an email of the books out this week that are getting buzz.
- Finally, if you want the real inside scoop on new releases, you have to check out Book Riot’s New Release Index! That’s where I find 90% of new releases, and you can filter by trending books, Rioters’ picks, and even LGBTQ new releases!
Share
Print
