Archives de catégorie : Crime & Thrillers

BLOOD LIKE WATER de Jennifer Lynn Alvarez

A house party turns deadly in this tightly wound thriller set against an icy Alaskan winter.

BLOOD LIKE WATER
by Jennifer Lynn Alvarez
Delacorte, Fall 2025
(via Sterling Lord Literistic))

Finley, Mya, River, and Eli. They were inseparable as kids, running wild on Alaska’s vast wide-open spaces. Then tragedy struck, and Finley moved to the lower 48. But now it’s senior year, and Finley’s back in Anchorage. When Mya throws a house party on a snowy Valentine’s Day night, it’s supposed to be a chance for the friends to reforge old bonds. But an encounter with a mysterious stranger quickly turns the evening into a nightmare. What happened that night was an accident, right? Or was there intent? Either way, loyalty takes a dark turn when Mya, the group’s de facto leader, pressures the friends into a pact of silence, plunging them into a web of deception. Now a man’s missing, the police are involved, and Finley doesn’t know what to do or who to trust.

Jennifer Lynn Alvarez is the author of the young adult thrillers, Lies Like Wildfire, Friends Like These, and two middle-grade fantasy series, The Guardian Herd and Riders of The Realm. She earned her degree in English Literature from UC Berkeley and is the Sonoma County Coordinator for SCBWI. Jennifer lives in Tennessee and often travels to Northern California.

VERY DANGEROUS THINGS de Lauren Muñoz

From the author of Suddenly a Murder comes a smart, twisty whodunnit—set on one very unique school campus, and filled with love, betrayal, and deadly secrets. Perfect for fans of Karen McManus and Maureen Johnson.

VERY DANGEROUS THINGS
by Lauren Muñoz
Penguin Random House, May 2025
(via Writers House)

The dead body should have been fake. It wasn’t.

Dulce Castillo is determined to win the murder mystery game her crime and criminology magnet school stages every fall. Last year’s loss to her ex-best friend’s team wasn’t only humiliating; it kept her from winning the $60,000 prize money she and her dad need to keep living in the town she loves. But Dulce is sure this year will be different because she and her friend Emi have a secret weapon: Zane, the new transfer student, who somehow knows everything about forensics.

It doesn’t hurt that he’s as cute as ten puppies wearing bunny ears.

The school’s golden boy, Xavier Torres, is chosen to play the victim. Unfortunately, someone wants Xavier dead for real. When he’s found murdered in the school greenhouse, the primary suspect is his girlfriend, Sierra. She swears she’s being railroaded by the sheriff, but the evidence against her is overwhelming: It shows that she stabbed Xavier with a poison-tipped knitting needle because he dumped her when he found out she was having a fling with his brother.

Sierra begs Dulce for help clearing her name, but Dulce refuses. After all, this is the same ex-bff who lied about why Dulce’s mom died in a car wreck three years ago. But when the prize committee decides to offer up the $60,000 to whoever solves Xavier’s real murder, Dulce has no choice but to throw her monocle in the ring. When she finds evidence that Sierra might be innocent and that someone she cares about might be guilty, Dulce has to determine whether justice is more important than love.

Lauren Muñoz is a writer, lawyer, and former teacher living in Southern California. She received her J.D. from Northwestern University in Chicago, where she frequently skipped class to commune with her sun lamp. When she’s not reading, she can be found knitting, crocheting, and collecting recipes for things she’ll never bake.

GRIMSTONE de Sophie Lark

From USA Today bestselling author Sophie Lark comes a brand new romantic thriller series in the gothic, secretive beach town of Grimstone.

GRIMSTONE
by Sophie Lark
Bloom Books/Sourcebooks, September 2024

Remi Hayes is beginning to think she’s cursed—her fiancé cheated on her, her brother Jude is a major pain in her ass, and the moldering mansion she inherited from her uncle might just be haunted.

Flipping Blackleaf Manor already feels impossible, even before Remi is blackmailed by Dane Covett, the dangerously hot doctor-next-door, and Grimstone’s most eligible bachelor—if you can ignore the fact that everyone in town thinks he murdered his wife.

Remi doesn’t want to believe it, especially after Dane sews up a gash in her thigh and steals a kiss in payment—a kiss that makes it hard to walk for reasons that have nothing to do with an injured leg.

But as the renovation takes a strange and violent turn, Remi must decide if Dane is the one haunting her nights, or if he’s trying to protect her from something much worse.

When Sophie Lark started writing, she wanted to create intelligent and powerful female characters who were allowed to be flawed. She’s always loved dark and twisty storylines. She thought so many of her interests were strange until she found an online community of readers who love all the same things. Sophie writes all kinds of stories, including dark romance, fantasy, and suspense. She’s a sucker for anti-heroes and moral dilemmas. Her readers mean everything to her. She couldn’t do what she loves for a living without them, and she’d be lost without the outlet of writing.

THE GREAT GIMMELMANS de Lee Matthew Goldberg

Filled with greed and love and the meaning of religion and tradition until the walls of the RV and the feds start closing in on the family, this thrilling literary tale mixes Michael Chabon and the Coen Brothers with equal parts humor and pathos.

THE GREAT GIMMELMANS
by Lee Matthew Goldberg
Level Best Books, November 2023
(via The Rights Factory)

Middle child Aaron Gimmelman watches as his family goes from a mildmannered reform Jewish clan to having over a million dollars of stolen money stuffed in their RV’s cabinets while being pursued by the FBI and loan sharks. But it wasn’t always like that. His father Barry made a killing as a stockbroker, his mother Judith loved her collection of expensive hats, his older sister Steph was obsessed with pop stars, and little sister Jenny loved her stuffed possum, Seymour.

After losing all their money in the Crash of 1987, the family starts stealing from convenience stores, but when they hit a bank, they realize the talent they possess. The money starts rolling in and brings the family closer together, whereas back at home, no one had any time for bonding due to their busy schedules. But Barry’s desire for more, more, more will take its toll on the Gimmelmans, and Aaron is forced into an impossible choice: turn against his father, or let his family fall apart.

From Jersey, down to an Orthodox Jewish community in Florida where they hide out, and up to California, The Great Gimmelmans goes on a madcap ride through the 1980s.

BUCKLE UP!

Lee Matthew Goldberg is the author of the six novels including The Ancestor and The Mentor, currently in development as a film off his original script. He has been published in multiple languages and nominated for the Prix du Polar. After graduating with an MFA from the New School, his writing has also appeared in The Millions, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, LitReactor, Monkeybicycle, Fiction Writers Review, Cagibi, Necessary Fiction, Hypertext, the anthology Dirty Boulevard, The Montreal Review, The Adirondack Review, The New Plains Review, Underwood Press and others.

SANCTUARY de Garry Disher

A thrilling new standalone from one of Australia’s most esteemed crime authors.

SANCTUARY
by Garry Disher
Text Publishing, April 2024

Grace is good at theft. She was taught by experts and she’s been practising since she was a kid. She specialises in small, high value items—stamps, watches—and she knows her Jaeger- LeCoultres from her Patek Philippes. But it’s not the life she wants.

Then, lying low after a run-in with an old associate, Grace walks into Erin Mandel’s rural antiques shop and sees a chance for something different. A normal job. A place to call home.

But someone is looking for Grace. And someone’s looking for Erin, too.

And they are both, in their own ways, very dangerous men.

Garry Disher has published sixty titles across multiple genres. With a growing international reputation for his best-selling crime novels, he has won four German and three Australian awards for best crime novel of the year, and has been longlisted twice for a British CWA Dagger Award. In 2018 he received the Ned Kelly Lifetime Achievement Award.