Archives de catégorie : Mystery

THE IVORY CITY d’Emily Bain Murphy

The Devil in the White City meets Pride and Prejudice in this romantic historical murder mystery set at the 1904 World’s Fair.

THE IVORY CITY by Emily Bain Murphy
Union Square & Co., November 2025
(via Park, Fine & Brower)

The St. Louis World’s Fair, 1904: A miniature city of palaces and pavilions that becomes a backdrop for romance, betrayal—and murder.

Cousins Grace and Lillie have been best friends since birth, despite Grace’s vastly inferior social status ever since her mother married for love instead of wealth. When Lillie invites Grace to the biggest event of the century—the legendary World’s Fair, also known as “The Ivory City”—Grace hopes her fortunes might be about to change.

But when a member of their party is brutally killed at the fair, and suspicion falls on Lillie’s brother Oliver, Grace must prove Oliver’s innocence before her beloved cousins’ family is ruined forever. Along the way, she’ll discover that the city’s wealthy elite—including Oliver’s handsome but irritable friend Theodore—aren’t quite who they appear to be. And amidst the glitz, glamor, and magic of the Ivory City lurks a danger that just may claim her life.

« Murphy’s intense research helps to immerse readers in the lush setting…A good pick for fans of Deanna Raybourn and Andrea Penrose. »―Library Journal, STARRED Review

Emily Bain Murphy is the author of two critically acclaimed young adult novels—The Disappearances, which was shortlisted for the Waterstones Children’s Book Prize, and Splinters of Scarlet—as well as the popular historical mystery novel Enchanted Hill. Murphy lives in St. Louis with her husband, three children, and a rescue bunny, where she’s always on the lookout for beautiful old mansions hiding new stories.

GOOD INTENTIONS de Marisa Walz

A deft and immersive psychological suspense debut about a luxury party planner who becomes obsessed with a woman she encounters in a hospital waiting room.

GOOD INTENTIONS
by Marisa Walz
St. Martin’s Press, February 2026

Cady has worked hard to have a good life. She has a thriving luxury event-planning business, the man she’s loved since she was seventeen, and a social calendar she can barely keep up with. She also has Dana, her identical twin, her beyond best friend, her most trusted confidante. When Cady gets a call that Dana has been in a serious accident and arrives moments too late to say goodbye, her world falls apart.

But to Cady’s family’s growing concern and confusion, it’s not Dana’s death that consumes her. It’s Morgan, a grieving mother Cady encountered in the hospital waiting room, the day her sister died. It can’t be a coincidence, that they both experienced tragedy at the same moment, in the same place―Cady doesn’t believe in coincidences. Instead, she is convinced that she must help this stranger overcome her tragedy, in order to come to terms with her own.

Or…is there more to it? Is it possible that Cady wants something else from Morgan? Something she can’t even admit to herself?

Slyly twisted and deeply provocative, GOOD INTENTIONS captures the moral ambiguity that can arise in the face of impossible choices. Like the aftermath of a car accident―and against your better judgment―you won’t be able to look away.

Marisa Walz is a Federal Reserve executive who also writes novels about people behaving badly. She lives in the Chicago suburbs with her husband and two young children.

MURDER MOST DELICIOUS de Danielle Postel-Vinay

Thursday Murder Club meets Butter—with a dash of the healing fiction of Days at the Morisaki Bookshop—in this heart-warming and delectable mystery set in Paris featuring two women in need of comfort: an American sommelier who has lost her sense of taste and an agoraphobic detective afraid to leave her quaint Parisian neighborhood.

MURDER MOST DELICIOUS
by Danielle Postel-Vinay
HarperCollins, May 2026
(via Writers House)

Olivia Branch has a legendary palette—or, rather, had. She was a master sommelier—a distinction given to only 269 people in the world, and only a handful of them women–with a mental catalogue for the scent and taste of wines that ran into the thousands. She was even, for a time, the youngest-ever Head Sommelier at the most prestigious French restaurant in New York City. That is, until Covid robbed her of one of her greatest weapons: her sense of taste.

While Olivia manages to keep this a secret for as long as she possibly can, her cover is blown one disastrous evening when she fails to identify one of the most important wines of her career. Reeling from the public humiliation, adrift, and massively depressed, she gets a miraculous second-chance opportunity in the form of an invitation from Jacques de Bizet—an old friend and celebrity chef in Paris—who invites her to fly to France to interview with him. Everything finally seems to be turning around for Olivia…until the esteemed gourmand takes his first sip and immediately drops dead.

Augusta Dupin is a former detective. Eccentric and intimidating in her intellect, she’d solved some of the hardest cases to come through the Sûreté de Paris. That is, until Covid arrived, and with it, a severe flare-up of her childhood agoraphobia. Unable to leave the borders of her tiny neighborhood, she was forced to quit her job, but she just can’t seem to give up her passion for mysteries. And now, one has landed right at her doorstep: Who killed the neighborhood’s dear friend and favorite chef Jacques? And who is the mysterious American woman who fled the scene of the crime?

In this captivating mystery full of sensual delights and adventures, Olivia and Augusta must join forces with a group of neighborhood amateur sleuths—a pâtissier, a café owner, a perfumer, and a florist—to solve the crime, and along the way find fresh purpose for their lives. Set against the backdrop of the enchanting Seventh Arrondissement, readers will be immediately transported to the cozy, charming Parisian neighborhood where friendship, food and creature comforts have the power to soothe the soul in dark times.

Danielle Postel-Vinay is the French alter-ego of The New York Times and internationally bestselling author Danielle Trussoni, whose books have won The Los Angeles Times Book Prize, Le Prix Bête Noire des Libraires and been translated into more than thirty languages. She spends part of the year in Paris with her French husband and their family.

TENDERNESS de Rowan Beaird

From the beloved author of The Divorcées comes a novel set in the 1970s during an island wedding, where the bride has recently left a sinister cult that might still be trailing her.

TENDERNESS
by Rowan Beaird
Flatiron/St. Martin’s Press, July 2026

On a remote island off the coast of Virginia, family and friends gather to celebrate the wedding of Shay O’Connor and Andrew Pruitt. From the moment the guests arrive, all they can whisper about is the bride, who recently left the headline-making cult Synanon. Why would someone like Shay, an Ivy League graduate with a wealthy, doting fiancée, join Synanon? And has she really escaped their grasp?

Told from the interwoven perspectives of Shay’s brother William, her longtime friend Joel, and Shay herself, Tenderness is a slow-burn mystery that excavates dark family histories and romantic regrets. As the wedding day approaches, Joel and William pull at the loose threads of Shay’s story, and it becomes clear there is an even greater threat on the island than the secrets each character is keeping from one another.

Set in the tinderbox of the 1970s, Tenderness is a lit match, bringing hidden truths to light and asking if we can ever see ourselves or the people we love for who they truly are.

Rowan Beaird’s fiction has appeared in The Southern Review, Ploughshares, and Gulf Coast. She lives in Chicago with her husband and daughter. She is the author of the acclaimed novel The Divorcées (Flatiron, 2024).

THIS WILL BE THE END OF ME de Jared Young

A mind-bending locked-room mystery where every suspect is the same man—and so is the corpse. Knives Out meets Everything Everywhere All At Once: clever, twisty, and impossible to put down.

THIS WILL BE THE END OF ME
by Jared Young
Crown Fiction, spring 2027

Joshua Hoffman is throwing a weekend-long party at his remote lakeside home with nine alternate versions of himself—other selves who made different choices at various crossroads in Joshua Hoffman’s life and ended up in wildly different circumstances.

To distinguish themselves from one another, they adopt nicknames. Among them are: The Argentinian, who fled his dreary hometown for a life of luxury in South America; The Townie, who stayed behind to marry his high school crush; The Marksman, a single father struggling to raise his troubled daughter; The Director, a Hollywood filmmaker facing an embarrassing end to his career; and The Teacher, a man of faith and moral duty who unknowingly carries a dark secret.

Some of the Joshua Hoffmans have gained fame and fortune, others have embraced the stability of family life. But over the course of the weekend, all of them will uncover deep wells of existential doubt and unhappiness as they reckon with what might have been. And when one of the Joshua Hoffmans turns up dead – brutally strangled in an upstairs bedroom – the others must confront a horrifying truth: a killer is among them.

As the violence escalates and the bodies pile up – stabbed, drowned, and burned alive – paranoia tears the group apart. Which Joshua Hoffman wants to kill his other selves, and why? Desperate to survive until the end of the weekend, they interrogate, accuse, and attack each other. When every suspect looks just like the others, finding the murderer is next to impossible.

Deftly told in rotating first-person perspectives, each chapter immerses readers in the consciousness of a different Joshua Hoffman—men divided by circumstance but bound by identity. THIS WILL BE THE END OF ME is for readers who love the ingenious puzzles of Agatha Christie and Stuart Turton, the unsettling tension of Iain Reid and Paul Tremblay, and the raw emotional introspection of writers such as Karl Ove Knausgaard and Kazuo Ishiguro. It’s for fans of high-concept mysteries that double as philosophical meditations, for readers who want both page-turning suspense and a work of literary ambition that asks philosophical questions about how to live a life.

Jared Young’s body of work spans books, magazines, and feature films. He is the author of the novel Into the Current, which was longlisted for the ReLit Award in 2016. His stories and essays have appeared in publications around the world, and have been anthologized by McSweeney’s. He is the writer of the feature film, Sinister Switch, and currently has multiple scripts optioned and in development.
As a creative director, his brand and campaign work has won international recognition, and has been covered by Adweek and The Globe & Mail. His book trailer for Into The Current was the first ever to screen at a major international film festival when it premiered at SXSW in 2017, where it won both the Audience and Jury Awards. Jared also publishes “Tolstoyan,” a Substack newsletter about culture, literature, and philosophy. His essay Youth, about the regrets of middle-age, recently went viral, generating thousands of new subscribers and becoming a Substack Editors’ Pick. He lives in Chelsea, Quebec, with his wife and two children.