Archives de catégorie : Crime & Thrillers

POSSESSION ISLAND de Sarah McCarry

Women bite back in this queer gothic thriller, perfect for fans of Interview with the Vampire and Plain Bad Heroines.

POSSESSION ISLAND
by Sarah McCarry
Saturday Books, December 2026
(via Writers House)

It wasn’t easy for Angela Bell growing up on Possession island, the remote Pacific Northwest setting of her late mother’s wildly popular vampire novel. When she returns home from college and her estranged best friend, Mo, is murdered, she’s forced to reckon with yet another loss—and finds herself in the crosshairs of the bungled police investigation.

Sally Raleigh has longed to leave the island for years, but she’s trapped by her father’s declining health and her devotion to her charismatic twin brother Adrian. The last thing she needs is her high-school nemesis Angela back in town. But Sally is also devastated by Mo’s death, and finds herself forging an unlikely alliance with her former enemy to find Mo’s killer.

As Angie and Sally delve deeper into the island’s sinister underbelly, they must confront just how far they’re willing to go to protect the people they love. And they’ll soon find that the secrets they’ve been keeping from each other won’t stay buried for long….

Sarah McCarry is the author of the novels All Our Pretty Songs, Dirty Wings, About A Girl, and The Darling Killers. Her work has been shortlisted for the Lambda Award, the Norton Award, and the Tiptree Award. She received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Joint Quantum Institute, the Launchpad Writers’ Workshop, and The Arctic Circle. She’s taught letterpress printing, writing, and zine-making across the United States.

MOBIUS, INC. d’Adam Fawer

The impossible can be done—if he can raise enough money. A sci-fi thriller set in the back-stabbing world of New York City’s Silicon Alley.

MOBIUS, INC.
by Adam Fawer
April Yayıncılık (Turkey), October 2024
(via Liza Dawson Associates)

Caleb had it all—brilliant wife, adorable son, fantastic career as CFO at a hot tech startup. But he screws up and in one moment it all vanishes.

His son dies while Caleb is distracted by a work text, his marriage disintegrates, and the arrogant CEO Caleb recruited and mentored for eight years fires him. In a drunken rage, Caleb tweets out every salary at his company. This goes over about as well as you might expect.

Desperate, Caleb agrees to meet with a new start-up recommended by his mentor Jim, a brilliant but callous billionaire venture capitalist.

The company—Mobius, Inc.—is located in one room in a fifth-floor walkup in deepest Brooklyn. The founders—Andy, a slippery trust fund kid, and Rowan, an inscrutable genius physicist—are half Caleb’s age and already hate each other.

But Rowan has invented a Temporal Displacement Portal, a device that receives messages from the future. Instantly Caleb knows: Mobius is his salvation. He will go back in time and save his son. Fix everything.

Rowan says going back is impossible, but after decades in tech, Caleb knows that the impossible can be done—if he can raise enough money.

All he has to do is navigate the venture capitalists who hate him, keep Andy and Rowan from killing each other, and not get fired. Or worse.

Adam Fawer (born 1970 in New York City) is an American Novelist. Improbable, his first novel, has been translated into eighteen languages and won the 2006 International Thriller Writers Award for best first novel. His second novel, Empathy, has been published in 2008 in German, Japanese and Turkish. Fawer holds undergraduate and master’s degrees from the University of Pennsylvania and received an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business. During his corporate career, Fawer worked for a variety of companies including Sony Music, J.P. Morgan, and most recently, About.com, where he was the chief operating officer. He lives in New York with his partner and two sons.

MURDER AT 30,000 FEET de Susan Walter

Under the cover of turbulence, a killer strikes. With nowhere to land and nowhere to hide, who will save the passengers from this nightmare at 30,000 feet?

MURDER AT 30,000 FEET
by Susan Walter
Blackstone Publishing, February 2026
(via Laura Dail Literary)

It’s a ticket to paradise. Flight 868 has nonstop service to San Juan, Puerto Rico. Over a dozen tipsy passengers are off to a destination wedding. A team of high school baseball players are headed to a tournament. The plane is packed with people eager to escape their lives, and others who can’t wait to return to their beloved home.

But sweet anticipation turns to terror when a lightning strike short-circuits the avionics and plunges the plane into darkness. When the lights come back on, a passenger is found brutally murdered, with only a bewildered air marshal to solve the crime. He soon realizes that several passengers are harboring dark secrets, but the identity of the murderer eludes him. There’s only one certainty: The killer is on the plane.

Thousands of feet above the earth with thunderstorms closing in, the danger outside is as grave as the mounting threat within. Can the captain outrun the storm? Or will the murderer among them bring the plane down first?

Passion, betrayal, and murder collide in this high-stakes, locked-room mystery. A must-read for fans of T. J. Newman and Jeneva Rose.

Susan Walter is a recovering screenwriter and film director who started writing books to kill people because it was frowned upon in real life. Her first two novels are set in the movie business, but then she discovered there are places that are even more dangerous and is now murdering people on airplanes, on ski hills, and in safe houses while on the run from organized crime. When not writing (and also maybe while writing) Susan can be found streaming Red Sox baseball and drinking too much coffee.

CHILDREN OF THE SAVAGE CITY d’Elizabeth Heider

Fast-paced, evocative, and steeped in the tension of moral compromise, CHILDREN OF THE SAVAGE CITY explores the thin line between hope and illusion in a city where every choice carries a price.

CHILDREN OF THE SAVAGE CITY
by Elizabeth Heider
Penguin Books, February 2026
(via Dystel, Goderich & Bourret)

Some cities feed on secrets. Naples is ravenous.

A peaceful evening mass at the historic Chiesa del Gesù Nuovo is shattered when a young au pair is killed in one of the cathedral’s quiet chapels. The daughter of the US Ambassador sees it happen–but she’ll speak only to one person: Nikki Serafino.

Shaken by betrayal in her last high-profile case, Nikki has retreated from the relentless vigilance that once defined her work as liaison between Italian police and the US military. Withdrawn and mistrustful, she works her shifts, cares for her aging family, teaches self-defense classes, and avoids entanglement. But this case threatens her self-imposed invisibility–drawing her into a web of lies and resurfacing old wounds and buried loyalties. The murder investigation leads Nikki and her friend, Naples officer Valerio Alfieri, into a shadow architecture of power: built to protect the guilty and hide their secrets at any cost.

Can she and Valerio—each carrying dangerous debts—resist the undertow of corruption that swallows truth whole?

Set against the chaos of modern Naples—the city of Roberto Saviano’s Gomorrah and Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend—where grace and corruption share the same narrow streets, Nikki and Valerio navigate a landscape where even the most principled must confront the cost of survival.

Elizabeth Heider is the author of May the Wolf Die, named a New York Times Best Crime Novel, a Washington Post Best Mystery, and one of Publishers Weekly‘s best books of the year. Her short fiction has been recognized by the Santa Fe Writers Project and New Century Writer Awards. She holds a PhD in physics and most recently worked as a program manager for Microsoft’s AI4Science and as a scientist in the European Space Agency’s human spaceflight program. She’s authored original scientific research, a patent, analytical reports for the US government and military, and coauthored a journal article with astronaut Thomas Pesquet. She lived and worked in Naples, Italy, as a civilian analyst embedded with the US Navy’s mission in Africa, where she deployed aboard US and European naval ships. Originally from Utah, she now lives in The Hague, where she’s working on the next Nikki Serafino novel.

ACCIDENTS NEVER HAPPEN de Penny Zang

From the author of Doll Parts comes a literary thriller partly inspired by We Have Always Lived in the Castle, injected with the gothic presence of Poe, and set against the vibrant and smoke-filled bars of the 80s.

ACCIDENTS NEVER HAPPEN
by Penny Zang
Sourcebooks Landmark, December 2026

1985. Madeline, a hard-edged twenty-something bartender in Baltimore, is still processing her father’s untimely death. Before, she and her sister, Annabel, a free-spirited party girl, lived alone in the apartment above the family bar where they spent their off-hours partying until sunrise and dreaming about their unsure futures in a smoke-filled rooms. Now, Annabel is reclusive, the neighborhood treats the family like outcasts, and Mad is struggling to make ends meet.

When a picture taken of the bar makes it look like there’s a ghost in the upstairs window, gothic obsessed tourists start to show up in droves. Desperate to keep customers coming in, Madeline and Annabel decide to embrace the publicity and make up a story that embellishes on the history of Edgar Allan Poe, who famously died in the city. But on opening night of their new venture, Annabel goes missing without a trace, and soon, strange things begin to happen not only in the bar, but in their neighborhood, and soon, Annabel isn’t the only bartender to disappear. Hoping to find the truth behind what happened to her sister, Mad finds herself confronted with the dark underbelly of a haunting Baltimore, and as she digs, she’ll come to realize that some ghost stories may turn out to be true.

Penny Zang is an English professor at Greenville Technical College and holds an MFA in Creative Writing from West Virginia University. She is the author of Doll Parts (Sourcebooks, 2025). Her other work has appeared in New Ohio Review, Louisville Review, Superstition Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Greenville, South Carolina with her husband and son.