Scottish Detective Book Series to Read Right Now

This is an excellent true crime memoir where Cristina Rivera Garza focuses on her sister’s life—including sharing diary entries—up until when Liliana, an architecture student, was murdered at the age of twenty. Almost thirty years after the crime took place, Cristina decides to get the case files and takes readers along for the process while also shining a light on femicide cases in Mexico and the protests as they try to fight back against gender-targeted crime.

If you’re an audiobook listener, Victoria Villarreal does a fantastic job with narration.

(TW mentions rape cases the way the news does/ talks of femicide cases/ mentions case believed to be suicide that was later determined murder/ mentions partner sexual assault, not graphic/ partner abuse/ mentions brief threat of suicide)

For reasons related to everything happening in the world, I have found fewer books grabbing me from the very beginning and keeping me fully invested. But this book broke through all the noise, I think, for three reasons: the initial hook, the MC’s voice, and the narrator on the audiobook (Karissa Vacker).

Since childhood, Vivvy Bouchet has had OCD and her mom’s psychic gift, except while her mom worked as a psychic, Vivvy instead became an astrophysicist. But her past comes to find her when a boy she once saved, who is now a cop, asks for her help on a complicated case: a missing child case where a body has never been found, and the imprisoned mother of the child continues to plead innocent.

(TW mentions eating disorder, detail/ murdered child/ brief mention past suicide attempt, detail/ mentions rape case/ mentions still birth/ past parent death of cancer/ OCD/ mentions all kinds of cases with brief mentions of every kind of violence/ past child abuse)