Smart Take On The Revenge Tale

Riot Recommendations

I’m going to do something a little different with my end-of-year Best Of List. In 2022 I got to read a bunch of great novels in the crime genre that also spoke on what it’s like to be a part of the diaspora, an immigrant, and from an immigrant family. I loved these voices a lot and that seemed a great reason to create a Best Of List for.

Four Aunties and a Wedding by Jesse Q. Sutanto — The sequel to the very fun and funny Dial A for Aunties which continues Sutanto’s gift for melding crime and comedy-of-errors, with a Chinese-Indonesian family that has mastered bickering and love.

Portrait of a Thief Grace D. Li — Li has written a crime novel inspired by the real headlines about Chinese art vanishing from Western museums. It’s a character-driven heist novel that takes you into a group of very different characters’ lives as it explores the many different layers of being Chinese American.

Counterfeit by Kirstin Chen — This is a wait-for-it crime novel that takes you into the counterfeit handbag world while following two women as the novel unravels Asian American stereotypes.

The Verifiers by Jane Pek — This is a character-driven amateur sleuth novel with an interesting job of verifying user info on matchmaking apps. The lead, Claudia Lin, is a Chinese American constantly navigating her complicated relationships with her mother and siblings while trying to forge her own path.

Blackwater Falls by Ausma Zehanat Khan — This is the beginning of a procedural series that pairs together Detective Inaya Rahman — who is American, half Afghan, and half Pakistani — and Lieutenant Waqas Seif — who keeps his culture/ethnicity to himself. As they navigate their own identities, they also need to solve the murder of a teen from a Syrian Muslim refugee family.

Secret Identity by Alex Segura — Here we get the exploration of a Cuban American woman moving from Miami to New York in the ’70s while having to navigate the very white male comic book industry, and also deal with a murder investigation.

Undercover Latina by Aya de León — Andréa Hernández-Baldoquín is a 14-year-old girl who discovers her parents work for a world organization of spies and then gets her first assignment: going undercover in a high school. But she’ll have to shed her identity and culture to do so, forcing her to answer complicated questions and do some soul searching.