Author: Jamie Canaves

Calling all heist and historical mystery fans! There’s a jewel-encrusted book aboard the Titanic. Also on board the ship: Josefa, Emilie, Hinnah, and Violet. There skills of being a thief, an artist, an acrobat and an actress will come into play as they are there with one mission: steal the book. Problem, aside from being on the Titanic (!): grudges amongst the team, a new romance, and mistakes could cost them everything.

For fans of fun historical mysteries, duo sleuths, and great character voice, plus humor!

Lillian Pentecost, the most famous PI woman in the U.S., has multiple sclerosis so she brought on Willowjean “Will” Parker, a runaway working at the circus, to help her. That’s how the story begins in the first book, Fortune Favors the Dead. Will is narrating for us the story and recounting their cases. This time there are three murders, seemingly bringing pulp detective magazines murders to life, which they must solve without alerting the press or cops that they are connected. Why? Because the writer of these stories writes under a pseudonym and wants to keep her private life private. Enter some undercover work, the fandom of crime memorabilia, and danger…

I inhaled this audiobook narrated by Kirsten Potter!

(TW child harm/ mentions child murder case/ brief suicide mention and past case, detail/ questions child abuse/ recounts domestic murder)

For fans of thrillers and PI crime novels! Trevor “Finn” Finnegan is ex LAPD, currently working as a PI for a lawyer. He’s put on the case of tailing two cops, one of which was his old partner. But he’s not given the reason behind the assignment and soon his surveillance turns into him witnessing the cops being shot, which complicates things even further for Finn… If you want to start at the beginning of the series, pick up Under Color of Law.

For fans of le Carré and reading people’s correspondence! This is a collection of private letters, never publicly seen before, by the former MI5/MI6 spy turned author, John Le Carré. You’ll read his correspondence with spies, actors (Ralph Fiennes), mentors (Vivian Green) authors (Philip Roth), politicians, museum curators, and more. His son Tim edited the letters, before his passing in June.

Cosby is one of the best crime writers and this is a reissue of his debut novel. Bonus: the audiobook has an excellent narrator, Adam Lazarre-White, who also narrated Blacktop Wasteland.

Nathan Waymaker works at a funeral home but also takes on side jobs when people can’t find other help. He’s at war with the sheriff’s department — he’s a former deputy and still seeking revenge after his parent’s death. When the pastor of the local church dies, some parishioners think the Sheriff won’t properly investigate and hire Waymaker to get the real answers. This will only add to the list of enemies…

I love that Cosby writes dark crime novels with dark humor and vividly places you inside every scene. He also has a knack for making me like and root for complicated characters.

(TW mentions past suicide with detail/ stories of past addiction, overdose/ recounts child sexual assault)

This is a really funny series that should work well for fans of Stephanie Plum. You won’t be lost starting with this book, but there is a personal mystery that is threaded throughout the books that was mostly solved in the second book, so you may want to start at the beginning with A Bad Day for Sunshine.

Sheriff Sunshine Vicram is only Sheriff in Del Sol, New Mexico because her parents entered her in the election without her knowledge and she won. Now she’s trying to raise her teenage daughter, deal with all the zany characters in the town, run a station, and solve crimes, plus wrangle a raccoon who is her partner’s antagonist. Fun times! Her current case: missing women. Determined to also help out, her 15-year-old daughter. Bonus: Lorelei King narrates the audiobook, and is also the narrator for Janet Evanovich’s Plum books.

If you wait for the audiobook format of a book to release then happy day to you because The Obsession now has an audiobook with dual narrators: Catherine Ho and David Lee Huynh.

Delilah has been having a really hard time after her father’s death and is now living with an abusive stepfather. Logan, her stalker classmate, witnesses something while secretly watching Delilah and uses it to blackmail her into dating him. The novel alternates between Logan and Delilah’s perspectives until a cornered, and fed up, Delilah is ready to fight back. I really like that this started with You vibes but then went its own way. If you’re a fan of dark YA, pick this one up!

(TW stalker/domestic abuse/past suicide attempt and suicide, detail/drugging without consent)

This is my current audiobook read, narrated by the author! The book uses a 30 year cold case, solved by Jim Scharf, a cold case investigator, and CeCe Moore, a genetic genealogist, to explore how far science has come with DNA. The case at the heart of the book is a young Canadian couple, Tanya Van Cuylenborg (18) and Jay Cook (20), who took a weekend trip to Seattle because Jay needed a part for a furnace. They disappeared and were later found violently murdered, Tanya raped. The murders, assumed to have been committed by a serial killer, went unsolved for 30 years until a team was sent to collect something with DNA on it from a truck driver who’d been assumed the killer and tested his DNA. The book goes into the case, and the lives of Tanya and Jay while equally exploring how much DNA technology has changed, including the ethics behind someone uploading their DNA to see their family lineage and that DNA being used by law enforcement in cold cases.

This is a quirky mystery series that uses a lot of cozy mystery tropes but also takes some sharp turns away from the genre making it feel unique. Arya Winters has social anxiety, so while she lives in a quaint English village she isn’t going out of her way to spend time with neighbors. When she’s presented with an opportunity to bake her macabre desserts at a two week retreat, she jumps at the opportunity to get away from her meddling neighbors. Except the retreat is filled with new people who want to talk to her and murder is soon to follow…If you want to start at the beginning, pick up Arya Winters and the Tiramisu of Death.

If you’ve been patiently, or impatiently, awaiting the newest Gamache release, your wait has ended. Past events from Gamache’s life tie into the present: a past murder case of a mother who had two young children, Fiona and Sam; Gamache and his wife had taken Fiona under their wing; recruiting Jean-Guy Beauvoir during that case; a mass slaying in 1989 where a young Gamache was on the scene. Now there are several unsolved murders, Fiona and Sam return to Three Pines, and a long dead stone mason’s letter leads to the unbricking of an attic room filled with puzzles and hidden messages…If you want to start at the beginning of the series, pick up Still Life.

For fans of historical mystery series! Set in 1950 Bombay, the story begins with a frozen man in the Himalayan foothills. Inspector Persis Wadia and Metropolitan Police criminalist Archie Blackfinch are tasked with figuring out who this man is and what happened to him, but his isn’t the only murder… If you want to start at the beginning of the series, pick up Midnight at Malabar House. And if you want a series with a baby elephant in it, pick up Khan’s other series The Unexpected Inheritance of Inspector Chopra.

For fans of psychics and fun series! Leda Foley runs a travel agency, and also has some psychic visions. A missing woman’s brother comes to her for help: the husband didn’t immediately report her missing and she has disappeared with a lot of her employer’s cash. Seattle PD detective Grady Merritt, whose life Foley technically saved, is out looking for his dog when he finds the dog with a human leg. The DNA of the leg points to Foley’s current case. Lucky for everyone who enjoys entertaining mysteries, Foley will come up with wild ideas to solve the case! If you want to start at the beginning, pick up Grave Reservations.

Here’s a new short story collection with a really interesting theme: what would you do if you witnessed a crime? Rather than following the criminals, these 14 short stories explore how witnessing a crime can shape and alter a person and their life — and lead them to seek justice for the victims. Bonus: “with proceeds benefitting the Alliance for Safe Traffic Stops.” Contributors include: Pamela Samuels Young, Alex Segura, Cara Black, Sarah M.Chen, Teresa Dovalpage, Scott Adlerberg, Christopher Chambers, Aaron Philip Clark, Tod Goldberg, Gar Anthony Haywood, Darrell James, Richie Narvaez, Gary Phillips, SJ Rozan.

For fans of bookstore mysteries, sisters, and Agatha Christie. Ellie returns home to Colorado to run a bookshop accessible by mountain road and ski gondola. But nothing is picturesque when a dead man is found in the gondola and a rockslide traps everyone in town. Naturally two sisters who love Agatha Christie, including naming their cat after her, will have to put all they know about sleuthing into play when their friend becomes a suspect…

If you’re getting a bit of déjà vu, it’s because I told you about this title in August except the pub date got moved. So now I’m telling you about it again when you can actually go and get it!

For fans of past mystery and coming-of-age stories! Anna Xu is a university freshman so school and everything related should be taking up all her time, except seven years ago her childhood babysitter went missing as a sophomore at the same university. So naturally she’s going to solve the case, which is difficult enough but she has way more stress on her plate considering her parents’ bakery now has competition and the son of the competing bakery is also in school with her. How will he fit in with everything already going on in her life?!

For fans of historical fiction and vigilante leads! Bonus if you’re a fan of Jane Eyre; if not, or you haven’t read it, you won’t be confused or anything. While many might find being sent away to boarding school a punishment, Adele is excited to go to a school in London. That is until a brutal attack, and the realization that the men circling her friends have malicious intent. Enter a con woman and a vigilante team is born…Come for the vengeance, stay for the empowerment, and love story.

For fans of returning-home-to-solve-a-mystery-fight-for-your-home reads. Mud left her Kiowa tribe behind in Oklahoma and now works at an agency in Silicon Valley. She has a huge project at the moment that could change everything for the agency when she gets a message from her grandfather back home: “I have a bad feeling. Come now.” And so she does, trying her best to manage what is needed from work over the phone while trying to help her grandfather. Except it’s not a happy homecoming when she returns to the Plains Indian tribe. Her grandfather is missing, she finds a dead man in his workroom, and he’s accused of having stolen a Jefferson Peace Medal. It’s up to her, and her cousin, to clear her grandfather’s name.

I have about 10% left of the book and am really enjoying it, especially the look at history (artifacts and the history behind them) and Mud’s character. Her grandfather is a storyteller and she is supposed to be too but some members of the tribe treated her like she wasn’t Kiowa enough because of her curly hair, so she left instead of taking her place in the tribe. Something she has to deal with now that she’s back and faced with what she’s left, lost, and forgotten. And she also has to deal with seeing the ex-girlfriend she left behind, which did not end on good terms. It appears to be the start of a series and I am absolutely here for the second book.

This is a great series with tons of nods to the mystery genre where each book reads as a standalone — they are all multiple points of view with just one detective character connecting all the books. The first was for fans of a book within a book (short story) and a nod to Gothic stories: The Stranger Diaries. The second one is for fans of not-dark murder mysteries with found family: The Postscript Murders. And this one is for fans of “a group of friends did something bad a long time ago and now someone is killing them off, maybe.”

Harbinder Kaur has taken a new position in London and is getting to know her officers, her roommates, and a new city. She has also just landed her first case: an MP is found dead at his school reunion. What Harbinder doesn’t know is that one of her new officers, who is also at the reunion, was part of a group of high school students who got away with murder once…

This is a good read if you like murder mysteries, friend groups, past and present, multiple points of view, and a few “say what now?” reveals.

(TW parent with terminal cancer, death/mentions death recorded as suicide, no detail/recounts sexual assault, and attempted assault, with some details)

Collections like this are a fantastic way to get a lot of mysteries at once and find new authors! It’s also a great way to sneak in reading, especially when you’re having trouble finding the time or staying focused, because short stories work so well as a one sitting read. Here you’ll find 22 crime stories set around the world. And this collection is literally filled with fantastic crime writers and so many of my favorites: Oyinkan Braithwaite, Abir Mukherjee, S.A. Cosby, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, J.P. Pomare, Sheena Kamal, Vaseem Khan, Sulari Gentill, Nelson George, Rachel Howzell Hall, John Vercher, Sanjida Kay, Amer Anwar, Henry Chang, Nadine Matheson, Mike Phillips, Ausma Zehanat Khan, Felicia Yap, Thomas King, Imran Mahmood, David Heska Wanbli Weiden and Walter Mosley.

For fans of dark academia! Detective Marlitt Kaplan is assigned a hit-and-run case on the university campus where her mom is a professor. The victim is in a fraternity, and witnesses swear the person who killed him smiled. Not only will Kaplan have to dive into campus Greek life and fight against those trying to stop the investigation, but she’ll also have to wrestle with her own issues after losing a friend years before to a fraternity…

The audiobook is narrated by Saskia Maarleveld, who has a huge list of narrated books including The Impossible Girl.

(TW brief mention past suicide, detail/brief mention of handful of headlines with cases from sexual assault to animal cruelty/mentions open sexual assault case/briefly recounts past murder suicide, mass shooting/panic attack/past baby death from illness)