The Best Novels of the Month: November 2022

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The CrimeReads editors select the best new fiction in crime, mystery, and thrillers.

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Erika T. Wurth, White Horse
(Flatiron)

Erika T. Wurth’s White Horse is part horror novel, part detective story, as a haunted woman finds herself compelled to investigate her mother’s long-ago disappearance. Why did her mother leave her at two days old? Why did no one listen to her father when he suspected foul play? How many others have gone missing the exact same way? What is her mother trying to tell her through the visions she sees when she wears her mother’s powerful beaded bracelet? And what is the horrifying presence she’s accidentally conjured into this world, along with her mother’s ghost? White Horse, like the bar in the story it takes its title from, is gritty, haunting, understated, and beautiful. Erika T. Wurth is of Apache, Chickasaw, and Cherokee descent, and sets out to capture the urban Native experience while also doing justice to deeply rooted spiritual beliefs and practices. –MO

Anthony Horowitz, The Twist of a Knife
(Harper)

The incomparable detective duo Horowitz and Hathaway are BACK in this fourth installment of their adventures. (If you’re wondering why the detective and the author share a name, it’s because they are the same person. Kind of.) But anyway, in this new installment, Horowitz is the main suspect in a murder, and Hathaway is the only one who can exonerate him. Problem is, they’re not talking.–OR

Ausma Zehanat Khan, Blackwater Falls
(Minotaur)

I’m a huge fan of Ausma Zehanat Khan’s Community Policing series set in Canada, so I was psyched to see that she’s bringing her social justice oriented procedurals to the states with a new series taking place in Colorado. In Blackwater Falls, a teenage girl who’s a Syrian refugee is found murdered and posed as the Madonna in a church; it’s up to Khan’s Muslim detective to solve the murder and protect her community from both violent attack and more subtle aggressions. –MO

Michael Connelly, Desert Star
(Little Brown)

After a year in the wilderness, Renée Ballard is back with the LAPD, this time taking up a post at the head of a cold case unit in the elite Robbery-Homicide Division. And naturally, she enlists Harry Bosch to bring his own passion project over to her squad. Longtime readers will be glad to know that Connelly is still bringing the same intensity and atmosphere to his iconic series. –DM

Catherine Steadman, The Family Game
(Ballantine)

This book reminds me a little of the movie Ready or Not, in that it’s about rich and creepy in-laws. Harriet is a young writer with exciting prospects, in love with her fiancé Edward (the estranged heir of the powerful Holbeck family. Even though the couple has remained distant from the family, the family lures them back into their orbit. But then, under the guise of showing Harriet a sample of the book he’s writing, Edward’s father gives Harriet a recording of him confessing to a horrific crime, and plunges them all into a world of danger, deception, judgement, and betrayal. –OR

Ewan Morrison, How to Survive Everything
(Harper Perennial)

Morrison’s new novel is a fascinating exploration of the ethics of prepper culture through the eyes of a teenage girl. Along with her young brother, Haley’s been abducted by their disaster-prepping father, who has funded a bunker with what should have gone to child support payments and is convinced they must stay with his motley crew of camo-clad fanatics for at least three years. Did the apocalypse happen? Or is their father completely delusional? Harrowing, humorous, and featuring a clever and resourceful heroine, How to Survive Everything is the perfect book to read down in your bunker ahem, living room. –MO

Craig Henderson, Welcome to the Game
(Atlantic Monthly Press)

A widowed Englishman with a past as a rally driver gets caught up in a Detroit gangster’s dreams of one last job in this intricate and fast-paced debut from Craig Henderson. Welcome to the Game will give you plenty of hair-raising thrills, but the quiet moments and thoughtful characterization will have this story lingering in your mind for a long time after the last page is turned. –DM

Blair Braverman, Small Game
(Ecco)

In this quiet survivalist thriller, a game show in the woods becomes the real deal when an apocalyptic event cuts off the competitors from the rest of the world. Blair Braverman’s wilderness expertise is evident throughout the book, and the ways in which characters must rely on each other to find a path forward are hopeful. The ending itself was fairly open to interpretation, so read the book and talk about it with meeeee…. –MO

Malcolm Gaskill, The Ruin of All Witches: Life and Death in the New World
(Knopf)

It’s been a great year for witch fiction, both for novels featuring powerful feminist magic and for history books exposing the intense misogyny behind the original witch trials. Gaskill’s The Ruin of All Witches is, of, course, the latter, as we learn of an obscure mid-17th century witch trial in Connecticut with vast implications for the present day. Gaskill paints a claustrophobic portrait of a suspicious, insular, and deeply competitive community ready to turn on each other just as quickly as one could shout “She curdled my milk!”. –MO

Lauren Nossett, The Resemblance
(Flatiron)

Like everyone else these days, I can’t get enough of dark academic fiction, and Lauren Nosett’s takes the aesthetic into the frat houses in this college campus thriller. Nossett’s detective protagonist has a mother who’s a professor, lending expertise to her investigation of the university and also providing a source of conflict. The crime propelling The Resemblance is a puzzler: a fraternity brother is run down in the street by a man who looks exactly like him, and everyone in school’s Greek scene appears to have something to hide. –MO

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