November’s Best Debut Novels

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The CrimeReads editors select the month’s best debut novels in crime, mystery, and thrillers.

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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…. –Molly Odintz, CrimeReads Senior Editor

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

D.M. Rowell, Never Name the Dead
(Crooked Lane)

Rowell’s Never Name the Dead is an impressive debut, charting a woman’s return from Silicon Valley to her roots, the Kiowa tribal land in Oklahoma, where she finds a divided tribe, land threatened by fracking, and her own grandfather missing and possibly framed for a crime she knows he didn’t commit. The novel then becomes a detective story with a deep sense of place and history. Rowell brings notes of poetry to the dark tale of corruption. –DM

Katy Hays, The Cloisters
(Atria)

This one is for all you lovers of tarot cards, medieval art, and deadly games of power and seduction. It’s also for art lovers, particularly ones who know the magic of the Cloisters, a museum at the sharp top of Manhattan where the Museum of Metropolitan Art’s medieval holdings are housed. Once again, there is a fresh-faced heroine, Ann Stilwell, but she is raring to intern in the curatorial department at the Met. After her initial disappointment when she’s assigned to The Cloisters, she falls in with the quirky staff and an obsession with a fifteenth-century tarot deck which might be able to predict the future. –Lisa Levy, CrimeReads contributing editor

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