Crime Fiction Coming Out This February
We lined up some of our favorite crime fiction and crime-adjacent novels coming to stores this February. This is by no means a comprehensive list (you can find more of our favorites in our Most Anticipated Books of 2024), but it shows all the potential for this month but a thrilling one for crime readers everywhere.
Jane Pool likes her safe, suburban existence just fine. She has a house, a family, (an infuriating mother-in-law,) and a quiet-if-unfulfilling administrative job at the local college. Everything is wonderfully, numbingly normal. Yet Jane remains haunted by her past: her mercurial, absent mother, her parents’ secrets, and the act of violence that transformed her life.
When her estranged twin, Lila, makes contact, claiming to know where their mother is and why she left all those years ago, Jane agrees to join her, desperate for answers and the chance to reconnect with the only person who really knew her true self. Yet as the hunt becomes treacherous, and pulls the two women to the earth’s distant corners, they find themselves up against their mother’s subterfuge and the darkness that always stalked their family. Now Jane stands to lose the life she’s made for the one that has been impossible to escape.
“KILLER”: Jack Queen has been exonerated and freed from prison thanks to retired LAPD officer Cato Hightower. But when guilt gnaws at Jack, he admits: “I actually did it.” To which Hightower responds: “Yeah, no kidding.” You see, the ex-cop has a special job in mind for the ex-con…
THE GIRL DETECTIVE: Fifteen-year-old Matilda Finnerty has been handed a potential death sentence in the form of a leukemia diagnosis. But that’s not going to stop her from tackling the most important mystery of her life: Is her father guilty of murder?GENE JEANIE: Jeanie Hightower mends family trees for a living, but the genealogist is unable to repair her own marriage. And her soon-to-be ex may have entangled her in a scheme that has drawn the bloody wrath of…
THE BEAR: A prolific serial killer who disappeared forty years ago, who is only now emerging from hibernation when the conditions are just right. And this time, the California Bear is not content to hunt in the shadows…
Kurt Argento, an ex-Detroit street cop who can’t let injustice go—and who has the fighting skills to back up his idealism. If he sees a young girl being dragged into an alley, he’s going to rescue her and cause some damage. When he does just that in a small corrupt Missouri town, he’s brutally beaten and thrown into a maximum-security prison. Julie Wakefield, a grad student who happens to be the governor’s daughter, is about to take a tour of the prison. But when a malfunction in the security system releases a horde of prisoners, a fierce struggle for survival ensues.
Argento must help a small band of staff and civilians, including Julie and her two state trooper handlers, make their way from the bottom floor to the roof to safety. All that stands in their way are six floors of the most dangerous convicts in Missouri.
A killer uses fearsome precision to take out impossible targets.
Detective Michael Bennett teams with a shooting expert—a former Army Ranger and sniper with NYPD’s Emergency Services Unit. But Officer Rob Trilling seems more comfortable with rifles than he is with people.
When his new partner begins to log unexplained absences from duty, only Bennett can prove whether the decorated officer is a lonely hunter or a hardened assassin.
She sees the figure of a man appear down the hallway, shrouded in the shadows. Terrified, she quietly wakes her children and hustles them into the oldest part of the house, a tiny, secret room concealed behind a wall. There they hide as the man searches for them, trying to tempt the children out with promises and scare the mother into surrender.
In the suffocating darkness, the mother struggles to remain calm, to plan. Should she search for a weapon or attempt escape? But then she catches another glimpse of him. That face. That voice. And at once she knows her situation is even more dire than she’d feared, because she knows exactly who he is–and what he wants.
Being the daughter of the village Capuwa, or demon-priest, Amara is used to keeping mostly to herself. Influenced by the new religious practices brought in by the British Colonizers, the villagers who once respected her father’s craft have turned on the family. Yet, they all still seem to call on him whenever supernatural disturbances arise.
Now someone—or something—is viciously seizing upon men in the jungle. But instead of enlisting Amara’s father’s help, the villages have accused him of carrying out the attacks himself.
As she tries to clear her father’s name, Amara finds herself haunted by dreams that eerily predict the dark forces on her island. And she can’t shake the feeling that it’s all connected to the night she was recovering from a strange illness, and woke up, scared and confused, to hear her mother’s frantic cries: No one can find out what happened.
Jane must either let Esme stand on her own two feet for once or jump to her flighty younger sister’s rescue—and her choice cleaves her life in two.
In one reality, Jane can’t overcome her fear and tells Esme to crash with a friend. Twenty-four hours later, her sister is missing. Tortured by regret, Jane dedicates herself to piecing together Esme’s life before her disappearance, unraveling a web of lies, broken relationships, and, finally, the truth.
In the other reality, Jane swallows her fear and offers her less-than-grateful sister a ride. But while Jane hopes living together in their childhood home will be healing, Esme is aloof and increasingly reckless. The tension between the sisters builds until they are finally forced to reckon with the explosive secret from their past that could destroy their fragile bond—and both their lives.
Leah has been living with akinetopsia, or motion blindness, since she was a child. For the last twenty years, she hasn’t been able to see movement. As she walks around her upper Manhattan neighborhood with her white stick tapping in front, most people assume she’s blind. But the truth is Leah sees a good deal, and with her acute senses of smell and hearing, very little escapes her notice.
She has a quiet, orderly life, with little human contact beyond her longtime housekeeper, her doctor, and her elderly neighbor. That all changes when Alice moves into the apartment next door and Leah can immediately smell the anxiety wafting off her. Worse, Leah can’t help but hear Alice and a late-night visitor engage in a violent fight. Worried, she befriends her neighbor and discovers that Alice is in the middle of a messy divorce from an abusive husband.
Then one night, Leah wakes up to someone in her apartment. She blacks out and in the morning is left wondering if she dreamt the episode. And yet the scent of the intruder follows her everywhere. And when she hears Alice through the wall pleading for her help, Leah makes a decision that will test her courage, her strength, and ultimately her sanity.
Cassie Andrews works in a New York City bookshop, shelving books, making coffee for customers, and living an unassuming, ordinary life. Until the day one of her favorite customers—a lonely yet charming old man—dies right in front of her. Cassie is devastated. She always loved his stories, and now she has nothing to remember him by. Nothing but the last book he was reading. But this is no ordinary book…
It is the Book of Doors.Inscribed with enigmatic words and mysterious drawings, it promises Cassie that any door is every door. You just need to know how to open them.Then she’s approached by a gaunt stranger in a rumpled black suit with a Scottish brogue who calls himself Drummond Fox. He’s a librarian who keeps watch over a unique set of rare volumes. The tome now in Cassie’s possession is not the only book with great power, but it is the one most coveted by those who collect them.Now Cassie is being hunted by those few who know of the Special Books. With only her roommate Izzy to confide in, she has to decide if she will help the mysterious and haunted Drummond protect the Book of Doors—and the other books in his secret library’s care—from those who will do evil. Because only Drummond knows where the unique library is and only Cassie’s book can get them there. But there are those willing to kill to obtain those secrets. And a dark force—in the form of a shadowy, sadistic woman—is at the very top of that list.
Welcome to paradise. We hope you survive your stay…
There are three rules to follow during a vacation at the famous Koh Sang Resort1 – Leave the past behind.
When Cass sets foot on the coast of Thailand’s world-famous party island, she’s searching for an escape. With dark secrets following her every move, Koh Sang becomes the perfect place to hide.2 – Always be careful of who you trust.Now, years later, Cass is a local dive instructor alongside the Permanents, a group of expats who have claimed the island as their own. The Permanents don’t linger on who they were before the island. Simply because, like Cass, they all have something to outrun.3 – If someone discovers who you really are, run.
But suddenly, a dive student is found dead and paradise comes crashing down. Because this isn’t the first mysterious death on the island, and it won’t be the last. Someone knows who Cass is and they’re ready to make sure justice is finally served.
