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Our Favorite Crime Fiction Debuts of 2023
By Emily Hoang
If you haven’t had a chance, check out some of our favorite crime fiction debuts that came out this year. These stunning stories follow characters who are willing to go through great depths to find the truth. These tales explore the genre at new angles, by including themes of mental health and race, to broaden the boundaries of the genre. These crime fiction debut novels showcase some of the best in the genre. We recommend putting these on your TBR and keeping these authors on your radar.
Katrina Kim’s obsession with Kurt, her co-worker, is just one of her coping mechanisms from the life of a slightly unhinged, broke, woman who’s the black sheep of her family. Like her constant shape and number ritual. Or how scenes from her favorite children’s book bleed into her vision when she’s anxious or stressed. Her life crumbles when she receives a cryptic message from Kurt, implying that he’s aware of her surveillance. She accidentally becomes a witness to Kurt’s suicide but not before he tells her that his death is all her fault. Horrified, Katrina combs through the clues she’s collected about Kurt and realizes he’s been watching her just as much as she has of him. Liar, Dreamer, Thief, is an intimate portrayal of life’s complexities and a sensitive exploration of mental health.
This item is a preorder. Your payment method will be charged immediately, and the product is expected to ship on or around January 10, 2023. This date is subject to change due to shipping delays beyond our control.
A year ago, beloved cheerleader Stella Blackthorn vanished without a trace. Devastated, her younger sister, Iris, launched her own investigation, but all she managed to do was scare off the police’s only lead and earn a stern warning: Once she turns eighteen, more meddling means prison-level consequences.
Then, a year later, the unthinkable happens. Iris’s ex-girlfriend, Heather, goes missing, too—just after dropping the polarizing last episode of her true crime podcast all about Iris’s sister. This time, nothing will stop Iris and her amateur sleuthing agency from solving these disappearances.
But with a suspicious detective watching her every move, an enemy-turned-friend-turned-maybe-more to contend with, and only thirty days until she turns eighteen, it’s a race against the clock for Iris to solve the most dangerous case of her life.
This item is a preorder. Your payment method will be charged immediately, and the product is expected to ship on or around September 19, 2023. This date is subject to change due to shipping delays beyond our control.
Alex had given up on her dreams of becoming a published author. But she gets a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to attend an exclusive month-long writing retreat at the feminist horror writer Roza Vallo’s estate. When Alex and the other attendees arrive, Roza surprises them with a challenge that will reap the winner huge rewards. During the retreat, they must all complete an entire novel from scratch and the best novel will receive a seven-figure publishing deal. Although seemingly impossible, Alex buckles down to write and tries to ignore strange happenings—Roza’s erratic behavior, her rival, Wren’s, mind games, and the alleged mansion’s hauntings. Then a writer vanishes during a snowstorm, and Alex must find the truth to save herself before the clock runs out.
Format
Hardcover
This item is a preorder. Your payment method will be charged immediately, and the product is expected to ship on or around February 21, 2023. This date is subject to change due to shipping delays beyond our control.
Clare arrives in Edinburgh, Scotland, the perfect destination for someone who wants to reinvent herself. There, she meets Tabitha, a beautiful, charismatic, and rich girl from her art history class. Clare becomes part of an exclusive circle and the new life she’s envisioned for herself finally seems to begin. Tabitha reveals a little project she’s working on and ropes Clare into helping her, even though it goes again everything Clare has tried to repent for. Clare slowly realizes what her new friends are capable of but it’s too late for her to turn back.
Format
Hardcover
This item is a preorder. Your payment method will be charged immediately, and the product is expected to ship on or around January 10, 2023. This date is subject to change due to shipping delays beyond our control.
Sissy has an…interesting family. Always the careful one, always the cautious one, she has handled the cleanup while her serial killer sisters have carved a path of carnage across the U.S. Now, as they arrive in the Arizona heat, Sissy must step up and embrace the family pastime of making a man fall in love and then murdering him. Her first target? A young widower named Edison-and their mutual attraction is instant. While their relationship progresses, and most couples would be thinking about picking out china patterns and moving in together, Sissy’s family is reminding her to think about picking out burial sites and moving on.
Then something happens that Sissy never anticipated- She begins to feel protective of Edison, and before she can help it, she’s fallen in love. But the clock is ticking, and her sisters are growing restless. It becomes clear that the gravesite she chooses will hide a body no matter what happens; but if she betrays her family, will it be hers?
Format
Hardcover
This item is a preorder. Your payment method will be charged immediately, and the product is expected to ship on or around March 21, 2023. This date is subject to change due to shipping delays beyond our control.
During the last year of high school, Aubrey, Maya’s best friend, mysteriously dropped dead in front of Frank, an enigmatic man they’d been hanging out with all summer. Seven years later, Maya lives with her loving boyfriend in Boston and is kicking a secret addiction that’s helped her work through what happened years ago. That is until she stumbles across a recent YouTube video of a young woman who dies in a diner and sitting across none other than Frank. Maya retreats back to her Berkshires hometown to look for answers. And all roads seem to lead back to Frank’s cabin…
Format
Hardcover
This item is a preorder. Your payment method will be charged immediately, and the product is expected to ship on or around January 3, 2023. This date is subject to change due to shipping delays beyond our control.
Instagram influencer Alabama Wood goes missing two days after arriving in Iceland for a promotional trip. With no leads, the police focus on the two influencers that were closest to Alabama on the trip: Celeste Reed, Alabama’s best friend of ten years, and Hollie Goodwin, Alabama’s idol. Celeste and Alabama have recently grown apart, and although Hollie sees to have everything, Alabama may have been the only person who suspected something was amiss. Loyalties are tested as secrets unravel to ask whether we really have control over our online image or not.
Format
Hardcover
This item is a preorder. Your payment method will be charged immediately, and the product is expected to ship on or around May 2, 2023. This date is subject to change due to shipping delays beyond our control.
Hugo Contreras’s world in Miami has shrunk. Since his wife died, Hugo’s debt from her medical bills has become insurmountable. He shuffles between his efficiency apartment, La Carreta (his favorite place for a cafecito), and a botanica in a strip mall where he works as the resident babaláwo.
One day, Hugo’s nemesis calls. Alexi Ramirez is a debt collector who has been hounding Hugo for years, and Hugo assumes this call is just more of the same. Except this time Alexi is calling because he needs spiritual help. His house is haunted. Alexi proposes a deal: If Hugo can successfully cleanse his home before Noche Buena, Alexi will forgive Hugo’s debt. Hugo reluctantly accepts, but there’s one issue: Despite being a babaláwo, he doesn’t believe in spirits.
Hugo plans to do what he’s done with dozens of clients before: use sleight of hand and amateur psychology to convince Alexi the spirits have departed. But when the job turns out to be more than Hugo bargained for, Hugo’s old tricks don’t work. Memories of his past—his childhood in the Bolivian silver mines and a fraught crossing into the United States as a boy—collide with Alexi’s demons in an explosive climax.
Format
Hardcover
This item is a preorder. Your payment method will be charged immediately, and the product is expected to ship on or around October 3, 2023. This date is subject to change due to shipping delays beyond our control.
When Ann Stilwell arrives in New York City, she expects to spend her summer working as a curatorial associate at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Instead, she finds herself assigned to The Cloisters, a gothic museum and garden renowned for its medieval art collection and its group of enigmatic researchers studying the history of divination.
Desperate to escape her painful past, Ann is happy to indulge the researchers’ more outlandish theories about the history of fortune telling. But what begins as academic curiosity quickly turns into obsession when she discovers a hidden 15th-century deck of tarot cards that might hold the key to predicting the future. When the dangerous game of power, seduction, and ambition at The Cloisters turns deadly, Ann becomes locked in a race for answers as the line between the arcane and the modern blurs.
Format
Trade Paperback
This item is a preorder. Your payment method will be charged immediately, and the product is expected to ship on or around July 11, 2023. This date is subject to change due to shipping delays beyond our control.
When Margaret and her husband Hal bought the large Victorian house on Hawthorn Street – for sale at a surprisingly reasonable price – they couldn’t believe they finally had a home of their own. Then they discovered the hauntings. Every September, the walls drip blood. The ghosts of former inhabitants appear, and all of them are terrified of something that lurks in the basement. Most people would flee. Margaret is not most people. Margaret is staying. It’s her house. But after four years Hal can’t take it anymore, and he leaves abruptly. Now, he’s not returning calls, and their daughter Katherine – who knows nothing about the hauntings—arrives, intent on looking for her missing father. To make things worse, September has just begun, and with every attempt Margaret and Katherine make at finding Hal, the hauntings grow more harrowing, because there are some secrets the house needs to keep.
Format
Hardcover
This item is a preorder. Your payment method will be charged immediately, and the product is expected to ship on or around September 5, 2023. This date is subject to change due to shipping delays beyond our control.
