As in her excellent debut My Husband’s Wife, Corry puts her personal experience working in prisons to use in Dead Ex, which chronicles the lives of an eight-year-old girl, her drug addicted mother, and an aromatherapist with memory trouble whose ex turns up dead. Jane Corry, The Dead Ex (Pamela Dorman/Viking)Ĭorry is good at so many things it’s hard to isolate what makes her books so compelling: it’s some combination of well-drawn characters, keen plotting, and realistic relationships. Camille LeBlanc, CrimeReads editorial fellow

With western democracies on the descent, it’s not hard to read Saccomanno’s novel as a dystopian warning for the present. Told through flashbacks and lyrical dreamlike sequences, Gomez recounts the everyday terrors of living under a violent regime at the height of the Dirty War as military raids seize unsuspecting civilians, fear pervades Buenos Aires, and an air of distrust seeps into households and between families. Not much is needed to turn a story of 1970s Argentina into a terrifying thriller, but it certainly raises the stakes when the protagonist is a gay man housing two dissidents and having an affair with a homophobic cop. Lisa Levy, CrimeReads contributing editor Meanwhile, she’s having a blistering affair with a senior attorney at her firm which threatens her own happy family life-and someone bent on destroying her knows her secret. Her client, a quiet housewife accused of killing her husband, is indeed guilty of stabbing him, but as Alison investigates the case she finds there might be more to the story than a lover’s spat.

Young lawyer Alison is defending in her first murder case. Tyce’s debut is an excellent psychological thriller, so good it could be one of the best of the nascent year. Harriet Tyce, Blood Orange (Grand Central Publishing) Molly Odintz, CrimeReads associate editor The Be-Bop Barbarians follows several comics artists struggling to make it in the black press and get syndicated in the white press without having their ideas stolen or their work appropriated, in a story as beautifully told as it is illustrated. Gary Phillips’ love song to the history of black comics is beautiful and moody, channelling the quiet desperation, simmering anger, and creative intensity of 1950s noir. Gary Phillips, The Be-Bop Barbarians (Pegasus Books)

Cara hunter in the dark