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If your August is filled with peak summer heat, I hope you’re in a blizzard of cold air conditioning so your detective cap doesn’t melt off your head. Grab a cold drink and get ready to read some great mystery and thrillers publishing this month that will have you glued to the page, and hopefully distract you from the heat for a bit.
I know there’s a lot of talk about anticipated fall books but let me tell you: the end of summer 2024 has some gems, including a great standalone from the author of the Truly Devious series. You can also find plenty of popular tropes and subgenres from middle grade to adult novels to keep you armchair sleuthing through the end of summer! There is a PI novel set in Chicago with a complicated case; a luxury resort wedding murder; an Australian missing person mystery; a suspense novel centering an influencer; a delightful middle grade series; a British procedural with a fictional serial killer; a YA novel starring the daughter of a PI; a dual POV missing person suspense, and a true crime memoir!
And if you prefer/also like backlist titles, there are plenty of those recommended throughout too!
Death at Morning House by Maureen Johnson
For fans of remote YA mysteries, dual POV, and family drama!
In the 1920s, physician Phillip Ralston adopts six children from England during the war and raises them in a mansion with strict exercise and studies based on his eugenic beliefs. Then, his youngest biological child is found dead, and an older sibling falls to her death shortly after.
In the present, Marlowe Wexler has a disastrous date that literally burns down a house, so she absolutely takes the opportunity to go stay on an island for a summer job. But while the fire she was in was an accident and everyone was unharmed, she is about to be in real danger: the house on the island was the home of a family with an unsolved murder mystery, and people are always willing to murder to keep secrets hidden…
Backlist readers looking for a mystery series should also pick up Johnson’s Truly Devious!
You Shouldn’t Be Here by Lauren Thoman
For fans of suspense, missing persons, and dual POV and timelines!
Angie Stewart is 16 and hearing things around her house that are odd enough to make her thrilled to play ghost-hunter.
Madelyn Zhao took a DNA test that led her to a cousin she built a friendship with but who never showed up to their first in-person meet. Now she’s moved to her cousin’s town, taken a job as a teacher, and is determined to find out what happened to her missing cousin…
Backlist readers who like a bit of time travel with their mystery should also pick up I’ll Stop the World!
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All the Way Gone (Detective Annalisa Vega #4) by Joanna Schaffhausen
For fans of prime-time procedurals, thrillers, and cops turned PIs!
Annalisa Vega was a cop who solved serial killer cases (start of the series) and is now a PI. Her first case is complicated: author Mara Delaney wrote a book defending the idea that good sociopaths exist, including Dr. Canning, a Chicago neurosurgeon. But when a woman dies in Canning’s building, Delaney starts to think he’s not the kind of sociopath she can defend, and Vega discovers the dead woman was disliked enough by multiple people for this to not be an easy murder case.
If you want to start at the beginning, pick up Gone for Good! And if you’re a fan of procedurals with the lead having survived a serial killer abduction, check out her other great series, beginning with The Vanishing Season!
You Will Never Be Me by Jesse Q. Sutanto
For fans of suspenseful reads and influencer characters!
Meredith Lee is an influencer who feels Aspen Palmer owes her now successful influencer career to her. So she gets access to Aspen’s calendar and starts messing with it, throwing Aspen’s career prospects into a tailspin. Aspen is beside herself trying to figure out what is happening when Meredith disappears and threats begin to arrive…
Sutanto has a sizeable backlist that includes children’s, YA, and adult novels, with both standalones and series to check out. Some of my backlist favorites include Dial A For Aunties, The Obsession, and Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice for Murderers.
Red River Road by Anna Downes
For fans of Australian settings and missing person cases!
Phoebe was on a solo van life trip in Australia’s remote Coral Coast when she disappeared. Now, a year later, her sister Katy is determined to find out what happened to Phoebe by following her sister’s path and finding the clues the police must have missed. That’s how she meets Beth, a woman fleeing her past, and they team up in the deadly terrain in search of Phoebe.
The Swifts: A Gallery of Rogues (The Swifts #2) by Beth Lincoln, Claire Powell (Illustrator)
For word lovers and fans of middle grade novels, zany characters, and art heists!
Shenanigan Swift is part of a family that uses a family dictionary to select names for their children on the day they’re born, names they are to grow into. Recently Shenanigan, along with her sisters Phenomena and Felicity and her cousin Erf, solved a murder mystery during a family reunion. Now they’re in Paris with their uncle Maelstrom and there are art heists to solve!
If you want to start at the beginning of this delightful series, pick up The Swifts: A Dictionary of Scoundrels!
The Kill List (Inspector Anjelica Henley #3) by Nadine Matheson
For fans of British procedurals and fictional serial killers!
DI Angelica Henley has a hell of a case before her that is also personal: her former boss and mentor, DCI Harry Rhimes, put a serial killer away 25 years ago, but Rhimes is now being accused of corruption, and his cases are being overturned. Henley now has to figure out how Rhimes got the original case wrong as the killings start up again…
If you want to start at the beginning of the series, pick up The Jigsaw Man!
Better Left Buried by Mary E. Roach
For fans of YA, murder mysteries, dual POV, and stories featuring the children of PIs!
Lucy Preston’s mom is a famous PI who has just derailed their vacation to stop in a small Tennessee town where she finds a dead body at an abandoned amusement park. While Lucy’s mom focuses on the case, Lucy looks into why and how her mom has a connection to this place. That’s how she meets Audrey, a local girl who rides a motorcycle and was there the night they found the body.
Never Saw Me Coming: How I Outsmarted the FBI and the Entire Banking System—and Pocketed $40 Million by Tanya Smith
For fans of nonviolent true crime memoirs!
Tanya Smith grew up in Minneapolis where her love of Michael Jackson in the ’70s—and trying to get his address—led her to discover a way to scam people: being passed enough times through the phone company’s departments would make it look like you were calling from the phone company. This taught her the art of a con and she spent two years scheming to get to Michael Jackson, including as a child getting on an airplane to fly out to L.A..
Then, as a teen, she became a little Robin Hood: using her phone con to learn how much money people she knew had in the bank, she pretended to work for the phone company in order to void people’s utility bills by claiming the person had just paid her in person. The cons only grew from there, leading to her learning the computer and banking systems. By the time the police caught up to her they didn’t think they had the “mastermind” and wanted to find whoever was the real brains behind the operation. Even in prison you could say she was unstoppable—she escaped twice!
The Plus One by S. C. Lalli
For fans of luxury resort settings and a murder mystery at a wedding!
Radhika Singh and Raj Joshi’s wedding will be a week-long celebration in Cabo. Shay Kapoor is there because she’s dating the groom’s best friend. When the bride and groom are found murdered on their wedding day, Shay realizes she has an outsider’s perspective that can help untangle all the secrets and lies as the police investigation begins.
Love all things mystery and thrillers? We got you covered with posts for every reading flavor! You can also find a full list of new releases in our New Release Index, carefully curated by your favorite Book Riot editors, organized by genre and release date.
