Emily Bain Murphy was born in Indiana and raised in Hong Kong and Japan. She graduated from Tufts University and has also called Massachusetts, Connecticut, and California home.
Enchanted Hill, Murphy’s debut adult novel, is a historical mystery set in 1930 over a glittering week of parties at a mansion on the California coast.
At Writer's Digest she tagged seven mystery novels with "engaging characters, an atmospheric setting, a mystery that keeps me turning pages, and at least one twist I didn’t see coming." One title on the list:
The Likeness, Tana FrenchRead about the other entries on the list.
Tana French is the queen of literary procedurals. Her first six novels shuffle recurring characters in the Dublin Murder Squadseries so that they each take turns getting prime placement. The Likeness follows Detective Cassie Maddox as she goes undercover—after discovering a dead woman who could be her double, and infiltrating the victim’s life to see if she can draw out the killer. If you’re willing to go along with the premise, you’ll fall deep for this one.
French could teach a masterclass in dialogue and this novel is a slow-burn, chilling kind of creepy with gorgeous writing. It shimmers with lines like, “This girl: she bent reality around her like a lens bending light, she pleated it into so many flickering layers that you could never tell which one you were looking at, the longer you stared the dizzier you got.”
The Likeness is among Emily Beyda's seven top doubles in the twisted world of mystery fiction, Sophie Stein's eight books about small-town woman detectives, Alison Wisdom's sven great thrillers featuring communal living, Christopher Louis Romaguera's nine books about mistaken identity, and Simon Lelic's top ten false identities in fiction.
--Marshal Zeringue
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