Six crime novels set in public school classrooms

Frederick Weisel has been a writer and editor for more than 30 years. He graduated from Antioch College and has an MA in Victorian Literature and History from the University of Leicester in England. His short stories were awarded an Artists Fellowship from the Massachusetts Arts and Humanities Foundation, and his articles have appeared in the Boston Globe, Washington Post, and Christian Science Monitor.

The Silenced Women is his debut novel. The second novel in the VCI series, The Day He Left, brings back the five detectives to investigate a missing person case and was published in February 2022. Weisel is currently at work on the third novel in the VCI series. He lives with his wife in Santa Rosa, California, and shares a birthday with his favorite author, Raymond Chandler.

At CrimeReads Weisel tagged six "school mysteries set ... in today’s ordinary public schools, specifically middle and high schools," including:

Dare Me by Megan Abbott

This 2012 thriller by the redoubtable, Edgar-winning Megan Abbott was a bestseller and was made into a popular TV series. The novel ostensibly takes place in a public high school, but it is so drilled down into the subculture of a cheerleading squad that classrooms, teachers, and— with a few exceptions—adults barely exist. The story follows the conflicts that arise when a new cheer coach takes over the squad and crashes into the established power structure of the girls in the squad. Abbott does a brilliant job of capturing the inner lives of teenage girls, who are often far more knowing and tough than perceived by those around them. Murder is at the heart of this story, and as usual Abbott has surprises at every turn. Pervading the novel is the irony arising from the incongruity between the seemingly positive, encouraging nature of cheer and the cynical machinations of the players, which travel far from that surface nature. Once you read this novel, you’ll not only look differently at those smiling squads on a Saturday afternoon, you may want to run away as fast as you can.

Read about the other entries on the list.

Dare Me is among Rachel Kapelke-Dale's eleven unexpected thrillers about female rage, Debbie Babitt's eight top coming-of-age thrillers, Avery Bishop's top five novels that explore "mean girl" culture, Kelly Simmons's six books to buddy-read with your teen or twentyish daughter, Katie Lowe's top eight crime novels for angry women in an angry world, Kate Hamer's top ten teenage friendships in fiction, S.R. Masters's seven thrillers that capture some of the darker aspects of tight-knit friendship groups, Jessica Knoll's top ten thrillers, Brian Boone's fifty most essential high school stories, Julie Buntin's twelve books that totally get female friendship, L.S. Hilton's top ten female-fronted thrillers, Megan Reynolds's top ten books you must read if you loved Gone Girl, Anna Fitzpatrick's four top horror stories set in the real universe of girlhood and Adam Sternbergh's six notable crime novels that double as great literature.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six titles about the shifting unreliability of memory

Jo Harkin studied literature at university. She daydreamed her way through various jobs in her twenties before becoming a full-time writer. She lives in Berkshire, England, and Tell Me an Ending is her first novel.

At Lit Hub she tagged six books about the shifting unreliability of memory, including:

Anne Tyler, Noah’s Compass

Anne Tyler turns her exquisitely humane, closely observed writing to the story of Liam, a 60-year-old man who has just lost his teaching job and has moved to a cheaper apartment. On his first night there, the apartment is robbed; Liam suffers a blow to the head, and he can’t remember anything about the incident. These missing hours—the “not knowing how he’d comported himself”—disturb him deeply. His preoccupation with the lost memory leads him into a relationship with Eunice, a professional “rememberer.” Yet, though Liam thinks his problem is that “his true self had gone away from him and had a crucial experience without him and failed to come back afterward,” this reading will be challenged as he comes to a deeper understanding of himself and his life.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Top 10 books about suffering artists

Tom de Freston is a visual artist based in Oxford. Among various fellowships and residencies he has held a Leverhulme residency at Cambridge University, a Levy Plumb Residency at Christ’s College and the inaugural Creative Fellowship at Birmingham University. His work is regularly exhibited, and is represented in numerous public and private collections. With his wife, the writer Kiran Millwood Hargrave, he is the co-author of Orpheus and Eurydice and Julia and the Shark.

Wreck: Géricault’s Raft and the Art of Being Lost at Sea is his debut non-fiction work.

At the Guardian de Freston tagged ten "works [that] complicate our understanding of the links between pain and art," including:

Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine

Rankine’s book-length lyric poem/essay about race relations in the US moves fluidly between discussion of everyday racism through to the explicit and structural. The entire fabric of society meets her gaze, from the artwork of JMW Turner to the writings of James Baldwin and Robert Lowell, anecdotes of microaggressions, analysis of the media around police shootings, the YouTube performances of Hennessy Youngman and her collaboration with John Lucas.

Read about the other entries on the list.

Citizen is among Diana London's nine books that celebrate the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Lit Hub's ten books we'll be reading in 2030.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eight utopian books for dystopian times

Allegra Hyde’s debut story collection, Of This New World, won the John Simmons Short Fiction Award through the Iowa Short Fiction Award Series. Her stories and essays have appeared in The Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, The Best Small Fictions, and The Best American Travel Writing. Originally from New Hampshire, she currently lives in Ohio and teaches at Oberlin College.

Hyde's new novel is Eleutheria.

At Electric Lit she tagged eight books that "offer us opportunities to reflect on what a better world could look like, as well as why that world doesn’t exist." One title on the list:

Arcadia by Lauren Groff

It was tempting to included Groff’s latest novel, Matrix, which surely has utopian vibes, but Arcadia is a classic. Set at a hippie commune in upstate New York, the novel opens in the 1960s with a haze of free love and an abundance of tofu. But the paradise can’t last forever, nor can it serve all of its constituents the same way—especially the children of the community’s founding adults, who had no say in the circumstances of their upbringing. A depiction of going back-to-the-land that ultimately surges forward to an imagined present, this novel considers the long-term impacts of a hippie experiment.

Read about the other entries on the list.

Arcadia is on Emma Straub's top ten list of books that mimic the feeling of a summer vacation, Ewan Morrison's top ten list of books about communes, and Jami Attenberg's top ten list of dysfunctional families in literature.

The Page 69 Test: Arcadia.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten groundbreaking true crime titles

Sarah Weinman is the author of The Real Lolita: A Lost Girl, an Unthinkable Crime, and a Scandalous Masterpiece and the editor of Unspeakable Acts: True Tales of Crime, Murder, Deceit & Obsession.

Her new book is Scoundrel: How a Convicted Murderer Persuaded the Women Who Loved Him, the Conservative Establishment, and the Courts to Set Him Free.

At Publishers Weekly Weinman tagged ten true crime "books [that] helped me make sense of the world's darkest corners," including:

True Crime edited by Harold Schechter (2008)

When a genre finally makes it into the hallowed halls of the Library of America, that is a sign of its growing respectability. (Psychological suspense did with my own two-volume set, Women Crime Writers, in 2015.) As a writer, Schechter has done more work and research on historical serial murderers than anyone else (and become, alas, ripe for pilfering by true crime podcasters.) Editing this volume demonstrates the breadth of his knowledge and his astute choices of other nonfiction crime writers and their pet cases. Someday, I hope, there will be a follow-up anthology.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven titles in which families are destroyed by their own secrets

Jane Cockram was born and educated in Australia, where she studied Journalism at RMIT. After completing postgraduate studies in Publishing and Communication at Melbourne University, she worked in the publishing industry, fulfilling a childhood dream of reading for a living.

Cockram's novels are The House of Brides and the newly released The Way from Here.

At CrimeReads she tagged seven of her "favorite books featuring multigenerational explorations of family secrets and mysteries," including:

The Forgotten Garden, by Kate Morton

The queen of the genre, every book Kate Morton writes effortlessly connects her research with deeply layered family mysteries. As a reader, we are drawn into her fully-drawn worlds, often across generations and countries, and as writers we marvel at the artistry of her writing and the way her stories come together so seamlessly. Although it is difficult to pick a favourite, The Forgotten Garden with its spectacular setting on the Cornish coastline, an unexpected family inheritance and long-kept secrets, is one of her best.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven novels that explore the inner life of the detective

Jane Pek was born and grew up in Singapore. She holds a BA from Yale University, a JD from the New York University School of Law, and an MFA in Fiction from Brooklyn College. Her short fiction has appeared in The Brooklyn Review, Witness, Conjunctions, Literary Hub, and twice in The Best American Short Stories. She currently lives in New York, where she works as a lawyer at a global investment company.

Pek's debut novel is The Verifiers.

At Electric Lit she tagged seven novels "that feature wildly different detectives—a Cold War spy, an Scottish journalist in the 1980s, and a multiverse traveller, to name a few—all of whom have deeply compelling voices and personal stories," including:

Land of Shadows by Rachel Howzell Hall

Detective Elouise “Lou” Norton is a Black LAPD homicide detective whose sister went missing as a teenager. When, years later, the body of another teenage girl is found in the same neighborhood, Lou becomes convinced that the two crimes are linked and that by solving this murder, she can finally learn what happened to her sister. Lou’s voice pulls you along from the very first page: she’s smart and snarky and driven, her observations spot-on and frequently hilarious, someone whose toughness makes her vulnerability even more poignant. Plus, I love how fully Lou’s life is portrayed—she may be focused on solving a crime, but she also has a circle of close friends, a philandering husband to worry about, and colleagues who respect and also challenge her.

Read about the other entries on the list.

Hall's Lou Norton series is among Amy Stuart's five deeply flawed characters you’ll learn to appreciate and Sara Sligar's seven California crime novels with a nuanced view of of race, class, gender & community. Land of Shadows is among Steph Cha's top ten books about trouble in Los Angeles.

--Marshal Zeringue

Top ten captivating fictional frenemies

Amelia Morris is a writer and gymnastics fan. Her food memoir, Bon Appétempt, was published in 2015 and her debut novel, Wildcat, was released last month. Her work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, McSweeney’s, The Millions, and USA Today.

Morris also co-created the podcast, Mom Rage. She lives in Los Angeles with her family.

At Publishers Weekly she tagged ten of the most captivating fictional frenemies (or ten examples of humans being complicated), including:

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

Though the story is set in the early 1800s, the way that Caroline Bingley tacitly weaponizes her higher social status against our heroine Elizabeth Bennet feels timeless. And maybe we can’t even say that Lady Catherine de Bourgh is a friend of Elizabeth’s, but she does have her over to dinner before completely eviscerating her at a later date when she hears the rumor that Darcy is itching to propose (again). Ah, so good it hurts!

Read about the other entries on the list.

Pride and Prejudice also appears on David Annand's list of the top ten buildings in fiction, Off the Shelf's list of ten of the most fantastical (and sometimes fanatical) parties imaginable in novels, KT Sparks's seven best graceless literary exits, Lit Hub's list of twenty-five actually pretty happy couples in literature, Ellie Eaton's list of eight of literature's notable mean girls, Sarah Vaughan's list of nine fictional bad mothers in fiction, Jessica Francis Kane's top ten list of houseguests in fiction, O: The Oprah Magazine's twenty greatest ever romance novels, Cristina Merrill's list of eight of the sexiest curmudgeons in romance, Sarah Ward's ten top list of brothers and sisters in fiction, Tara Sonin's lists of fifty must-read regency romances and seven sweet and swoony romances for wedding season, Grant Ginder's top ten list of book characters we love to hate, Katy Guest's list of six of the best depictions of shyness in fiction, Garry Trudeau's six favorite books list, Ross Johnson's list of seven of the greatest rivalries in fiction, Helen Dunmore's six best books list, Jenny Kawecki's list of eight fictional characters who would make the best travel companions, Peter James's top ten list of works of fiction set in or around Brighton, Ellen McCarthy's list of six favorite books about weddings and marriage, the Telegraph's list of the ten greatest put-downs in literature, Rebecca Jane Stokes' list of ten fictional families you might enjoy more than the one you'll actually spend the holidays with, Melissa Albert's lists of five fictional characters who deserved better, [fifteen of the] romantic leads (and wannabes) of Austen’s brilliant books and recommended reading for eight villains, Molly Schoemann-McCann's list of ten fictional men who have ruined real live romance, Emma Donoghue's list of five favorite unconventional fictional families, Amelia Schonbek's list of five approachable must-read classics, Jane Stokes's top ten list of the hottest men in required reading, Gwyneth Rees's top ten list of books about siblings, the Observer's list of the ten best fictional mothers, Paula Byrne's list of the ten best Jane Austen characters, Robert McCrum's list of the top ten opening lines of novels in the English language, a top ten list of literary lessons in love, Simon Mason's top ten list of fictional families, Cathy Cassidy's top ten list of stories about sisters, Paul Murray's top ten list of wicked clerics, John Mullan's lists of ten of the best housekeepers in fiction, ten great novels with terrible original titles, and ten of the best visits to Brighton in literature, Luke Leitch's top ten list of the most successful literary sequels ever, and is one of the top ten works of literature according to Norman Mailer. Richard Price has never read it, but it is the book Mary Gordon cares most about sharing with her children.

The Page 99 Test: Pride and Prejudice.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six books that push the limit of acceptable thriller storylines

After a brief career in criminal law, Leanne Kale Sparks is returning to her first love—writing about murder and mayhem. Her new novel, The Wrong Woman, features an FBI agent hunting down her best friend’s murderer. The backdrop is the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, the playground of her youth, and the place that will always be home. When not writing, she and her husband spend time reading, mountain biking, and spoiling their German Shepherd, Zoe. And drinking wine.

[Coffee with a Canine: Leanne Kale Sparks & Zoe; The Page 69 Test: The Wrong Woman]

At CrimeReads Sparks tagged "six thrillers that will make even the steeliest readers a little squeamish," including:

Brother by Ania Ahlborn

What could be better—and more troubling—than a serial killer on the loose in the Appalachians? A family of serial killers on the loose in the Appalachians. Taking full advantage of the property where they live and the rugged landscape, the Morrow family has its own version of the killing fields. And the writer does not hold back on the blood, guts, and gore of this family’s favorite pastime.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Top 10 world-spanning novels

C.A. Davids's debut novel, The Blacks of Cape Town, was published in South Africa and shortlisted for the Edinburgh Book Fest's First Book Award, the University of Johannesburg Debut Writing Prize, and the SALA First-time Published Author Award, among others.

Her new novel is How to Be a Revolutionary.

At the Guardian Davids tagged ten novels "that seek out interconnectedness, testing and pulling at the idea of nationhood," including:

Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

Few can cross the centuries, bending genres and language, so that it works effortlessly on the page. From the South Pacific in the mid-19th century to a dystopian, ultimately consumerist future Korea, Cloud Atlas presents a case for the universality of human nature. It’s a joyful, poignant re-read, 18 years after the novel was first published and especially when this notion of what binds us appears to be in question again.

Read about the other entries on the list.

Cloud Atlas is among Sjón's ten top artificial humans in fiction, Naomi Klein's six favorite books, Jeff Somers's seven novels with chronologies that will break you, Christopher Priest’s top five science-fiction books that make use of music, Patrick Hemstreet's five top books for the psychonaut and the six books that changed Maile Meloy's idea of what’s possible in fiction.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eight books to better understand Ukraine, past & present

Kalani Pickhart is the recipient of research fellowships from the Virginia G. Piper Center and the U.S. Department of State Bureau of Intelligence for Eastern European and Eurasian Studies.

She currently lives and writes in Phoenix, Arizona.

I Will Die in a Foreign Land is Pickhart's first novel.

At Electric Lit she tagged eight books about the fight for Ukrainian democracy. One title on the list:

Grey Bees by Andrey Kurkov, translated by Boris Drayluk

This beautiful, heart-wrenching book follows a beekeeper in the gray zone of Eastern Ukraine, where the war has destroyed most of the village and driven out most residents, except the beekeeper and his frenemy. This is a story about survival, friendship, and the powerful significance of home. A must-read to understand life in Crimea and Eastern Ukraine.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five titles about the power of music in fiction

Emme Lund is an author living and writing in Portland, Oregon. She has an MFA from Mills College. Her work has appeared in Electric Literature, Time, The Rumpus, Paper Darts, and many more. In 2019, she was awarded an Oregon Literary Arts Fellowship in Fiction.

The Boy with a Bird in His Chest is Lund's first novel.

At Lit Hub she tagged five "books I’ve read recently that speak to the power of music and dancing in our lives," including:

C.R. Foster, Shine of the Ever

C.R. Foster’s collection of short stories is described as “a literary mixtape of queer voices out of 1990s Portland,” so of course grunge, punk, and indie permeate its pages. The collection deals with queer love, addiction, and tenderness in a raw way, while remaining honest and funny throughout. Music is everywhere in the book—the reader is clued into the music playing in the background so often, we can hear the soundtrack to these stories.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue