Ten New England noir titles

Dwyer Murphy is a New York-based writer and editor. He is the editor-in-chief of CrimeReads, Literary Hub‘s crime fiction vertical and the world’s most popular destination for thriller readers. He practiced law at Debevoise & Plimpton in New York City, where he was a litigator, and served as editor of the Columbia Law Review. He was previously an Emerging Writer Fellow at the Center for Fiction. His writing has appeared in The Common, Rolling Stone, Guernica, The Paris Review Daily, Electric Literature, and other publications.

Murphy's new novel is The Stolen Coast.

At Lit Hub he tagged ten New England titles "which together make up a complex tradition worthy of considering together: modern novels of suspense and strangeness, contemporary gothics, and a few more or less hardboiled crime storie." One entry on the list:

Elizabeth Strout, The Burgess Boys

Strout is the ultimate observer of small-town New England life, bringing its subtleties and tragedies out with a hardened poetry. In The Burgess Boys, likely her most ‘noir’ work, we’re in a Maine town, where two brothers have been called home. They left years before, after their father’s death, and both went to New York to practice law. Now their sister needs them: her son has been implicated in a devastating crime. The complex family and community dynamics play out against a backdrop of the tough northern life and the people who carve out a living there.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven titles by veterans about serving in the U.S. military

John Milas enlisted in the US Marine Corps at age nineteen and subsequently deployed to the Helmand Province of Afghanistan in support of OEF 10.1. He was honorably discharged from active service in 2012.

After his discharge, he earned both his BA and MFA in creative writing.

His new book is The Militia House.

At Electric Lit Milas tagged seven books by "writers whose books break the standard of sanitized, routine portrayals of life and war in the US military. Their work faces the truth head on." One title on the list:

Love My Rifle More Than You by Kayla Williams

For a candid (read: brutally honest) experience of a young woman enlisted in the US Army, this is your book. Williams, a linguist who studied Arabic at Defense Language Institute, shares a range of stories about her time in the Army. Rather than summarizing from a zoomed-out perspective, she relays her experiences through intricate, intimate scenes.

Her own sergeants sometimes move beyond incompetent to being brazenly disrespectful to their subordinates. Her male peers seem to make innocuous small talk, but then close out these interactions by hinting at a sexual proposition or bluntly speaking them. Most disturbing early on: a lieutenant overseeing the search of a monastery, who refuses to interact directly with an English-speaking monk in Iraq, forcing Williams awkwardly to translate between two people who can see, hear, and understand each other. Love My Rifle More Than You does an excellent job of highlighting scenes and mindsets that are effectively terrifying in their implications.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five great thrillers about domineering parents

David Bell is a USA Today bestselling, award-winning author whose work has been translated into multiple foreign languages. He’s currently a professor of English at Western Kentucky University in Bowling Green, Kentucky, where he directs the MFA program. He received an MA in creative writing from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, and a PhD in American literature and creative writing from the University of Cincinnati. His novels include The Request, Layover, Somebody’s Daughter, Bring Her Home, Since She Went Away, Somebody I Used to Know, The Forgotten Girl, Never Come Back, The Hiding Place, and Cemetery Girl.

His new novel is Try Not to Breathe.

At CrimeReads Bell tagged five great books about domineering parents, including:

RAZORBLADE TEARS by SA Cosby

There isn’t much I can add to the phenomenon that is SA Cosby, one of the most (justifiably) acclaimed crime writers of our time. And his star is still very much on the rise. But I mention Razorblade Tears here because this is a story about the redemption of two deeply flawed fathers. Not only is this book beautifully written and loaded with action and suspense, it also shows the lengths a parent can go to demonstrate their love for their child. Love lasts forever and its reach extends beyond the grave. Don’t miss it.

Read about the other entries on the list.

Razorblade Tears is among Robyn Harding's seven unlikely friendships in crime fiction, Lesley Kara's six crime novels about settling old scores, and Liz Nugent's top ten first lines in fiction.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eight titles that deliver behind-the-scenes drama

Lindsay Lynch is a writer from Washington, DC.

She is the author of the novel Do Tell.

She holds an MFA in Fiction from the University of Wyoming.

A longtime indie bookseller, Lynch currently lives in Nashville, TN, where she works as a book buyer for Parnassus Books.

At Electric Lit she tagged eight favorite books "that show us the mess off-camera, behind the curtain, and backstage." One title on the list:

Hollywood: Mercury Pictures Presents by Anthony Marra

I couldn’t do this list without a Golden Age Hollywood novel and Anthony Marra’s Mercury Pictures Presents is one of the greatest. The eponymous studio at the heart of Marra’s novel isn’t like the MGMs and Paramounts of the era—Mercury Pictures specializes in B-list films and is primarily run by a crew of immigrants and refugees from war-torn Europe. Among them is Maria Lagana, an Italian transplant whose father is still being held under arrest by the Fascist regime in their home country. Maria finds herself at the helm of Mercury Pictures as an associate producer, dealing with ego-driven men in power, attacks from the Production Code Administration, racist typecasting, and threat of bankruptcy. What I love about this novel is how deftly Marra moves between high and low brow art, revealing the underlying currents that shape B-list productions and the machine of propaganda in America. It’s always a pleasure to read Marra, and a delight to see him working in this era.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten books with irresistible anti-heroines

Rita Chang-Eppig received her MFA in fiction from NYU. Her novel about an infamous Chinese pirate queen, Deep as the Sky, Red as the Sea, is a Barnes & Noble Discover pick, an Indie Next pick, and Good Morning America Buzz Pick for June 2023 as well as an Indies Introduce pick for Summer/Fall 2023.

At Publishers Weekly Chang-Eppig tagged ten "great works of fiction featuring morally questionable women." One title on the list:

Maddalena and the Dark by Julia Fine

Fine's third novel is a sumptuous and strange visit to the Venice of the 1700s, when a girl's future could be destroyed by her mother’s misdeeds. The book alternates between the POVs of two girls: Maddalena, who is sent to a conservatory after her mother runs away with another man, and Luisa, an aspiring violinist yet to reach her full potential living at the same conservatory. The girls form an intense bond, made more intense by the magic of the waters of Venice. To get what she wants, Maddalena makes increasingly dangerous bargains with the sea.

Read about the other entries on the list.

Maddalena and the Dark is among Joshilyn Jackson's five top suspense novels set in the entertainment world.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five thrillers in which women get revenge or justice

Bonnie Kistler is a former Philadelphia attorney and the author of House on Fire and The Cage. She graduated from Bryn Mawr College, magna cum laude, with Honors in English literature, and she received her law degree from the University of the Pennsylvania Law School, where she was a moot court champion and legal writing instructor.

She spent her law career in private practice with major law firms. Peer-rated as Distinguished for both legal ability and ethical standards, she successfully tried cases in federal and state courts across the country.

She and her husband now live in Florida and the mountains of western North Carolina.

Kistler's new novel is Her, Too.

[Q&A with Bonnie Kistler; The Page 69 Test: The Cage; The Page 69 Test: Her, Too]

At CrimeReads she tagged five thrillers in which women get revenge or justice, including [SPOILER ALERT]:

In Big Driver by Stephen King, mystery author Tessa Thorne is lured into an ambush where a man brutally rapes her and leaves her for dead, stuffing her into a culvert where she awakes in horror to discover the corpses of his previous victims. She doesn’t report her attack, fearing the public embarrassment that would follow. She has a passing thought for his other victims, but finds herself too tired to worry about moral responsibility. She asks herself What’s in it for me? Eventually, though, those bodies in the culvert call to her, and she kills her rapist, accomplishing revenge for herself while also protecting those women who would have been his future victims. But she goes on to kill his mother and brother, too, for facilitating his crimes. These murders read as pure revenge. Nonetheless she apparently goes on to live happily ever after, untroubled by what she’s done.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Top 10 elderly heroines in fiction

Amanda Craig is a British novelist, short-story writer and critic who has been compared to Dickens, Trollope, Balzac and Evelyn Waugh. As a literary chronicler of contemporary life she has been called a "state of the nation novelist" by Prospect magazine and the Sunday Times, and her interconnected novels often feature strong plots with murder, romance and social satire.

Craig's newest novel is The Three Graces.

At the Guardian she tagged ten books featuring "strong, challenging, intellectually active elderly women." One title on the list:

Aunt Augusta in Travels With My Aunt by Graham Greene (1969)

This is equally flamboyant, and unlike the author’s doomy Catholic fiction, pure fun thanks to its irrepressible elderly heroine. Its bank manager narrator Henry has led a quiet, respectable life until he meets the septuagenarian Aunt Augusta. She persuades him to accompany her across Europe, and her account of her decidedly racy life leads him to become less prim. “I have never planned anything illegal in my life,” Aunt Augusta tells him. “How could I plan anything of the kind when I have never read any of the laws and have no idea what they are?”

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven books about women across the world searching for agency

Mihret Sibhat was born and raised in a small town in western Ethiopia before moving to California when she was seventeen. A graduate of California State University, Northridge, and the University of Minnesota’s MFA program, she was a 2019 A Public Space Fellow and a 2019 Minnesota State Arts Board Artist Initiative grantee. In a previous life, she was a waitress, a nanny, an occasional shoe shiner, a propagandist, and a terrible gospel singer. She's currently a miserable Arsenal fan.

Sibhat's new novel is The History of a Difficult Child.

At Electric Lit the author tagged seven books that "recount the stories of women who breach those narrow boundaries of womanhood through the commission of violence or the embrace of rudeness and disorder and dirt or a descent into darkness, returning with seismic realizations that could turn the tamest woman into a killing machine." One title on the list:

Zimbabwe: Nervous Conditions by Tsitsi Dangarembga

Our young narrator, Tambu, begins her story with a confession: “I was not sorry when my brother died.” She lives in a village with her family, helping out on the farm, herding the cows, fetching water, and cooking. The family sends her and her older brother, Nhamo, to school, but Nhamo gets the better deal: he goes to the mission school where his foreign-educated uncle is the principal and lives in a comfortable house with running water. Tambu’s education is not guaranteed as there’s not always enough money to pay the fees for the local school, and her father tells her to focus on learning the skills she needs to be a good wife. Nhamo is increasingly detached from his family in the countryside. When he visits during school breaks, he contributes little and abuses his little sister.

Despite witnessing her brother’s inability to be transformed by education, Tambu latches onto the hope that there is a better life to be gained through education. Look at her uncle’s educated wife. When Tambu leaves the village to attend the mission school and later to a better one, she realizes that even as one moves across class borders, women’s status remains one of alienation, and that race further complicates and increases that alienation. She excels in the classroom but her liberation comes from the piercing clarity she gains about family and her own place in the world.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven novels inspired by other art forms

Julia Fine is the author of The Upstairs House, winner of the Chicago Review of Books Award for Fiction, and What Should Be Wild, which was
shortlisted for the Bram Stoker Award for Superior First Novel.

[My Book, The Movie: The Upstairs House; The Page 69 Test: The Upstairs House]

Fine's third novel, Maddalena and the Dark, was released in June 2023. She teaches writing in Chicago, where she lives with her family.

At Lit Hub Fine tagged seven novels inspired by other art forms, including:

Taylor Jenkins Reid, Daisy Jones and the Six

Reid’s rock and roll story of a band’s seminal record requires multiple points of view, and the oral history lets her access each perspective just when she needs it. It feels like the transcript of a documentary about your favorite band, while at the same time giving us a fully built narrative.

Read about the other entries on the list.

Daisy Jones and the Six is among Elvin James Mensah's seven top novels that celebrate pop music, Glenn Dixon's ten best novels about fictional bands, and Benjamin Myers's top ten mentors in fiction.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six titles featuring killers with a code

Heather Chavez is a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley’s English literature program and has worked as a newspaper reporter, editor, contributor to mystery and television blogs, and in communications for a major health care organization. She lives with her family and two cat overlords in Santa Rosa, California.

Chavez's new novel is Before She Finds Me.

At CrimeReads she tagged six books that feature killers with a code, including:

THE INNOCENT, David Baldacci

This novel introduces Will Robie, the guy the U.S. government calls on to eliminate the worst of the worst—enemies of the state, monsters who prey on the weak, and men with more money than morals. Robie is the type to sleep soundly after killing five men, but who turns off his scope when a female target of his surveillance begins to undress. He’s also the type of hitman who has second thoughts when his latest target turns out to be a young mom. After he refuses to pull the trigger, a fleeing Robie crosses paths with a teen runaway. Against all his training, he can’t walk away—especially after learning her parents were killed, and her life, too, is in danger.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven books about life under occupation in WWII

Bryn Turnbull is the internationally bestselling author of The Woman Before Wallis and The Last Grand Duchess. With a master of letters in creative writing from the University of St. Andrews, a master of professional communication from Toronto Metropolitan University and a bachelor's degree in English literature from McGill University, Turnbull focuses on finding stories of women lost within the cracks of the historical record.

Her new novel is The Paris Deception.

[My Book, The Movie: The Paris Deception; The Page 69 Test: The Paris Deception; Q&A with Bryn Turnbull]

At Lit Hub Turnbull tagged seven books that explore the stories of ordinary people living through the extraordinary time of the Second Word War. One title on the list:

Jennifer Robson, Our Darkest Night (Italy)

In Our Darkest Night, Jennifer Robson explores the fate of a young Jewish woman—Nina—as she strives to live in fascist Italy. Posing as the Christian wife to a young Italian farmer, Nina endures the day to day struggle to survive undetected by local Nazi authorities.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven titles about questionable geniuses & false saviors

Marta Balcewicz spent her early childhood in Pomerania and Madrid, and now lives in Toronto. Her work has appeared in Catapult, Tin House online, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Washington Square Review, The Rumpus, and Passages North among other publications. Her fiction was anthologized in Tiny Crimes (Catapult, 2018). She received a fellowship from Tin House Workshops in 2022.

Big Shadow is her first novel.

At Electric Lit Balcewicz tagged seven novels featuring "questionable geniuses, part saviors, part villains, all due for exposure. The common thread is that they keep the wool over someone else’s eyes, and the smoke and mirrors of their genius-status has the power to greatly affect others." One title on the list:

My Heart Hemmed In by Marie NDiaye

My Heart Hemmed In is a mystery—not the genre of mystery, but a story seemingly oblivious to the need to explain anything to its reader. The idea that this can’t go on is propulsive, and conducive to paranoia. The unknowns become suffocating in the most pleasant of ways, and we read on for the hope of release, some air to be let in. The novel follows a woman living in Bordeaux who attempts to understand why others have suddenly come to despise her and her husband. The antagonism is so severe that the couple is effectively ostracized. In the opening page, the husband has been stabbed; he may be dying. One of the many unexplained phenomena is the presence of a neighbor, Richard Noget, who unilaterally moves into the couple’s apartment to act as a nurse. His aggressive presence, marked by absurd actions, adds another level of oppression for the narrator: she cannot understand it. And what truly fuels her (and so, our) flame is that while she’s convinced Noget is sinister, he is a famous and revered figure in France. Noget’s status as beloved is a repeating, painful blow, as the narrator’s whole consciousness has turned to the question of why she is despised and unloved. While Noget is only one of the few terrifying elements that challenge the notion of realism in this novel, he is a central symbol that haunts the narrator until the very final scenes.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue