Best mysteries and thrillers of September 2024, as chosen by the Amazon Editors
September is pretty much the biggest month in publishing (foreshadowing: followed by October), and so our roundup of all the great crime fiction we read this month is a little longer than usual. But whether you are in the mood for a literary spy thriller by an award-winning author (Rachel Kushner), the newest entry in a series with a well-loved lead character (try Flavia de Luce, Vera Stanhope, or Jackson Brodie) or the first in a new series by an author we love (Richard Osman), we’ve got you covered.
And that’s not even all we loved this month. Read on for a few of our recommendations and don’t forget the check out the complete list of Best Mysteries and Thrillers of the Month.
In the acknowledgements of We Solve Murders, Richard Osman admits that as he began to write the new book, he felt as though he were “somehow cheating on my other characters,” meaning Joyce, Elizabeth, Ibrahim, and Ron, aka The Thursday Murder Club. We know what he means; we felt the same way as we began reading. But then we met Amy Wheeler (“She hasn’t shot at anyone in a while, but you can’t have everything”), the woman she’s guarding, Rosie Antonio (the world’s best-selling novelist “if you don’t count Lee Child”), and Amy’s homebody ex-cop father-in-law Steve ("Always expect the worst, and you'll always be prepared.") And we were hooked. It’s different (features much more Van Halen, ChatGPT, international travel, and gullible influencers, for a start), but Osman’s Agatha-Christie-cross-pollinated-with-Guy-Ritchie sensibility remains, and we were all in on this witty, quirkily brilliant new series-starter. —Vannessa Cronin, Amazon Editor
In The Night We Lost Him, Laura Dave pivots away slightly from mystery while leaning into the emotional ballast that set her blockbuster last novel (The Last Thing He Told Me) apart. Nora Noone’s father Liam had three marriages and three children and kept his families rigorously separate. But when he falls to his death in an accident (or…) at his beach home, architect Nora teams up with her estranged brother Sam to investigate the truth behind their dad’s death. This is more ‘romystery’ (can’t let romantasy have all the portmanteau fun) than The Last Thing He Told Me; Liam, Nora, and Sam may have been divided emotionally, but they have one painful thing in common—they've each had a ‘one that got away’ story to tell. Liam’s may hold clues to his death while Nora’s may hold the key to her future. With the perfect mix of heart-pounding and heartfelt, Dave lets the secrets emerge, uses architecture as a striking analogy for relationship-building, and delivers yet another suspenseful page-turner. —Vannessa Cronin, Amazon Editor
With Guide Me Home, Attica Locke brings a standout series to a stunningly satisfying conclusion. It’s a few years after the events of Heaven, My Home, and it’s a challenging time for Texas Ranger Darren Mathews, who’s seen the country he loves turned upside down. People he once brought the law to bear upon now sit in government office, and Darren himself lives under the threat of an indictment which could permanently strip him of his badge, the woman he loves, and even his freedom. Into this mess appears his estranged mother, enlisting his help to locate a Black college student, Sera, whose white sorority sisters, her hometown, and even her own family, insist isn’t missing. Locke’s novel is a note-perfect swirl of perplexing mystery, professional turmoil, and the emotional knife-edge of a good man who’s done some questionable things and is now grappling with both reckoning and realization. And there are few get out of jail free cards for a Black man, even a Black lawman. Guide Me Home brings a richly-nuanced, savvily topical, and satisfyingly philosophical end to a great series. —Vannessa Cronin, Amazon Editor
Always brainy, wry, and sardonic, the Booker shortlisted and best-selling Rachel Kushner (The Flamethrowers, Telex from Cuba, The Mars Room) will delight her fans with her latest. In her third novel, Kushner entertainingly and haughtily picks up the story of an American spy who infiltrates a band of French radical anarchists and doesn’t mind sleeping with them to achieve her objectives. “Sadie Smith” as she's known by her lover, is so much fun to read about—she's calculating, saucy in an intellectual kind of way, and worldly, if not a bit proud. Her targets and lovers offer erudite intrigue but as she goes deeper into their environmental, anti-capitalist, and violent rhetoric her own sense of self begins to dissolve. Who is she really? Sadie's memories of her past spy craft, seemingly always paired with sex and duping the male species, makes for riveting reading, examining the lines between identity and agency, work and pleasure. —Al Woodworth, Amazon Editor
Don’t worry if you are new to Kate Atkinson’s fabulous Jackson Brodie novels, you should still read this, the sixth in the series. A) because it will inspire you to go back and read the rest of this excellent collection of books and B) because the hook here is Brodie getting caught up in an English country house mystery that allows Atkinson to have great fun playing with tropes and tipping her hat to some of the greats like Agatha Christie and even some more recent pleasures, like Knives Out. —Vannessa Cronin, Amazon Editor
Actress Brenda Blethyn may be hanging up her rain hat and her olive raincoat, and no longer playing Vera Stanhope on screen, but author Ann Cleeves is thankfully forging ahead. In The Dark Wives, a murder takes place near Rosebank, a home for troubled youth, and over the course of the investigation in a remote coastal town, secrets and superstition get tangled. Meanwhile, Vera has a new team member to break in and she’s trying to learn from past mistakes. —Vannessa Cronin, Amazon Editor
If you ignore the royal shenanigans (ie fights for succession), Lord and Lady Macbeth were pretty much the original Bonnie and Clyde, the couple whose ambition (or greed—potato, pot-ah-to) made them cross the line into villainy. Queen Macbeth was written as part of the Darkland Tales, in which Scotland’s best contemporary novelists reframe historical Scottish stories with a modern cast, and while at first glance it seems out of keeping with McDermid’s other novels, she’s actually in her element here, bringing bucketloads of both suspense and sympathy to a woman who was either (or maybe both) a supportive wife and a criminal ahead of her time. —Vannessa Cronin, Amazon Editor
We were hooked on this series the moment we cracked the spine on The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie and when no new book followed 2019’s The Golden Tresses of the Dead, we grieved and tried to make our peace with it. But Flavia, the precocious 12 year-old chemist, poison expert, and relentless amateur sleuth is a hard habit to break. So we were thrilled to see her and Dogger—estate gardener, sometime chauffeur, and erstwhile sidekick—back to prove that Major Greenleigh was not killed by “a jolly good old-fashioned mushroom poisoning” courtesy of the de Luce family cook, Mrs Mullet. Brilliant, funny, and just a little heart-tugging (and that’s just Flavia), it was so good to be back in Buckshaw. —Vannessa Cronin, Amazon Editor
Count us as huge fans of Rendon’s Cash Blackbear series (we’re waiting impatiently to read the fourth in series, Broken Fields, out March 2025), so we were excited for this standalone. Missing and murdered Indigenous women (MMIW) is an epidemic and Quill, a Native woman who lives on the Red Pine reservation in Minnesota, has had her own brush with violence against women. It’s why she runs. She’s running in the woods—practicing for the Boston City Marathon—when she hears a woman screaming. Finding no trace of the lady, bar an earring, she and her friends decide enough is enough, that they will do what law enforcement appears to have no interest in doing. Suspenseful and eye-opening, it’s hard not to cheer for Quill and her friends. —Vannessa Cronin, Amazon Editor
Black River is a debut, a startlingly good murder mystery set in a small, remote village hours away from Delhi. It opens with two shocking murders, the second the more devastating because the victim is an eight-year-old child, Munia, who’s in the wrong place at the wrong time. Likewise, Mansoor is an itinerant Muslim man whose presence in a mostly Hindu village is enough to make him the prime suspect. Can the understaffed, under-resourced local Sub-Inspector Ombir Singh deal with officials from Delhi and solve the case before the enraged town lynches the only suspect? Religious intolerance, the tensions of city versus country, and mob rule versus cool heads, add layers of suspenseful nuance to a clever plot in this must-read mystery. —Vannessa Cronin, Amazon Editor
Perhaps his day job as a rapper made me sceptical about his crime fiction chops, but his other gig as a highly successful producer (hit series, Black Mafia Family and Power Book II: Ghost) should have clued me in. The Accomplice (co-written with author, screenwriter, and creative writing instructor Aaron Philip Clark) will surely make its way to screen also, with its breakneck pacing, cinematic dust-ups and chases, and two charismatic leads: Nia, the first Black Texas Ranger and Desmond Bell, a good-guy-gone-bad who robs a Texas bank. They’re set to square off against one another with neither one going to back down first, in this slick, tightly-wound, and compulsively readable debut novel. —Vannessa Cronin, Amazon Editor
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