Heather
by Caitlin Mullen
Halfway through 2026, I’ve found my favorite crime novel of the year so far, one I’m already recommending to people who love Tana French and Liz Moore. Saying this about HEATHER (Celadon, 352 pp., $28.99) is a great relief, because I’ve been anticipating this novel ever since Mullen’s Edgar-winning debut, “Please See Us,” bowled me over in 2020.
Like that earlier book, “Heather” is set in New Jersey. After years as a narcotics detective, 30-year-old Callie Hauser has returned home to a small town in the Pine Barrens as its police chief — and the first person she arrests is her own mother. After this showstopping opening scene, Mullen unspools a narrative of corkscrew complexity involving decades-old unearthed remains, even older family secrets and the ways in which young women are preyed upon.
Callie wonders whether there will ever be a day “when girls aren’t told how to look, won’t be forced to contort themselves into one thing only for the fad to pass and then they’re handed the next template.”
Mullen depicts Callie’s story with a combination of gimlet-eyed compassion and ice-cold rage. I read “Heather” in a single sitting, equal parts infuriated and dazzled.
Blunt Instrument
by Amy Bloom
So many writers of literary fiction have pivoted to crime writing — with varying results — that I’ve become blasé to the point of cynicism. But BLUNT INSTRUMENT (The Mysterious Press, 288 pp., $28), the first in a new mystery series by Bloom, startled me in the best possible way. Its wry tone is in keeping with her prior literary work, and Bloom engages with the full spectrum of genre expectations.
Dell Chandler was supposed to be an academic, but a life of the mind didn’t end up working out, so she became a private detective. She’s back on the Cromwell University campus to investigate the murder of the oafish professor Oliver Bullfinch, done in by a bronze bust of Nathaniel Hawthorne. It’s a set-up worthy of Helen Eustis’s “The Horizontal Man” or any of Amanda Cross’s mysteries.
Bloom takes clear pleasure in exploring Dell’s complicated feelings about academia, how it’s tied to her relationship with her father, and how reckoning with this past while investigating a grisly killing is bound to throw serious emotional curveballs. This is rich terrain, and I’m eager for Bloom to delve deeper in future installments.
A Murder in Springtime
by Martin Walker
Walker’s charming Bruno, Chief of Police books are solid procedurals, but their true pleasures are found in the depictions of the small Dordogne town of St. Denis and the idiosyncratic characters who populate the place. A MURDER IN SPRINGTIME (Knopf, 288 pp., $30), the 19th installment, is a perfect place to start if you’re new to the series or, like me, hadn’t checked in for some years.
Bruno is feeling a little harried. His current relationship is teetering, a film crew has taken over St. Denis and he’s spending a great deal of time trying to save the town’s struggling market. “The market is our heart,” he tells a friend. “Without the market, how long would the cafe stay open? The Maison de la Presse? The boulangeries? Our market is our magnet and we can’t afford to lose it.” So it’s all too easy for him to ignore calls from his neighbor and good friend Pamela. Wrong move: She’s discovered her brand-new lodger murdered on the patio.
She couldn’t have done it, though Bruno feels he can’t investigate since he and Pamela have known each other so long. But then his rookie detective, Fabien, realizes he’s even more connected to the victim, putting Bruno back on the case. Walker sneaks in surprising twists under cover of a slow-burn, community-driven mystery in a magical setting.
Sex on Murder Island
by Jo Firestone
Finally, I’m not sure how I missed Firestone’s “Murder on Sex Island” when it came out in 2023. I’ve rectified that: It’s a delightful, sidesplitting satire of the reality TV industry as seen from the perspective of Luella van Horn, the crime-solving alter ego of a Staten Island social worker named Marie Jones.
The sequel, SEX ON MURDER ISLAND (Bantam, 213 pp., paperback, $20), brings Luella back a few months after her first sleuthing triumph. Somehow she’s even worse off than before: The gigs are scant, her money’s almost gone, she’s about to be evicted and — oh yeah — she’s turning 30. Of course she’ll accept a new case that takes her to Murder Island, an exclusive enclave near New York City, where she’s hired to investigate an extramarital affair that, alas, has led to murder.
As Luella investigates, she grows increasingly taken aback at the island’s naughty activities. (Let’s just say I’ve never read a more wholesome novel involving multiple sex parties.) She’ll catch the killer, but the book shines brightest in its depiction of a lonely woman searching for real friends.
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