New Releases Tuesday: The Best Books Out This Week

Bo is 8 when he loses his mother and becomes transfixed with Raider, an ’80s detective show. And 28-year-old Brandon is freshly fired when he does a little retail therapy before meeting someone making job promises too good to be true. Once he starts at Flux, a bioelectric startup, he begins to lose his memory for reasons unknown to him. And finally, there’s Blue, who is 48, just out of a coma, and only able to speak through cybernetic implants. Time shifts as Blue helps to expose Flux, and Asian identity, grief, and mystery converge to connect the three characters.

Pick this one up for a wholly unique speculative novel that looks at how our saddest moments shape us.

X was an artist and writer who subverted expectations. Until she died in her office. Her wife, consumed by grief and not knowing the most basic things about her wife, sets off to fill out the life of the woman she married. What she finds is a person who arrived in New York in ’72, but was born in the Southern Territory, a theocracy that had formed in the U.S. after WWII. She also finds the betrayal that comes with realizing someone you married isn’t who they said they were. The closeness of the fiction and nonfiction aspects of this novel blend fact and an alternate reality in interesting ways, as X the shapeshifter is fleshed out.

As three siblings — Anh, Thanh, and Minh — start to make their way out of a war torn Vietnam, they become orphans. Once they get to the U.K. as refugees, 16-year-old Anh becomes the parent to her younger brothers. As they settle into a land with a new language that barely conceals its resentment for them, the three siblings slowly drift apart. The narrative of their lives is told through multiple viewpoints, historical documents, and the voices of those lost.

Brynn is 15, anxious, and depressed, and when her mother sees a Tumblr post by her that sounds like a suicide note, she sends Brynn to live off the grid in her father’s houseboat in Florida. At first disconnected from her online friends and lonely, she eventually finds Skylar. Though Skylar is the opposite of Brynn — magnetic and confident — Brynn feels safe with her. But Skylar is confined to the bayou, and to save her, Brynn will have to confront the worst things she knows.

The character Tempest Raj returns in the second book in the Staircase Mystery series — which you don’t have to have read the first of to appreciate this one. It opens up with a client commissioning Raj’s family’s business, the Secret Staircase Construction company, to renovate her home and give it a classic mystery novel interior. The client then throws a party with a fake séance to celebrate the absence of her philandering ex-husband — the same ex-husband who shows up to the party dead. Now the suspects are the eight people who had participated in the séance, but had not been seen leaving. Pandian is known for her locked room mysteries, and this is another one that delivers. We stan a Mystery Queen.