The Best New Mysteries For Your Book Club This Fall

The award-winning Locke is back with the conclusion to her amazing Highway 59 series. It follows Black Texas Ranger Darren Matthews as he contends with all manner of racism and effery while investigating murders. Here, his trifling mother has dropped a case in his lap that he’s hesitant to pick up, lest it ruin the life he’s reconstructing for himself. It involves a missing Black sorority member whose fellow sorority sisters insist she’s just moved out. As he follows leads, he finds out that her hometown—and even her family—have some rotten inner workings.

The combination of subject matter—I love reading about art students for some reason—and the unique format of this mystery makes it sound like so much fun. Let’s start off with Gela Nathaniel, who’s in quite the pickle. She’s the Royal Hastings University’s new Multimedia Art course head, and if she doesn’t find six students from diverse backgrounds, her funding will get cut. Problem is, the ones she’s found all come with a bit of mess. There’s the desperate sculptor Jem, the low-key nepo baby Jonathan, the less than tech-savvy Patrick, the single mother (and kind of broke) Ludya, the former marketing executive Cameron, and the overqualified artist Alyson. Then there’s the person who will grade the students’ work—a man titled “The Examiner,” who looks through texts, essays, and even message boards, and comes to the conclusion that someone is in danger. They may actually already be dead.

In this dark academia thriller, Maya is excited to go back to Princeton for her 10-year reunion. She’s also hyped to see her little sister, Naomi, graduate from the same school. But then something terrible happens: Naomi is found dead. Police are saying it was an accident, but Maya knows better, and as she starts to look into Naomi’s life right before she died, she sees how right she is. Turns out, Naomi had joined the über exclusive social club Maya had warned her against, and Maya is certain they approached her for the secret society within it. Maya starts to wonder if she should have been more forthcoming about what really happened at Princeton when she went there as an undergraduate because Naomi isn’t the first woman who died.

Quill is no longer the lonely Native girl she was when she grew up on the Red Pine reservation in Minnesota. She is still living there, but now, after a lifetime of seeing what happens to women and girls who look like her, she’s had enough. That’s why, when she hears a scream while she’s out training to run the Boston Marathon one day, she starts investigating with only tire tracks and a beaded earring to go off of. As she searches, someone else goes missing, and she’ll find herself needing all the support of her husband, friends, and community to confront the dangers her people face.

I got a copy of this one, and I’m so excited to finish it. It’s a queer YA murder mystery set in 1927 in Washington, D.C. during Prohibition. Three teen girls—Gertrude, Clara, and Milly—sneak out of the Washington Female Seminary to get their flapper on, but return to their headmistress murdered. Gertrude, in an effort to clear her mentor’s reputation, sets out to solve the murder with the help of her friends. But it’s hard out there in the ’20s for a girl—and all the sus federal agents and bootleggers they come up against don’t make things any easier.