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Riot Recommendation

Riot Recommendation: What’s Your Favorite Recent Crime Fiction?

Vanessa Diaz

Managing Editor

Book Riot Managing Editor Vanessa Diaz is a writer and former bookseller from San Diego, CA whose Spanish is even faster than her English. When not reading or writing, she enjoys dreaming up travel itineraries and drinking entirely too much tea. She is a regular co-host on the All the Books podcast who especially loves mysteries, gothic lit, mythology/folklore, and all things witchy. Vanessa can be found on Instagram at @BuenosDiazSD or taking pictures of pretty trees in Portland, OR, where she now resides.

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Size Zero by Abigail Mangin.

Condom dresses and space helmets have debuted on fashion runways. A dead body becomes the trend when a coat made of human skin saunters down fashion’s biggest stage. The body is identified as Annabelle Leigh, the teenager who famously disappeared over a decade ago from her boyfriend’s New York City mansion. This new evidence casts suspicion back on the former boyfriend, Cecil LeClaire. Now a monk, he is forced to return to his dark and absurd childhood home to clear his name. He teams up with Ava Germaine, a renegade ex-model. And together, they investigate the depraved and lawless modeling industry behind Cecil’s family fortune.

Crime fiction as a genre was first defined in the 19th century; The Murders in the Rue Morgue by Edgar Allen Poe was published in 1841, and that locked-room mystery is now considered one of the first detective stories. From those early days to the Golden Age of crime, the rise of hardboiled American crime fiction, and beyond, readers have kept up faithfully with beloved sleuths like Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot, and Philip Marlowe. Today a new class of crime solvers has joined the ranks of crime favorites, a class that includes Joe Ide’s IQ, Attica Locke’s Darren Matthews, and Tana French’s Dublin Murder Squad.

With so much excellent—and thankfully, if slowly, more diverse—crime fiction to choose from, we want to know which works have kept you turning those pages lately. So tell us: what’s the best recent crime fiction you’ve read? Come share your top picks with us on Facebook and Twitter, then we’ll round up your answers and share a roundup with our Riot readers next week. Remember: we’re looking for recent(ish) releases; our TBRs are long enough as it is!