If any of the titles garnered starred reviews in the four library journals, that is indicated after the plot summary of the title. Amazon does a good job of coming up with these monthly lists and especially its year-end best list.

The big book this month both in size(960 pages) and importance is THE RUNNING GRAVE by Robert Galbraith (J.K. Rowling). I’m reading THE RUNNING GRAVE right now and it will be featured on the cover in the next issue of Deadly Pleasures Mystery Magazine. This is the first month in quite awhile that I haven’t read any of the selections ahead of their release. October revolves around Halloween and there are more than enough titles to scare the wits out of you. A HAUNTING ON THE HILL appears to be the best of the bunch. The only others that intrigue me are MURDER BY DEGREES and GLORY BE. Somewhat of a lackluster monthly list as far as I’m concerned — especially compared with last month’s stellar one.

Disclaimer: this is not intended to advertise amazon.com or encourage you to buy books from that site. It is for information purposes only.

Amazon Editor’s Picks: Best Mystery, Thriller & Suspense – Standalones–October, 2023

KILL SHOW, Daniel Sweren-Becker (Harper, $27.00). Sara Parcell disappeared without a trace on a crisp April morning in Frederick, Maryland. Her tragic story was a national obsession and the centerpiece of a controversial television docuseries that followed her disappearance in real time. But is it possible that everyone missed the biggest secret of all?
Ten years after these events, the people who knew Sara best are finally ready to talk. In this genre-bending novel, Daniel Sweren-Becker fashions an oral history around the seemingly familiar crime of a teenage girl gone missing. Yet KILL SHOW, filled with diabolical twists and provocative social commentary, is no standard mystery. Through “interviews” with family members, neighbors, law enforcement, television executives, and a host of other compelling characters, Sweren-Becker constructs a riveting tale about one family’s tragedy—and Hollywood’s insatiable desire to exploit it. Publishers Weekly & Booklist Starred Reviews

A HAUNTING ON THE HILL, Elizabeth Hand (Mulholland, $27.00). Holly Sherwin has been a struggling playwright for years, but now, after receiving a grant to develop her play Witching Night, she may finally be close to her big break. All she needs is time and space to bring her vision to life. When she stumbles across Hill House on a weekend getaway upstate, she is immediately taken in by the mansion, nearly hidden outside a remote village. It’s enormous, old, and ever-so eerie—the perfect place to develop and rehearse her play.
Despite her own hesitations, Holly’s girlfriend, Nisa, agrees to join Holly in renting the house for a month, and soon a troupe of actors, each with ghosts of their own, arrive. Yet as they settle in, the house’s peculiarities are made known: strange creatures stalk the grounds, disturbing sounds echo throughout the halls, and time itself seems to shift. All too soon, Holly and her friends find themselves at odds not just with one another, but with the house itself. It seems something has been waiting in Hill House all these years, and it no longer intends to walk alone . Booklist Starred Review

MY DARLING GIRL, Jennifer McMahon (Gallery/Scout Press, $28.00). Alison has never been a fan of Christmas. But with it right around the corner and her husband busily decorating their cozy Vermont home, she has no choice but to face it. Then she gets the call. Mavis, Alison’s estranged mother, has been diagnosed with cancer and has only weeks to live. She wants to spend her remaining days with her daughter, son-in-law, and two granddaughters. But Alison grew up with her mother’s alcoholism and violent abuse and is reluctant to unearth these traumatic memories. Still, she eventually agrees to take in Mavis, hoping that she and her mother could finally heal and have the relationship she’s always dreamed of. But when mysterious and otherworldly things start happening upon Mavis’s arrival, Alison begins to suspect her mother is not quite who she seems. And as the holiday festivities turn into a nightmare, she must confront just how far she is willing to go to protect her family.

MURDER BY DEGREES, Ritu Mukerji (Simon & Schuster, $27.99). Philadelphia, 1875: It is the start of term at Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania. Dr. Lydia Weston, professor and anatomist, is immersed in teaching her students in the lecture hall and hospital. When the body of a patient, Anna Ward, is dredged out of the Schuylkill River, the young chambermaid’s death is deemed a suicide. But Lydia is suspicious and she is soon brought into the police investigation.
Aided by a diary filled with cryptic passages of poetry, Lydia discovers more about the young woman she thought she knew. Through her skill at the autopsy table and her clinical acumen, Lydia draws nearer the truth. Soon a terrible secret, long hidden, will be revealed. But Lydia must act quickly, before she becomes the next target of those who wished to silence Anna. Publishers Weekly, Kirkus and Library Journal Starred Reviews

ONE PUZZLING AFTERNOON, Emily Critchley (Sourcebooks Landmark, $16.99). I kept your secret Lucy. I’ve kept it for more than sixty years… It is 1951, and at number six Sycamore Street fifteen-year-old Edie Green is lonely. Living with her eccentric mother and her mother’s new boyfriend, she is desperate for something to shake her from her dull, isolated life. So when the popular, pretty Lucy Theddle befriends Edie, she thinks all her troubles are over. Even though Lucy has a secret, one Edie is not certain she should keep. Then Lucy goes missing.
Now in 2018, Edie is eighty-four and still living in the same small town, when one afternoon she glimpses Lucy Theddle, still looking the same as she did at fifteen. Her family write it off as one of her many mix ups, there’s a lot Edie gets confused about these days. But Edie knows she’s the key to finding Lucy. Time is running out and Edie must piece together the clues before Lucy is forgotten forever. Booklist Starred Review

CALL ME HUNTER, Jim Shockey (Atria/Emily Bester, $27.99). The single greatest work of art in the world is not in the Louvre or The Met, or in any private collection. In fact, its whereabouts are unknown. Once in a long while, a child is born possessing the rarest of gifts, the innate ability to feel impossible beauty, to recognize priceless works of art. When such a child is discovered, a 250-year-old secret organization called Our World trains them to acquire the greatest works of art through theft, bribery, forgery, and even murder. Once found, the masterpiece will disappear again without anyone ever knowing it surfaced and sold for billions of dollars of profit at a secret auction attended by only the wealthiest of the art world’s patrons.
One of Our World’s rare geniuses is Zhivago. He is also a psychopathic killer. On his trail is Hunter, a man who will stop at nothing to destroy the organization and save his daughter from suffering the same fate her mother did at its hands.

GENEVA, Richard Armitage (Pegasus, $27.95). Nobel Prize-winning scientist Sarah Collier has taken a step back from work to spend more time with her family. Movie nights with her husband Daniel and their daughter Maddie are a welcome respite from the scrutiny of the world’s press. As much as it hurts, it’s good to be able to see her father more too. He’s suffering from Alzheimer’s and needs special care. Sarah has started to show tell-tale signs of the disease too. She’s been experiencing blackouts and memory loss. It’s early days but she must face the possibility that she won’t be there to see her daughter grow up. Daniel, a neuroscientist himself, is doing his best to be supportive but she already knows that she will have to be the strong one. For all of them. So when Sarah is invited to be the guest of honour at a prestigious biotech conference in Geneva she declines, wanting to stay out of the public eye—that is until Daniel shows her the kind of work that the enigmatic Mauritz Schiller has been developing. Flown first class to the spectacular alpine city and housed in a luxury hotel, Sarah and Daniel are thrust back into the spotlight. As they try to shut out the noise of the public media storm, in private Sarah is struggling with her escalating symptoms. And the true extent of what Schiller has achieved is a revelation. This is technology that could change medicine forever. More than that, it could save Sarah’s life. But technology so valuable attracts all kinds of interest. Wealthy investors are circling, controversial blogger Terri Landau is all over the story, and someone close to Schiller seems bent on taking advantage of the situation for themselves. Sarah feels threatened and does not know who to trust—including herself. Far from being her lifeline Schiller’s technology may be her undoing.

RUMOR OF EVIL, Gary Braver (Oceanview, $27.95). Detectives Kirk Lucian and Mandy Wing are charged with investigating a reported suicide of a Cambridge woman in her backyard. The death came as a shock—the woman was considered a pillar of her community and was well-liked by everyone. After further investigation, the hanging appears staged. Once Kirk and Mandy’s suspicions are confirmed, they make a list of suspects. Clues begin to connect the recent murder to the decades-old mysterious death of a beautiful 16-year-old Romany exchange student who perished when a treehouse she was sleeping in caught fire. The girl, Vadima Lupescu, had done “odd” things among her American peers that stirred up prejudices and suspicions, leading to her brutal death—and cover-up. As Kirk and Mandy investigate the bizarre rumors—that Vadima had “gypsy powers” and put curses on those around her—they discover a cauldron of dark secrets. Will they uncover the true cause of this tangled web of deaths and horrors before it spirals out of control?

WEST HEART KILL, Dann McDorman (Knopf, $28.00). An isolated hunt club. A raging storm. Three corpses, discovered within four days. A cast of monied, scheming, unfaithful characters. When private detective Adam McAnnis joins an old college friend for the Bicentennial weekend at the exclusive West Heart club in upstate New York, he finds himself among a set of not-entirely-friendly strangers. Then the body of one of the members is found at the lake’s edge; hours later, a major storm hits. By the time power is restored on Sunday, two more people will be dead.

FORTUNE, Ellen Won Steil (Lake Union, $16.99). One drop of blood for a chance at a multimillion-dollar windfall. Is it a philanthropic gesture from a billionaire widow? Some suspect a darker motive behind the DNA lottery?one tied to the eighteen-year-old mystery of an infant’s unidentified remains that mars the history of idyllic Rosemary Hills, Iowa. Right after the blood lottery is announced, three local women fall under suspicion of knowing something about that night, and their carefully kept secrets threaten to spill out too.
Cleo is a divorced single mom forced to return to her hometown and accept a strange job reading to an invalid recluse; Jemma is a controversial state senator whose reelection campaign and teenage daughter have her on edge; and Alex, a divorce attorney, copes with a crumbling marriage of her own and the suffocating presence of a cold, overbearing mother.

Amazon Editor’s Picks: Best Mystery, Thriller & Suspense – New and Continuing Series – October, 2023

THE EXCHANGE, John Grisham (Doubleday, $29.95). What became of Mitch and Abby McDeere after they exposed the crimes of Memphis law firm Bendini, Lambert & Locke and fled the country? The answer is in The Exchange, the riveting sequel to The Firm, the blockbuster thriller that launched the career of America’s favorite storyteller. It is now fifteen years later, and Mitch and Abby are living in Manhattan, where Mitch is a partner at the largest law firm in the world. When a mentor in Rome asks him for a favor that will take him far from home, Mitch finds himself at the center of a sinister plot that has worldwide implications—and once again endangers his colleagues, friends, and family. Mitch has become a master at staying one step ahead of his adversaries, but this time there’s nowhere to hide.

A TRAITOR IN WHITEHALL, Julia Kelly (Minotaur, $28.00). 1940, England: Evelyne Redfern, known as “The Parisian Orphan” as a child, is working on the line at a munitions factory in wartime London. When Mr. Fletcher, one of her father’s old friends, spots Evelyne on a night out, Evelyne finds herself plunged into the world of Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s cabinet war rooms. However, shortly after she settles into her new role as a secretary, one of the girls at work is murdered, and Evelyne must use all of her amateur sleuthing expertise to find the killer. But doing so puts her right in the path of David Poole, a cagey minister’s aide who seems determined to thwart her investigations. That is, until Evelyne finds out David’s real mission is to root out a mole selling government secrets to Britain’s enemies, and the pair begrudgingly team up. With her quick wit, sharp eyes, and determination, will Evelyne be able to find out who’s been selling England’s secrets and catch a killer, all while battling her growing attraction to David?

GLORY BE, Danielle Arceneaux (Pegasus, $26.95). It’s a hot and sticky Sunday in Lafayette, Louisiana, and Glory has settled into her usual after-church routine, meeting gamblers at the local coffee shop, where she works as a small-time bookie. Sitting at her corner table, Glory hears that her best friend—a nun beloved by the community—has been found dead in her apartment.
When police declare the mysterious death a suicide, Glory is convinced that there must be more to the story. With her reluctant daughter—who has troubles of her own—in tow, Glory launches a shadow investigation into Lafayette’s oil tycoons, church gossips, a rumored voodoo priestess, nosey neighbors, and longtime ne’er-do wells. Publishers Weekly Starred Review

DANGEROUS WOMEN, Mark de Castrique (Poisoned Pen Press, $16.99). This urgent, cleverly plotted high stakes thriller is set in motion by botched attack on two law clerks leaving one dead and the other in a coma. The ensuing cover up leaves a string of bodies and too many players at cross-purposes. It also leaves Chief Justice Clarissa Baxter with a target on her back.
We’ll need an off the grid hero with friends in high places: enter retired FBI agent-turned-boardinghouse landlady, Ethel Fiona Crestwater (legend) and her double-first-cousin-twice-removed Jesse Cooper (sidekick). Although in her mid-seventies, Ethel is no bumbling amateur sleuth; she’s a seasoned pro with razor-sharp instincts and Bond-worthy skills. College-aged Jesse brings tech savvy and boundless enthusiasm, along with an innate talent for intrigue. Together, the unlikely duo will face malicious back-stabbing political sycophants, conniving lobbyists, and a motivated assassin bent on removing the Chief Justice from the equation?along with Ethel, who stands defiantly between the hitman and his payday.

THE SECRET, Lee Child & Andrew Child (Delacorte, $28.99). 1992. All across the United States respectable, upstanding citizens are showing up dead. These deaths could be accidents, and they don’t appear to be connected—until a fatal fall from a high-floor window attracts some unexpected attention. That attention comes from the secretary of defense. All of a sudden he wants an interagency task force to investigate. And he wants Jack Reacher as the army’s representative. If Reacher gets a result, great. If not, he’s a convenient fall guy. But office politics isn’t Reacher’s thing. Three questions quickly emerge: Who’s with him, who’s against him, and will the justice he dispenses be the official kind . . . or his own kind?

JUDGMENT PREY, John Sandford (Putnam, $29.95). Alex Sand was spending the evening at home playing basketball with his two young sons when all three were shot in cold blood. A wealthy federal judge, there’s no short list of people who could have a vendetta against Sands, but the gruesome murders, especially that of his children, turn their St. Paul community on its head. Sand was on the verge of a major donation to a local housing charity, Heart/Twin Cities, and with the money in limbo, eyes suddenly turn to his grieving widow, Margaret Cooper, to see what she might do with the money. Margaret, distraught over the death of her family, struggles to move forward, and can’t imagine how or why anyone would target her husband. With public pressure mounting and both the local police force and FBI hitting dead end after dead end, Lucas Davenport and Virgil Flowers are called in to do what others could not: find answers. With each potential lead flawed, Davenport and Flowers are determined to chase every theory until they figure out who killed the Sands. But when they find themselves being stonewalled by the most unlikely of forces, the two wonder if perhaps each misdirection could lead them closer to the truth.

THE RUNNING GRAVE, Robert Galbraith (Mulholland, $32.50). Private Detective Cormoran Strike is contacted by a worried father whose son, Will, has gone to join a religious cult in the depths of the Norfolk countryside. The Universal Humanitarian Church is, on the surface, a peaceable organization that campaigns for a better world. Yet Strike discovers that beneath the surface there are deeply sinister undertones, and unexplained deaths.
In order to try to rescue Will, Strike’s business partner, Robin Ellacott, decides to infiltrate the cult, and she travels to Norfolk to live incognito among its members. But in doing so, she is unprepared for the dangers that await her there or for the toll it will take on her.

MURDER MOST ROYAL, S. J. Bennett (Morrow, $30.00). Queen Elizabeth II is looking forward to a traditional Christmas gathering with her family in Sandringham when a shocking discovery interrupts holiday plans. A severed hand has been found—but even more unsettling, she recognizes the signet ring still attached to a finger. It belongs to a scion of the St Cyr family, her old friends from nearby Ladybridge Hall. Despite the personal connection, the Queen wants to leave the investigation to the police—that is, until newspapers drag her name into the matter.
As reporters speculate about the proximity of the crime to the Crown and the police fail to investigate a suspicious accident on her doorstep, Elizabeth quietly begins to mull over the mystery herself. With help from her Assistant Private Secretary, Rozie Oshodi, she delves into the interlocking layers of fact and fiction surrounding the high-profile case. Someone in the quiet county of Norfolk seems to have a secret worth killing for, and the Queen is determined to find out who and what that is—even if that means discovering that someone in her close circle is a murderer.

WHERE DEMONS HIDE, Douglas Skelton (Arcade Crimewise, $27.99). Something scared Nuala Flaherty to death. When her body is found in the center of a pentagram on a lonely moor in the shadow of Ben Shee mountain, Rebecca is determined to find out what killed her. Was her death caused by supernatural means or is there a more down-to-earth explanation? The body was discovered on the Island of Stoirm, about which Rebecca has some complicated feelings. Her beloved father, a career policeman, came from there, but he fled the island’s and his own family’s dark history, and Rebecca herself had a brush with death while pursuing a story there. But there’s no way she can avoid going back. Besides, her dear friends, photographer Chaz Wymark and his partner, Alan, are about to be married on Stoirm, causing a small stir in the isolated island community. Rebecca’s investigation will lead her to a mysterious cult and local drug dealings. But what she doesn’t know is that crime matriarch Mo Burke still has her in her crosshairs. Mo wants payback for the death of her son, and after one failed attempt to hurt Rebecca, she’s upping the ante. And this time, it could be lethal.

THE BELL IN THE FOG, Lev AC Rosen (Forge, $27.99). San Francisco, 1952. Detective Evander “Andy” Mills has started a new life for himself as a private detective?but his business hasn’t exactly taken off. It turns out that word spreads fast when you have a bad reputation, and no one in the queer community trusts him enough to ask an ex-cop for help. When James, an old flame from the war who had mysteriously disappeared, arrives in his offices above the Ruby, Andy wants to kick him out. But the job seems to be a simple case of blackmail, and Andy’s debts are piling up. He agrees to investigate, despite everything it stirs up.The case will take him back to the shadowy, closeted world of the Navy, and then out into the gay bars of the city, where the past rises up to meet him, like the swell of the ocean under a warship. Missing people, violent strangers, and scandalous photos that could destroy lives are a whirlpool around him.

DEATH AND THE SISTERS, Heather Redmond (Kensington, $27.00). London, 1814: Mary Godwin and her stepsister Jane Clairmont, both sixteen, possess quick minds bolstered by an unconventional upbringing, and have little regard for the rules that other young ladies follow. Mary, whose mother famously advocated for women’s rights, rejects the two paths that seem open to her—that of an assistant in her father’s bookshop, or an ordinary wife. Though quieter and more reserved than the boisterous Jane, Mary’s imagination is keen, and she longs for real-world adventures. One evening, an opportunity arrives in the form of a dinner guest, Percy Bysshe Shelley. At twenty-one, Shelley is already a renowned poet and radical. Mary finds their visitor handsome and compelling, but it is later that evening, after the party has broken up, that events take a truly intriguing turn. When Mary comes downstairs in search of a book, she finds instead a man face down on the floor—with a knife in his back. The dead man, it seems, was a former classmate of Shelley’s, and had lately become a personal and professional rival.