The 24 Best New Book Releases This Week: June 25-July 1, 2024

Here are 24 of the best books out the week of June 25–July 1. Do you remember how people hung out in groups in high school ? The jocks over here, the mathletes over there, the goths out back sneaking a smoke? And the troublemakers all got together over the weekend for a mandatory Breakfast Club. (Shout out to the Brat Pack !)

It’s the same way with books. Some weeks you discover a bunch of terrific romances are heading to stores on the same day. The next week outstanding memoirs and biographies burst through the door at the same time. This week? This week, it’s mysteries and thrillers. Everywhere we turned we found great historical works of espionage, contemporary thrillers and true crime chronicles any lovers of the genre will devour. Of course, we’ve also got great fiction and romances, a delightful picture book, a new horror novel from the creator of Bird Box and so much more.

So let’s get reading. At the head of the Parade is….

The 24 Best New Book Releases This Week: June 25-July 1, 2024

1. A Novel Love Story by Ashley Poston
2. A Happier Life by Kristy Woodson Harvey
3. Under Your Spell by Laura Wood

Three novels of romance and life to lift your spirits. A Novel Love Story takes the premise of Pleasantville, The Purple Rose of Cairo and other “jump into the world you’ve been imagining” tales and gives it a clever spin. Our hero Eileen Merriweather is a professor of literature. So she’s the perfect person to maneuver through danger after she somehow ends up in the fictional setting of her favorite romance novels. If only that annoyingly handsome bookstore owner wasn’t standing in her way!

For her tenth novel, Kristy Woodson Harvey delivers perhaps her most ambitious one yet. Oh, A Happier Life still has the small-town warmth and Southern charm you expect. But it also contains two storylines set some 50 years apart. In the 1970s, Becks is struggling to maintain the happy facade of North Carolina’s best hostess with a stunning historic home and perfect life. In the present, Keaton returns to her mother’s empty childhood home to put it up for sale…but discovers a charming nextdoor neighbor, the small town’s enjoyable busybodies and a secret revolving around her grandparents who died tragically so many years ago.

Author Laura Wood enjoys success as an author for kids and young adults. Her Poppy Pym series is perfect for those who can’t get enough of British boarding school novels and The Agency For Scandal– about an all-female detective agency in the 1800s–is surely fated to become a TV series. Now Wood jumps into adult fiction with Under Your Spell . In it, Clementine Moore is the daughter of a rock star so she is determined never to date somebody famous. Yes, she’s cornered into taking a summer job working alongside the hottest pop star on the planet, in every sense of the word. Yes, he’s unexpectedly delightful. Yes, sparks fly. And no no no, it’s not gonna happen.

A Novel Love Story by Ashley Poston ($19; Berkley) Buy now from Amazon , Barnes & Noble , Bookshop.org

A Happier Life by Kristy Woodson Harvey ($28.99; Gallery Books) Buy now from Amazon , Barnes & Noble , Bookshop.org

Under Your Spell by Laura Wood ($18.99; Atria) Buy now from Amazon , Barnes & Noble , Bookshop.org

Related: Celebrate Pride 2024 With These 39 Best New LGBTQI+ Books

4. Love Letters To A Serial Killer by Tasha Coryell
5. Shanghai by Joseph Kanon
6. Don’t Let The Devil Ride by Ace Atkins

What is it with people who develop a romantic fixation on serial killers and other notorious criminals? Hannah is not one of them. In Love Letters to a Serial Killer, she finds friendship and an online community with people determined to solve the brutal murders of four women in Atlanta. When a very handsome lawyer is arrested, Hannah starts writing him letters. When he’s acquitted –and she’s sure he’s guilty–quite naturally she pretends to fall for him and moves in with the guy, determined to uncover the evidence proving his guilt. Ok, so she’s not romantically twisted, just Nancy Drew turned up to 11.

Joseph Kanon ( The Good German, Los Alamos ) makes Shanghai a Casablanca- worthy setting for World War II-era intrigue. It’s 1938 and some Jews fleeing Nazi Germany’s violence ended up in Shanghai. It’s a Western outpost inside China and all anyone wants to do is get letters of transit–I mean, book passage–on one of the cruise ships by Lloyd that offer a rare way to escape. Start casting the movie version now.

They’re pitching the new thriller by Ace Atkins as a cross between Don Winslow (is he really retiring from novels? Nooooooo) and S.A. Cosby. If you love crime novels, you know how great they are, so yeah, of course a publisher would claim that about his new book Don't Let The Devil Ride . But then it’s followed by rave reviews…from, among others, Don Winslow and S.A. Cosby! Props. The latest Memphis thriller from Atkins includes a disappearing husband marked for death, a hook-handed villain straight out of childhood horror stories, a one-time leading lady opposite Elvis Presley and enough twists to do The Clambake.

Love Letters To A Serial Killer by Tasha Coryell ($29; Berkley) Buy now from Amazon , Barnes & Noble , Bookshop.org

Shanghai by Joseph Kanon ($28.99; Scribner) Buy now from Amazon , Barnes & Noble , Bookshop.org

Don’t Let The Devil Ride by Ace Atkins ($30; William Morrow) Buy now from Amazon , Barnes & Noble , Bookshop.org

7. How The Light Gets In by Joyce Maynard
8. Bear by Julia Phillips

Two works of literary fiction that focus on family.

Joyce Maynard delivers a sequel to her acclaimed bestseller Count The Ways. Like that novel, How The Light Gets In gives a widescreen look at three generations of a family, this time over the course of 15 years. Maynard captures all the messiness of life and relationships as the now-widowed Eleanor moves back to New Hampshire to care for her son, while other children spread out from Vermont to Seattle. But Maynard had us at the reference to Leonard Cohen’s lovely song “Anthem.”

Julia Phillips zeroes in on two sisters: Sam and Elena, siblings struggling to get by on the island off the coast of Washington where they were born and raised. Sam works on the ferry and Elena bartends at the country club they could never afford to join. Then…a bear is spotted swimming in the waters off shore. And then the bear lingers near their home. Somehow, this changes everything in a work praised by everyone from Ann Patchett to Kirkus Reviews, which calls it “bold and brilliant.”

How The Light Gets In by Joyce Maynard ($32; William Morrow) Buy now from Amazon , Barnes & Noble , Bookshop.org

Bear by Julia Phillips ($28; Hogarth) Buy now from Amazon , Barnes & Noble , Bookshop.org

9. Children of Anguish and Anarchy by Tomi Adeyemi
10. Foul Days by Genoveva Dimova

Fantasy author Tomi Adeyemi became an instant superstar with her debut fantasy novel Children of Blood and Bone, a work steeped in the mythology of her West African heritage. Now Adeyemi completes the Legacy of Orisha trilogy with this highly anticipated finale. Up next? The film version, scripted by Adeyemi herself. Even so, readers know the book is always better, so why wait?

As one fantasy series ends, another one begins. Foul Days is rooted in the Slavic mythology found in author Genoveva Dimova’s Bulgarian childhood. From it she spins an entirely original world, one where a witch who traded away her shadow for safety must now team up with an untrustworthy detective (he’s too honorable!) and defeat the enemies of her home, the walled city of Chernograd. While powerless (no shadow!) and avoiding lycanthropes, bloodsucking upirs and the Tsar of Monsters. Oh dear.

Children of Anguish and Anarchy by Tomi Adeyemi ($24.99; Henry Holt and Co.) Buy now from Amazon , Barnes & Noble , Bookshop.org

Foul Days by Genoveva Dimova ($17.99; Tor Trade) Buy now from Amazon , Barnes & Noble , Bookshop.org

11. Adventures of Mary Jane by Hope Jahren
12. Dinner at the Brake Fast by Renee Beauregard Lute

Author Hope Jahren read Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and wanted to know more about Mary Jane, the red-headed girl Huck couldn’t stop thinking about it. So she tells Mary Jane’s story herself, even taking care to nod to Twain by not including “The” in the title. Huck Finn has inspired two great books this year, so far: Percival Everett’s James (expanding on the inner life of the enslaved man who escapes on a raft with Huck) and now Jahren’s Adventures of Mary Jane.

The young adult/middle grade/who cares it’s good novel Dinner at the Brake Fast stands alone. So does Tacoma Jones, a kid working at her family’s roadside dinner who deals with asthma, a dad wracked by depression, and a murderous rooster, not in that order. It’s author has the Tennessee Williams-like name Renee Beauregard Lute and her novel has vivid characters and a similar eccentric charm.

Adventures of Mary Jane by Hope Jahren ($19.99; Delacorte Press) Buy now from Amazon , Barnes & Noble , Bookshop.org

Dinner at the Brake Fast by Renee Beauregard Lute ($18.99; Quill Tree Books) Buy now from Amazon , Barnes & Noble , Bookshop.org

13. All The Colors of the Dark by Chris Whitaker
14. Joe Hustle by Richard Lange
15. Trust Her by Flynn Berry

More thrillers! All The Colors of the Dark begins with a kid preventing tragedy after a serial killer seems to target the local girl the boy loves. Then the boy disappears and heroism becomes heartbreak. Joe Hustle is named for a screw-up, a guy who can turn an innocent favor into disaster, a reasonable request into an endless series of crises and a simple road trip into a ride from hell. But he’s charming, somehow and you forgive him and then things go really wrong. Trust Her is a tense thriller about two Irish sisters desperate to forge a new life after barely escaping the IRA and its relentless punishment to those who inform on their activities. But the past is never past, least of all in Northern Ireland. And one sister is given an ultimatum: track down her MI-5 informant, make him a turncoat or she and her son will pay the price.

All The Colors of the Dark by Chris Whitaker ($30; Crown) Buy now from Amazon , Barnes & Noble , Bookshop.org

Joe Hustle by Richard Lange ($29; Mulholland Books) Buy now from Amazon , Barnes & Noble , Bookshop.org

Trust Her by Flynn Berry ($30; Viking) Buy now from Amazon , Barnes & Noble , Bookshop.org

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16. Hombrecito by Santiago Jose Sanchez
17. Hot Summer by Elle Everhart
18. Cue The Sun! The Invention of Reality TV by Emily Nussbaum

Hey, it’s still Pride Month! Have you checked out our roundup of some of the best LGBTQI+ books of the year ? Here are three more.

Hombrecito is a debut novel in which our hero emigrates from Colombia to Miami, discovers and accepts his queer identity (or at least the pleasures of the flesh) but still struggles to make peace with his absent father, his absent homeland and his very un-absent mother. It’s one of the literary debuts of the year.

Hot Summer is frothy romantic fun, with our queer heroine Cas joining a UK reality show set on an island. But her plan to score well, win over the audience and get a promotion is upended when this very straight setting proves the backdrop to true love with fellow contestant Ada. In other words, reality TV gets in the way of reality. But doesn’t it always?

That romance hints at why Cue The Sun! Is included in a queer roundup. This look at reality TV by Emily Nussbaum of the New Yorker tracks the history of reality programs from its roots in radio ( Candid Camera, Queen For A Day, Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts– think American Idol ) right up to the Kardashians and all those Housewives. But the queer community knows their visibility on TV is often pioneered by these very shows. Think Lance Loud in An American Family on PBS, Pedro Zamora on MTV’s The Real World, Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, the almost unimaginable mainstream popularity of RuPaul’s Drag Race and so much more. You’ll find them all in this acclaimed work of pop culture history.

Hombrecito by Santiago Jose Sanchez ($29; Riverhead Books) Buy now from Amazon , Barnes & Noble , Bookshop.org

Hot Summer by Elle Everhart ($19; G.P. Putnam’s Sons) Buy now from Amazon , Barnes & Noble , Bookshop.org

Cue The Sun! The Invention of Reality TV by Emily Nussbaum ($30; Random House) Buy now from Amazon , Barnes & Noble , Bookshop.org

19. Incidents Around The House by Josh Malerman

Josh Malerman wrote Bird Box, the horror novel that became the Sandra Bullock blockbuster . Now he’s delivering a new creepfest with Incidents Around The House. I am not interested. I do not like being scared. It features your everyday family: Mommy, Daddo, Grandma Ruth, eight year old Bella…Other Mama, the presence only Bella can see and hear, the creature that asks Bella one question every single day: “Can I go inside your heart?” See? I’m already scared.

Incidents Around The House by Josh Malerman ($28; Del Rey) Buy now on Amazon , Barnes & Noble , Bookshop.org

20. The First Week of School by Drew Beckmeyer
21. Owls in Our Yard! by Carl Safina
22. Tell Me A Mitzi by Lore Segal; pictures by Harriet Pincus

Three winning picture books. The First Week of School features an awesome crayon-inspired look (the book title is also cleverly done), along with pages jam-packed with dialogue and incident. It’s one of the best of year.

Kids who enjoy nature will go crazy for Owls In Our Yard!, the true story of owls that nest and raise baby owls in writer Carl Safina’s backyard. It features numerous photographs of absolutely adorable owls so be prepared to explain why, no, you are not ready to raise owls in your home.

The New York Review Books imprint NYRB has an impeccable track record bringing forgotten classics back into the light. Their NYRB Kids imprint does the same, this time with a delightful picture book about a resourceful urban kid named Mitzi. She makes every day an adventure, whether the day is ready or not.

The First Week of School by Drew Beckmeyer ($18.99; Atheneum Books for Young Readers) Buy now from Amazon , Barnes & Noble , Bookshop.org

Owls in Our Yard! by Carl Safina ($18.99; Norton Young Readers) Buy now from Amazon , Barnes & Noble , Bookshop.org

Tell Me A Mitzi by Lore Segal; pictures by Harriet Pincus ($18.95; NYRB Kids) Buy now from Amazon , Barnes & Noble , Bookshop.org

23. A Gentleman and a Thief by Dean Jobb
24. The Case of Lizzie Borden and Other Writings by Elizabeth Garver Jordan

This week filled with great mysteries and thrillers ends with two true crime books. A Gentleman and a Thief is a new work about Arthur Barry, the man Life magazine once called “the greatest jewel thief who ever lived.” It’s a Roaring Twenties treat of a tale filled with derring do (he robbed seemingly every rich person in NYC) and high drama. Barry only copped a deal to protect his wife. And when he was in prison and she fell ill, Barry engineered a daring escape so they could go on the lam and spend her final days together. If George Clooney hasn’t optioned this yarn, we don’t know nothing.

And if you’re a fan of true crime, you should know the work of pioneering journalist Elizabeth Garver Jordan. She was one of the few women to cover the Lizzie Borden and other murder trials…and did so with an innovative, narrative style that captivated the country. She championed women’s rights, denounced sexual violence, turned out detective tales and novels and if Emma Stone hasn’t optioned her story, well then Hollywood knows nothing.

A Gentleman and a Thief by Dean Jobb ($32.50; Algonquin Books) Buy now from Amazon , Barnes & Noble , Bookshop.org

The Case of Lizzie Borden and Other Writings by Elizabeth Garver Jordan ($22; Penguin Classics) Buy now from Amazon , Barnes & Noble , Bookshop.org

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