Keep your eyes peeled for these 10 summer mystery reads

In an attempt to solidify England’s colonial rule, Prince Edward VIII visits Bombay in 1921. During a parade, a student, Freny Cuttingmaster, the daughter of a tailor, is murdered. Massey’s indomitable main character, lawyer Perveen Mistry, investigates. In strict Parsis culture where a family’s reputation is everything and a daughter’s perceived flaws can destroy that standing, Cuttingmaster’s death becomes embroiled in Bombay’s increasingly violent independence movement. The prince’s visit has also returned someone to Mistry’s life that she’d decided never to see again. Mistry charges into both matters with her usual pointed but restrained anger toward India’s patriarchy and colonial rule. Massey’s lush descriptions and rich historical details are transporting.

Soho Crime, $27.95

In Percy’s immersive and imaginative sci-fi thriller, Minnesota is the epicenter of a phenomenon that’s created a “geopolitical crisis” for the world and “existential quandary” for humanity. Northfall, Percy’s fictional town in the Manitou Range, is “making bank” from omnimetal. It’s an alien matter, a powerful energy source like nothing in the known universe, but it’s infected more than the land. Mother Gunderson once was a cashier at Farm and Fleet. Now, she’s a “drug lord or a pope or an amulet” sitting on incalculable wealth. Percy’s novel is a clever amalgamation of speculative fiction and family drama, of supercharged characters and regular folk, encompassing various viewpoints in a highly cinematic narrative.

HMH, $25

Eric Walker doesn’t want to relive the day in 1994 when he walked “deep into the woods” in Oklahoma wielding a knife. Yet the memory comes in “white flashes of fear.” He hears Sam, his stepsister, sobbing, sees the “gushing blood.” Many of their wounds have healed, but scars remain. Until 2009, when the police find Sam’s stepfather’s white Chevy pickup submerged in a pond. Eric and Sam’s shared secrets and their dark childhoods are slowly laid bare. Eric “fit the narrative of the troubled son” and Sam wants to save him. “Walking Through Needles” is an astonishing debut that openly explores sexual violence and its legacies on a woman’s body and her mind. Levy’s novel is a gripping, disturbing read, and, perhaps for some, triggering, but I couldn’t turn away.

Polis Books, $26 (June 29)

“One way or another,” World War II British spy extraordinaire Maggie Hope is going to discover who murdered Gloria Hutton, the ex-wife of one of Los Angeles’ wealthiest men and the fiancée of Maggie’s beloved John Sterling. It’s July 1943 and Maggie is in Hollywood, staying at the Château Marmont with her friend Sarah, who’s choreographing a movie with George Balanchine. Suspended between fantasy and reality, Los Angeles is “an idea, not a real city.” And that’s what I loved most about this stellar novel. Elia MacNeal expertly braids the glitz and glamour of Hollywood with the chilling reality of the rise of American Nazis and the blatant racism against Blacks, Japanese, Germans and Italians. Maggie notes that “it’s the same war, different country,” and, sadly, one we’re still fighting.

Bantam, $27 (July 6)

This heartbreaking, hard-punching stunner of a novel is about grief and loss wrapped in some serious “Rolling Thunder John Wick” action. Cosby has created two unforgettable characters, Ike Randolph and Buddy Lee Jenkins, one Black, one white, both fathers of gay sons married to each other. Their sons have been “shot multiple times in front of a fancy wine store.” Ike regrets he never “walked across the goddamn glacier” that was his relationship with his son “instead of waiting for it to melt.” Buddy Lee believes his son was ashamed of him because he could sound like “a cracker in an old hillbilly movie.” The two fathers come together to seek revenge for their sons. Maybe redemption for themselves, too. Either way, they’re going to make things right.

Flatiron, $26.99 (July 6)

Every day, a group of commuters booze at the bar on a Thames ferry as they shuttle back and forth to their jobs in London. This self-indulgent and narcissistic group is connected by their “freedom to put (themselves) before everyone else.” Couples Jamie and Clare, and Kit and Melia appear to have it all; beneath the surface, though, things are murky. In a terrifically fiendish way, Candlish gives voice to Jamie, who narrates the story before and after the day Kit goes missing. After six days, “the stress has become corrosive” and Jamie is surrounded with suspicion. As everyone’s motives get murkier, the tide takes a shockingly believable turn (two or three, in fact). Candlish’s story is a stiletto take on desire and ambition and the power of possession.

Atria, $17 (July 20)

More than once, I winced at something the seemingly guileless main character, Ted Crutcher, spouts in Downing’s sly, smart thriller. Crutcher is Teacher of the Year at a private high school in the Northeast, one built on entitlement and wealth (Crutcher has little of either), where parents are not helicopters, but diabolical drones. Crutcher feels obligated, even driven, to “fiddle” with his students’ lives, to cajole, crusade, even murder on their unsuspecting behalf. Everything Crutcher does is for his students’ good. He’s a Dickens-loving Dexter, a psychopath with literary tendencies. When the consequences of one of his “fiddles” spirals out of control, Crutcher is caught in a battle of wits with three students out to uncover his demented machinations with a few of their own.

Berkley, $27 (July 20)

Hirahara’s beautifully written and deeply moving mystery set in 1943 is about the lives of two sisters, Rose and Aki Ito (Nisei, first generation Japanese born in America) after their release from Manzanar, a concentration camp in California. Rose is relocated first and heads to Chicago. If Rose “insisted on something, the whole family went along with it.” They follow Rose to Chicago. But on the day they arrive, they learn Rose was run over at the corner of Clark and Division. Aki doesn’t want to be “that tragic girl,” the “surviving sister.” With Rose’s diary in hand and a deep commitment to her sister’s memory in her heart, Aki investigates. Hirahara’s novel is an accomplished and important story about a time in American history that I felt privileged bearing witness to.

Soho Crime, $27.95 (Aug. 3)

Like Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Mrs. March is planning a party (her first name isn’t revealed until the book’s last line). Mrs. March is the wife of a famous novelist. They live in an expensive brownstone in New York. Like Mrs. Dalloway, Mrs. March’s perception of herself is thrown into dangerous relief when a shopkeeper suggests the main character in her husband’s latest novel is based on her. In that barbed moment, paranoia seizes her, her identity dissolves. She wonders if she “was ever there at all.” Feito’s fiendish narrator presents Mrs. March to readers like a specimen under glass. The narrator zooms in and out of Mrs. March’s thoughts with sometimes scathing, sometimes sympathetic precision as her psyche unravels. I delighted in every moment of this stellar debut.

Liveright, $26 (Aug. 10)

Cork O’Connor’s father, Liam, was “a good man in a hard job.” The latest novel in Krueger’s accomplished series set in the North Woods of Minnesota returns to 1963 and an investigation when Cork was 12 and his father was sheriff of Tamarack County. The reminiscing is the older Cork’s attempt “to unravel the mystery that had been his father.” The case involves Big John, a “handsome and sad and solitary” man whom the young Cork discovers hanging from “the burned remains of a large log construction” that was once a sacred site for the Ojibwe. It’s during this first time working with his father that Cork learns “a tremendous sense of responsibility for finding the truth.” This expertly crafted mystery has the North Woods, its people and their legacies at its tender heart.

Atria, $27 (Aug. 24)