Mysteries to Read Before Summer Officially Ends

Summer is coming to a close, so set aside time for a few mystery indulgences before back-to-school and back-to-work. I'm betting on some proven favorites. One is a book I missed at the end of last year: Tana French's The Witch Elm. After happy-go-lucky Toby surprises two burglars who beat him and leave him for dead, he retreats to the family ancestral home to recover from his injuries and care for a dying uncle. But then a skull is found in the trunk of an elm tree, detectives arrive, and Toby's beliefs about the past are challenged. As a fan of Karin Slaughter, I want to read her latest The Last Widow, too: First a scientist for the Center for Disease Control is abducted and then bombs blast the Atlanta neighborhood of the FBI and CDC. Medical examiner Sara Linton and investigator Will Trent are unraveling a deadly conspiracy when Sara is abducted, and Will must go undercover to save her and thousands of innocent lives. Plus, I'm putting the reliable Jo Nesbo on my list with the latest installment in his Harry Hole series, Knife, which plunges Harry, even though relegated to cold cases, into new danger. A new author I'd like to try is Ruth Ware. Ware's Turn of the Key is about a young woman who takes a live-in nanny post with an ideal family at a luxurious home in the Scottish Highlands, only to find herself in a nightmare that ends with a child dead and herself on trial for murder. For a very different locale, the reviewer-lauded Into the Jungle by Erica Ferencik takes readers to Bolivia, where a heroine running from her past arrives to take a teaching gig that falls through. She ends up following her lover into the depths of the jungle--and a fight for survival. For a different kind of primal confrontation, there's Daniela Petrova's Her Daughter's Mother. Lana meets and befriends her daughter's anonymous egg donor Katya in New York City. When Katya suddenly disappears, Lana begins to dig obsessively into her past, drawing the suspicion of police and unearthing shocking secrets. Meanwhile, parallel stories twist in a deadly knot in the opioid-plagued rural Kansas town of Laura McHugh's The Wolf Wants In as Sadie Keller tries to find out how her brother died, 18-year-old Henley Pettit desperately seeks to escape her family's crimes, and the police keep finding bones in the woods. For more ideas, see https://crimereads.com/the-most-anticipated-crime-books-of-summer/