Murder Summer!

Here in the northern hemisphere, as temperatures get hotter and hotter, and vacations get (hopefully) more and more imminent, don’t we all just want to relax with a cold beverage and a book in which people die at the hand of another? It can’t just be me. Luckily, publishers know we want this, and there is a delightful lineup of murder books this season, to help us while away the hot days of summer.

If you’re in the mood for a politically progressive teen slasher, go for Body Count, by Codie Crowley. If you want a self-referential portal fantasy (with murders), Sarah Rees Brennan’s All Hail Chaos is perfect for you. And if your summer calls for a combo classic mystery and romance that takes place in the golden era of British mystery novels, The Cloak and Dagger Club by Jackie McMahon will satisfy that craving.

All of these books are genre-savvy, commenting enjoyably on the tropes and potential pitfalls of their respective genres, which is exactly my jam.

Body Count came out from Disney Hyperion on May 5th. Don’t let the Disney publisher lead you astray. There are no princesses with animal sidekicks here. I loved Codie Crowley’s first book, Here Lies a Vengeful Bitch, so I was extremely excited for Body Count. In Body Count, Sundae is a cheerleader prom queen on the Jersey Shore for Prom Weekend, when a supernatural entity starts targeting her and everyone around her. A classic set up for a teen slasher story, but this one upends several genre expectations.

Sundae has a history in this town, and she has told all her friends about it. They support her. She isn’t a lonely “not like other girls.” The “nice guy” who is interested in her isn’t very nice. Sundae is bi and much more interested in a girl in a band she’s never met before. Also, there’s no way that sexual purity can be a requirement for any final girl nonsense, as Sundae and all her friends are enthusiastically and good-naturedly competing for the “Slut Cup:” to be won by whichever one of them finishes the weekend with the highest body count.

In fact, Body Count pairs great with another murder book coming out soon, Fabulous Bodies by Chuck Tingle! If you love Body Count, go ahead and preorder Fabulous Bodies, which comes out July 7th, because I bet you’ll love that, too.

On May 12, All Hail Chaos, Sarah Rees Brennan’s hotly anticipated sequel to Long Live Evil came out from Orbit. The middle book in a trilogy, it does everything you want a middle installment to do. In Long Live Evil, Rae, dying of cancer in our world, was given the opportunity to isekai herself into her favorite book series, The Time of Iron, in which she would have a chance to magically heal herself in the real world.

Hurled into the healthy and buxom body of a villainess who dies early in the series, Rae manipulates events to survive, and starts realizing that outsiders who enter this world can change the narrative. Long Live Evil is full of the kind of literary and pop culture allusions, zany musical performance, and genre analysis and examination of the love of stories that Sarah Rees Brennan is known for from her earlier books like In Other Lands. 

To prepare for All Hail Chaos, I revisited Long Live Evil via audiobook, which was really enjoyable both because Moira Quirk is one of my favorite audiobook readers (up there with Adjua Andoh and Jeff Hays), and because there is a twist at the end of the first book that really rewards rereading. I definitely recommend reading the first one before the second, but it turns out All Hail Chaos, which picks up right when Long Live Evil left off, has a lot of reminders in case it has been a while since you have read Long Live Evil.

In All Hail Chaos, the plot thickens. The Emperor is on the throne, the undead have risen, and war looms. As my headline implies, not everyone survives. There are new characters and new sides to existing characters. Further,  we get excerpts from different versions of the Time of Iron series as it exists in our world in different editions as different people from our world have portaled in and changed things up. Being fictional is no guarantee of a happy ending, and All Hail Chaos ends on just as much of a cliffhanger as Long Live Evil did. The third and final book in the series, Kill Your Darlings, is scheduled to come out in July of 2027, so we can start anticipating.

And once your appetite for self-referential supernatural murder is temporarily sated, it will be time to sit back and sip a cocktail as you read The Cloak and Dagger Club by Jackie McMahon, which comes out from Berkley on July 14th. Just maybe not an amaretto sour, because anything with amaretto reminds me too much of cyanide from the almond smell when I am reading a golden age mystery.

Inspired by a real club for murder mystery authors in 1930s England, in The Cloak and Dagger Club, an ingenue author reunites with her ex when she is invited to join a prestigious writing group. The day she attends for the very first time one of the members is murdered and she is plunged into the investigation.

In tone, I would characterize The Cloak and Dagger Club as a romance novel in which there is a murder investigation rather than a detective novel with a side of romance. The solution to each mystery that gets cleared up along the way and the solution to the murder itself are in service of the romance beats as the main character and her ex reconnect.  However, the solution to the murder mystery is also satisfying, and I did not see it coming!  I felt that McMahon did a good job of introducing us to the world of her novel without resorting to characters explaining 1930s fashion and technology out loud to each other. This is one I will recommend to my classic mysteries book club, and I look forward to other people reading it so we can chat about it.