The Month’s Best New Crime Novels

By Deanna Raybourn

In Raybourn’s “Killers of a Certain Age” (2022), four female assassins on a celebratory retirement cruise discovered their lives were in danger. It was a fresh and fun adventure with a steel-toed kick. Now the quartet returns in the equally delightful KILLS WELL WITH OTHERS (Berkley, 356 pp., $29).

Billie, Mary Alice, Natalie and Helen have been reunited because “the Museum,” the off-the-books government agency that once employed them, has summoned them to a meeting in Virginia. It turns out that they’re on a kill list that’s somehow connected to their very first mission, in 1979. “We posed as stewardesses on a private plane in order to take out Boris Lazarov, a Bulgarian assassin. He had a flair for torture, if I remember,” Mary Alice says. Once again, the women have to save their own lives, and prevent more murders.

They globe-trot, tussle, scuffle and, yes, kill when they have to. “I realized that there are some jobs you leave, but they never leave you,” muses Billie, once again the arch, world-weary narrator. “I was playing at being retired because the truth was, I would be a killer until the day I died.”

By Danielle Arceneaux

Arceneaux also focuses her attention on women of a certain age, specifically Glory Broussard of Lafayette, La., who takes a second bow in GLORY DAZE (Pegasus Crime, 295 pp., $27.95).

Glory is still recovering from her unwitting turn as an amateur detective in the unforgettable “Glory Be,” when she helped solve the murder of a friend. “It was attention that she had relished at first, but now it made her itchy with discomfort.” She’s working her weekly Sunday bookie stint when an unusual visitor arrives with a plea for help: Her husband is missing. It turns out the husband in question is Glory’s ex, Sterling Broussard, who left her long ago for the woman now standing before her. Glory takes the case — she figures she owes it to the daughter she and Sterling share — but when she finds him, there’s an expensive chef’s knife embedded in his chest.

Glory can’t help herself — she starts to investigate his death. She knows she’s on the right track when she starts making people mad. “The last thing I need is a nosy church lady, running an illegal side hustle, who recently solved a murder, and was on every television station in the parish, on my premises,” a casino owner tells her. “Don’t you go shining a light on things that should stay in the dark.”

By Elle Cosimano

Readers can always use a good laugh in these ever-trying times, and Cosimano has delivered annually with her series featuring a romantic suspense writer with a knack for getting herself — and her friends and family — into criminal trouble. In FINLAY DONOVAN DIGS HER OWN GRAVE (Minotaur, 308 pp., $28), yet another murder case lands in her lap.

Human remains have been discovered in the backyard of her across-the-street neighbor, Mrs. Haggerty, a busybody who relishes keeping track of everyone around her, especially Finlay. With her house declared a crime scene, Mrs. Haggerty shows up to stay with Finlay, who’s not pleased: “Mrs. Haggerty might not have been guilty of murder, but I wasn’t sure I would be able to say the same for myself by the time the weekend was over.”

How Finlay and her bestie, Vero, will figure out the culprit while also keeping Finlay’s cop love interest Nick at bay is the central question in all of Cosimano’s books to date. But this one pushes further into emotionally vulnerable territory, tempering the humor with real personal growth that should only deepen with future series books.

By Sergio Olguín; translated by Miranda France

I’m late to Olguín’s series featuring the complicated, accomplished Argentine investigative journalist Verónica Rosenthal, but after tearing through THE BEST ENEMY (Bitter Lemon Press, 399 pp., paperback, $16.95), I know I’ll be reading the three earlier installments immediately.

Verónica’s newest assignment is far too close to home: One of her magazine’s former executives has been found murdered along with an ex-partner, and the cops want to paint their execution-style killings as a robbery gone wrong. Verónica and her colleagues suspect otherwise, thanks to an ongoing investigation that links high-ranking business types to years-old war crimes in Gaza, which in turn connect to Verónica’s increasingly fraught personal life with her boyfriend, Federico, and his law firm boss — her father, Aarón.

The pacing is a little looser than I would have liked, largely because Olguín is so interested in exploring the porous bonds of romantic relationships and the shifting meanings of fidelity and commitment. But those explorations pay off in surprising (and juicy) ways.