The Best Recent Mysteries for Your Book Club

This is the final book in a popular Japanese detective series, the nature of which means you don’t really need to have read the other books. Here, a Tokyo detective reaches out to detective Kyoichiro Kaga about two cases — one involving a woman mysteriously far from home using a fake name and the other a houseless man. Turns out there is a connection to the death of Kaga’s mother, who ran away from her family and died over a decade ago.

In this gothic locked room mystery, a group of friends who first met when they were teens meet up again as adults under a cloud of grief. Their friend Bea died nine years ago, and now that the group has gathered at Bea’s family’s estate to remember the good times, the story surrounding her death is questioned. And the truth will come out after they get snowed in, no matter what.

Here’s a murder mystery set in a place I don’t usually see with murder mysteries: Nigeria. Philip Taiwo starts working on a case based around a megachurch in Ogun State, where a bishop’s wife was murdered, and a young woman went missing. As Taiwo will soon learn, there are secrets that, if uncovered, will threaten the entire church.

The Queen of Irish detective fiction is back with another Cal Hooper entry, but as with a lot of other detective fiction, I don’t think you necessarily have to have read the first in the series to enjoy this one. Here, Cal retires from the Chicago PD early and moves to the Irish countryside to find quiet. He gets the peace he’s looking for and more — he, local woman Lena, and Lena’s troubled teen daughter Trey start to form what feels like a supportive family. But then Trey’s trifling biological father, Johnny, shows up with a scheme to get rich, and everything goes south. The delicate, newly formed connections of Cal’s family are threatened by a search for gold that turns into a search for a killer.