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Kerri Miller is here just in time for the official start of the summer with a bunch of “take it to the lake” crime novels & thrillers that you can find in your local library. 

Hardbacks abound at the start of summer — shiny new books just out of the oven that will cost you a chunk of change at your local indie bookstore or on Amazon.

I’ll have three must-read, just-published thrillers and crime novels next week for you, but I’m starting the summer with some of my favorites that should be available either in paperback or as an e-book at your local library.

I’m a new fan of Wallace Stroby. He’s a fellow journalist who was the editor of the Newark Star Ledger — Tony Soprano’s hometown paper — and Stroby’s crime novels are replete with small-town Jersey wise guys with big guns and get-rich-quick ambitions. He’s published nine novels, four of them featuring accomplished thief and bad girl Crissa Stone. Start with 

Louise Candlish made quite a splash when she published her debut novel, 

 in 2019. It was short-listed for best British crime and thriller novel of the year and I love the way the novel opens: Fi Lawson arrives home from a day at work to discover new people have moved into her house and all of her possessions are gone. The novel dives into themes of gentrification, suburban shenanigans and those annoying neighbors you know that are way too house proud.

My last not-so-new but must-read thriller is 

 from Rachel Howzell Hall.  Updating the Agatha Christie novel, “And Then There Were None,” Howzell Hall brings seven strangers to a verdant island off the coast of Mexico and let’s the sex, drugs and dram roll from there.

It’s a great lakeside read that you can finish in a weekend.

My three not-so-new but must-read crime and  thriller novels are: “They All Fall Down” by Rachel Howzell Hall; Wallace Stroby’s “A Cold Shot to the Heart,” and Louise Candlish’s “Our House.”

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Kerri Miller is here just in time for the official start of the summer with a bunch of “take it to the lake” crime novels & thrillers that you can find in your local library.

Three book covers in a combined photograph.

A few 'take to the lake' crime novels

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