Fill the Void: What to Read While You Wait For The Next True Detective

From the acclaimed author of Sirens, damaged Detective Aidan Waits returns in a mind-bending new thriller that will have everyone asking “Who is the Smiling Man?”

When two eighteen-year-old girls go missing in Thailand, their families are thrust into the international spotlight: desperate, bereft, and frantic with worry. What were the girls up to before they disappeared?

As addictive, cinematic, and binge-worthy a narrative as The Wire and The Killing, Two Girls Down introduces Louisa Luna as a thriller writer of immense talent and verve.

In 1986, Eddie and his friends are just kids on the verge of adolescence. They spend their days biking around their sleepy English village and looking for any taste of excitement they can get. The chalk men are their secret code: little chalk stick figures they leave for one another as messages only they can understand. But then a mysterious chalk man leads them right to a dismembered body, and nothing is ever the same.

What makes a crime novel addictive? The Anti-Hero. Olav is an extremely talented “fixer” for one of Oslo’s biggest crime bosses whose capacity for love is as far-reaching as his gift for murder.

Whether dealing with deceit, spies, or self-reflection, military officer Georges Picquart is caught up in the gripping world of 1890’s Paris. The New York Daily News describes this novel as a “a thrilling page-turner…Thick with espionage, daring and cruel turns of fate.” Hook, line, read.

True Detective is all about the complicated narrative. Private Investigator, Michael Kelly, is known as the poetry-reading gunslinger. Perfect. He’s offered a quarter of a million dollars to find a missing person, the governor of Illinois, and finds himself instead risking his own life.

Crime? Check. Drugs? Check. The Deep South? Check. It’s brother against brother in this gritty multigenerational saga about a family of outlaws running a drug ring in northern Georgia.

Private eye, Doc Sportello’s ex-girlfriend shows up unexpectedly with a plot to kidnap a billionaire land developer. Between the marijuana-driven prose and crime noir storyline, this novel is a psychedelic version of True Detective.

Quinn Colson is on a revenge mission to bring down the county kingpin that that got him voted out of his office as sheriff of Tibbehah County, Mississippi. He gets wrapped up in a new investigation along the way- one that brings old secrets to light… secrets that could either save Colson or destroy him once and for all.

Gutsy, relentless, wisecracking Boston P.I. Fina Ludlow is back- investigating Liz Barone, a former college soccer star who was attacked in her kitchen. The twist? Barone was in the process of a huge lawsuit that could be a legal gold mine. Was she attacked to stop her lawsuit, or are there other secrets in the financially lucrative and emotionally-charged world of collegiate sports?

In this high-octane thriller, Special Agent Lacey Sherlock foils a terrorist attack at JFK airport, but that turns out to be only the beginning. Another plot unfolds nearly simultaneously with a bomb at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. It’s a race against the clock to find out who’s really behind the terrorist attacks, as more lives are in danger with every passing minute.

Chicago’s V. I. Warshawski confronts crooked politicians and buried family secrets during an investigation that puts her in close contact with her old high school flame, but will asking too many questions in the viper’s nest of Illinois politics be her demise?

In the first pages of W is for Wasted, Grafton’s infamous PI Kinsey Millhone says ominously, “Two dead men changed the course of my life that fall. One of them I knew and the other I’d never laid eyes on until I saw him in the morgue.” Alright, we have to know what happens next!