May serves up quite a few holidays, but it’s also dedicated to celebrating and highlighting Asian American and Pacific Islander heritage. I’ve pulled together a list of some of my favorite suspense thrillers penned by AAPI authors.
When Lila Macapagal moves back home to recover from a horrible breakup, her life seems to be following all the typical rom-com tropes. She's tasked with saving her Tita Rosie's failing restaurant and has to deal with a group of matchmaking aunties who shower her with love and judgment....
What happens when you mix one (accidental) murder with 2,000 wedding guests, and then toss in a possible curse on three generations of an immigrant Chinese-Indonesian family? You get four meddling Asian aunties coming to the rescue....
From USA Today best-selling author Gigi Pandian comes a modern tale of ancient intrigue.
Unpacking her belongings in her new hometown of Portland, Oregon, herbalist and reformed alchemist Zoe Faust can't help but notice she's picked up a stowaway. Dorian Robert-Houdin is a living, breathing three-and-half-foot gargoyle - not to mention a master of French cuisine - and he needs Zoe's expertise to decipher a centuries-old text. Zoe, who's trying to put her old life behind her, isn't so sure she wants to reopen her alchemical past... until the dead man on her porch leaves her no choice.
Includes recipes!
In the wake of the police shooting of a black teenager, Los Angeles is as tense as it’s been since the unrest of the early 1990s....
The Ninja Daughter is an action-packed thriller about a Chinese-Norwegian modern-day ninja with Joy Luck Club family issues who fights the Los Angeles Ukrainian mob, sex traffickers, and her own family to save two desperate women and an innocent child.
After her sister is raped and murdered, Lily Wong dedicates her life and ninja skills to the protection of women. But her mission is complicated. Not only does she live above the Chinese restaurant owned by her Norwegian father and inspired by the recipes of her Chinese mother, but she has to hide her true self from her Hong Kong tiger mom, who is already disappointed at her less-than-feminine ways, and who would be horrified if she knew what she had become.
But when a woman and her son she escorted safely to an abused women’s shelter return home to dangerous consequences, Lily is forced to not only confront her family and her past, but team up with a mysterious - and very lethal - stranger to rescue them.
Leilani Santiago is back in her birthplace, the Hawaiian island of Kaua’i, to help keep afloat the family business, a shave ice shack. When she goes to work one morning, she stumbles across a dead body, a young pro surfer who was being coached by her estranged father. As her father soon becomes the no. 1 murder suspect, Leilani must find the real killer and somehow safeguard her ill mother, little sisters, and grandmother while also preserving a long-distance relationship with her boyfriend in Seattle.
###Joe Ide
Although Joe Ide might not be as prolific as most authors on this list, what his canon lacks in quantity is more than made up for in quality. He's the author of the IQ series, which stars Isaiah Quintabe, a young private detective with Sherlock Holmes tendencies whom the people turn to when justice goes unserved in his LA neighborhood. He only charges what people can afford, which means that sometimes he has to take sketchier high-paying cases that get him into more than a few scrapes. This is an ongoing series with four audiobooks out so far, and each of the four has won an AudioFile Earphones Award for the narration by Sullivan Jones and Zeno Robinson. IQ, the first in the series, was also an Edgar Award finalist, and it has won the Anthony, Shamus, and Macavity Awards.
April 21. Twisty and unpredictable, this heart-pounding mystery will keep you guessing until the final showdown.
Listen if you liked Descent.
The acclaimed debut novel by the author of Little Fires Everywhere and Our Missing Hearts
“A taut tale of ever deepening and quickening suspense.” —O, the Oprah Magazine
“Explosive . . . Both a propulsive mystery and a profound examination of a mixed-race family.” —Entertainment Weekly
“Lydia is dead. But they don’t know this yet.” So begins this exquisite novel about a Chinese American family living in 1970s small-town Ohio. Lydia is the favorite child of Marilyn and James Lee, and her parents are determined that she will fulfill the dreams they were unable to pursue. But when Lydia’s body is found in the local lake, the delicate balancing act that has been keeping the Lee family together is destroyed, tumbling them into chaos. A profoundly moving story of family, secrets, and longing, Everything I Never Told You is both a gripping story and a sensitive family portrait, uncovering the ways in which mothers and daughters, fathers and sons, and husbands and wives struggle, all their lives, to understand one another.
From the critically acclaimed author of The Book of M, a highly imaginative thriller about a young woman who discovers that a strange map in her deceased father’s belongings holds an incredible, deadly secret - one that will lead her on an extraordinary adventure and to the truth about her family’s dark history.
What is the purpose of a map?
Nell Young’s whole life and greatest passion is cartography. Her father, Dr. Daniel Young, is a legend in the field, and Nell’s personal hero. But she hasn't seen or spoken to him ever since he cruelly fired her and destroyed her reputation after an argument over an old, cheap gas station highway map.
But when Dr. Young is found dead in his office at the New York Public Library, with the very same seemingly worthless map hidden in his desk, Nell can’t resist investigating. To her surprise, she soon discovers that the map is incredibly valuable, and also exceedingly rare. In fact, she may now have the only copy left in existence...because a mysterious collector has been hunting down and destroying every last one - along with anyone who gets in the way.
But why?
To answer that question, Nell embarks on a dangerous journey to reveal a dark family secret, and discover the true power that lies in maps....
Perfect for fans of Joe Hill and V.E. Schwab, The Cartographers is an ode to art and science, history and magic - a spectacularly imaginative, modern story about an ancient craft and places still undiscovered.
Supplemental enhancement PDF accompanies the audiobook.
PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.