A look at the best reviewed crime fiction from September.

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Jessica Knoll, Bright Young Women
(S&S/Marysue Rucci Books)

“Brilliant, blistering … Writing with pulse-pounding tension and urgency, Knoll expertly conjures an atmosphere of dread and anxiety while paying tribute to all the bright young women whose lives are cut short or forever changed by the craven actions of sociopaths. An utterly absorbing, disturbing, and absolutely essential read.”

–Kristine Huntley (Booklist)

Richard Osman, The Last Devil to Die
(Viking/Pamela Dorman Books)

“Overall, the real strength of these books is that they are genuinely funny. It is a truism that people who aren’t funny think that writing funny books is easy. To wear it as lightly as Osman does is a gift; these books read like champagne … Not all fantasies will or should come true, but Osman’s is so terribly beguiling.”

–Jenny Colgan (Air Mail)

James Ellroy, The Enchanters
(Knopf)

“Marilyn Monroe’s death has achieved myth status, and Ellroy’s take on it is at once a superb crime novel about the city he’s always written about, a love letter to a very different time, and a narrative that ensures the Freddy Otash novels will be mentioned along the novels in The L.A. Quartet and the Underworld U.S.A. Trilogy as some of Ellroy’s best work.”

–Gabino Iglesias (NPR)

Mick Herron, The Secret Hours
(Soho)

“The Secret Hours delights in complicated plotting that occasionally makes you despair whether you’re understanding as much as you should be. Don’t worry. You are … There’s wit and suspense on almost every page of The Secret Hours, where the good guys are bad, the bad guys are worse and the reader is in luck.”

–Chris Hewitt (The Minneapolis Star-Tribune)

Stephen King, Holly
(Scribner)

“What makes King’s work so much more frightening than that of most other suspense writers, what elevates it to night-terror levels, isn’t his cruelty to his characters: It’s his kindness. King describes his characters’ interior landscapes, their worries and plans, with a focus like a giant benevolent beam. You can sense the goodness running through them, and that current of goodness is what makes the acts of violence so disturbing.”

–Flynn Berry (The New York Times Book Review)