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Crime & Mystery

The Best Crime Novels of 2022

Our columnist, who’s read dozens of books this year, selects her favorites.

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By Sarah Weinman

Let’s start with a phrase I loathe, one I promise will never appear in this column again: “transcending the genre,” which is so often applied to crime novels. The implication is that crime fiction, as a category, is begging for reinvention and reinterpretation, for quality prose where it did not exist before, for some author to come along and save it from its worst instincts.

Nonsense. The genre does not need saving. Smart, sharp and endlessly inventive, it’s salvation for readers in need of entertainment and escape.

Reading widely, always my goal, introduced me to a marvelous array of mysteries this year. Here are the ones that stood out.

Best Debuts

When I reviewed Eli Cranor’s DON’T KNOW TOUGH back in March, I called it “one of the best debuts of 2022,” and my opinion hasn’t changed. The raw ferocity of Cranor’s prose is perfectly in keeping with the novel’s examination of a high school football team, their tormented coach and the town that demands constant winning no matter the cost. “Don’t Know Tough” is unmistakably noir in the rural Southern tradition: grim and gritty, a cauldron of terrible choices and even more terrible outcomes. I cannot imagine how Cranor will top it.

A number of heist and con artist novels published this year grappled with larger socioeconomic and racial injustice. The best and most entertaining of these was Grace D. Li’s debut, PORTRAIT OF A THIEF, which juxtaposes thrilling international antiquities heists against a layered examination of what it is to be displaced, overlooked and underestimated.

Best Standalones

REAL EASY, by Marie Rutkoski, is a thoughtful, character-driven mystery revolving around a strip club and the women who dance there. It never once dips into stereotype. “It makes her impatient, the way people think that a stripper must be some cracked-out whore, like no good woman ever took off her clothes for practical reasons,” one dancer thinks. With multiple perspective shifts among detectives, dancers, family members and club patrons, it’s a challenging narrative, but one that masterfully inverts standard crime tropes.

Absence and loss permeate Tyrell Johnson’s THE LOST KINGS in a way that surprised and moved me multiple times over the course of the novel. The anguish Jeannie King feels at the abrupt disappearance of her father and twin brother informs every aspect of her life — which is why the prospect of discovering the truth threatens to shatter her very being. I loved how the twists felt psychologically true, a reflection of the way buried trauma always resurfaces, inflicting damage and then lancing the wounds.

It’s been so long since Chuck Hogan wrote a stand-alone novel that when GANGLAND came out, I set aside whatever I was doing and started reading, and I didn’t stop till I was done. This 1970s-set novel, which is now my favorite of Hogan’s, revolves around Chicago mobsters like Tony Accardo and Sam Giancana (whose murder remains unsolved). It’s a masterly portrait of allegiances forged and broken.

Two novels into her career, Wanda M. Morris has established herself among the biggest risk-takers in the crime genre. ANYWHERE YOU RUN casts the reader into 1964 Mississippi, when the civil rights movement was in full swing. Marigold and Violet Richards are sisters at first stuck in their assigned roles of Good Girl and Bad Girl, but then they each make a series of choices that test their mettle and land them in more danger than they ever dreamed possible.

Best in a Series

I was mightily impressed with Robyn Gigl’s debut, “ By Way of Sorrow, ” which introduced the defense lawyer Erin McCabe, but Gigl’s second outing, SURVIVOR’S GUILT , is even better. A groundbreaking series — Erin is trans, one of precious few in crime fiction — now stands to become a definitive one. Gigl is especially gifted at writing razor-sharp, compulsively readable courtroom scenes, something that sinks many legal thriller authors.

Nothing pleased me more than the arrival of a new Vera Kelly mystery by Rosalie Knecht. Alas, there will be no more, but VERA KELLY LOST AND FOUND concludes the trilogy at the highest possible level. It opens in 1971, two years past Stonewall. When her girlfriend Max disappears, Vera puts her private detective skills to work, unearthing all manner of secrets and tragedy. I’m still haunted by one line: “We had gotten in the habit of mystery, and now we didn’t know how to drop it.

I’ve been waxing rhapsodic about Stephen Spotswood’s Pentecost and Parker mysteries for a few years now; they push all of my reading pleasure buttons. SECRETS TYPED IN BLOOD, the third book in this 1940s-set private eye series, is even smarter, spikier and more surprising than the first two.

Best Overall

I read Danya Kukafka’s NOTES ON AN EXECUTION not long before it came out in January. Even then, I knew it would rank among my favorites, but it’s my pick for the year’s best mystery because, simply put, I think about it every single day. In bringing the voices of the women orbiting a murderer to the forefront, Kukafka flips the script on serial killer thrillers — a script in dire need of permanent rethinking.

One More: Best in Genre Nonfiction

Crime fiction is blessed to have Martin Edwards. He’s a novelist; he edits anthologies; and he oversees the British Library line of reissued crime classics. There are few others who could be persuaded to write a cradle-to-grave (so to speak) compendium of the genre that would pay homage to and supersede Julian Symons’s essential “Bloody Murder” (1972), but Edwards has indeed done this with THE LIFE OF CRIME. It should be part of every discerning mystery reader’s library.

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Blog – Posted on Monday, Apr 06

The 30 best mystery books of all time.

When you flip open a mystery novel, what do you expect? Probably a thrilling tale that keeps you wondering who the culprit was. The best mystery books are those with ingenious sprinklings of clues along the way that brings out the inner detective in you. Arguably, the best feeling when reading a crime novel is being faced with a sufficiently difficult puzzle and yet still being able to jump up and shout “I knew it!” when the final reveal comes around. 

A good murder case will always rank high on a list of mystery novels, but other stories also have their merits. From true crime books to espionage odysseys (of course, including whodunnit riddles) here are the 30 best mystery books that you cannot miss out on if you’re looking for twisted stories to keep you on the edge of your seat.

If you're feeling overwhelmed by the number of great mystery books to read, you can also take our 30-second quiz below to narrow it down quickly and get a personalized mystery book recommendation 😉

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1. And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie

It’s impossible to talk about mystery novels without immediately thinking of the legendary Agatha Christie. Amongst all of her works , none has a story quite as impeccably crafted as And Then There Were None , which explains why it is the best selling mystery book of all time. 

The story follows ten people who are brought together, for various reasons, to an empty mansion on an island. The mysterious hosts of this strange party are not present, but left instructions for two of the ten to tend the house as the housekeeper and cook. As the days unfold in accordance with the lyrics of a nursery rhyme, each invitee is forced to face the music (literally) and bear the consequences of their troubling pasts, as death will come for them one by one. 

2. The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler

Raymond Chandler’s idea of mystery strays from conventions — for him it’s less about the intricate plot and more about the atmosphere and characters. As such, The Big Sleep is no ordinary story: private eye Philip Marlowe gets hired to investigate the blackmailing of Carmen Sternwood, the second daughter of a wealthy general. The further he digs into this messy business, the more complicated the story gets, as Carmen continues to be blackmailed by others in a web of unexpected relations between the characters. 

Chandler’s work is complex: his characters are multi-faceted and his language rich with premonitions of the tragedy about to fall on this family. While the signs he drops are not exactly there to help you find out “who done it”, it will definitely give you a foreboding awareness that makes it hard to put the book down. 

3. Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

Perhaps better known by its major motion picture adaptation, Gone Girl is the ultimate mystery puzzle for the modern media age. Devoted wife Amy’s sudden disappearance throws Nick Dunne into a hailstorm of suspicion — from her parents to his neighbours to the investigators, everyone leans towards believing that he is somehow responsible. Nick himself becomes aware of how his wife viewed him, as well as how little he knows of her, when stories of her emerge from friends he’s never heard of. 

Even if you’ve failed to keep the media buzz regarding the movie adaptation from spoiling you, the experience of reading the minds of these unreliable narrators is well-worth picking this one up. 

4. The Postman Always Rings Twice by James M. Cain

The Postman Always Rings Twice is often lauded the most important crime book of the 20th century, and it's not hard to see why. Short, racy, and full of surprises, it will leave you no time to catch your breath. In fact, the language used by Cain was so unprecedentedly explicit, the book was banned in Boston for a while. 

The story follows Frank Chambers and his roadside encounter with diner owner Cora Papadakis. Frank ends up working for Cora and her husband and then falling in love with her, despite her marriage. Frank’s spontaneity gets the better of him when he and Cora decide to sinisterly plot for the breakup of her marriage. Once the plan succeeds, they can stay happily ever after in each other’s arms… or so they think. 

5. In Cold Blood by Truman Capote

As it’s based on a real-life case that has already been solved, you might think all the mystery is taken out of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood . Fortunately, that couldn’t be more wrong, because this nonfiction novel is one of the best-selling crime stories of all time. 

Capote had closely followed the investigation of a quadruple murder in Kansas, and was doing a bit of inerviewing himself before the murderers were caught. As a result, his book is filled with twists and turns you would not expect — surely such vile behaviors must be works of fiction?

6. Woman in White by Wilkie Collins

This Wilkie Collins’s late Victorian novel is among the earliest psychological thrillers ever written. It follows what first appears to be a simple story of two star-crossed lovers — Walter Hartright and Laura Fairlie — who weren’t meant to be together. Laura was betrothed to Sir Percival Glyde and yet she was mysteriously warned not to proceed with the marriage. Meanwhile, the city is gripped by the story of a strange woman clad in white who’s roaming its dark street.

As the title suggests, this final character is the key to the mystery that will enshroud these characters. Set in dimly-lit streets, The Woman in White is as much Gothic horror as it is mystery book, and that’s precisely why the clarity you get when the riddle is solved is so incredibly satisfying. 

7. Anatomy of a Murder by Robert Traver

Before there was How To Get Away With Murder and Suits , lawyer-related entertainment came in the form of criminal cases. Anatomy of a Murder , written by a Supreme Court Justice under the pseudonym Robert Traver, is such a classic. It follows lawyer Paul Biegler and his defense of Frederick Manion, who’s accused of murdering an innkeeper. While the case is overwhelmingly against Manion, his unreliable behavior leaves room for challenges against conviction, and that’s where Biegler and his seemingly laid-back attitude comes in. This thrilling courtroom drama will keep you on the edge of your seat, wondering how this lawyer can argue such an impossible case. 

8. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by John le Carré

Packed with interesting codenames and stressful covert actions, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is about an ex-spy, George Smiley (codename Beggarman), who is pulled out of retirement, to his relief, to weed out a Soviet mole in the British Intelligence Service. You’ve probably never seen the motto “Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer” in better action than this, as Smiley attempts to distinguish the double-agent amidst old partners. There are plenty of clever hints and details about these cryptically named characters that you can pick up on, thus joining Smiley on the race to safeguard his country. 

From deceit to elaborate tricks, le Carré’s espionage masterpiece will not only keep you on your toes because of the constant suspicion, it will also shed some light on the incredible social tension that existed in the 1970s at the height of the Cold War.

9. The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown

Dan Brown knows how to write up a riddle — just read The Da Vinci Code and you’ll see. In this volume, Professor Robert Langdon is brought to Paris on a whirl to shed some light on a bizarre murder in the Louvre. As he and sidekick cryptologist Neveu tries to decode the artistic riddles left at the scene, all of which are related to the works of Leonardo da Vinci, Dan Brown takes readers scrambling through the City of Love, speechless (because of the shrewd puzzles and not Paris’ beauty, of course). 

You can imagine Dan Brown spending hours meandering between paintings and statues in Paris before coming up with this elaborate quest that Langdon embarks on. The story thus produced is shockingly satisfying to read, and it will no doubt leave you wanting to travel to France’s capital just to retrace Langdon’s steps. 

10. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson

It appears a mark of a good mystery book is that it has been made into a movie. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is no exception. The first book of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium series introduces us to journalist Mikael Blomkvist and freelance hacker Lisbeth Salander. Following two separate strings of events, the characters eventually find themselves both trying to find the person who, forty years ago, supposedly killed Harriet Vanger — niece of one of the wealthiest men in Sweden. Blomkvist is invited to stay over at the wealthy family’s island, where he comes into contact with other family members who were present at the scene years ago, and begins to wonder if any of them were involved. 

As Blomkvist decodes the copious amount of decades-old notes and newspaper clippings, he slowly fills in the missing pieces of the puzzle about this dysfunctional family. Larsson’s story takes classic mystery tropes — family feud, blackmailing sequences — and spices them up with additional developments in the protagonists’ personal lives. 

11. The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey

Delve into the past once more as we explore the story of King Richard III in The Daughter of Time . Scotland Yard Inspector Alan Grant takes time off from modern-day cases to recover from an injury, but still he searches for puzzles to occupy himself. Subsequently, he stumbles upon the mystery of King Richard III, a monarch accused of being a murderer but who Grant can only see as kind and wise. Following his strange physiognomic intuition, Grant rummages historical records to solve a complex case that occurred decades ago. 

Josephine Tey brings to life in this novel the intricacies of the past, and the way history is interpreted to reopen a case that was once done and dusted. The political intrigue and peculiar records make for a good dramatic story that is incredibly informative and intriguing, thereby winning The Daughter of Time tremendous love from the readers and praise from the critics. 

12. Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier

Gothic mystery Rebecca is a classic when it comes to telling bone-chilling stories set in an old, grand mansion. The unnamed protagonist of the tale becomes the wife of a widowed, wealthy man, Mr. de Winter, and moves into the Manderly, his stately home. Rather than promising a peaceful and happy marriage, the grand house holds the shadow of the first Mrs. de Winter over the new lady, and threatens not just her happiness but her life. 

Elegantly crafted and movingly told, Rebecca’s beauty will remind you of Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre , only more sinister and enigmatic. 

13. The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett

Returning to detective stories we have The Maltese Falcon , which follows Sam Spade’s journey to find his client’s sister and her unwelcomed partner. Spade and his business partner, Miles Archer, are on their tail when things go off the track and Archer is found dead. Spade goes on trying to uncover the mystery surrounding the sisters while becoming a suspect for the death of his partner. 

Spade’s sleuthing opens his eyes, and yours, too, to a worldwide system he had never thought he’d walk into. Told without a single paragraph dedicated to the thoughts of any of the characters, this is truly an enigma that keeps you guessing.

14. The Day of the Jackal by Frederick Forsyth

“The Jackal” is the codename of the assassin hired to kill French President Charles de Gaulle in this enthralling tale. What’s more thrilling is the fact that this kill order came from within the government and thus must be covered up well. The Jackal’s challenge is thus two-fold — to circumvent the heavy safeguarding reserved for one of the most important men on Earth, and to protect his own identity, even from his employers. 

Inspired by an actual failed assassination attempt on the French President and politcally developments in Europe at the end of the Cold War, The Day of the Jackal is intriguing on many fronts. Prepare for some serious espionage, meticulous planning, and political infighting.

15. Big Little Lies by Liane Moriarty

Single mother Jane sends her son to kindergarten and befriends two mothers — Madeleine and Celeste. Along with their friendships is an array of family dramas, from ex- or abusive husbands to dark pasts. Jane doesn’t know it, but there’s a piece of her past that makes her fit perfectly into this wild puzzle. No one ever displays their domestic problems in their totality to others, not even to friends, and that makes Big Little Lies so much more captivating. 

16. In the Woods by Tana French

In the Woods takes readers to the woody outskirts of Ireland, where a 12-year-old girl is found dead. Two detectives, Rob and Cassie, are assigned the case, and the case forcibly reminds the former of the mystery that haunted his childhood — a mystery which happened in these same woods. As they make their way through the crime scene and interrogate dysfunctional parents and friends, Rob’s past keeps coming back to him, begging the question of whether it is related to this sad event. 

As haunting as it is alluring, In the Woods is more than just a mystery book. It is also a poignant tale of family ties and childhood trauma — a reminder of the importance of growing up in a safe and loving environment. 

17. The Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris

In this iconic suspense novel, FBI agent Clarice Stirling investigates a serial killer, “Buffalo Bill,” who preys on young women, and who potentially is linked to psychiatrist and cannibalistic murderer Hannibal Lecter. In order to weed a clue out from Lecter about Bill’s whereabouts, Stirling visits the psych ward where Lecter is imprisoned. However, her shuddering exchanges seem to reveal less about the killer on the loose, and more about Lecter’s astounding ability to get into the head of his victims. Follow Clarice Stirling on her bone-chilling mission, juggling two sociopathic criminals, in The Silence of the Lambs .

18. The Hound of the Baskervilles by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

The Hound of the Baskervilles is one of the best mystery books ever written; it’s certainly one of the most-read books of all time. Conan Doyle's legendary detective, Sherlock Holmes , presumed dead, returns to the land of the living to shed light on the petrifying death of his friend, Charles Baskerville. The Baskerville family estate is located on the moors of Devon, where legend has it there’s a demonic beast roaming about. Sinister supernatural forces appear to be the only explanation for this mystery, but the supremely rational Sherlock Holmes is not going to give up on his quest to find the one and only truth. 

19. The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins

Aristocrat Rachel Verinder receives a beautiful gem, the Moonstone, from her uncle, a soldier returning from India, for her eighteenth birthday. She decides to wear it to the big party celebrating her adulthood, after which the jewel disappears from her room. Distraught, Rachel and her family seek the help of Sergeant Cuff to find the thief and recover the treasure. The case is more complicated than it seems, especially since the Moonstone has a mysterious history Rachel doesn’t yet know of. 

The Moonstone is widely regarded as the first mystery novel ever published, and Wilkie Collins paved the way for subsequent books in this genre by introducing hallmark elements such as the large number of suspects, an incompetent constabulary force, and an exceptionally brilliant detective.

20. The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins

Rachel Watson takes a train from her home into the city center everyday, and to kill the time, she often spends much of it looking at the same houses that pass by her. She makes up stories for the lives she observes, stories that are better than her own, free of divorce and alcoholism. One day, she witnesses something that turns Rachel from a mere observer of the lives of this particular street to an active participant in it. 

The Girl on the Train is yet another suspenseful read that uses unreliable narrators to the full. Its intertwining perspectives will take turns changing your mind as to who is the real threat in this domestic drama. 

21. Eye of the Needle by Ken Follett

Historical fiction novelist Ken Follett’s critical success is set during the turning point of World War II, when D-Day plans were being carried out. German spy Henry Faber, codename “The Needle,” stations himself in London, and is transmitting information back to Berlin. He’s the cream of the crop when it comes to this trade: only him and a few other German agents are still at large in Britain. Faber soon catches on to a crucial operation that the British are about to embark on — one that, if successful, will turn the table against Germany. The problem is the British are coming closer and closer to uncovering him… 

If you’ve read any of Ken Follett’s books, you’ll know he has a talent for vividly reviving the past in his pages. Eye of the Needle is no exception — the tension and secrecy that plagued this tumultuous time is captured skillfully in this volume. 

22. Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn

Journalist Camille Preaker returns to work from her “break” at the hospital with a project that will take her back home: there is a girl who had been murdered, and another missing, in the little town she grew up in. Homecoming proves harder than she thought: Camille had been estranged from her family, and must now reconnect with them. The more she and the detective on the case, Richard Willis, delve into the mysteries, the closer to home Camille appears to be — much closer than she would hope. In probably the most unpleasantly satisfying way possible, Sharp Objects will leave you shivering with wonders about how far the effects of a broken family can reach.  

23. My Sister, the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite

On a similar note, let’s watch as a saucy sibling drama unfurls in My Sister, the Serial Killer . Korede has a sister who has a tendency to date horrible men — men so bad she has to kill them, “in self-defense”. Korede doesn’t report or question this — her sister is family, after all, and Korede goes to great lengths to protect her family. But when her sister starts approaching a coworker that Korede likes, she begins to wonder how far is too far. Braithwaite’s novel is bleakly humorous and as wild as Lagos, the city it’s set in. 

24. Case Histories by Kate Atkinson

If you still are in need of a good domestic thriller, Case Histories is your book. Get ready for three gruesome backyard tales: the disappearance of a young child in one home, the slaughter of a husband in another, and the murder of a solicitor’s daughter in the last. Beyond exploring the hurt and loss of each of these unfortunate families, Kate Atkinson also expertly tied all three together — how exactly, you’ll have to read to find out. 

25. The Detective by Roderick Thorp

The Detective is a classic when it comes to mystery novels — Thorp’s work is inspiration for several famous movies, including Die Hard . This story follows private eye Joe Leland as he is asked by a widow to look into the circumstances of her husband’s death. As he delves into the entangling relationships of this man who he happens to have known from his fighting days in World War II, Leland uncovers details about the victim he never would’ve guessed. 

26. The Alienist by Caleb Carr

Maybe you’ve heard of The Alienist before in the form of the Netflix original that takes the audience back in time to 1890s New York. Crime reporter John Moore takes the lead on the grisly and peculiar serial killing of teenage boys. The first victim who is found, and whose case Moore covered in the news, was dressed up like a girl and disturbingly mutilated, so much so that Moore believes there must be someone mentally sick behind it all. Moore turns to his friend and famous psychologist — then known as an alienist — in order to figure out this mystery and catch the murderer. This mystery book has everything from psychological analysis to breath-taking chases through New York’s grimy streets. 

27. Shutter Island by Dennis Lehane

When Rachel Solando, a patient at the Ashecliffe Hospital for the criminally insane, disappears from the facility, Marshal Teddy Daniels and his partner are summoned to investigate and recapture her. Upon arriving at the island on which the hospital is located, the two detectives found traces that Solando left behind regarding the ill-boding operations of the institution. The investigation takes several sharp turns before finally unveiling the true conspiracy. In emulating Gothic elements by isolating the case from technology and the outside world, and combining it with modern-age psychology, Shutter Island fosters an eerie yet captivating atmosphere that makes it impossible to put down. 

28. The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley

Not all of the best mystery books have to leave a heavy sense of dread at the bottom of your stomach, and The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie is proof of that. The sleuth who saves the day in this novel is Flavia, an intuitive 11-year-old whose father is accused of murder. A stranger has ended up dead in the family’s yard, one who happened to have been seen arguing with Flavia’s dad days before. Determined that her stamp-loving father, who has been heart-broken since the death of his wife, would never kill anyone, Flavia tours the town to try and prove his innocence. Light-hearted as it may sound, this novel’s puzzle is incredibly well-crafted and its classical mystery style, reminiscent of the works of Agatha Christie and Josephine Tey, makes it easy to finish the volume in one sitting. 

29. The Deep Blue Good-by by John D. MacDonald

The Deep Blue Good-by is the first novel of MacDonald’s series about private investigator Travis McGee. As we are introduced to this tall, charming, and righteous character, he is swept away on a mission to find military man Junior Allen, a serial rapist and murderer. Allen has also discovered a smuggled treasure buried somewhere in Florida, and is using that to fund his malicious exploits. The difficult responsibility of trying to locate this psychopath falls onto McGee’s shoulders, the only person with the methodological patience to pick up Allen’s trace. Too often, the protagonist of detective stories are portrayed as being rational to the point of cold-hearted; it’s probably worth your while to change it up a little with Travis McGee’s quest for goodness.

30. Killing Floor by Lee Child

In another first book to a detective series we have Killing Floor , a novel full of action and secrets. Former policeman Jack Reacher gets arrested the moment he comes into the town of Margrave, for a murder he is sure he did not commit. As he tries to convince the detectives in charge of his innocence, Reacher initially only wants to get out of this mess and go on with his travels. The stakes, however, are raised when he found out that his own brother is somehow involved in the mystery, and the murder he is falssely accused of is nowhere near as simple as he thought. 

If you’re looking for more books to send chills down your spine, check out this list of best suspense books of all time ! Or have a look at our guide to Kindle Unlimited if you want to boost your reading game.

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The Best Reviewed Mystery and Crime Fiction of 2020

Featuring tana french, don winslow, ivy pochoda, liz moore, and more.

Tana French’s The Searcher , Don Winslow’s Broken , Ivy Pochoda’s These Women , and Liz Moore’s Long Bright River all feature among the best reviewed crime mystery and crime fiction of 2020.

Brought to you by Book Marks , Lit Hub’s “Rotten Tomatoes for books.”

1. The Searcher by Tana French (Viking)

10 Rave • 6 Positive • 3 Mixed Read an interview with Tana French here

“…an audacious departure for this immensely talented author … there’s a lot at work in The Searcher,  even if its story sounds simple … One of this book’s many pleasures is French’s way of building Cal and Trey’s bond … These scenes are keenly observed, with a strong sense of place, and unfailingly entertaining. They’re also ominous, given what we know about the close-knit, gossipy nature of the town … Nobody beats French when it comes to writing pub scenes fraught with tension … This is why you read Tana French: for the nuances that go into an ambush like this, and for her ability to immerse you in the moment completely. As you read this scene, the sidelong glances and daggers in the small talk come flying off the page … Where does The Searcher  stand in the lineup of French’s books? It’s an outlier: not her most accessible but not to be missed. It’s unusually contemplative and visual, as if she literally needed this breath of fresh air. It steps back to examine the policing powers she has traditionally taken for granted. And it’s her foray into the natural world, which is so welcome right now. It’s also slower than some of her other books. But as Cal says in the folksy western voice he often affects here, ‘All’s you can do is your best.'”

–Janet Maslin  ( The New York Times )

2  Snow by John Banville

13 Rave • 2 Positive • 3 Mixed • 1 Pan Listen to an excerpt from Snow here

“Time and again, Banville sets up and then deftly demolishes the Agatha Christie format he seems to be aping. Everything that seems creakingly familiar about the country-house murder turns out to be darker and darker still … I won’t reveal how the plot thickens. Banville’s depiction of the young republic that Ireland then was (real independence came only in 1937) is fascinating … The book sings with authenticity and Banvillian tropes … Banville is one of the great stylists of fiction in English and Snow  allows the limpid cadences of his prose free rein … An entertainment, perhaps, but a superbly rich and sophisticated one.”

–William Boyd  ( The New York Times Book Review )

3. The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman (Pamela Dorman Books)

11 Rave • 2 Positive • 1 Mixed Read an excerpt from The Thursday Murder Club here

“The author…blends in many of his own unique touches that render the proceedings fiendishly clever and brilliantly funny. The whole narrative is held together and driven forward by its perfectly formed characters … a compelling whodunit complete with red herrings, unexpected twists, and a pair of police officers who, despite their best efforts, always manage to be one step behind their amateur counterparts. At the same time, and without reducing any of his carefully built-up momentum, Osman allows his main characters to experience senior moments or reflect on growing old. There is regular humor but also bouts of tragicomedy…and moments of real poignancy.”

–Malcolm Forbes  ( The Star Tribune )

4. Blacktop Wasteland by S. A. Cosby (Flatiron)

12 Rave • 1 Mixed Read an essay by S. A. Cosby here

“… a gritty, thrilling reminder that small-town America has an underbelly, too … Cosby immediately displays a talent for well-tuned action, raising our heart rates and filling our nostrils with odors of gun smoke and burned rubber. But the real draw here is his evocative depiction of rural Virginia and its denizens. Cosby’s voice is distinctive, and he plays a sharp-tongued Virgil as we descend into the Hades of bucolic poverty … Gross! Sad! And kind of fun … The milieu is fresh; the setup, more familiar … Cosby delivers heavy doses of imaginative action and highway high jinks in lieu of any real mystery. But this grim tale finds its saving grace in its refusal to worship its hero.”

–Daniel Nieh  ( The New York Times Book Review )

5. Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line by Deepa Anappara (Random House)

10 Rave • 3 Positve • 1 Mixed Read an excerpt from Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line here

“Like its nine-year-old narrator, Jai… Djinn Patrol , too, shape-shifts, matures from genre to genre: a murder mystery, a high-stakes detective story, a coming-of-age story, crime fiction, political satire. The plot is simple and more or less progresses straightforwardly … it’s what Anappara does with language(s) that makes Djinn Patrol  utterly and wholly distinctive, inventive, and immersive … As a bilingual speaker and reader of Hindi and English, this felt like a bonus: to ‘get’ the cues, clues, and cultural references; to always nod along in recognition; enjoy plenty of ‘Aha!’ moments; and, most considerately, to not have one’s culture explained to oneself … Anappara’s Jai is endearing, entertaining, and earnest; he keeps you on the edge of your seat … What a child narrator affords Anappara is the ability to write about institutional injustice and negligence, unimaginable atrocities and harsh lived-realities … And for this, we can hold Deepa Anappara’s story close to our hearts.”

–Sana Goyal  ( The Los Angeles Review of Books )

6. The Devil and the Dark Water by Stuart Turton (Sourcebooks Landmark)

10 Rave • 3 Positive Read an essay by Stuart Turton here

“ The Devil and the Dark Water  lies between genres—it is a mystery with an occult MacGuffin, a demonic symbol that bodes ill for a group of travelers aboard a United East India Company galleon … The Devil and the Dark Water  like Turton’s first novel, The 7½ Deaths of Eleanor Hardcastle  is compulsively readable, slightly over the top and more interested in the mysteries of character and mise-en-scène than the rigors of plot. The horror elements are entertaining rather than terrifying, perfect for readers who like a little occult with their mystery but dare not get entangled in anything too scary. While there were times when I felt the novel unfolded a bit too slowly—it is 463 pages, and could easily have been shorter—Pipps and Hayes are such charming company that I was happy to travel with them for the extended journey.”

–Danielle Trussoni  ( The New York Times Book Review )

7. These Women by Ivy Pochoda (Ecco)

8 Rave • 5 Positive Listen to an interview with Ivy Pochoda here

“… not only has Pochoda written an immersive, intriguing murder mystery—she’s also crafted a framework with which we can examine how all women are viewed in Western cultures, sometimes as madonnas, more often as whores … almost more chilling than the killer’s actions and motivations is the strange family situation in which he operates, one that is so opposite to the lives of his victims that readers will wonder how they can coexist in the same locale, and one that also shows our society’s views of women, taken to any extreme, make things bad for us all.”

–Bethanne Patrick  ( NPR )

8. Broken by Don Winslow (William Morrow)

8 Rave • 4 Positive • 2 Mixed Read an interview with Don Winslow here

“If you haven’t read American writer Don Winslow, Broken  is all the introduction you need. In six novellas, each different in focus and mood, Winslow showcases his best moves. These stories may worry you—the first, Broken , is the most confronting—but then, as Winslow makes clear, America itself is indeed broken … will make you laugh and cry, but in the end will explain why The New York Times  thinks Winslow is simply ‘the greatest’. Not forgetting, of course, his prose. He crafts every sentence until it beats to a rhythm of its own … The humour may be gentle but it is acute … devastating and brilliant.”

–Sue Turnbull  ( The Sydney Morning Herald )

9. Saint X by Alexis Schaitkin (Celadon)

7 Rave • 4 Positive • 1 Mixed Listen to an excerpt from Saint X here

“… a fetching, charismatic, somewhat volatile heroine. One who is pure enough that you feel the enormity of her loss, but slick enough to be interesting … All these sub-narratives dedicated to minor and major characters, chapters that do little to move the plot along, could easily have resulted in a novel that buckled under the weight of its structural ambitions, but Schaitkin pulls it off without a hitch … hypnotic, delivering acute social commentary on everything from class and race to familial bonds and community, and yet its weblike nature never confuses, or fails to captivate. Schaitkin’s characters have views you may not always agree with, but their voices are so intelligent and distinctive it feels not just easy, but necessary, to follow them. I devoured Saint X  in a day … Perhaps intentionally, the narrative deflates a little at the end. But perhaps this was bound to happen; after spending over 300 pages trying to understand what happened on the island that night, could the reader be satisfied by any ending? Could the bereaved?”

–Oyinkan Braithwaite  ( The New York Times Book Review )

10. Long Bright River by Liz Moore (Riverhead) 8 Rave • 2 Positive • 1 Mixed

“… extraordinary … the mundane has been made menacing … Moore is an astute social observer. Her depictions of Mickey’s isolation are sharp-eyed to the point of pain … Moore is every bit as deft in constructing suspense … nervously twists, turns and subverts readers’ expectations till its very last pages. Simultaneously, it also manages to grow into something else: a sweeping, elegiac novel about a blighted city. As Chandler did for various sections of Los Angeles, Moore—who lives in Philadelphia—excavates Kensington and surrounding areas in Philadelphia, illuminating the rot, the shiny facades of gentrification and the sturdy endurance of small pockets of community life.”

–Maureen Corrigan  ( The Washington Post )

The Book Marks System: RAVE = 5 points • POSITIVE = 3 points • MIXED = 1 point • PAN = -5 points

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Top 20 detective novels

Posted by Mal Warwick | Detective Stories , Mysteries & Thrillers , Reading Recommendations | 0

The 20 detective novels listed below may not be the 20 “best” detective novels, even by my uniquely idiosyncratic criteria. I’d read a lot of work in the genre even before I began writing these reviews in January 2010—and there are tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of detective novels I’ve never read. But, for what it’s worth, I gave every one of these 20 books a rating of ★★★★★. And they’re the best of the more than 250 detective novels I’ve read over the past decade.

This post was updated on April 2, 2024.

In this list of the top 20, I’ve arbitrarily limited myself to one book per author, which is significant because several of the authors might easily appear here multiple times. Below, I’ve listed more than 200 other excellent detective novels reviewed here. I’ve assigned nearly all of them either a rating of ★★★★☆ or ★★★★★. In other words, you’ll find here only the best of those I’ve read and reviewed here to date. As you can see, many authors appear numerous times. When I find a series of novels that I like, I usually try to read them all from the first book to the latest.

In both lists, books are listed alphabetically by the authors’ last names.

Keep in mind that every one of these 200+ suspenseful detective novels is linked to the review I posted on this site.

The 20 top detective novels reviewed here

A conspiracy of faith (department q #3) by jussi adler-olsen (2013) 508 pages ★★★★★ — a captivating tale of religious fanaticism, blackmail, and serial murder.

In the third novel in Adler-Olsen’s extraordinary Department Q series, the three misfits of the Copenhagen Police’s cold case department wrestle with fiendishly complex investigations involving a message in a bottle, religious fanaticism, kidnapping, serial murder, arson, and gang warfare. Carl Mørck heads the team. He is assisted by Hafez el-Asaad, a brilliant Syrian refugee with a mysterious past, and a schizophrenic “secretary” named Rose who rarely follows orders. It sounds foolishly complicated and more than a little silly, but it works beautifully. Read the review .

A Stained White Radiance (Dave Robicheaux #5) by James Lee Burke (1992) 394 pages ★★★★★ — A penetrating look at lowlife on the bayou

James Lee Burke is hands down the most accomplished literary stylist in the crime genre. His series of novels featuring Detective Dave Robicheaux of the New Iberia Parish (Louisiana) Sheriff’s Department evokes the rural South in all its lyrical beauty and suppressed violence. A Stained White Radiance , the fifth book in the series, involves Klansmen, Nazis, and Mafia wiseguys. Dave takes on the bad guys with the support of his loving family and of his former partner on the New Orleans Police Department, Cletus Purcell. Read the review .

The Crossing (Harry Bosch #8) by Michael Connelly (2015) 272 pages ★★★★★ — A police procedural and courtroom drama rolled into one excellent novel

In one of the most recent entries in Michael Connelly’s bestselling series featuring LAPD Detective Harry Bosch, the now-retired investigator teams up with his half-brother, Mickey Haller, the protagonist of another of Connelly’s long-running series of crime novels. In this hybrid work—a police procedural and a courtroom drama rolled into one—Harry has “crossed over” to the defense to work with Mickey on a fascinating capital murder case. Read the review .

And Justice There is None (Duncan Kincaid & Gemma James #8) by Deborah Crombie (2002) 416 pages ★★★★★ — A murder mystery unfolds against the backdrop of the antiques trade

Detective Inspector Gemma James and her former partner and current lover, Superintendent Duncan Kincaid, make the big move into a home together in Deborah Crombie’s excellent murder mystery series chronicling their rise through the ranks in the Metropolitan Police. In this entry in the series, the mystery unfolds against the backdrop of the London antiques trade. Read the review .

A Banquet of Consequences (Inspector Lynley #19) by Elizabeth George (2015) 577 pages ★★★★★ — Elizabeth George’s latest is much more than a whodunit

The aristocratic Inspector Thomas Lynley and his brilliant but exasperating partner at New Scotland Yard, Detective Barbara Havers, become embroiled in a murder mystery involving a famous feminist author. Meanwhile, Lynley and Havers wrestle with their personal demons. On the surface, this is a simple whodunit, but the psychological depth of George’s character development lifts this (and other novels she’s written) far out of the realm of simplistic detective fiction. Read the review .

IQ (IQ #1) by Joe Ide (2016) 337 pages ★★★★★ — Sherlock in the hood: inner-city crimesolver

This is the only debut novel among the 15 books listed here. Japanese-American screenwriter Joe Ide writes about a brilliant, self-taught young man in East Long Beach, California, who puts to work his unique deductive skills to solve crimes involving poor people in African-American and Latino neighborhoods. IQ is Isaiah Quintabe. In this, the first book of a series, IQ shows up the police by solving a case forced on him by a wealthy rap star whose life has been threatened. All the while, he pursues the identity of the person who killed his older brother while IQ was in high school. Read the review .

A Man Without Breath (Bernie Gunther #9) by Philip Kerr (2013) 477 pages ★★★★★ — Mass murder in the Katyn Forest

Philip Kerr’s Bernie Gunther novels are all grounded in the history of Nazi Germany. They frequently feature historical figures, many of them famous. In the ninth book of the series, Bernie conducts a wartime investigation for the German military about the 1940 massacre of 22,000 Polish officers by Josef Stalin’s NKVD. The event entered into history as the Katyn Forest Massacre . The cast of characters includes Field Marshall Günther von Kluge, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris , as well as Josef Goebbels and a host of lesser-known, real-world officials in World War II Germany. Even Adolf Hitler lurks behind the curtain, stage right, in a critical episode in the novel. Read the review .

How It Happened by Michael Koryta (2018) 368 pages ★★★★★ — A top-notch thriller set on the coast of Maine

As this standalone novel opens, a young woman named Kimberly (Kimmy) Crepeaux is confessing to taking part in a pair of gruesome murders. Rob Barrett, the FBI agent sent to Maine to interview her, has finally found his patience paying off. Now, after two months of interrogating Kimmy, he understands at last what happened. Or does he? When Rob and his local partner, Lieutenant Don Johansson of the Maine State Police, go to a nearby pond to uncover the bodies, there are no bodies to be found. Read the review .

The Preacher (Fjällbacka #2) by Camilla Läckberg (2004) 436 pages ★★★★★ — A great example of Swedish noir

Camilla Läckberg writes about the partnership between Detective Patrik Hedström and real-crime writer Ericka Falck in the Swedish seaside town of Fjällbacka. In The Preacher , Patrik is drawn into a seemingly unsolvable case involving the murder of three teenage girls decades apart. His efforts are frustrated by two older, incompetent police officers and a boss of limited intelligence who claims every success as his own. Meanwhile, Ericka is struggling through a difficult pregnancy. The preacher of the title is a Bible-thumping fundamentalist who plays a major role in the story. Läckberg is reported to be the most successful native author in Swedish history. Read the review .

Bluebird Bluebird by Attica Locke (2017) 318 pages ★★★★★ — A compelling tale of murder, race, and family secrets

Two bodies have turned up in quick succession in a small town in hardscrabble East Texas. The sheriff is inclined to treat them as unconnected. But not so Darren Matthews, a Texas Ranger who has come to town at the urging of a friend in the FBI who suspects larger forces at work there. An African-American, Darren fears a connection with the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas (ABT), a violent racist gang enriched by drug smuggling. Read the review .

The Galton Case (Lew Archer #8 of 18) by Ross MacDonald (1959) 255 pages ★★★★★ — A classic detective novel that’s hard to put down

Reading as much as I do, it’s highly unusual for me to come across a book I find so riveting that I lose track of time. But this masterpiece of detective fiction did that to me. Strangely, I had read the novel nearly half a century ago, when I was in the process of devouring all 18 of the Lew Archer tales. But Ross MacDonald’s plot was so fiendishly complex, and the book was stuffed with so many startling surprises, that I couldn’t possibly have remembered them all. Thus, “I (literally) couldn’t put it down.” Here’s a classic detective novel that fully merits the label.

In The Galton Case , an attorney in Santa Teresa summons Lew Archer to investigate the disappearance of a wealthy woman’s son. (Santa Teresa is MacDonald’s lightly disguised version of Santa Barbara, California, where he lived for decades.) Tony Galton vanished 20 years earlier, in 1936, at the age of 22. Now, as she nears death, old Maria Galton wants to reconcile with her long-lost son. Archer regards the case as a waste of time and money, but he’s got plenty of time, and he won’t turn down the money. Read the review .

The Double Comfort Safari Club (#1 Ladies Detective Agency #11)  by Alexander McCall Smith (2010) 225 pages ★★★★★ — About cakes, cattle, and the passing of the old ways

For any reader looking for respite from the unrelenting violence of the world we live in,  The Double Comfort Safari Club  is a worthy antidote. The characters in this novel “. . . talked about all sorts of things . . .: about weddings and children and money. About cattle. About jealousy and envy and love. About cakes. About friends and enemies and people they remembered who had gone away, or changed, or even died. About everything, really.” About everything, indeed. The #1 Ladies Detective Agency Series is less a collection of detective stories than a continuing portrait of a fascinating worldview unfamiliar to most North Americans. Read the review .

The Leopard (Harry Hole #8) by Jo Nesbø (2011) 626 pages ★★★★★ — Is Jo Nesbø the world’s best crime novelist?

Detective Harry Hole of the Oslo Police Department is the protagonist of a long and ongoing series of bestselling novels by Jo Nesbø. Harry is an alcoholic who frequently descends into deep depression, sometimes over his difficult personal life, sometimes over the mysteries he is investigating. The Leopard portrays the conflicted homicide cop in the depth of his complexity, pursuing a fiendish serial killer from Norway to the Congo. Read the review .

The Ghosts of Belfast (Belfast #1)  by Stuart Neville (2009) 337 pages ★★★★★ — A grim story of war and betrayal in Northern Ireland

You may never have read a murder mystery like this one. The protagonist, Gerry Fegan, is a former hit man for the IRA responsible for the deaths of twelve people (the “ghosts” of the title), and it’s never much of a mystery when he begins killing again. The mystery lies deeper, somewhere in the vicinity of his stunted family life and the treacherous relationships among the others in his violence-prone faction. As Fegan reflects, “You can’t choose where you belong, and where you don’t. But what if the place you don’t belong is the only place you have left?” Read the review .

Brush Back (V. I. Warshawski #17) , by Sara Paretsky (2015) 475 pages ★★★★★ — A fascinating detective novel about big city corruption

Sara Paretsky’s excellent series of V.I. Warshawski detective novels revolves around the widespread political corruption in her hometown, Chicago. Though by no means a superhero, V.I. is sometimes referred to as “Chicago’s best investigator.” In Brush Back , she investigates an alleged murder committed by her much-revered cousin, the late Bernard “Boom-Boom” Warshawski, a legendary star on the Chicago Blackhawks hockey team. As V.I. pursues the case in the face of a painful media storm, she comes up against the powers-that-be in her old neighborhood—and their connections to much higher places in the firmament of Chicago politics. Read the review .

The Black Book (Inspector Rebus #5)  by Ian Rankin (2011) 372 pages ★★★★★ — An Elvis-themed restaurant, a five-year-old murder, and Inspector Rebus

Read any one of the twenty-seven novels published to date in the Inspector Rebus series, and you will have no doubt that  Ian Rankin , is a native Scotsman, and proud of it. You’ll rush to the dictionary from time to time to look up strange words known only to the inhabitants of that cold and rain-soaked land. And you’ll read about people actually eating haggis —willingly! (They even ask for it in restaurants!) This is all evident in  The Black Book , the fifth entry in the series, a more mature effort than the four novels that precede it. John Rebus seems to have grown into his skin. Read the review .

Rough Country (Virgil Flowers #3) by John Sandford (2009) 404 pages ★★★★★ — John Sandford’s best Virgil Flowers novel?

Virgil Flowers is one of the most intriguing characters in detective fiction today. He’s the top investigator in the (fictional) Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. His boss, Lucas Davenport, gives him only the toughest cases. But he is in no way a stereotype. For one thing, he doesn’t like guns, and he hates shooting people.  Rough Country, the third book in the Virgil Flowers series, opens with the murder of Erica McDill, a partner in a prominent Minneapolis advertising agency at a resort for women-only in the state’s lake country. Read the review .

Triptych (Will Trent #1) by Karin Slaughter (2006) 512 pages ★★★★★ — Karin Slaughter’s Will Trent: the first novel

Karin Slaughter’s ongoing series features Agent Will Trent of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. A functional illiterate due to profound dyslexia, Will has nonetheless acquired both a college degree and a doctorate in criminology. He is regarded as one of the bureau’s finest investigators. Triptych is the first novel in a series that now includes thirteen novels. In collaboration with his on-again, off-again wife, Angie Polaski, and two local cops, Will heads an investigation into serial rape and murder. Read the review .

Victory Square (Yalta Boulevard #5) by Olen Steinhauer (2008) 368 pages ★★★★★ — A powerful tale of life in Eastern Europe during the fall of Communism

Espionage novelist Olen Steinhauer earlier wrote a cycle of five detective novels set in a fictional Communist Central European country. The cycle spans the years from 1948, when the Soviet Empire consolidated its hold on the nations directly to its West, until 1990, when the USSR and the Warsaw Pact collapsed.  Victory Square is the final novel in the cycle. The events in the book are based on the fall of Nicolae Ceausescu ’s brutal dictatorial regime in Romania. An aging homicide cop, Emil Brod, now Chief of the Militia, is just days from retirement. A new case forces him to contend with an unraveling government, a series of shocking murders, and a best friend engaged at the very center of the revolutionary movement. Read the review .

The Crow Girl  by Erik Axl Sund (2016) 770 pages ★★★★★ — Pedophiles, serial murder, and the Holocaust in a Swedish psychological thriller

If you favor mysteries and thrillers full of surprises, you’ll love  The Crow Girl  by the Swedish writing team that publishes under the name Erik Axl Sund. No matter how shrewd and analytical you might be, I predict you won’t figure out who’s who and what’s what until at least close to the end of this staggeringly complex novel. And, unless you read at a blistering pace, this is not a book you’ll finish at one sitting: the hardcover edition runs to 784 pages. To say that I enjoyed this novel would be misleading. At times it’s gruesome beyond belief. And I found the constant use of long Swedish place names distracting. Yet the writing is devilishly clever. It’s difficult to put the book down. In fact, I found it impossible. Read the review .

Among the Mad (Maisie Dobbs #6) by Jacqueline Winspear (2010) 319 pages ★★★★★ — Shell shock, madness, and the Great Depression

Jacqueline Winspear’s unusual historical detective novels feature the “psychologist and investigator” Maisie Dobbs, who operates as an “inquiry agent” in England during the 1930s. In Among the Mad , Maisie and her sidekick, Billy Beale, are pressed into service by New Scotland Yard’s secretive Special Branch, charged with finding a man who has threatened the Prime Minister himself. The action unfolds over the last week of 1931 and the first month of 1932, a time when Britain was experiencing the worst of the Great Depression. As its title suggests, one of the book’s overarching themes is the primitive care of mental illness in that era. The persistent impacts of World War I loom large, most immediately in the thousands of veterans suffering from what today we would call PTSD. Read the review .

200+ other excellent detective novels reviewed here

The list below includes several examples of series in which you’ll find many titles. Some are continuous. In others, one or more numbers in the series are missing. Possible reasons include that I read and assigned a rating lower than ★★★★☆ or ★★★★★, I’ve listed the title in the top 20, or I haven’t yet gotten around to reading the book.

Jussi Adler-Olsen’s Department Q Series

• The Keeper of Lost Causes (Department Q #1)
• The Absent One (Department Q #2)
• The Purity of Vengeance (Department Q #4)
• The Marco Effect (Department Q #5)
• The Hanging Girl (Department Q #6)
• The Scarred Woman (Department Q #7)
• Victim 2117 (Department Q #8)

The Return of Faraz Ali  by Aamina Ahmad

The John Madden series by Rennie Airth

• River of Darkness (John Madden #1)
• The Blood-Dimmed Tide (John Madden #2)
• The Dead of Winter (John Madden #3)
• The Reckoning (John Madden #4)
• The Death of Kings (John Madden #5)
• The Decent Inn of Death (John Madden #6)

The Redeemers (Quinn Colson #5)  by Ace Atkins

Case Histories (Jackson Brodie #1) by Kate Atkinson

The Dark Lake , by Sarah Bailey

Disciple of the Dog  by R. Scott Bakker

The Fleur de Sel Murders (Brittany Mysteries #3) by Jean-Luc Bannalec

The Black-Eyed Blonde: A Philip Marlowe Novel  by Benjamin Black (John Banville)

Snow by John Banville

A Tap on the Window  by Linwood Barclay

The Second Rider (Inspector Emmerich #1)  by Alex Beer

The Long and Faraway Gone by Lou Berney

Vengeance (Quirke #5)  by Benjamin Black

Cara Black’s Aimee Leduc Novels

• Murder in the Marais (Aimee Leduc #1)
• Murder in Belleville (Aimee Leduc #2)
• Murder in the Sentier (Aimee Leduc #3)
• Murder in Montmartre (Aimee Leduc #6)
• Murder on the Quai (Aimee Leduc #16)

The Pictures  by Guy Bolton

The Last Six Million Seconds  by John Burdett

James Lee Burke’s Dave Robicheaux Series

• The Neon Rain (Dave Robicheaux #1)
• Heaven’s Prisoners (Dave Robicheaux #2)
• Black Cherry Blues (Dave Robicheaux #3)
• A Morning for Flamingos (Dave Robicheaux #4)
• In The Electric Mist With Confederate Dead (Dave Robicheaux #6)
• Dixie City Jam (Dave Robicheaux #7)
• Burning Angel (Dave Robicheaux #8)
• Cadillac Jukebox (Dave Robicheaux #9)
• Sunset Limited (Dave Robicheaux #10)

The Big Sleep (Philip Marlowe #1) by Raymond Chandler

Hidden Moon (Inspector O #2)  by James Church

Where It Hurts (Gus Murphy #1)  by Reed Farrel Coleman

The Hound of the Baskervilles (Sherlock Holmes #3 of 4) by Arthur Conan Doyle

Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch series

• The Black Echo (Harry Bosch #1)
• Nine Dragons (Harry Bosch #14)
• The Drop (Harry Bosch #15)
• The Black Box (Harry Bosch #16)
• The Burning Room (Harry Bosch #17)
• The Wrong Side of Goodbye (Harry Bosch #19)
• Two Kinds of Truth (Harry Bosch #20)

The Ballard and Bosch series

• The Late Show (Renee Ballard and Harry Bosch #1 )
• Dark Sacred Night (Renee Ballard and Harry Bosch #2)
• The Night Fire (Renee Ballard and Harry Bosch #3)
• The Dark Hours (Renée Ballard and Harry Bosch #4)
• Desert Star (Renée Ballard and Harry Bosch #5)

All the Sinners Bleed  by S. A. Cosby

The Monkey’s Raincoat (Elvis Cole and Joe Pike #1) by Robert Crais

Deborah Crombie’s Duncan Kincaid & Gemma James novels

• Dreaming of the Bones (Duncan Kincaid and Gemma Jones #5)
• Now May You Weep (Duncan Kincaid & Gemma James #9)
• In a Dark House (Gemma James and Duncan Kincaid #10)
• Garden of Lamentations (Duncan Kincaid & Gemma James #17)
• A Bitter Feast (Gemma James and Duncan Kincaid #18)

A Credible Threat (Jeri Howard #6)  by Janet Dawson

Amerikan Eagle: The Special Edition  by Brendan DuBois

Old Bones (Gideon Oliver #4)  by Aaron Elkins

Curses! (Gideon Oliver #5)  by Aaron Elkins

The Black Dahlia by James Ellroy

The Harbor (Kørner and Werner #3)  by Katrine Engberg

Seven Days Dead (Storm Murders Trilogy #2)  by John Farrow

The Laws of Murder (Charles Lenox #8)   by Charles Finch

The Nick Heller novels by Joseph Finder

• Buried Secrets (Nick Heller #2)
• Guilty Minds (Nick Heller #3)
• House on Fire (Nick Heller #4)

The Zero Hour  by Joseph Finder

Faithful Place (Dublin Murder Squad #3) , by Tana French

Broken Harbor (Dublin Murder Squad #4)  by Tana French

The Searcher by Tana French

Crash and Burn  by Lisa Gardner

Elizabeth George’s Inspector Lynley Series

• This Body of Death (Inspector Lynley #16 )
• Believing the Lie (Inspector Lynley #17)
• Just One Evil Act (Inspector Lynley #18)
• The Punishment She Deserves (Inspector Lynley #20)
• Something to Hide (Inspector Lynley #21)  

The Groucho Marx Mysteries by Ron Goulart

• Groucho Marx Master Detective (Groucho Marx Mysteries #1)
• Groucho Marx, Private Eye (Groucho Marx Mysteries #2)
• Elementary, My Dear Groucho (Groucho Marx Mysteries #3)
• Groucho Marx and the Broadway Murders (Groucho Marx Mysteries #4)
• Groucho Marx, Secret Agent (Groucho Marx Mysteries #5)
• Groucho Marx, King of the Jungle (Groucho Marx Mysteries #6)

Last Looks , by Howard Michael Gould

The Crossing Places (Ruth Galloway #1)  by Elly Griffiths

Tarquin Hall’s Vish Puri series

• The Case of the Missing Servant (Vish Puri #1)
• The Case of the Man Who Died Laughing (Vish Puri #2)
• The Case of the Deadly Butter Chicken (Vish Puri #3)
• The Case of the Love Commandos (Vish Puri #4)
• The Case of the Reincarnated Client (Vish Puri #5 )

Red Harvest (Continental Op #1)  by Dashiell Hammett

The Governor’s Wife (Michael Kelly #5)  by Michael Harvey

Bad Monkey  by Carl Hiaasen

Dance Hall of the Dead (Leaphorn and Chee #2) , by Tony Hillerman

A Rage in Harlem (Harlem Detectives #1 of 6)  by Chester Himes

The Bitter Season (Kovac and Liska #5) by Tami Hoag

The IQ novels by Joe Ide

• Righteous (IQ #2)
• Wrecked (IQ #3)

Stan Jones’ Nathan Active novels

• White Sky, Black Ice (Nathan Active #1)
• Shaman Pass (Nathan Active #2)
• Village of the Ghost Bears (Nathan Active #4)

Stuart M. Kaminsky’s Soviet police procedurals

• Death of a Dissident (Inspector Porfiry Rostnikov #1)
• Black Knight in Red Square (Inspector Porfiry Rostnikov #2)
• Red Chameleon (Inspector Porfiry Rostnikov #3)
• A Fine Red Rain (Inspector Porfiry Rostnikov #4)
• A Cold Red Sunrise (Inspector Porfiry Rostnikov #5)
• The Man Who Walked Like a Bear (Inspector Porfiry Rostnikov #6)  
• Rostnikov’s Vacation (Inspector Porfiry Rostnikov #7)
• Death of a Russian Priest (Inspector Porfiry Rostnikov #8)
• Hard Currency (Inspector Porfiry Rostnikov #9)
• Blood and Rubles (Inspector Porfiry Rostnikov #10)

The Peter Decker and Rina Lazarus series from Faye Kellerman

• The Ritual Bath (Peter Decker and Rina Lazarus #1 )
• Sacred and Profane (Peter Decker & Rina Lazarus #2)
• Walking Shadows (Peter Decker & Rina Lazarus #25)

Jonathan Kellerman’s Alex Delaware series

• When the Bough Breaks (Alex Delaware#1)
• Blood Test (Alex Delaware #2)
• Over the Edge (Alex Delaware #3)
• Silent Partner (Alex Delaware #4)
• Time Bomb (Alex Delaware #5)  
• Night Moves (Alex Delaware #33)
• The Wedding Guest (Alex Delaware #34)

The Dime , by Kathleen Kent

The Fire Witness (Joona Linna #3) by Lars Kepler

The Bernie Gunther series by Philip Kerr

• March Violets (Bernie Gunther #1)
• The Pale Criminal (Bernie Gunther #2)
• A German Requiem (Bernie Gunther #3)
• The One from the Other (Bernie Gunther #4)
• A Quiet Flame (Bernie Gunter #5)
• If the Dead Rise Not (Bernie Gunther #6)
• Field Gray (Bernie Gunther #7)
• Prague Fatale (Bernie Gunther #8)
• The Lady from Zagreb (Bernie Gunther #10)
• The Other Side of Silence (Bernie Gunther #11)
• Prussian Blue (Bernie Gunther #12)
• Greeks Bearing Gifts (Bernie Gunther #13)
• Metropolis (Bernie Gunther #14)

Blackwater Falls (Blackwater Falls #1)  by Ausma Zehanat Khan

The Lost Man of Bombay (Malabar House #3)  by Vaseem Khan

Camilla Läckberg’s Fjallbacka novels

• The Ice Princess (Fjallbacka Book #1)
• The Stonecutter (Fjällbacka #3)
• The Stranger (Fjällbacka #4)
• The Hidden Child (Fjallbacka #5)
• The Drowning (Fjallbacka #6)
• The Lost Boy (Fjällbacka #7)

Chameleon People (K2 and Patricia #4)  by Hans Olav Lahlum

Japantown (Jim Brodie #1)   by Barry Lancet

Death in Shanghai (Inspector Danilov #1) by M. J. Lee

Save Me from Dangerous Men (Nikki Griffin #1) by S. A. Lelchuk

The Commissario Brunetti series by Donna Leon

• Death in a Strange Country (Commissario Brunetti #2)
• Dressed for Death (Commissario Brunetti #3) aka The Anonymous Venetian
• Death and Judgment (Commissario Brunetti #4)

Damage (Abe Glitsky #3)   by John Lescroart

Peter Lovesey’s Peter Diamond novels

• The Last Detective (Peter Diamond #1)
• Diamond Solitaire (Peter Diamond #2)
• Bloodhounds (Peter Diamond #4)
• Upon a Dark Night (Peter Diamond #5)
• Down Among the Dead Men (Peter Diamond #15)

The Troubled Man (Kurt Wallender #13)  by Henning Mankell

The Pyramid and Four Other Kurt Wallender Mysteries  by Henning Mankell

Murder in Old Bombay by Nev March

The Lewis Trilogy by Peter May

• The Blackhouse (Lewis Trilogy #1)
• The Lewis Man (Lewis Trilogy #2)
• The Chessmen (Lewis Trilogy #3)

Alexander McCall Smith on the No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency

• The Saturday Big Tent Wedding Party (No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency #12)
• The Limpopo Academy of Private Detection (No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency #13)
• The Minor Adjustment Beauty Salon (No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency #14)
• The Handsome Man’s De Luxe Cafe (No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency #15)
• The Woman Who Walked in Sunshine (No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency #16)
• Precious and Grace (No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency #17)
• The House of Unexpected Sisters (No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency #18)
• A Song of Comfortable Chairs (#1 Ladies Detective Agency #23)
• From a Far and Lovely Country (#1 Ladies’ Detective Agency #24)

The German Client (Bacci Pagano #6)  by Bruno Morchio

Devil in a Blue Dress (Easy Rawlins #1) by Walter Mosley

Abir Mukherjee’s Wyndham and Banerjee’s novels

• A Rising Man (Wyndham and Banerjee #1)
• A Necessary Evil (Wyndham and Banerjee #2)
• Smoke and Ashes (Wyndham and Banerjee #3)
• Death in the East (Wyndham & Banerjee #4)
• The Shadows of Men (Wyndham and Banerjee #5)

Lover Man (Artie Deemer #1) by Dallas Murphy

The Ambassador’s Wife (Inspector Samuel Tay #1)  by Jake Needham

The Umbrella Man (Inspector Samuel Tay #2)  by Jake Needham

The Harry Hole series by Jo Nesbø

• Cockroaches (Harry Hole #2)
• The Redbreast (Harry Hole #3)
• Nemesis (Harry Hole #4)
• The Devil’s Star (Harry Hole #5)
• The Snowman (Harry Hole #7)
• Phantom (Harry Hole #9)
• Police (Harry Hole #10)
• The Thirst (Harry Hole #11)

Collusion (Belfast #2) , by Stuart Neville

Nairobi Heat by Mukoma Wa Ngugi

Sara Paretsky’s V. I. Warshawski series

• Body Work (V. I. Warshawski #16)
• Breakdown (V. I. Warshawski #17)
• Critical Mass (V. I. Warshawski #18)
• Shell Game (V. I. Warshawski #19)
• Fallout (V. I. Warshawski #20)
• Dead Land (V. I. Warshawski #21)
• Overboard (V. I. Warshawski #22)

The Godwulf Manuscript (Spenser #1) by Robert B. Parker

The Cut (Spero Lucas #1)  by George Pelecanos

The Armand Gamache novels by Louise Penny

• Still Life (Inspector Armand Gamache #1)
• A Fatal Grace (Armand Gamache #2)
• How the Light Gets In (Chief Inspector Gamache #9)

The Cadfael Chronicles by Ellis Peters

• A Morbid Taste for Bones (Brother Cadfael #1)
• One Corpse Too Many (Brother Cadfael #2)
• Monk’s Hood (Brother Cadfael #2)
• Saint Peter’s Fair (Brother Cadfael #4)
• The Leper of St. Giles (Brother Cadfael #5)
• The Virgin in the Ice (Brother Cadfael #6)
• The Sanctuary Sparrow (Brother Cadfael #7)
• The Devil’s Novice (Brother Cadfael #8)

Qiu Xiaolong’s Inspector Chen novels

• Death of a Red Heroine (Inspector Chen #1)
• A Loyal Character Dancer (Inspector Chen #2)
• When Red Is Black (Inspector Chen #3)  

The Missing American (Emma Djan #1) by Kwei Quartey

Sleep Well, My Lady (Emma Djan #2) by Kwei Quartey

The Darko Dawson novels by Kwei Quartey

• Wife of the Gods (Darko Dawson #1)  
• Children of the Street (Darko Dawson #2)  
• Murder at Cape Three Points (Darko Dawson #3)

The Second Son (Inspector Nikolai Hoffner #3) by Jonathan Rabb

Ian Rankin’s Inspector Rebus novels

• Knots and Crosses (Inspector Rebus #1)
• Hide and Seek (Inspector Rebus #2)
• Tooth and Nail (Inspector Rebus #3)
• Strip Jack (Inspector Rebus #4)
• Mortal Causes (Inspector Rebus #6) by Ian Rankin
• Standing in Another Man’s Grave (Inspector Rebus #18)
• Saints of the Shadow Bible (Inspector Rebus #19)
• Even Dogs in the Wild (Inspector Rebus #20)
• A Heart Full of Headstones (Inspector Rebus #24)

Murder Under the Bridge: A Palestine Mystery ,  by Kate Jessica Raphael

The Collaborator of Bethlehem (Omar Yussef #1) by Matt Rees

The Cormoran Strike series by Robert Galbraith (J. K. Rowling)

• The Cuckoo’s Calling (Cormoran Strike #1)
• The Silkworm (Cormoran Strike #2)
• Career of Evil (Cormoran Strike #3)
• Lethal White (Cormoran Strike #4)
• Troubled Blood (Cormoran Strike #5)
• The Ink-Black Heart (Cormoran Strike #6)
• The Running Grave (Cormoran Strike #7)

The Captain Alexei Korolev novels by William Ryan

• The Holy Thief (Captain Alexei Korolev #1)
• The Darkening Field (Captain Alexei Dimitrevich Korolev #2)
• The Twelfth Department (Captain Alexei Korolev #3)

John Sandford’s Prey series

• Rules of Prey (Prey #1)
• Shadow Prey (Prey #2)
• Phantom Prey (Prey #18)
• Wicked Prey (Prey #19)
• Storm Prey (Prey #20)
• Stolen Prey (Prey #22)
• Silken Prey (Pray #23)
• Field of Prey (Prey #24)
• Gathering Prey (Prey #25)
• Extreme Prey (Prey #26)
• Masked Prey (Prey #30)
• Ocean Prey (Prey #31)
• Righteous Prey (Prey #32)

John Sandford’s Virgil Flowers series

• Dark of the Moon (Virgil Flowers #1)
• Heat Lightning (Virgil Flowers #2)
• Bad Blood (Virgil Flowers #4)
• Shock Wave (Virgil Flowers #5)
• Storm Front (Virgil Flowers #7)
• Deadline (Virgil Flowers #8)
• Escape Clause (Virgil Flowers #9)
• Deep Freeze (Virgil Flowers #10)
• Holy Ghost (Virgil Flowers #11)
• Bloody Genius (Virgil Flowers #12)

Dead Watch  by John Sandford

Dissolution (Matthew Shardlake #1)  by C. J. Sansom 

The Martin Beck novels by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö

• Roseanna (Martin Beck #1)
• The Man Who Went Up in Smoke (Martin Beck #2)  
• The Man on the Balcony (Martin Beck #3)
• The Laughing Policeman (Martin Beck #4)
• The Fire Engine That Disappeared (Martin Beck #5)
• Murder at the Savoy (Martin Beck #6)
• The Abominable Man (Martin Beck #7)
• The Locked Room (Martin Beck #8 )

From Karin Slaughter, the Will Trent series

• Broken (Will Trent #4)
• Criminal (Will Trent #7)
• The Kept Woman (Will Trent #10)

Girl, Forgotten (Andrea Oliver #2)  by Karin Slaughter

Martin Cruz Smith’s Arkady Renko novels

• Wolves Eat Dogs (Arkady Renko #5)
• Three Stations (Arkady Renko #7)  
• Tatiana (Arkady Renko #8)
• Independence Square (Arkady Renko #10)

Agent 6 (Leo Demidov #3) , by Tom Rob Smith

Secrets Typed in Blood (Pentecost and Parker #3)  by Stephen Spotswood

Trouble in Nuala (Inspector de Silva #1)  by Harriet Steele

Olen Steinhauer’s Yalta Boulevard Cycle

• The Bridge of Sighs (Yalta Boulevard #1)
• The Confession (Yalta Boulevard #2)  
• 36 Yalta Boulevard (Yalta Boulevard #3)
• Liberation Movements (Yalta Boulevard #4)

The Land of Dreams (Minnesota Trilogy #1) ,  by Vidar Sundstøl

The Second Girl  by David Swinson

Briarpatch  by Ross Thomas

A Test of Wills (Inspector Ian Rutledge #1)  by Charles Todd  

The Ark (Children of a Dead Earth #1 of 3) by Patrick S. Tomlinson

Trident’s Forge (Children of a Dead Earth #2 of 3) by Patrick S. Tomlinson

The Chinese Maze Murders (Judge Dee #1)  by Robert van Gulik

Waking the Tiger (Inspector Betancourt #1)  by Mark Wightman

The Maisie Dobbs novels by Jacqueline Winspear

• Maisie Dobbs (Maisie Dobbs #1)
• Birds of a Feather (Maisie Dobbs #2)
• Pardonable Lies (Maisie Dobbs #3)
• Messenger of Truth (Maisie Dobbs #4)
• An Incomplete Revenge (Maisie Dobbs #5)
• The Mapping of Love and Death (Maisie Dobbs #7)
• A Lesson in Secrets (Maisie Dobbs #8)
• Elegy for Eddie (Maisie Dobbs #9)
• Leaving Everything Most Loved (Maisie Dobbs #10)
• A Dangerous Place (Maisie Dobbs #11)
• Journey to Munich (Maisie Dobbs #12)
• In This Grave Hour (Maisie Dobbs #13)
• To Die But Once (Maisie Dobbs #14)
• The American Agent (Maisie Dobbs #15)
• The Consequences of Fear (Maisie Dobbs #16)
• A Sunlit Weapon (Maisie Dobbs #17)

For related reading

This post is one of  My 10 top reading recommendations .

You might also enjoy my posts:

• Mystery and thriller series starters can be misleading
• Top 10 mystery and thriller series
• 20 excellent standalone mysteries and thrillers
• 20 outstanding detective series from around the world

And if you’re looking for exciting historical novels, check out Top 10 historical mysteries and thrillers .

Also, you can always find my most popular reviews, and the most recent ones, on the Home Page .

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RECENT REVIEWS

Tuesday's Newsletter

Mysteries & Thrillers Tuesday includes my latest mystery and thriller book review, with links to other science fiction content.

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• Crime & Thrillers

The 50 best crime fiction books of all time

From gentle detective stories to gritty true-to-life cases, our edit of the most exciting crime fiction will have you turning the pages late into the night. .

Few books are as satisfying as a crime fiction novel you can really sink your teeth into. Including gripping detective novels and cosy crime series , here’s our edit of the most exciting crime fiction of 2023, what's to come in 2024, and the best crime fiction of all time. 

If you're looking for even more unputdownable reads, don't miss our edit of the best thriller books.  

The best crime fiction books of 2024

The raging storm, by ann cleeves.

Detective Matthew Venn returns in The Raging Storm , the next captivating novel in the Two Rivers series from Ann Cleeves. When enigmatic sailor Jem Rosco arrives in Greystone, Devon, the town are delighted to have a celebrity in their midst. But when he disappears and is later found dead during a storm, DI Matthew Venn faces an uncomfortable case. Having left the Barum Brethren community in Greystone, Venn's judgment is clouded by superstitions and rumors as another body is discovered in Scully Cove. Isolated by the storm, Venn and his team embark on a perilous investigation, unaware that their own lives may be at risk. 

Don't Miss

Ann Cleeves' Two Rivers series in order

A calamity of souls, by david baldacci.

1968, southern Virginia. Jack Lee is a white lawyer who has never pushed back against racism until he decides to represent Jerome Washington, a Black man charged with killing a white couple. Desiree DuBose is a Black lawyer who has devoted her life to furthering the cause of justice. Lee and DuBose could not be more dissimilar. On their own, neither one can stop the prosecution’s deliberate march towards a guilty verdict and the electric chair. But together, the pair fight for a chance for a fair trial and true justice. A Calamity of Souls is the latest book from crime thriller aficionado, David Baldacci. 

David Baldacci's books in order

All of us are broken, by fiona cummins.

Thirteen-year-old Galen has wanted to see the wild dolphins at Scotland’s Chanonry Point for as long as she can remember, and lone mother Christine is determined she gets her wish. But their trip is interrupted when DC Saul Anguish is called to investigate the shooting of an ex-police officer –  the first of a string of killings by Missy and Fox, a damaged young couple hell-bent on infamy, their love story etched in blood. In pursuit, Saul follows their trail north. Meanwhile, the paths of the Hardwickes' and the deadly couple are about to collide . . . 

Other Women

By emma flint.

Based on a real case from the 1920s,  Other Women  tells the story of Beatrice, one of the thousands of invisible unmarried women trying to make lives for themselves after the First World War, and Kate, the wife of the man Beatrice has fallen in love with. When fantasy and obsession turns to murder, two women who should never have met are connected forever. Mesmerising, haunting and utterly remarkable, this is a devastating story of fantasy and obsession inspired by a murder that took place almost a hundred years ago.

The Antique Hunter's Guide to Murder

By c l miller.

Freya Lockwood has avoided the quaint English village she grew up in for the last twenty years, until she is forced to return when her estranged mentor and antiques dealer, Arthur Crockleford, suspiciously dies. She receives a letter from Arthur and discovers his journals, plunging her back into her past. Joining with her Aunt Carole, Arthur's loyal friend, they attend an antiques weekend at a manor. There, amidst poor replicas and guests with hidden agendas, they have to solve the mystery and uncover the killer before it's too late.

Death on the Lusitania

By r. l. graham.

Set on the RMS Lusitania's final journey in 1915, Patrick Gallagher, a government civil servant, escorts a British diplomat back to England. But after a passenger, secluded in a locked cabin, is believed to have killed himself with a missing firearm, Gallagher is requested to investigate. Was it suicide or a meticulously planned murder? Gallagher believes one of the passengers is a deadly killer who could strike again to protect their true reasons for being on board. And all the while, the ship sails on towards Europe, where deadly submarines patrol dark waters.

The best crime fiction books of 2023

Bright young women, by jessica knoll.

January 1978. Tallahassee. When sorority president Pamela Schumacher is startled awake at 3 a.m. by a strange sound, she’s shocked to encounter a scene of implausible violence – two of her friends dead and two others, maimed. The only person to see the man responsible, she is thrust into a terrifying mystery, entangled in a crime that captivates public interest for more than four decades. This extraordinary novel is inspired by the real-life sorority targeted by America's first celebrity serial killer in his final murderous spree.

Must-read female crime authors

The cat who solved three murders, by l t shearer.

Rescue cat Conrad is no ordinary feline. Since he moved onto retired police detective Lulu Lewis’s narrowboat, the pair have become a secret crimefighting duo. When Lulu travels by boat to Oxford for a friend’s party, tracking down a murderer is the last thing on her mind. But when a murder is committed and a priceless painting is stolen without a trace, the pair find themselves with two mysteries to solve. The perfect autumn read for cat lovers, discover the sequel to L T Shearer's The Cat Who Caught a Killer .

The Murder Wall

By mari hannah.

Months after failing to solve a brutal double murder that rocked a sleepy town in the Northumbrian countryside, DCI Kate Daniels is still reeling from the case and looking for a new chance to prove her mettle. When she’s called to the scene of a murder in Newcastle’s city centre, her opportunity to make amends is clouded when she realises she knows the victim. Caught in a dilemma of whether to disclose what she knows, Daniels soon finds herself being watched and fearing that she might be the killer’s next target. The Murder Wall is the first novel by Mari Hannah to feature veteran investigator DCI Kate Daniels. 

by Jane Harper

When a young mother vanishes from a bustling spring festival, leaving her young baby alone in her pram, her disappearance casts a long shadow over her small outback town. One year later and no closer to finding out what became of Kim Gillespie, Detective Aaron Falk sets out to unearth the secrets behind her disappearance once and for all. With its gripping plot, evocative Australian setting and haunting tale of a woman who vanishes without a trace, Jane Harper’s new thriller is one of the most anticipated crime fiction books of 2023. 

Discover all of Jane Harper's books in order

Cast a cold eye, by robbie morrison.

With violence erupting between rival gangs and political tensions rising, for war veterans turned investigators Dreghorn and McDaid, murder on their patch in interwar Glasgow is nothing new. But when a man is left brutally executed on a narrowboat on the city’s Forth and Clyde Canal, the pair quickly realise that this isn’t a run-of-the-mill killing. Capturing the tension and grit of interwar Glasgow in this thrilling historical mystery, Cast a Cold Eye is the second Dreghorn and McDaid novel by Robbie Morrison, winner of Bloody Scotland’s Scottish Crime Debut of the Year. 

The Blame Game

By sandie jones.

There are two sides to every story, but only one truth. He came to me for help with his marriage. I was alone and afraid. She was there when I needed to talk. I needed to make him understand that he had to get away. I knew what I needed to do. I just couldn’t do it on my own. I trusted her. Now it has gone too far. And I can’t tell anyone what I have done. Now I have nowhere to turn and I just pray they find me before she does. In  The Blame Game , a psychologist becomes involved with a patient and each blame the other for what happens next. This is a dark, entertaining and suspenseful thriller from Sandie Jones. 

The Murders at Fleat House

By lucinda riley.

The sudden death of a pupil in Fleat House at St Stephen’s – a small private boarding school in deepest Norfolk – is a shocking event that the headmaster is very keen to call a tragic accident. But the local police cannot rule out foul play and the case prompts the return of high-flying Detective Inspector Jazmine ‘Jazz’ Hunter to the force.  As staff at the school close ranks, the disappearance of another young pupil and the death of an elderly Classics master provide Jazz with important leads, but as snow covers the landscape and another suspect goes missing, Jazz must also confront her personal demons.

More standalone books by author of The Seven Sisters, Lucinda Riley

Good bad girl, by alice feeney.

In a tale of intertwining crimes, a baby's abduction two decades ago connects to a murder in a care home. Unravelling the truth rests on the shoulders of a complex yet intriguing character, the 'good bad girl.' Edith, determined to escape her nursing home, forms a bond with Patience, a caretaker harbouring secrets. Meanwhile, Edith's daughter Clio remains distant, and a looming presence approaches Clio's doorstep with ill intentions. With mistrust brewing, the women must navigate a web of suspects, murders, and a singular victim, unearthing the fates of the vanished baby, the grieving mother, and the ties that bind them all.

Stop Them Dead

By peter james.

Stop Them Dead is the latest instalment of Peter James's award-winning Grace series. In the dead of night, a farmer hears a suspicious noise. It’s everyone’s worst nightmare: a break-in. When he confronts the intruders, he has no idea that he will be left lying in a pool of blood just minutes later. But the chilling truth lies not in the act itself, but what the perpetrators were willing to kill for. And Roy Grace’s investigation into this deadly trade pits him against some of the most ruthless people he has ever encountered.

Peter James's Roy Grace books in order

Palace of shadows, by ray celestin.

Artist Samuel Etherstone, impoverished and isolated in London, accepts a commission from mysterious heiress Mrs Chesterfield for her house on North Yorkshire's Smugglers' Coast. Warned about the haunted lands, Samuel hears eerie tales of missing girls, mad locals, and fate of house's first architect, Varano. Upon arrival, the eerie details of Varano's disappearance and the ever-expanding wings of the house puzzle him. As he explores deeper, he begins to understand the terrifying nature of his project.

Ritual of Fire

By d. v. bishop.

In Summer 1538 Florence, a merchant is found hanged and ablaze, mirroring the execution of puritanical monk, Savonarola, forty years ago. It raises fears of the revival of his holy terror regime. While Cesare Aldo is busy in the Tuscan countryside, Constable Carlo Strocchi investigates this murder. As more merchants are publicly burned, panic ensues. A blend of growing religious zeal and intense heatwave brings Florence closer to madness. Aldo and Strocchi's collaboration is Florence's only hope of avoiding destruction.  Ritual of Fire  is the third book in B. V. Bishop's historical crime series, preceded by  City of Vengeance  and  The Darkest Sin .

The Square of Sevens

By laura shepherd-robinson.

A historical crime fiction novel packed with fortune-telling, travels and mystery, The Sqaure of Sevens an epic and sweeping novel set in Georgian high society. A girl known only as Red, the daughter of a Cornish fortune-teller, travels with her father making a living predicting fortunes using the ancient method: the Square of Sevens. When her father suddenly dies, Red becomes the ward of a gentleman scholar. But soon, she can't ignore the burning questions about her family. The pursuit of these mysteries takes her across the country in an tale of intrigue, heartbreak and audacious twists. 

Black Thorn

By sarah hilary.

Sarah Hilary's compulsive psychological crime thriller will have you questioning how much you know about the people who live next to you.  An exclusive new housing development, Blackthorn Ashes, is the new home for six families hoping for a peaceful life on the cliffs overlooking the Cornish sea. But six weeks later, paradise is lost. Six people are dead. One of its surviving residents, Agnes Gale, is determined to discover the truth about what happened, even if that truth is deadlier than she could have ever believed possible. 

The Wild Coast

By lin anderson.

A remote shoreline. A lethal killer. Forensic scientist Rhona MacLeod faces a disturbing case when she encounters a shallow grave on Scotland's west coast adorned with a stickman made of twigs in the victim's mouth. Rhona realises a predator is targeting wild campers as another young woman goes missing from a nearby campsite, with a similar sinister figurine discovered in her van. An idyllic coastline known for providing peace and serenity, now the area is a hunting ground. With a young woman's life hanging in the balance, time is running out, and Rhona must unravel the truth.

A Twist of the Knife

Peter James's A Twist of the Knife is a thrilling collection of short stories, including the novellas The Perfect Murder, Footloose with Val McDermid, and In The Nick of Time written with Ian Rankin. Each story begins with a chilling twist of a knife, featuring characters from a revengeful woman to a man planning a life-altering meeting. Readers are introduced to detective Roy Grace in his first case, the inspiration for James's series. Each tale carries a twist that will haunt readers for days after they turn the final page.

The Cat Who Caught a Killer

Essential reading for Richard Osman and S. J. Bennet fans, and all those who love their crime cosy. Follow Lulu Lewis as she seeks to resolve the suspicious death of her mother-in-law, Emily, in L T Shearer's gripping whodunit. As a former police detective fraught with grief following the death of her husband, Lulu's retirement is turned upside-down when Emily dies. However, Lulu's not alone. Amidst her quest for answers is Conrad, a remarkable cat who is with her every step of the way.

Into the Dark

DS Saul Anguish, a brilliant detective with a difficult past, must face his own demons as he untangles the painful story behind the sudden disappearance of an entire family. 

The kettle is still warm, all the family’s phones are charging on the worktop, but the house is deserted. In fifteen-year-old Riva Holden’s bedroom, scrawled across the mirror in blood, are three words: Make Them Stop . In a gorgeous Art Deco home looking out to the bay of Midtown-on-Sea, a terrible crime has come to light. An entire family – Piper and Gray and their two teenage children – has vanished. 

by Hayley Scrivenor

Detective Sergeant Sarah Michaels begins her investigation of the disappearance of twelve-year-old Esther Bianchi from her home in the small rural Australian town of Durton. For Esther's mother Constance this is the worst thing that could possibly happen. But as the investigation continues, things get worse still. Esther's best friend Ronnie is doing her own investigation. Who is the strange man Esther was seen with at the creek? And why are witnesses refusing to speak to the police?

The Darkest Sin

It's spring in Florence in 1537, and Cesare Aldo is investigating a report that a convent in the northern quarter has been breached. Soon Aldo finds himself immersed in a bitterly divided community. And when a man's body is found in the convent, it seems as if one of the nuns must be the murderer. Meanwhile, Constable Carlo Strocchi finds human body parts in the Arno, which turn out to be the remains of a much feared officer who went missing in the winter. Aldo and Strocchi search for the truth, in an investigation that is increasingly full of peril.

The best crime fiction books of all time

The daughter of time, by josephine tey.

Voted the top crime novel of all time by the UK Crime Writers’ Association,  The Daughter of Time  has an unusual premise for a crime novel: investigating the role Richard III played in the death of his own nephews. Inspector Alan Grant is laid up in hospital with a spinal injury and he’s bored. Renowned for his ability to read a face, he passes the time looking at old portraits and one which particularly grabs his attention is of Richard III. Grant doesn't accept the face in the portrait is one of a villain so he sets out to investigate what really happened to the children. So, unusual, yes; but also extremely clever and engrossing, brilliantly plotted and written with enormous charm and erudition.

The Franchise Affair

The Franchise Affair is a gripping thriller detective, perfect for fans of true crime and classic crime fiction . Fifteen-year-old Betty Kane has never put a foot wrong. Naturally, everyone is shocked to hear her story – that she was kidnapped, tortured and held prisoner by Marion Sharpe and her elderly mother, owners of the mysterious old house, The Franchise. But are the two women really guilty of such a horrendous crime? Every page resonates with tension as the story unfolds – did they or didn’t they take a young girl prisoner? And whose story can you trust?

Malice Aforethought

By francis iles.

Malice Aforethought  is one of the earliest and finest examples of the inverted detective story – we know who committed the crime, the question is, will he get away with it? Dr Edmund Bickleigh and his insufferable wife Julia are hosting a tennis party where gossip rivals tennis as the most interesting sport. The seemingly genteel doctor is unable to tolerate Julia’s henpecking any longer, and as his passion for the mysterious Madeleine Cranmere grows so does his resolve to murder his wife. Set in stuffy 1920s England and told from the perspective of the devious Dr Bickleigh himself,  Malice Aforethought  is impeccably plotted and darkly comic.

Brighton Rock

By graham greene.

Set among the seaside amusements and dilapidated boarding houses of Brighton’s pre-war underworld,  Brighton Rock  is both a gritty thriller and a study of a soul in torment. Pinkie Brown, a neurotic teenage gangster commits a brutal murder – but it does not go unnoticed. Rose, a naive young waitress at a rundown cafe, has the unwitting power to destroy his crucial alibi, and Ida Arnold, a woman bursting with easy certainties about what is right and wrong, has made it her mission to bring about justice and redemption. A classic of modern literature, it maps out the strange border between piety and savagery. 

The Face on the Cutting-Room Floor

By cameron mccabe.

1930s King's Cross, London. When aspiring film actress Estella Lamare is found dead on the cutting-room floor of a London film studio, Cameron McCabe finds himself at the centre of a police investigation. There are multiple suspects, multiple confessors and, as more people around him die, McCabe begins to perform his own amateur sleuth-work, followed doggedly by the mysterious Inspector Smith. But then, abruptly, McCabe's account ends. Who is Cameron McCabe? Is he victim? Murderer? Novelist? Joker?

by Yvvette Edwards

Marcia Williams thought she knew her son. She was wrong. Marcia is heading to the Old Bailey. She's going there to do something no mother should ever have to do: to attend the trial of the boy accused of her son's murder. She's not meant to be that woman; Ryan, her son, wasn't that kind of boy. But Tyson Manley  is  that kind of a boy and, as his trial unfolds, it becomes clear that it's his girlfriend Sweetie who has the answers Marcia so badly needs and offer Marcia some kind of hope for the future. But Sweetie is as scared of Tyson as Ryan should have been and, as Marcia's learned the hard way, nothing's certain.

Sixteen Horses

By greg buchanan.

Near the dying English seaside town of Ilmarsh, local police detective Alec Nichols discovers sixteen horses’ heads on a farm, each buried with a single eye facing the low winter sun. After forensic veterinarian Cooper Allen travels to the scene, the investigators uncover evidence of a chain of crimes in the community – disappearances, arson and mutilations – all culminating in the reveal of something deadly lurking in the ground. A story of enduring guilt, trauma and punishment, set in a small seaside community the rest of the world has left behind, Sixteen Horses is the debut literary thriller from an extraordinary talent. 

The Interview

By c. m. ewan.

It is Friday, 5 p.m. You're being interviewed for the job you always wanted, in an office thirteen floors above the city. There's nobody else around but you and the interviewer, and their questions are getting stranger and more unsettling. Your fear is rising, and the only route out is to answer a seemingly impossible question. This nail-biting novel comes from bestselling mystery and thriller author C. M. Ewan.

The Decagon House Murders

By yukito ayatsuji.

A Japanese cult classic, Ayatsuji's murder mystery puzzle will delight fans of classic whodunnits. Tsunojima is a desolate, rocky island known for a series of gruesome and unsolved murders – the perfect choice for the K-University Mystery Club's annual trip. But after a club member turns up dead, the Mystery Club realise they might have taken on more than their amateur sleuthing skills can handle. Will any of the survivors deduce the murderer's horrific plan before it's too late?

The Honjin Murders

By seishi yokomizo.

Hailed as Japan's greatest classic murder mystery, Seishi Yokomizo's story has been translated into English for the first time. In the depths of winter, 1937, excitement grows throughout the rural Japanese village of Okamura as the wedding of a son of the famous Ichiyanagi family approaches, despite the worrying presence of a masked man lurking in the village. But on the night of the wedding, a terrible death upends the Ichiyanagi household – with the only clue being a bloody samurai sword left in the snow outside the house. Can amateur detective Kosuke Kindaichi find the killer, and unravel what is appears to be an impossible crime?

The Shape of Water

By andrea camilleri.

Escape the winter chill and step into the sun-soaked Sicilian setting of Andrea Camilleri’s brilliantly witty Inspector Montalbano series. The Shape of Water introduces Camilleri’s beloved sleuth as he investigates the mysterious death of a respected and brilliant engineer, whose unexpected death his colleagues are all too ready to declare as due to natural causes. With its corrupt politicians, red herrings and the island’s ever-present mobsters, The Shape of Water is escapist crime writing at its page-turning best.

Last Bus to Woodstock

By colin dexter.

Last Bus to Woodstock is the first novel in Colin Dexter's gripping Inspector Morse crime fiction series. The death of Sylvia Kaye figured dramatically in Thursday afternoon's edition of the Oxford Mail. By Friday evening Inspector Morse had informed the nation that the police were looking for a dangerous man – facing charges of wilful murder, sexual assault and rape. But as the obvious leads fade into twilight and darkness, Morse becomes more and more convinced that passion holds the key. 

A guide to Colin Dexter's Inspector Morse series

Black water rising, by attica locke.

After saving a woman from drowning in the Houston bayou, lawyer Jay Porter finds himself entangled in a murder investigation that could cost him his practice – or even his life. But as he attempts to make sense of a dark mystery that threatens the hierarchies of corporate power, while confronting his own banished demons of the past. Shortlisted for the Orange Prize, Black Water Rising was Attica Locke's incredible debut onto the crime fiction scene. 

My Sister, the Serial Killer

By oyinkan braithwaite.

Korede faces a daunting predicament when Ayoola, her sister, seeks her assistance after killing her third boyfriend under the pretence of self-defence. Bearing the responsibility of clearing her sister's mess, Korede grapples with the idea of approaching the police, but familial loyalty holds her back. That is until Ayoola starts dating the doctor where Korede works as a nurse. Korede's long been in love with him, and isn't prepared to see him wind up with a knife in his back: but to save one would mean sacrificing the other.

Blanche on the Lam

By barbara neely.

Blanche White is middle-aged African-American housekeeper, working in the homes of the decorous rich in North Carolina. But after one employer refuses to pay her, she goes on the lam and begins to work at a summer home for a wealthy family. It's a great plan, until she finds herself as the prime suspect of a murder investigation. Using all of her quick wit and years of experience as a domestic made, she must uncover the truth and clear her name. Revealing the quirks of southern society with a biting irony, Barbara Neely's Blanche White has quickly become one of the most original and well-loved characters to appear in crime fiction.

A Little Local Murder

By robert barnard.

This classic small-town murder mystery from Robert Barnard has everything you could ask from a cosy crime novel. A radio documentary on the small village of Twytching provokes a fierce rivalry among the villagers. Inspector George Parrish is keen to stay out of all the fuss until the murder of one of the villagers and a rash of letters uncovering secrets about Twytching's leading citizens force him to get involved. Robert Barnard skilfully demonstrates that no one is more cunning in preparing the reader to expect the unexpected and his incisive character portrayals impart a dimension rarely found in English detective fiction.

Tell Me Your Secret

By dorothy koomson.

Ten years ago, Pieta survived a weekend with a serial killer. She never told anyone what happened, but now he’s back – and staying alive might mean revealing her darkest secret. Fifteen years ago, Jody, a policewoman, made a mistake that resulted in the killer going free. When she discovers Pieta’s story, she realises she now has a way to catch him. 

Murder on the Orient Express

By agatha christie.

Agatha Christie belongs on any essential reading list, and Murder on the Orient Express is widely regarded as her most famous murder mystery. A train journey is delayed by thick snow. So when a passenger on the train is found murdered in his bed, it is the perfect opportunity for Agatha Christie's famous detective, Hercule Poirot, to prove his ability and solve the crime using the power of his brain. Now also a major motion picture, delve into the suspense, twists and turns of this story from the queen of mystery herself. 

Dead Simple

When a young husband-to-be vanishes three days before his wedding after a prank on his stag night goes awry, his distraught fiancée enlists the task of finding him to Detective Superintendent Roy Grace. As Grace attempts to recreate the timeline from that fateful night, he finds that some of the wedding party are holding onto secrets that may help him crack the case. The first novel in Peter James DS Roy Grace, Dead Simple will leave you guessing until the final page. 

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50 Best Detective Books of All Time

Detective novels are such a great genre of books, filled with with quirky private investigators, dark back alleys, sultry heiresses, and shocking villains.

I fell in love with Agatha Christie novels early on when I was young for reasons I don’t entirely understand, but I’ve loved detective novels ever since. Most of the authors on this list have written multiple detective novels, but I tried to limit most of them to one or two entries, usually the first book in a series unless there’s a particularly good or well-known book in the series. The only exception is Agatha Christia, who gets three because I love her!

Anyway, there’s the list of the Best Detective Books of All Time! Happy detecting slash reading! :)

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Saving this post to use as a TBR list! So many great books and so many I haven’t read. Thanks for the list!

yay! happy reading and thanks for dropping by! :)

Falk, Murakami, Gone Girl, and Christie are in my TBR. Have read Holmes and LOVE the Millennium trilogy by Stieg Larsson. 😍 And Reacher is the next series I’m going to read, event chronology wise.

you’ve never read an agatha christie book? oh you have to, I love her so much!

I’ll start this year. With And Then There Were None, hopefully. 🙈

excited for you, and interested to hear your thoughts if you end up getting a chance to read it! :)

that’s interesting! i’ve never read a detective book before but they do have a wide variety! thanks for sharing💞

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Explore the mysteries of fictional and real worlds with four Los Angeles writers who pay homage to giants of the genre while creating stories that are irresistible in their own right.

The Murder of Mr. Ma By S.J. Rozan and John Shen Yen Nee Soho Crime: 312 pages, $26

“The Murder of Mr. Ma” combines first-time author John Shen Yen Nee’s experience in comics and digital storytelling with the mystery-writing chops of veteran S.J. Rozan. The novel reimagines two Chinese historical figures — magistrate Di Renjie, popularized in Judge Dee mysteries and numerous film adaptations, and novelist Lao She — and drops them into 1924 London, a period rich in Sino-British intrigue. Twentysomething Lao She is a lecturer attempting to teach Chinese to “people whose need to learn it far outstripped their interest in doing so” and looking for an idea for a novel when he’s asked by Bertrand Russell to help the renowned Judge Dee escape from jail, where he’s been rounded up with a group of Chinese agitators. Though their plan goes sideways, Lao She and Judge Dee form a bond that carries them into the murder investigation of Ma Ze Ren, a Chinese national and shop owner who served with the Chinese Labour Corps in France during WWI.

Drawing inspiration from the Holmes/Watson dynamic and the long tradition of gong’an crime fiction in China, the intrepid duo’s investigation draws readers into the Chinese presence in WWI and postwar London. Along the way, they reveal the intersection of real-life figures like Russell and Ezra Pound in Sino-British relations, the early British film industry’s lucrative “yellow peril films” and much more. Also engrossing are the rich details of Chinese culture and traditions familiar to readers of Rozan’s Lydia Chin/Bill Smith mysteries, while the vivid action scenes feel as visceral as a Chow Yun-fat circular kick with double forearm strike.

A sparkling and thought-provoking debut of a fresh dynamic duo whose adventures I’ll be eager to follow.

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Although you have independently had success in different creative fields, yours is a first-time collaboration. What did each of you bring to the pairing?

S.J. Rozan : John brought more historical knowledge and understanding than anyone I’d ever met. He also brought the outline, which was a great gift. I’m not an outliner; I can’t create a character until I see her act. The process of writing my own books is filled with angst. John had a complete story.

John Shen Yen Nee : Which S.J. operated on, surgically removing parts and Frankensteining other things in. And then she gave the characters three full dimensions, gave the settings atmosphere and gave the story rhythm.

How do you reimagine the historical Di Renjie? And why pair him with Lao She?

Rozan : The relationship between the real Judge Dee and the stories translated by, and the new ones written by, Robert van Gulik is a bit like that between the real Robin Hood and the stories about him. There was such a man, but the legend outgrew him. So we felt allowed to add to the legend.

Nee : The historical Judge Dee was known for solving all his cases, and for exacting demanding justice. He wasn’t a physical hero, a martial artist. We added that. Lao She, a writer revered in China, then banned, then “rehabilitated” and once again revered, seemed like the perfect soft-spoken, smart, brave but slightly behind narrator to tell Dee’s stories.

Who is your favorite Golden Age mystery writer and why?

Nee : Hands down, it’s Agatha Christie. I really liked the way that she used Captain Hastings as a narrator with Hercule Poirot. I’m a giant fan of Poirot, and I thought it would be fun to create a Chinese detective that wasn’t a caricature of the “Insidious Chinaman” (Fu Manchu) or someone like Charlie Chan.

Rozan : Christie for me too. She’s admired for her plots, but I don’t think she gets enough credit for her understanding of people, of motive. Motive is what has always interested me.

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The Stars Turned Inside Out By Nova Jacobs Atria Books: 320 pages, $28

In 2018’s Edgar-nominated debut, “The Last Equation of Isaac Severy,” Nova Jacobs incorporated STEM into a mystery that was approachable and highly engaging. She’s at it again with “The Stars Turned Inside Out,” set among physicists working at the CERN laboratory’s Large Hadron Collider outside of Geneva. A CERN engineer discovers the body of recent hire Howard Anderby in an LHC tunnel shut down for repairs, presumably killed by radiation exposure. Yet the collider had not been turned on nor do videos of the tunnel show anyone present.

The CERN director calls in Sabine Leroux, a “consulting detective” and friend, to secretly investigate. Chapters from the point of view of Leroux — an outsider who employs Poirot-inspired investigative methods — contrast with those centered on Eve Marsh, a young postdoctoral physicist and colleague crushing on the handsome Anderby while harboring her own secrets and professional worries.

While the novel exposes the professional rivalries and hidden desires of a sensitively drawn group of Anderby’s colleagues and frenemies, it’s also a touching story about love and friendship, born of sorrow and guilt. Then the novel takes a metaphysical turn that is wholly unexpected. Who knew particle physics could be so bewitching?

What inspired you to combine physics and a locked-room mystery?

I didn’t initially think of my book as a locked-room mystery, though I very much set out to write a classic whodunit in a physics setting. It was the CERN laboratory’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) that first captivated my imagination, not just as an intensely complex machine but also as very much its own place unlike any on Earth. I saw a 2013 documentary about CERN, which features a shot of an engineer bicycling through the LHC tunnel during a collider shutdown. The contrast between this sophisticated machine and the very low-tech manner in which engineers travel along the pipe really delighted me.

Why did you write two such different but engaging central characters?

I didn’t want every single character to be a scientist, which seemed a recipe for a static story. I was interested in creating some kind of tension between science and not-science . So in switching between a woman who has devoted her life to particle physics yet is questioning her own choices (Eve) and a detective who’s rejected a strictly scientific path (Sabine), I was able to create that necessary push and pull in the novel between the sciences and the lay world.

Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers are inescapable early loves and ongoing favorites. But G.K. Chesterton is up there for me simply for “The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare,” which is one of the most inventive mysteries I’ve ever encountered. It also reads as a kind of spy thriller, with a speculative depth lurking beneath its multiple switchbacks in plot. It remains one of the most buoyant, mischievous and surprisingly metaphysical pieces of fiction I’ve ever read.

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A Better World By Sarah Langan Atria Books: 368 pages, $29

In “A Better World,” Sarah Langan paints a disturbing picture of a late 21st century world not that far removed from our own. In the United Colonies and around the world, it’s the “Era of the Great Unwinding,” a time when “the institutions, laws and even the bridges and roads that people had come to depend upon were falling apart.” Those with the means and connections are fleeing to company towns. One such town is Plymouth Valley, or PV as it’s called by insiders, in South Dakota. Owned by BetterWorld, makers of Omnium, a biodegradable polymer made from recycled plastic, PV is the seat of operations for the multinational conglomerate and home to its top executives and scientists.

It’s also the last chance for the Farmer-Bowens family, Brooklynites drowning in debt, rising waters and crime. Linda Farmer’s job as part-time pediatrician at a free clinic doesn’t cover the bills. Her husband, Russell Bowens, has been laid off from his job as a science advisor in the EPA’s regulatory department. Then the family is thrown a lifeline — a job for Russell at BetterWorld, plus all living and education expenses paid. The job also comes with the ultimate perk — a golden ticket to live in PV forever, earned for the family once Russell satisfactorily completes 25 years of service. Bottom line, the recruiter tells them: “Your children will be set for life.” It’s a sacrifice any parent would make, right? What could be wrong with that?

Turns out plenty, much of it revolving around a set of customs called Hollow, a genetically engineered carnivorous bird called a caladrius and the increasingly bizarre behavior of the cosmetically perfect locals. As the family tries to fit in, Linda begins investigating what an unhinged mother swears is the kidnapping of her two children, both of whom are fighting a rare form of cancer. A potent cocktail of horror, suspense and thriller, “A Better World” is a cautionary tale of a family’s sacrifice gone wrong and a high-water mark in the career of a novelist who’s already won three Bram Stoker Awards. My only warning: Don’t start this book on a school night. Beware the sacrifice!

To put it mildly, Plymouth Valley is a company town on steroids. What inspired it?

About 10 years ago, a friend gave me a tour of the Google offices in Manhattan. They’re fantastic. They have everything; you never need to leave. Plus, everyone there is hard-working and pleasant — the kinds of people you’d love to spend time with and learn from. I can see the appeal. Who wouldn’t take that job?

In my fictional town, the have-nots are all outside PV’s high walls and therefore invisible. But the kinds of people who can tolerate that cognitive dissonance — their work scaffolds their privilege but also hurts the world — tend to become erratic and prone to magical thinking. They’ll believe any story, submit to any absurdity, so long as they don’t have to admit they’re the villains.

For all of the thriller and horror tropes in “A Better World,” I was intrigued by the intimate portrait of the Farmer-Bowens family. Can you share a bit about why families in distress are so central to your story?

Families fascinate me. We all come from family; we’re all seeking chosen families. The good and the bad that we learned from our birth families, we project onto our new families. Through our children, we understand our parents. Or we understand them a lot less than we thought.

What both this novel and my last, “Good Neighbors,” have in common is this question: How much would you sacrifice for your children? How much of your own morality would you violate to keep them safe? And the question that comes after that: Should you sacrifice that much? Is it good for you? For them? For the world?

I felt like there were a lot of classic genre echoes in “A Better World” — Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery,” Ira Levin’s “The Stepford Wives” and “Rosemary’s Baby,” even Aldous Huxley’s “1984.” Were there classic genre writers on your mind as you were writing the book?

I had those works on my mind, as well as “The Handmaid’s Tale” for its theocratic world-building. And Alice Munro’s “The Beggar Maid” never leaves my thoughts. A book I’d also like to shout out, because not enough people have read it, is Kate Wilhelm’s “Where Late the Sweet Birds Sing.” In preparation for writing “A Better World,” I also watched “Chinatown.” I was inspired by the great conspiracy at the center of the story, and [John] Huston’s villain. I mean , that’s a villain!

A member of the National Book Critics Circle, Woods is the editor of several anthologies and four novels in the “Charlotte Justice” mystery series.

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The Best Fiction Books » Crime Novels

The best detective fiction, recommended by jeffrey archer.

Over My Dead Body by Jeffrey Archer

With so many works of detective fiction coming out each year, which books stand the test of time? Here, bestselling British author Jeffrey Archer talks us through some of his favourites, the books he found completely unputdownable and made him want to read everything the author had written.

Interview by Sophie Roell , Editor

The Kind Worth Killing by Peter Swanson

An Unsuitable Job for a Woman by P D James

The House of Silk by Anthony Horowitz

The Firm by John Grisham

And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie

1 The Kind Worth Killing by Peter Swanson

2 an unsuitable job for a woman by p d james, 3 the house of silk by anthony horowitz, 4 the firm by john grisham, 5 and then there were none by agatha christie.

Y ou’ve chosen some of your favourite detective fiction for us, spanning quite a few decades. What makes a good work of detective fiction, what are you looking for as a reader?

There are great detective writers over the ages who are wonderful. The books I’ve chosen are ones that I think are unputdownable and exceptional. They only come once in a while and I’ve chosen five for you to consider.

Given it’s so overcrowded, how come you ended up writing in the detective fiction genre?

Well, I didn’t. As I’ve said very clearly, my book is not a detective story, it’s a story about a detective. I’m more interested in the life of William Warwick as he goes from being a constable on the beat—and, if I live long enough—through to being Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police. Each book will have a new subject. The first one is about art and he’s on the antiques squad. The second one is about drugs, the third about police corruption. Now, in the latest one, he’s head of the murder squad. He will go up one rank with each book, so in the first book he is a detective constable, in the second a detective sergeant, in the third a detective inspector. In the book you have in front of you, he has become a detective chief inspector.

“I want a book that’s exceptional”

So, with each book, you’re going to have a different subject and a different rank, right through to Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police—as long as I live to the age of 86, Sophie! That’s my only hope. Otherwise, he will never get to the Commissioner’s office.

I read a lot of crime fiction and I’m a fan of plot twists. But from what you’re saying, it’s sounds like you’re not going for that corner of the genre, where the book revolves around a ‘wow’ moment where you’re completely taken aback by something that you weren’t expecting. It’s more about the detective, is that right?

Let’s talk about the books you’re recommending. First on the list is The Kind Worth Killing which is by Peter Swanson. It’s a slightly Strangers on a Train -inspired plot, isn’t it?

I hadn’t thought about it that way, but you’re quite right, there is a bit of Strangers on a Train to it.

I found I was turning the pages and wanting to follow this strange situation. It’s about a man who meets this girl at an airport with red hair. I always wondered when I read that line—because an author is always looking for the clue that will give everything away—is the red hair going to be a clue? He sits next to her at an airport bar and tells her he’d like to murder his wife. Then, they happen to be on the same plane and they end up sitting next to each other. It’s about what happens after that, because he gets off the plane thinking, ‘Oh, well, that was just a plane journey with a woman I’ll never see again.’ But it wasn’t.

So it’s a real page turner?

For me, it was. I loved it and recommended it to a lot of people at the time because I’d never read Peter Swanson before. I have been reading him since, so it was a book that turned me into a fan.

Yes, thank you for that—because I hadn’t come across him either. It’s always exciting to discover someone new.

Absolutely right. The truth is that we’re all in that category. I spend my life saying to people, ‘Tell me someone I haven’t read! Tell me a book I ought to read!’ I do it all the time and get some very surprising and wonderful results. In fact, that’s how I discovered Stefan Zweig , who I think is arguably the greatest writer and storyteller of the last 100 years. I didn’t discover him until I was 60. A lady said to me, ‘It’s amazing you’ve got to this great age, Jeffrey, and not come across Stefan Zweig! He is one of the most respected authors of the last century.’

That’s a pretty strong endorsement of Stefan Zweig, but we’d better turn back to our lighter topic. The next book you’ve chosen is An Unsuitable Job for a Woman . This is by PD James and it’s from 1972. So this book also made a good impression on you?

She’s a fine writer. I knew her in the House of Lords, of course. She was an absolutely delightful, charming person. This is the first of the Cordelia Gray series, who is a very tough, very intelligent, frankly, a very PD James woman. I mean, she could have been writing about herself.

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Next up is The House of Silk by Anthony Horowitz, which is the first of his Sherlock Holmes stories. I knew vaguely that these books existed, but I hadn’t actually read one so I was very pleased to see this on your list.

He drives me mad, Anthony Horowitz . He is a dear friend and drives me completely bonkers because you can never tell what he’s going to write next. He’s so talented and so versatile. He goes from the Alex Rider books through to Sherlock Holmes through to James Bond through to a detective story without even stopping. I don’t know how he does it. He is amazing, but this is my favorite of his.

He decided to take on Sherlock Holmes. And the greatest compliment I can pay Anthony is you think it’s been written by Conan Doyle. It’s a brilliant story that starts with Watson and Sherlock Holmes sitting in their home, quietly having a drink at night, when this lunatic rushes in and tells them a mystery. They don’t believe a word of it, but they set out just because they’ve got nothing better to do—typical Holmes—and it turns into a magnificent tale. I think it’s the best thing Horowitz has ever done.

I like the way the book starts by recounting how Holmes and Watson met, as it’s told in A Study in Scarlet . I’ve read all the Sherlock Holmes stories —it was a while ago now, admittedly—but I did feel, reading this story, that this was another one.

Let’s go on to The Firm by John Grisham. This is a fantastic legal thriller, I still remember staying up all night reading it when it came out.

It’s probably the best thing Grisham has ever done. It came out 30 years ago. It’s a wonderful story about a young man who leaves Harvard third in his class. Every law firm in the country is desperate to get hold of him. He comes from a poor family, he’s just got married, and he gets an offer he just can’t refuse. He gets a wonderful salary, wonderful provisions, wonderful everything. It includes what he thought was important at the time, a BMW.

Then he discovers he’s working for the mafia. He’s a very moral man and he has to find a way out of this problem, realizing you don’t get severance pay, you just disappear. It’s a bloody good novel and it’s Grisham at his best.

Part of its appeal for me was the rags-to-riches element.

So, you’re a Kane and Abel fan are you?

I loved Kane and Abel , yes. I read lots of your books as a teenager, so it’s really fun, all these years later, to get a chance to chat with you.

I was flattered to be asked. Thank you very much indeed.

Your final recommendation dates from the golden age of mystery writing, the 1930s. This is And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie . I love books from this era. Are you a Christie fan, then?

I think Agatha Christie would have a terrific problem nowadays, not least with Poirot and his genius because you couldn’t gather the six or seven possibly guilty people into one room and give them a lecture and then quiz them. They would just say, ‘Talk to my lawyer’ and walk out. But she could get away with that 50 years ago.

The other thing she couldn’t get away with today, and she’d be the first to accept it, is DNA. My dear friend, Gilbert Gray QC, one of the great murder QCs, said it ruined his career. He was halfway through it when DNA arrived. He was getting people off, being paid amazing fees, he was the leading murder barrister in the north of England. Suddenly DNA came along, and he was losing every single case. He brought to my attention that Agatha Christie, dare one say it, died at the right time. She managed to miss DNA.

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I have chosen what I think is a masterpiece. Now, there are always the snooties, and there always will be, particularly in this country. There are snobs who don’t like authors who dare to tell stories and don’t like success. Agatha Christie was a brilliant storyteller. She didn’t sell millions of books by mistake. But the best one is And Then There Were None .

It’s a wonderful story about a group of people caught on an island, and someone gets murdered. And then someone else gets murdered. And then someone else gets murdered. The numbers are going down and down, and you’re wondering who is murdering all these people. The television version was quite outstanding as well, with Charles Dance playing the lead. He was terrific, I’ve never seen him better.

But for those who have wondered where to start with Agatha Christie, this and The ABC Murders are frankly the two best she’s ever done, and if I had to pick just one, I would pick And Then There Were None.

I’ve read all the Agatha Christies, probably a couple of times, mostly just as fun stories. But with And Then There Were None , thinking about it still makes me feel quite uncomfortable. That scene where the girl is swimming in the sea, and she lets the little boy drown. Just the moral ambiguity was horrible and it’s stayed with me.

Her biographers say she first got the story from a German author and then wrote her version of it. I have no problem with that at all because I suspect her version of it was far superior. But it wasn’t her usual theme, it wasn’t her normal, ‘This is a jolly good read, enjoy Christmas!’ That’s what she was famous for, ‘Have a Christie at Christmas.’ This wasn’t exactly a fun, Christmas stocking book.

As I say, it was suggested she originally read the story by not a well-known, but not an unknown German author. I’m hardly one to complain because I attempted to rewrite The Count of Monte Cristo in the form of A Prisoner of Birth . I made it very clear that was the case. So many authors rely on stories and, frankly, the great line that there are only six great stories and all we do is variations on them may indeed have an element of truth.

Over My Dead Body  by Jeffrey Archer is out now, priced £20 hardback (HarperCollins)

October 16, 2021

Five Books aims to keep its book recommendations and interviews up to date. If you are the interviewee and would like to update your choice of books (or even just what you say about them) please email us at [email protected]

Jeffrey Archer

Jeffrey Archer is a bestselling author and former Conservative politician. His books have been published in 97 countries and more than 33 languages with international sales passing 275 million copies. In addition to his many novels, he has also written short stories and plays, as well as a nonfiction trilogy, A Prison Diary.

We ask experts to recommend the five best books in their subject and explain their selection in an interview.

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The Best Reviewed Books of the Month: March 2024

New books from tana french, colin barrett, and more..

A look at the month’s best new releases in crime fiction, mystery, and thrillers, via Bookmarks .

Ben H. Winters, Big Time (Mulholland Books)

“A weird and wonderful cautionary tale … It features the month’s most engaging investigator, a schlumpy bureaucrat roused to action.”

–Sarah Lyall ( New York Times Book Review )

Colin Barrett, Wild Houses (Grove Press)

“Barrett’s dialogue, spiked with the timbre of Irish speech and shards of local slang, makes these characters sound so close you’ll be wiping their spittle off your face … The craft of Wild Houses shows a master writer spreading his wings — not for show but like the stealthy attack of a barn owl. Despite moments of violence that tear through the plot, the most arresting scenes are those of anticipated brutality … Barrett cleverly constructs his novel … Given the pervasive gloom, the fact that these chapters spark with life — even touches of humor — may seem impossible, but it’s a measure of Barrett’s electric style. Tense moments suddenly burst with flashes of absurdity or comic exasperation. Clearly, those years of writing short stories have given Barrett an appreciation for how fit every sentence must be; there isn’t a slacker in this trim book. Even the asides and flashbacks hurtle the whole project forward toward a climax that feels equally tensile and poignant, like some strange cloak woven from wire and wool.”

–Ron Charles ( Washington Post )

Maggie Thrash, Rainbow Black (Harper Perennial)

“Stunning and intense … At once a rivetingly dramatic procedural and an intimate portrait of a relationship forged in trauma.”

–Bridget Thoreson ( Booklist )

Andrey Kurkov (transl. Boris Dralyuk), The Silver Bone (Harpervia)

“It is a gift for crime fiction fans that he writes in this genre … Kurkov, as filtered through the supple translation of Boris Dralyuk, infuses The Silver Bone with wry humor.”

–Sarah Weinman (New York Times Book Review)

Tana French, The Hunter (Viking)

“Suspense is in the details — small details — scattered throughout … The extraordinary sequel to … A singularly tense and moody thriller, but it’s also an exceptional novel because of its structure.”

–Maureen Corrigan (Washington Post)

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THE MYSTERY WRITER

by Sulari Gentill ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 19, 2024

A fizzy whodunit with pace, panache, and surprises galore.

The killing of a famous author turns a faithful protégé into a fanatic sleuth.

Australian college student Theodosia Benton has abruptly left her university in Sydney and moved to the United States with the intention of becoming a writer. When she shows up unannounced on the doorstep of her older brother, Gus, in Lawrence, Kansas, she interrupts a romantic moment he's having with a half-dressed woman named Pam, who beats a hasty retreat. Such rashness leads to the kind of sibling spats and banter that propel this story and make for a compellingly unpredictable protagonist. When she meets writer Dan Murdoch at a restaurant, Theo quickly manages to become his friend and avid writing student. Then Dan is murdered, and his agent, Veronica, hires Theo to find his killer, who also apparently snatched the manuscript of Dan’s latest novel. The tale presents two intertwined mysteries. First, who slew the renowned author? Second, who are all those people with quirky screen names who comment on the murder at the beginning of most chapters? This latter thread is introduced through Caleb, someone who vaguely touts the rise of something called The Shield and the revolutionary plans of its leader, Primus. Caleb’s quest to discover the identity of Primus proceeds in tandem with Theo’s. He comes to believe that Dan was Primus, but was he? Primus is just the tip of an identity iceberg that includes Space Monkey, Frodo 14, Patriot Warrior, and others. Fans will rejoice that the prolific Gentill, author of the Rowland Sinclair mysteries, maintains her record of packing stand-alone novels with devilish twists on genre conventions.

Pub Date: March 19, 2024

ISBN: 9781728285184

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Poisoned Pen

Review Posted Online: Jan. 5, 2024

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2024

THRILLER | CRIME & LEGAL THRILLER | GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | GENERAL FICTION

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Awards & Accolades

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New York Times Bestseller

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 6, 2024

A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.

A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.

When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.

Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024

ISBN: 9781250178633

Page Count: 480

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023

FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP | GENERAL FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION

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THE TRUTH ABOUT THE DEVLINS

by Lisa Scottoline ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 26, 2024

As an adjunct member says, “You’re not a family, you’re a force.” Exactly, though not in the way you’d expect.

The ne’er-do-well son of a successful Irish American family gets dragged into criminal complications that suggest the rest of the Devlins aren’t exactly the upstanding citizens they appear.

The first 35 years in the life of Thomas “TJ” Devlin have been one disappointment after another to his parents, lawyers who founded a prosperous insurance and reinsurance firm, and his more successful siblings, John and Gabby. A longtime alcoholic who’s been unemployable ever since he did time for an incident involving his ex-girlfriend Carrie’s then 2-year-old daughter, TJ is nominally an investigator for Devlin & Devlin, but everyone knows the post is a sinecure. Things change dramatically when golden-boy John tells TJ that he just killed Neil Lemaire, an accountant for D&D client Runstan Electronics. Their speedy return to the murder scene reveals no corpse, so the brothers breathe easier—until Lemaire turns up shot to death in his car. John’s way of avoiding anything that might jeopardize his status as heir apparent to D&D is to throw TJ under the bus, blaming him for everything John himself has done and adding that you can’t trust anything his brother has said since he’s fallen off the wagon. TJ, who’s maintained his sobriety a day at a time for nearly two years, feels outraged, but neither the police investigating the murder nor his nearest and dearest care about his feelings. Forget the forgettable mystery, whose solution will leave you shrugging instead of gasping, and focus on the circular firing squad of the Devlins, and you’ll have a much better time than TJ.

Pub Date: March 26, 2024

ISBN: 9780525539704

Page Count: 384

Publisher: Putnam

SUSPENSE | THRILLER | SUSPENSE | CRIME & LEGAL THRILLER | PSYCHOLOGICAL THRILLER | GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE

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by Lisa Scottoline

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These mystery novels are changing how we see autistic women

Recent stories by brandy schillace, nita prose and brendan slocumb push back against old stereotypes about life on the spectrum.

Neurodiversity has long been associated with mystery fiction, even for characters created before we had terms like “autism” and “the spectrum” at our disposal. Sherlock Holmes is noted for his social bluntness, his obsessive routines and his hyperfocus, traits that have left readers speculating about his mind for decades. More modern examples make the neurodiversity more explicit — Adrian Monk, the investigator played by Tony Shalhoub for eight seasons of TV, is canonically obsessive-compulsive. In the NBC series “Hannibal,” FBI profiler Will Graham describes himself as probably on the spectrum in the show’s pilot and is guided by a sort of hyper-empathy.

However, like the popular image of autism itself, these examples are overwhelmingly male, and each character’s neurotype is not so much a part of who they are but a superpower. That approach has a fraught history in the autistic community, and some advocates express concerns that it overemphasizes an expectation of performance or achievement rather than inherent human dignity. In a 2014 episode of the meta-textual sitcom “Community,” Abed (Danny Pudi), a character heavily implied to be on the spectrum throughout the show, has a “vision” of “mildly autistic super-detectives” at a crime scene. “Painful writing … it hurts …” Abed winces.

But the gendering of these autistic investigators may be still more pertinent. For years, autism has been publicly associated predominantly with boys and men, and researchers like the British psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen have popularized the controversial idea that it is a manifestation of an “extreme male brain.” Almost four times as many men and boys are diagnosed as women and girls. Recent research suggests this is less a result of actual prevalence and more of diagnostic criteria that make women and girls easier to overlook, compounding the problem when girls miss out on access to early treatment and therapy.

As with autistic mystery protagonists, media representation of autistic people more generally has been almost exclusively male until relatively recently. A number of high-profile women have publicly identified as autistic in the past decade, including climate activist Greta Thunberg, former “Bachelor” contestant Demi Burnett and perpetually Oscar-contending songwriter Diane Warren . But fictional representations of autistic women remain rare.

Three recent examples in the mystery genre are helping to make up this gender gap and illustrating the range of the spectrum with very different but equally unforgettable female protagonists. In these stories, crucially, autism isn’t a superpower but a part of the protagonist’s personality that can frustrate her efforts as often as it can help point her to the truth.

“ The Framed Women of Ardemore House ,” by Brandy Schillace, introduces Jo Jones, an autistic American book editor who retreats to a crumbling, inherited British manor house in the wake of a divorce and soon finds herself in the middle of a murder mystery involving the estate’s shady caretaker.

Schillace, who was diagnosed as autistic as an adult, describes her experience in terms common among autistic women.

“Women, even at a very early age, are taught to subjugate their needs in favor of others. They are taught to ‘behave’ and to take up less space, to not be a burden but to help support others — the men and boys or other children in their lives,” Schillace said in an interview. “What this means for autistic girls is that they learn to mask early, to hide their true natures and to ‘not be a problem.’”

We meet Jo at a crossroads in her life, when she’s struggling to shake off this same conditioning, frequently referring to her difficulty with “peopling” and the ways her awful ex-husband undermined her progress. As a result, the book is more than just a mystery: It’s an autistic woman’s journey of self-discovery, a layer that we wouldn’t get without Jo’s — and Schillace’s — perspective.

In creating Jo, Schillace said, she aimed to create a protagonist who “isn’t treated like a savant, and her autism — though present — does not become the most interesting thing about her. … Jo isn’t the mystery; she helps to solve one. Likewise, I (and other autistic women) are not enigmas. We are people, fellow human beings, with intrinsic value.”

Nita Prose’s “ The Maid ” and its follow-up, “ The Mystery Guest ,” feature a hotel maid named Molly Gray . Molly, as our limited first-person narrator, lacks either the language or the inclination to specifically describe herself as autistic, but it’s made obvious by the comfort she takes in things like her rituals, her uniform and her quaint little rhyming mantras. It’s also an engine of conflict in the novels, as Molly tends to assume that everyone is as well-intentioned as she is. In the first book, this puts her in a wrong-place-at-the-wrong-time scenario, a classic of the genre, that leads to her being wrongly accused of murder.

As her confidence improves, however, Molly’s autistic traits and her gender make her an ideal amateur sleuth: Not only does she know her hotel better than anyone, she’s seen by others as just part of the scenery, which allows her to witness things others can’t. Her fierce sense of justice and egalitarianism, a common autistic trait, makes her both a sympathetic character and a great mystery protagonist. When Molly says, “I don’t believe that some people are more important than other people. We’re all very important in our own way,” it’s a moral conviction, but it’s also the perspective of someone who can succeed where the police fail.

In Brendan Slocumb’s “ Symphony of Secrets ,” an autistic woman is a central character, but she isn’t in the role of sleuth this time. The novel is divided between the story of Bern Hendricks, a modern music scholar analyzing what appears to be a lost opera written by a (fictional) legendary composer, and flashbacks to the 1930s, where we learn the truth: The opera, and all of the composer’s music, was ghostwritten by Josephine Reed, an autistic Black woman.

Slocumb confirmed in an interview that Josephine is intended to be autistic, but her story takes place before she would ever be recognized as such, and her race and gender make it easy for the racist and sexist society of her time to dismiss her as unintelligent or insane. Like Schillace, Slocumb said he wanted to write an autistic character who was “so much more than their behavior.”

Josephine’s personality “totally fit with the theme of the story I wanted to tell, which was about people not getting credit for their work and [others] taking advantage of their situations,” he said.

Unlike Jo and Molly, Josephine is, herself, the mystery in Slocumb’s book — her communication difficulties, the effort of those around her to erase her from history and the dubious record-keeping of her era have combined to suppress the credit she deserves. Unlike in most mysteries, the central question is not whether a killer will be brought to justice or a missing person found, but whether a woman robbed of her voice will get it back.

The paradox of representation in fiction is that progress often turns into a sort of stasis: While a community’s representation may improve, it’s often exclusively under the sign of inspirational figures who function more as avatars of their community than as three-dimensional characters, and who are often written by people from outside those communities. That’s what makes characters like Jo, Molly and Josephine particularly refreshing. Their stories and arcs aren’t about autism — they’re about specific autistic women and their hopes, fears and quirks. And as real autistic women work to become more visible, those stories feel more vital than ever.

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10 books to read while you wait for true detective season 5.

True Detective season 5 is confirmed, but it won’t premiere for quite some time. Fortunately, there are plenty of books for those missing the show.

• True Detective season 5 is confirmed, but it won't arrive for quite some time. There are many books fans can read in the meantime.
• Books with gruesome crime scenes and southern gothic settings are perfect for fans of True Detective seasons 1-3.
• Numerous novels have settings and themes similar to True Detective: Night Country.

True Detective season 5 is already confirmed after the success of Night Country, but it'll be a while before it arrives — and fans may be looking for books and shows like True Detective to consume in the meantime . There's no shortage of thrillers and crime fiction out there, but HBO's hit series strikes a distinct tone when it comes to the unusual cases it covers. This is true for all four seasons of True Detective , but the first and Night Country are especially successful at creating an eerie, atmospheric backdrop and tone over the course of their runs.

True Detective is also known for its leads, as the show tends to follow detectives with compelling dynamics that hook viewers from the jump. This can be less easy to find in thrillers and crime books, but it's not impossible. There's a book out there for every True Detective fan , but which they choose will depend on what they love about the series. From books tackling bizarre and brutal cases to novels set in a dark, frozen atmosphere like Night Country, there's plenty of fiction to dive into until True Detective season 5 debuts.

10 The Devil All The Time By Donald Ray Pollock

Why it's perfect for true detective fans: its southern gothic setting, complex characters, & eerie storylines.

The Devil All the Time by Donald Ray Pollock has a southern gothic atmosphere that will appeal to fans of True Detective seasons 1 and 3. The 2011 novel is set in rural Ohio and West Virginia, and it follows a range of characters, all of whom offer a complexity on par with those in the HBO show — especially Arvin Eugene Russell, who's trying to be a good man despite the violence constantly unfolding around and within him. There are quite a few eerie throughlines in The Devil All the Time, but the book is an exploration of religion at its core.

If the themes and setting aren't enough to convince True Detective fans to read The Devil All the Time, they can also check out the Netflix adaptation of Pollock's book . With Tom Holland in the lead, it makes for a solid watch. It's not quite as compelling as True Detective itself, but it'll hold fans over until the next outing arrives.

9 All The White Spaces By Ally Wilkes

Why it's perfect for fans of true detective: its icy & eerie backdrop, allusions to the supernatural.

While The Devil All the Time is perfect for fans of True Detective 's earlier seasons, Ally Wilkes' All the White Spaces may be more suitable for those looking for stories like Night Country . Set on the heels of World War I, the novel follows Jonathan Morgan as he stows away on an explorers' ship headed to the Antarctic. While Jonathan is hoping for a journey of self-discovery, during which he'll be able to embrace his true gender identity, what he gets is far scarier. The expedition realizes something's off about where they've landed, but they're alone and increasingly on edge, leaving them at the mercy of whatever it is.

Anyone wishing Night Country leaned further into horror would do well to pick Wilkes' novel up

​​​ The eerie, icy vibes of All the White Spaces are perfect for anyone who enjoyed Night Country 's backdrop and allusions to the supernatural. In fact, anyone wishing Night Country leaned further into horror would do well to pick Wilkes' novel up. It will keep readers on edge from cover to cover, making it an ideal way to fill the time between seasons of True Detective.

8 Bone White By Ronald Malfi

Why it's perfect for fans of true detective: set in alaska, features spirituality & local superstition.

Another great follow-up to True Detective: Night Country is Bone White by Ronald Malfi , a book that delivers on the eerie vibes of the HBO series and the Alaskan setting. Bone White is set in the town of Dread's Hand, Alaska, where a killer has been leading law enforcement to his victims' graves. The book's lead, Paul, ventures to Dread's Hand for closure, as the town is where his brother disappeared years ago. But while Paul expects to make peace with this tragedy during this trip, he's in for a surprise. Local superstition gets him more wrapped up in the mystery, leading to a tense ride.

7 Never Whistle At Night Edited By Shane Hawk and Theodore C. Van Alst

Why it's perfect for fans of true detective: its exploration of indigenous characters & legends, its darker themes.

Never Whistle at Night is a collection of horror stories by Indigenous authors, and it's the perfect read for anyone who enjoyed the Indigenous representation in True Detective: Night Country . Not every story within this collection is reminiscent of the HBO series. However, there are a few that will scratch that itch while waiting for True Detective season 5. Several tales, like "Kushtuka," explore Indigenous legends, making them ideal for those who enjoy the supernatural teases of Night Country . And other stories, like "Quantum," take a more grounded approach — but one that's as harrowing as True Detective nonetheless.

6 City Under One Roof By Iris Yamashita

Why it's perfect for fans of true detective: alaskan setting, small town with secrets, & a detective duo.

Another thrilling mystery set in Alaska is City Under One Roof by Iris Yamashita , a novel that isn't exactly like True Detective: Night Country but does have a similar feel. Yamashita's story follows Detective Cara Kennedy as she attempts to uncover the truth behind a murder in a small Alaskan town. Everyone in this town resides in a single building, and they're all tight-lipped when it comes to Cara's investigation.

Another thrilling mystery set in Alaska is City Under One Roof by Iris Yamashita, a novel that isn't exactly like True Detective: Night Country but does have a similar feel.

A small town full of secrets is the perfect setup for True Detective fans, and City Under One Roof also boasts a detective duo and mysterious severed limbs. The latter is reminiscent of Night Country, while the former is present in every season of the HBO show. Needless to say, Yamashita's novel is worth reading, especially for those eager to get their hands on True Detective season 5.

5 Dark Places By Gillian Flynn

Why it's perfect for fans of true detective: a gruesome story, rural setting, & focus on satanic rituals.

Gillian Flynn is well known for Gone Girl, but Dark Places has a more fitting vibe for those who enjoy True Detective . The 2009 novel is set in rural America, and it's got a thrilling mystery at its core — along with some fairly gruesome moments that could give the HBO series a run for its money. Dark Places follows Libby Day, whose testimony put her teenage brother in prison for killing their family. Decades later, Libby is forced to question whether she got it right — and whether there's still a killer on the loose. The backdrop, brutality, and focus on satanic rituals will appeal to fans of True Detective.

4 Razorblade Tears by S.A. Cosby

Why it's perfect for true detective fans: it's southern noir, contains complex & entertaining character dynamics.

Razorblade Tears fits into the southern noir category , which already makes it a great choice for fans of True Detective 's early seasons. S.A. Cosby's novel sees two fathers from Virginia investigating the murders of their sons in the hopes of enacting revenge. Their quest for vengeance is made complicated by the racial divide between the two characters — one is a white man who's never had to explore his own prejudice, while the other is a Black man who's dealt with his share of racism living in the South — and their disapproval of their sons' LGBTQ+ lifestyles.

The unlikely dynamic between its leads and its setting make it especially great for those missing True Detective.

Cosby's story explores its social themes with impressive care, all while painting a narrative that's action-packed and thrilling. For these reasons, Razorblade Tears is a must-read for anyone looking for incredible thriller books . However, the unlikely dynamic between its leads and its setting make it especially great for those missing True Detective.

3 The Black Dahlia By James Ellroy

Why it's perfect for true detective fans: a solid pair of detectives & gruesome murder investigation.

James Ellroy's work is great for True Detective fans generally, and The Black Dahlia is the perfect entry point to the author's work . The novel takes on the real-life Black Dahlia case from 1947, which saw Elizabeth Short being gruesomely murdered by a killer who was never identified. Ellroy's book fictionalizes the real case, setting a pair of detectives up to track down the person responsible for Elizabeth's death. The brutality of the case alone makes The Black Dahlia an ideal follow-up to True Detective. However, Ellroy's detectives, Lee and Bucky, also make a solid team reminiscent of Rust Cohle and Marty Hart or Liz Danvers and Evangeline Navarro.

2 Broken Monsters By Lauren Beukes

Why it's perfect for true detective fans: ghastly crime scenes, a thrilling narrative.

Ghastly crime scenes are par for the course in True Detective, and the one in Lauren Beukes' Broken Monsters is just as terrible as anything the HBO series has done . Set in Detroit, Broken Monsters follows Detective Gabriella Versado as she tries to solve the number of a boy whose body was found melded with that of a deer. This will no doubt bring back memories of True Detective season 1, though Broken Monsters' gruesome murders don't stop there. And as Gabriella tries to investigate, other characters' storylines unfold, leading up to the book's big reveal. This book is sure to hook fans of True Detective from start to finish.

1 Galveston By Nic Pizzolatto

Why it's perfect for true detective fans: written by the show's creator, is very atmospheric.

Nic Pizzolatto has gotten a lot of heat for his criticisms of True Detective: Night Country , but those looking for the feeling of seasons 1-3 — all of which Pizzolatto was in charge of — can check out his own book , Galveston. Of course, they shouldn't go into it expecting an identical story. While Galveston has the moody atmosphere of the HBO show, its plot centers Roy Cady, who's forced to go on the run from his loan shark boss after he realizes the man wants him dead. His journey becomes intertwined with that of a girl named Rocky, who ends up joining him on his adventure.

Galveston will take True Detective fans from New Orleans to Texas, entertaining them with unlikely character dynamics, atmospheric backdrops, and plenty of thrills. Those missing Pizzolatto's take on the show will no doubt find something to love about his book. It's an ideal story to add to one's TBR ahead of True Detective season 5.

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‘I’d love a scathing review’: novelist Percival Everett on American Fiction and rewriting Huckleberry Finn

His work triumphed at the Oscars, but the Booker-shortlisted author isn’t interested in acclaim. He talks to the Guardian about race, taking on Mark Twain and why there’s nothing worse than preaching to the choir

I t’s 10am on the morning of the Oscars, and Percival Everett is nowhere to be seen. We’re supposed to be meeting at his neighbourhood coffee shop in leafy South Pasadena, a suburb of Los Angeles, before he makes his way across the city for the ceremony, which begins its long march towards best picture just after lunch.

American Fiction, the film of his novel Erasure, is nominated for best adapted screenplay, up against Barbie , but tipped to win. The hour went forward last night, but surely he knows that? At 10.25am I WhatsApp him, but the message remains unread. Eventually I call. “Yes, this is Percival Everett. We’re meeting in half an hour?” The clocks, Percival, the clocks. “Ah,” he chuckles, “my fault.” He’s there in a couple of minutes, in khaki pants, grey shirt and a baseball cap, looking as if he has nothing much on today – a man not only in his own world, but his own time. When I ask why his phone didn’t update like they all do now, he says he never looks at it, and raises his wrist to flaunt a distinctively analogue watch. Hasn’t he got quite an important date later? “Oh,” he shrugs, “my wife would’ve made sure I got there on time.” That’s the novelist Danzy Senna, with whom he has two sons, aged 17 and 15.

Despite having lived in LA for more than three decades, Everett, 67, who teaches literature at the University of Southern California, doesn’t see being invited to the Oscars as somehow getting the keys to the city. It’s more like “visiting someone’s garden shed”, he says, a little bizarrely. “I’ll feel ‘Oh that’s a nice lawnmower’ and never go back.” I suggest that’s quite a prosaic image for what lots of people consider to be the most glamorous event in the universe. “I guess that betrays my feelings about glamour.”

Not that he’s ostentatiously professorial, his otherwordliness just a different way of showing off. He genuinely doesn’t seem to care: about the red carpet, accolades, critics. “I don’t go online,” he tells me. No social media? No, and no reviews. Is he not curious to see how others interpret his work? “Oh I do read scholarship – I think I learn stuff from that – but reviews I just never have any interest in.” Is it a case of protecting himself from comments that might sow doubt, or sting? “In fact, I might be interested in a really scathing review.” Why? “It might be fun? That’s gonna be kind of crazy, to be upset about a bad review. Like, what else can you expect in the world? Not everybody is gonna like my shirt.”

Acclaim isn’t a big motivator, then – instead he writes when he gets fascinated by something, which has happened often enough to produce 24 dazzlingly different novels, stories of baseball players, ranchers, mathematicians, cops and philosophising babies. And, despite his output, he finds time for plenty of other interests. Painting is the big one, and we stroll the short distance from the cafe to his studio, a windowless room in a basement complex bedecked with frenetic, abstract canvases, half-squeezed tubes of paint and impasto-slathered palettes. He’s also a skilled woodworker (he recently became obsessed with buying and repairing old mandolins), a jazz musician, and a horse and mule trainer. (Everett once told Bookforum that when he was being hired by USC a member of the faculty saw his name and exclaimed: “The last thing we need is another 50-year-old Brit,” only to be told by the receptionist that the newest professor was in fact a “black cowboy”).

Horses are no longer a part of his life – he combined working on ranches with teaching much earlier in his career – but they taught him some transferable skills. “I don’t get stressed out,” he tells me. “I think that’s from being on horses. You can’t calm down a 1,200-pound animal by getting excited.” That’s handy, because others in his position might be getting a little wound up by their work being judged in the most public way possible in just a few hours time. It’s a big day, no? “I mean, sort of. It’s not my film,” he laughs. “So, I’m excited for the director.”

He means Cord Jefferson , the former journalist who also adapted the novel, and who described showing Everett the movie as “the most frightening screening I did”. The plot differences are relatively minor, though Erasure is more complex, less certain in its conclusions. Both works tell the story of Thelonious “Monk” Ellison, a writer of abstruse fiction who fumes when he finds his retelling of Aeschylus’s The Persians filed under “African American studies” in a bookstore (“The only thing ostensibly African American [about it] was my jacket photograph”). But his commercial fortunes are transformed when he decides to submit a “ghetto” novel, ramping up the stereotypes to an obscene degree that white liberal editors nevertheless find irresistible.

Everett has spoken in the past with frustration about Erasure looming so large in his body of work. Does he still feel that way? “The only thing that ever pissed me off is that everyone agreed with it. No one took issue, or said: ‘It’s not like that.’” Why was that annoying? “I like the blowback. It’s interesting. There’s nothing worse than preaching to the choir, right?” Erasure came out in 2001, but people have taken American Fiction as a satire of modern publishing. Are the double standards he satirised still as pervasive? “There is a much greater range of work [now], and that was what I was addressing. So in some ways, there’s been a lot of change. The problem I had wasn’t with particular works, just with the fact that those were the only ones available.”

On the other hand, the thinking that led to that narrow range still very much exists. “For example, I have a friend, a director, who had some success with a film. And the next call he got was someone wanting him to direct a biopic of George Floyd. Why? Because he’s black.” That could be very irritating, of course. But it could also be a dream project. “Well,” Everett considers the point. “It’s like you’re at the office and they say: ‘We need a black person.’ Why? ‘Well, we need diversity in this room, so would you come in here?’ That’s not why you want to be invited.”

In any case, he isn’t feeling proprietorial about American Fiction: “I view it as a different work,” he tells me, though I get the impression he’s making a statement of artistic fact, rather than attempting to distance himself from the production. “I appreciate it as a different work. In spirit it’s much like the novel, but being a film, it’s not as dark.” It could have been worse: he entirely disowned the TV movie of his second book, Walk Me to the Distance. “I never saw it. I read the script, and I didn’t like it. The changes that they made were so grotesque, there was no way to embrace that at all.”

Regardless, more Everett will be coming soon to a screen near you. In 2022 he published The Trees , a genre-busting comedy about lynching, if you can imagine such a thing – part police procedural, part zombie-horror, part solemn testament to the victims of racial murder. It has been optioned for a possible “limited series” and “people are working on it” but he can’t say any more. While not surprising (the novel was shortlisted for the Booker), it will be interesting to see how a big entertainment company deals with the taboo imagery and extensive gore – “Yeah, well that’s their problem!” he laughs.

His new novel, James, is at least as likely to pique the interest of producers – partly because it adapts a cornerstone of American culture, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. While I’m teasing him about his lack of interest in Hollywood glitz, I ask if there are any writers he would be starstruck by. “[All] dead,” he replies – but offers up Samuel Butler, Chester Himes and, of course, Mark Twain. What would they talk about in any ethereal meeting? “You know, I’ve thought about that,” he says. “I don’t know if we would say much. We’d probably just talk about the landscape or something. I’d just kind of like to hear what he sees.”

In the meantime, Everett has taken the initiative with Twain’s most famous text, which tells the story of 13-year-old Huck as he navigates the Mississippi River accompanied by an enslaved man, Jim. “It’s kind of a cliche to say how important it is to American letters. It’s the first time that a novel tried to deal with the very centre of the American psyche – and that is race.” There were protest novels about slavery before then, he says, but they were narrower, focused on the institution itself. “Huck Finn, picaresque adventures aside, is really about a young American, representing America, trying to navigate this landscape, and understand how someone – his friend, actually the only father figure in the book – is also property.”

“He’s got this moral conundrum: ‘He belongs to someone and I’m doing something illegal by helping him run, but he’s my friend and a person, and he shouldn’t be a slave.’ There’s nothing more American.” Whereas Twain’s focus is tightly on Huck’s moral universe, Everett tells the other half of the story, making Jim the narrator, restoring his full name, James, and turning him into an erudite intellectual. Characteristically, one of the major plot devices is linguistic. The hokey dialect that, in Twain, renders Jim rustic and unthreatening, is revealed as a feint – a survival mechanism that the slaves use to disguise their real capacities in front of white people. One evening, James sits down in his cabin to teach some of the enslaved children a language lesson. “White folks expect us to sound a certain way and it can only help if we don’t disappoint them,” he explains, the children chanting: “The better they feel, the safer we are.” He asks a little girl to translate, and is reassured when she produces a sentence in amped-up vernacular: “Da mo’ betta dey feels, da mo’ safer we be.”

Everett’s novels make abundant use of language games, conceits and disquisitions. Erasure contains a passage from Monk’s inpenetrable post-structuralist novel, and snippets of conversations between Wittgenstein and Derrida. This could be off-putting were it not for the fact that they’re often spliced with much more conventional, pacey writing, and many darkly hilarious moments – 2022’s Dr No , for example, mixes head-scratching maths with a lot of wild, Bond-inspired action. James, likewise, combines dreamed visitations from Voltaire and Locke with page-turning jeopardy. Is that kind of juxtaposition a tactic on Everett’s part, a way of licensing the intellectual gymnastics? “I don’t know if I think about it a lot. I think that any kind of intellectual understanding of the world is generated by a physical location in the world.” And by stuff happening? “Yes, by stuff happening.

It’s why I like teaching – because I get to go out into the world and be reminded that there are other people thinking different thoughts. My inclination is to stay at home and never leave. What would I write if I did that?”

L eave he does, though, and one of his more important outposts is an office in the humanities building of the University of Southern California. Unusually for LA, it’s an easy trip by metro from South Pasadena, which is why a lot of professors choose to live there. The day after the Academy Awards, the campus is glorious, its terracotta tiles and pink-brick modernist halls warming in the sun. Everett is running late, but only by a few minutes. He catches me in the lobby and we walk upstairs to a room with a view of the skyscrapers of downtown and, in the distance, the San Gabriel Mountains. American Fiction won its Oscar, and I ask if he got into the spirit of things. “Oh, that was fine. We had fun going, but we don’t need to go to that again.” No parties, then? “We went to the so-called Governors ball, which is in the ballroom right after the event. We could take it for about 10 minutes and we found a way out.”

If Everett sounds ungrateful, or grumpy, he’s not – though he’s in a little pain because of a bad back. No, he’s quick to smile, generous with his time, and simply “not the most extroverted person in the world”. He suspects that, like several of his characters, he’s “on the spectrum”. Today, we’re surrounded by another typically Everettian assortment – a framed photograph of a beloved mule, lots of books and some awards, including one from the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame. “Oxymoronic” he jokes, before explaining that, though he grew up in South Carolina, he was born in the neighbouring state. He got out of the south quickly, moving west after his undergraduate degree. “I don’t want to return and live in the south,” he told one interviewer. “I want to see the sun set on the ocean.” But when I suggest he’s no fan of that part of the world, he demurs. “That’s a little unfair. The American inclination is to find a region and blame it so it doesn’t have to feel bad as a whole. There are lots of good people there, and lots of people I’d rather not spend time with. But that’s true of everywhere.”

My attention is drawn to what looks like an elaborate sewing box. “Oh, it’s a fly tying kit.” Is fishing another one of his things? “Yes.” So you make the flies yourself? “Usually while I’m talking to students.” I find it interesting that he likes to distract part of his brain from the task at hand, and it turns out to be something of a theme. James, he says, was written “on the coffee table with Mission: Impossible going the entire time”. What? “Some network would just play the same episodes over and over. It’s just white noise for me.” We’re talking the original 1960s series, by the way, not the movie. “I don’t remember them from being a kid,” he says, and then, for perhaps the first time, becomes really animated: “but the bongo part of the [theme] is fantastic. And that’s really what got me watching. It’s an OK song but the bongo part of it, the percussive part, is incredible – the counting of it. It’s just completely mesmerising.” I’m amazed he can concentrate, but he says: “I don’t really watch. I just know what’s there. And I look up, and my game would be how quickly could I identify the episode. Just from a shot of a hand or anything.” In fact, it makes the writing easier: “It’s a distraction that allows my mind to run instead of trying to … to figure out the story.”

It remains to be seen whether critics will pick up on any subliminally incorporated plotlines from Mission: Impossible in the new book. The reviews for James, published in the US a few weeks ago, are beginning to trickle in. I mention that the Washington Post seemed to like it . “They also told me there was a New York Times review today,” Everett says, without affect. It’s only afterwards that I take a look: it’s a spectacular rave .

We return, briefly, to that Oscar. “Awards are what they are. They don’t make anything better” – unlike bongos, clearly. Being unimpressed by the event is one thing, but this is going to have a concrete effect on his life. The tour he’s about to embark on – “against my better judgment, 12 cities in 13 days” – will doubtless be sold out. There will be more interest in his work, more sales, more scrutiny. And Erasure will potentially define him far more than it did before. Does he worry, given the sheer variety of his writing, about the gravitational pull of that “African American studies” bookshelf – of, ironically, being reduced to the stereotype of “race writer”? “When people come to the work, they get what the work offers. And however you get them there, it’s OK. I don’t much worry about that. If people read anything , I’m happy. It doesn’t even have to be my work. Because if they just become readers, that’s a much better culture.”

“What is it Walt Whitman says in By Blue Ontario’s Shore?” he continues. “I’m paraphrasing, but since it’s Whitman, it doesn’t matter: if you want a better society, produce better people.” (The phrase in the poem is “Produce great Persons, the rest follows.”)

So how do you produce better people? “By helping make them smarter. Education, so they’re interested in ideas. It’d be great if somehow literary fiction could affect popular culture.” But isn’t that precisely what Erasure has done, via American Fiction? “A little bit,” he concedes. “We’ll see”. And with a bemused and friendly laugh, he’s ready to turn his attention to the next thing.

James by Percival Everett is published by Mantle. To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com . Delivery charges may apply.

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Books | the book club: “the house on mango street” and more short reviews from readers, one book earns 4 out of 4 stars.

Editor’s note: The opinions of the smart, well-read women in my Denver book club mean a lot, and often determine what the rest of us choose to pile onto our bedside tables. So we asked them, and all Denver Post readers, to share these mini-reviews with you. Have any to offer? Email [email protected].

“Airplane Mode: An Irreverent History of Travel,” by Shahnaz Habib (Catapult, 2023)

This is not your typical Rick Steves (or even Paul Theroux) travel book. Rather, Habib dissects what it means to travel in the 21st century, as opposed to, say, what it means to emigrate. Who gets to travel, where and when? Who gets (or does not get) a passport or even a visa? How did “traveling” even become a thing? (Think: the Grand Tours of Europe in the late 19th century and early 20th centuries.) Travel is a form of consumerism, you might even say. But what does it mean to be a traveler in a post-colonial world, in the midst of a climate crisis? Habib addresses these questions and more in this enlightening and entertaining book. — 2 1/2 stars (out of 4); Kathleen Lance, Denver

“The Women,” by Kristin Hannah (St. Martins Press, 2024)

Kristin Hannah is an enormously successful writer of compulsively readable historic fiction. “The Women” — a tribute to the often overlooked women who served in the Vietnam War — is no exception. The story follows idealistic nurse Frankie McGrath through two tours of duty, bolstered by friends Ethel and Barb. Work shifts are long and brutal, yet after-hours allow them to blow off steam with drinking, dancing and romancing.

Part One is gripping as Frankie sheds her naivete and advances her medical skills. Part Two follows her home to an ungrateful, unwelcoming America.  Hannah’s storytelling is strong enough to more than balance occasional writing gaffs, but uneven pacing is more of an issue. Part Two seems underdeveloped, despite its length. —  2 1/2 stars (out of 4); Neva Gronert, Parker

“The House on Mango Street,” by Sandra Cisneros (Arte Publico Press, 1984)

Hispanic families, known for their emotional intimacy, reveal their benefits as well as their challenges in this trio of stories. Sandra Cisneros earned national attention for this first book of fiction, which includes insights into her journey to success and shows that “coming of age” is a trip for many young people, regardless of their backgrounds or ethnicities. Her work has been called “sensitive, alert, nuanced,” as the reader tracks Esperanza, a young Latina girl, while she grows up in Chicago, and deals with issues of social class, race, sexuality, identity and gender. A best-seller and winner of a number of literary awards, it educates as it entertains. — 4 stars (out of 4); Bonnie McCune, Denver; bonniemccune.com

“The Prospectors,” by Ariel Djanikian (William Morrow, 2023)

This is the story (on the surface) of a family who struck it rich in the Klondike Gold Rush and then amassed great wealth through shrewd investments. It also explores greed, ambition, family loyalty, family secrets and, ultimately, the moral questions of justice for and restitution owed to displaced native peoples. The individual characters are, for the most part, finely drawn and the historical details of life in the Alaskan frontier are captivating.  A fascinatingly good read. — 1 1/2 stars (out of 4); Kathleen Lance, Denver

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