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All of NY Times Best Mysteries & Thrillers of 2022

Best Crime Fiction

Don't Know Tough

Best debuts.

In Denton, Arkansas, the fate of the high school football team rests on the shoulders of Billy Lowe, a volatile but talented running back. Billy comes from an extremely troubled home: a trailer park where he is terrorized by his mother’s abusive boyfriend. Billy takes out his anger on the field, but when his savagery crosses a line, he faces suspension. Without Billy Lowe, the Denton Pirates can kiss their playoff bid goodbye. But the head coach, Trent Powers, who just moved from California with his wife and two children for this job, has more than just his paycheck riding on Billy’s bad behavior. As a born-again Christian, Trent feels a divine calling to save Billy—save him from his circumstances, and save his soul. Then Billy’s abuser is found murdered in the Lowe family trailer, and all evidence points toward Billy. Now nothing can stop an explosive chain of violence that could tear the whole town apart on the eve of the playoffs.

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Portrait of a Thief

Grace D. Li

A senior at Harvard, Will fits comfortably in his carefully curated roles: a perfect student, an art history major and sometimes artist, the eldest son who has always been his parents' American Dream. But when a mysterious Chinese benefactor reaches out with an impossible—and illegal—job offer, Will finds himself something else as well: the leader of a heist to steal back five priceless Chinese sculptures, looted from Beijing centuries ago.  His crew is every heist archetype one can imag­ine—or at least, the closest he can get. A con artist: Irene Chen, a public policy major at Duke who can talk her way out of anything. A thief: Daniel Liang, a premed student with steady hands just as capable of lockpicking as suturing. A getaway driver: Lily Wu, an engineering major who races cars in her free time. A hacker: Alex Huang, an MIT dropout turned Silicon Valley software engineer. Each member of his crew has their own complicated relationship with China and the identity they've cultivated as Chinese Americans, but when Will asks, none of them can turn him down.  Because if they succeed? They earn fifty million dollars—and a chance to make history. But if they fail, it will mean not just the loss of everything they've dreamed for themselves but yet another thwarted at­tempt to take back what colonialism has stolen.

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Marie Rutkoski

Best Standalones

It’s 1999 and Samantha has danced for years at the Lovely Lady strip club. She’s not used to mixing work and friendship—after all, between her jealous boyfriend and his young daughter, she has enough on her plate. But the newest dancer is so clueless that Samantha feels compelled to help her learn the hustle and drama of the club: how to sweet-talk the boss, fit in with the other women, and make good money. One night, when the new girl needs a ride home, Samantha agrees to drive: a simple decision that turns deadly. Georgia, another dancer drawn into the ensuing murder and missing person investigation, gathers information for Holly, a grieving detective determined to solve the case. Georgia just wants to help, but her involvement makes her a target. As Holly and Georgia round up their suspects, the story’s point of view shifts between dancers, detectives, children, club patrons—and the killer. Drawing on her experience as a former dancer, Marie Rutkoski immerses us in the captivating world of the club, which comes alive with complicated people trying their best to protect themselves and those they love.

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The Lost Kings

Tyrell Johnson

Jeanie’s whole world is turned upside down. Not only has she lost her beloved brother, but with no family left in Washington, she is ripped from everything she knows, including Maddox, the boy she could be learning to love. Twenty years later, Jeanie is in England. She keeps her demons at bay by drinking too much, sleeping with a married man, and speaking to a therapist she doesn’t respect. But her old life catches up to her when Maddox reappears, claiming to have tracked down her dad. Stunned, Jeanie must decide whether to continue running from her past or to confront her father and finally find out what really happened that night, where her brother is, and why she was the one left behind.

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Anywhere You Run

Wanda M. Morris

It’s the summer of 1964 and three innocent men are brutally murdered for trying to help Black Mississippians secure the right to vote. Against this backdrop, twenty-one year old Violet Richards finds herself in more trouble than she’s ever been in her life. Suffering a brutal attack of her own, she kills the man responsible. But with the color of Violet’s skin, there is no way she can escape Jim Crow justice in Jackson, Mississippi. Before anyone can find the body or finger her as the killer, she decides to run. With the help of her white beau, Violet escapes. But desperation and fear leads her to hide out in the small rural town of Chillicothe, Georgia, unaware that danger may be closer than she thinks.

Back in Jackson, Marigold, Violet’s older sister, has dreams of attending law school. Working for the Mississippi Summer Project, she has been trying to use her smarts to further the cause of the Black vote. But Marigold is in a different kind of trouble: she’s pregnant and unmarried. After news of the murder brings the police to her door, Marigold sees no choice but to flee Jackson too. She heads North seeking the promise of a better life and no more segregation. But has she made a terrible choice that threatens her life and that of her unborn child? 

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Survivor's Guilt

Best in a series.

At first, the death of millionaire businessman Charles Parsons seems like a straightforward suicide. There’s no sign of forced entry or struggle in his lavish New Jersey mansion—just a single gunshot wound from his own weapon. But days later, a different story emerges. Computer techs pick up a voice recording that incriminates Parsons’ adoptive daughter, Ann, who duly confesses and pleads guilty. Erin McCabe has little interest in reviewing such a slam-dunk case—even after she has a mysterious meeting with one of the investigating detectives, who reveals that Ann, like Erin, is a trans woman. Yet despite their misgivings, Erin and her law partner, Duane Swisher, ultimately can’t ignore the pieces that don’t fit. As their investigation deepens, Erin and Swish convince Ann to withdraw her guilty plea. But Ann clearly knows more than she’s willing to share, even if it means a life sentence. Who is she protecting, and why? Fighting against time and a prosecutor hell-bent on notching another conviction, the two work tirelessly—Erin inside the courtroom, Swish in the field—to clear Ann’s name. But despite Parsons’ former associates’ determination to keep his—and their own—illegal activities buried, a horrifying truth emerges—a web of human exploitation, unchecked greed, and murder. Soon, a quest to see justice served becomes a desperate struggle to survive . . .

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Rosalie Knecht

Everyone’s favorite sleuth—Vera Kelly—is back and put to the test as she searches for her missing girlfriend.

It’s spring 1971 and Vera Kelly and her girlfriend, Max, leave their cozy Brooklyn apartment for an emergency visit to Max's estranged family in Los Angeles. Max’s parents are divorcing—her father is already engaged to a much younger woman and under the sway of an occultist charlatan; her mother has left their estate in a hurry with no indication of return. Max, who hasn’t seen her family since they threw her out at the age of twenty-one, prepares for the trip with equal parts dread and anger. 

Upon arriving, Vera is shocked by the size and extravagance of the Comstock estate—the sprawling, manicured landscape; expansive and ornate buildings; and garages full of luxury cars reveal a privileged upbringing that, up until this point, Max had only hinted at—while Max attempts to navigate her father, who is hostile and controlling, and the occultist, St. James, who is charming but appears to be siphoning family money. Tensions boil over at dinner when Max threatens to alert her mother—and her mother’s lawyers—to St. James and her father’s plans using marital assets. The next morning, when Vera wakes up, Max is gone.

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Secrets Typed in Blood

Stephen Spotswood

New York City, 1947: For years, Holly Quick has made a good living off of murder, filling up the pages of pulp detective magazines with gruesome tales of revenge. Now someone is bringing her stories to life and leaving a trail of blood-soaked bodies behind. With the threat of another murder looming, and reluctant to go to the police, Holly turns to the best crime-solving duo in or out of the pulps, Willowjean “Will” Parker and her boss, famed detective Lillian Pentecost. The pair are handed the seemingly-impossible task of investigating three murders at once without tipping off the cops or the press that the crimes are connected. A tall order made even more difficult by the fact that Will is already signed up to spend her daylight hours undercover as a guileless secretary in the hopes of digging up a lead on an old adversary, Dr. Olivia Waterhouse. But even if Will is stuck in pencil skirts and sensible shoes, she’s not about to let her boss have all the fun. Soon she’s diving into an underground world of people obsessed with murder and the men and women who commit them. Can the killer be found in the Black Museum Club, run by a philanthropist whose collection of grim murder memorabilia may not be enough to satisfy his lust for the homicidal? Or is it Holly Quick’s pair of editors, who read about murder all day, but clearly aren’t telling the full story?

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Notes on an Execution

Danya Kukafka

Best Overall

Ansel Packer is scheduled to die in twelve hours. He knows what he’s done, and now awaits execution, the same chilling fate he forced on those girls, years ago. But Ansel doesn’t want to die; he wants to be celebrated, understood. 

Through a kaleidoscope of women—a mother, a sister, a homicide detective—we learn the story of Ansel’s life. We meet his mother, Lavender, a seventeen-year-old girl pushed to desperation; Hazel, twin sister to Ansel’s wife, inseparable since birth, forced to watch helplessly as her sister’s relationship threatens to devour them all; and finally, Saffy, the detective hot on his trail, who has devoted herself to bringing bad men to justice but struggles to see her own life clearly. As the clock ticks down, these three women sift through the choices that culminate in tragedy, exploring the rippling fissures that such destruction inevitably leaves in its wake. 

Blending breathtaking suspense with astonishing empathy,  Notes on an Execution  presents a chilling portrait of womanhood as it simultaneously unravels the familiar narrative of the American serial killer, interrogating our system of justice and our cultural obsession with crime stories, asking readers to consider the false promise of looking for meaning in the psyches of violent men.

Best Thrillers

Janice Hallett

The Fairway Players, a local theatre group, is in the midst of rehearsals when tragedy strikes the family of director Martin Hayward and his wife Helen, the play’s star. Their young granddaughter has been diagnosed with a rare form of cancer, and with an experimental treatment costing a tremendous sum, their castmates rally to raise the money to give her a chance at survival. But not everybody is convinced of the experimental treatment’s efficacy—nor of the good intentions of those involved. As tension grows within the community, things come to a shocking head at the explosive dress rehearsal. The next day, a dead body is found, and soon, an arrest is made. In the run-up to the trial, two young lawyers sift through the material—emails, messages, letters—with a growing suspicion that the killer may be hiding in plain sight. The evidence is all there, between the lines, waiting to be uncovered.

Broken Summer

J. M. Lee; An Seon Jae (Translator)

Lee Hanjo is an artist at the peak of his fame, envied and celebrated. Then, on his forty-third birthday, he awakens to find that his devoted wife has disappeared, leaving behind a soon-to-be-published novel she’d secretly written about the sordid past and questionable morality of an artist with a trajectory similar to Hanjo’s. It’s clear to him that his life is about to shatter and the demons from his past will come out. But why did his wife do it? Why now?

The book forces Hanjo to reflect on a summer from his youth when a deadly lie irreversibly and tragically determined the fates of two families.

From master storyteller J. M. Lee, one of Korea’s most renowned authors, comes an unforgettable novel of hidden truths, denials, and their inevitable repercussions. Everyone still left standing from that terrible summer so long ago must finally reckon with the deceptions that started it all and, twist after shocking twist, reap both the suffering and the vindication that comes with revenge.

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The Other Side of Night

The Other Side of Night  begins with a man named David Asha writing about his biggest regret: his sudden separation from his son, Elliot. In his grief, David tells a story. Next, we step into the life of Harriet Kealty, a police officer trying to clear her name after a lapse of judgment. She discovers a curious inscription in a secondhand book—a plea:  Help me, he’s trying to kill me . Who wrote this note? Who is “he”? This note leads Harri to David Asha, who was last seen stepping off a cliff. Police suspect he couldn’t cope after his wife’s sudden death. Still, why would this man jump and leave behind his young son? Quickly, Harri’s attention zeroes in on a person she knows all too well. Ben Elmys: once the love of her life. A surrogate father to Elliot Asha and trusted friend to the Ashas. Ben may also be a murderer.

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Blood Sugar

Sascha Rothchild

Though she may be a murderer, Ruby is not a sociopath. She is an animal-loving therapist with a thriving practice. She’s felt empathy and sympathy. She’s had long-lasting friendships and relationships, and has a husband, Jason, whom she adores. But the homicide detectives at Miami Beach PD are not convinced of her happy marriage. When we meet Ruby, she is in a police interrogation room, being accused of Jason’s murder. Which, ironically, is one murder that she did not commit, though a scandal-obsessed public believes differently. As she undergoes questioning, Ruby’s mind races back to all the details of her life that led her to this exact moment, and to the three dead bodies in her wake. Because though she may not have killed her husband, Ruby certainly isn’t innocent.

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The Murder Rule

Dervla McTiernan

First Rule: Make them like you.

Second Rule: Make them need you.

Third Rule: Make them pay.

They think I’m a young, idealistic law student, that I’m passionate about reforming a corrupt and brutal system.

They think I’m working hard to impress them.

They think I’m here to save an innocent man on death row.

They're wrong. I’m going to bury him.

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Notable Mysteries & Thrillers

Hokuloa Road

by Elizabeth Hand

On a whim, Grady Kendall applies to work as a live-in caretaker for a luxury property in Hawaiʻi, as far from his small-town Maine life as he can imagine. Within days he's flying out to an estate on remote Hokuloa Road, where he quickly uncovers a dark side to the island’s idyllic reputation: it has long been a place where people vanish without a trace. When a young woman from his flight becomes the next to disappear, Grady is determined—and soon desperate—to figure out what's happened to Jessie, and to all those staring out of the island’s “missing" posters. But working with Raina, Jessie’s fiercely protective best friend, to uncover the truth is anything but easy, and with an inexplicable and sinister presence stalking his every step, Grady can only hope he'll find the answer before it's too late.

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The Bangalore Detectives Club

Harini Nagendra

When clever, headstrong Kaveri moves to Bangalore to marry handsome young doctor Ramu, she's resigned herself to a quiet life. But that all changes the night of the party at the Century Club, where she escapes to the garden for some peace and quiet—and instead spots an uninvited guest in the shadows. Half an hour later, the party turns into a murder scene. When a vulnerable woman is connected to the crime, Kaveri becomes determined to save her and launches a private investigation to find the killer, tracing his steps from an illustrious brothel to an Englishman's mansion. She soon finds that sleuthing in a sari isn't as hard as it seems when you have a talent for mathematics, a head for logic, and a doctor for a husband . . . And she's going to need them all as the case leads her deeper into a hotbed of danger, sedition, and intrigue in Bangalore's darkest alleyways.

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The Daughter of Doctor Moreau

Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Carlota Moreau: A young woman growing up on a distant and luxuriant estate, safe from the conflict and strife of the Yucatán peninsula. The only daughter of a researcher who is either a genius or a madman. Montgomery Laughton: A melancholic overseer with a tragic past and a propensity for alcohol. An outcast who assists Dr. Moreau with his experiments, which are financed by the Lizaldes, owners of magnificent haciendas and plentiful coffers. The hybrids: The fruits of the doctor’s labor, destined to blindly obey their creator and remain in the shadows. A motley group of part human, part animal monstrosities. All of them live in a perfectly balanced and static world, which is jolted by the abrupt arrival of Eduardo Lizalde, the charming and careless son of Dr. Moreau’s patron, who will unwittingly begin a dangerous chain reaction. For Moreau keeps secrets, Carlota has questions, and, in the sweltering heat of the jungle, passions may ignite.

The Furrows

Namwali Serpell

Cassandra Williams is twelve; her little brother, Wayne, is seven. One day, when they’re alone together, there is an accident and Wayne is lost forever. His body is never recovered. The missing boy cleaves the family with doubt. Their father leaves, starts another family elsewhere. But their mother can’t give up hope and launches an organization dedicated to missing children.  As C grows older, she sees her brother everywhere: in bistros, airplane aisles, subway cars. Here is her brother’s face, the light in his eyes, the way he seems to recognize her, too. But it can’t be, of course. Or can it? Then one day, in another accident, C meets a man both mysterious and familiar, a man who is also searching for someone and for his own place in the world. His name is Wayne. 

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Percival Everett

The protagonist of Percival Everett’s puckish new novel is a brilliant professor of mathematics who goes by Wala Kitu. (Wala, he explains, means “nothing” in Tagalog, and Kitu is Swahili for “nothing.”) He is an expert on nothing. That is to say, he  is  an expert, and his area of study is nothing, and he does nothing about it. This makes him the perfect partner for the aspiring villain John Sill, who wants to break into Fort Knox to steal, well, not gold bars but a shoebox containing nothing. Once he controls nothing he’ll proceed with a dastardly plan to turn a Massachusetts town into nothing. Or so he thinks. With the help of the brainy and brainwashed astrophysicist-turned-henchwoman Eigen Vector, our professor tries to foil the villain while remaining in his employ. In the process, Wala Kitu learns that Sill’s desire to become a literal Bond villain originated in some real all-American villainy related to the murder of Martin Luther King Jr. As Sill says, “Professor, think of it this way. This country has never given anything to us and it never will. We have given everything to it. I think it’s time we gave nothing back.”

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The Old Woman with the Knife

Gu Byeong-mo

The kinetic story of a sixty-five-year-old female assassin who faces an unexpected threat in the twilight of her career—this is an international bestseller and the English language debut from an award-winning South Korean author At sixty-five, Hornclaw is beginning to slow down. She lives modestly in a small apartment, with only her aging dog, a rescue named Deadweight, to keep her company. There are expectations for people her age—that she'll retire and live out the rest of her days quietly. But Hornclaw is not like other people. She is an assassin. Double-crossers, corporate enemies, cheating spouses—for the past four decades, Hornclaw has killed them all with ruthless efficiency, and the less she's known about her targets, the better. But now, nearing the end of her career, she has just slipped up. An injury leads her to an unexpected connection with a doctor and his family. But emotions, for an assassin, are a dangerous proposition. As Hornclaw's world closes in, this final chapter in her career may also mark her own bloody end.

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Our Missing Hearts

Twelve-year-old Bird Gardner lives a quiet existence with his loving but broken father, a former linguist who now shelves books in a university library. His mother Margaret, a Chinese American poet, left the family when he was nine years old without a trace. Bird knows to not ask too many questions, stand out too much, or stray too far. For a decade, his family's life has been governed by laws written to preserve “American culture” in the wake of years of economic instability and violence. To keep the peace and restore prosperity, the authorities are now allowed to relocate children of dissidents, especially those of Asian origin, and libraries have been forced to remove books seen as unpatriotic. Bird has grown up disavowing his mother and her poems; he doesn’t know her work or what happened to her, and he knows he shouldn’t wonder. But when he receives a mysterious letter containing only a cryptic drawing, he is pulled into a quest to find her. His journey will take him back to the many folktales she poured into his head as a child, through the ranks of an underground network of librarians, into the lives of the children who have been taken, and finally to New York City, where a new act of defiance may be the beginning of much-needed change.

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The Passenger

Cormac McCarthy

1980, PASS CHRISTIAN, MISSISSIPPI: It is three in the morning when Bobby Western zips the jacket of his wet suit and plunges from the Coast Guard tender into darkness. His dive light illuminates the sunken jet, nine bodies still buckled in their seats, hair floating, eyes devoid of speculation. Missing from the crash site are the pilot’s flight bag, the plane’s black box, and the tenth passenger. But how? A collateral witness to machinations that can only bring him harm, Western is shadowed in body and spirit—by men with badges; by the ghost of his father, inventor of the bomb that melted glass and flesh in Hiroshima; and by his sister, the love and ruin of his soul.

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The Best Reviewed Mystery and Crime Books of 2022

Featuring fernanda melchor, robert harris, john darnielle, don winslow, and more.

We’ve come to the end of another bountiful literary year, and for all of us review rabbits here at Book Marks, that can mean only one thing: basic math, and lots of it.

Yes, using reviews drawn from more than 150 publications, over the next two weeks we’ll be calculating and revealing the most critically-acclaimed books of 2022, in the categories of (deep breath): Fiction ; Nonfiction ; Memoir and Biography ; Sci-Fi, Fantasy, and Horror ; Short Story Collections ; Essay Collections; Poetry; Mystery and Crime; Graphic Literature ; and Literature in Translation .

Today’s installment: Mystery and Crime .

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

1. Paradais by Fernanda Melchor, trans. by Sophie Hughes (New Directions)

18 Rave • 6 Positive

“ Paradais is both more compact and more cogent [than Hurricane Season ]. Rhythm and lexis work in tandem to produce a savage lyricism. The translator Sophie Hughes marvellously matches the author in her pursuit of a new cadence … From its first sentence, in fact, Paradais feels rhythmically propelled towards a violent climax. Full stops occur rarely enough to seem meaningful, Melchor using long lines of unbroken narrative to reel in her terrible ending … The author wants to understand the violence, not merely condemn it … The novel’s language, meanwhile, is both high-flown and street-smart, strewn with Veracruzian slang, the odd made-up word and many eye-watering expletives … Pressure builds remorselessly to a dreadful climax. It is an extraordinary feat of control, making Fernanda Melchor’s exceptional novel into a contemporary masterpiece.”

–Miranda France ( Times Literary Supplement )

2. Devil House by John Darnielle (MCD)

14 Rave • 8 Positive • 2 Mixed Listen to a conversation with John Darnielle here

“… terrific: confident, creepy, a powerful and soulful page-turner. I had no idea where it was going, in the best possible sense … The thing about Darnielle’s writing, in all its forms, is this: If you’re that dorky outcast kid drawing a pentagram on the back page of your three-ring binder in algebra class, not because you want to drink anyone’s blood but because you think it’s cool, he sees you. His novels are in close contact with the alternative cultural universes of fantasy and the occult and science fiction, yet they don’t resemble genre fiction. They’re earthy and fly low to the ground. They are plain-spoken and in no hurry … Devil House …[is] never quite the book you think it is. It’s better.”

–Dwight Garner ( The New York Times )

3. Act of Oblivion by Robert Harris (Harper)

14 Rave • 5 Positive

“Gripping … A belter of a thriller. It will be compulsive reading for those who loved An Officer and a Spy , Harris’s book about the Dreyfus affair. Like that novel, the research is immaculate. A chewy, morally murky slice of history is made into a tale that twists and surprises. The characters are strong and we care about their predicament. The story stretches over continents and years, but the suspense feels as taut as if the three main characters were locked in a room with a gun.”

–Antonia Senior ( AirMail )

4. City on Fire by Don Winslow (William Morrow)

14 Rave • 4 Positive Read an interview with Don Winslow here

“Winslow…brings his sharp interpretive skills to Virgil’s Aeneid, and makes the events at Troy and the founding of Rome into a riveting gangster tale. He makes me wonder why I had never before seen the Trojan War as the obvious fight between rival criminal gangs … In City of Fire, he returns to his New England roots for this new classic he says took him decades to write … Winslow is a master of pacing. Action and erotic sequences fire the adrenaline, while tender scenes feel languid and warm. He shades the relationship between men and women in noir tones. Tough guys don’t always get their way. Noir women are wicked smart, and press their advantages against how men’s low assumptions of women make them weak … Winslow has been lauded for the ways that his previous crime novels confront social issues. He has interrogated the ways that borders work between us, that we’re weak at the border when we build insurmountable walls to shore them up. One that runs under the surface of Winslow’s novel is that it’s not just the faults of individuals that cause these men to fail. But here, rigid definitions of who gets to belong in ‘our thing’ create fatal weaknesses among them. The refusal to think outside their constricted notions of masculinity and honor hobbles them.”

–Lorraine Berry ( The Boston Globe )

5. Bad Actors by Mick Herron (Soho Crime)

9 Rave • 4 Positive Listen to an excerpt from Bad Actors here

“Herron’s plots are masterpieces of convolution and elegant wrong-footing. Beyond that, his action scenes are fast-paced and thrilling—there are a couple of high-octane doozies in this installment. But the real draw of the series is its dark, dark humor. Much of it is interpersonal, but the most biting of all concerns the state of Britain, a country beset by Brexit, COVID and incompetent, if mercenary, leadership … If there is bad news, it is that you really should have read some of the previous Slough House novels in order to get a handle on this party of rejects, their histories and capabilities. Further, if you are a veteran of the series, you may have become a little weary of Jackson Lamb’s extravagant foulness and his habit of magicking cigarettes and even himself out of nowhere. That said, this is still one of the most enjoyable series I have ever read.”

–Katherine A. Powers ( The Star Tribune )

6. The Bullet That Missed by Richard Osman (Pamela Dorman Books)

9 Rave • 5 Positive • 1 Pan

“Osman concocts a satisfyingly complex whodunit full of neat twists and wrong turns. But unlike most crime novelists, he ensures his book’s strength and momentum stem not from its plot or its thrills but rather its perfectly formed characters. Once again, the quartet of friends makes for delightful company … If there is fault to be found it is a recurring one throughout the series—namely that Osman’s two men have less to do than his two women, and as a result feel like extras around the main double-act. But what a double-act … What could have been twee and uninvolving is in fact heartwarming and enthralling. ‘They carried a kind of magic, the four of them,’ a policeman muses. That magic is still there in abundance.”

–Malcolm Forbes ( The Washington Post )

7. Luckenbooth by Jenni Fagan (Pegasus)

9 Rave • 2 Positive • 1 Mixed • 1 Pan

“. deliciously weird … Fagan once again examines the way people are affected by unhealthy spaces … she writes about placement and displacement with an arresting mix of insight and passion … Fagan tests each floor of No. 10 Luckenbooth as though she’s playing a literary version of Jenga, drawing out one block after another from this unstable structure … a muffled scream—with a feral melody and a thundering bass line. Her prose has never been more cinematic. This story’s inexorable acceleration and its crafty use of suggestion and elision demonstrate the special effects that the best writers can brew up without a single line of Hollywood software—just paper, ink and ghosts.”

–Ron Charles ( The Washington Post )

8. The Christie Affair by Nina de Gramont (St. Martin’s Press)

7 Rave • 2 Positive • 3 Mixed

“An ingenious new psychological suspense novel that concocts an elaborate backstory behind Christie’s disappearance … Here’s the neatest narrative trick of all: As Christie characteristically did, de Gramont hides the solution to the mystery of The Christie Affair in plain sight … The Christie Affair is richly imagined; inventive and, occasionally, poignant; and about as true-to-life as Christie’s own tales of quaint villages with their staggering murder rates. But when fabrications are this marvelous, why demand realism?”

–Maureen Corrigan ( The Washington Post )

9. Heat 2 by Michael Mann and Meg Gardiner (William Morrow)

7 Rave • 2 Positive • 2 Mixed

“It’s a pulpy, expansive crime novel that feels of a piece with Mann’s filmography, from its hypercompetent, ambitious characters to the richly detailed underworlds they operate in … At times, Mann and Gardiner use the prequel portion of the book to directly explain the origins of iconic moments from the film, but even those instances tend to feel motivated by the story rather than like cheap ploys to get readers to do the Leo pointing meme … part of the fun of Heat 2 lies in watching its authors pull ideas and tiny details from across Mann’s entire filmography … Heat 2 , though, paints complete enough portraits of its characters to allow you to imagine them separately from the stars who played them, making a film adaptation with new actors easier to imagine.”

–Chris Stanton ( Vulture )

10. An Honest Living by Dwyer Murphy (Viking)

6 Rave • 3 Positive • 2 Mixed Listen to an interview with Dwyer Murphy here

“Like the best noir practitioners, Murphy uses the mystery as scaffolding to assemble a world of fallen dreams and doom-bitten characters … Murphy’s hard-boiled rendering of the city is nothing short of exquisite. It’s a landscape of reeking garbage, of salty rain sweeping off the ocean, of Midtown towers that look ‘ghostly like a mountain range,’ … For anyone who wants a portrait of this New York, few recent books have conjured it so vividly. For those who demand a straightforward mystery without any humor, romance and ambience, well, forget it, Jake, it’s literature.”

–Christopher Bollen ( The New York Times Book Review )

Our System:

RAVE = 5 points • POSITIVE = 3 points • MIXED = 1 point • PAN = -5 points

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America’s top mystery book critics break down the year in crime

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Amid the ongoing COVID-19 threats and racial reckoning that have marked 2021, reading crime (fiction and nonfiction) has provided both some much-needed escapism and, in the proliferation of diverse new voices and urgent themes, a bracing tonic — a harbinger of hoped-for change.

What more is there to say about the year in crime writing? A lot, if you ask the critics who keep a close eye on its multitude of genres. Below are the edited results of a rolling email correspondence with several of them: Steph Cha , author of “ Your House Will Pay ” and series editor of “The Best American Mystery and Suspense”; Oline Cogdill , mystery reviewer for the Sun-Sentinel and other outlets; Maureen Corrigan , book critic for NPR’s “Fresh Air”; CrimeReads Senior Editor Molly Odintz; and Sarah Weinman , author and crime fiction columnist for the New York Times Book Review.

The 20 best books of 2021

We asked four critics to name their five favorite books of the year. None of them overlapped. Here are their 20 candidates for best of the year

Dec. 20, 2021

How would you characterize this year in crime?

Cogdill : The genre continues to expand, reenergize and elevate itself. The stories continue to take us to new levels, showing deeper plots and characters.

Corrigan : I felt as though almost every mystery and suspense novel I picked up this year featured an “anxiety of appropriation” plot. Ever since Edgar Allan Poe wrote “The Purloined Letter” in 1844, the theft of a manuscript has been a standard plot, but this year, it packed more of a political charge, often revolving around a less powerful person reclaiming ownership of what was originally theirs through elaborately plotted acts of revenge.

That reminds me of a line from “Medea” that Alison Gaylin used as an epigram for her thriller “ The Collective ”: “Hate is a bottomless cup; I will pour and pour.” Why do you think revenge-motivated fiction is increasingly popular?

Weinman : We all feel rage, particularly over the last five or so years, so it has to be channeled somewhere. We will certainly see more revenge thrillers in the near future.

Cha : We are helpless in so many ways, and revenge thrillers provide a fantasy of retribution and brutal justice that is miles beyond anything we might hope to see in real life.

What debuts made an impression this year?

Cogdill : Mia P. Manansala folded in a lively mixture of Filipino culture, food and family bonds in “ Arsenic and Adobo .” Catherine Dang in “Nice Girls” and Amanda Jayatissa with “My Sweet Girl” brought a youthful angst while exploring their cultural backgrounds. Questions of identity have long been a mainstay of mysteries, and Alexandra Andrews with “Who Is Maud Dixon?” and Abigail Dean with “Girl A” brought a fresh perspective.

I’m also encouraged to see established writers continue to grow and evolve. Naomi Hirahara’s historical mystery, “Clark and Division,” was a real departure from her other mystery series.

Corrigan : I think it was gutsy of Lisa Scottoline to publish historical fiction this year. As she’s said in interviews , she’s wanted to write in that genre for decades. I enjoyed “Eternal” (set in fascist Italy), and I admired the fact that Scottoline hasn’t let her enormous success box her in.

Cha : I know he’s best known for his pedigreed literary fiction, but Colson Whitehead has been working with crime elements since “The Intuitionist,” and “Harlem Shuffle” is an absolute delight that embraces the genre. And there’s a sequel coming — a first for Whitehead.

Cogdill : Megan Abbott continues to produce provocative novels that show us the dark side of female ambition, competition and anxiety with her latest, “The Turnout.” Michael Connelly , who delivered a generational shift when he introduced Renée Ballard with “The Late Show” in 2017, has taken it to a new level in “The Dark Hours.”

Speaking of Connelly, as we reassess the role of policing in our society, how have police procedurals fared this year?

Cogdill : Connelly has consistently and unflinchingly shown the good and the bad cops. This is especially true in “The Dark Hours,” in which Connelly, without taking sides, shows how racial justice protests, the Jan. 6 insurrection and the pandemic have affected the LAPD’s officers, decimated morale and caused some to question their career choices.

Weinman : I admit to being discomfited by the procedural. But I also don’t want to make any definitive conclusion about this subgenre for at least another two to three years, when writers have had the time to really grapple with the last few years.

I was encouraged to see more crime fiction by queer authors.

Odintz : I loved so many, including: Robyn Gigl’s “By Way of Sorrow”; Michael Nava’s “Lies With Man”; Cheryl Head’s “Warn Me When It’s Time”; and Amanda Kabak’s “Upended.” Timothy Schaffert’s “The Perfume Thief” entranced me.

Corrigan : I’m thrilled to see the resurgence of LGBTQ+ crime fiction. There was so much energy in the 1980s and 1990s around queer crime writers like Nava, Liza Cody, Katherine V. Forrest, Joseph Hansen and J.M. Redmann, to name a few. Then something changed, making it harder for both LGBTQ+ writers and writers of color to keep going. A friend and colleague of mine insists that the demise of independent mystery bookstores had a lot to do with the ebbing of diversity in crime fiction. These days, podcasts and online crime fiction sites are helping readers discover writers whose profiles don’t fit “just the usual suspects.”

Odintz : I thought Caitlin Wahrer’s “The Damage” was really great ally fiction, as was S.A. Cosby’s “Razorblade Tears.” Like Cosby’s book, “The Damage” used its platform to explore the effects of toxic masculinity on straight cis male characters, which used to just go as an unquestioned norm of crime protagonist behavior. That’s a huge improvement.

But I’ve also noticed what seems like a preponderance of gay men securing publishing contracts over lesbian and other queer authors.

Cogdill : I hope this may be turning in terms of mainstream publishers. Edgar finalist Kathleen Kent ’s trilogy about Dallas Detective Sgt. Betty Rhyzyk and her wife, Jackie, just wrapped up this year with “The Pledge.” Next year, I’ll be watching for Dawn Winter’s “Sedating Elaine,” Katharine Schellman’s series debut, “Last Call at the Nightingale,” along with books by some smaller imprints.

Odintz : I agree, there are a lot of small presses that are doing better when it comes to publishing a diverse array of queer voices. However, it’s not only up to the publishers; it’s also up to the readers to read, request and recommend as many works by underrepresented queer authors as possible.

I am thrilled to read crime fiction by more writers of color than ever. Were there any that stood out for you this year?

Cha : I agree. I already mentioned Whitehead, but I was also really impressed by Silvia Moreno-Garcia ‘s “Velvet Was the Night,” James Han Mattson ’s “Reprieve” and Cosby’s “Razorblade Tears.” We’re dealing with an industry that has been dominated by white voices for centuries, so every writer of color is recovering ground. We’re still in an era of firsts and onlies, where, for example, Cosby is treading new territory by writing rural Southern noir about Black people.

Corrigan : I think Cosby’s novels are standouts. They summon up the noir predicament of being fated to a certain “no exit” destiny; given that he’s writing about characters of color, that familiar noir predicament is recharged with contemporary commentary.

Weinman : But the key point is staying power. If they sell, we will get more. I don’t want what happened in the 1990s to happen again. Then, Black writers were published in greater numbers than ever before but weren’t given much chance to find an audience and thus were dropped by their publishers. Readers lost out when writers like Charlotte Carter, Penny Mickelbury and Valerie Wilson Wesley didn’t get the support they deserved. It’s heartening to see many of these writers reemerge (I love the reissues of Charlotte Carter’s Nanette Hayes novels dearly) but even more so to see an ecosystem that recognizes more of these voices and nurtures them.

True crime seems to be more popular than ever. Why do you think it has secured a growing place in readers’ (and publishers’) imaginations?

Weinman : I’ve always said true crime is a perennially popular genre dating back at least three centuries. People love to read about the worst of humanity. What is different now, of course, is a greater preponderance of stories that center on those who were harmed and murdered, giving them three-dimensional portraits and contextualizing the crimes as part of broken systems and subcultures. Elon Green’s “Last Call” does this exceptionally well.

Odintz : I like to think of true crime as military history for women and any group disproportionately affected by violence.

Domestic suspense is a growing subgenre, too, though the term itself is a bit polarizing.

Odintz : I’ve been enjoying how domestic suspense has sparked a revival of gothic fiction — a natural progression, given that both often include a woman in danger in a large, mysterious house. Much of domestic suspense has been more of the suburban psychological thriller variety, but we all love to read about horrible things happening in sumptuous settings, and I (and many others) have noticed a trend toward richer protagonists. Ooh, and smart houses. Lots and lots of smart homes showing up lately.

Weinman : Here’s where I would like to chime in and beat a particular drum: “Domestic suspense,” as I used it in my 2013 anthology , was specifically meant to classify crime novels and short stories by women written between the early 1940s and the mid-1970s. Mary Higgins Clark ‘s “Where Are the Children?” (1975) marked the end of “domestic suspense” and the beginning of contemporary psychological suspense, culminating in Gillian Flynn’s “ Gone Girl ” (2012) and A.S.A. Harrison’s “The Silent Wife” (2013). We’ve been in the post-“Gone Girl” phase ever since, and I think now it’s time for some other descriptor.

One of the trends I’ve also enjoyed is the growth of crime fiction that intersects with horror or other genres. “Reprieve,” Laura Lippman’s “Dream Girl” and Zakiya Dalila Harris’ “ The Other Black Girl ” come to mind.

Corrigan : I think the splicing of crime fiction and horror is part of a current trend of “literary intersectionality” that’s affecting all genres. Think of Kazuo Ishiguro’s latest novel, “ Klara and the Sun ,” which invokes sci-fi, dystopian fiction and “straight” literary fiction. Then there‘s Nghi Vo’s inventive “The Chosen and the Beautiful,” a reimagining of “The Great Gatsby” — heavy on fantasy — narrated by a Jordan Baker who’s queer and Asian.

Odintz : This was the year I discovered I was into horror! Psychological thrillers are the perfect gateway drug into further nightmares of the mind. Crime readers have long had an appetite for psychological thrillers and gothic fiction, which are both steeped in horror tropes, and a serial killer novel is absolutely both crime fiction and horror. Some types of crime novels become less problematic considered as horror. A home invasion story portrayed as ordinary and/or plausible is always annoying, but someone’s nightmare of a home invasion story with, like, clowns is much less annoying.

There are also a lot of experiences — in particular, women’s bodily experiences, and the gaslighting and physical harm society inflicts on marginalized people — that can be best represented by horror. Statements of fact or realistic fiction are often not enough to do justice to emotional truths, even in something as dark as crime fiction. And there are also some traditions — I’m thinking of Latinx and Native American fiction — that have a long history of incorporating horror and fantastical elements into crime stories. Plus, you can’t discount the influence of “Midsommar” and “Get Out” in marketing [comparisons] alone.

Cogdill : This is another way the genre continues to expand.

Woods is a book critic, editor and author of the “Charlotte Justice” series of crime novels.

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The Best Reviewed Books of 2022: Mystery and Crime

Featuring fernanda melchor, robert harris, john darnielle, don winslow, and more.

We’ve come to the end of another bountiful literary year, and for all of us review rabbits here at Book Marks, that can mean only one thing: basic math, and lots of it.

Yes, using reviews drawn from more than 150 publications, over the next two weeks we’ll be calculating and revealing the most critically-acclaimed books of 2022, in the categories of (deep breath): Fiction ; Nonfiction ; Memoir and Biography ; Sci-Fi, Fantasy, and Horror ; Short Story Collections ; Essay Collections; Poetry; Mystery and Crime; Graphic Literature ; and Literature in Translation .

Today’s installment: Mystery and Crime .

1. Paradais by Fernanda Melchor, trans. by Sophie Hughes (New Directions)

18 Rave • 6 Positive

“ Paradais is both more compact and more cogent [than Hurricane Season ]. Rhythm and lexis work in tandem to produce a savage lyricism. The translator Sophie Hughes marvellously matches the author in her pursuit of a new cadence … From its first sentence, in fact, Paradais feels rhythmically propelled towards a violent climax. Full stops occur rarely enough to seem meaningful, Melchor using long lines of unbroken narrative to reel in her terrible ending … The author wants to understand the violence, not merely condemn it … The novel’s language, meanwhile, is both high-flown and street-smart, strewn with Veracruzian slang, the odd made-up word and many eye-watering expletives … Pressure builds remorselessly to a dreadful climax. It is an extraordinary feat of control, making Fernanda Melchor’s exceptional novel into a contemporary masterpiece.”

–Miranda France ( Times Literary Supplement )

2. Devil House by John Darnielle (MCD)

14 Rave • 8 Positive • 2 Mixed Listen to a conversation with John Darnielle here

“… terrific: confident, creepy, a powerful and soulful page-turner. I had no idea where it was going, in the best possible sense … The thing about Darnielle’s writing, in all its forms, is this: If you’re that dorky outcast kid drawing a pentagram on the back page of your three-ring binder in algebra class, not because you want to drink anyone’s blood but because you think it’s cool, he sees you. His novels are in close contact with the alternative cultural universes of fantasy and the occult and science fiction, yet they don’t resemble genre fiction. They’re earthy and fly low to the ground. They are plain-spoken and in no hurry … Devil House …[is] never quite the book you think it is. It’s better.”

–Dwight Garner ( The New York Times )

3. Act of Oblivion by Robert Harris (Harper)

14 Rave • 5 Positive

“Gripping … A belter of a thriller. It will be compulsive reading for those who loved An Officer and a Spy , Harris’s book about the Dreyfus affair. Like that novel, the research is immaculate. A chewy, morally murky slice of history is made into a tale that twists and surprises. The characters are strong and we care about their predicament. The story stretches over continents and years, but the suspense feels as taut as if the three main characters were locked in a room with a gun.”

–Antonia Senior ( AirMail )

4. City on Fire by Don Winslow (William Morrow)

14 Rave • 4 Positive Read an interview with Don Winslow here

“Winslow…brings his sharp interpretive skills to Virgil’s Aeneid, and makes the events at Troy and the founding of Rome into a riveting gangster tale. He makes me wonder why I had never before seen the Trojan War as the obvious fight between rival criminal gangs … In City of Fire, he returns to his New England roots for this new classic he says took him decades to write … Winslow is a master of pacing. Action and erotic sequences fire the adrenaline, while tender scenes feel languid and warm. He shades the relationship between men and women in noir tones. Tough guys don’t always get their way. Noir women are wicked smart, and press their advantages against how men’s low assumptions of women make them weak … Winslow has been lauded for the ways that his previous crime novels confront social issues. He has interrogated the ways that borders work between us, that we’re weak at the border when we build insurmountable walls to shore them up. One that runs under the surface of Winslow’s novel is that it’s not just the faults of individuals that cause these men to fail. But here, rigid definitions of who gets to belong in ‘our thing’ create fatal weaknesses among them. The refusal to think outside their constricted notions of masculinity and honor hobbles them.”

–Lorraine Berry ( The Boston Globe )

5. Bad Actors by Mick Herron (Soho Crime)

9 Rave • 4 Positive Listen to an excerpt from Bad Actors here

“Herron’s plots are masterpieces of convolution and elegant wrong-footing. Beyond that, his action scenes are fast-paced and thrilling—there are a couple of high-octane doozies in this installment. But the real draw of the series is its dark, dark humor. Much of it is interpersonal, but the most biting of all concerns the state of Britain, a country beset by Brexit, COVID and incompetent, if mercenary, leadership … If there is bad news, it is that you really should have read some of the previous Slough House novels in order to get a handle on this party of rejects, their histories and capabilities. Further, if you are a veteran of the series, you may have become a little weary of Jackson Lamb’s extravagant foulness and his habit of magicking cigarettes and even himself out of nowhere. That said, this is still one of the most enjoyable series I have ever read.”

–Katherine A. Powers ( The Star Tribune )

6. The Bullet That Missed by Richard Osman (Pamela Dorman Books)

9 Rave • 5 Positive • 1 Pan

“Osman concocts a satisfyingly complex whodunit full of neat twists and wrong turns. But unlike most crime novelists, he ensures his book’s strength and momentum stem not from its plot or its thrills but rather its perfectly formed characters. Once again, the quartet of friends makes for delightful company … If there is fault to be found it is a recurring one throughout the series—namely that Osman’s two men have less to do than his two women, and as a result feel like extras around the main double-act. But what a double-act … What could have been twee and uninvolving is in fact heartwarming and enthralling. ‘They carried a kind of magic, the four of them,’ a policeman muses. That magic is still there in abundance.”

–Malcolm Forbes ( The Washington Post )

7. Luckenbooth by Jenni Fagan (Pegasus)

9 Rave • 2 Positive • 1 Mixed • 1 Pan

“. deliciously weird … Fagan once again examines the way people are affected by unhealthy spaces … she writes about placement and displacement with an arresting mix of insight and passion … Fagan tests each floor of No. 10 Luckenbooth as though she’s playing a literary version of Jenga, drawing out one block after another from this unstable structure … a muffled scream—with a feral melody and a thundering bass line. Her prose has never been more cinematic. This story’s inexorable acceleration and its crafty use of suggestion and elision demonstrate the special effects that the best writers can brew up without a single line of Hollywood software—just paper, ink and ghosts.”

–Ron Charles ( The Washington Post )

8. The Christie Affair by Nina de Gramont (St. Martin’s Press)

7 Rave • 2 Positive • 3 Mixed

“An ingenious new psychological suspense novel that concocts an elaborate backstory behind Christie’s disappearance … Here’s the neatest narrative trick of all: As Christie characteristically did, de Gramont hides the solution to the mystery of The Christie Affair in plain sight … The Christie Affair is richly imagined; inventive and, occasionally, poignant; and about as true-to-life as Christie’s own tales of quaint villages with their staggering murder rates. But when fabrications are this marvelous, why demand realism?”

–Maureen Corrigan ( The Washington Post )

9. Heat 2 by Michael Mann and Meg Gardiner (William Morrow)

7 Rave • 2 Positive • 2 Mixed

“It’s a pulpy, expansive crime novel that feels of a piece with Mann’s filmography, from its hypercompetent, ambitious characters to the richly detailed underworlds they operate in … At times, Mann and Gardiner use the prequel portion of the book to directly explain the origins of iconic moments from the film, but even those instances tend to feel motivated by the story rather than like cheap ploys to get readers to do the Leo pointing meme … part of the fun of Heat 2 lies in watching its authors pull ideas and tiny details from across Mann’s entire filmography … Heat 2 , though, paints complete enough portraits of its characters to allow you to imagine them separately from the stars who played them, making a film adaptation with new actors easier to imagine.”

–Chris Stanton ( Vulture )

10. An Honest Living by Dwyer Murphy (Viking)

6 Rave • 3 Positive • 2 Mixed Listen to an interview with Dwyer Murphy here

“Like the best noir practitioners, Murphy uses the mystery as scaffolding to assemble a world of fallen dreams and doom-bitten characters … Murphy’s hard-boiled rendering of the city is nothing short of exquisite. It’s a landscape of reeking garbage, of salty rain sweeping off the ocean, of Midtown towers that look ‘ghostly like a mountain range,’ … For anyone who wants a portrait of this New York, few recent books have conjured it so vividly. For those who demand a straightforward mystery without any humor, romance and ambience, well, forget it, Jake, it’s literature.”

–Christopher Bollen ( The New York Times Book Review )

Our System:

RAVE = 5 points • POSITIVE = 3 points • MIXED = 1 point • PAN = -5 points

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2022 was a decent year for mystery books. We track new books in the genre throughout the year as they were published, adding them whenever we think they're worth reading. On this list, we've also included books that have been nominated for prestigious mystery book awards, like the Edgars  in the US and the  Dagger Awards in the UK. The shortlist for the Edgars was announced in January, and the Dagger shortlist unveiled in May. Bear in mind that these are the best books of the previous year, rather than the very latest—with the advantage that they're already likely to be in paperback.

For more recent books, please consult our best mystery books of 2023 list. 

No One Will Miss Her

By kat rosenfield.

***Shortlisted for the 2022 Edgar Allan Poe Awards***

No One Will Miss Her is an excellently plotted mystery. It’s also incredibly touching with a heartwrenching main protagonist. We’ve put it at the top of this list because so far it’s our favourite of the mystery books we’ve read this year.

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The Ink Black Heart

By robert galbraith.

The Ink Black Heart is the sixth book in Robert Galbraith’s Cormoran Strike series, one of our favourite crime fiction series. The plot revolves around a cartoon and an online game based on that cartoon, and London’s Highgate Cemetery plays a key role in events (if you’ve never visited, you should: both Karl Marx and Douglas Adams are buried there, amongst hundreds of graves and ash trees growing all over the place. All in all, an ideal setting for a murder). The book is long, and it’s for readers who enjoy living daily life with the two main protagonists, Strike and Robin, as they go out about running their detective agency, rather than a pacy thriller you rush through at speed to find out whodunnit. As we’ve noted previously, this is a series where character development is important and while you can read each of the books as standalones, it’s best to start at the beginning with The Cuckoo’s Calling . The audiobook narrator for every book in the series so far, Robert Glenister, is excellent.

by Sarah Vaughan

Before adding a book to this list, we often think about it for a few weeks, to see if it sticks with us. Reputation does. It's a book about what it's like to be a female politician, and so is significant not just as a good read, but for its insight into the price paid by women to participate actively in a democracy. It's scary and depressing and helps question what's important in life—even if the answer is uncomfortable.

Razorblade Tears

By s.a. cosby.

***Shortlisted for the 2022 CWA Gold Dagger***

If you loved S.A Cosby's last book, Blacktop Wasteland , you'll enjoy this one. The characters are different, but the chief protagonists are again ex-cons, sucked back to the dark side by circumstances beyond their control. You, the reader, will again wish them well as they commit gruesome murders. As a mystery, however, this latest book, Razorblade Tears, is much more satisfying: it's driven along not only by memorable characters but also by the plot.

“ Razorblade Tears is a moody Southern thriller with fast-paced action, the story of two men—one black, one white, both ex-cons—who team together to solve the murder of their sons, who were married to one another. It’s a gritty tale that looks into questions of race, poverty, and other bias through the lens of both violence and compassion.” Read more...

The Best Thrillers of 2022

Tosca Lee , Novelist

The It Girl

By ruth ware.

We’re Ruth Ware fans here at Five Books so it’s not a huge surprise we’re including her latest, The It Girl , on our mysteries of 2022 list. It’s set in a fictional Oxford college and involves the murder of a student. The story is told through the eyes of her roommate and best friend, ten years on and now married to the boyfriend of the murdered girl. The how and who of the murder is possibly a little quick to become clear to the reader—leading to a slight frustration with the main character—though the why remains a surprise.

by Nita Prose & narrated by Lauren Ambrose

☆ Shortlisted for the 2023 Edgar Allan Poe Awards

The Maid by Nita Prose falls into the cosy mystery genre , though it has an edge to it that makes it extremely memorable. It's set in a boutique hotel in New York and the narrator is the guileless and perfectionistic Molly, who cleans rooms there. The audiobook of The Maid is outstanding, chosen by AudioFile magazine as one of its best books of the year.

“You really feel you are listening to someone whose whole life has to be in the details done the same every time and that if anything goes awry then you’re off kilter. It’s just brilliantly done. The Maid is also a very good mystery, with lots of red herrings, lots of misdirection. You’re really rooting for Molly to be exonerated.” Read more...

The Best Audiobooks of 2022

Robin Whitten , Journalist

The Shadows of Men

By abir mukherjee.

***Shortlisted for the 2021 CWA Gold Dagger***

The books in Abir Mukherjee's Wyndham and Banerjee series are set in India in the last decades of the Raj. In this book, Gandhi is in the background and communal violence in the foreground, but like all the books in the series, The Shadows of Men is very lighthearted in tone. India's first elections had taken place a few years before, in 1920. The two main protagonists, Sam Wyndham and Surendranath Banerjee, are based in colonial Calcutta but in this book also travel to Bombay . If you like your mysteries set in the past but not too heavy, this series is ideal. The Shadows of Men is the fifth book in the series, if you want to start at the beginning, the first is A Rising Man .

Before You Knew My Name

By jacqueline bublitz.

Before You Knew My Name is a touching story set mainly in New York's Upper West Side. The author Jacqueline Bublitz is from Australia/New Zealand, so it's a little bit of an outsider's perspective. The focus of the book is violence against women and it's a little bit more than just a crime novel.

Blackstone Fell

By martin edwards.

Blackstone Fell is by Martin Edwards, a leading expert on the 'golden age' of mystery writing, the period between the two world wars when escapism was the order of the day and reading a mystery book all about solving a clever puzzle. This book is written very much in that genre, even featuring a locked room mystery (though that's not the main plot). Set mainly in Yorkshire, it does read like it was written in the 1930s and even has a 'cluefinder' at the end, a device popular during the golden age and alerted the reader to the clues they should have picked up on while reading the book. It's the third book in a series featuring Rachel Savernake as the crime solver, Gallows Court and Mortmain Hall are the first two books in the series.

Five Decembers

By james kestrel.

***Winner of the 2022 Edgar Allan Poe Awards***

Five Decembers is a mystery set in World War II, starting off in Hawaii just before Pearl Harbor. The main protagonist is a Honolulu Police Department detective, who ends up travelling to Wake Island, Guam, Hong Kong and Tokyo in his search for the perpetrator of two brutal murders. Though many books feature World War II , it’s interesting to have the war in Asia as the backdrop, including the firebombing of Tokyo in March 1945.

Sunset Swing

By ray celestin.

***Winner of the 2022 CWA Gold Dagger***

Sunset Swing is the fourth and final novel in Ray Celestin's City Blues Quartet , intertwining the history of jazz and the mob across six decades and each set in a different American city: New Orleans, Chicago and New York. Los Angeles in 1967 is the backdrop for Sunset Swing and one of the main characters is on leave from service in the Vietnam War to find her brother. Another wants to leave town to set up a vineyard. Louis Armstrong makes an appearance. Overall, the plot is slightly disjointed and the book does not work well as a standalone read. Like a few other mystery books on this list, it may be worth starting with the first book in the series, The Axeman's Jazz,  to appreciate this one.

The Paris Apartment

By lucy foley.

If you haven't read any Lucy Foley before, they're always good, pacy mysteries, somewhat similar in structure and style. The Paris Apartment is a good one. Part of the attraction is that it's set in Paris. The two main characters (siblings) also feel more real or perhaps are more touching than in her previous bestsellers ( The Hunting Party , The Guest List ).

The Unwilling

By john hart.

This is one of two books on the 2022 Gold Dagger shortlist set in the Vietnam War era. John Hart is a good writer and The Unwilling draws you in. You will connect with the main characters, two brothers, and want to read on to find out what happens next. That said, the plot has a disconnected feel, almost as if it's two books instead of one. If you haven't read John Hart before, it might be worth turning to some of his earlier books, like Down River , first.

by Will Leitch

How Lucky by Will Leitch is a mystery told in the voice of a young man with spinal muscular atrophy or SMA, who is confined to a wheelchair and heavily dependent on others to stay alive. It's very touching and life-affirming and it was not a surprise, at the end of the book, to find out that the author was inspired to write it from knowing a young boy suffering from the genetic condition.

Dead of Winter

By anders de la motte.

Dead of Winter  is a mystery by Swedish crime writer (and former police officer) Anders de la Motte, set in Skåne, the southernmost part of Sweden. The book divides between the present and events in 1987, when a fire ends up killing Laura, the main protagonist’s, best friend. It’s a nice evocation of a rural region—a place of lakes and forests—and it has a reasonably good plot.

The Second Cut

By louise welsh.

It’s taken a couple of decades, but the protagonist of The Cutting Room is back. Rilke is a middle-aged auctioneer in Glasgow, who enjoys hooking up with other men on Grindr. A friend gives him a tip about a house clearance, is found dead the following day, and the story unfolds from there. The author, Louise Welsh, is Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Glasgow and the book is on the literary end of mystery-writing. As the author of Trainspotting put it in his interview with us, “to my mind she is not really a crime writer. She is a very serious literary writer working in crime”

The Trawlerman

By william shaw.

The Trawlerman is a mystery set on a beautiful piece of Kent coastline near Dungeness nuclear power station. The book is part of a series featuring a police officer called DS Alexandra Cupidi, who combines a tough job with being a single parent to a teenage daughter. In terms of plot, the book does work as a standalone. However, it is hard to feel very invested in the characters or their lives—Cupidi is recovering from PTSD—so it may be worth exploring the first book in the series, Salt Lane , before trying this one.

The Venice Sketchbook

By rhys bowen.

☆ Shortlisted for the 2022 Edgar Allan Poe Awards

The Venice Sketchbook by Rhys Bowen is a work of historical fiction (or possibly historical romance ) set in both the present and the lead up to World War II . We’ve included it because it’s been shortlisted for an Edgar, but it’s not really a mystery in the classic sense of having you guessing whodunnit. The plot revolves around a woman learning more about the past life of her recently deceased great aunt, with most of the action taking place in Venice (aka La Serenissima).

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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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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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Kirkus Prize winner

National Book Award Finalist

A LITTLE LIFE

by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015

The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.

Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.

Yanagihara ( The People in the Trees , 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.  

Pub Date: March 10, 2015

ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8

Page Count: 720

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015

GENERAL FICTION

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by Hanya Yanagihara

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Book Reviews

5 new mysteries and thrillers for your nightstand this spring.

Bethanne Patrick

Welcome back, mystery and thriller devotees! These books will take you from murder in present-day Texas to cryptography in Cold War Berlin to an online community that might hold the solution to a missing-person case.

Happy reading!

Listen for the Lie by Amy Tintera

Savannah Harper, the sweetheart of Plumpton, Texas, died from blows to her head. A few hours later, her best friend forever, Lucy Chase, was found wandering the town streets covered in blood. While Lucy was never formally charged with the murder, the community convicted her lock, stock and a full plate of barbecue. Five years later, Lucy has come home just as true-crime podcaster Ben Owens arrives to produce an episode of his show "Listen for the Lie."

As Ben encourages the tetchy, secretive Lucy to share her side of the story with him, she relaxes beneath his sunny, handsome gaze and starts to look at the truth. Unfortunately, truth doesn't matter much to the residents of Plumpton, who long ago made up their minds about a young woman whose persona chafes against their ideas of femininity. Fortunately, by the time you meet the Plumptonites, you'll have been mesmerized by Lucy's hilarious, self-deprecating first-person narration. "It's probably unfair to say that a podcast ruined my life," she tells readers, and then, as she talks about making dinner during which she'll break up with her clueless boyfriend: "Let this be a lesson to all the men out there who can't handle conflict — man up and dump your girlfriend, or you might end up living with a suspected murder indefinitely."

Podcast episodes interspersed between Lucy's chapters form a clever way for Tintera (already a bestselling YA author; this is her debut for adults) to draw out the suspense. Revealing too much about the other characters might ruin that cleverness, but it's important to note that even when the story has ended and the murderer found, there are secrets within secrets, the kind that women have long used to protect each other.

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Where You End by Abbott Kahler

Abbott Kahler's debut centers on a young woman named Katherine "Kat" Bird, who has a near-death experience after her car collides with a deer, and wakes to near-total amnesia. She remembers her twin sister, Jude, who tries to fill in all of the blanks in Kat's memory, but as Kat slowly recovers, she realizes Jude's recounting of events contradict her own.

5 mysteries and thrillers new this fall

5 new mysteries and thrillers for the start of summer

Did the sisters have an idyllic childhood, or were they raised in a cult? If the latter is true, why would Jude be trying to pretend it never happened? Kahler (who has written acclaimed nonfiction as Karen Abbott) constructs a thriller so perfectly paced that you actually will not be able to put it down. You'll be longing at each step to see how much Kat remembers and how much Jude complicates the memories. Each clue (there are few pictures of the sisters together, for example) has a flip side, a structural technique that works particularly well since the book is set in 1970s Philadelphia, with all of that city's grittiness, community, and culture.

Kahler based her novel on the real-life story of Alex and Marcus Lewis, 18-year-old British identical twins. In 1982, Alex awoke from a coma following a motorcycle accident and remembered nothing except his brother's name and face; Marcus decided to use the opportunity to invent new lives for them both. Kahler expands on their situation by going deeper into the effects of trauma for women and girls, making Where You End incredibly relevant, right up to the truly shocking ending.

The Night of the Storm by Nishita Parekh

Answer to a question you didn't ask: In the UK, the board game Clue is known as Cluedo, a portmanteau word for "clue" plus "ludo," the Latin for "I play." In Nishita Parekh's debut, a locked-room mystery that toys with everyone's memories of playing Clue, readers may want to keep that active verb in mind. Set in Houston among a group of upperclass suburban Desi friends, The Night of the Storm puts family drama above anything resembling, say, Cape Fear -style hijinks — but the word "storm" in the title can mean so many things.

Protagonist Jia Shah, single mom to Ishaan, decides they'll both shelter from Hurricane Harvey at her sister Seema's large home in Sugar Land. Seema's husband Vipul and some of his relatives make things more complicated for Jia, through both their busy presence and because Jia and Vipul have some sexual tension going on; one of the things that makes this book fascinating is the look at a second-generation immigrant family enjoying their new country while also feeling the pull of hereditary expectations.

If you're looking for a thriller — and this book is labeled one — you've come to the wrong place. The Night of the Storm resembles nothing so much as a Golden Age mystery, and if you appreciate those, you've come to the right place. Parekh has clearly read her Christie, Marsh, and Allingham; she also clearly relishes those authors and their attention to cohesion and convention. Come on in and shelter from this Storm with a truly unreliable cast of characters.

Rabbit Hole by Kate Brody

A decade ago, Teddy Angstrom's older sister Angie disappeared at age 18. When their father chooses suicide on the anniversary of Angie's death, the now 26-year-old Teddy leaves the private school in Maine where she teaches English for home to sort out family matters with her grieving mother. Teddy discovers Mark Angstrom had grown obsessed with Reddit boards about true crime, some of them specifically about Angie's case.

Her initial look at the discussions soon turns into an obsession equaling her father's, one that will pull her into the orbit of 19-year-old Mickey, a local college student with multiple tattoos and perhaps multiple motives for the assistance she gives Teddy. The weird friendship these women create reflects the darkness into which Teddy descends, continuing her addiction to the internet as she develops an addiction to alcohol, and accidentally outing herself as Angie's sister to the various members of the Reddit boards.

Brody wisely builds the suspense around Teddy's dissolution and paranoia, rather than focusing on the details of Angie's fate, creating an atmosphere so suffocating and panicky that readers will feel the effects of loss, grief, and confusion as surely as if they were inside Teddy's very smart and once better-adjusted mind. Teddy's longing not just for her sister's survival but for their ability to share life as 20-somethings marks her more indelibly than Mickey's body ink.

The Berlin Letters by Katherine Reay

Brilliant cryptographer Luisa Voekler, whose talent was nurtured by her grandfather's frequent code-based scavenger hunts, wants to move up in the CIA, but finds her career sidelined in the late 1980s as she translates World War II documents. One day she recognizes a tiny symbol that will lead her down a dangerous path. Her discovery involves her father, Haris, who remains in the East Berlin his family left in 1961 as the East German government put up a wall dividing the city.

Reay has written a number of novels based on Brontë and Austen characters, as well as a couple of lighthearted looks at women's friendships in Illinois, but in 2021 she turned to darker territory, setting books about spycraft in London, Moscow — and now Berlin and Washington, D.C. The cover of The Berlin Letters announces both its relatively recent time period, with the figure of a young woman dressed in contemporary clothing, yet also nods to the singularity of modern Berlin, with a backdrop of the Wall covered in graffiti and the trunk of an iconic East German Trabant or "Trabi" auto (known for being constructed from lightweight resin).

The author knows East and West Berlin inside out, discussing details like the houses on Bernauer Strasse that allowed inhabitants, for a time, to easily defect simply by walking out of their front doors. However, those details never overwhelm a fast-paced story told by father and daughter from their different vantage points, as Luisa learns the truth of her past, and both stories reach the shocking, history-making night when The Berlin Wall fell on Nov. 9, 1989.

Bethanne Patrick is a freelance writer and critic who tweets @TheBookMaven and hosts the podcast Missing Pages.

15 best mysteries to read in 2023

Explore 15 of the best mystery books of 2023

Updated August 24, 2023

Recommendations are independently chosen by Reviewed's editors. Purchases made through the links below may earn us and our publishing partners a commission.

Several thrillers have taken the internet by storm in recent years like “The Silent Patient” and “A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder.” This year popular picks like “I Have Some Questions for You” and “Everyone Here is Lying” have been getting a lot of buzz. Keep reading to find more exhilarating murder mysteries to add to your bookshelf this year.

1. ‘I Have Some Questions for You’ by Rebecca Makkai

Best mysteries of 2023: “I Have Some Questions for You”

“I Have Some Questions for You” has been all over social media since its release in February. The novel follows Bodie Kane, a film professor and podcaster whose former roommate, Thalia Keith was tragically murdered during senior year. Omar Evans, the school’s athletic director, was convicted for Thalia’s murder, but not everyone believed he was the killer. When Bodie is invited to speak at the school years later, she can’t help but do some digging to find out the truth of Thalia’s death.

2. ‘Everyone Here is Lying’ by Shari Lapena

Best mysteries of 2023: “Everyone Here is Lying”

“Everyone Here is Lying” is a highly-anticipated mystery that follows William Wooler, a man whose affair ends badly. When he returns home angry after the breakup, William discovers his daughter Avery is unexpectedly home from school. Just hours later, Avery is declared missing and the community’s true colors get exposed as everyone tries to solve the mystery of Avery’s disappearance. “Everyone Here is Lying” will be released on August 22, 2023 .

3. ‘The Surgeon’ by Leslie Wolfe

Best mysteries of 2023: “The Surgeon”

“The Surgeon” by Leslie Wolfe follows a surgeon who loses a patient for the first time—worse, she knew him and disliked him. In the aftermath of the death, she begins to panic, and becomes embroiled in an investigation into whether or not the patient’s death was deliberate or an accident.

4. ‘The Housekeepers’ by Alex Hay

Best mysteries of 2023: “The Housekeepers”

“The Housekeepers” follows Mrs. King, a housekeeper and lifetime con artist who’s suddenly fired from her position. She then goes on a quest to discover the truth behind her firing, recruiting a group to help her get revenge by committing a robbery during a grand ball at the mansion where she used to work. 

5. ‘Zero Days’ by Ruth Ware

Best mysteries of 2023: “Zero Days”

“Zero Days” is a mystery by popular thriller writer Ruth Ware. It follows a couple, Jack and Gabe, who break into houses for a living. One day, one of their assignments goes wrong and Gabe turns up dead. Jack then goes on the run and works to uncover her husband’s killer. 

6. ‘The Maid’ by Nita Prose

Best mysteries of 2023: “The Maid”

“The Maid” centers on Molly Gray, a hotel maid who’s struggling to cope after the death of her grandmother. One day, Molly’s life changes when she walks into a hotel suite and finds Charles Black dead in his bed. Police begin questioning Molly’s behavior and name her as the prime suspect. Molly and her friends decide to come together to find Charles’ true killer.

7. ‘Dark Angel’ by Robert Petkoff

Best mysteries of 2023: "Dark Angel"

“Dark Angel” features Letty Davenport, a woman with incredible gun skills who gets scouted by US government agencies. Letty gets assigned to a project by the Department of Homeland Security and the NSA to infiltrate a hacker group called Ordinary People. As Letty and her partner dig deeper, they discover that they have enemies beyond Ordinary People and may have been betrayed by someone in their own circle. 

8. ‘Strange Sally Diamond’ by Liz Nugent

Best mysteries of 2023: “Strange Sally Diamond”

9. ‘One of Us Is Back’ by Karen M. McManus

Best mysteries of 2023: “One of Us Is Back”

“One of Us Is Back” is a new thriller by The New York Times bestselling author Karen M. McManus. The third book in the “One of Us Is Lying” series takes place two years after the death of Simon, with the Bayview Four having to prove that they weren’t responsible. Someone begins taunting them with a mysterious billboard and shortly after, one of the Bayview Four disappears. Once an unexpected guest turns up, people begin turning up dead.

10. ‘All the Sinners Bleed’ by S.A. Cosby

Best mysteries of 2023: “All the Sinners Bleed”

“All the Sinners Bleed” features Titus Crown, who is the first Black sheriff in Charon County, Virginia. The tragic murder of a teacher rocks the quiet community, but Titus begins uncovering deep secrets that point to a possible serial killer in the area. Titus grapples with secrets of his own past while trying to solve the case and confront a racist far-right group in town.

11. ‘None of This Is True’ by Lisa Jewell

Best mysteries of 2023: “None of This Is True"

“New York Times” bestselling mystery author Lisa Jewell is back with another thriller, “None of This Is True.” The book follows podcaster Alix Summer who meets Josie Fair at a bar as they both happen to be celebrating their 45th birthdays. The two run into each other again and become friends and Josie suggests that Alix make a podcast about her. Just as Josie’s secrets come out and Alix discovers she’s darker beneath the surface, Josie suddenly disappears. “None of This Is True” will be released on August 8, 2023 .

12. ‘The Villa’ by Rachel Hawkins

Best mysteries of 2023: “The Villa”

“The Villa” is a suspenseful novel about lifelong friends Emily and Chess. As their relationship begins to fizzle in adulthood, the two decide to take a girl’s trip to Italy to reconnect. The two stay at a villa where rockstar Pierce Sheldon was brutally murdered in 1974. Emily decides to dig deeper and suspects that Pierce’s murder involved more than drugs. As secrets unravel, another guest's life is put in danger.

13. ‘The Only One Left’ by Riley Sager

Best mysteries of 2023: “The Only One Left”

“The Only One Left” takes place in 1983 on the Maine coast, where the Hope family murders took place in 1929. 17-year-old Lenora Hope was the suspected killer, but police never had enough evidence to prove it. Lenora is now an elderly woman living in a nursing home and being cared for by Kit McDeere. One day, Lenora decides she wants to come clean to Kit about the murders. 

14. ‘The Only Survivors’ by Megan Miranda

Best mysteries of 2023: “The Only Survivors”

Megan Miranda, author of the “New York Times” bestseller “All the Missing Girls,” is back with another thriller, “The Only Survivors.” The mystery takes place a decade after two vans full of high schoolers on a trip crashed into a ravine, killing multiple kids and teachers. A year after the crash, a surviving classmate committed suicide and the remaining survivors promised to always come together each year to commemorate his death. On the tenth anniversary, another survivor commits suicide, and suspicions rise as the group faces another storm with threats of flooding and more deaths.

15. ‘Bad Summer People’ by Emma Rosenblum

Best mysteries of 2023: “Bad Summer People”

“Bad Summer People” has already been named the best book of the summer by Elle, Cosmopolitan, Vogue, Bustle and more. It follows friends Jen and Lauren who spend their summers at Salcombe, Fire Island. It’s a normal summer on the island until a body is discovered on the boardwalk and everyone’s seemingly perfect lives begin to unravel.

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‘The Maid’ was a surprise hit. Its sequel lives up to the hype.

‘the mystery guest,’ the second installment in nita prose’s maid novels series, is both a delightful whodunit and a pointed social commentary.

Molly Gray, the heroine of “ The Mystery Guest ,” has inherited a trove of chipper maxims from her late grandmother, known as Gran, but the one she repeats most often is this gem about making hasty assumptions: “When you assume, you make an A-S-S out of U and ME.”

I thought of that wisdom after I read “The Mystery Guest” and, then, went back and read its predecessor, “ The Maid ,” the best-selling 2022 novel by Nita Prose in which Molly made her debut. (Florence Pugh is to produce and star in the screen adaptation .) As someone whose tastes in mysteries skew toward the hard-boiled, I initially passed on “The Maid” because I assumed that a story featuring a hotel maid as an amateur detective was going to be stuffed with heartwarming fluff. Heartwarming, yes; but the only fluff in the Maid Novels, as this series is now called, is the deluxe filler in the pillows of the five-star Regency Grand Hotel where Molly works.

Charming as the world of these mysteries can be, they’re also informed by tough truths about the routine humiliations of service employees like Molly and Gran. In their acute class-conscious commentary, Prose’s Maid Novels are worthy successors to Barbara Neely’s four award-winning Blanche White mysteries, featuring a middle-aged Black domestic worker rendered invisible to her mostly White employers, not only by her profession but by her race. Neely, who died in 2020 , was recognized as a Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America that same year.

As Prose’s many fans already know, Molly is a sensitive young woman who processes the world differently. She’s hyper-attentive to details like, say, a tiny smudge on a TV remote. This single-minded focus makes Molly an excellent maid, but she’s not so sharp when it comes to reading people or catching the undertones of conversations. Amused by her diligence and demeanor, Molly’s meaner fellow employees at the Regency Grand mock her with names like “Roomba the Robot.”

The 10 best mystery novels of 2023

“The Mystery Guest,” however, finds Molly in a better position, professionally and personally, than she was a few years earlier. She’s been promoted to head maid and she’s happily living with Juan Manuel, the sweet kitchen worker who had fallen into the grip of a predatory co-worker in the earlier novel. Juan is visiting his family in Mexico, so he’s not on hand to help in this outing, which finds Molly confronting a real mess: the death of a famous mystery writer, J.D. Grimthorpe, who keeled over while he was signing books at a reception at the Regency Grand. Foul play is involved.

To make matters even more muddled, Molly spent a fair bit of time with Grimthorpe when she was a child, because Gran worked as a housemaid for him and his wife. In alternating flashback chapters, we learn that Gran was forced to take Molly along with her to the Grimthorpe mansion after bullying by Molly’s classmates — and even some of her teachers — became intolerable. The scene where Gran, with young Molly in tow, must bow and scrape before the censorious Mrs. Grimthorpe will resonate with anyone who’s ever had to bring their child into a less-than-welcoming workplace.

Although young Molly and Grimthorpe became unlikely friends, he fails to recognize her at that fatal reception at the Regency Grand, even when she steps in front of him to have her copy of his latest book signed. (“How was it possible that I remembered everything about him but he did not remember me?”) Because of their proximity to the victim and the murder weapon, Molly and her protégé — a nervous young woman named Lily Finch — become the prime suspects of the police investigation. Molly is also troubled by the strange behavior of her good friend Mr. Preston, the doorman at the Regency. As she digs deeper into the past to ferret out the truth about Grimthorpe and his murder, Molly also despairs of her own limitations. “I was afraid of myself, of my infinite capacity for understanding things too late.”

Throughout this novel and its predecessor, Prose vividly depicts working people stuck in tight places with no easy exits. As Gran told Molly when she was a little girl, her eyes filling with tears, “You deserve better, but I don’t know what else to do.” The fact that our narrator Molly, even as an adult, can’t quite give voice to the emotions she’s recalling or witnessing adds poignancy to these moments.

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“The Mystery Guest” isn’t as intricately plotted as its superb predecessor, but Prose scatters enough revelations throughout this tale to keep tension on a moderate setting. Besides, the characters of Molly and her beloved Gran, women who are overlooked because of the kind of work they do, are the overwhelming draw of the Maid Novels. In this affecting and socially pointed mystery series, invisibility becomes the superpower of the pink-collared proletariat.

Maureen Corrigan, who is the book critic for the NPR program “Fresh Air,” teaches literature at Georgetown University.

The Mystery Guest

A Maid Novel

By Nita Prose

Ballantine. 304 pp. $29

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7 Books on Navigating Grief

Psychologists, counselors and other experts share the titles they recommend most.

By Hope Reese

Joanna Luttrell is well acquainted with grief. The bereavement coordinator supports families that are navigating a child’s terminal illness at St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital in Memphis.

From the moment they receive a diagnosis until a year after the loss, “I send letters, resources, emails,” Ms. Luttrell said, so that families know they have support. A big part of the process, she added, involves sharing books.

If there’s a “challenging relationship or situation, I might send out a book right away,” she said. “If they’re looking to process their experience, and their emotional response to their experience, I will send one a bit later.”

While grief is universal, it’s complicated and highly individualized, Ms. Luttrell said. Reading books can provide perspective and help mourners feel less alone, she has found.

We asked Ms. Luttrell, as well as counselors, psychologists and other experts on loss, to recommend the most helpful books about grief.

1. Understanding Your Grief , Alan D. Wolfelt

Among the experts we spoke to, nearly all cited Alan Wolfelt, the founder of the Center for Loss and Life Transition, as their No. 1 author on grief.

In this book, first published in 1992, Dr. Wolfelt offers concrete steps toward healing. He helps people who have just lost someone and are having trouble thinking straight understand that “there’s nothing wrong with them,” said Audri Beugelsdijk, vice president of survivor services at the Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors.

Dr. Wolfelt’s presentation of the material is “comprehensive, easy to read, and accessible to the general audience,” Ms. Luttrell said. “It’s easy to get overwhelmed when you are already emotionally challenged. So reading a little bit at a time can be very helpful as you work through your grief.”

2. It’s OK That You’re Not OK , by Megan Devine

In this accessible book, published in 2018, Megan Devine, a therapist and bereaved partner, offers stories, research and advice to people who are navigating grief, as well as those who support them.

She also unpacks the myth that we need to “fix” grief, said Andy McNiel, senior adviser of youth programs at Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors. “In our society, we’re very one-dimensional in the way we talk about our experiences,” he said. “You’re either OK or you’re not OK. And the reality is, you can be OK and not OK at the same time.”

3. Man’s Search for Meaning , by Viktor E. Frankl

When the psychiatrist Viktor Frankl was imprisoned in Nazi death camps during World War II, he made a conscious effort to survive by observing, taking notes and reflecting on his higher purpose. In 1946, he published these reflections on survival in “Man’s Search for Meaning.”

This book is “truly a classic,” said Dr. David Spiegel, a medical director at the Center for Integrative Medicine at Stanford University School of Medicine. “Frankl reminds us that when we cannot change our situation, our choices still matter.”

4. A Heart That Works , by Rob Delaney

Rob Delaney’s son was diagnosed with a brain tumor as a 1-year-old and died two and a half years later. In this 2022 title, Mr. Delaney, a comedian known for his role on the Amazon Prime series “Catastrophe,” explores the full range of his emotional journey during these years and in the aftermath of the loss.

Ms. Luttrell recommends the book often to grieving families because “it’s hard to find good books from a father’s perspective,” she said. “If you’re working with a profoundly grieving father, or a man who just lost his wife, or just wants to talk to another man, having that male perspective is really, really helpful,” she said.

5. Notes on Grief , by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

In the summer of 2020, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s father died. Less than a year later, the acclaimed novelist published this memoir, sharing her personal experience of grief.

“This book is relatable to readers who are in the depths of grief, who are trying to process their own feelings and their embodied experiences around the loss of a loved one,” said Michelle Peterie, a sociologist and researcher at the University of Sydney.

Ms. Adichie conveys that “grief is a physical experience as much as it is just an emotional experience,” Dr. Peterie said. “Adichie talks about pounding the floor with her fists and about her heart beating so fast and seeming like it’s going to run away from her. ”

“We experience grief in our bodies,” she said, “and Adichie does a really good job of capturing that.”

6. The Year of Magical Thinking , by Joan Didion

This 2005 title, from one of America’s most renowned writers is “a window into what living with grief day in, day out, is really like,” said Amber Jeffrey, host of “The Grief Gang” podcast.

“It’s really hard to quantify that first year — couple of years — after a loss, to explain the kind of delusional thoughts you have without sounding completely mad,” she said. “This book does that.”

“The Year of Magical Thinking” also helped Ms. Beugelsdijk, who now works with the families of veterans, through her own personal loss. “My version of magical thinking is that my husband is still on deployment. He’s going to come back and I’m going to be OK.”

The book also challenges the notion that the first year after a death is the hardest, Mr. McNiel said. “In reality, in the first year, there’s a lot of unknowns and sometimes just denial and struggle,” he said. “The second year sets in, and many people say that that’s when their grief is the most intense.”

7. Sad Book , by Michael Rosen, illustrated by Quentin Blake

When Michael Rosen’s 18-year-old son, Eddie, died of meningitis, he teamed up with Quentin Blake, an illustrator most known for his work with Roald Dahl, to create a picture book called the “Sad Book.” The book, published in 2004, can be illuminating for both children and adults who are grieving a loved one.

“There’s something about grief that’s really hard to articulate,” Dr. Peterie said. This book “captures something really fundamental about grief as a lived and felt experience, because it’s not purely dependent on words.” The medium allows grieving people to “have part of their experience echoed back to them,” she said.

Coping With Grief and Loss

Living through the loss of a loved one is a universal experience. but the ways in which we experience and deal with the pain can largely differ..

What Experts Say:   Psychotherapists say that grief is not a problem to be solved , but a process to be lived through, in whatever form it may take.

How to Help: Experiencing a sudden loss can be particularly traumatic. Here are some ways to offer your support to someone grieving.

A New Diagnosis: Prolonged grief disorder, a new entry in the American Psychiatric Association’s diagnostic manual, applies to those who continue to struggle long after a loss .

The Biology of Grief: Grief isn’t only a psychological experience. It can affect the body too, but much about the effects remains a mystery .

Comforting Memories:  After a person dies, their digital scraps — text messages, emails, playlists and voicemails — are left behind. They can offer solace to their grieving families .

Grieving the Loss of a Pet:   Counseling. Grief-group sessions. The number of resources for coping with a pet’s death  has grown in recent years.

WTOP Book Report: Reporter-turned-author Christina Estes unveils debut mystery novel ‘Off the Air’

Terik King | [email protected]

April 28, 2024, 5:36 AM

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This story was written as part of the WTOP Book Report series written by Terik King.  Read more of that coverage .

Award-winning journalist Christina Estes steps into the realm of fiction with her debut mystery novel, “Off the Air” (Minotaur Books) , introducing readers to the tenacious Phoenix, Arizona-based TV reporter Jolene Garcia.

Garcia finds herself at the center of a media frenzy following the suspicious death of Larry Lemmon, a controversial talk show host at a local radio station. Having conducted Lemmon’s final interview, Garcia and her station initially possess a competitive edge.

However, the arrival of an onslaught of national media outlets escalates the stakes, plunging Garcia into a cutthroat investigation that could define her career, or perhaps, threaten her life.

“ It’s been 15 years (since) I said, ‘I’m gonna write a book,’” Estes said in an interview with the WTOP Book Report, providing insight into the book’s genesis.

“ I just wanted to give people a look behind local news and what goes on. There are newsroom politics. There are wonderful newsroom relationships. There’s a bond, sort of a special bond, that you create working in a newsroom. Sometimes it’s great. Sometimes it’s not. And the pressure of all of the social media and the business reality of the constant corporate cutbacks … I put it in Jolene.”  

Estes explained that she chose to ground the feisty, driven Garcia’s character in aspects of her personal experience as well: highlighting her Midwestern roots and her experiences as a former foster parent (making Garcia a former foster youth), creating parallels between Garcia’s journey and her own.

“I made her feel like a fish out of water because I felt like a major fish out of water when I moved to Phoenix,” Estes shared, reflecting on her personal connection to Garcia’s back story.

The character’s disadvantaged upbringing adds an extra dimension to her motivation, Estes said, because “she also is seeking recognition and attention that she didn’t get growing up. And that really leads her to sometimes behave in ways that maybe some people don’t like that can come across as abrasive or a little ‘too much.’ She doesn’t know when to stop, because … she is seeking recognition, often through her reporting, when she’s really looking for it with her family.” 

This drives the character of Jolene to assume extraordinary risks in the name of finding Lemmon’s killer. Would the journalist Estes have acted in the same way? “29-year-old me might have,” Estes said, “Today? No. You mellow with age.”

“Off The Air” reads as a tribute to Phoenix itself, as Jolene’s quest for answers unfolds against a vivid backdrop of the people, places and the essence of what makes Phoenix unique. “I was able to actually put in a couple of my real-life references here in Phoenix,” said Estes, “and made them sort of Jolene’s experiences in the book.” 

One such anecdote: a memorable Emmy nomination for a lighthearted feature about a fish visiting the dentist in Arizona. Estes (and Jolene) lost to another story — about bubble wrap. “I tracked down the guy that won,” Estes said, “I said, ‘I want to give you a belated yet sincere congratulations.’ And I sent him a book.” 

Asked about the challenge of balancing her demanding day job with her literary aspirations. “I would say I did not juggle it very well,” Estes laughed, referring to “Off The Air”’s 15-year gestation.

That said, another Jolene Garcia novel is in the works, and Estes said the next one will arrive much sooner. “It’s been my dream to have a mystery series set in Phoenix. So yes … Jolene is working on yet another suspicious death. She’s convinced it suspicious. She’s trying to find out if that’s really the case.”

For those intrigued by the enigmatic world of local news and the relentless pursuit of truth, “Off the Air” beckons as a riveting read, offering a compelling blend of mystery, intrigue and a behind-the-scenes glimpse into the world of journalism.

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© 2024 WTOP. All Rights Reserved. This website is not intended for users located within the European Economic Area.

Terik King is an Associate Producer for WTOP. Before joining WTOP in 2022 he held roles producing podcasts, unscripted television and content for MTV, the NFL and independent documentary production companies.

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Waiting for the Monsoon by Rod Nordland review – a war reporter finds a ‘second life’ in the shadow of death

The Pulitzer prize-winning New York Times foreign correspondent provides fascinating insights into surviving his job and his 2019 diagnosis with an aggressive form of brain cancer in this inspiring journal of self-discovery

I n the searing heat in Delhi in July 2019, the New York Times foreign correspondent Rod Nordland went for a morning jog across the city. It was more than 48C (120F), and the monsoon rains had arrived the previous day.

The Pulitzer prize-winning war reporter collapsed during the run, with a witness describing him reeling in circles, arms raised, before falling to the ground with a seizure. He had been struck down by an undiagnosed malignant brain tumour. Within days, Nordland had been flown back to the US by the New York Times and was being treated at the Weill Cornell medical center in New York, one of the best hospitals in the world.

Nordland had survived numerous conflict zones, having reported for more than four decades from countries such as Timor-Leste, Afghanistan and Iraq, but now he faced a dire prognosis. The “cerebral intruder” was diagnosed as a glioblastoma, the most aggressive form of brain cancer. “I will be with you the whole way; but understand that it will get you,” he was told by Dr Phil Stieg, the world-renowned neurosurgeon. “It’s a terminal disease, it’s incurable and it will eventually kill you.”

Waiting for the Monsoon is a compelling and clear-eyed dispatch in the face of a cruel and relentless illness, or what Nordland describes as the “hawks’ boil”, a description of birds of prey circling their quarry. It is also the journalist’s autobiography, revealing how he survived appalling malevolence in his childhood and went on to have an award-winning career as a war reporter.

The median survival time for someone with a glioblastoma is about 15 months. Around 250,000 people are diagnosed globally each year. In the US, it killed senators Ted Kennedy and John McCain, and President Biden’s son Beau at the age of 46. In Britain, the former Labour culture secretary Tessa Jowell and former Labour general secretary Margaret McDonagh were both victims. Nordland describes his research into glioblastoma as “supercharged” and quickly discovers it is a neglected type of cancer. Survival rates have barely improved in 40 years. He writes movingly of the personal insight that comes with diagnosis, saying: “As Confucius is reputed to have said, it is only when confronted with your second life that you realise you only really have one life and finally appreciate it fully.”

Nordland was brought up in southern California, one of six children. There were days on the beach, camping expeditions and fishing trips in the high sierra, but his father, Ronald James Nordland, was a violent and predatory figure. He would beat his wife, Lorine, with his fists and the children with the belt.

Lorine escaped with the children back to her family home in Jenkintown, Pennsylvania. It proved a safe refuge from the sinister presence of her husband, who later remarried. Several years later, Nordland discovered his father was a paedophile, convicted of a series of assaults. In July 1995, he was sentenced to life imprisonment for kidnapping and abusing an eight-year-old boy.

“I am the son of a convicted paedophile and kidnapper who died in an Idaho prison,” he writes. “I am also the son of a working-class single mother of extraordinary fortitude and devotion, who was determined to protect her children from him, which she did at brutal cost to herself.”

Nordland was juggling four jobs by the time he was 13, but also got involved in petty crime, with a spell in a county jail for shoplifting. He was released on probation for theft and was determined to mend his ways. “I lived in terror of going back to jail,” he writes.

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He was unbowed by the past. After studying at Pennsylvania State University, he landed a job in 1972 on the Philadelphia Inquirer , benefiting from the tutelage of executive editor Gene Roberts, a former national editor of the New York Times . This era was the high-water mark of US journalism, with teams of reporters deployed on stories and the Watergate scandal starting to break.

In March 1979, the Inquirer covered the Three Mile Island accident, a partial nuclear meltdown at a power plant on the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania. Nordland was tasked with heading the on-the-ground reporting team, going to the site despite the risks. The Inquirer won a Pulitzer prize for its coverage.

Roberts was impressed by Nordland’s initiative and determination to land the scoops, posting him to open the paper’s Asia bureau. Nordland joined Newsweek in 1994, was appointed their chief foreign correspondent in 2005, and moved to the New York Times in 2009. This book provides an invaluable aide-memoire on the foreign reporter’s craft, with the author describing the ruthlessness that is required. He explains that the best stories are often found miles behind the frontline, and repeats his mentor Roberts’s advice to zig when everyone else is zagging.

After a career reporting from 150 countries, and moving from one bloody conflict to the next, Nordland came to a standstill with the glioblastoma. Family and friends rallied to support him at the New York hospital. His ex-wife, Sheila, was at his bedside, along with his three grownup children. His partner, Leila Segal, provided constant support.

Nearly two weeks after his collapse in Delhi, he had a “lime-sized” mass removed from his brain. The surgery on the day of his 70th birthday was followed by six weeks of radiotherapy and then eight sessions of chemotherapy over seven months. There were lifestyle changes. He quit alcohol, lost weight and started a low-carbohydrate diet. There were also more profound changes. He viewed the past and present with deep gratitude and relished his new life.

Nordland had brought up his children in different countries while commuting to war zones. He realised he had pursued a career with certitude and arrogance at the cost of family life. He now felt beloved. “In my second life, my children and I made peace and enjoyed a closeness I had once thought impossible,” he writes. “In my second life, I could see clearly all the mistakes I had made in the first one.”

Nordland has managed to survive beyond the median life expectancy, citing world-class care as one of the reasons. When asked by his son how his book ends, he responds: “I guess with my death.”

This is a gripping memoir of a consummate foreign reporter, and an inspiring journal of self-discovery when the “cold breath of mortality” is on the neck. Nordland says it is a future he now faces with greater clarity. “If I do have to die – I have yet to accept that as a given – know that I will die a happy man.”

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