“Best of” Begins

Well, it’s official: with Halloween now behind us and the clocks properly messed up, how far away can the end of the year really be? That being the case, what’s it time for? You’ve got it: best-of-the-year book picks.

A lot of best-of lists will be published between now and the actual end of 2008, but the first entry that we’ve seen thus far was offered up earlier this week, while our attention was focused elsewhere.

Interestingly, Publishers Weekly’s Best Books of the Year list includes a mystery section with nine featured titles, but others in the general fiction list that we would definitely talk about here at The Rap Sheet.

PW’s best-of rundown begins with a nod to the kind of year it’s been:

“May you live in interesting times” is a quote commonly attributed to Confucius, probably erroneously, but Robert F. Kennedy did use it in a speech in 1966, adding a rueful twist: “Like it or not, we live in interesting times. ...” Regardless of your thinking on these current times, they are certainly anything but boring, and we feel the same about the books published this year.

The general fiction section features 25 titles, including seven we would unquestionably count as mysteries around here and one that is definitely not a mystery, but is by an author this community often claims. (That reference is, of course, to Dennis Lehane and his recently published historical novel, The Given Day.)

The other mysterious works PW included under “general fiction” are:

• When Will There Be Good News?, by Kate Atkinson (Little, Brown)
• Hold Tight, by Harlan Coben (Dutton)
• The Brass Verdict, by Michael Connelly (Little, Brown)
• Master of the Delta, by Thomas H. Cook (Harcourt)
• The Likeness, by Tana French (Viking)
• Ritual, by Mo Hayder (Atlantic Monthly)
• Flesh House, by Stuart MacBride (St. Martin’s Minotaur)

These are the books PW chose as its best mysteries of 2008:

• Wild Inferno, by Sandi Ault (Berkley Prime Crime)
• Lie Down with the Devil, by Linda Barnes (St. Martin’s Minotaur)
• Ghost at Work, by Carolyn Hart (Morrow)
• The Private Patient, by P.D. James (Knopf)
• The Messengers of Death: A Mystery in Provence, by Pierre Magnan, translated from the French by Patricia Clancy (St. Martin’s Minotaur)
• Death’s Half Acre, by Margaret Maron (Grand Central)
• Salt River, by James Sallis (Walker)
• Fear of Landing, by David Waltner-Toews (Poisoned Pen)
• The Calling, by Inger Ash Wolfe (Harcourt)

You can see Publishers Weekly’s entire best of list--with brief comments about each book--here.