Let the Accolades Begin!

Here comes the annual onslaught of year-end “best books” lists, beginning with Publishers Weekly. There’s plenty of controversy surrounding the fact that none of the titles on PW’s top-10 rundown was written by a woman. But what’s lost in all of that is the fact that so many choices in the Fiction and Mystery categories are crime fiction: Michael Connelly’s The Scarecrow, Thomas H. Cook’s The Fate of Katherine Carr, Gillian Flynn’s Dark Places, George Dawes Green’s Ravens, Reggie Nadelson’s Londongrad, Craig Johnson’s The Dark Horse, and more.

Meanwhile, one book from the crime-fiction/thriller field--Stieg Larsson’s The Girl Who Played with Fire--finds a place on Amazon.com’s top-10 choices. But a number of others have made it onto the site’s rundown of 100 favorites from 2009, including The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, by Alan Bradley; The Defector, by Daniel Silva; Blood’s a Rover, by James Ellroy; Nobody Move, by Denis Johnson; and Inherent Vice, by Thomas Pynchon.