One Critic’s Opinion

My friend Adam Woog, who writes about crime fiction once a month for The Seattle Times, today presents his list of what he thinks were the “Best Mysteries of 2011.” Making the cut are:

• Started Early, Took My Dog, by Kate Atkinson (Reagan Arthur)
• Back of Beyond, by C.J. Box (Minotaur)
• A Red Herring Without Mustard (Bantam) and I Am Half-Sick of Shadows (Delacorte), by Alan Bradley
• The Troubled Man, by Henning Mankell (Knopf)
• A Trick of the Light, by Louise Penny (Minotaur)
• The Second Son, by Jonathan Rabb (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
• The Death Instinct, by Jed Rubenfeld (Riverhead) -- published last year in Britain, and one of January Magazine’s favorite books of 2010
• An Uncertain Place, by Fred Vargas (Penguin)
• A Lesson in Secrets, by Jacqueline Winspear (Harper)

You’ll find his comments about each book here.

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Meanwhile, the Crime Fiction Lover blog presents a very different selection of five top titles from 2011, including one book--Dregs, by Jørn Lier Horst--that I’d never even heard of before today.