These Are a Few of My Favorite Reads

What do you know, it’s not even the 1st of December yet, and I have already selected my 10 favorite crime, mystery, and thriller novels published in 2012. I won’t tell you here which works made the cut, but my Kirkus Reviews column today is devoted to it.

Click here to read more. And please feel free to add your own suggestions of the year’s best crime fiction in the Comments section at the end of that column.

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I should note, too, that while 10 is a neat and conventional number for this sort of accounting, it’s also a highly restrictive one. Over the last 12 months, I have enjoyed many times more works in this genre than 10, published for the first time on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. Some of those I didn’t include in my Kirkus count also deserve particular attention for the quality of their prose or storytelling. So below I offer up 25 “honorable mentions” for 2012, listed alphabetically rather than in order of preference:

• Archie Meets Nero Wolfe, by Robert Goldsborough
(The Mysterious Press/Open Road)
• Bellringer, by J. Robert Janes (The Mysterious Press/Open Road)
• Blood Lance, by Jeri Westerson (Minotaur)
• The Boy in the Snow, by M.J. McGrath (Viking)
• City of Saints, by Andrew Hunt (Minotaur)
• Dare Me, by Megan Abbott (Reagan Arthur)
• Dead and Buried, by Stephen Booth (Sphere UK)
• Death on the Pont Noir, by Adrian Magson (Allison & Busby)
• Detroit Breakdown, by D.E. Johnson (Minotaur)
• The Devil’s Cave, by Martin Walker (Quercus UK)
• Die a Stranger, by Steve Hamilton (Minotaur)
• The Double Game, by Dan Fesperman (Knopf)
• House of the Hunted, by Mark Mills (Random House)
• Kings of Midnight, by Wallace Stroby (Minotaur)
• Lake Country, by Sean Doolittle (Bantam)
• Lehrter Station, by David Downing (Soho Crime)
• Live by Night, by Dennis Lehane (Morrow)
• Mission to Paris, by Alan Furst (Random House)
• Murder Mile, by Tony Black (Preface Publishing UK)
• The Professionals, by Owen Laukkanen (Putnam)
• Robert B. Parker’s Lullaby, by Ace Atkins (Putnam)
• Standing in Another Man’s Grave, by Ian Rankin (Orion UK)
• Target Lancer, by Max Allan Collins (Forge)
• The Twenty-Year Death, by Ariel S. Winter (Hard Case Crime)
• Trust Your Eyes, by Linwood Barclay (NAL)

I don’t think you will go wrong giving any of these novels as holiday presents, or just purchasing them for your own reading pleasure.