The Listing Post

With not much more than one week to go now before 2014 ends, “best books of the year” lists continue to pop up online.

Library Journal’s rundown features five titles drawn from the mystery/thriller stacks, among them Peter May’s The Lewis Man and Terry Shames’ The Last Death of Jack Harbin. My friend Adam Woog’s 11 choices for The Seattle Times include Love Story, With Murders, by Harry Bingham, and The Day of Atonement, by David Liss. Meanwhile, Sarah Ward weighs in at Crimepieces with her top-five contenders for the year’s best reads in this genre. (It seems she was very high on Thomas Mogford’s Hollow Mountain.) The bloggers for Crime Fiction Lover have each been rolling out their five top-shelf choices, at the same time as Sons of Spade’s Jochem Vandersteen presents a simple rundown of his five favorite works of private-eye fiction from the last 12 months. Austin, Texas’ MysteryPeople bookshop goes in a slightly different direction, highlighting its five favorite short-story collections. And three different crime novels are mentioned in novelist David Abrams’ compilation of the “Best First Lines of 2014.”