Making a List and Checking It Twice

Through a three-step balloting process, visitors to the “social cataloguing” Web site Goodreads have chosen Stephen King’s End of Watch (Scribner)—the concluding entry in his Bill Hodges trilogy—as the best mystery or thriller novel of 2016. It won with 42,382 votes, compared with the 23,038 votes given to the second-place finisher, Louise Penny’s A Great Reckoning, and the 21,621 votes that went to Ruth Ware’s The Woman in Cabin 10, which scored third-place honors in this online contest. Click here to see all of the nominees and their relative polling counts.

And as part of my continuing effort to stay on top of this year’s proliferating “best crime novels” lists, let me point you toward Kristopher Zgorski’s top 11 choices in his BOLO Books blog. A couple of his picks—Thomas Mullen’s Darktown and Megan Abbott’s You Will Know Me—also appeared on my “favorites” list, but otherwise, they rosters are different. Which just proves that dusty adage about no two readers being alike.

FOLLOW-UP: South Florida Sun-Sentinel critic Oline H. Cogdill is out with her own “best of 2016” rundown, and though you’ll be forced to click through one of those annoying online slideshows to see all of her crime-fiction picks, at least they’re good ones.