“One Cracking Year for Crime Fiction”

While other blogs and Web sites continue to broadcast their critics’ comparatively paltry five or 10 individual choices of the “best crime fiction” published over the last 12 months, Barry Forshaw’s Crime Time has dashed out in front of the pack, waving its list of the “Top 100 Books of 2016.” The choices are so numerous, they had to be split three ways. Part I is available now, featuring the first 50 picks, everything from Alan Furst’s A Hero of France and Lisa Lutz’s The Passenger to Anthony J. Quinn’s Trespass, William Shaw’s The Birdwatcher, and Melissa Ginsburg’s Sunset City.

There’s no telling yet when Parts II and III of Crime Time’s rundown might appear, but we’ll update this post when they do.

FOLLOW-UP: The second part of Crime Time’s list—which gives effusive thumbs-up to Ruth Ware’s The Woman in Cabin 10, Reed Farrel Coleman’s Where It Hurts, Ian Rankin’s Rather Be the Devil, and Walter Mosley’s Charcoal Joe, among other books—can be found here. Finally, Part III focuses on the top 21 vote-getters, from Chris Brookmyre’s Black Widow and Eva Dolan’s After You Die to Ray Celestin’s Dead Man Blues, Abhir Mukherjee’s A Rising Man, and ... sorry, but you’ll have to click here to find out which novel Crime Time chose as this year’s best.