Bragging Rights

British books critic and American Noir author Barry Forshaw kindly invited me recently to add my two cents to a survey of “the great and the good from the world of crime-fiction reviewing,” the task being to select the 10 most outstanding crime, mystery, and thriller novels published in 2017. He has just posted the results of that sampling. They find me in remarkably esteemed company, with other respondents being Marcel Berlins of the London Times, writer-editor Maxim Jakubowski, Laura Wilson of The Guardian, Jake Kerridge of The Daily Telegraph, and Sarah Ward of the blog Crime Pieces. Some of our most frequently touted releases of the year: Attica Locke’s Bluebird, Bluebird; John le Carré’s A Legacy of Spies, Don Winslow’s The Force, and Jane Harper’s The Dry. My own 10 picks are confined to works originally published in 2017, meaning I have excluded UK novels re-released on this side of the Atlantic during the last 12 months.

Meanwhile, Oline H. Cogdill is out with her own “Best Mystery Novels of 2017” list for the South Florida Sun-Sentinel. Her 25 choices (presented in one of those annoying slideshows) include The Blinds, by Adam Sternbergh; He Said/She Said, by Erin Kelly; The Fallen, by Ace Atkins; The Roanoke Girls, by Amy Engel; The Marsh King’s Daughter, by Karen Dionne; and The Late Show, by Michael Connelly.