What You Should Have Read This Year

We have a fresh handful of works boldly purported to be the “best books of 2019.” First up are Laura Wilson’s crime and thriller nominees in The Guardian. Among her picks: Philip Kerr’s Metropolis, Attica Locke’s Heaven, My Home, Adrian McKinty’s The Chain, and Lucy Foley’s The Hunting Party.

Next up are Kristopher Zgorski’s 16 choices for BOLO Books, almost all of them written by women. Included are Alafair Burke’s The Better Sister, Ann Cleeves’ The Long Call, Tara Laskowski’s One Night Gone, and Alex Michaelides’ The Silent Patient.

Finally comes The New York Public Library’s 100 Books of the Year list. “This one is noteworthy to me,” opines Literary Hub’s Jonny Diamond, “because it reflects, shall we say, a more direct engagement with people who read books outside of professional exigencies, who are neither critics nor writers nor editors nor vampiric media types always conjuring listicles, the better [to] destroy literary culture as we know it.” Fiction and non-fiction are covered in 13 different categories. The 10 “Mystery and Suspense” choices take in Lauren Wilkinson’s American Spy, Kevin Barry’s Night Boat to Tangier, Tim Johnson’s The Current, Lara Prescott’s The Secrets We Kept, and more.