Check the Times

Both The Times and Sunday Times of London put out, this last weekend, their annual (and much-anticipated) rosters of favorite crime and thriller novels, chosen by their respective genre critics, Mark Sanderson and Joan Smith. While those pieces appear online, they are concealed by paywalls. English journalist and Rap Sheet correspondent Fraser Massey, though, sent us the two lists via e-mail.

Let’s start with the papers’ “16 Best Crime Books of 2022.”

Times Crime Novel of the Year:
The Second Cut, by Louise Welsh (Canongate)

Sunday Times Crime Novel of the Year:
The Ink Black Heart, by Robert Galbraith (Sphere)

• A Killing in November, by Simon Mason (Riverrun)
• The Cook, by Ajay Chowdhury (Harvill Secker)
• Reptile Memoirs, by Silje Ulstein (Grove)
• The Twyford Code, by Janice Hallett (Viper)
• City on Fire, by Don Winslow (HarperCollins)
• Life Sentence, by A.K. Turner (Zaffre)
• The Murder Book, by Mark Billingham (Little, Brown)
• Sometimes People Die, by Simon Stephenson (Borough)
• The Companion, by Lesley Thomson (Head of Zeus)
• The Trenches, by Parker Bilal (Canongate)
• The Cliff House, by Chris Brookmyre (Little, Brown)
• Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone, by Benjamin Stevenson (Michael Joseph)
• Bleeding Heart Yard, by Elly Griffiths (Quercus)
• A Heart Full of Headstones, by Ian Rankin (Orion)

And below are the “14 Best Thriller Books of 2022” as selected by The Times’ James Owen and The Sunday Times’ John Dugdale.

Times Thriller of the Year:
Heat 2, by Michael Mann and Meg Gardiner (HarperCollins)

Sunday Times Thriller of the Year:
Wrong Place, Wrong Time, by Gillian McAllister (Michael Joseph)

• The Berlin Exchange, by Joseph Kanon (Simon & Schuster)
• The Skeleton Key, by Erin Kelly (Hodder & Stoughton)
• The Garden of Angels, by David Hewson (Canongate)
• A Flicker in the Dark, by Stacy Willingham (HarperCollins)
• Katastrophe, by Graham Hurley (Head of Zeus)
• Bad Actors, by Mick Herron (Baskerville)
• A Tidy Ending, by Joanna Cannon (Borough)
• Suspect, by Scott Turow (Swift)
• Winter Work, by Dan Fesperman (Head of Zeus)
• This Is the Night They Come for You, by Robert Goddard (Bantam)
• Two Storm Wood, by Philip Gray (Harvill Secker)
• The Recruit, by Alan Drew (Corvus)

I’m decidedly better read in the first list than the second. However, there are still several more of these 30 novels that I would like to tackle before this year concludes, among them A Killing in November, The Berlin Exchange, and The Garden of Angels.