Easter Finally Comes Clean

George Easter, the editor of Deadly Pleasures Mystery Magazine, has spent much of the last three months tracking down “best crime fiction of 2022” lists and featuring them in his blog. But until today, he’d withheld his own list of favorite reads of the year. “My list may appear long compared to some,” he writes, “but it was very difficult for me to limit it to the number I did.” Below is Easter’s top-24 rundown.

Best Mystery/Crime Fiction Novels:
• Desert Star, by Michael Connelly (Little, Brown)
• The Dark Flood, by Deon Meyer (Atlantic Monthly Press)
• The Botanist, by M.W. Craven (Constable UK)
• Shifty’s Boys, by Chris Offutt (Grove Press)
• Lying Beside You, by Michael Robotham (Sphere UK)
• City on Fire, by Don Winslow (HarperCollins)
• The Blackbird, by Tim Weaver (Michael Joseph UK)
• The Accomplice, by Steve Cavanagh (Orion UK)

Best First Mysteries:
• Even the Darkest Night, by Javier Cercas (Knopf)
• Blood Sugar, by Sascha Rothchild (Putnam)
• WAKE, by Shelley Burr (Morrow)
• The Maid, by Nita Prose (Ballantine)

Best Paperback Original Mysteries:
• The Lemon Man, by Keith Bruton (Brash)
• Goering’s Gold, by Richard O’Rawe (Melville House)
• May God Forgive, by Alan Parks (World Noir)
• Pesticide, by Kim Hays (Seventh Street)

Best Thrillers:
• Bad Actors, by Mick Herron (Soho Crime)
• The Runaway, by Nick Petrie (Putnam)
• Sierra Six, by Mark Greaney (Berkley)
• Alias Emma, by Ava Glass (Bantam)
• Killers of a Certain Age, by Deanna Raybourn (Berkley)
• Seventeen, by John Brownlow (Hanover Square Press)
• The Partisan, by Patrick Worrall (Bantam Press UK)

Best Short Story Collection:
Dalziel and Pascoe Hunt the Christmas Killer & Other Stories, by Reginald Hill (HarperCollins)

I read a handful of those same new novels, including Burr’s WAKE, Offutt’s Shifty’s Boys, and Parks’ May God Forgive. Yet only the first of that trio also appears among my favorites of 2022. A couple of others are still gathering dust in my to-be-read pile.

Clearly, Easter has either more time to spend in a reading chair than I do, or he gobbles up books a good deal faster. While I have so far completed almost 90 novels this year (which doesn’t count a dozen or so others I put down unfinished), he says he’s consumed 146 from the crime, mystery, and thriller field—just short of his 150 goal!