Nick-of-Time Additions to Your TBR Stack

As 2022 ends its eventful run and clears the way for 2023, we’re surely nearing an end to our accounting of “best books of the year” lists. There are just a few stragglers left.

• Lesa Holstine and her Library Journal colleague Liz French published a joint “Best Crime Fiction of 2022” post earlier this month. But Holstine is now back with an idiosyncratic compilation, in her own blog, of “favorite books” that includes the full range of works she read over the last 12 months. Half of her 10 choices come from the crime/mystery stacks, including Terry Shames’ Murder at the Jubilee Rally and Jenn McKinlay’s The Plot and the Pendulum.

• In mid-November I highlighted Kirkus Reviews’ “Best Mysteries and Thrillers of 2022” picks. However, I failed to notice that Kirkus also released a “Best Indie Mysteries & Thrillers of 2022” tally. I confess to not having read any of those seven novels, but have heard complimentary things about Kim Hays’ Pesticide, and am already in possession of an advance reader copy of her next novel, Sons and Brothers, due out in April from Seventh Street Books.

• As I often include critiques from the blog Grab This Book in my “Revue of Reviewers” wrap-ups, I was interested to see which titles its UK-based author, Gordon McGhie, would applaud as his 10 most-prized works of the year. Simon Toyne’s Dark Objects, C.S. Robertson’s The Undiscovered Deaths of Grace McGill, and Neil Lancaster’s The Blood Tide are among those making the cut. Yet it’s Dominic Nolan’s Vine Street that McGhie calls “my favourite book of 2022—I wish I could have the chance to read it for the first time all over again.”

• One of my most auspicious blog finds this year was Reading Reality, in which Atlanta librarian Marlene Harris comments smartly on not only mystery fiction, but books of all sorts. Her baker’s dozen of endorsements for 2022 mentions several entries from this genre, notably Karen Odden’s Under a Veiled Moon (which made my own honorable mentions roster) and Mary Robinette Kowal’s The Spare Man (described invitingly as “The Thin Man in space”).

• Finally, ex-Rap Sheet contributor Jim Winter (aka T.S. Hottle), now a columnist for SleuthSayers, identifies the best book he read in 2022 as Under Color of Law, by Aaron Philip Clark.

READ MORE: “My Favorite Reads of 2022: Reading Room Recommendations,” by Kathy Reel (The Reading Room); “Review of the Year—2022,” by Steve Barge (In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel); “Raven’s Yearly Round-Up 2022 and Top 10ish Books of the Year,” by Jackie Farrant (Raven Crime Reads).