Revue of Reviewers: 12-30-23

Critiquing some of the most interesting recent crime, mystery, and thriller releases. Click on the individual covers to read more.

Thoroughness Reigns Supreme

My colleague in tracking this year’s “best crime fiction of 2023” nominations, George Easter of Deadly Pleasures Mystery Magazine, has now compiled the conflicting results from 111 separate inventories. “From those,” he explains, “I tallied the number of times certain titles were mentioned on those lists. This is an attempt to find some consensus on what exactly are the best mysteries, crime novels and thrillers of the year 2023.”

The top vote-getter overall? S.A. Cosby’s All the Sinners Bleed (Flatiron), which featured on 50 of the lists under study (and has dominated these sorts of contests in three out of the last four years). Dennis Lehane’s Small Mercies (Harper) came in second place with 34 mentions. Rounding out the top five are Mick Herron’s The Secret Hours (Soho Crime), 29; Jessica Knoll’s Bright Young Women (Simon & Schuster), 27; and a tie—with 24 votes apiece—between Richard Osman’s The Last Devil to Die (Viking) and India-born author Deepti Kapoor’s debut novel, Age of Vice (Riverhead).

Click here to see the full results of Easter’s tallying.

Also revealing their 2023 book biases before the year comes abruptly to an end are Sandra Mangan and Garrick Webster, both with the excellent British site Crime Fiction Lover; Marilyn Brooks, who writes Marilyn’s Mystery Reads; Brad Friedman of Ah Sweet Mystery; The Invisible Event’s Jim Noy; and Ayo Onatade names her favorite crime-related non-fiction works of 2023 in this post.

UPDATE: Blogger Jerry House has assembled this long inventory of all the titles recommended on 90 different “year’s best” lists of crime and mysteries books. Scroll down to find the start of that register.

Adrian McKinty’s Forgotten Early Works

(Editor’s note: This is the third Rap Sheet submission by Northern California resident Peter Handel, who has reviewed and written about crime fiction for the San Francisco Chronicle, the Portland Oregonian, Pages Magazine, Mystery Readers International, and CrimeReads. He previously appraised Peter Swanson’s The Christmas Guest.)

As an inveterate used bookstore browser, and a regular patron of ThriftBooks, I’ve noticed that while Northern Irish author Adrian McKinty has become an established, and now increasingly mainstream novelist (having hit it big with both The Chain and The Island), some of his earlier releases aren’t often found in the usual places. His young-adult series, the Lighthouse Trilogy, is rarely seen, as is his debut work from 1997, Orange Rhymes With Everything.

Much more attention is paid to the standalones mentioned above, as well as to McKinty’s superb series starring Detective Sergeant (later Detective Inspector) Sean Duffy, set largely during “The Troubles” in 1980s Northern Ireland. The latest of the Duffy novels, which takes place in the early ’90s, is titled The Detective Up Late. It came out earlier this year.

The following essay looks at four early McKinty books, which one seldom sees even in a well-stocked used store, or online.

* * *

2009’s Fifty Grand is the rousing story of a Cuban cop (!), told in a first-person narrative by one Detective Mercado, straight from Havana. She’s entered the United States covertly with a small group of unauthorized aliens, lead by a “mule,” but things don’t go so smoothly once they get across the border. Mercado is headed for the state of Colorado, where she hopes to find out who killed her defector father in a hit-and-run accident. And why was he posing as a Mexican pest controller in a rich Hollywood actors’ enclave called Fairview, anyway?

Back to that border crossing, though. A group of men—predators—determine to rob the “illegals” while they are in the middle of nowhere. Fortunately, Mercado knows how to fight. One of the predators seemingly overpowers her and plans to rape her, but when he puts down his knife to take his pants off, she leaps to save herself.

His tossed his cartoon-covered boxers and when they were gone he grinned and reached for the knife.

The knife that wasn’t there.

“Huh?” he said.

Watching his brain tick over was like watching a dinosaur step on volcanic glass. Confusion showed between his eyes and before he could say or do anything his own treasonous hunting knife slashed him across the belly.

Maroon venous blood, stomach fluids, coffee. A deep laceration, nothing punctured, but enough to sear his nerve endings and get his attention. He reacted faster than I was expecting. His fist hammered into the ground a few centimeters from my swerving head. I slashed at his face and the serrated blade opened his cheek like a sushi knife into yellowtail.

The situation gets worse, much worse in fact, and our idiotic wannabe rapist is further sliced and diced, until “blood, piss, [and] one of his testicles [rolled] onto the ground.”

Once Mercado reaches the resort town of Fairview, she is forced to acquiesce to a local “boss” and becomes a faceless maid for a service that exploits illegals. The job at least allows her to meet various suspects her journalist brother, Ricky, had sussed out during his earlier mission to identify their father’s killer.

As she surreptitiously probes her few leads, she encounters B-list Hollywood players, fellow illegals scuffling for work, and a cast that would not be complete without a sadistic sheriff and his lackey deputy.

Sheriff Briggs runs the area’s illicit “trade,” and when one of his dealers oversteps the line, he’s beaten with a nightstick, then humiliatingly dressed down. “Our deal,” Briggs declares, “was for cocaine from Mexico and you’ve been dealing ice and meth and pot, bringing it in from fucking Canada. Who do you think you are, amigo? Where do you think you are? Nothing escapes me ... Nothing. I know everything that goes on in this town. Everything you or anybody else tries to do, I fucking know it. Never forget that.” As you would imagine, both “law-enforcement” officials do get theirs in the end.

Fifty Grand is an unusual thriller, and the Cuba-set segments that open and close this novel add much to the arc of its story.

In the noirish Falling Glass (2011), McKinty’s protagonist is an “enforcer” named Killian, someone who has done dirty work for other white-collar criminals, those who like to keep their hands as clean as possible. Here, he’s offered a half-million dollars to take on one last job: Find the missing, often drug-addled ex-wife and two daughters of a wealthy, powerful, and politically connected Irish businessman, Richard Coulter. Included in the mix of quasi-mobsters is Michael Forsythe, who appeared in three previous McKinty novels, beginning with 2003’s Dead I Well May Be. It is Forsythe who becomes part of what is the novel’s key flaw.

Falling Glass is an engrossing but trope-driven story centered around an opportunity to win redemption after an often-ugly past. Killian does indeed find the missing ex, Rachel, as well as her two young children. And, yes, Rachel and Killian fall in love, a love that can’t last. But leave it to McKinty to keep the plot moving at breakneck speed, much of its action taking place in a richly depicted rural Irish setting.

The unexpected fugitives are forced to hide out when Killian learns the reason Rachel had absconded with the kids. That reason isn’t a particularly revelatory shock, however.

A nice twist in the story is Killian’s personal background—he’s “Pavee” or a “tinker.” When the four absconders need a safe place to stay, it’s a tinker camp of caravans, quickly moveable, yet well hidden.

Regular readers of McKinty’s fiction know of his (at times almost excruciating) propensity for having his characters mull, and mull, concepts and beliefs from a wide range of philosophers and archetypal mythological stories. As a graduate of Oxford with a degree in philosophy, the author does indeed know his Schopenhauers, his Irish folklore, and his famous architects—Le Corbusier, anyone?

In this tale, Killian comes across a book about that famous Swiss-French architect, and as he thumbs through it, he begins to … mull. “He didn’t like Le Corbusier,” we’re told. “Le Corbusier didn’t understand human nature. Humans were biophilic. Half a million years of living on the savannah was bound to select for adaptations linked to open plains, grasslands. In his concrete dreamscapes Le Corbusier didn’t allow for any kind of spiritual longing for vistas, for greenery, for other mammal species, for space. Like other twentieth-century social engineers, Corbusier wanted to remake man in his own image.”

And now we return to our regular programming ...

Falling Glass offers some spectacular set-pieces, derring-do escapes, and an exceptionally grisly scene with some chainsaw, uh, human sculpting. No one writes killing like McKinty does. But then there are those disappointing final few pages that feel anticlimactic—for this reader, one of his few missteps.

* * *

Besides his YA Lighthouse Trilogy, in 2011 McKinty published Deviant. With a wonderfully unnerving cover that belies its made-for-teens content, this story, set in Colorado Springs, Colorado, begins with an unknown person in an isolated, venerated Native American setting, preparing to do away with a stray cat in ritualistic fashion. “He poked the bag with his finger,” McKinty writes, “and the cat thrashed weakly against the sides. There was a little fight left in it, but not much.” Just as he’s about to stab the cat and skin it, “He imagined the deliciously pitiful yell … the light dying from the cat’s eyes, the smell of fear and intestinal gases … his spine tingled, his attention wandered, his grip slackened, the cat seized its opportunity.” It dashes off, leaving its would-be slayer behind, stung by his failure.

Cut now to teenager Danny Lopez, who has just arrived in Colorado Springs from Las Vegas with his Native mother, Juanita, and a stepfather he loathes. Mom has taken an important job managing a new casino, and Danny will be attending a specialized school, where the students and teachers wear white gloves, and there is no talking on campus except by the instructors in class.

This story supplies teenage lust—unrequited, of course; a mega-church pretty much everyone in the city attends; a creepy school principal; and a long boulevard of various prisons—keep that economy humming. Amid it all, Danny feels like a fish out of a Vegas fountain.

As word ricochets through Colorado Springs about missing felines, and cats found dead, Danny and a group of his fellow students from the school resolve to find out what’s going on.

Some of the dialogue here feels dated and clunky, but as a former high school teacher himself, McKinty understands the social milieu well. There’s good suspense in these pages, and enjoyable characters abound; but the solution to the mystery at hand is fairly easy to guess. Deviant is ultimately best read as a parable of religious extremism. Set in a hotbed of evangelical true believers, the unthinking allegiance to a rigid conformism is the real terror in the tale.

McKinty’s most unusual novel is surely 2014’s The Sun Is God. Taking place in a German-colonized part of New Guinea, circa 1906, the story is based on largely true events. A former British military policeman, Will Pryor, is tasked with visiting a cult-like island community inhabited by a small group of Germans. A man has died there, ostensibly from malaria, but an autopsy on the mainland finds evidence of his having drowned. It’s up to Will to figure out what really happened.

“They call themselves the Sonnenoden,” a German emissary, Herr Kessler, says. “Sun Worshippers. They believe that nudity and the eating of coconuts will give them immortality.”

“Coconuts?” exclaims Will.

“The fruit that grows closest to the sun. [The cult’s leader, August Englehardt] believes that worshiping the sun and eating only coconuts purifies the body of ‘the foul pollutants and excesses of modern twentieth-century life.’ Free from these toxins apparently humans can live an unlimited lifespan in paradise. … They call themselves Cocovores, as the coconut is considered to be the only pure food.”

In a 2014 Irish Times interview with Declan Burke, McKinty talked about why he undertook such an offbeat historical novel. “Mostly it was because I was so excited by the story,” said McKinty. “It was a murder case that took place in a German nudist religious cult—and no one has told this story? But, to be honest, I was a bit fed up about reading background material about Northern Ireland in the 1980s, because you know what they’re all going to say. And it was really fun to look at another part of the world, at a different time. In The Sun Is God Will Prior's previous experience of horrific violence has dulled his humanity to the point where he is nowhere as smart, noble or interested in justice as the conventional detective in a crime novel should be.

“One of the things I liked about Will Prior—and this probably won’t be popular at all—is that he doesn’t actually solve the crime,” McKinty added. “He gets it all wrong. We’ve seen that kind of thing before, many times, but it’s always done for comedic effect. But I thought, what about doing it when it’s not for comedic effect? He’s just wrong. Even today, nobody knows the truth about Kabakon Island. I’ve done a lot of research into it, and no one actually knows the answer. It probably was a murder, but no one knows for sure, or who did it, or why. You can only speculate on what happened.” (By the way, that Irish Times piece features a blurry photo of the real Englehardt.)

The first third of The Sun Is God is rather pokey, but once Will arrives on the island, the plot thickens like the heroin-spiked arak the cult followers enjoy—and which certainly keeps them docilely stoned. “From Bayer,” says an islander. “It is a kind of morphine but without morphine’s unfortunate addictive qualities. A remarkable medicine.”

“After a couple pints of this joy-juice,” Will observes, “I’m surprised anyone can walk to their huts.”

In addition to Englehardt, we are also given here another real-life figure, young travel writer Bessie Pullen-Burry. She accompanies Will and a German officer, Klaus Kessler, to the community. She goes all in with the cultists until she sees through the façade of sun and nudity, and plays a key role in the exhilarating finale.

Well worth its occasional slog, The Sun Is God remains the quirkiest book McKinty has given his readers so far.

The TV Year That Was

Over at the TV-obsessed British blog The Killing Times, editors are counting down what they contend are “the top 20 crime dramas of the year.” The initial set of five shows comprises Copenhagen Cowboy, Poker Face, The Reckoning, Endeavour, and Without Sin.

If things go as they have in years past, there will be four parts to this series, though it’s unclear exactly when they’ll be posted.

UPDATE: All four parts of this feature are now available: Part I, Part II, Part III, and Part IV. In addition to the aforementioned shows, Killing Times critics selected as their favorites Dalgliesh, Astrid: Murder in Paris, The Murder at the End of the World, Paris Police 1905, The Woman in the Wall, Happy Valley, and many others.

Still More Reading Guidance

We’re approaching not only the end of 2023, but also a cessation of the recent flood of “best crime and mystery fiction of the year” lists.

The British books blog Crime Fiction Lover presents two additional sets of nominations from its resident critics. Vicki Weisfeld’s “top five books of 2023” include one that passed me by, James McCrone’s Bastard Verdict (‎Faithless Elector), along with James Wolff’s The Man in the Corduroy Suit (Bitter Lemon Press). Meanwhile, Mike Parker (aka Rough Justice) touts Chris Offutt’s Code of the Hills (Grove Press) and Margaret Douaihy’s Scorched Grace (Pushkin Vertigo), as well as three other works. Click here to find all of CFL’s 2023 picks.

Librarian Marlene Harris, who writes the blog Reading Reality, has posted her own favorites from the last 12 months. Most of them don’t belong in the crime/mystery/thriller category, and two of those that do (penned by Will Thomas) did not first appear in 2023. However, she does feature on her list Stephen Spotswood’s Murder Crossed Her Mind (Doubleday) and Tracy Clark’s Fall (Thomas & Mercer), both of which came the way of crime-fiction fans earlier this month.

Finally, Vick Mickunas, a contributor to Ohio’s Dayton Daily News and host of the long-running Book Nook radio show, has selected half a dozen novels from 2023 that he is convinced other enthusiastic followers of this genre would benefit from reading:

• Dark Ride, by Lou Berney (Morrow)
• All the Sinners Bleed, by S.A. Cosby (Flatiron)
• Prom Mom, by Laura Lippman (Morrow)
• The Detective Up Late, by Adrian McKinty (Blackstone)
• Flags on the Bayou, by James Lee Burke (Atlantic Monthly Press)
• The Autobiography of Matthew Scudder, by Lawrence Block
(LB Productions)

You can read Mickunas’ comments about each title here.

Happy Christmas to All!

A Surprise for Christmas and Other Seasonal Mysteries, edited by Martin Edwards (Poisoned Pen Press, 2021). The cover art copyright belongs to the Illustrated London News Ltd./Mary Evans Picture Library. A classic, indeed.

Whether or not you celebrate Christmas, those of us working at The Rap Sheet extend our warmest wishes to you on this morning. Absent our readers, the blog would be nothing. So your participation and support are priceless. We wish you only the best as 2023 ends and 2024 remains a promising but uncertain presence on the horizon.

READ MORE: “Merry Christmas To …,” by Bob Sassone; “St. Pancras Has Unveiled Its Spectacular 2023 Christmas Tree—and It’s Made Out of Books,” by India Lawrence (TimeOut).

A Decade of Recognition

As organizers of the Petrona Award for the Best Scandinavian Crime Novel of the Year look forward to handing out their 11th-annual prize in 2024, they revisit the contest’s first 10 recipients, beginning in 2013 with Liza Marklund’s Last Will (Corgi), translated by Neil Smith.

The Petrona Award takes its name from a blog written by Maxine Clarke, a British editor and “champion of Scandinavian crime fiction,” who died in 2012. As press materials have explained, “The Petrona Award is open to crime fiction in translation, either written by a Scandinavian author or set in Scandinavia, and published in the UK in the previous calendar year.”

Favorite Crime Fiction of 2023, Part VI: J. Kingston Pierce

J. Kingston Pierce wears an abundance of hats. He’s the editor of both The Rap Sheet and Killer Covers, the senior editor of January Magazine, and a contributing editor of CrimeReads.

• The Golden Gate, by Amy Chua (Minotaur):

I’m a known sucker for mid-20th-century noir yarns, so Chua’s brilliantly atmospheric debut mystery was bound to please. The year is 1944, and Homicide Detective Al Sullivan has been summoned to investigate reported gunfire at Berkeley, California’s opulent Claremont Hotel. In Room 602, he finds libidinous, Midwestern industrialist and former U.S. presidential candidate Walter Wilkinson (clearly modeled on Wendell Wilkie), claiming to have just survived an attempted shooting by “a Communist” he’s at a loss to cogently describe. Sullivan promptly has Wilkinson moved, and starts asking questions, but with negligible results. Then, only three hours later, he returns to Room 602, this time to find the 59-year-old Wilkinson actually dead. Shot in the head at close range, he’s sprawled out on the king-size bed with his trousers gathered about his ankles and his mouth crammed full of “hotel detritus: a pen, unsmoked cigarettes, a bar of soap, a paper doily, crumpled stationary, flowers, and apparently a piece of chocolate.” There’s a tiny green cube in his throat, too. Oh, and a child’s disfigured doll hidden in the closet.

The only person with any information about Wilkinson’s fate is a frightened Mexican cleaning lady, but her identification of the young blonde she saw entering the industrialist’s room shortly prior to his snuffing is less than helpful. She insists it was one of the three granddaughters of venerable Bay Area socialite Genevieve Bainbridge—Isabella Stafford or her cousins, Nicole and Cassie Bainbridge—all of whom are hotel regulars. Yet she says the three look alike to her.

Chua’s sinuous tale follows dual timelines, and is told generally through either Sullivan’s first-person account or the coerced testimony of Genevieve Bainbridge, who’s determined to protect her granddaughters—at almost any cost. It’s the latter who provides the background necessary to ultimately solve Wilkinson’s demise; but Sullivan commands (and deserves) greater attention. He’s the college-educated son of an Irish mother from Nebraska and a part-Jewish father from Guadalajara, who’s caring for his irresponsible half-sister’s precocious 11-year-old daughter, while “passing” for white. Sullivan is a proficient crime-solver, but his task is complicated by talk of insanity in the Bainbridge family tree and Japanese spies operating out of the hotel; an eyebrow-raising relationship between Wilkinson and China’s first lady, Madame Chiang Kai-shek; and connections between this latest murder and the unsolved slaying—14 years before, and also at the Claremont—of Isabella Stafford’s 7-year-old sister.

The author has quite obviously done her homework. This narrative is peppered with notes about Bay Area history and architecture, as well as obscure historical details that greatly enhance its verisimilitude. What most distinguishes this fine novel from classic noir, though, is the attention Chua pays to deep economic and racial disparities that were present during World War II, and still afflict us today.

• Unnatural Ends, by by Christopher Huang (Inkshares):

Here’s a twisty whodunit that should make you feel better about your own upbringing, no matter how wretched it seemed. It’s 1921, and Sir Lawrence Linwood has been bludgeoned to death at his Yorkshire manse, likely by someone he knew. His three adopted, adult children—Alan, Roger, and Caroline—all return home for the funeral, only to learn of a peculiar clause in their pater’s will: the one of them who identifies his murderer inherits the estate.

Although the siblings hungered for his approval, Sir Lawrence was a callous parent, instilling in them fear, and emphasizing ruthless self-interest over compassion. Weakness and any demonstration of emotion were judged unacceptable. Despite that severe upbringing, all three children seemed to survive largely unscathed, and to thrive in adulthood. Alan, the oldest, became an archaeologist; Roger went into engineering, and now tinkers with automobiles and airplanes; while the Asian-featured youngest, Caroline—for whom their father imagined a triumphant future in politics—works as a journalist in Paris, but is interested as well in the performing arts. Before his passing, Sir Lawrence had convinced each of them, separately, that they were his favorite, and that the entirety of his considerable estate would eventually go to them. But now that he’s been the evident victim of homicide, those beliefs can be construed as motives for patricide. So, which of the trio had the most to gain from his eradication?

Hoping to clear themselves in the eyes of the law, Alan, Roger, and Caroline all take up investigating the killing (often reluctantly), in the process revealing themselves as intriguing individual characters. They also uncover disquieting family secrets and determine that answers to this mystery must lie in their birth origins. The stakes only become greater after Sir Lawrence’s wife, Rebecca—who’d give up her medical career to bow wholly before her brutish spouse’s demands, and had never been overly interested in their adopted progeny—is arrested for his slaying. Her claim that she has no recollection of what went on during Sir Lawrence’s last night only enfeebles her defense.

Canadian author Huang heaps this gripping, tightly-plotted yarn with red herrings and other classic genre tropes (secret passages, impersonators, talk of hauntings, and a locked room), but employs them in distinctive fashion. It’s an outstanding follow-up to his 2018 debut novel, A Gentleman’s Murder.

• Ashes in the Snow, by Oriana Ramunno (HarperVia):

As Italian author Ramunno explains in this powerful work, her interest in Germany’s oft-brutal World War II history was born from an interview she conducted as a teenager with her great-uncle. He’d survived imprisonment at Bavaria’s Flossenbürg concentration camp, and while there had witnessed rare Nazi commanders employing subterfuges to help inmates endure camp life. This novel reflects her uncle’s unearthing of humanity amid the war’s horrors.

Taking place during the 1943 Christmas season at Auschwitz concentration camp in southern Poland, Ashes in the Snow’s story centers around the perplexing expiry of Sigismund Braun, a pediatrician specializing in genetic diseases, who was also a close associate of Josef Mengele, the Nazi doctor known as the “Angel of Death” because of his barbarous experiments on prisoners. Braun allegedly choked on a mouthful of apple. Yet there are rumors of ghosts haunting Block 10, the building where he met his end, and the authorities want those discredited before they can cause trouble.

Dispatched from Berlin to look into these matters is Hugo Fischer, a young police criminologist who long ago shucked off his devotion to Adolf Hitler’s regime and is now keeping a secret the Reich would deem to be solid grounds for his suicide: he suffers from multiple sclerosis, and must rely on drugs to cloak his symptoms. Fischer has scant evidence to guide him in his fact-finding efforts: Braun’s office was scrubbed before the detective arrived; the doctor’s lofty wife is disinclined to cooperate in the inquiry; and his best source of information is an 8-year-old Jewish inmate, Gioele Errera, who—with his twin brother—is under Mengele’s “care.” But Fischer is warned early on not to take seriously anything the camp’s Jews might tell him. “Jews have one role here,” explains a Nazi officer, “and that’s to vanish from the face of the earth.”

Against a bleak but vividly rendered historical backdrop, Fischer pursues those responsible for the slaying of Braun (who hardly lacked for enemies); discovers Auschwitz’s quotidian atrocities (including the source of its “sickly-sweet smell”); and exposes a substratum of German military men determined to impede the pernicious goals of their superiors. Don’t be surprised to find that this tale leaves you saddened but at the same time feeling strangely uplifted.

• The Broken Afternoon, by Simon Mason (Riverrun UK):

Ray and Ryan Wilkins may share a surname, and they may both be young cops in Oxford, England, but otherwise, the two could hardly be more different from one another. As we learned in Mason’s A Killing in November (2022), Detective Inspector Raymond Wilkins is a “strikingly good-looking” man of affluent Nigerian-London heritage, eloquent, thoughtful, Balliol College-educated, and ambitious as hell. Ryan Wilkins, meanwhile, is white, the rough-around-the-edges product of a trailer-park upbringing and too much friendly association with the criminal classes. He’s a single father, with an infant son and a mammoth chip on his shoulder regarding those who believe themselves better than him. Their partnership seemed unlikely, at best; but Ray came to realize that despite his bluntness and impulsive behavior, Ryan notices things others don’t. That comes in handy when you’re detectives chasing killers and other malcontents.

However, when we encounter him again in this sequel, Ryan is no longer a member of the Thames Valley force. Disciplinary issues led to his dismissal at the end of the previous novel, and he’s now a disgruntled night-watch security guard for a van rental business. So he’s left to watch dull surveillance camera footage and shoo riff-raff from his company’s property, as Ray assumes command of a team charged with locating 4-year-old Poppy Clarke, just abducted from her nursery school. That assignment carries more than a modicum of urgency, for as Ray knows all too well, the longer a child is missing, the less chance there is of him or her being found. Or found alive, in any case. But clues to Poppy’s whereabouts are negligible, and obvious suspects not easily found culpable. Concurrently, Ryan faces a puzzle of his own. He finds an old acquaintance, down-on-his-luck ex-con Michael “Mick” Dick, endeavoring to break into one of his vans to escape the rain. Ryan ejects him before the cops he’d called show up, but the next days hears that Dick was killed in a hit-and-run.

After Poppy Clarke’s corpse turns up in a shallow woodland grave, Ray Wilkins’ search refocuses on her kidnapper. In the meantime, Ryan has been rooting about in Mick Dick’s past, only to stumble across his link to another prison alumnus, trailing a history of illicit contacts with children. Suddenly, and quite improbably, the two ex-partners find themselves once more working in tandem.

The Broken Afternoon is remarkably nuanced in portraying both the victims and perpetrators of crime, and in its emotional fleshing out of Mason’s protagonists. Ray Wilkins’ wife is facing a difficult pregnancy, which only exacerbates his anxieties at becoming a parent. Ryan’s struggles with rearing a precocious boy reveal him as far more sensitive than he appears; and when the opportunity to reclaim his rank with Thames Valley Police is dangled before him, Ryan realizes just how much that job means to him, despite its strictures. This is police-procedural writing of the highest order. A third entry in the series, Lost and Never Found, arrives in Britain next month.

• The Second Murderer, by Denise Mina (Mulholland):

Scottish crime-fictionist Mina has demonstrated her versatility in recent years with modern fictional takes on historical dramas (Rizzio, Three Fires). In this evocative, crisply penned new tale, she stretches her muscles further, dispatching Raymond Chandler’s solitary L.A. gumshoe, Philip Marlowe, in search of Chrissie Montgomery, a naïve 22-year-old heiress gone missing after her engagement party.

Marlowe suspects her repugnant father—who comes from money “so old there was a rumour that some of it still had Moses’ teeth marks on it”—has employed him in hopes that he’ll fail, yet at least keep a lid on the affair. Instead, our hero easily locates his quarry, but suspects she may have good reason for wishing not to be returned. Marlowe’s alternatives there are limited by the involvement in these doings of another sleuth, lovely Anne Riordan (introduced in 1940’s Farewell, My Lovely), who’s been put on the same trail. And they’re further complicated when he discovers Chrissie standing over a freshly slain Nazi painter said to have perished months before in Europe.

Class stratifications, violence against women, and corruption of all flavors figure into this pre-World War II story, jockeying for elbow room against Mina’s sun-baked atmospherics and Marlowe’s signature witty patter. It’s not quite Chandler, but it will do in a pinch.

Last but not least, one work from the biography shelves …

• Spillane: King of Pulp Fiction, by Max Allan Collins and
James L. Traylor (Mysterious Press):

“The chewing gum of American literature” is how writer Mickey Spillane described his crime novels, which blended eye-for-an-eye justice with risqué innuendos and granite-chinned philosophizing (“Too many times naked women and death walked side by side”). And boy, did readers eat up his fiction, making his first Mike Hammer private-eye yarn, I, the Jury, into a best-seller that spawned a dozen sequels and turned its protagonist into a radio, film, and TV fixture.

Spillane crafted his own media persona along the way, part-Hammer (he portrayed his Gotham gumshoe in a 1963 film, The Girl Hunters) and part-ham (he spoofed himself in a succession of Miller Lite beer commercials). In this enlightening biography, fellow scribblers Collins (his friend and posthumous collaborator) and Traylor make the most of their extraordinary access to Spillane’s personal archives, delivering acute perspectives on his comic-book years, his multiple marriages, his pugnaciousness and wont to embellish the facts of his life, his surprising conversion by Jehovah’s Witnesses, his vexation with Hollywood, and his eventual recognition by peers who’d earlier condemned him as “a vulgar pulpmeister.”

This book’s paramount success, though, is in depicting Mickey Spillane as a trendsetting stylist, who recognized early the value of paperback publication and helped shape late-20th-century detective fiction.

Other 2023 Favorites: Dead of Night, by Simon Scarrow (Kensington); The Square of Sevens, by Laura Shepherd-Robinson (Atria); The Nightingale Affair, by Tim Mason (Algonquin); Sing Her Down, by Ivy Pochoda (MCD); Too Many Bullets, by Max Allan Collins (Hard Case Crime); and Evergreen, by Naomi Hirahara (Soho Crime).

All Good Things …

Well, it’s finally come time to wrap things up. Over the last week, The Rap Sheet has posted lists of favorite 2023 crime, mystery, and thriller novels from five regular contributors. The last installment in that series (from yours truly) will appear around noon today.

We hope you’ve enjoyed our additions to the year’s veritable deluge of “best books” choices. Some of our picks also appeared elsewhere, but others were peculiar to Rap Sheet critics. This proves the fact that fiction authors simply cannot please everyone with their work, no matter how ostensibly worth reading it might be. If you missed seeing which titles any of our writers named, click on their names:

• Ali Karim
• Jim Thomsen
• Fraser Massey
• Kevin Burton Smith
• Steven Nester
• J. Kingston Pierce

Things will be running at a slightly slower pace here until after New Year’s Day, but there are still pieces waiting in the pipeline for publication. So in between drinking cups of good cheer with friends and family members next week, check up on The Rap Sheet now and then. You never know what you might find.

They Just Keep on Coming

The British books blog Crime Fiction Lover has commenced posting its critics’ choices of 2023’s finest crime, mystery, and thriller fiction.

Each contributor was limited to just five particularly praiseworthy titles. First to commit herself was Erin Britton, a former NB Magazine editor with an obvious bent toward Golden Age-style mysteries. Her favorites from the last 12 months include Death Comes to Marlow, by Robert Thorogood (‎HQ); Killing Jericho, by William Hussey (Zaffre); and The Mysterious Case of the Alperton Angels, by Janice Hallett (Viper). For his part, Paul Burke, the editor of Crime Time and co-host of the Crime Time FM podcast, picks Megan Davis’s The Messenger (Zaffre), Deepti Kapoor’s Age of Vice (Fleet), Graham Bartlett’s Force of Hate (Allison & Busby), and two more.

South Africa writer Sonja van der Westhuizen also submits critiques in Crime Fiction Lover, and her 2023 standouts may eventually appear there. But for now, she has posted the names of her six favorite crime novels in her own blog, West Words Reviews. Among them are Dennis Lehane’s Small Mercies (Abacus), Tiffany McDaniel’s On the Savage Side (W&N), and Amy Chua’s The Golden Gate (Corvus).

CrimeReads came out earlier today with yet another in its series of “bests” inventories, this one focused on crime and suspense anthologies. And yes, Jordan Peele’s collection of Black horror yarns, Out There Screaming (Random House), made the cut.

Finally, we have a couple of lists from prominent Canadian newspapers. The Globe and Mail’s 10 endorsements take in All the Sinners Bleed, by S.A. Cosby (Flatiron); Zero Days, by Ruth Ware (Simon & Schuster); and The Girl by the Bridge, by Arnaldur Indridason (Vintage). Only Cosby’s latest finds a place on the Toronto Star’s roster, beside Sam Wiebe’s Sunset and Jericho (Harbour), Catherine Chidgey’s Pet (Europa Editions), and two other 2023 releases.

READ MORE: “Declan Burke’s Best Crime Novels, 2023,” by George Easter (Deadly Pleasures Mystery Magazine); “The Best Horror Fiction of 2023” and “The Best Speculative Crime Fiction of 2023,” by Molly Odintz (CrimeReads); “The Best Traditional Mysteries of 2023” (CrimeReads); “Our Favorite Books of 2023” (Criminal Element).

Loved Again

This news comes from In Reference to Murder, and is worth passing on. As you might expect, I have already cast my ballot.

Several bloggers banded together to create a poll for readers to vote on the best reprint nominations of the year. … Kate Jackson, aka Armchair Reviewer over at Cross Examining Crime, has posted the poll which includes the 23 nominations, 3 of which were randomly selected from the nominations put forward by blog readers. The list reflects a variety of writing styles from the mysteries, most of which were originally published in the 1930s and 1940s. Three authors managed to get two books into the poll: John Dickson Carr, Erle Stanley Gardner (one under the pen name of A.A. Fair). and Clifford Witting. You can add your vote now for up to 3 titles.

You can declare your own favorites among the list until December 29 at midnight (GMT, I assume, as Jackson resides in the UK).

Favorite Crime Fiction of 2023, Part V: Steven Nester

Steven Nester is the longtime host of Poets of the Tabloid Murder, a weekly Internet radio program heard on the Public Radio Exchange (PRX). In addition, he is a New York-based freelance writer whose work has appeared in The Rap Sheet, January Magazine, Shotgun Honey, Yellow Mama, Mystery Scene, and Firsts Magazine.

• Too Many Bullets, by Max Allan Collins (Hard Case Crime):

The beauty of conspiracy theories is that they can’t be proved or disproved. They live forever in a kind of limbo, like those surrounding the Loch Ness monster or the Abominable Snowman—or, in this instance, the 1968 assassination of Democratic U.S. Senator Robert F. Kennedy, who was then running for president. In his 19th well-researched novel starring Chicago-based private eye Nathan Heller, acclaimed author Max Allan Collins takes the RFK tragedy in an interesting direction, combining Manchurian Candidate paranoia with Rat Pack hip.

Heller is brought on to enhance security for his old friend Bob Kennedy during the candidate’s fateful, June ’68 campaign stop at downtown Los Angeles’ Ambassador Hotel. After that assignment goes horrifically wrong, and RFK is shot (which history tells us was the work of a Palestinian-Jordanian ex-stablehand named Sirhan Sirhan), the P.I. is approached by none other than syndicated newspaper columnist Drew Pearson (who had previously been “unduly harsh” on the senator) to probe what he contends has been a cover-up by L.A. police of the true circumstances behind Kennedy’s killing. “[I]t would appear there are too many bullets,” Pearson tells Heller. “The assassin’s gun only held eight rounds, but many of the witnesses report substantially more shots.”

This is a star-studded outing for Collins’ hard-boiled shamus, rich in dialogue (the most economical method by which to deliver information in this sprawling story); and Heller overlooks nothing, starting with a mystery woman in a polka-dot dress and traveling all the way up the food chain to the CIA and reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes. The journey is the point of this book, and there is an unexpected payoff for Heller: he may not get his man, but he does get the girl.

• Dark Ride, by Lou Berney (Morrow):

“I’m lost, wandering, and somewhat stoned,” says Hardy “Hardly” Reed as he introduces himself in Berney’s fifth novel, following the award-winning November Road (2018). The 23-year-old Hardly is a low-paid slacker employed as a scare-worker at a decrepit amusement park in some unnamed Midwestern city. He exhibits no more ambition than to take another toke and play with his Xbox.

But Hardly (think “hardly ever tries”) is thrust into responsibility when he figures out that two seemingly abandoned young siblings, dotted with cigarette burns, are in the custody of a mother who lives in fear of her abusive, drug-dealing lawyer spouse. That’s the real scare show, and it turns worse (and also better) when Hardly decides he finally wants to matter. Child Protective Services offers no help to those children, and while their schoolteacher sees signs of their mistreatment, she does nothing, prompting Hardly to play amateur sleuth in an effort to render the lost siblings aid.

For a young man who likes “being ordinary,” it comes as no surprise that he was reared in a foster home and possesses empathy he can rouse to action. With the help of a renegade Goth DMV worker, who supplies information about the abusive couple’s identities, and an older, very helpful woman who is conversant in private investigation techniques and takes the learning-curve-challenged Hardly under her wing (and then some), Hardly finds that he really does matter after all.

• Bloody Martini, by William Kotzwinkle (Blackstone):

Brother Thomas “Tommy” Martini has yet to solve his anger-management problem, and in this sequel to Kotzwinkle’s Felonious Monk (2021), it serves him well. With a hair-trigger temper and the heft to back it up, why would he want to change? He’s a knight errant (but still a Benedictine monk), and a fist often comes in handy. The “grenade of anger I carried inside me was armed once again and ready to blow,” is how he puts it. The pin is pulled in Bloody Martini when he’s faced with both human trafficking in his small hometown of Coalville, Pennsylvania, and the murder of old friend.

Tommy has returned to Coalville—a (fictional) place manifestly bursting with mine fires, as if hell was breaking through—at the request of Finn Sweeney, a crusading TV journalist who might be onto something, and who has asked Tommy to look after his wife, Bridget Breen, an old flame of Tommy’s who has gone missing. Few people are happy to see the prodigal son return; eight years ago, he killed a Coalville man by accident, forcing his exile and unlikely move into the monastic life, and nobody has forgotten about that. His nemesis, a local district attorney aptly named Brian Fury, tried to lock up Tommy for that slaying, and he’s ready to move against our hero again, only this time with brutality and thuggery. It helps that the Martini family business is organized crime; that levels the playing field, letting Tommy fight fire with fire in a novel that’s as humorous as it is violent.

• Everybody Knows, by Jordan Harper (Mulholland):

Life is precarious in the Hollywood Hills, where “houses that hung from cliffs like suicides” are no refuge for even the biggest of stars. The cannon fodder of the show business world live there as if self-destruction was part of the job description—and that’s where Mae Pruett comes in. She’s a “black-bag publicist” for a Los Angeles public relations firm, specializing in disaster control. Truth and lies play hide and seek in Mae’s world, and some clients and associates are “so up front with bullshit it almost counts as honesty.”

When Mae’s boss, Dan Hennigan, is gunned down during what looks like a carjacking, she is convinced there’s more to the story. Mae begins to investigate with valuable assistance from Chris Tamburro, ex-cop, ex-lover, and freelance muscle. They soon find themselves embroiled in a case that blooms like blood in the water, attracting the attention of lawyers, renegade police, sleazy industry insiders, politicians, and the incredibly wealthy—call them, collectively, “the Beast”— because if one isn’t careful, you’ll be lunch.

After all the dirty chores Mae has had to undertake over the years, she yearns “to do one good thing.” She finally gets that chance—but even it is tainted with cynicism and deceptions. Everybody Knows is eminently quotable; author Harper’s sentences are short, pointed, and ironic. Anyone searching for a killer mash-up of Joan Didion and Raymond Chandler should look no further.

Last but not least, one work from the non-fiction shelves …

• While Idaho Slept: The Hunt for Answers in the Murders of Four College Students, by J. Reuben Appelman (Harper):

It was just over a year ago that Americans were shocked to hear about the random fatal stabbings of four University of Idaho students living off-campus in the small college town of Moscow (pronounced MOS-koh). In While Idaho Slept, private investigator and crime journalist J. Reuben Appelman dives deep into the story by taking over where Truman Capote left off in his groundbreaking work, In Cold Blood. But instead of trying to create empathy for the murderers, as Capote did, Appelman puts his focus on those who perished. He re-creates their lives, with dialogue and character movement, and with just enough detail to build a bond between reader and victims.

The accused perpetrator, 28-year-old Bryan Christopher Kohberger, was a Ph.D. criminology student and teaching assistant at Washington State University in Pullman, Washington, located less than eight miles west of Moscow. Police linked him to the November 13, 2022, carnage through DNA evidence found on a leather knife sheath discovered at the crime scene. He was arrested at his parents’ home in Pennsylvania in late December of that year, and formally charged on January 5, 2023. Kohberger has said since that he expects to ultimately be exonerated in court. Prosecutors are seeking the death penalty, but the case has yet to go to trial. Meanwhile, new facets of the killings and of Kohberger’s defense continue to emerge. His lawyers will likely insist the house where the victims lived was a “party house,” and say he very well have attended one of these parties. Further, they’ll argue he was not at the scene when the crimes were committed, but instead out on a routine drive, alone.

An interesting element of Appelman’s account is his description of how the execution of crimes and their subsequent investigation has changed with the advent of social media. It would be a distinction of some sort if, during jury selection in Kohberger’s trial, one or more of the prospective jurors were disqualified because they’d read this book.

Other 2023 Favorites: The Lost Americans, by Christopher Bollen (Harper); Hard Country, by Reavis Z. Wortham (Poisoned Pen Press); Blood Sisters, by Vanessa Lillie (Berkley); Device Free Weekend, by Sean Doolittle (Grand Central); and The Gentlemen's Hour (Simon & Schuster, from 2011).

Presents of the Past

CrimeReads is definitely not done yet in rolling out its “bests” lists for 2023. Today, managing editor Molly Odintz presents her 10 favorite historical crime novels released over the last dozen months:

• The Adventures of Amina Al-Sirafi, by Shannon Chakraborty
(Harper Voyager)
• A True Account: Hannah Masury’s Sojourn Amongst the Pyrates, Written by Herself, by Katherine Howe (Henry Holt)
• The Square of Sevens, by Laura Shepherd-Robinson (Atria)
• My Men, by Victoria Kielland (Astra House)
• A Disappearance in Fiji, by Nilima Rao (Soho Crime)
• Symphony of Secrets, by Brendan Slocumb (Anchor)
• Hazardous Spirits, by Anbara Salam (Tin House)
• Time’s Undoing, by Cheryl Head (Dutton)
• At the Hour Between Dog and Wolf, by Tara Ison (IG)
• The Bell in the Fog, by Lev AC Rosen (Forge)

The same site offers a list of “The Best True Crime Books of 2023” and Olivia Rutigliano’s picks of “The Best Crime Movies of 2023.”

Favorite Crime Fiction of 2023, Part IV: Kevin Burton Smith

Kevin Burton Smith is the Montreal, Quebec-born founder and editor of that essential resource, The Thrilling Detective Web Site, as well as the Web Monkey for The Private Eye Writers of America and a contributor to Deadly Pleasures Mystery Magazine. He’s currently hiding out in Southern California’s High Desert region, where he’s still working on a non-fiction book about married detective couples with his wife, mystery author D.L. Browne (aka Diana Killian and Josh Lanyon), and waiting for the end of the world.

• The Second Murderer, by Denise Mina (Mulholland):

Before there was AI, there were “legacy authors”—writers hired by assorted and often dubious “literary estates” to dig up beloved series characters once their creators had shuffled off this mortal coil, and put them through their paces once again. All the biggies (Gardner, Hammett, Fleming, Spillane, Larssen, Christie, etc.) have been “honored” in this way, with results that have ranged from sublimely respectful to Ka-ching! Ka-ching! ridiculous. And now it’s Raymond Chandler’s turn.

Again.

There were originally seven novels by Chandler featuring his iconic Los Angeles private eye, Philip Marlowe. Naturally, the character has been pastiched before, but the increasing frequency (Ka-ching! Ka-ching!) of these “tributes” to Marlowe is rather troubling—the last one (which was wretched) was published just a year ago.

Somehow, though, Scottish author Denise Mina has beaten the odds. She may not have nailed Chandler’s style (Who could? Really?), but she’s certainly nailed Marlowe. She digs in deep, working through the caustic cynicism, the sardonic wisecracks, and the drinking, prying off that hard-boiled shell, exposing the bruised romanticism and crushed idealism of his gooey center.

It’s a staggering achievement; Mina not only “gets” Marlowe, but also the sweltering L.A. of the 1940s, thanks to an astounding amount of research (bitching about the heat while riding the open elevator in the un-air-conditioned Bradbury Building? Brilliant!), and an almost supernatural understanding of a time and a place.

Marlowe is hired in Mina’s tale to find runaway socialite Chrissie Montgomery, but he’s not the only one. Also on the case? His former inamorata Anne Riordan (last seen in Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely from 1940), now working as a private investigator herself. Their forced partnership is uneasy, and the ex-lovers are frequently at odds—over the case, their methods, and their shared past, as they crisscross the City of Angels, bouncing from the lowly flophouses and dive bars of Skid Row (and even a “kittens-only” lesbian joint) to the lofty heights of the Montgomery estate, and back again.

It’s all so Chandleresque: the heartbreak, the melancholy, the misunderstandings, the lies, the vividly drawn characters, the bitter taste of truth and the inevitable acknowledgment that, even more than 80 years after Marlowe made his debut, it still isn’t a game for knights. Mina may not “speak” Chandler, but Marlowe? She nails that poor son of a bitch. I just loved it.

• Holly, by Stephen King (Scribner):

What a fucking book! Since his career began, Stephen King has teased us with promises of a straight-up crime novel, one utterly devoid of any hint of woo-woo. Finally, after more than a few entertaining shucks and jives, he’s delivered, in what may one of his finest works ever. There are no vampires, sewer-dwelling killer clowns, or haunted Plymouths, but there are monsters.

The only catch? The monsters are us, or more precisely, they’re Rodney and Emily Harris, a couple of utterly unremarkable elderly professors you might run into at your local supermarket or the library. But monsters they are, and the evil they inflict on the sleepy college town they live in is almost too disturbing to stomach.

Enter private eye Holly Gibney, of the Finders Keepers Detective Agency. One of King’s most enduring characters, she was introduced in 2014’s Mr. Mercedes as former cop Bill Hodges’ new investigative partner, and went on to appear in now three more books, plus a novella. In Holly, she’s hired by a woman named Penny Dahl to track down her librarian daughter, Bonnie, who vanished three weeks before, leaving behind a note that read, “I’ve had enough.” As COVID-19 rages across the world and the Trump presidency staggers through its final bloody months, eccentric but endearing Holly is on her own, having recently buried her mother (an anti-vaxer brought down by the pandemic). Still emotionally fragile, with more issues than a magazine stand (OCD, synesthesia, sensory processing disorder, and she’s somewhere out there on the spectrum), Holly is also blessed with a keen intelligence, a savant-like memory, and some pretty savvy detective chops. But as she digs into this case, she discovers more people missing, and that real evil comes from within.

That’s just King reporting on human nature … being what it is. He pulls no punches in these pages, and digs right into the guts of who we are as a people at this moment. Those with delicate sensibilities might shy away, but this is a major work, no matter how you slice it.

• The Autobiography of Matthew Scudder, by Lawrence Block (LB Productions):

2023 was a good year for some of my favorite series characters to make appearances. But this one was unexpected. For years, Lawrence Block has made a pretty good living, fictionalizing the adventures of New York City private detective Matthew Scudder, who has appeared in novels, short stories, feature films, and even a graphic novel. But the now 85-year-old Block, who has admitted to telling lies for fun and profit, may not have always told the whole truth. Which is where this fascinating “autobiography” (purportedly written by Block, whose name is on everything), comes in. Not that Mr. Scudder is here to set the record straight, exactly. He’s more or less content with any dramatic license Block took over the years. What’s he’s more interested in doing is making some sense of his own life, as a form of self-therapy, dutifully recalling his past in daily installments.

And so Scudder scribbles away, occasionally balking at some details but diving deeply into other facets of his life that he thought he’d forgotten. This work covers only the first 35 years or so of Scudder’s existence on the planet, because he figures Block’s books have already presented a “sufficient printed record” of his years since. Thus, we see the future sleuth as a child, a young man, a student, a husband, a cop, and an alcoholic, casually meandering here and there, a conversation not so much read as overheard.

“Regrets. Yes, of course. There are things I could have done better,” Scudder confesses at this book’s conclusion. “But no bitter regrets, not really, because I truly like where I am. And the trip that got me here has had its moments.” By that point, I suspect most readers—and certainly fans of Mr. Scudder—will agree.

• Gotham City: Year One, by Tom King and Phil Hester (DC Comics):

This graphic novel (collecting all six issues of the 2022-2023 mini-series, plus a few tasty extras) ain’t for kids. Set two generations before Bruce Wayne's birth, it stars tough-as-nails Samuel Emerson “Slam” Bradley, the hardest-working private eye in the DC universe, a two-fisted palooka who brawled his way through more than 150 cases, and was actually the star of Detective Comics before Ol’ Pointy-Ears showed up.

In the ever-elastic world of comics, it’s 1961, and Bruce Wayne hasn’t even been born. Slam’s hired by Richard and Constance Wayne, pillars of Gotham society (and Bruce’s grandparents), to investigate the abduction of infant Helen Wayne, the so-called “Princess of Gotham”—a crime already being dubbed the “kidnapping of the century.” This is a noirish, brooding tale, all dark blunt shadows and family secrets, and the slash-and-burn angular artwork of Phil Hester, wielding a limited color palette to astounding effect, complements the tenebrous and heart-wrenching story—proclaiming this … this is something different. Lines of class and race rip through Gotham like a chainsaw, with Slam Bradley trying to work a case where everyone is lying, and writer Tom King uses that as a springboard to question everything from civic corruption and policing to the civil-rights movement, challenging the previously established history not just of Gotham City, but of Batman himself (he appears in a framing sequence).

There’s sex and treachery and nods to the notorious Lindbergh kidnapping and Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon, and the secrets exposed here will knock sharp-eyed BatFans off their keisters, and plenty of 10-year-old fan boys will be left scratching their heads. We’ll tell them all about it when they’re older.

• Last Seen in Lapaz, by Kwei Quartey (Soho Crime):

Ex-cops turned private eyes are, of course, a dime a dozen in the Shamus Game, but young Emma Djan is something else. Cut adrift from the Ghana Police Service in Accra, her dreams of becoming a homicide detective (like her father) turned to dust, she goes to work instead for the tight-knit Sowah Private Investigators Agency, run by Yemo Sowah, the “Old Man” (all detective agencies beyond a certain size seem to be run by the “Old Man).

Like its predecessors, The Missing American (2020) and Sleep Well, My Lady (2021), this novel is billed as an “Emma Djan Investigation.” But these are really rarities in the genre: honest-to-goodness P.I. procedurals, following the whole team as they work a case to its conclusion—slowly, calmly, methodically, and—as the circle of suspects narrows—most inevitably. Emma may be Sowah’s youngest operative and the only woman among them, but she more than carries her weight, with a definite knack for undercover assignments. She may chafe when her male co-workers mock her “woman’s perspective,” but she’s one tough (and infinitely polite) cookie.

This third entry in Quartey’s increasingly fascinating and eye-opening series finds the team looking into the disappearance of Ngozi, a young Nigerian woman bound for law school, who has fled to Ghana to be with Femi, the new love of her life. However, he’s not quite the Prince Charming she imagined, and soon she’s a suspect in his murder. That would be story enough played straight down the line, as the crew work the case with their typical slow-burn professionalism, but the author cracks his plot wide open with multiple points of view and timelines, exposing the evils of human trafficking in West Africa. It’s not a pretty picture, and Quartey doesn’t point fingers or offer simple solutions—but insists that readers (and, hopefully, the world) bear witness.

Other 2023 Favorites: A Death in Denmark, by Amulya Malladi (Morrow); Death of a Dancing Queen, by Kimberly G. Giarratano (Datura); The Running Grave, by Robert Galbraith (Mulholland); Robert B. Parker’s Bad Influence, by Alison Gaylin (Putnam); Odyssey’s End, by Matt Coyle (Oceanview); Too Many Bullets, by Max Allan Collins (Hard Case Crime); and Homicide: The Graphic Novel, Parts 1 and 2, by David Simon and Philippe Squarzoni (First Second).

Crime for Christmastime

We’re less than a week away from Christmas 2023—time to start planning your reading for that occasion, if holiday-related stories are your bag. Mystery Fanfare’s Janet Rudolph has updated her considerable inventory of “Christmas Mysteries.” There are so many of them, that they’ve had to be broken into three parts, and filed under their authors’ last names: A-E, F-L, and M-Z.

Are you in the mood for David Alexander’s Shoot a Sitting Duck? How about Susanna Gregory’s A Conspiracy of Violence, or else Nicholas Blake’s The Corpse in the Snowman? Maybe Amy Pershing’s An Eggnog to Die For, Maggie Sefton’s Fleece Navidad, or Jack Iams’ Do Not Murder Before Christmas? And there’s always Catriona McPherson’s new Hop Scot? Among the hundreds of choices Rudolph provides, there should be something to get you in the festive spirit.

READ MORE: “Christmas Mystery Short Story Anthologies and Novellas,” by Janet Rudolph (Mystery Fanfare).

Kremlin Attacks Mystery Writer

This is the sort of noxious power wielded by dictators, whether they exercise it on “day one” or throughout their incumbency:

Russia has placed the popular detective novelist Grigory Chkhartishvili—known under the pen name Boris Akunin—on its register of “extremists and terrorists” for his criticism of Moscow’s war in Ukraine.

Since the Kremlin ordered Russian troops to march on Kyiv on 24 February last year, a crackdown on dissent has hit the arts and books by authors critical of Moscow have disappeared from bookshops in the country.

Chkhartishvili, 67, is known for his historical detective novels and his longstanding criticism of President Vladimir Putin.

Russia’s financial watchdog, Rosfinmonitoring, said on
Monday that his name had been listed on the “terrorist and extremists” list while the country’s Investigative Committee announced it had opened a criminal investigation into Akunin for allegedly “justifying terrorism and publicly spreading fake information” on the Russian army.

You can read the whole story here.

Mystery readers will recognize Akunin as the author of the very popular Erast Fandorin detective novels, set in 19th-century Russia. That series began with The Winter Queen, originally published in 1998. If I’m not mistaken, the most recent English-translated Fandorin tale was 2019’s Not Saying Goodbye. The books have featured in two of CrimeReads contributor Paul French’s “Crime and the City” columns, one covering stories set in Moscow, the other focusing on St. Petersburg-based crime fiction.

With the author facing Putin’s pettish wrath, now might be a valuable time to purchase one of his books and thereby contribute to his defense fund. It is gift-buying season and all …

READ MORE: “Russia Adds Prominent Writer Akunin to ‘Extremists and Terrorists’ Registry” (The Moscow Times).

Favorite Crime Fiction of 2023, Part III: Fraser Massey

Fraser Massey is a journalist in London, England. A former columnist for Radio Times, Now, and Real People, he reviews crime fiction for the Aslef Journal. An early draft of his not-yet-published neo-noir thriller, Whitechapel Messiah, was shortlisted in the New Voices category at the inaugural Capital Crime Festival Awards in 2019.

• The Last Dance, by Mark Billingham (Atlantic Monthly):

Mark Billingham knows a thing or two about murder, as well he might after 22 years spent writing Tom Thorne police procedurals. Specifically, he knows what many other authors often forget: For every murder victim, there’s doubtless a grieving relative in need of comfort left behind.

Perhaps not many real-life police would wrap their arms around a despairing widow and assure her that one day things will feel better. But when Blackpool Detective Sergeant Declan Miller—Billingham’s new protagonist in The Last Dance—does, only a cold-hearted, cynical reader could fail to feel a lump in their throat. Miller’s tender-heartedness is understandable. We meet him as he returns to work early from compassionate leave, following the shooting death of his police inspector wife (and amateur ballroom dancing partner), Alex. Partly, Miller wants to keep an eye on detectives looking into her death, but mostly he just needs a distraction from his grief.

He’s assigned a new police partner, heavy metal music fan DS Sara Xiu, as well as a double murder in need of attention. Two seemingly unconnected guests have been found dead in adjoining rooms at the Sands Hotel. Miller knows instinctively that if he can find a link between those victims, he’ll be well on the way to solving this labyrinthine mystery. The case intrigues him, even more so when he discovers one of the deceased is the son of a crime boss Alex had been investigating at the time she died. Evidence suggests these crimes were the result of a bungled contract hit-job.

Don’t be misled into thinking that a novel about a grieving detective is going to be a thoroughgoing sob-fest. Yes, as Miller reunites with members of the dancing group (mostly ex-cops) to which he and his wife belonged, tears are shed. But one of this detective’s mechanisms for coping with his lingering pain is making wisecracks wherever possible. That plays well to Billingham’s background as a former stand-up comedian. The jokes start right off the bat, as he comments on his story’s setting: the rundown British seaside resort of Blackpool.

“To the casual observer,” he writes, “this might be Las Vegas.

“If that casual observer really squinted.

“And had never been to Las Vegas.”

The author’s enjoyment at introducing a fresh detective series after all those Tom Thorne novels is infectious.

• Ozark Dogs, by Eli Cranor (Soho Crime):

Noir fiction is said to flourish whenever faith in society and its institutions is at a particularly low ebb. In tough times, the argument goes, readers take refuge in stories that show how things could actually be far worse than they are. Perhaps that’s why cracking yarns by S.A. Cosby, Dennis Lehane, Jordan Harper, and Eli Cranor have all drawn favorable responses this year.

Cranor’s second novel (after 2022’s Edgar Award-winning Don’t Know Tough) presents us with two warring rural Arkansas families, the Ledfords and the Fitzjurls. Their feud goes back a generation, to when junkyard owner Jeremiah Fitzjurls’s son, Tommy, was convicted for the brutal slaying of Bunn Ledford’s eldest boy, Rudnick.

Bunn, a methamphetamine dealer by trade, has benefited from the meth epidemic that’s become such a scourge across rural America. He made his own product until his ramshackle drugs lab literally blew up in his face, leaving him both horribly disfigured and with no way to continue earning an income. It’s his second son, a white supremacist skinhead named Evail, who finally comes up with a desperate new moneymaking stratagem. Instead of manufacturing their own meth, they’ll purchase it from a Mexican drugs cartel over the border. When the Ledfords find themselves short of cash to embark on this enterprise, Evail offers to kidnap white teenage girls and trade them as sex slaves to pay for the drugs.

Bunn sees this as a fine opportunity to wreak some revenge on Jeremiah Fitzjurls, a loner and Vietnam War veteran who’s been struggling to bring up his 17-year-old granddaughter, Jo, ever since her father, Tommy, was sent to prison. But Jeremiah’s temperamentally unsuited to that role, and his overprotectiveness is driving her to find brand-new ways to misbehave. Evail intends to take advantage of her freedom by snatching her as his first victim to swap for 50 pounds of Mexican meth.

This is as black a noir yarn as you’ll find, and Cranor maintains an admirably relentless pace throughout his telling of it. He even saves the story’s most startling plot twist to puncture the only light element in these pages—the love story between Jo and her quarterback boyfriend, Colt Dillard (another Ledford relation, though she doesn’t know that), to whom she plans to lose her virginity on high school prom night.

Any romantics among this novel’s readers might want to skip that particular revelation.

• Past Lying, by Val McDermid (Atlantic Monthly):

Teasingly, Val McDermid opens her seventh and latest Detective Chief Inspector Karen Pirie novel with a Raymond Chandler quote: “The perfect detective story cannot be written.” Might she be setting out to prove the great man wrong?

One of Past Lying’s principal players, bestselling Tartan noir crime-fictionist Jake Stein, believes the perfect crime story must contain the perfect murder. Following Stein’s untimely demise due to a brain aneurysm, his papers are bequeathed to the National Library of Scotland. Among those is a fragment of a novel-in-progress in which a character claims to have devised the perfect murder—and then gone on to kill someone in order to test whether his theory would stand up. The victim sounds worryingly similar to Lara Hardie, an Edinburgh University student whose disappearance in the previous year has not yet been solved by police.

McDermid’s tale is set in April 2020, in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, when Scotland imposed rigorous lockdown conditions to halt the virus’ spread. As a consequence of those, Pirie and her team are only allowed to interview witnesses from a distance of two meters (six feet five inches)—or, to paraphrase McDermid, approximately the length of two German Shepherds or one Richard Osman. (The exceptionally tall author of the Thursday Murder Club novels is just one real-life figure McDermid mentions as she writes gleefully about the world of mystery thrillers.)

When Lara Hardie’s body turns up exactly where Stein’s unpublished book said it would be, Pirie has to decide whether the case can really be that simply solved. “It’s a three-layer problem,” declares her sergeant, Daisy Mortimer, producing a massive box of chocolates. The two detectives munch salted pralines, treacle toffees, nut clusters, pisco sours, and mint cracknels as they sift through the evidence. By the time Pirie grabs the last chocolate ginger, she’s worked out the answer.

Past Lying may not be the perfect crime story, but it’s one of the best this year and likely the greatest we’ll see set during the pandemic.

• Red Queen, by Juan Gómez-Jurado (Minotaur):

When the near-transparent corpse of a teenage boy is found in the home of Spain’s most prominent banker, the newly formed investigative team of civilian Antonia Scott and Inspector Jon Gutiérrez are brought in to catch the killer. The boy suffered a slow and painful death, with all the blood drained from his body.

That macabre killing, we learn, was the result of an abduction gone wrong carried out by a figure called Ezekiel, who has now claimed another victim—a textile tycoon’s daughter. Can Scott and Gutiérrez rescue her before Ezekiel takes another life?

Those mismatched partners in crime-solving are employed by a secret pan-European agency tasked with stopping the sort of major crimes that would spread panic across the continent if they became public knowledge. Scott’s a half-English/half-Spanish bona fide genius with an IQ of 242, the highest in Spain—and possibly in the world. (Older readers may compare her to American TV sleuth Adrian Monk, though Monk was never pitted against an opponent as nightmarishly cruel and disturbing as Ezekiel.) Gutiérrez, meanwhile, is a gay, food-loving, and corrupt cop who was caught red-handed planting evidence on a suspect. He’s been told that the only way he can escape incarceration is to work as Scott’s minder. He readily agrees, knowing that maintaining his freedom will allow him to continue consuming his mother’s delectable cod cheeks. As we read about Gutiérrez struggling to climb stairs, though, it’s hard not to wonder whether an enforced spell away from his mother’s home-cooking might actually do him good.

Red Queen is a stylish thriller, the first novel in a trilogy by journalist and author Gómez-Jurado, which between them in their original Spanish language versions have already sold more than 2 million copies. The English translation of the second entry, Black Wolf, is due out on both sides of the Atlantic in March 2024.

• Dead of Night, by Simon Scarrow (Kensington):

The ghost of Nazi chieftain Heinrich Himmler hovers ominously over this second World War II-era thriller starring Criminal Inspector Horst Schenke of Berlin’s Kriminalpolizei, or Kripo. It’s the early days of 1940. Schenke and his detectives are diligently dealing with the latest scams perpetrated by their city’s criminal element, while slowly becoming aware of the far greater atrocities being carried out in their name across Europe by Adolf Hitler’s government. All the while, they’re watched over by Himmler—a complete madman, as history records it, yet put in charge of maintaining German law and order—who keeps a close watch on Kripo activity via his deputy, Reinhard Heydrich.

Dead of Night is a fictionalized account of how the Aktion T4 eugenics program—a classified policy of Hitler and his henchmen to murder mentally and physically disabled children before there was a chance their blood might “contaminate” the Aryan gene pool—ultimately came to light. Even the Nazis, it seems, were worried at first that their monstrous plan to do away with innocent children might cause sufficient outrage to prompt an uprising.

In this novel, Schenke risks the wrath of Himmler and Heydrich by ignoring an instruction not to investigate the death of a doctor, and then looking into what happened to one of the early young patients sent for treatment in an Aktion T4 healthcare facility. Scarrow’s prose is admirably terse, allowing the full horror of the evidence Schenke uncovers to speak for itself. This is a terrifying story but an important and chilling reminder, if one be needed, of the evil ideology that lay behind the fascist policies that once held sway in Germany.

Scarrow’s previous Horst Schenke novel, Blackout, was released in 2021. An as-yet-untitled third installment in the series is set for publication in Great Britain this coming June. UPDATE: The release of that third novel has been postponed until March 2025.

Other 2023 Favorites: Small Mercies, by Dennis Lehane (Harper); All the Sinners Bleed, by S.A. Cosby (Flatiron); The Secret Hours, by Mick Herron (Soho Crime); Scorched Grace, by Margot Douaihy (Gillian Flynn); and City of Dreams, by Don Winslow (Morrow).