Women Make Their Influence Felt

You’d think that by now, midway through December, the release of nominations for “best crime and thriller fiction of 2023” would finally be abating. But that hardly seems to be the case.

Just today, for instance, CrimeReads’ Molly Odintz posted her 15 selections of “The Best International Crime Novels of 2023,” which means works that appeared originally in another language, and were translated into English for publication this year:

• My Men, by Victoria Kielland,
translated by Damion Searls (Astra House)
• Vengeance Is Mine, by Marie NDiaye,
translated by Jordan Stump (Knopf)
• Nothing Is Lost, by Chloe Mehdi,
translated by Howard Curtis (Europa Editions)
• Our Share of Night, by Mariana Enriquez,
translated by Megan McDowell (Hogarth)
• My Husband, by Maud Ventura,
translated by Emma Ramadan (HarperVia)
• Urgent Matters, by Paula Rodriguez,
translated by Sarah Moses (Pushkin Vertigo)
• Tina, Mafia Soldier, by Maria Rosa Cutrufelli,
translated by Robin Pickering-Iazzi (Soho Crime)
• Bad Kids, by Zijin Chen,
translated by Michelle Deeter (Pushkin Press)
• Abyss, by Pilar Quintana,
translated by Lisa Dillman (Bitter Lemon)
• Kids Run the Show, by Delphine de Vigan,
translated by Alison Anderson (Europa Editions)
• Scene of the Crime, by Patrick Modiano,
translated by Mark Polizzotti (Yale University Press)
• The Second Woman, by Louise Mey,
translated by Louise Rogers Lalaurie (Pushkin Press)
• The Owl Cries, by Hye-Young Pyun,
translated by Sora Kim-Russell (Arcade)
• The City of the Living, by Nicola Lagioia,
translated by Ann Goldstein (Europa Editions)
• Blaze Me a Sun, by Christoffer Carlsson,
translated by Rachel Willson-Broyles (Hogarth)

This follows Odintz’s declaration of what she says are “The 15 Best Psychological Thrillers of 2023.” Some of those picks overlap with her favorite translated works, but among the rest in this roster are Wendy Heard’s You Can Trust Me (Bantam), Jean Kwok’s The Leftover Woman (Morrow), Ashley Winstead’s Midnight Is the Darkest Hour (Sourcebooks Landmark), and Angie Kim’s Happiness Falls (Hogarth). If I’m not mistaken, all but three of those were penned by women.

Again, in a supplementary list of 2023’s “Most Highly Rated Psychological/Domestic Suspense Novels,” this compiled by Deadly Pleasures’ George Easter, 11 of the dozen authors are women. Is it that female crime-fictionists lean more toward psychological suspense, or that they’re just better at writing it than men?

Two other “bests” inventories worth glancing over: author Abir Mukherjee’s final column for the blog Criminal Minds contains his eight most-loved titles from the last dozen months, half of them drawn from the crime/mystery shelves; and it’s good to see that at least four offerings from this genre found places among the Washington Independent Review of Books’ “51 Favorite Books of 2023.”

READ MORE: “Most Highly Rated Debut Mystery & Thriller Fiction 2023,” by George Easter (Deadly Pleasures Mystery Magazine); “What Women Liked in 2023,” by Sarah Weiss (Crimespree Magazine); “The 10 Best Book Reviews of 2023,” by Adam Morgan (Literary Hub).