I’ll be honest: I read less new crime fiction (or, at least, books marketed as such) in 2024, and liked less of what I read than in any year previous. I get a sense that genre writers are struggling to speak coherently to the current moment, and have largely retreated to safe corners of it to
observe and comment on our divided classes. That said, there were some works in this vein well worth celebrating.• Holly, by Stephen King (Scribner):
Holly may not be the best crime novel of 2024 (it was, after all, first published in late 2023), but it’s up there near the top, and it’s certainly the most fun one I read, by far. The killers—a pair of octogenarian, semi-retired professors—are an absolute hoot, full of themselves and their out-there ideas on how to prolong their lives at the expense of others. And Holly Gibney, King’s neurasthenic, neurodivergent sleuth from the Mr. Mercedes trilogy (among other stories), is the perfect person to connect the dots between the marginalized missing victims in this tale and that nutjob couple. Her methodical detective work is laid out in painstaking slow-burn detail; King doesn’t skimp on the step-by-step. As is always expected with this author, his secondary characters are extraordinarily well-developed. Holly’s pages turn but don’t fly; there’s much to linger over in every passage, even as you can’t wait to find out what comes next.
• The Hunter, by Tana French (Viking):
This second novel (after 2020’s The Searcher) to be centered on Cal Hooper, a retired Chicago cop relocated to the eccentric Irish village of Ardnakelty, where he is forever navigating the town’s
arcane protocols and suspicious locals, is a patiently plotted masterpiece. Just when Cal thinks he’s finally settled in, with teenage pal Theresa “Trey” Reddy and semi-girlfriend Lena in his everyday orbit, he’s pushed out of his comfort zone once more when Trey’s charming-loser father, Johnny Reddy, breezes into town promising riches too rich for the not-rich locals to ignore. He’s caught between those who know Johnny is full of shit and others who choose to look past that because he’s “one of them.” And Cal, for all his virtues, is not. French’s prose burns long and on even low heat, like an underground peat fire; and though you may think nothing much is happening on occasion, you can’t look away because you and the author both know better.• Where They Last Saw Her, by Marcie R. Rendon (Bantam):
In this standalone novel from the author of the standout Cash Blackbear series (Murder on the Red River, Girl Gone Missing, etc.), Rendon shows she’s basically the genre-fied incarnation of Louise Erdrich,
depicting Native American reservation life with chilling authenticity. Here, Quill, wife and mother, steps in when women from Minnesota’s Red Pine Reservation go missing amid an uptick in the number of white-male pipeline workers housed in the surrounding area. Quill is as reluctant a sleuth as they come, feeling called to action in the face of chilling complacency from local law enforcement. But when one of her best friends appears to fall into the clutches of sex traffickers, Quill goes into Full Metal Mama Bear mode. The thriller elements in Rendon’s tale are satisfyingly urgent; the cultural study of a place white people will never fully understand is first-rate.
• Broiler, by Eli Cranor (Soho Crime):As Marcie Rendon knows reservation life in Minnesota and North Dakota, so Eli Cranor knows rural Arkansas, and its cultural and economic forces that constantly collide from within and without. Brutal conditions experienced by the undocumented workers at a chicken processing plant in a trailer-park town push one man to his breaking point, leading to the kidnapping of the plant manager’s 6-month-old boy, the ransom demanded being tens of thousands of dollars in overtime pay. And the only people who seem to have their heads on straight here—the abducted child’s mother and a female line worker married to the kidnapper—find a cracked sort of common cause when the men in their lives prove to be useless. This yarn’s deeper themes never lose their impact in the face of
nonstop action, which is tougher to pull off than it seems. Cranor, in his third novel, finally sees his gifts take flight in full feather.• The Winner, by Teddy Wayne (Harper):
As sleek as it is dark, Wayne’s story of clashing classes and cultures unfolds in old-monied coastal Long Island, where a struggling law-school graduate turned tennis instructor, Conor O’Toole, leans into his looks to bed both a mother and her daughter. His desperate efforts to keep one from finding out about the other lead to murder and an equally desperate and seemingly endless attempt to cover it up. The thriller elements in this novel are strong, but what stands out most is the cluelessness of the elite, who never have to worry about where their next meal—or mansion—is coming from.
Other 2024 Favorites: The Best American Mystery and Suspense 2024, edited by S.A. Cosby (Mariner); Buried Lies, by Steven Tingle (Crooked Lane); Blond Hair, Blue Eyes, by Chris Kelsey (Black Rose Writing); Ordinary Bear, by C.B. Bernard (Blackstone); and American Spirits, by Russell Banks (Knopf).
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