I’ll own it: I haven’t read as much new crime fiction this year as I did in years previous.Part of the reason for that is that as I get older—and I turned 60 this year—I get crankier. I’m less willing to read novels I suspect I won’t like. In past years, I forced myself to read any novel under the mystery/suspense/thriller umbrella that seemed to have some “buzz,” in order to assure my insecurities that I was staying nominally relevant among the glitterati of the genre, the conference commandos. And while I discovered some good stories along the way, the risk/reward ratio for me was way out of whack, something like 10 duds for every gem. At my age, why waste that kind of time?
To be honest, the gems seemed harder for me to find on 2025 publication lists, especially now that I almost fully forgo series novels and what I believe to be their increasingly reductive pleasures. And I’ve been looking as hard as I ever have.
Another reason for my reading less is that I feel more despair about the direction of crime fiction—and book publishing, in general—as we near the end of this year. Down & Out Books, a home for the genre’s otherwise homeless, shut down in October after 15 years, finding its lane increasingly too narrow to financially squeeze through. And one of my closest author friends—someone with an extensive track record of success who had a Big Five (or is it Four?) contract at the beginning of 2025—now finds himself without an agent or publisher, having had his last three novels rejected because, as he told me, the marketing committees of those publishing houses decided his books couldn’t sell 100,000 copies at a minimum. Evidently that’s become the new standard for acceptance.
No longer can editorial tastemakers will a good novel into published reality, it seems. Now, apparently, it’s all about how derivative of past success a work can be. Risk aversion for original approaches and ideas seems to be at an all-time high. I can sniff out those please-the-market-of-the-moment works in the first few pages, and I avoid them at all costs because they don’t feel written out of love for storytelling as much as they feel like business plans in book form.
That said, I did manage to find a handful of new novels this year that met my increasingly cranky standards:• Crooks, by Lou Berney (Morrow)
• El Dorado Drive, by Megan Abbott (Putnam)
• What About the Bodies, by Ken Jaworowksi (Atlantic Crime)
• Silent Creek, by Tony Wirt (Thomas & Mercer)
• Friends Helping Friends, by Patrick Hoffman (Atlantic Monthly Press)
• You Will Never See Me, by Jake Hinkson (Crooked Lane)
• Heartwood, by Amity Gaige (Simon & Schuster)
• The Length of Days, by Lynn Kostoff (Stark House Press)
• Murderapolis, by Anthony Neil Smith (Urban Pigs Press)
And I’ll add one non-fiction crime book:
Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers, by Caroline Fraser (Penguin Press)
What do these novels have in common? They all feature Everyman/Everywoman characters in a baseline battle for everyday survival—and right-now survival. (With rare exception, I can’t stand a protagonist with standing; the central character who doesn’t want to be there or has no particular right to be there portends the best kind of compelling conflicts, that of character on top of plot.) They never seem to be uphill reads; they hum with grace and glide, the kind of stories that come from never forcing a phrase or a plot twist. In short, these are novels I can read more than once, novels that never front-load their pleasures, novels that reveal fresh nuance with each reading.
Why read any other kind of novel? Or is that too cranky a mindset?
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