Favorite Crime Fiction of 2023, Part II: Jim Thomsen

Jim Thomsen is a writer and editor who lives in tiny Kingston, Washington. He is the editor of A Killing Rain, an anthology of crime stories set in the greater Seattle area, to be published by Down & Out Books in April 2024 in conjunction with the Left Coast Crime convention being held in nearby Bellevue.

This is the year I mostly gave up on genre crime fiction, on all its clichés, formulas, and tropes, no matter how artfully inverted or subverted. Instead, in 2023 I found myself with a ravenous appetite for tales about ordinary people who find out what they’re capable of when circumstances, self-selected or otherwise, crush them against a wall—tales in which any outcome for any character is possible. Tales that chose their own path, even down non-commercial avenues. Fortunately there are a lot of good novels marketed as crime fiction that meet this standard, and a large number of those titles were published in 2023. Below are the ones I especially loved.

• Small Town Sins, by Ken Jaworowski (Henry Holt):

In a deteriorating Pennsylvania town, three down but not quite out locals take advantage of rare circumstances to better their own, but find that doing so means embracing mortal darkness they’re not fully equipped to cleanly handle. Every amateurish move each of them makes, makes their problems worse, to the point that they simply have no choice but to plunge ahead, no matter who gets hurt. This debut novel is a rare gem, the work of a confident storyteller who knows where he’s going and gets there with a minimum of fussiness and a maximum of emotionally engaging glide.

• Small Mercies, by Dennis Lehane (Harper):

It’s the summer of 1974, and single mother Mary Pat Fennessy has always played by the unwritten rules of her knock-around, mob-governed South Boston neighborhood. But when her teenage daughter goes missing, and the block bosses tell her to move on from it, Mary Pat surprises everyone—most of all herself—by not moving on, becoming instead a one-woman wrecking crew in pursuit of truth, justice, and fierce vengeance at any cost. Granular, lived-in details of time and place serve this story every bit as much as they did Lehane’s Mystic River (2001), and in my opinion this is Lehane’s finest novel since that one.

• An Honest Man, by Michael Koryta (Mulholland):

To my mind, Michael Kortya has had a mixed career, using his boundless talents in the service of mostly tepid, trope-addled tales. But every now and then he engages a higher gear, as he did in 2012’s The Prophet, and An Honest Man, about a guy who killed his father and tries to return to the coastal Maine town where his uncle is the corrupt sheriff, hits the same high-water mark. The vibrancy of the setting, and the close observations of the clannish community that occupies it, lift this one above its familiar genre constructs.

• The Guest, by Emma Cline (Random House):

The Guest is not classified as a work of crime fiction, but perhaps it should have been, given that Cline’s first novel (The Girls, 2016) centered on the Manson Family. This story is focused around a young woman who’s gotten a little too used to being transactional arm candy for rich men, and isn’t prepared to take care of herself when she’s abruptly cut loose. So, over several days all over Long Island, she seeks to attach herself to any number of affluent people in her orbit, with grim results, all the while trying to stay a step ahead of an old boyfriend to whom she owes money. In Cline’s hands, the yarn moves fast but invites the reader to linger on the lifestyle porn from the vantage point of a window-shopper who never quite realizes that she simply cannot have whatever she’s eyeing.

• Lay Your Body Down, by Amy Suiter Clarke (Morrow):

Situated in a horrifyingly realistic world halfway between today’s ascendant Christian nationalism and tomorrow’s Handmaid’s Tale, a growing mega-church in a small Minnesota town dominates the community through dark tribalism, darker patriarchy—and, it seems, the occasional murder of those who refuse to be dominated. When the onetime best friend who “stole” Del Walker’s boyfriend is jailed for killing him, Del, who had fled the town, losing her own family in the process, reluctantly returns to look into the case—and confront her past shame and the gaslighting pastor who drilled that shame into her, with increasingly deadly results. This is a stunning story that feels ripped from today’s headlines as told by an author who has clearly lived what she writes about.

Other 2023 Favorites: The End of the Road, by Andrew Welsh-Huggins (Mysterious Press); The Trackers, by Charles Frazier (Ecco); Sunsetter, by Curtis LeBlanc (ECW Press); Dark Ride, by Lou Berney (Morrow); and Always Something Sings, by Roger Lynn Howell (Coffeetown Press).

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).

Need Some Shopping Assistance?

Are you feeling desperate yet in your search for the perfect book to buy for those crime-fiction lovers on your holiday gift list? If so, you’re certainly not alone. But The Rap Sheet is here to lend a hand. Revisit our rundown of more than 400 books in this genre released, on both sides of the Atlantic, during the last quarter of 2023.

And don’t forget to pick up some extra wrapping paper!

Favorite Crime Fiction of 2023, Part I: Ali Karim

Ali Karim is The Rap Sheet’s longtime British correspondent, a contributing editor of January Magazine, and the assistant editor of Shots. In addition, he writes for Deadly Pleasures Mystery Magazine and Mystery Readers International.

• Small Mercies, by Dennis Lehane (Harper):

This combustible crime thriller is set in the Irish working-class neighborhood of South Boston during the heatwave-bedeviled summer of 1974. That was a period of court-ordered desegregation in the local public schools, when high school students from low-income Black areas were bused into poor white neighborhoods, and vice versa. The goal was to improve the quality of education system-wide, to force a better balance between the funding given to white schools (which were sometimes under-populated) and that going to struggling, under-equipped Black facilities. But the actual result was scattered protests and eruptions of violence.

Lehane’s story is propelled by the vividly realized Mary Pat Fennessy. A tough, middle-aged, and single working-class Irish woman, she’s a basically good person, but has been inculcated with the prejudices and hatreds of her time and environment. She’s also without a husband after being married twice, has lost one son (the victim of a drug overdose after he returned from military service in Vietnam), and manages to hold down two jobs—neither of which keeps her head much above water. The only thing that makes her care anymore is her teenage daughter, Jules, who is set to become part of Boston’s new social-engineering experiment, and with whom Mary Pat maintains a strained relationship.

Not long after Mary Pat gets involved in the anti-busing movement, Jules doesn’t come home one night. Her vanishing coincides with the death of Augustus Williamson, a Black youth whose corpse is found at a subway station on the white side of town. Could there be some connection between those two mysteries? Mary Pat is panicked over her daughter’s fate, but the people in her community—the only people she thought she could rely on in times of trouble—shy away from helping. Which causes her to question how much she really knows about her neighbors and her daughter’s life, and also makes her doubt the motives of local mobsters claiming to side with anyone who will pledge them loyalty. Mary Pat’s determination to get to the bottom of Jules’ disappearance leads her to risk all of what little she has left.

Small Mercies presents a tangled web of tribalism, inherited ignorance, and a hunger for belonging. It serves up historical detail of an uncommon vibrancy. Short, clipped chapters are not so much written as carved, leaving nary a superfluous word in evidence. As the story leaps along, the reader’s moral compass is tested right along with Mary Pat’s. This fast-paced, highly literate novel shows Dennis Lehane at the height of his storytelling powers.

• Notes on an Execution, by Danya Kukafka (Phoenix UK):

The best crime novels engage deep thought by mirroring the yin and yang of the human condition, displaying the very worst but also the very best aspects of our existence. Kukafka’s second novel (after 2018’s Girl in Snow) is structured like a prism, its central motif diffracted into narrative chunks. Shifting timelines supply multiple perspectives on a serial killer, Ansel Packer, who has been condemned to death row.

Packer now has only 12 hours left before he gets the needle for having strangled three innocent women. Rather than dwell upon his young victims, though, or lament his fate, Packer concentrates on a desperate escape plan he’s cooked up with one of the female prison guards. He’s also focused on a manifesto he intends to leave behind, which theorizes on the conflict between human capacities for both good and evil. Meanwhile, Kukafka thrusts the reader back into the past, into the depths of Packer’s troubled history as seen through the eyes of three defiant and complex women destined to survive him—none of whom passed through that man-monster’s life unaffected by their contact. Those witnesses are his forlorn, mistreated mother, Lavender, who abandoned him as a child; Hazel, the twin sister of his ex-wife, who he may also have been murdered; and Saffron “Saffy” Singh, who was harrowed by Packer as a child, but who grew up the become the homicide detective responsible for finally bringing him to justice. It’s Saffy who plays principal antagonist in this novel to Packer, the antagonist. Together they traverse time, territories, families, colleagues, and their friends—as well as delving into their own inner motivations and the demons that hover as one pages succeeds another.

This is not a traditional serial-killer tale, rampant with the pornography of violence. Instead, it focuses on the women in Packer’s life and on how we can never truly comprehend what goes on inside another person’s mind. There’s masculinity on display here, waiting to evolve into something potentially toxic. Circumstances and the choices that determine who we’ll become are explored in a powerful but dispassionate manner. Kukafka even teases out a bit of uneasy sympathy for her slayer (who, among her characters, is never allowed to offer first-person narration), but amalgamates it with a sense of imminent dread. It is easy to understand why the American edition of Notes on an Execution won the Edgar Award for best novel.

• Everybody Knows, by Jordan Harper (Mulholland):

Written in a terse staccato style that brings to mind James Ellroy’s work, Everybody Knows plays like a knowingly real thriller—a Hollywood Babylon exposé that mixes the excesses of Los Angeles with the darkest edges of human nature.

Mae Pruett is a “black-bag publicist” with Mitnick and Mitnick Associates, the specialist dispatched to clean up messes caused by film celebrities, studio execs, and heedless politicians, and to keep their indiscretions from the attention of traditional media as well as “citizen journalists” attached to TikTok, Instagram, and their electronic brethren. When we first encounter Mae in this hard-boiled yarn, she’s called out to L.A.’s notorious Chateau Marmont, there to find a 20-something actress already on her way down who’s nursing a black eye given her by a silk-stockinged scumbag; it seems he objected to her objections that they be filmed in the course of sexual relations. Mae’s cover-up of that affair is both crafty and comical.

However, her next undertaking proves to be more challenging. And considerably riskier. Her boss and mentor, Dan Hennigan, is murdered in front of the Beverly Hills Hotel during what appeared to have been a carjacking. Mae sees the circumstances as suspicious—especially since Hennigan was preparing to clue her in on some mysterious money-making scheme. She’s further bothered by the fact that others at her firm aren’t equally disconcerted by it all. Adding to her concerns is that she’s been tasked with taking over Hennigan’s workload—which Mae fears precipitated his premature demise.

At the same time, her old friend Chris Tamburro, a cop turned private enforcer with BlackGuard Security, is assigned to investigate Hennigan’s death on behalf of an unidentified client. That’s only the first of many secrets that will bring Mae and Tamburro together again, and convince them to pursue leads involving murder, sexual offenses, and powerful men who believe themselves immune from legal penalties. Could Mitnick and Mitnick be working in-concert with Blackguard to conceal the unthinkable? A bumped-off star, a pregnant 14-year-old, drugs, brutality, the draw of fame—they’re all tossed into Harper’s storytelling mix, as Mae starts to question her values system and ask herself what ethical limits she is unwilling to violate.

Harper, who won an Edgar for his first novel, She Rides Shotgun, here delivers the most energetic and most unsettling novel I’ve read this year. Prescient and unmissable in a #MeToo world.

• The Turnglass, by Gareth Rubin (Simon & Schuster UK):

For those readers—many, I’ll wager—who are unfamiliar with the term, tête-bêche (or head-to-tail book) generally refers to a volume comprising two different works by two different authors, published back-to-back with one of them upside down to the other, offering two separate front covers (not unlike the old Ace Double Novels). The Turnglass is just such a production, though in this case its mystery novellas were both penned by UK journalist-author Gareth Rubin, and the stories are self-referential: reading one affects your understanding of its opposite.

Got all that? There will be a test later on. Just kidding …

Rubin’s yarns take place during two periods of time, upon two continents, and are composed in two very different styles. First we are taken back to the 1880s, on the Essex Coast in England, where Dr. Simeon Lee of London investigates a puzzling illness that has befallen his relative, soldier-turned-clergyman Oliver Hawes. Hawes resides in Turnglass House, the sole abode on the island of Ray, cut off from the mainland at high tide. Smuggling operations by local fisherman and ne’er-do-wells provide a dangerous backdrop to the plot as do the mysterious “Florence,” a murderess firmly imprisoned in a glass-walled cell within Turnglass House, and a chapbook/novelette titled The Gold Field, by O. Tooke, about a journey to America set several decades in the future.

The second novella is less of a Victorian Gothic mystery, more of an American noir narrative set in L.A. during the late 1930s. Ken Kourian is a struggling actor who befriends the enigmatic Gloria. As success in “Hollywoodland” (Hollywood’s original name) is all about connections, Gloria introduces Ken to successful author Oliver Tooke, who lives with his sister in a glass-walled home, The Turnglass, situated on the Californian beachfront. Ken and Oliver become friends, and after Oliver is found dead from an apparent suicide, Ken—distrusting that explanation—starts making inquiries. Revelations in Oliver’s abbreviated novel The Turnglass, about a certain Dr. Simeon Lee, prove to be most enlightening, both to Kourian and the reader.

It’s a unique and ambitious reading experience offered between these covers, with each of Rubin’s stories in conversation with the other, and nothing in either quite as it seems to be.

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

• Word Monkey, by Christopher Fowler (Doubleday UK):

Although he was best known for composing the Bryant and May/Peculiar Crimes Unit tales, Christopher Fowler was also a bibliophile who co-managed a London-based film-marketing business, wrote horror yarns and weird fiction, reviewed books and was basically a wonderful rampart in London’s lively literary scene. This makes his diagnosis of terminal cancer in early 2020 troubling. Yet instead of becoming angry and resentful of the cards dealt him, he used the time he had left to do what he’d always done: celebrate books.

The title Word Monkey alludes to how one of his early bosses unkindly referred to his career choice, in lieu of the term “writer.” His final narrative barely touches upon the assorted awards and other plaudits he received during his 40-year career; nor does it reflect upon life’s great injustices. Instead, it focuses on gratitude and modesty.

The magic of Word Monkey is that it can make you roar with laughter, smile in agreement, and turned your eyes wet, all within the space of a single chapter. Fowler’s recollections and the absurdity of his observations are life-affirming, as well as reflective. They also present valuable context and comfort not only to his many appreciative readers, but to bibliophiles in general. One of his non-fiction contributions was to suss out, originally on behalf of The Independent, “forgotten authors,” a term that will never apply to him.

Other 2023 Favorites: Holly, by Stephen King (Scribner); Resurrection Walk, by Michael Connelly (Little, Brown); Kill For Me Kill For You, by Steve Cavanagh (Headline UK); The Scarlet Papers, by Matthew Richardson (Michael Joseph); and The Secret, by Lee Child and Andrew Child (Delacorte Press).

Top Reads of 2023: It’s Finally Down to Us

For the last three months, we have been bringing you nominations by other publications of this year’s best crime, mystery, and thriller fiction. Now, Rap Sheet critics will begin offering their own selections.

First up will be our longtime British correspondent, the well-known Ali Karim, whose preferences range from a novel dealing with racial tensions in 1970s Boston and one about a “black-bag publicist” trying to solve a murder in Los Angeles, to a book comprising two twisted historical yarns that reveal clues about each other.

Tomorrow, Jim Thomsen will share his five top reads of the last 12 months. And then next week will bring recommendations from Fraser Massey, Kevin Burton Smith, Steven Nester, and yours truly.

In the spirit of this festive holiday season, you can expect these revelations to kick off just as they do in Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, when the clock strikes 12 (PST)—noon, that is.

Exposing the Acts of Agents

Earlier today, CrimeReads posted its preferences in the way of espionage novels released over the course of 2023. I’m surprised this list is so short, given how many works in this genre have been endorsed by other Web and print publications:

• Tomás Nevinson, by Javier Marías (Knopf)
• Hope You Are Satisfied, by Tania Malik (Unnamed Press)
• Beirut Station, by Paul Vidich (Pegasus)
• Red London, by Alma Katsu (Putnam)
• The Helsinki Affair, by Anna Pitoniak (Simon & Schuster)

Concurrently, Chicago Review of Books has posted a rundown of its 15 “Best Books We Read in 2023.” Those include a pair of works frequently classified as crime or thriller fiction: My Men, by Victoria Kielland (Astra House), which previously received thumbs up from both Tom Nolan and Sarah Weinman, and is definitely on my Christmas wishlist; and I Have Some Questions for You, by Rebecca Makkai (Viking), which also—quite unexpectedly—was chosen by Open Letters Review critic Steve Donoghue as one of “The Worst Books of 2023.” Gee, I guess you can’t please everyone.

Is There No End to This Guidance?

In the mood for yet another “favorite crime fiction of 2023” list? Take a gander at Gordon McGhie’s 10 choices in Grab This Book:

• Paris Requiem, by Chris Lloyd (Orion)
• The Last Line, by Stephen Ronson (Hodder & Stoughton)
• The Darkest Sin, by D.V. Bishop (Pan Macmillan)
• The Sun Down Motel, by Simone St. James (Penguin)
• The Institution, by Helen Fields (HarperCollins)
• The Devil You Know, by Neil Lancaster (HarperCollins)
• The Hotel, by Louise Mumford (HarperCollins)
• Murdle, by G.T. Karber (Profile)
• The Silent Man, by David Fennell (Bonnier)
• The Stranger Times, by C.K. McDonnell (Penguin)

OK, not all of these are novels fall within the bounds of this genre, and at least one of them didn’t debut this year, but I have come to appreciate McGhie’s taste. So give these works a shot.

* * *

Deadly Pleasures Mystery Magazine editor George Easter, who’s been my ally in scouring the Web for these sorts of end-of-the-year selections, now offers up his own “Best of 2023” selections. Their number is greater than I wish to report, but you can see them all here. Below are just his crime novel preferences.

• Small Mercies, by Dennis Lehane (Harper)
• Resurrection Walk, by Michael Connelly (Little, Brown)
• Everybody Knows, by Jordan Harper (Mulholland)
• Holly, by Stephen King (Scribner)
• Lying Beside You, by Michael Robotham (Scribner)
• Red Queen, by Juan Gómez-Jurado (Minotaur)
• The Detective Up Late, by Adrian McKinty (Blackstone)
• The River We Remember, by William Kent Krueger (Atria)
• Expectant, by Vanda Symon (Orenda)
• The Running Grave, by Robert Galbraith (Mulholland)
• Murder in the Family, by Cara Hunter (Morrow)

I continue to be astounded by George’s reading records. He says his goal for 2023 “was to read 120 mysteries, crime novels, and thrillers. Today the count stands at 121 read. So my goal was reached.” Sheesh! He’s already devoured a good 40 more books than I have this year, and mine haven’t all been crime or mystery fiction. Maybe my mistake is in not setting a challenging goal for my annual reading; perhaps if I committed myself so, I would have something to shoot for, rather than striking a more leisurely pace. It’s worth considering.

Predilections on Parade

The Edinburgh-based Scotsman newspaper is out with a list of what it says are “five of the best Scottish crime books of 2023”:

• Past Lying, by Val McDermid (Sphere)
• Squeaky Clean, by Callum McSorley (Pushkin Vertigo)
• The Maiden, by Kate Foster (Mantle)
• The Second Murderer, by Denise Mina (Harvill Secker)
• Voices of the Dead, by Ambrose Parry (Canongate)

One other set of “best” picks deserving your attention comes from the ever-dependable Ayo Onatade, a reviewer with Shots magazine and author of its top-notch blog, Shotsmag Confidential. Ayo is also a member of the thriller-fiction nominating committee for Deadly Pleasures Mystery Magazine’s annual Barry Awards. DP today revealed her favorite crime and mystery releases from the last dozen months.

Best Novels:
• All the Sinners Bleed, by S.A. Cosby (Headline)
• The Secret Hours, by Mick Herron (Baskerville)
• The Second Murderer, by Denise Mina (Harvill Secker)
• The Turnglass, by Gareth Rubin (Simon & Schuster)
• Viper’s Dream, by Jake Lamar (No Exit Press)
• Murder Your Employer: The McMaster’s Guide to Homicide,
by Rupert Holmes (Avid Reader Press)
• Everybody Knows, by Jordan Harper (Faber and Faber)
• Ozark Dogs, by Eli Cranor (Headline)
• Small Mercies, by Dennis Lehane (Abacus)
• The Land of Lost Things, by John Connolly (Hodder & Stoughton)
• The Lost Diary of Samuel Pepys, by Jack Jewers (Moonflower)
• The Square of Sevens, by Laura Shepherd-Robinson (Mantle)

Honorable Mentions:
• Moscow Exile, by John Lawton (Grove Press)
• Prom Mom, by Laura Lippman (Faber and Faber)
• Resurrection Walk, by Michael Connelly (Orion)
• Flags on the Bayou, by James Lee Burke (Orion)
• Palace of Shadows, by Ray Celestin (Mantle)
• The Mantis, by Kotaro Isaka (Harvill Secker)

FOLLOW-UP: Ayo Onatade offers more information about her favorite novels of the year in this Shotsmag Confidential post.

Still More for Your Reading Pile

Adding further to this season’s barrage of “best crime fiction of 2023” lists, English author Natasha Cooper’s own seven preferences have been posted on the Literary Review Web site:

• The Translator, by Harriet Crawley (Bitter Lemon Press)
• The End of the Game, by Holly Watt (Raven)
• The Last Dance, by Mark Billingham (Sphere)
• Deep Dark Blue, by Seraina Kobler (Pushkin Press)
• The Scarlet Papers, by Matthew Richardson (Michael Joseph)
• All of Us are Broken, by Fiona Cummins (Macmillan)
• Between the Lies, by Louise Tickle (Cinto)

(Hat tip to Fraser Massey).

* * *

Not content with having already announced its nominations of “The Best Crime Novels of 2023” and “The Best Crime TV of 2023,” CrimeReads is now out with its 10 picks of “The Best Debuts Novels of 2023” (again in the crime and mystery field).

• The Shamshine Blind, by Paz Pardo (Atria)
• Scorched Grace, by Margot Douaihy (Zando/Gillian Flynn)
• The Quiet Tenant, by Clémence Michallon (Knopf)
• Better the Blood, by Michael Bennett (Atlantic Monthly Press)
• The Good Ones, by Polly Stewart (Harper)
• The House in the Pines, by Ana Reyes (Dutton)
• Mother-Daughter Murder Night, by Nina Simon (Morrow)
• Death of a Bookseller, by Alice Slater (Scarlet)
• The Gulf, by Rachel Cochran (Harper)
• Our Best Intentions, by Vibhuti Jain (Morrow)

Revue of Reviewers: 12-10-23

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

It’s Not Easy Staying Up-to-Date

I have not been nearly so diligent as George Easter, the editor of Deadly Pleasures Mystery Magazine, in keeping up with the publication of lists that purport to identify the best crime, mystery, and thriller novels of 2023. But I’ve been posting selections from prominent sources that I think can help readers discover books they might have failed to pay attention to over the last dozen months. I concede, though, that I’ve missed a few along the way.

For instance, I drew your attention to choices made in the cozy whodunits category by Aunt Agatha’s Mysteries, the blog spun off from Ann Arbor, Michigan’s old Aunt Agatha’s Bookstore. But then I failed to mention its nominations of the year’s finest historical mysteries (which include Tasha Alexander’s A Cold Highland Wind, James R. Benn’s Proud Sorrows, and I Heard a Fly Buzz When I Died, the second Emily Dickinson mystery by Amanda Flower). In addition, I somehow overlooked that blog’s 12 “Best of 2023” endorsements, among them Hard Rain, by Samantha Jayne Allen; Glory Be, by Danielle Arceneaux; The Raging Storm, by Ann Cleeves; The Bones of the Story, by Carol Goodman; and Sarah Stewart Taylor’s A Stolen Child.

The Canadian TV and radio broadcaster CBC, meanwhile, asked a pair of crime novelists from north of the U.S. border to name their favorite reads from this past year. Angela Misri (The Detective and the Spy) and Sam Wiebe (Sunset and Jericho) picked these eight works:

• The Village Hall Vendetta, by Jonathan Whitelaw (HarperNorth)
• Code of the Hills, by Chris Offutt (Grove Press)
• The Golden Gate, by Amy Chua (Minotaur)
• Hard Rain, by Samantha Jayne Allen (Minotaur)
• That Others May Live, by Sara Driscoll (Kensington)
• Double Eagle, by Thomas King (HarperCollins)
• Gull Island, by Anna Porter (Simon & Schuster)
• Deus X, by Stephen Mack Jones (Soho Crime)

Finally, CrimeReads editor Olivia Rutigliano has posted her 13 candidates for “Best Crime TV of 2023” honors. Included are Poker Face (Season 1); HBO’s Perry Mason (Season 2), the third series of Happy Valley (a show that definitely does not justify its title), and a couple of Hulu programs I’ve relished lately: A Murder at the End of the World (Season 1) and Only Murders in the Building (Season 3).

The Book You Have to Read: “The Looters,” by John Reese

(Editor’s note: This is the 182nd installment in The Rap Sheet’s continuing series about great but forgotten books.)

By Steven Nester
The Looters (published originally by Random House in 1968) is not so much a crime novel as it is an examination of human behavior, the American banking system, economics, gambling, government, racism, organized crime, state’s rights, and a few of the Seven Deadly Sins. That’s a lot to pour into a scant 205 pages (and too much to cover here), especially when there’s a bank job to pull. Author John Reese accomplishes the task—but to the detriment of the action in this novel. His well-conceived caper didn’t live up to its potential as a pure heist yarn until it was filmed in 1973 as Charlie Varick, starring Walter Matthau, Joe Don Baker, and John Vernon as opposing heavies. That doesn’t mean, though, that readers should ignore this book. Reese had a plan and stuck to it; and his character studies of criminals, and how the local citizenry is affected by their crime, comprise an interesting—if not crucial—element of the narrative.

Charlie Varick is an ex-con, crop duster, and former stunt pilot who thinks robbing the Tres Cruces National Bank in a sleepy California town will be an easy score. Aided by his common-law wife and two henchmen, he pulls the job. The bad news is that it doesn’t go as planned; the good news is it doesn’t go as planned. A bank guard and a cop are killed and another one shot up, and Varick loses a couple of accomplices (including his missus). Oh, and about that bank? Varick had no idea its vault would be filled with six figures worth of cash, or that the small institution was being used as a repository in a Mafia money-laundering operation.

But things are about to get even knottier.

Reese turns up the suspense by making Varick hide in plain sight after the rip-off. He can’t skip town because he’s on the radar of the local constabulary and must play it cool; he can’t cut loose his surviving partner, Harman Sullivan, because Sullivan is the linchpin in their crop-duster cover story and could easily be turned by police interrogation. (Once readers get to know Varick, they see he’d never split the take with Sullivan and send him on his way; he just can’t be trusted.) Making matters still worse, bank thefts automatically get the FBI involved, and once the feds begin sniffing around it doesn’t take long for them to figure out what’s really going on. From their viewpoint, the money—where it came from and where it’s going—is more important than solving a petty hold-up. While Varick is left to cool his heels, readers learn plenty about everyone involved in this tale.

With the Mafia out almost half a million bucks from this heist, J.J. Schirmer, a heavy-hitting, self-hating Semite who runs the bank for the mob, is ordered to put a lid on the situation. An amoral war-profiteer and homophobe, among other things, Schirmer is tough enough to butt heads with the FBI, which is closing in fast. “Well,” he fumes, “give it your best shot, you smart little City College dill-pickle G-man!” This is one of his more PG-rated rants, and he has plenty to say about plenty, from the banking system (he schools “Possum Trot,” a corrupt U.S. senator from Nevada on the subject, and predicts electronic bank transactions) to the inferiority of his fellow man based merely on gender, skin color, religion, or country of origin.

Meanwhile, we find that Varick is a cold-hearted misogynist who rues the deaths of no one, not even the woman in his life, whom he remembers as a “pig.” To avoid being implicated in the mess around the robbery, he actually sets her corpse on fire, hoping to inhibit its identification. But he can’t stay under the radar forever.

An enforcer named Molly Edwards is soon hired to recover the missing dough and keep any further damage to a minimum. His best route to doing that may be locating Sybil Fort, Schirmer’s secretary and doormat of a lover. Schirmer has sent Sybil into the wind with incriminating evidence that could bring down every mafioso and crooked politician from coast to coast. A “perverted cottonmouth,” Molly is named after a family friend. He must have endured as much ignominy as the boy named Sue, because he’s now a sadist of the first order, sparing no one as he takes out his revenge on others for the wrongs done him in life. The last thing Sybil Fort wants is Molly dogging her tail. But as readers discover, she’s a woman willing to put up with only so much before striking back.

There’s a Peyton Place-like undertone of drama coursing through the small town where this story’s action takes place. In the wake of the stick-up, police chief Bob Horton is aroused by Mildred, the widow of his newly dead officer, who wastes no time in letting him know she’s available—even though her hubby hasn’t yet been buried.


(Above) The poster promoting 1973’s Charley Varick. Click here to watch the official trailer for that picture.

Of greater interest is policeman Kenneth “Stainless” Steele, who was injured less seriously during the robbery, and who spends most of this book in a hospital bed. Since he interacted briefly with the thieves after they pulled their car up to the bank, Steele is assigned a sketch artist named Joyce (who frets that she’s bound headlong for spinsterhood at the ripe old age of 26). With Steele’s help, she arrives at a workable representation of Varick. In a desperate and awkward encounter, she also deflowers the young officer, after which he remarks: “By golly, that’s one thing you can learn in a hurry.” Bolstered by newfound manliness, Steele antes-up for greater glory. He abandons his hospital bed, straps on his pistol, pins on his badge, and re-enters the world as a man, prepared to make his bet amid the high-stake chips that might be stacked against him.

Such High Noon heroism is not reflected in the big-screen adaptation of this yarn, yet the production’s cast couldn’t have been better selected. Directed by Don Siegal (remembered for such other features as Crime in the Streets, Madigan, and Dirty Harry), the movie focuses more on Varick covering his tracks and the race to find him and recover the ill-gotten gains.

Varick is played on-screen by Walter Matthau (whose performance won him the 1974 British Academy of Film and Television Arts Awards for Best Actor). While audiences know Matthau best as a shambling and grumpy comic actor, here he possesses an off-hand determination paired with a hard-guy insouciance that can stand up to the best in the business. (His flinty performances in the original The Taking of Pelham 1,2,3 and Billy Wilder’s dark The Fortune Cookie are, likewise, masterpieces.) Joe Don Baker, as the methodical and mean Molly, specialized in tough-guy roles, among them Buford Pusser in Walking Tall. As Schirmer, John Vernon (who later gained renown as Dean Wormer in National Lampoon’s Animal House) enjoyed a lengthy career playing hard-nosed torpedoes, including in such other Siegel films as Dirty Harry and Point Blank. I wonder how Charley Varick would have fared had its director stayed true to author Reese’s subplots.

I think Siegel and screenwriter Howard Rodman (who’d devised scripts for the TV series Naked City and Route 66, and later created the private-eye drama Harry O), saw the skeleton beneath the skin in Reese’s novel and made a wise decision to swap character development for action. In their hands, the tale becomes a race-to-the-finish-line caper; the book is more cat-and-mouse, with coincidences and chance encounters keeping the wandering plot moving, prompting thoughts that the ancient deus ex machina might be the oldest (and most hackneyed) literary device still being used. At several points in the book, it provides a quick paring-down of the plot and brings the conclusion into focus; but why did Reese employ it when it seems so artificial and impossible to overlook? Perhaps as a seasoned pulp-fictionist, he understood the need for literary expediency.

(Right) Author John H. Reese

John Henry Reese’s history in pulp fiction, in fact, offers a key to appreciating him as a writer. Born in Nebraska in 1910 to a former cavalryman and horse breaker, his mother being the daughter of a blacksmith, it’s no surprise he leaned towards penning westerns. His first major success, though, was a children’s novel, Big Mutt, which came out in 1953. Reese had started his prolific writing career in the 1930s, publishing extensively in men’s adventure magazines under various pseudonyms, before moving up to “the slicks.” He wrote fast in hopes of creating fast reads, and in the days before mass-media entertainment, brevity was essential; churning out novels and short stories that a voracious audience disposed of as soon as the next ones appeared also kept the paychecks coming.

In Charley Varick, Matthau’s protagonist is called “the last of the independent” bank robbers; Reese himself belonged to the last generation of pulp writers lucky enough to survive and make the switch to new media. He always had plenty of irons in the fire, his books and stories being adapted into movies and radio dramas. But how many of the works credited to him can still be recalled? At least two: The Looters and Charlie Varick. Take your pick, both are worth enjoying.

Subjective but Also Significant

BOLO Books blogger Kristopher Zgorski offers his list of 13 crime and mystery novels lucky enough to be his “Top Reads of 2023”:

• Happiness Falls, by Angie Kim (Hogarth)
• Beware the Woman, by Megan Abbott (Putnam)
• Penance, by Eliza Clark (Harper)
• Hide, by Tracy Clark (Thomas & Mercer)
• All the Sinners Bleed, by S.A. Cosby (Flatiron)
• Time’s Undoing, by Cheryl A. Head (Dutton)
• Murder Your Employer: The McMasters Guide to Homicide, by
Rupert Holmes (Avid Reader Press)
• The Taken Ones, by Jess Lourey (Thomas & Mercer)
• Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone, by Benjamin
Stevenson (HarperCollins)
• Midnight Is the Darkest Hour, by Ashley Winstead
(Sourcebooks Landmark)
• The Housekeepers, by Alex Hay (Graydon House)
• Mother-Daughter Murder Night, by Nina Simon (HarperCollins)
• Speak of the Devil, by Rose Wilding (Minotaur)

I like the mix here. Zgorski has included a few titles that have appeared on other “best of 2023” rolls, but he doesn’t try to be too slavishly in alignment with what everybody else has been reading. The ratio of female authors to male writers is a bit skewed toward the former, but not so ridiculously as some recent selections by reviewers who seem to be trying to make up for centuries of masculine dominance in the literary marketplace by choosing only new books penned by women. (All of this may give you insight into how I am judging which works to feature on my own forthcoming favorites list.) I avoided or never got around to reading a small handful of the novels Zgorski applauds here, and now I wish I’d been prescient enough to know they would have been worth my time, after all.

READ MORE: “The BOLO Books Most Wanted List (2010-2023),” by Kristopher Zgorski (BOLO Books).

McFadden’s Extraordinary Triumph

After three weeks of public polling, and two separate rounds of voting, we finally have the winners of the 2023 Goodreads Choice Awards.

To recap, there were 15 categories of books competing for this year’s prizes. In the end, the most popular choice in the Mystery & Thriller division turned out to be ... The Housemaid’s Secret, by Freida McFadden (Bookouture), which collected 86,468 votes. That’s something of a surprise, observes Deadly Pleasures Mystery Magazine editor George Easter, because McFadden’s thriller (a sequel to The Housemaid) “has appeared on only one other best list of the more than sixty best lists that I have posted over the last few weeks.”

The full roll of Mystery & Thriller nominees is here. If you’d like to see the victors in Goodreads’ other 2023 categories, go here.

Earning Nolan’s Seal of Approval

Here’s yet another “best books of the year” list, this one from Tom Nolan, The Wall Street Journal’s longtime crime-fiction critic:

• Birnam Wood, by Eleanor Catton (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
• Fixit, by Joe Ide (Mulholland)
• I Have Some Questions for You, by Rebecca Makkai (Viking)
• The Kind Worth Saving, by Peter Swanson (Morrow)
• The Last Devil to Die, by Richard Osman (Viking)
• The Late Mrs. Willoughby, by Claudia Gray (Vintage)
• The Lock-Up, by John Banville (Hanover Square Press)
• My Men, by Victoria Kielland (Astra House)
• Prom Mom, by Laura Lippman (Morrow)
• Small Mercies, by Dennis Lehane (Harper)

I’m a big fan of Nolan’s work—both his reviews and his books—and frequently find my reading tastes to be in accordance with his. There are a few novels here that I have not yet sampled (notably My Men, which I first heard of from Sarah Weinman), but which I shall now have to add onto my Christmas wishlist.

You’ve Gotta Love CFL’s Enthusiasm

Following on from CrimeReads’ picks of this year’s foremost crime, mystery, and thriller novels, we come to this morning’s big announcement of which books, TV programs, and authors have won the 2023 Crime Fiction Lover Awards. There are seven categories here, and in six of them, readers were asked to vote for their favorite nominees, with the CFL team adding an Editor’s Choice Award.

Book of the Year Winner:
The Last Remains, by Elly Griffiths (Quercus)
Book of the Year Editor’s Choice: Strange Sally Diamond, by Liz Nugent (Sandycove)

Best Debut Winner:
You’d Look Better as a Ghost, by Joanna Wallace (Viper)
Best Debut Editor’s Choice:
City Under One Roof, by Iris Yamashita (Berkley)

Best in Translation Winner:
Thirty Days of Darkness, by Jenny Lund Madsen; translated by Megan E. Turney (Orenda)
Best in Translation Editor’s Choice:
The Sins of Our Fathers, by Åsa Larsson; translated by Frank Perry (MacLehose Press)

Best Indie Novel Winner:
Scratching the Flint, by Vern Smith (Run Amok Crime)
Best Indie Novel Editor’s Choice:
The Associate, by Victoria Goldman (Three Crowns)

Best Crime Show Winner:
Only Murders in the Building, Season 3 (Hulu)
Best Crime Show Editor’s Choice:
Happy Valley, Season 3 (BBC One)

Best Crime Author Winner:
Michael Connelly
Best Crime Author Editor’s Choice:
Mick Herron

Beyond those, CFL’s British editors have designated American fictionist James Ellroy as the recipient of their very first Crime Fiction Lover Life of Crime Award. “Without James Ellroy,” they enthuse, “there wouldn’t be a site called Crime Fiction Lover. It’s as simple as that. His down and dirty scat man prose is what hooked the founders of our site on crime fiction—and most of our contributors too. Novels like The Black Dahlia and L.A. Confidential are beyond compare for the author’s use of language and his storytelling. We see the noble and the venal sides of Ellroy’s characters, and he was unafraid of showing huge chunks of Los Angeles history, and indeed American history, that many would rather forget. Here in the world of literary criticism, we often talk about books where the setting becomes a character. With James Ellroy, the prose itself is like another character in the story, running from coarse and aggressive to gentle and empathetic in a style that is unique, and unmistakably so.”

Click here to see all of the contenders in this third-annual Crime Fiction Lover Award contest. Congratulations to the victors!

CrimeReads Appraises the Field

In the way of “best books of the year” lists, today delivers two major installments. Let’s begin with CrimeReads’ choices of 2023’s top-quality crime, mystery, and thriller novels:

• Bright Young Women, by Jessica Knoll (Simon & Schuster)
• Crook Manifesto, by Colson Whitehead (Doubleday)
• Beware the Woman, by Megan Abbott (Putnam)
• Excavations, by Hannah Michell (One World)
• Pet, by Catherine Chidgey (Europa Editions)
• Age of Vice, by Deepti Kapoor (Riverhead)
• Everybody Knows, by Jordan Harper (Mulholland)
• All the Sinners Bleed, by S.A. Cosby (Flatiron)
• Penance, by Eliza Clark (Harper)
• I Have Some Questions for You, by Rebecca Makkai (Viking)
• I’m Not Done With You Yet, by Jesse Q. Sutanto (Berkley)
• The Reformatory, by Tananarive Due (Mulholland)
• The Eden Test, by Adam Sternbergh (Flatiron)
• Every Man a King, by Walter Mosley (Mulholland)
• Sing Her Down, by Ivy Pochoda (MCD)
• The Shards, by Bret Easton Ellis (Knopf)
• The Stolen Coast, by Dwyer Murphy (Viking)
• Confidence, by Rafael Frumkin (Simon & Schuster)
• Ozark Dogs, by Eli Cranor (Soho Crime)
• Hot Springs Drive, by Lindsay Hunter (Roxane Gay)

Some readers may be skeptical of these 20 selections because they conveniently succeed in including the sophomore novel from CrimeReads editor-in-chief Murphy (just as last year’s CrimeReads picks featured his debut tale). Yet we find here a respectable mix of more traditional-style genre yarns with ambitious literary efforts, and at least a couple of works endeavoring to stretch this category’s boundaries. An extensive addendum of other notable releases from the last dozen months (which includes several duplicates) gives holiday gift-buyers still more options of what to shop for if they wish to please crime-fiction fans among their friends and family members.

And Now From the Mystery Heap …

In a follow-up to his previous selection of the year’s finest thriller novels, critic Steve Donoghue today announces his top-10 years of the best mysteries of 2023:

• The Last Songbird, by Daniel Weizmann (Melville House)
• Not the Ones Dead, by Dana Stabenow (Head of Zeus)
• The Lady from Burma, by Alison Montclair (Minotaur)
• The Mistress of Bhatia House, by Sujata Massey (Soho Crime)
• Playing It Safe, by Ashley Weaver (Minotaur)
• Code of the Hills, by Chris Offutt (Grove Press)
• City Under One Roof, by Iris Yamashita (Berkley)
• Murder Under a Red Moon, by Harini Nagendra (Pegasus Crime)
• So Shall You Reap, by Donna Leon (Atlantic Monthly Press)
• The Mitford Secret, by Jessica Fellowes (Minotaur)

By the way, I like Donoghue’s short introduction to this list: “The most happily reliable escape-hatch of all the genres, the one where you get all the intrigue and betrayal and murder and mayhem of the news headlines without any of the rude intrusions of reality, is almost certainly the murder mystery. Certainly it’s been a refuge for me during the whole course of my reading life. And given some of the appalling news headlines of 2023, that refuge was much appreciated and well-stocked with good books.”

Tops in the Crime Line

I knew, when Sarah Lyall’s “Best Thrillers of 2023” list appeared in The New York Times, that her fellow critic Sarah Weinman was soon to declare her own favorite crime novels. And sure enough, her 10 choices appeared yesterday on the Times Web site:

• All The Sinners Bleed, by S.A. Cosby (Flatiron)
• Everybody Knows, by Jordan Harper (Mulholland)
• Ozark Dogs, by Eli Cranor (Soho Crime)
• Scorched Grace, by Margot Douaihy (Gillian Flynn)
• Glory Be, by Danielle Arceneaux (Pegasus Crime)
• The Quiet Tenant, by Clémence Michallon (Knopf)
• My Men, by Victoria Kielland (Astra)
• Blaze Me a Sun, by Christoffer
Carlsson (Hogarth)
• Reykjavik, by Ragnar Jonasson and Katrín Jakobsdóttir (Minotaur)
• The Last Devil to Die, by Richard Osman (Pamela Dorman)

You will find Weinman’s short comments about these books here.

I must admit, several of these releases never crested my reading pile over the last 12 months. And My Men escaped my notice altogether, which is odd, since my appetite for more information about Norwegian-American serial killer Belle Gunness had been whetted by Camilla Bruce’s disturbing 2021 novel, In the Garden of Spite.

* * *

Another example of reviewers tag-teaming? Laura Wilson submitting to The Guardian her nominees for “Best Crime and Thrillers of 2023,” which follow Alison Flood’s thematically identical selections. But while the field under study is obviously the same, Wilson’s roll of books is much longer (34 to Flood’s five), giving it the feel of a high-points survey of what crime, mystery, and thriller fiction had to offer this year in Britain—from cozies to debuts, spy novels to vintage reprints—rather than an enumeration of her most treasured reads.

• The Last Devil to Die, by Richard Osman (Viking)
• The Mysterious Case of the Alperton Angels, by Janice Hallett (Viper)
• The Christmas Appeal, by Janice Hallett (Viper)
• Murder in the Family, by Cara Hunter (HarperCollins)
• The Turnglass, by Gareth Rubin (Simon & Schuster)
• Death and the Conjuror, by Tom Mead (Head of Zeus)
• Squeaky Clean, by Callum McSorley (Pushkin Vertigo)
• Scorched Grace, by Margot Douaihy (Pushkin Vertigo)
• Thirty Days of Darkness, by Jenny Lund Madsen (Orenda)
• Case Sensitive, by A.K. Turner (Zaffre)
• The Wheel of Doll, by Jonathan Ames (Pushkin Vertigo)
• Ozark Dogs, by Eli Cranor (Headline)
• All the Sinners Bleed, by S.A. Cosby (Headline)
• Beware the Woman, by Megan Abbott (Virago)
• I Have Some Questions for You, by Rebecca Makkai (Fleet)
• Everybody Knows, by Jordan Harper (Faber)
• The Second Murderer, by Denise Mina (Harvill Secker)
• The Secret Hours, by Mick Herron (Baskerville)
• The Scarlet Papers, by Matthew Richardson (Michael Joseph)
• Moscow Exile, by John Lawton (Grove Press)
• The Translator, by Harriet Crawley (Bitter Lemon Press)
• Other Women, by Emma Flint (Picador)
• The Square of Sevens, by Laura Shepherd-Robinson (Mantle)
• The Winter List, by S.G. MacLean (Quercus)
• Viper’s Dream, by Jake Lamar (No Exit Press)
• Palace of Shadows, by Ray Celestin (Mantle)
• Death of a Lesser God, by Vaseem Khan (Hodder & Stoughton)
• Age of Vice, by Deepti Kapoor (Fleet)
• The Bandit Queens, by Parini Shroff (Atlantic)
• Strange Sally Diamond, by Liz Nugent (Penguin Sandycove)
• Black Thorn, by Sarah Hilary (Macmillan)
• Uncle Paul, by Celia Fremlin (Faber)
• The Man Who Lived Underground, by Richard Wright (Vintage)

In addition, Wilson touts Word Monkey (Doubleday), which she describes as the late Christopher Fowler’s “funny and moving memoir of a life spent writing popular fiction.”

* * *

The two end-of-year lists I always most look forward to studying are those from Sarah Weinman and from Oline H. Cogdill, the latter of whom is a longtime reviewer for South Florida’s Sun Sentinel newspaper. Not only is Cogdill a delightful woman in person, but she is a very discriminating critic. If she recommends a book, I’m quite certain to relish it, too. Her 2023 catalogue of crime, mystery, and thriller “bests” runs to 18 titles:

• Sing Her Down, by Ivy Pochoda (MCD)
• Time’s Undoing, by Cheryl A.
Head (Dutton)
• Everybody Knows, by Jordan
Harper (Mulholland)
• Small Mercies, by Dennis Lehane (Harper)
• All the Sinners Bleed, by S.A. Cosby (Flatiron)
• Resurrection Walk, by Michael Connelly (Little, Brown)
• The River We Remember, by William Kent Krueger (Atria)
• An Honest Man, by Michael Koryta (Mulholland)
• Dark Ride, by Lou Berney (Morrow)
• Prom Mom, by Laura Lippman (Morrow)
• To Catch a Storm, by Mindy Mejia (Atlantic Monthly Press)
• The Last Word, by Taylor Adams (Morrow)
• Distant Sons, by Tim Johnston (Algonquin)
• Blood Sisters, by Vanessa Lillie (Berkley)
• Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone, by Benjamin
Stevenson (HarperCollins)
• Beware the Woman, by Megan Abbott (Putnam)
• The Only One Left, by Riley Sager (Dutton)
• The Golden Gate, by Amy Chua (Minotaur)

Cogdill also identifies her six favorite 2023 debuts in this genre:

• The Curse of Penryth Hall, by Jess Armstrong (Minotaur)
• The Hunter, by Jennifer Herrera (Putnam)
• Fadeaway Joe, by Hugh Lessig (Crooked Lane)
• A Flaw in the Design, by Nathan Oates (Random House)
• Mother-Daughter Murder Night, by Nina Simon (HarperCollins)
• City Under One Roof, by Iris Yamashita (Berkley)

On top of all those, she offers compliments to Murder on the Orient Express: The Graphic Novel, by Agatha Christie and Bob Al-Greene (Morrow Paperbacks); the puzzle books Murdle, Volumes 1 and 2, by G.T. Karber (St. Martin’s Griffin); and a trio of short-story collections—The Best American Mystery and Suspense, edited by Lisa Unger (Mariner), The Refusal Camp, by James R. Benn (Soho Crime), and Happiness Is a Warm Gun, edited by Josh Pachter (Down & Out).

* * *

Apparently there can never—no, never—be too many opinions on books that must be read. Library Journal contributors Liz French and Lesa Holstine are out with their “Best Crime Fiction of 2023” picks:

• The Golden Gate, by Amy Chua (Minotaur)
• Fall, by Tracy Clark (Thomas & Mercer)
• All the Sinners Bleed, by S.A. Cosby (Flatiron)
• The Secret Hours, by Mick Herron (Soho Crime)
• Age of Vice, by Deepit Kapoor (HarperCollins)
• Small Mercies, by Dennis Lehane (Harper)
• A Disappearance in Fiji, by Nilima Rao (Soho Crime)
• Guilt Strikes at Granger’s Store, by Terry Shames (Severn House)
• Mother-Daughter Murder Night, by Nina Simon (HarperCollins)
• City Under One Roof, by Iris Yamashita (Berkley)

* * *

Yesterday, Steve Donoghue, a veteran critic for The Boston Globe and the Christian Science Monitor, published his “Best Books of 2023: Thrillers!” selections in Open Letters Review:

• Sea Castle, by Andrew Mayne (Thomas & Mercer)
• Forgotten War, by Don Bentley (Berkley)
• Sleepless City, by Reed Farrell Coleman (Blackstone)
• You Will Never Be Found, by Tove Alsterdal (Harper)
• All the Dangerous Things, by Stacy Willingham (Minotaur)
• Red River Seven, by A.J. Ryan (Orbit)
• Going Zero, by Anthony McCarten (Harper)
• Burner, by Mark Greaney (Berkley)
• Code 6, by James Grippando (Harper)
• Exiles, by Jane Harper (Flatiron)

* * *

And although it has only been a couple of weeks ago since the Web site She Reads posted its numerous candidates for “Best Books of 2023,” in 19 categories, the winners of a public have already been announced.

The choice for Best Mystery, Thriller & Suspense novel is … All the Sinners Bleed, by S.A. Cosby (Flatiron).

Competing as well for that honor this year were Blood Sisters, by Vanessa Lillie (Berkley); Bright Young Women, by Jessica Knoll (S&S/Marysue Rucci); Don’t Let Her Stay, by Nicola Sanders (Independently published); I Have Some Questions for You, by Rebecca Makkai (Viking); Just Another Missing Person, by Gillian McAllister (Morrow); None of This Is True, by Lisa Jewell (Atria); Stone Cold Fox, by achel Koller Croft (Berkley); The Only One Left, by Riley Sager (Dutton); The Traitor, by Ava Glass (Bantam); Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice for Murderers, by Jesse Q. Sutanto (Berkley); and What Never Happened, by Rachel Howzell Hall (Thomas & Mercer).

Look for the victors in all 19 categories here.

(Hat tip to Deadly Pleasures Mystery Magazine.)

Weisel, Cudmore Share Wolfe Glory

Two morsels of news from Jiro Kimura’s The Gumshoe Site:

On December 2 at the Black Orchid Banquet held in New York City, the Wolfe Pack, the official Nero Wolfe literary society, announced that The Day He Left, by Frederick Weisel (Poisoned Pen Press, 2022), won the 2023 Nero Award. The winning novel was the second in the Santa Rosa Violent Crime Investigations Team Mystery.

On the same night, “Alibi in Ice,” by Libby Cudmore​, received the 2023 Black Orchid Novella Award. Banquet. The winning novella will be published in the July 2024 issue of Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine.

Congratulations to both of this year’s recipients!

PaperBack: “Some Die Hard”

Part of a series honoring the late author and blogger Bill Crider.



Some Die Hard, by “Nick Quarry,” aka Marvin H. Albert (Gold Medal, 1961). In October, I wrote about The Hoods Came Calling, the last of six entries in Albert’s series starring Jake Barrow, “a tough, no-nonsense private eye from New York City.” Some Die Hard marked Barrow’s entry into the genre.

Cover illustration by Raymond Johnson.

Flood’s Fabulous Five

Critic for The Guardian Alison Flood is out today with her own list of the “Best Crime Novels and Thrillers of 2023.”

• The Mysterious Case of the Alperton Angels, by Janice Hallett (Viper)
• Black River, by Nilanjana Roy (Pushkin Vertigo)
• Holly, by Stephen King (Hodder & Stoughton)
• Looking Glass Sound, by Catriona Ward (Viper)
• The Year of the Locust, by Terry Hayes (Bantam)

Drat! Another collection of books that I never got around to reading during the last year. But two of these I have in my to-be-read pile, and with any luck I’ll get around soon to cracking open their spines.

“Suspense, Dread and Wonder”

New York Times writer at large Sarah Lyall is out today with her nominations of “The Best Thrillers of 2023.” Unlike some critics this year, she’s kept her list short, mentioning only six titles.

• Whalefall, by Daniel Kraus (MTV)
• The Plinko Bounce, by Martin Clark (Rare Bird)
• Going Zero, by Anthony McCarten (Harper)
• The Soulmate, by Sally Hepworth (St. Martin’s Press)
• How Can I Help You, by Laura Sims (Putnam)
• The Secret Hours, by Mick Herron (Soho Crime)

I’m hoping the appearance of this list portends the imminent publication of her fellow Times critic Sarah Weinman’s choices for best crime and mystery novels of 2023.

How Much Prompting Do You Need?

Consider this a genial nudge to vote in this year’s Crime Fiction Lover Awards competition. The nominees, in four categories, were announced earlier this month. The deadline for readers to take a hand in choosing the winners is this coming Monday, December 4.

If you haven’t yet made your preferences known, click here to do so.

* * *

Set to end even sooner is polling for She Reads’ Best of 2023 Awards. If you wish to take part, you must act by tomorrow, December 3.

There are 16 divisions in which you may voice your opinion, most notably Mystery and Thriller, which contains a dozen nominees. Go here to vote. Winners are to be announced next Tuesday, December 5.