How Many Can You Read Before 2019?

As 2018 spins to a close, the proliferation of “best crime books of the year” lists is increasingly dramatically. For Open Letters Review, Steve Donoghue presents 10 books—all published over the last dozen months—that he believes are worth special attention. Among those are Anne Perry’s Dark Tide Rising (her latest William Monk mystery) to Philip Kerr’s Greeks Bearing Gifts (his penultimate Bernie Gunther thriller), and Wendy Webb’s Daughters of the Lake.

Meanwhile, National Public Radio offers up 24 “great reads” from the Mysteries and Thriller shelves, including Sara Gran’s The Infinite Blacktop, Lawrence Osbourne’s Only to Sleep (his Philip Marlowe continuation novel), Tana French’s The Witch Elm, and Anthony Horowitz’s The World Is Murder. In its rundown of the “Best Thrillers of 2018,” The Real Book Spy mentions Jack Carr’s The Terminal List, J.T. Ellison’s Tear Me Apart, Lou Berney’s November Road, and Daniel Silva’s The Other Woman (“Of all the great, must-read new thrillers that hit bookstores in 2018, nobody delivered more than Daniel Silva.”). Book Marks highlights the best-reviewed mystery, crime, and thriller novels of the year. And The Christian Science Monitor weighs in with a more generalized selection of “Best Fiction Reads of 2018” that features two works drawn from this genre’s riches: Kate Atkinson’s Transgression and Kerr’s Greeks Bearing Gifts.

2018 marks the beginning of a new practice by several blogs specializing in vintage crime fiction, to choose reprints of the year. The process will evolve in four stages, as explained here. The winner “has to be a reprint published this year and not a title released for the first time,” explains Kate Jackson in Cross-Examining Crime. “We’ve not been draconian about setting a time period for the original publication dates, but in the main our choices unsurprisingly focus more on pre-1960s texts.” Saturday brought the start of this competition, and you will find links to all of the participating blogs here. An ultimate victor will be announced on December 29.

Finally, a quite different kind of “best of the year” list: Emily Stein of CrimeReads has selected what she says are “The Best New Crime Podcasts of 2018.”