It’s Simply a Matter of Taste

Even as The Rap Sheet rolls out its “favorite crime fiction of 2020” lists, other publications and columnists are doing the same.

For instance, while Mike Ripley’s latest “Getting Away with Murder” column for Shots covers various other subjects (not least significantly Colin Larkin’s “wondrous” new book, Cover Me: The Vintage Art of Pan Books, 1950-1965—available to U.S. readers here), it also features his picks of 10 crime novels he relished over the last 12 months:

• Hammer to Fall, by John Lawton (Grove Atlantic)
• A Song for the Dark Times, by Ian Rankin (Orion)
• Blacktop Wasteland, by S.A. Cosby (Headline)
• Painted in Blood, by Ilaria Tuti (Weidenfeld)
• The Good Killer, by Harry Dolan (Head of Zeus)
• The Split, by Sharon Bolton (Trapeze)
• Brixton Hill, by Lottie Moggach (Corsair)
• The Night of the Shooting Stars, by Ben Pastor (Bitter Lemon Press)
• Angel’s Inferno, by William Hjortsberg (No Exit Press)
• Kind Hearts and Coronets, by Roy Horniman (Dean Street Press)—a novel originally published in 1907 as Israel Rank, which Ripley dubs his “revival of the year” choise.

Meanwhile, my friend Adam Woog, who writes regularly about crime fiction for The Seattle Times, has his own 10 recommendations:

• Three Hours in Paris, by Cara Black (Soho)
• A Private Cathedral, by James Lee Burke (Simon & Schuster)
• He Started It, by Samantha Downing (Berkley)
• The Last Passenger, by Charles Finch (Minotaur)
• Last Dance, by Jeffrey Fleishman (Blackstone)
• Just Watch Me, by Jeff Lindsay (Dutton)
• Pretty as a Picture, by Elizabeth Little (Viking)
• The Finisher, by Peter Lovesey (Soho)
• Long Bright River, by Liz Moore (Riverhead)
• The Nightworkers, by Brian Selfon (MCD)

Oline H. Cogdill, a fixture at the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, breaks her choices down into three categories: top mysteries, best debuts, and best short-story and essay collections. Numbering among her novel selections: Blacktop Wasteland, by S.A. Cosby (Flatiron U.S.); And Now She’s Gone, by Rachel Howzell Hall (Forge); These Women, by Ivy Pochoda (Ecco); The Eighth Detective, by Alex Pavesi (Henry Holt); and Darling Rose Gold, by Stephanie Wrobel (Berkley).

Brand-new to me this year is the quite active blog Booklist Queen, written by a woman who signs herself only as “Rachael.” She recently proclaimed 17 novels to be the “best thriller books of 2020,” including Dear Child, by Romy Hausmann (Flatiron); Invisible Girl, by Lisa Jewell (Atria); Home Before Dark, by Riley Sager (Dutton); and The Night Swim, by Megan Goldin (St. Martin’s Press).

Finally, author and friend of The Rap Sheet Patricia Abbott has posted in her blog the titles of 12 books she says “gave me succor, escape, pleasure” in 2020. Not all of them come from the crime-fiction shelves, but two older ones do: Strangers on a Train, by Patricia Highsmith (1950), and Before the Poison, by Peter Robinson (2011).