Proudly Flaunting Their Biases

I’m always eager to see which crime, mystery, and thriller novels Tom Nolan will identify as his favorites of any given year. A critic for The Wall Street Journal ever since 1990, and a former contributor to January Magazine (which is how I met him), Nolan often shares my taste in this genre’s offerings. His top picks for 2022 appeared online earlier today, but as I’m not a Journal subscriber, I had to request that he send me the list (see below) via e-mail.

• Desert Star, by Michael Connelly (Little, Brown)
• The Christie Affair, by Nina de Gramont (St. Martin’s Press)
• The Enigma of Room 622, by Joël Dicker (HarperVia)
• The Murder of Mr. Wickham, by Claudia Gray (Vintage)
• The Twist of a Knife, by Anthony Horowitz (Harper)
• The Goodbye Coast, by Joe Ide (Mulholland)
• Dark Music, by David Lagercrantz (Knopf)
• The Bullet That Missed, by Richard Osman (Pamela Dorman/Viking)
• The Diamond Eye, by Kate Quinn (Morrow)
• The It Girl, by Ruth Ware (Scout Press)

Note that three of the fictionists mentioned here—Connelly, Osman, and Ide—were also featured on Nolan’s 2021 best-of-the-year roll. Which is fine, really; we all have our reliable, go-to wordsmiths. But it does cause me to reassess my own reading history. Although, in general, I seek to diversify my consumption of books every twelvemonth by sampling new-to-me authors, a record of my preferences over the last decade does find a few names recurring—Philip Kerr, Kelli Stanley, Walter Mosley, Megan Abbott, Peter May, and Laura Lippman among them. Maybe I haven’t been as good as I thought at widening my experience with modern writers.

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Meanwhile, Steve Donoghue, whose book reviews appear frequently in The Christian Science Monitor and The Washington Post, has released a roster of his own crime- and mystery-fiction recommendations for 2022. He lists them in order of his liking:

1. The Bangalore Detectives Club, by Harini Nagendra (Pegasus)
2. The Burglar Who Met Fredric Brown, by Lawrence Block
(LB Productions)
3. The Mitford Vanishing, by Jessica Fellowes (Minotaur)
4. Give Unto Others, by Donna Leon (Atlantic Monthly Press)
5. A Sunlit Weapon, by Jacqueline Winspear (Harper)
6. When Blood Lies, by C.S. Harris (Berkley)
7. Hatchet Island, by Paul Doiron (Minotaur)
8. Death and the Conjuror, by Tom Mead (Mysterious Press)
9. To Kill a Troubadour, by Martin Walker (Knopf)
10. Showstopper, by Peter Lovesey (Soho Crime)

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Finally, Australian Jeff Popple, who this year celebrated his 40th anniversary (!) as a paid crime fiction and thriller reviewer, and writes regularly for both Canberra Weekly and Deadly Pleasures Mystery Magazine, weighs in with his personal selections of favorite crime and thriller novels published in 2022.

Best Crime Novels:
• Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone, by Benjamin
Stevenson (Penguin)
• The Dark Flood, by Deon Meyer (Hodder & Stoughton)
• Desert Star, by Michael Connelly (Allen & Unwin)
• A Heart Full of Headstones, by Ian Rankin (Orion)
• Those Who Perish, by Emma Viskic (Echo)
• Lying Beside You, by Michael Robotham (Hachette)
• The Furies, by John Connolly (Hodder & Stoughton)
• The Accomplice, by Steve Cavanagh (Orion)
• Day’s End, by Garry Disher (Text)

Best Thriller Novels:
• Bad Actors, by Mick Herron (John Murray)
• Yesterday’s Spy, by Tom Bradby (Bantam)
• The Match Maker, by Paul Vidich (Pegasus)
• Winter Work, by Dan Fesperman (Head of Zeus)
• One Step Too Far, by Lisa Gardner (Century)
• Cold Fear, by Brandon Webb and John David Mann (Bantam)

Elsewhere in his blog, Popple offers his choices of the year’s “Best Debut Crime Novels and Thrillers,” plus “Seven Good Books You May Have Missed in 2022.”