Wednesday, December 06, 2023

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.”

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