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).
1 comment:
I found Small Town Sins captivating from start to finish. The characters have authentic weight to them and the narrative is sometimes both heart-breaking and life-affirming on the same page.
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