Subjective but Also Significant

BOLO Books blogger Kristopher Zgorski offers his list of 13 crime and mystery novels lucky enough to be his “Top Reads of 2023”:

• Happiness Falls, by Angie Kim (Hogarth)
• Beware the Woman, by Megan Abbott (Putnam)
• Penance, by Eliza Clark (Harper)
• Hide, by Tracy Clark (Thomas & Mercer)
• All the Sinners Bleed, by S.A. Cosby (Flatiron)
• Time’s Undoing, by Cheryl A. Head (Dutton)
• Murder Your Employer: The McMasters Guide to Homicide, by
Rupert Holmes (Avid Reader Press)
• The Taken Ones, by Jess Lourey (Thomas & Mercer)
• Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone, by Benjamin
Stevenson (HarperCollins)
• Midnight Is the Darkest Hour, by Ashley Winstead
(Sourcebooks Landmark)
• The Housekeepers, by Alex Hay (Graydon House)
• Mother-Daughter Murder Night, by Nina Simon (HarperCollins)
• Speak of the Devil, by Rose Wilding (Minotaur)

I like the mix here. Zgorski has included a few titles that have appeared on other “best of 2023” rolls, but he doesn’t try to be too slavishly in alignment with what everybody else has been reading. The ratio of female authors to male writers is a bit skewed toward the former, but not so ridiculously as some recent selections by reviewers who seem to be trying to make up for centuries of masculine dominance in the literary marketplace by choosing only new books penned by women. (All of this may give you insight into how I am judging which works to feature on my own forthcoming favorites list.) I avoided or never got around to reading a small handful of the novels Zgorski applauds here, and now I wish I’d been prescient enough to know they would have been worth my time, after all.

READ MORE: “The BOLO Books Most Wanted List (2010-2023),” by Kristopher Zgorski (BOLO Books).