Earning Ayo’s OK

Why should everyone else have all the fun? Our friend Ayo Onatade, an editor at the UK-based e-zine Shots and the principal author of its Shotsmag Confidential blog, has finally weighed in with her own list of favorite crime-fiction reads from 2024:

• The Peacock and the Sparrow, by I.S. Berry (No Exit Press)
• The Waiting, by Michael Connelly (Orion)
• Karla’s Choice, by Nick Harkaway (Penguin)
• Hotel Lucky Seven, by Kotaro Isaka (Vintage)
• Imposter Syndrome, by Joseph Knox (Transworld)
• Guide Me Home, by Attica Locke (Profile)
• Moscow X, by David McCloskey (Swift Press)
• Hunted, by Abir Mukherjee (Vintage)
• White City, by Dominic Nolan (Headline)
• Holmes and Moriarty, by Gareth Rubin (Simon and Schuster)
• The Hitchcock Hotel, by Stephanie Wrobel (Penguin)
• Butter, by Asako Yuzuki (HarperCollins)

Honorable Mentions:
• The Instruments of Darkness, by John Connolly
(Hodder and Stoughton)
• A Beginners Guide to Breaking and Entering, by Andrew Hunter Murray (Cornerstone)
• Holmes, Margaret and Poe, by James Patterson and
Brian Sitts (Century)
• Midnight and Blue, by Ian Rankin (Orion)

What’s frustrating about selections such as this one, from people whose taste I trust, is they inevitably leave me regretful that I never got around to reading some of the works mentioned. It seems I’ll still be catching up with books from this year as we dive into 2025.

* * *

Also out with “bests” rundowns are the London Times and Sunday Times. Their list of the top 10 crime novels published this year includes Between Two Worlds, by Olivier Norek (MacLehose Press); One Perfect Couple, by Ruth Ware (Simon & Schuster); Cover the Bones, by Chris Hammer (Wildfire); and The Final Act of Juliette Willoughby, by Ellery Lloyd (Macmillan). Meanwhile, their 10 best thrillers picks encompass I.S. Berry’s The Peacock and the Sparrow (No Exit Press), Don Winslow’s City in Ruins (Hemlock Press), Abigail Dean’s Day One (Hemlock Press), Deon Meyer’s Leo (Hodder and Stoughton), and more.