At the close of 2024, as I looked back over the lengthy list of books I’d enjoyed that year, I realized two things: (1) I had read far fewer historical non-fiction releases than is my preference; and (2) I had read a disproportionate number of books by men, and considerably fewer by women authors. That latter fact may be attributed in part to my bias toward harder-edged tales, and my lazy presumption that men will satisfy me better in said arena. But it also pointed out that I was being less deliberate about the books I picked up, choosing cavalierly rather than consciously trying to sample a breadth of what was made available in this genre.
Over the decades I have been reading and reviewing crime and mystery fiction, there’s been a significant upsurge in the number of women contributing to the field, and in 2024, I had failed to tailor my choices accordingly.This isn’t about my trying to be “equitable” or “inclusive”—which have become charged terms during our ridiculous period of machismo’s revival, when the U.S. secretary of defense claims that women in the military have made our armed forces weaker, and Donald Trump openly spews abuse at women (especially female reporters). For me, seeking to read more books by women is a matter of self-education: I want to see what new things are possible within crime fiction, and many of the parameters are best being tested and expanded by women writers.
So in 2025, I made an effort to sift more books by distaff scribblers into my reading diet. This proved to be anything but a hardship; I’ve actually found myself more satisfied with the choices I made over these last 12 months than I was in 2024. In the end, about 50 percent of the books I bought and enjoyed this year were by women. And when it came time to select my favorite crime, mystery, and thriller works … well, what do you know? Eight of my dozen picks are by women! This is the first time since I began publishing “favorites” lists a decade and a half ago, that the balance has favored female wordsmiths.
Without further ado, here are my crime-fiction favorites of this last year, listed simply in the order I read them:
• The Naming of the Birds, by Paraic O’Donnell (Tin House)
• Victorian Psycho, by Virginia Feito (Liveright)
• Murder at Gulls Nest, by Jess Kidd (Atria)
• Marble Hall Murders, by Anthony Horowitz (Harper)
• Hotel Ukraine, by Martin Cruz Smith (Simon & Schuster)
• The Art of a Lie, by Laura Shepherd-Robinson (Atria)
• The Girl in the Green Dress, by Mariah Fredericks (Minotaur)
• The Rush, by Beth Lewis (Pegasus)
• The Dentist, by Tim Sullivan (Atlantic Crime)
• Guilty by Definition, by Susie Dent (Sourcebooks Landmark)
• Smoke in Berlin, by Oriana Ramunno (Hemlock Press UK)
The particularly perspicacious among you will notice right off the bat that most of these novels are of the historical fiction variety. That’s become my penchant; I like to learn about periods foreign to my experience at the same time as I delight in a wickedly knotty mystery or an intensely rendered novel of dastardly doings. O’Donnell’s The Naming of the Birds (his sequel to The House on Vesper Sands) transports us to 1894 London, where the slayings of prominent men may be linked to a dreadful long-ago fire at a Grimm-esque orphanage.
The alternately macabre and hilarious Victorian Psycho introduces a 19th-century English governess who endures indignities visited upon her by society and priggish employers—until she snaps in a final sanguinary spree. Murder at Gulls Nest, easily the coziest of this lot, finds a sassy quondam nun venturing to the English coast in 1954, hoping to solve the disappearance of a novice from her old order. In The Art of a Lie, we get a confectioner bringing the Italian delicacy “iced cream” to mid-18th-century Londoners, while engaging in a battle of wits with a gentleman con artist. The Girl in the Green Dress imagines a headline-hungry New York City reporter teaming with Zelda Fitzgerald, the madcap mate of author F. Scott Fitzgerald, to solve the real-life murder of a bridge-playing playboy. In The Rush, we’re offered a trio of audacious Victorian women chasing down a killer amid Canada’s wild Klondike Gold Rush. And Ramunno’s Smoke in Berlin thrusts us into the bombed-out German capital in 1944, where police detective Hugo Fischer investigates the deaths of an ideologically divided couple and a Reich journalist; it’s the affecting follow-up to Ashes in the Snow.The remaining three modern stories all benefit from quirky, multidimensional characters and more than a fistful of plotting surprises. Book editor-cum-sleuth Susan Ryeland (Magpie Murders, Moonflower Murders) returns in Marble Hall Murders to tease out the secrets behind the demise, two decades ago, of a famous children’s author. Smith’s 11th and last outing for Arkady Renko, in Hotel Ukraine, pits that dogged Moscow police inspector against national security and paramilitary forces (and his creeping Parkinson’s disease) as he digs for connections between a deputy defense minister’s murder and Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Autistic English police detective George Gross makes his American publishing debut in The Dentist, wherein he strives to link the ostensibly random strangling of a homeless man with a perhaps intentionally bungled 15-year-old homicide case. Finally, in Guilty by Definition, we meet lexicographer Martha Thornhill, who—with help from her eccentric staff of dictionary writers—struggles to make sense of anonymously submitted clues suggesting there’s more to know about why Martha’s sister went missing 10 years ago than has yet been revealed. Bonus: Author Dent peppers her pages with arcane words with which to impress your friends. “Conjobble,” anyone? Or “procaffeinate”?
Finally, let me recommend an exceptional historical true-crime release from earlier this year—also composed by a woman: Story of a Murder: The Wives, the Mistress, and Dr. Crippen (Dutton). In it, Hallie Rubenhold (who previously penned The Five) re-examines the bizarre case of Hawley Harvey Crippen, a mild-mannered homeopathic physician who, in 1910, poisoned his domineering spouse and then buried her partial remains beneath the brickwork floor of their London abode, before fleeing by ship to Canada with his young employee and lover. No matter how many times these incidents are revisited, whether in John Boyne’s Crippen (2004), Erik Larson’s Thunderstruck (2006), Martin Edwards’ Dancing for the Hangman (2008), or Peter Lovesey’s The False Inspector Dew (1982, which uses the Crippen affair as the starting point for an original mystery), I never tire of reading about their peculiarities and ill-starred protagonist.
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