Half Done, Fully Satisfied

With 2020 already half over as of next Tuesday, June 30, you can expect to see blogs, Web sites, and individual reviewers declaring which works of crime and thriller fiction (all published in the United States) they believe are “the best of the year … so far.”

CrimeReads made its 10 picks yesterday, including Ivy Pochoda’s These Women (Ecco), Don Winslow’s Broken (Morrow), Elizabeth Little’s Pretty as a Picture (Viking), Kwei Quartey’s The Missing American (Soho Crime), and Jennifer Hillier’s Little Secrets (Minotaur).

Amazon, meanwhile, turns thumbs-up on 20 books from this genre—most of them written by women—that have been released since January 1. Among those are Kimberly McCreight’s A Good Marriage (Harper), Michael Connelly’s Fair Warning (Little, Brown), Mindy Mejia’s Strike Me Down (Atria/Emily Bestler), Hye-young Pyun’s The Law of Lines (Arcade), and Sara Sliger’s Take Me Apart (MCD).

My own reading tastes differ somewhat from those of the folks responsible for the aforementioned lists. There are also a few works they applaud (notably These Women and Fair Warning) that I have still not cracked open. All that now said, let me offer my own list of favorite crime novels from the first six months of 2020:

• The Decent Inn of Death, by Rennie Airth (Penguin)
• Three Hours in Paris, by Cara Black (Soho Crime)
• Black Sun Rising, by Matthew Carr (Pegasus)
• Do No Harm, by Max Allan Collins (Forge)
• The Good Killer, by Harry Dolan (Mysterious Press)
• Hammer to Fall, by John Lawton (Atlantic Monthly Press)
• Death in the East, by Abir Mukherjee (Pegasus)
• Dead Land, by Sara Paretsky (Morrow)
• Mr. Nobody, by Catherine Steadman (Ballantine)
• The Coldest Warrior, by Paul Vidich (Pegasus)

These preferences are likely to change between now and year’s end, when I post my Favorite Crime Fiction of 2020 selections. For the present, however, I’m feeling good about them all.

So, which 2020 releases in this genre have you read since January that you think the rest of us would also relish? Suggestions are welcome in the Comments section at the end of this post.

Out Ahead of the Crowd

Booklist’s Bill Ott holds the distinction of being the first notable reviewer every year to publish a list of his 10 favorite crime, mystery, and thriller novels. That’s because while other critics select only from books published during the current calendar year, Ott’s picks are culled from works released during the last eight months of the previous annum as well as the initial four months of the new year. The selections he posted on Friday, for instance, all reached bookstores between May 1, 2019, and April 15, 2020.

Those 10 tales, Ott explains, “explore cybercrime, throw ordinary people into situations of unimaginable horror, confront racial injustice past and present, and, yes, seek to understand a deadly virus.” Among his choices are Kate Atkinson’s Big Sky (Little, Brown), Lawrence Wright’s The End of October (Knopf), Steph Cha’s Your House Will Pay (Ecco), and Chris Pavone’s The Paris Diversion (Crown). You will find his full top-10 list here.

In addition, Ott offers up a top-10 list of “crime fiction debuts”—first novels of particular distinction. That list includes Owen Matthews’ Black Sun (Doubleday), Heather Chavez’s No Bad Deed (Morrow), Andrew Hunter Murray’s The Last Day (Dutton), and The Whisper Man (Macmillan/Celadon), by “Alex North” (aka Steve Mosby).

(Hat tip to Randal S. Brandt.)