Favorite Crime Fiction of 2024, Part IV: Ali Karim

Ali Karim is The Rap Sheet’s longtime British correspondent, a contributing editor of January Magazine, and assistant editor of the e-zine Shots. In addition, he writes for Deadly Pleasures Mystery Magazine and Mystery Readers International. Later this year, Ali will appear as the Fan Guest of Honor at Bouchercon in New Orleans.

• You Like It Darker, by Stephen King (Scribner):

It’s only right that the title of King’s latest short-story collection should be a tip of the hat to Leonard Cohen’s last studio album. The abbreviated yarns filling this book, like Cohen’s songs, explore age and aging. Longtime King readers—especially those who are cognizant of their approaching mortality—will find these stories not just unsettling, but elegiac as well.

However, the contents here vary greatly in quality, with the shorter stories being far less engaging than the longer ones. “The Fifth Step” is rather unpleasant, and “Red Screen” is little more than a shrug, while “Two Talented Bastids” and “On Slide Inn Road” are eventful tales that, despite their meandering pace, are delightfully throw-away ditties.

You Like It Darker’s four novellas are what make this book unmissable. “Danny Coughlin’s Bad Dream” is truly extraordinary. Ostensibly a brief crime novel, it begins with the eponymous character reporting the presence of a dead body from the fragments of a dream, only to soon become a frantic thriller. “Rattlesnakes” is a coda to Cujo (1981) and Duma Key (2008), featuring the themes of loss and reflection in the context of how past griefs can become the horrors of today.

“The Dreamers” is a superbly realized cosmic horror piece (with debts owed to H.P. Lovecraft) that weaves memories of the Vietnam War into a vision of what may lie beneath the veneer of our reality. And the final offering, “The Answer Man,” is a dark morality tale, told in a beguiling style that starts with whimsy, but soon turns nasty. It’s an EC Comics-like horror narrative that is both keen and thought-provoking.

Even half a century after he published his first novel, King continues to surprise. And he shows here that his enthusiasm for short fiction writing is just as vibrant as it has ever been.

• A Talent for Murder, by Peter Swanson (Morrow):

Peter Swanson has a genuine talent for taking a crime-fiction cliché and turning it on its head, making you question the darkness (or horror) of human nature as well as its entwined beauty.

In A Talent for Murder, he introduces us to Martha Ratcliff, a middle-aged, mild-mannered, wallflower librarian in Maine who’s newly wed to an equally unimpressive but ostensibly sweet traveling salesman, Alan Peralta. How well, though, does she really know or understand her husband? After watching him (covertly) from her bedroom window as he returns from one of his business trips to a teaching conference—an event during which a young female art instructor reportedly committed suicide by jumping, naked, from her sixth-floor hotel balcony—Martha begins to wonder if he’s up to more at those conventions than peddling merch to stressed-out schoolteachers. As this suspicion turns into an existential crisis for the librarian, she starts digging into whether similar tragedies have occurred elsewhere during Alan’s travels.

Soon overcome by her disturbing discoveries, Martha contacts an old graduate school friend, the irascible Lily Kitner, who had helped Martha escape a previous relationship. Now bored and living at home with her elderly parents, Lily is ready to provide assistance to Martha once more. She agrees to shadow Alan at his next conference, in Saratoga Springs, New York, and try to bait him into a flirtation, maybe learn whether he has any tendency toward violence. And she further enlists the support of private investigator Henry Kimball. (Those two were also featured in Swanson’s The Kind Worth Killing and The Kind Worth Saving).

What Lily hadn’t expected to find was that she’s not the only one dogging Alan’s footsteps. So is Martha’s abusive former boyfriend from college. As this dark adventure proceeds, and mysteries unravel, Kitner and Kimball both reveal the truth beneath the veneer of normal lives and turn up a trail of dead bodies.

Told in a beguiling style, and alternating between third-person and first-person points of view, Swanson delivers a sophisticated psychological thriller. One that might make you think twice before diving into other stories, like those of John Cheever, that take place in purportedly peaceful suburban environments.

• Leo, by Deon Meyer (Hodder & Stoughton UK):

Following on from Meyer’s last novel, The Dark Flood (2021), Leo finds South African detectives Benny Griessel and Vaughn Cupido still exiled—as a result of past misbehavior—to the historic tourist town of Stellenbosch, located about 31 miles east of their customary stomping grounds in Cape Town. There, recovering alcoholic Benny is preparing for his upcoming nuptials, while Cupido finds himself restless dealing with unremarkable police work.

Their attention is soon drawn away, though, to the demise of a female student cyclist, whose body is found on a desolate mountain road. Not long afterward, the principal suspect in that incident, one Basie Small, turns up murdered amid all the trappings of a professional assassination. Griessel and Cupido are keen to investigate further, but their superiors are determined to dismiss these crimes as simple robberies gone terribly wrong. Not surprisingly, the two detectives keep working the case, a choice that may lead them into dangerous intrigues and conspiracies that lie at the heart of the African continent—or do they?

If you think that’s all this book has to attract the reader, you’re wrong. Meyer, an expert at narrative gear shifts, parallels the cyclist’s story with one involving professional thieves, including the beautiful Christina Jaeger (from The Trackers), who are intent on executing a sequence of multimillion-dollar heists. In the mix, too, is a tense subplot involving an ex-member of the South African Special Forces Brigade, a man on a mission of revenge. That combination keeps the novel’s storytelling pace sprightly, and leaves one wondering who among these players might survive all the action.

Written in a terse journalistic style, and benefiting from blistering set-pieces as well as Meyer’s on-target dialogue, Leo is a powerful, dramatic tale that it would be a crime to miss. It was published in Great Britain last fall, but will be released in the States in February.

• The Rumor Game, by Thomas Mullen (Minotaur):

This timely thriller, set in 1943, is relayed from two perspectives. First, that of Anne Lemire, an earnest young reporter who writes a regular column, “The Rumor Game,” for the fictional Boston Star newspaper. Second is Devon Mulvey, a blithely philandering FBI special agent and one of the few Irish Catholics in the Bureau’s ranks.

Lemire’s assignment is to dispel hearsay and propaganda, both of which are being wielded by American right-wing groups sympathetic to the Nazi cause, and are designed to undermine U.S. support for Great Britain (and its allies) in defending Europe from the ugly, expansionist desires of Germany’s Adolf Hitler. Meanwhile, Mulvey—whose own father is an unrepentant isolationist—is tasked with investigating industrial espionage that may or may not hurt the nation’s war efforts.

It could rightly be said that anti-Semitism brings this seemingly mismatched pair together. Anne intends to write about that subject after her 17-year-old brother, Sammy, is bloodily thrashed by a pack of youths targeting him for being half-Jewish. Yet she meets with resolute resistance from both her bosses and from a source for the story, who wants to keep his name out of print. Does Sammy’s beating signal a rift opening up between the city’s Irish Americans and more recently immigrated Jews fleeing the carnage of World War II in Europe? At the same time, Devon and his partner, Lou Loomis, probe the killing of Abraham Wolf, a Jewish worker at a federal munitions factory in Boston. Can a connection be established between that crime and a crate of machine guns that has gone missing from the factory? And why aren’t the Boston Police—and Devon’s cousin on the force, Officer Brian Dennigan—more concerned about these events?

Once they’ve met and found common purpose in their endeavors, Anne and Devon go after the Christian Legion, a pro-Nazi, anti-Semitic group that is printing up fascist leaflets and phony ration stamps, the latter of which are being peddled to Jewish families the Legion intends to frame later as fraudsters and traitors. Not surprisingly, all of these shared pursuits eventually lead our two protagonists into romance. But the pressures of their respective jobs, hidden family secrets, and the era’s politics of hate conspire to separate them and have them questioning each other’s allegiances and faith.

Author Mullen, who earned our respect with his earlier novels about struggling Black policemen in 1950s Atlanta, Georgia (Darktown, Lightning Men, and Midnight Atlanta), does a particularly deft job in these pages of making Boston—with its definably ethnic neighborhoods, acrid dockyards, and class divisions—a character in its own right. He also employs religion, racial animus, and isolationist perspectives to bring contemporary resonance to what might otherwise have been dismissed as only a tale about America’s past.

Last but not least, one work from the non-fiction shelves ...

• Framed: Astonishing True Stories of Wrongful Convictions, by John Grisham and Jim McCloskey (Doubleday):

It’s hardly unexpected that when John Grisham (The Firm, The Exchange, etc.) sits down to compose a non-fiction book, it should eventually read like a thriller. And this one does. It examines 10 American cases of wrongful convictions overturned by dogged determination and an admirable level of tenacity from the advocates of the accused. Five of the cases are detailed by Grisham, while the others are laid out by Jim McCloskey, the founder of Centurion Ministries, a non-profit organization, based in New Jersey, that is dedicated to exonerating people who have been improperly convicted and sentenced to either lengthy incarceration or capital punishment. A shared preface adds useful context to everything that follows.

The explanations of these cases are restricted by the writers’ self-imposed 10,000-word limit. Framed comes off as an angry work, and not simply because of how Grisham and McCloskey approach their subjects; readers will likewise become progressively more enraged as each prosecution is scrupulously detailed. There is incompetence aplenty here, along with abusive motives and a sometimes unfortunate determination that police investigators should close their cases quickly. In some of these investigations, had it not been for the work of the advocates, innocent men might have been forced to pay unjustifiably high prices for the crimes they were falsely charged with perpetrating.

Within these 10 stories, we are given DNA, skewed evidence, unreliable witnesses, and a good deal more, all validating the book’s subtitle: Astonishing True Stories of Wrongful Convictions. Readers will wind up incredulous that such injustices came to pass, and that only through unwavering efforts were they finally corrected.

Other 2024 Favorites: One of Us Is Dead, by Peter James (‎Macmillan UK); Kill For Me, Kill For You, by Steve Cavanagh (Atria); Crampton, by Thomas Ligotti and Barndon Trenz (Chiroptera Press); The Scarlet Papers, by Matthew Richardson (Penguin, 2023); and A Short Stay in Hell, by Steven L. Peck (‎Strange Violin Editions, 2012).

Favorite Crime Fiction of 2024, Part III: Steven Nester

Steven Nester is the longtime host of Poets of the Tabloid Murder, a weekly Internet radio program heard on the Public Radio Exchange (PRX). In addition, he is a New York-based freelance writer whose work has appeared in The Rap Sheet, January Magazine, Shotgun Honey, Yellow Mama, Mystery Scene, and Firsts Magazine.

• Double Barrel Bluff, by Lou Berney (Soho Crime):

Shake Bouchon, a onetime wheelman for the Armenian mob in Los Angeles, is at it again, and this third (perhaps last?) installment in Lou Berney’s franchise is a doozy. Shake’s former boss and gorgeous ex-lover, Alexandra “Lexy” Ilandryan—who is now a capo di capo herself—has been kidnapped while enjoying a solo vacation to Cambodia. Shake is blissfully ignorant of this turn until he’s suddenly dragooned from his sedentary life by a mob enforcer, the Freudianly skewed Dikran, who demands his help in rescuing Lexy.

Meanwhile, in the jungles of Cambodia, Lexy is being held captive by a couple of knuckleheads, Ramos and French, who are waiting for their own gangster leader to appear and cut a deal for her release. This happens to be Bjorn, a Cambodian who speaks “flawless hipster American” and who really should’ve been a better planner; Bjorn has no idea who he’s grabbed or the consequences that might follow. Considering what readers learn about Bjorn’s lineage later in this story, he is in the wrong business.

It doesn’t take long for the whole abduction scheme to begin unraveling. Shake’s wife (and erstwhile adversary), Gina, arrives in Cambodia, along with Lexy’s second in command, who circles the circumstances like a shark and spots an opportunity to replace her as number one. Oh, and add to those plot twists an expatriate hippy girl named Mitch, and Ouch, a Cambodian godfather with CIA connections. If the success of this overseas free-for-all doesn’t convince author Berney to keep Shake alive for readers, then nothing will.

• Ash Dark as Night, by Gary Phillips (Soho Crime):

It’s the long, hot summer of 1965 in Los Angeles, and Harry Ingram is in it up to his neck. This Black crime photographer and part-time process server happens upon a traffic stop in the city’s racially charged Watts neighborhood that quickly turns fatal. Cops beat the motorist, and when a young Black activist confronts them, he’s shot dead—and Harry documents the entire scene. The police then proceed to pound on Harry and take away his camera, a Korean War-era Speed Graphic. But while he recuperates in a hospital bed, his lover, Anita Claire, finds that camera, and the photos he snapped with it are published, putting Harry squarely in the unwelcome sights of the LAPD.

Once released back onto the street, Harry achieves plenty of notoriety and exposure (a bad thing for a man whose avocation is playing gumshoe), but that doesn’t stop him. An invitation to find the missing partner of a local businesswoman takes Harry on an odyssey through the underbelly of Los Angeles, where it comes as no surprise that even the police are corrupt—and they aren’t the only ones.

As this story progresses, Phillips adds complication upon complication. He eventually has Harry walking a fine line between crime and retribution, after he discovers that Anita, who also happens to be an associate of L.A. mayor Tom Bradley, has a sideline as a Robin Hood-like bank robber, assisted by her interracial parents.

Phillips, probably best known for creating private eye Ivan Monk (Violent Spring), recounts actual events—racial tensions and violence—that are a tragic part of this country’s history, and still haunt us today. However, a significant appeal of this novel and its predecessor, 2022’s One-Shot Harry, comes from how the author re-creates the past, dusting off a Los Angeles that no longer exists. Mid-20th-century demands for racial equality are brought more to the fore in this second Ingram novel, and it will be interesting to see in future installments of this series how Phillips’ intrepid lensman makes it past the age of Motown and Stax, and documents the country’s social/cultural evolution into the era of Superfly and Shaft.

• The Devil Raises His Own, by Scott Phillips (Soho Crime):

Novelist and screenwriter Scott Phillips has concocted The Devil Raises His Own with a touch of film director Robert Altman’s historical irreverence, choice of ensemble cast and meandering plot line, giving readers not just a slice of life, but a slab of life looked at from many angles. “The good old days,” Phillips tells us, is bunk.

It’s the year 1916, and Hollywood is just in its formative stages. After being found innocent of murdering her abusive husband back in Wichita, Kansas, Flavia Purcell flees to Los Angeles, where her grandfather Bill Odgen (the main character from Cottonwood, Phillips’ 2004 novel) now owns a photography studio. There she learns the business, but this being Hollywood—where dreams die and reality sets in hard and fast—Flavia and Bill soon find themselves in the nascent pornography business. (A warning for readers: this book features sex, but when it does [people must make a living somehow], it’s not even close to the full-frontal nuts-and-bolts, lascivious variety that’s so prevalent today.) As the city endures a succession of murders, Bill and his resourceful granddaughter find themselves mixed up in events as complicated and ominous as any found in old black-and-white pictures.

While The Devil Raises His Own is classified as “noir,” that’s true only in the way Joan Didion’s Play It As It Lays (a very dark take on the same town) is noir: the people in its pages make choices, sometimes bad ones, and must live with the consequences, dealing with what life has arbitrarily dished out. Vaudevillian losers of high birth; a washed-up actor getting a second chance as a child star’s punching bag; cinematic performers on the way up and on the way down—they all find roles here. Phillips offers a cross-section of pre-World War I America through his focus on early Hollywood, for it was there to which so many people with big dreams went to see them thrive … or die.

• The Last King of California, by Jordan Harper (Mulholland):

As wildfires consume Southern California’s long, flat Central Valley, and war erupts among the area’s white-trash dope purveyors, Luke Crosswhite—heir-apparent to the throne of the criminal Combine gang—returns to the fold. Unsure whether to prepare to be groomed for the crown (the king, his father, has been incarcerated for a slaying Luke witnessed, yet he still calls the shots), Luke needs time to sort things out. Meanwhile, prospects are looking up for the gang’s crank-dealing business—that is until the vicious Aryan Steel gang rolls in. Its leaders demand not only a 10-percent payoff from the Combine for doing business in the neighborhood, but want Luke’s family’s gang to purchase their product, as well. The Combine’s de facto boss, Luke’s uncle Del, nixes any such deal, which is understood clearly as throwing down the gauntlet.

Amid all of this, young lovers Pretty Baby and Callie (the latter being an old friend to Luke) hope to escape the Combine’s hold over them at last. Their scheme involves ripping off an associate in a drug deal, and then handing him over to police. Unfortunately, that associate owes money to Aryan Steel honcho Beast Daniels. An all-out war ensues and the death toll mounts. As an initiated gang member, Luke must obey orders even though his future holds much brighter—or in the world of gangbangers, much darker—promise. When Del orders him to kill Callie in retribution for her actions, Luke realizes that the gang’s motto, Blood Is Love, cannot be taken lightly. Traveling to visit his father in prison, Luke is left to wonder, Just who is the last king of California?

Like Harper’s 2023 thriller, Everybody Knows, The Last King of California (published originally in Great Britain two years ago) is a most discomfiting tale of the American West.

Last but not least, one work from the non-fiction shelves ...

• Son of the Old West: The Odyssey of Charlie Siringo: Cowboy, Detective, Writer of the Wild Frontier, by Nathan Ward (Grove Press):

Speaking of the American West, that expansive region has provided so many things: tall tales, legends, and more than a few rich myths. But its 19th- and early 20th-century history also contains a goodly number of real men and woman who lived large in spirit, bravery, and what might be called spunk. Buffalo Bill Cody, Bat Masterson, Wyatt Earp, Belle Starr—they all made their marks on the growing country. This list wouldn’t be complete, though, without Charlie Siringo, a cowboy, bounty hunter, sleuth, and eventual silent-movie extra who has often been  overlooked by writers and filmmakers focused mostly on the Old West’s lawless particulars. Nathan Ward (previously the author of The Lost Detective: Becoming Dashiell Hammett) seeks to correct that slight with this non-fiction work—first published in late 2023, but released in paperback last fall—that supplies a deeply researched account of Siringo’s adventures and accomplishments.

Born in Texas in 1855 to an Irish mother and an Italian father, Siringo participated in his first cattle drive at age 12. He went on to survive a fusillade of beer glasses flung in a Dodge City saloon by the aforementioned Sheriff Masterson; chase after cattle rustled by Billy the Kid; witness Chicago’s deadly Haymarket massacre of 1886; and join the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, for which he investigated mining corruption and pursued outlaws, among them Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. He also penned a variety of books, including A Texas Cow Boy: Or, Fifteen Years on the Hurricane Deck of a Spanish Pony (1885), which readers ate up—and which helped mold the public’s image of the leathery range rider. After leaving the Pinkertons in the early 1900s. he engaged in a lengthy dispute with that agency, claiming it had sabotaged the publication of his cowboy memoirs.

Without a doubt, Charlie Siringo was an American original, and Ward does him justice here. Son of the Old West gives a generous accounting of this cowboy-detective’s long life (he died in 1928, just short of his 74th birthday), at the same time providing a history of the West from the post-Civil War era through the age of steam to the wonderment of the motion-picture industry.

Other 2024 Favorites: The Queen City Detective Agency, by Snowdon Wright (Morrow); and The Arizona Triangle, by “Sydney Graves,” aka Kate Christianen (Harper Paperbacks).

Favorite Crime Fiction of 2024, Part II: Jim Thomsen

Jim Thomsen is a writer and editor living in the pocket-edition community of Kingston, Washington. He edited A Killing Rain, an anthology of crime stories set in the greater Seattle area, which was published earlier this year by Down & Out Books in conjunction with the Left Coast Crime convention held in nearby Bellevue.

I’ll be honest: I read less new crime fiction (or, at least, books marketed as such) in 2024, and liked less of what I read than in any year previous. I get a sense that genre writers are struggling to speak coherently to the current moment, and have largely retreated to safe corners of it to observe and comment on our divided classes. That said, there were some works in this vein well worth celebrating.

• Holly, by Stephen King (Scribner):

Holly may not be the best crime novel of 2024 (it was, after all, first published in late 2023), but it’s up there near the top, and it’s certainly the most fun one I read, by far. The killers—a pair of octogenarian, semi-retired professors—are an absolute hoot, full of themselves and their out-there ideas on how to prolong their lives at the expense of others. And Holly Gibney, King’s neurasthenic, neurodivergent sleuth from the Mr. Mercedes trilogy (among other stories), is the perfect person to connect the dots between the marginalized missing victims in this tale and that nutjob couple. Her methodical detective work is laid out in painstaking slow-burn detail; King doesn’t skimp on the step-by-step. As is always expected with this author, his secondary characters are extraordinarily well-developed. Holly’s pages turn but don’t fly; there’s much to linger over in every passage, even as you can’t wait to find out what comes next.

• The Hunter, by Tana French (Viking):

This second novel (after 2020’s The Searcher) to be centered on Cal Hooper, a retired Chicago cop relocated to the eccentric Irish village of Ardnakelty, where he is forever navigating the town’s arcane protocols and suspicious locals, is a patiently plotted masterpiece. Just when Cal thinks he’s finally settled in, with teenage pal Theresa “Trey” Reddy and semi-girlfriend Lena in his everyday orbit, he’s pushed out of his comfort zone once more when Trey’s charming-loser father, Johnny Reddy, breezes into town promising riches too rich for the not-rich locals to ignore. He’s caught between those who know Johnny is full of shit and others who choose to look past that because he’s “one of them.” And Cal, for all his virtues, is not. French’s prose burns long and on even low heat, like an underground peat fire; and though you may think nothing much is happening on occasion, you can’t look away because you and the author both know better.

• Where They Last Saw Her, by Marcie R. Rendon (Bantam):

In this standalone novel from the author of the standout Cash Blackbear series (Murder on the Red River, Girl Gone Missing, etc.), Rendon shows she’s basically the genre-fied incarnation of Louise Erdrich, depicting Native American reservation life with chilling authenticity. Here, Quill, wife and mother, steps in when women from Minnesota’s Red Pine Reservation go missing amid an uptick in the number of white-male pipeline workers housed in the surrounding area. Quill is as reluctant a sleuth as they come, feeling called to action in the face of chilling complacency from local law enforcement. But when one of her best friends appears to fall into the clutches of sex traffickers, Quill goes into Full Metal Mama Bear mode. The thriller elements in Rendon’s tale are satisfyingly urgent; the cultural study of a place white people will never fully understand is first-rate.

• Broiler, by Eli Cranor (Soho Crime):

As Marcie Rendon knows reservation life in Minnesota and North Dakota, so Eli Cranor knows rural Arkansas, and its cultural and economic forces that constantly collide from within and without. Brutal conditions experienced by the undocumented workers at a chicken processing plant in a trailer-park town push one man to his breaking point, leading to the kidnapping of the plant manager’s 6-month-old boy, the ransom demanded being tens of thousands of dollars in overtime pay. And the only people who seem to have their heads on straight here—the abducted child’s mother and a female line worker married to the kidnapper—find a cracked sort of common cause when the men in their lives prove to be useless. This yarn’s deeper themes never lose their impact in the face of nonstop action, which is tougher to pull off than it seems. Cranor, in his third novel, finally sees his gifts take flight in full feather.

• The Winner, by Teddy Wayne (Harper):

As sleek as it is dark, Wayne’s story of clashing classes and cultures unfolds in old-monied coastal Long Island, where a struggling law-school graduate turned tennis instructor, Conor O’Toole, leans into his looks to bed both a mother and her daughter. His desperate efforts to keep one from finding out about the other lead to murder and an equally desperate and seemingly endless attempt to cover it up. The thriller elements in this novel are strong, but what stands out most is the cluelessness of the elite, who never have to worry about where their next meal—or mansion—is coming from.

Other 2024 Favorites: The Best American Mystery and Suspense 2024, edited by S.A. Cosby (Mariner); Buried Lies, by Steven Tingle (Crooked Lane); Blond Hair, Blue Eyes, by Chris Kelsey (Black Rose Writing); Ordinary Bear, by C.B. Bernard (‎Blackstone); and American Spirits, by Russell Banks (Knopf).

Favorite Crime Fiction of 2024, Part I: Kevin Burton Smith

Kevin Burton Smith is the Montreal, Quebec-born founder and editor of that essential resource, The Thrilling Detective Web Site, as well as the Web Monkey for The Private Eye Writers of America and a contributor to Deadly Pleasures Mystery Magazine. A lost Canadian, he’s currently hiding out in Southern California’s High Desert with his wife, mystery author D.L. Browne (aka Diana Killian and Josh Lanyon), and waiting for the end of the world.

• Huge, by Brent Butt (Seal):

It sounds like the set-up for a bad joke: three stand-up comics walk into a bar in Canada …

But it’s no joke—it’s a scene played out several times in comedian Brett Butt’s dead-serious thriller, Huge.

One of the comedians is Dale, a cash-strapped but seasoned pro who knows how to leave ’em laughing. Not a superstar, maybe, but he knows how to play the game, serving as emcee and closing headliner on a low-key, low-budget tour of nowhere Canadian prairie towns (Brass Hole! Wire Beach! Horsewater!), working its way to big-city Winnipeg, Manitoba, a prime spot (really!) on the North American comedy circuit. Joining Dale is Rynn, a feisty young Irish comedienne with a possible TV show deal in the works. She’s the opener. And the third comic, occupying the middle slot, is Hobie Huge, an over-sized Canadian desperate to make it as a comedian. He’s local, and so he’s using his customized van to drive them from gig to gig.

Only catch? Hobie’s a frickin’ psychopath—a stone-cold, homicidal nutjob with absolutely zero impulse control and a hair-trigger temper. So what starts out as a fascinating behind-the-scenes peek at the world of stand-up comedy ends up being infinitely darker as Hobie slowly loses it, and Dale and Rynn realize—too late—just how far out on the crazy train their co-star really is.

The lovably schlubby Canadian author, Butt, is probably best known in the United States for Corner Gas, a long-running, still-streaming Canadian sitcom, and No Clue, a 2014 film comedy in which a mild-mannered, middle-aged Vancouver, British Columbia, novelty salesman (played by Butt) poses as a hard-boiled private investigator, hoping to impress a woman. But Huge is something else again—a disturbing, twitchy, and surprisingly effective nail-biter that draws you in … before it yanks the rug right out from under you.

Killer, eh?

• Where the Body Was, by Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips (Image Comics):

By this point, a kick-ass graphic novel by Brubaker (words) and Phillips (art) is no surprise—it’s pretty much an annual event. But Where the Body Was, which marks a break from their regular (and much harder-boiled) Criminal and Reckless series, is something else again—a clever and engaging standalone that borders on cozy; a crime story featuring a group of characters who all live in the same sleepy 1980s American suburban neighborhood, told through a bunch of overlapping viewpoints.

It’s almost quaint: tree-lined streets, well-tended (mostly) lawns, tranquil cul-de-sacs, a tree house, a slew of seemingly comfy bungalows, an old boarding house and, as presented in the helpful “Cast of Characters” list (a nod to vintage Dell Mapbacks), a closed circle of suspects. Those include a couple of ne’er-do-well “wild” kids, a loner with a badge and a rich fantasy life, a horny housewife, a workaholic psychiatrist, a homeless Vietnam vet, a precocious 11-year old fangirl who has appointed herself the local superhero, and an outsider private eye hunting for a runaway girl. And of course a murder that rocks this little world.

It’s all depicted with a nuanced and empathetic hand by Phillips, and as the viewpoint slides back and forth between multiple players and timeframes, the tale feels as cozy as a cup of Earl Grey, poured by Dame Agatha herself. At first, anyway, because Brubaker and Phillips can’t help but slide in a deliciously dark if-not-quite-noir sucker punch at the end. As the various pieces slowly come together, they click into place in a fashion that, frankly, knocked me for a loop.

But of course. How else could it end?

Well played, gentlemen, well played.

• California Bear, by Duane Swierczynski (Mulholland):

I generally hate serial-killer novels. Too often they’re simply workarounds for lightweights who want to skip over the tough job of creating credible villains. But Swierczynski does the heavy lifting here, because he’s after much bigger game. This ain’t no party, this ain’t no disco—he ain’t foolin’ around.

Sure, there’s the obligatory hunt for a serial killer, but that's just the corkboard for this author to pin a whole lot of things to, including:

— A multiple murderer known as the “California Bear,” who vanished four decades ago but is now coming out of retirement.
— An upcoming true-crime documentary by some scruple-free filmmakers about that slayer coming out of retirement.
— Cato Hightower, a crooked former cop who smells money, and isn’t beyond a little extortion to get what he wants.
— Jack Queen, a recently released ex-convict and single parent who’s trying to do right by his 15-year-old daughter.
— Jeanie Hightower, Cato’s beleaguered wife, a genealogist unwillingly dragged into her husband’s schemes.
— A slew of California Bear online fans and true-crime podcasters, plus a handful of real-life wannabes and copycats gumming up the works.
— The Girl Detective (aka Matilda), Jack Queen’s aforementioned daughter, a brainiac problem solver, confined to a hospital bed with a bad case of leukemia. And the prognosis is not good.

Along the way, Southern California writer Swierczynski takes savage pokes at a true-crime industry that cashes in on other people’s tragedies, a health care system run for profit, a legal system’s sometimes shaky notions of justice, and the million ways we can be torn apart, while shining a defiant light on the fragile, yet enduring ties that somehow—against all odds—bind us together.

Yeah, the plot slips and slides all over the place, its short, punchy chapters leaping from viewpoint to viewpoint, the head-whipping twists held together only by this author’s always muscular storytelling chops. But what it all adds up to is arguably Swierczynski’s best novel yet—a multilevel triumph that burns red hot, with an ending guaranteed to put the boot to even the most hardened of hearts. (And for those of us fortunate enough to know Duane Swierczynski, that ending is even more devastating.)

• Galway Confidential, by Ken Bruen (Mysterious Press):

There are all kinds of tough guys (and gals), and the Shamus Game has had more than its fair share of both, starting back in the pulps when bullet wounds, knife wounds, the ever-popular KOs, and every other sort of bodily misfortune could be miraculously cured by a shot of hooch from the office bottle, a Lucky or two, a good night’s rest, and maybe a therapeutic roll in the hay.

And in some ways that hasn’t changed much. Bruen’s latest entry in the Jack Taylor series carries on the tradition in grand old fashion. The private eye’s first instinct, after awaking in a Galway, Ireland, hospital from an almost two-year-long coma (thus conveniently skipping the entire pandemic), is to reach for a drink.

And who could blame him?

Alas, that restorative slug is offered by Rafferty, a poetry-spouting stranger who, it’s soon revealed, has been Jack’s only regular visitor. Allegedly an ex-Marine (among other things), he’s the guy who saved Jack from the brutal attack that had landed him in the hospital.

But upon release, it’s a whole new, more violent Galway that greets Jack (Masks! Reduced hours in the bars! Someone setting fire to homeless people at night!). He’s approached by a woman who wants him to find the man who’s been attacking nuns with a hammer. Reluctant at first (Jack’s no fan of the Catholic Church), he eventually relents, and so, wearing his all-weather Garda coat and armed with his beloved hurley, he sets out to do what must be done.

Simple enough, maybe, but fans of these books know that Bruen, one of the most distinctive stylists in crime fiction, only makes it look simple—the Taylor series contains multitudes. Loyal, steadfast, and as Irish as a pint of the black, Jack’s also an angry, bitter alcoholic and drug abuser, broken, battered, tattered, and scarred inside and out, and prone to violence—and not even much of a detective at times. “Cases get solved around me,” he admits, “very rarely did I actually find the solution.”

But try turning away. Somehow, despite numerous betrayals and failures, Jack perseveres. And really, how can anyone turn their back on a man who is so damned that even the nuns, he tells us, were “no longer praying for” him?

• Hero, by Thomas Perry (Mysterious Press):

In this standalone Perry yarn, the man behind the critically acclaimed Jane Whitfield series gives us another strong, resourceful female. But Justine Poole isn’t a “guide,” shepherding people into new lives under new identities.

Nope, Justine—we eventually find out—has already done that. To herself. Not that it matters—it’s her present life, as a personal security agent on the payroll of a high-priced and well-regarded Los Angeles firm, that lands her in trouble.

She's young, ambitious, attractive, quick on her feet, and very good at her job, protecting wealthy, high-profile Hollywood celebrities, attending lavish galas, and hobnobbing with Tinseltown’s rich and famous. So when she gets a call from her hands-on boss, who suspects a couple he’s been guarding—an elderly television producer and his wife—are possibly the targets of a home invasion, she doesn’t hesitate. She rushes to the couple’s swanky Beverly Hills home, and confronts five armed robbers lying in wait, who open fire. Her training kicks in, and she kills two of them, reluctantly becoming the “hero” of the title.

But that acclaim doesn’t last. Her brief moment of local celebrity does not go down well with the fragile ego of Mr. Conger, the man behind the robbery; a self-styled criminal mastermind who takes umbrage at a lone “girl” who not only took out two of his lackeys, but more importantly, blew his scheme to smithereens. Gee, what will all the other criminal masterminds think?

So he dispatches Leo Sealy, a coldly efficient assassin with a few ego problems of his own, to take out Justine and, he hopes, restore the chronically insecure Conger's reputation. Should be a snap, Leo figures, especially with the easily manipulated local media more than eager to dish on the new “hero” and her current whereabouts. Thus begins a dangerous game of cat-and-mouse, as the young bodyguard finds herself trying to stay out of the sights (literally) of a much more experienced and deadly foe.

I said cat-and-mouse, but maybe I should have said roadrunner-and-coyote. It turns out that Justine Poole is unexpectedly resourceful, clever, and … lucky. A few coincidences click into place, a few missteps occur, and the increasingly frustrated Leo winds up badly rattled, making him even more dangerous.

This is a fine romp, a blood-flecked cartoon of deadly intentions and random chaos, tinged with black humor.

Meep-meep.

• Negative Girl, by Libby Cudmore (Datura):

All rock stars die in plane crashes of one kind or another. Sex. Drugs. Actual plane crashes. Take your pick. Someone (Lennon?) said that.

For former rock musician Martin Wade, it was definitely drugs (mostly heroin) that ended not his life, but at least his gig as front man for the French Letters, a 1990s punk band that had a brief slam dance with success. Well, the drugs and the subsequent disappearance of Wade’s wife, Cecilia, for which the LAPD has long suspected (and still suspects) Martin was responsible. As he tells it, “they didn’t know if she was dead or alive, but they saw a junkie ex-rock star aching for a fix and a blackout where a woman should be.”

That was almost two decades ago, though, and somehow Martin was eventually cleared. He survived, cleaned up his act, earned his P.I. ticket, and moved to Perrine, a small town in upstate New York, where he “learned how to run searches and what to look for.” Revisiting his wife’s fate, he finally came to the conclusion that “there was no trace of the woman [he] had once planned to spend [his] life with.”

Yet it’s that years-past tragedy that adds a strong touch of compelling melancholy to this story by Shamus and Black Orchid award winner Cudmore. Martin continues to rebuild his life, attend AA meetings, and live quietly and alone, working simple cases out of his shabby office over a vape shop, playing piano by himself in his living room. Not drinking. Not doing drugs. And keeping his head down.

Of course, one of the big hooks for a geek like me is the never-quite-gone music that is still a huge part of the middle-aged Martin's life, with songs and bands being name-dropped like confetti all over the place. His former bandmates have been mentioned casually in previous Wade stories Cudmore has contributed to Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, and other periodicals. But in this long-awaited novel-length debut (its title nicked from a Steely Dan song), one of them is finally dragged into the spotlight.

Janie Carlock, a promising young classical musician, shows up one day at Martin’s office and asks his new assistant, the heavily tattooed, 30-something Valerie Jacks, for an appointment. Janie wants Martin to speak to her estranged, drug addict father, who has lately been stalking her, trying to push his way into her life. As it transpires, that father is Ron Carlock, Martin’s old friend and a guitarist from the French Letters, who is still struggling with pills and booze. When Martin finally hooks up with Ron, the reunion isn’t a happy one. And their association doesn’t improve after Janie’s corpse is fished out of a river only days later.

The cops quickly write this drowning off as an accident, but Martin, Valerie, and Janie's heart-broken father don’t buy it. Martin reluctantly starts to nose around, unaware that Valerie, eager to prove her investigative chops and do more than manage their office, is conducting her own parallel investigation. Martin, we learn, isn’t the only sleuth here with a dark past, and Valerie has more than enough confidences of her own to confront.

As Cudmore’s story unfolds, and the side-by-side investigations crisscross in an uneasy tango (at one point, Valerie confesses that she doesn’t mind Martin when he “wasn’t being an asshole”), façades fall away and both secrets and hard, unpleasant truths are brought to the fore. Addiction, family ties, obsession, greed, resentment, mental illness, jealousy, and denial swirl around as Martin and Valerie swap the first-person narrative chores from chapter to chapter. When the solution of this moody, noir-tinged weeper comes, it cuts deep.

But not as deep as the concealed histories of our two gumshoes.

Wrenching. But you can dance to it.

Other 2024 Favorites: Murder at La Villette, by Cara Black (Soho Crime); Cream of the Crop: Best Mystery and Suspense Stories of Bill Pronzini, by Bill Pronzini (Stark House); Kingpin, by Mike Lawson (Atlantic Monthly Press); The Murder of Mr. Ma, by S.J. Rozan and John Shen Yen Nee (Soho Crime); and Buster, by George Pelicanos (Akashic).

Are You Ready for Our Own Favorites?

December hasn’t exactly worked out the way I had planned. My hope was to have all of The Rap Sheet’s “favorite crime fiction of 2024” lists, from our various contributors, edited and posted by this point in the month, and be well along in completing my catalogue of early 2025 releases. None of that has happened. Through an unfortunate collision of personal and professional responsibilities (and a wee bit of laziness on my part), I am only now ready to begin delivering our critics’ collections of “favorites.”

The first of those posts—from the always-reliable Kevin Burton Smith—will appear later today, with more to follow through the end of this year, and probably into the first chill week of January.

You will note, sadly, two fewer voices in the mix this time around. Canadian correspondent and novelist Jim Napier, who had shared his annual choices with us for many years, passed away in December 2023. And this last summer, journalist, author, and West Ham United Football Club aficionado Fraser Massey died from cancer. I did not know Fraser well, but he provided The Rap Sheet with a variety of excellent articles, including three installments in our annual “favorites” series, dating back to 2021 (see here, here, and here).

Here’s a short biographical note I wrote about Fraser for The Rap Sheet’s “Contributors” page:

Fraser Massey is a freelance journalist based in London, England. A former columnist for the Radio Times, Now, and Real People, he is also a regular contributor to The Times. His short story “Have a Cigar” appears in Coming Through in Waves: Crime Fiction Inspired by the Songs of Pink Floyd (2021), the latest entry in Gutter Books’ Rock Anthology series. An early draft of his yet-to-be published neo-noir thriller, Whitechapel Messiah, was shortlisted in the New Voices category at the inaugural Capital Crime Festival Awards in 2019.

At least for the time being, the opening segment from Whitechapel Messiah can be found on Fraser’s Web page.

Two thousand twenty-four has been a sad year for me in many respects. I lost an old and very good friend a few months ago, at age 80, and Fraser was only one of the people I knew from the crime-fiction community who went to their graves during these last dozen months. With the political situation in the United States likely to turn dark, mean, and perhaps violent in the near future, I find myself longing for the power to turn back time—even slightly. Putting up this blog’s latest “favorites” posts—late as they are—gives me the chance to think back on 2024, and to remember how many wonderful diversions fiction gave us from the turmoil and tragedies all around.