Tops in the Crime Line

I knew, when Sarah Lyall’s “Best Thrillers of 2023” list appeared in The New York Times, that her fellow critic Sarah Weinman was soon to declare her own favorite crime novels. And sure enough, her 10 choices appeared yesterday on the Times Web site:

• All The Sinners Bleed, by S.A. Cosby (Flatiron)
• Everybody Knows, by Jordan Harper (Mulholland)
• Ozark Dogs, by Eli Cranor (Soho Crime)
• Scorched Grace, by Margot Douaihy (Gillian Flynn)
• Glory Be, by Danielle Arceneaux (Pegasus Crime)
• The Quiet Tenant, by Clémence Michallon (Knopf)
• My Men, by Victoria Kielland (Astra)
• Blaze Me a Sun, by Christoffer
Carlsson (Hogarth)
• Reykjavik, by Ragnar Jonasson and Katrín Jakobsdóttir (Minotaur)
• The Last Devil to Die, by Richard Osman (Pamela Dorman)

You will find Weinman’s short comments about these books here.

I must admit, several of these releases never crested my reading pile over the last 12 months. And My Men escaped my notice altogether, which is odd, since my appetite for more information about Norwegian-American serial killer Belle Gunness had been whetted by Camilla Bruce’s disturbing 2021 novel, In the Garden of Spite.

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Another example of reviewers tag-teaming? Laura Wilson submitting to The Guardian her nominees for “Best Crime and Thrillers of 2023,” which follow Alison Flood’s thematically identical selections. But while the field under study is obviously the same, Wilson’s roll of books is much longer (34 to Flood’s five), giving it the feel of a high-points survey of what crime, mystery, and thriller fiction had to offer this year in Britain—from cozies to debuts, spy novels to vintage reprints—rather than an enumeration of her most treasured reads.

• The Last Devil to Die, by Richard Osman (Viking)
• The Mysterious Case of the Alperton Angels, by Janice Hallett (Viper)
• The Christmas Appeal, by Janice Hallett (Viper)
• Murder in the Family, by Cara Hunter (HarperCollins)
• The Turnglass, by Gareth Rubin (Simon & Schuster)
• Death and the Conjuror, by Tom Mead (Head of Zeus)
• Squeaky Clean, by Callum McSorley (Pushkin Vertigo)
• Scorched Grace, by Margot Douaihy (Pushkin Vertigo)
• Thirty Days of Darkness, by Jenny Lund Madsen (Orenda)
• Case Sensitive, by A.K. Turner (Zaffre)
• The Wheel of Doll, by Jonathan Ames (Pushkin Vertigo)
• Ozark Dogs, by Eli Cranor (Headline)
• All the Sinners Bleed, by S.A. Cosby (Headline)
• Beware the Woman, by Megan Abbott (Virago)
• I Have Some Questions for You, by Rebecca Makkai (Fleet)
• Everybody Knows, by Jordan Harper (Faber)
• The Second Murderer, by Denise Mina (Harvill Secker)
• The Secret Hours, by Mick Herron (Baskerville)
• The Scarlet Papers, by Matthew Richardson (Michael Joseph)
• Moscow Exile, by John Lawton (Grove Press)
• The Translator, by Harriet Crawley (Bitter Lemon Press)
• Other Women, by Emma Flint (Picador)
• The Square of Sevens, by Laura Shepherd-Robinson (Mantle)
• The Winter List, by S.G. MacLean (Quercus)
• Viper’s Dream, by Jake Lamar (No Exit Press)
• Palace of Shadows, by Ray Celestin (Mantle)
• Death of a Lesser God, by Vaseem Khan (Hodder & Stoughton)
• Age of Vice, by Deepti Kapoor (Fleet)
• The Bandit Queens, by Parini Shroff (Atlantic)
• Strange Sally Diamond, by Liz Nugent (Penguin Sandycove)
• Black Thorn, by Sarah Hilary (Macmillan)
• Uncle Paul, by Celia Fremlin (Faber)
• The Man Who Lived Underground, by Richard Wright (Vintage)

In addition, Wilson touts Word Monkey (Doubleday), which she describes as the late Christopher Fowler’s “funny and moving memoir of a life spent writing popular fiction.”

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The two end-of-year lists I always most look forward to studying are those from Sarah Weinman and from Oline H. Cogdill, the latter of whom is a longtime reviewer for South Florida’s Sun Sentinel newspaper. Not only is Cogdill a delightful woman in person, but she is a very discriminating critic. If she recommends a book, I’m quite certain to relish it, too. Her 2023 catalogue of crime, mystery, and thriller “bests” runs to 18 titles:

• Sing Her Down, by Ivy Pochoda (MCD)
• Time’s Undoing, by Cheryl A.
Head (Dutton)
• Everybody Knows, by Jordan
Harper (Mulholland)
• Small Mercies, by Dennis Lehane (Harper)
• All the Sinners Bleed, by S.A. Cosby (Flatiron)
• Resurrection Walk, by Michael Connelly (Little, Brown)
• The River We Remember, by William Kent Krueger (Atria)
• An Honest Man, by Michael Koryta (Mulholland)
• Dark Ride, by Lou Berney (Morrow)
• Prom Mom, by Laura Lippman (Morrow)
• To Catch a Storm, by Mindy Mejia (Atlantic Monthly Press)
• The Last Word, by Taylor Adams (Morrow)
• Distant Sons, by Tim Johnston (Algonquin)
• Blood Sisters, by Vanessa Lillie (Berkley)
• Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone, by Benjamin
Stevenson (HarperCollins)
• Beware the Woman, by Megan Abbott (Putnam)
• The Only One Left, by Riley Sager (Dutton)
• The Golden Gate, by Amy Chua (Minotaur)

Cogdill also identifies her six favorite 2023 debuts in this genre:

• The Curse of Penryth Hall, by Jess Armstrong (Minotaur)
• The Hunter, by Jennifer Herrera (Putnam)
• Fadeaway Joe, by Hugh Lessig (Crooked Lane)
• A Flaw in the Design, by Nathan Oates (Random House)
• Mother-Daughter Murder Night, by Nina Simon (HarperCollins)
• City Under One Roof, by Iris Yamashita (Berkley)

On top of all those, she offers compliments to Murder on the Orient Express: The Graphic Novel, by Agatha Christie and Bob Al-Greene (Morrow Paperbacks); the puzzle books Murdle, Volumes 1 and 2, by G.T. Karber (St. Martin’s Griffin); and a trio of short-story collections—The Best American Mystery and Suspense, edited by Lisa Unger (Mariner), The Refusal Camp, by James R. Benn (Soho Crime), and Happiness Is a Warm Gun, edited by Josh Pachter (Down & Out).

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Apparently there can never—no, never—be too many opinions on books that must be read. Library Journal contributors Liz French and Lesa Holstine are out with their “Best Crime Fiction of 2023” picks:

• The Golden Gate, by Amy Chua (Minotaur)
• Fall, by Tracy Clark (Thomas & Mercer)
• All the Sinners Bleed, by S.A. Cosby (Flatiron)
• The Secret Hours, by Mick Herron (Soho Crime)
• Age of Vice, by Deepit Kapoor (HarperCollins)
• Small Mercies, by Dennis Lehane (Harper)
• A Disappearance in Fiji, by Nilima Rao (Soho Crime)
• Guilt Strikes at Granger’s Store, by Terry Shames (Severn House)
• Mother-Daughter Murder Night, by Nina Simon (HarperCollins)
• City Under One Roof, by Iris Yamashita (Berkley)

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Yesterday, Steve Donoghue, a veteran critic for The Boston Globe and the Christian Science Monitor, published his “Best Books of 2023: Thrillers!” selections in Open Letters Review:

• Sea Castle, by Andrew Mayne (Thomas & Mercer)
• Forgotten War, by Don Bentley (Berkley)
• Sleepless City, by Reed Farrell Coleman (Blackstone)
• You Will Never Be Found, by Tove Alsterdal (Harper)
• All the Dangerous Things, by Stacy Willingham (Minotaur)
• Red River Seven, by A.J. Ryan (Orbit)
• Going Zero, by Anthony McCarten (Harper)
• Burner, by Mark Greaney (Berkley)
• Code 6, by James Grippando (Harper)
• Exiles, by Jane Harper (Flatiron)

* * *

And although it has only been a couple of weeks ago since the Web site She Reads posted its numerous candidates for “Best Books of 2023,” in 19 categories, the winners of a public have already been announced.

The choice for Best Mystery, Thriller & Suspense novel is … All the Sinners Bleed, by S.A. Cosby (Flatiron).

Competing as well for that honor this year were Blood Sisters, by Vanessa Lillie (Berkley); Bright Young Women, by Jessica Knoll (S&S/Marysue Rucci); Don’t Let Her Stay, by Nicola Sanders (Independently published); I Have Some Questions for You, by Rebecca Makkai (Viking); Just Another Missing Person, by Gillian McAllister (Morrow); None of This Is True, by Lisa Jewell (Atria); Stone Cold Fox, by achel Koller Croft (Berkley); The Only One Left, by Riley Sager (Dutton); The Traitor, by Ava Glass (Bantam); Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice for Murderers, by Jesse Q. Sutanto (Berkley); and What Never Happened, by Rachel Howzell Hall (Thomas & Mercer).

Look for the victors in all 19 categories here.

(Hat tip to Deadly Pleasures Mystery Magazine.)

Bullet Points: Father’s Day Edition

• Mystery Fanfare reminds us that tonight will bring the U.S. broadcast, on PBS-TV, of the first episode (of three) in the very last season of Endeavour. That British detective drama series, launched in 2012, is a prequel to the long-running Inspector Morse, both based on Colin Dexter’s novels about the same Oxford investigator. Shaun Evans stars as Detective Sergeant Endeavour Morse, with Roger Allam playing his immediate superior, Detective Chief Inspector Fred Thursday (a character not included in Dexter’s tales). There are many loose ends to tie up in Season 9, which already aired in the UK back in March and April. The Killing Times provides the following overview:

Set in 1972, [this concluding season] kicks off with “Prelude,” in which murders in an orchestra track back to childhood bullying; but two other deaths are unexplained, leading to a reinvestigation of Blenheim Vale. In “Uniform,” it all becomes a bit self-referential as a TV detective filming in Oxford is tied to two murders; and in the finale, “Exeunt,” there’s some resolution to the Blenheim Vale case, and at least an attempt (if not entirely successful) to explain the subsequent fate of the Thursday family.

Endeavour begins at 9 p.m. ET/PT as part of PBS Masterpiece.

• In other TV news, In Reference to Murder reports that Season 2 of Netflix’s The Lincoln Lawyer, “based on the series of bestselling novels by Michael Connelly, will return with a two-part launch this summer. Part 1 premieres on July 6 while Part 2 drops Aug. 3. Created for TV by David E. Kelley, The Lincoln Lawyer tells the story of Mickey Haller (Manuel Garcia Rulfo), who runs his legal practice from the back of his Lincoln Town Car. Season 1 was based on the second book, The Brass Verdict, while the second season draws from the fourth book in the series called The Fifth Witness.”

• We wish a slightly belated happy 20th anniversary to Television Chronicles, an invaluable Web resource that launched in 2003.

• To have and have another? Eddie Muller's Noir Bar: Cocktails Inspired by the World of Film Noir has brought its author, the colorful host of Turner Classic Movies’ Noir Alley, a good deal of favorable press attention since it was dropped onto the market in late May by Running Press. Entertainment Weekly explains that the 224-page work “pairs 50 different noir films with 50 unique craft cocktails, some of which Muller invented himself, hearkening back to his earliest career as a bartender in noir-worthy haunts.” Reviewer C.J. Bunce of the blog Borg notes, “This book is certainly not for everyone, but its full-color photographs and Muller’s eye for detail might draw in even teetotaling fans of the Golden Age of cinema. Basically each section is arranged with screencaps from a film, an image of a vintage movie poster or lobby card, and then a recipe for a drink to be paired with the movie, accompanied by commentary where Muller tries to tie his ingredients to a character’s mood or style.” Finally, Terence Towles Canote remarks, “while Eddie Muller's Noir Bar: Cocktails Inspired by the World of Film Noir is somewhat unique, in some ways it is surprising that a book of its sort had not been published years ago. It is no secret that drinking figures heavily in film noir. Bars, nightclubs, and seedy backrooms are tropes of the film style. And while many film noir protagonists took their liquor straight up, cocktails do appear frequently in film noir. There is a good reason many film noir fans are also cocktail connoisseurs.”

• This certainly seems to be the year for celebrating connections between crime fiction and spirited libations. In September, publisher Skyhorse will debut Agatha Whiskey: 50 Cocktails to Celebrate the Bestselling Novelist of All Time, by Colleen Mullaney.

• Editors at the mammoth Internet retailer Amazon are out with a list of what they proclaim are the 20 best mystery, thriller, and suspense novels of the year—so far:

1. All the Sinners Bleed, by S.A. Cosby
2. Small Mercies, by Dennis Lehane
3. Symphony of Secrets, by Brendan Slocumb
4. Sisters of the Lost Nation, by Nick Medina
5. Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice for Murderers, by Jesse Q. Sutanto
6. Murder Your Employer: The McMasters Guide to Homicide,
by Rupert Holmes
7. Better the Blood, by Michael Bennett
8. The White Lady, by Jacqueline Winspear
9. The Maid’s Diary, by Loreth Anne White
10. A Disappearance in Fiji, by Nilima Rao
11. Bad Summer People, by Emma Rosenblum
12. Murder Book, by Thomas Perry
13. No Life for a Lady, by Hannah Dolby
14. Central Park West, by James Comey
15. Those Empty Eyes, by Charlie Donlea
16. A House With Good Bones, by T. Kingfisher
17. The Bandit Queens, by Parini Shroff
18. All the Dangerous Things, by Stacy Willingham
19. Age of Vice, by Deepti Kapoor
20. Drowning, by T.J. Newman

I’ve read only a few of these works, and there are several I simply won’t find time to tackle. Needless to say, not everyone will agree with Amazon’s choices. Deadly Pleasures Mystery Magazine editor George Easter suggests that Michael Robotham’s Lying Beside You and Juan Gomez-Jurado’s Red Queen would be among his own top 20. Confining myself to U.S. publications only, I’d wish to add The Nightingale Affair, by Tim Mason, and perhaps Paris Requiem, by Chris Lloyd to the mix. If allowed to incorporate releases from across the pond, I’d nominate Simon Scarrow’s Dead of Night and Simon Mason’s The Broken Afternoon, as well. But the year is still young, with plenty of promising new works yet to appear.

• Not to be seen slacking, Library Journal has selected what it says are the 15 best thriller books published thus far in 2023. Choices include Thomas Mullen’s Blind Spots, Ivy Pochada’s new Sing Her Down, Lee Goldberg’s Malibu Rising (which won’t actually reach stores until September), Don Winslow’s City of Dreams, and of course Cosby’s All the Sinners Bleed and Newman’s Drowning.

• There are just three more months to go, if Mike Ripley follows through on the threat to retire his “Getting Away with Murder” column from Shots come August. His June installment finds Ripley reflecting on his “34 years as a reviewer of crime fiction”; applauding fresh hardcover editions of two Agatha Christie works; recalling his discovery of a Stanley Ellin short-story collection he’d not known existed; and plugging recent releases by Craig Russell, Catherine Aird, Hansjörg Schneider, and others. Click here to read it all.

• Timed to this weekend’s Shetland Noir crime-fiction festival in northern Scotland, author Ann Cleeves’ publisher is making available—free of charge—a brand-new short story featuring her beloved Shetland police protagonists, Jimmy Perez and Alison “Tosh” McIntosh. To procure your own copy of “Missing in the Snow,” simply sign up here to receive the Pan Macmillian newsletter.

• Washington resident Jim Thomsen, a writer, infrequent Rap Sheet contributor, and book editor for Blackstone Publishing, announced on Twitter not long ago that he’s been chosen to edit a short-story anthology pegged to next year’s Left Coast Crime convention, which will be held in Seattle from April 11 to 14.” Stay tuned for a call for submissions!” Thomsen suggested in that same posting.

• Editor Cynthia Swanson has captured the 2023 Colorado Book Award for Best Anthology with her short-story collection, Denver Noir (Akashic). UPDATE: I neglected to mention that two other mystery-fiction works numbered among this year’s Colorado Book Award recipients. Aunt Dimity & the Enchanted Cottage, by Nancy Atherton (Viking), won for Best Mystery, while Leanne Kale Sparks’ The Wrong Woman (Crooked Lane) picked up Best Thriller honors.

• Amid all the chatter about ChatGPT, Nicholas Fuller, at The Grandest Game in the World blog, decided to ask that artificial intelligence chatbot to create new stories by classic mystery novelists—with dubious results. You’ll find ChatGPT’s version of Agatha Christie stories here, and its take on John Dickson Carr tales here.

• R.I.P., Carol Higgins Clark. As The Washington Post explains, Higgins Clark, “a writer of popular suspense novels who infused the corpses-and-clues genre with doses of dark humor, while also teaming up with her mother, famed mystery author Mary Higgins Clark, on Christmas-themed whodunits, died June 12 at a hospital in Los Angeles. She was 66.” The cause of death is said to have been appendix cancer. Deadline recalls that Carol Higgins Clark’s “career highlight was an 18-novel series starring private investigator Regan Reilly, several of them made into television movies. She appeared in each one.” The 15th and presumably final Reilly novel was Gypped (2012). A 16th series installment, Knocked, was announced for 2019 publication, but never reached print.

Critical Opinions Galore

Another day, another batch of “best books of the year” lists, courtesy of Deadly Pleasures Mystery Magazine. First up are the following 10 picks from the “reading recommendation magazine” BookPage:

• All the Sinners Bleed, by S.A. Cosby (Flatiron)
• Bright Young Women, by Jessica Knoll (S&S/Marysue Rucci)
• Exiles, by Jane Harper (Flatiron)
• The Frozen River, by Ariel Lawhon (Doubleday)
• The Last Devil to Die, by Richard Osman (Viking)
• The Motion Picture Teller, by Colin Cotterill (Soho Crime)
• The River We Remember, by William Kent Krueger (Atria)
• The Secret Hours, by Mick Herron (Soho Crime)
• Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice for Murderers, by Jesse Q.
Sutanto (Berkley)
• Zero Days, by Ruth Ware (Gallery/Scout Press)

* * *

Next come these 20 recommendations, in two categories, from the Canadian bookstore chain Indigo:

Top 10 Thriller Books of 2023:
• The Leftover Woman, by Jean Kwok (HarperCollins)
• The Manor House, by Gilly Macmillan (HarperCollins)
• Everyone Here Is Lying, by Shari Lapena (Doubleday Canada)
• Just Another Missing Person, by Gillian McAllister (HarperCollins)
• Huge, by Brent Butt (Doubleday Canada)
• The Whispers, by Ashley Audrain (Penguin Canada)
• None of This Is True, by Lisa Jewell (Atria)
• The Only One Left, by Riley Sager (Penguin)
• The Coworker, by Freida McFadden (Sourcebooks)
• Age of Vice, by Deepit Kapoor (HarperCollins)

Top 10 Mystery Books of 2023:
• Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone, by Benjamin
Stevenson (HarperCollins)
• Murder in the Family, by Cara Hunter (HarperFiction)
• Mother-Daughter Murder Night, by Nina Simon (HarperCollins)
• Warrior Girl Unearthed, by Angeline Boulley (Macmillan)
• Charlotte Illes Is Not a Detective, by Katie Siegel (Kensington)
• Murder Your Employer, by Rupert Holmes (Avid Reader Press)
• Resurrection Walk, by Michael Connelly (Little, Brown)
• The Raging Storm, by Ann Cleeves (Pan Macmillan)
• The Last Devil to Die, by Richard Osman (Penguin)
• I Only Read Murder, by Ian Ferguson (HarperCollins)

The only weird one in this bunch is Boulley’s Warrior Girl Unearthed, which comes from the teen/young adult section.

* * *

Finally, the annual Crime Time debate over the best crime fiction of the year was held in the Waterstones bookshop at London’s Islington Green on November 9. A star-studded panel of critics from The Guardian, The Telegraph, the Sunday Express, Shotsmag, and Crime Time, along with Barry Forshaw of the Financial Times, expressed what Forshaw describes as “healthy agreement and healthy disagreement” on the matter at hand. They each offered their personal choices of 2023’s best mysteries and thrillers, but together reached agreement on the following six top choices:

• The Secret Hours, by Mick Herron (Baskerville)
• Everybody Knows, by Jordan Harper (Faber)
• All the Sinners Bleed, by S.A. Cosby (Headline)
• Small Mercies, by Dennis Lehane (Abacus)
• A Murder in the Family, by Cara Hunter (HarperFiction)
• The Square of Sevens, by Laura Shepherd-Robinson (Mantle)

You can listen to this year’s full, hour-long Crime Time Debate here.

NPR Shares Its Affections Widely

Just this week, National Public Radio in the United States debuted its extensive list of “Books We Love” for 2023. Like previous picks from the London Times, Amazon, and the British bookseller Waterstones, this collection features so many titles (42!!), that it’s not really helpful in narrowing down what must be read next, or which books might be best to give as holiday presents to friends and other loved ones. Most of these choices would be found in the adult mystery, crime, and thriller section of your local bookshop, but some are likely shelved in the mainstream fiction area, or under children’s/young adult.

• Age of Vice, by Deepit Kapoor (HarperCollins)
• All the Sinners Bleed, by S.A. Cosby (Flatiron)
• Better the Blood, by Michael Bennett (Atlantic Monthly Press)
• Beware the Woman, by Megan Abbott (Putnam)
• Birnam Wood, by Eleanor Catton (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
• Bright Young Women, by Jessica Knoll (S&S/Marysue Rucci)
• Brooklyn Crime Novel, by Jonathan Lethem (Ecco)
• Brutes, by Dizz Tate (Catapult)
• The Centre, by Ayesha Manazir Siddiqi (‎Gillian Flynn)
• Crook Manifesto, by Colson Whitehead (Doubleday)
• The Cuban Heiress, by Chanel Cleeton (Berkley)
• Edith Holler, by Edward Carey (Riverhead)
• The Enchanters, by James Ellroy (Knopf)
• The End of Drum-Time, by Hanna Pylvainen (Henry Holt)
• The Frozen River, by Ariel Lawhon (Doubleday)
• The Golden Spoon, by Jessa Maxwell (‎Atria)
• A Haunting in Hialeah Gardens, by Raul Palma (Dutton)
• Holly, by Stephen King (Scribner)
• House of Cotton, by Monica Brashears (Flatiron)
• How to Sell a Haunted House, by rady Hendrix (Berkley)
• I Have Some Questions for You, by Rebecca Makkai (Viking)
• Kala, by Colin Walsh (Doubleday)
• The Last Devil to Die, by Richard Osman (Viking)
• The Mona Lisa Vanishes, by Nicholas Day (Random House Studio)
• My Murder, by Katie Williams (Riverhead)
• None of This Is True, by Lisa Jewell (Atria)
• Old God’s Time, by Sebastian Barry (Viking)
• Our Share of Night, by Mariana Enriquez (Hogarth)
• The Peacock and the Sparrow, by I.S. Berry (Atria)
• Prom Mom, by Laura Lippman (Morrow)
• The Reformatory, by Tananarive Due (Gallery/Saga Press)
• The Secret Hours, by Mick Herron (Soho Crime)
• Sing Her Down, by Ivy Pochoda (MCD)
• Small Mercies, by Dennis Lehane (Harper)
• Stolen, by Ann-Helen Laestadius (Scribner)
• The Stolen Coast, by Dwyer Murphy (Viking)
• Symphony of Secrets, by Brendan Slocumb (Anchor)
• There’s No Way I’d Die First, by Lisa Springer (Delacorte Press)
• Vampires of El Norte, by Isabel Canas (Berkley)
• Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice for Murderers, by Jesse Q.
Sutanto (Berkley)
• Warrior Girl Unearthed, by Angeline Boulley (Macmillan)
• Whalefall, by Daniel Kraus (MTV)

Click here to investigate any of these works further.

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Deadly Pleasures Mystery Magazine editor George Easter, who first tipped me off to this NPR offering, has been analyzing all of the “best crime fiction of 2023” lists as they’ve rolled out over the last couple of months. He’s discovered that “The top vote-getter so far is All the Sinners Bleed by S.A. Cosby. It has 16 mentions so far. The Dennis Lehane (Small Mercies) has 10 mentions so far, the Mick Herron (The Secret Hours) and Richard Osman (The Last Devil to Die) titles have 9 mentions so far.” Read more about his findings here.

Bullet Points: Feelings of Fall Edition

• We still have a month to go before the U.S. release of director Martin Scorcese’s western crime drama, Killers of the Flower Moon. So for now, we’ll just have to be happy watching the trailer for that picture, featured below. Based on David Grann’s widely acclaimed non-fiction book of the same title, the story—set in the early 1920s—focuses on a succession of bewildering murders of dozens of wealthy members of the Osage tribe in northeastern Oklahoma, following the discovery of large oil deposits under their land. The U.S. Bureau of Investigation (predecessor of today’s FBI) was called in to investigate. Headlining this likely cinematic blockbuster are Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro, Lily Gladstone, and Brendan Fraser. Killers of the Flower Moon is set to debut in U.S. theaters on October 20.



• Kenneth Branaugh’s A Haunting in Venice opened in U.S. theaters last week. I haven’t yet gotten around to seeing that big-screener, which is based on Agatha Christie’s 1969 Hercule Poirot novel, Hallowe’en Party, and stars Branaugh as the brainy Belgian sleuth. But based on Olivia Rutigliano’s assessment in CrimeReads, it sounds as if I might enjoy this one more than I did Branaugh’s previous Poirot picture, the scandal-plagued Death on the Nile. Rutigliano calls Haunting “a vibrant tapestry of drama and feeling, fueled by magnetic performances, splendid effects, and some of the best camerawork, lighting, and art direction of the year.” She concludes: “But the grandest, greatest thing about A Haunting in Venice is that it feels firmly tied to its location. Venice is Branagh’s idea, not Christie’s, but it works beautifully with the themes in the script. The camera lingers lovingly on the decaying walls and splintering wood and chipping paints of the once-opulent Venice, a spooky, creamy mysterious relic, itself. With all of this, Branagh has engineered one of the most effusive, hypnotic films I’ve seen all year ...”

• Using A Haunting in Venice as its springboard, the A.V. Club site selects its favorite Christie movie adaptations, including 1963’s Murder at the Gallop, 2022’s Why Didn’t They Ask Evans? (a favorite of mine, too), and 1957’s Witness for the Prosecution. Those 15 write-ups are presented in slideshow fashion; click the “Start Slideshow” link within the artwork at the top of the page to get started.

• For his part, author Martin Edwards has little nice to say about director Peter Collinson’s suspense-deficient, 1974 version of Christie’s renowned And Then There Were None.

• Meanwhile, UK author Cara Hunter (Murder in the Family) muses on the continuing literary appeal of Dame Agatha’s “closed circle crime” narrative trope, which Hunter describes thusly: “A group of apparently random people gathered in some more or less artificial isolation—a train, an island, a ship, a country house—whereupon everything starts to go horribly wrong and they realise, with growing horror, that one among their number is a killer.” As examples of such yarns, she cites Christie’s Evil Under the Sun (1941), as well as eight other books, one of them a work of non-fiction.

• Rounding out today’s Christie-related coverage are two posts playing off the fun new book Agatha Whiskey: 50 Cocktails to Celebrate the Bestselling Novelist of All Time, by Colleen Mullaney (Skyhorse). Both Dave Bradley, in Crime Fiction Lover, and Doreen Sheridan, in Criminal Element, decided to mix up and judge some of this book’s libations for themselves. Nice work, if you can get it …

• The Literary Salon reports that Dennis Lehane’s latest standalone thriller, Small Mercies (published in France as Le Silence), is one of eight novels longlisted for this year's Grand prix de littérature américaine—“a prize for the best American novel translated into French.” The winner is to be announced on November 6.

• As 2023 winds into its fourth and final quarter, Deadly Pleasures Mystery Magazine editor George Easter is seeing more agreement among his cadre of book critics as to which of this year’s releases will wind up on the mag’s “best of the year” list. He observes that the following 16 novels now appear on multiple lists:

— All the Sinners Bleed, by S. A. Cosby
— My Father’s House, by Joseph O’connor
— Resurrection Walk, by Michael Connelly
— Going Zero, by Anthony Mccarten
— Everybody Knows, by Jordan Harper
— Small Mercies, by Dennis Lehane
— The River We Remember, by William Kent Krueger
— Expectant, by Vonda Symon
— Lying Beside You, by Michael Robotham
— The Detective Up Late, by Adrian McKinty
— The Secret Hours, by Mick Herron
— Independence Square, by Martin Cruz Smith
— Moscow Exile, by John Lawton
— Drowning, T.J. Newman
— Ozark Dogs, by Eli Cranor
— Assassin Eighteen, by John Brownlow

• Sadly, editor Gerald So has discontinued regular updates of his “crime poetry weekly,” The Five-Two, due to an inadequacy of submissions. Its September 4 poem, “‘Something Fishy’ by J.H. Johns, about the recent arrest of a suspect in the Gilgo Beach murders,” was the last published entry, he says. So, a teacher, book reviewer, contributing editor to The Thrilling Detective We Site, and co-founder of The Lineup: Poems on Crime, launched the Five-Two in 2011, bringing readers new crime-related verse each week—52 entries per year. But in 2022, So recalls, “Elon Musk chaotically took over Twitter, upending an important news outlet for the site, and Blogger’s post editor became unreliable in the wee hours, the time I usually worked on the site.” In the future, So says, the blog will be given over to “sporadically” publicizing news about Five-Two alumni.

• I very much enjoyed British crime novelist David Hewson’s complex, four-book series about “Pieter Vos, a rather eccentric detective living a bohemian life in a canalboat” in Amsterdam, and have been disappointed at the utter lack of fresh entries since Sleep Baby Sleep came out in 2017. Hewson, though, is at least celebrating the fact that the original novels are “now back in my hands and available as revised e-book and print editions exclusively on Amazon worldwide. Plus there’s an omnibus e-book edition of all four titles too.”

• Happy 90th birthday this week to David McCallum, the Scottish-born actor who co-starred with Robert Vaughn in the trendsetting 1960s spy-fi series The Man from U.N.C.L.E.

• Here’s a delightful CrimeReads piece about the history of true-crime storytelling. “Long before Stitcher, Netflix, and TikTok, stories of young women being killed were shared through folksongs that were often inspired by real events—just like Lifetime movies,” writes Janet Beard, author of The Ballad of Laurel Springs. “Murder ballads are folksongs that tell the story of a violent crime, usually the murder of a young woman, most often by a lover. These songs were popular throughout the United States in the nineteenth century, though they have become particularly associated with southern Appalachia, where they are an essential part of the region’s musical traditions. Earlier versions of many of the popular Appalachian murder ballads, such as ‘Pretty Polly’ or ‘Silver Dagger,’ can be traced back hundreds of years to England and Scotland, though in their heyday, plenty of homegrown American ballads, like ‘The Banks of the Ohio’ or ‘Tom Dooley,’ made their way around the country, telling the stories of real-life murders in a time before people could tune into Dateline to hear them.”

• R.I.P., James Hayman, author of the McCabe & Savage police procedural mysteries. Mystery Fanfare notes he died on June 15 “after a six month battle with glioblastoma.”

• Following the great time I had at Bouchercon in San Diego earlier this month, I’m giving serious thought to attending the next Left Coast Crime convention, scheduled to be held in Bellevue, Washington, from April 11 to 14, 2024. Getting there each morning would require only a short drive (much longer during rush hour) across Lake Washington from my home in Seattle. But what’s stopping me so far is the registration price: $329, compared with Bouchercon’s $230. Fortunately, I need not commit myself at this stage, though to take advantage of that $329 fee, I must register by December 31; after that the price will shoot up to $349. It’s been years since my last time at LCC—is participation always this pricey?

• A welcome Banacek retrospective in T-Magazine.

• Campaigns by narrow-minded right-wingers to censor books are an insult to the intelligence of readers. Nonetheless, they are relentless. From National Public Radio:

There were nearly 700 attempts to ban library books in the first eight months of 2023, according to data released Tuesday by the American Library Association. From Jan. 1 to Aug 31, the attempts sought to challenge or censor 1,915 titles, a 20% increase compared to the same months in 2022, the organization said. Last year saw the most challenges since the ALA began tracking book censorship more than two decades ago. But the real numbers may even be higher. The ALA collects data on book bans through library professionals and news reports, and therefore, its numbers may not encompass all attempts to ban or censor certain books.

Ideology-driven reading restraints in American schools are an especially pernicious problem, denying students the right to learn the complete breadth and truth of their history, and to possibly expand their perspectives on the world. Again from NPR: “School book bans and restrictions in the U.S. rose 33% in the last school year, according to a new report from the free speech group PEN America, continuing what it calls a worrisome effort aimed at the ‘suppression of stories and ideas.’ Florida had more bans than any other state.”

• And Bookgasm is finally back—sort of. The blog disappeared suddenly last December, the victim of a belligerent hacking. Since then, editor Rod Lott says he’s “fought a constant battle between my URL registrant, site host and site security provider, all pointing fingers at one another, some promising multiple times it would be up within 24 hours.” While a stripped-down version of Bookgasm’s front page is visible at its former location, Lott notes that “The old reviews aren’t accessible at the moment. The good news: They’re not gone; I can click into them on the back end and all the content is there.” Now he just has to figure out how to make everything work right again. “I’m not highly skilled at this thing,” he acknowledges, “nor do I have the allotted free time to devote [to it that] I did when I started this site two decades ago! Bear with me as I get this thing rebuilt.”

Short Subjects

• Lambda Literary, a self-described champion of LGBTQ+ books and their authors, has released its list of finalists for the 2025 Lambda Literary Awards, aka the “Lammys.” There are 26 brackets of contenders, but here are the five titles vying for designation this year as Best LGBTQ+ Mystery:

— Charlotte Illes Is Not a Teacher, by Katie Siegel (Kensington)
— One of Us Knows, by Alyssa Cole (Morrow)
— Rough Pages, by Lev AC Rosen (Tor)
— Rough Trade, by Katrina Carrasco (MCD)
— The Night of Baba Yaga, by Akira Otani (Soho Crime)

All of the winners are expected to be honored during a virtual ceremony on Saturday, October 4.

• I attended only a single summer camp during the years of my youth, a week-long Boy Scout outing that I remember mostly for its mosquitoes and invariably malodorous outhouses. (Believe me, I searched for one that didn’t make my eyes water every time I creaked open its door, but without success!) Other children, however, have apparently had more enjoyable or at least more interesting experiences than my own, which is why there are now sufficient summer-camp mysteries to justify Janet Rudolph compiling their titles in this post. I think that of those works, the only one I’ve tackled is Liz Moore’s The God of the Woods. And if that tale had existed for me to read as a tyke, I never would have gone to camp even once!

• Has the quarterly crime-fiction journal Mysterical-E folded? I just noticed that the last issue available online is dated “Summer 2022.”

• Screenwriter Steven Wright (A Thousand Blows, All the Light We Cannot See, Peaky Blinders) has been recruited to script Amazon’s first James Bond film. This announcement, notes The Spy Command, “follows Amazon MGM hiring Denis Villeneuve in June to direct its first Bond entry. In March, Amazon MGM installed David Heyman and Amy Pascal as the new Bond producers. Amazon gained creative control of the Bond movie franchise early this year from Eon Productions.”

• Meanwhile, The Book Bond brings word that Kim Sherwood’s third and last Double O spy thriller, due for publication (at least in Great Britain so far) in May 2026, will be titled Hurricane Room.

• This item comes from In Reference to Murder:

Golden Age authors Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers (the Lord Peter Wimsey series), and G.K. Chesterton (the Father Brown series) are to be brought to life in a TV series titled The Detection Club from the BBC and BritBox International. Produced by BBC Studios Drama Productions, the show is understood to be taking a “mystery-of-the-week”-style approach with fictional versions of Christie, Sayers, and Chesterton set as the main characters solving crimes each episode. Formed nearly 100 years ago, the elusive and exclusive Detection Club met regularly as its members dined and helped each other with technical aspects of their writing. As well as meeting, they also adhered to [clergyman and writer Ronald] Knox’s Commandments, which instructed that a reader of their books must always be given a fair chance at guessing the guilty party. Casting is said to be underway.

While that write-up makes it sound rather like the Detection Club is a historical relic, it is fact still active, with author Martin Edwards serving as its current president.

• The Stiletto Gumshoe’s C.J. Thomas draws my attention to a fine piece, printed earlier this year in a Montana lifestyle magazine, that he says recalls “how these things called ‘noir’ and ‘hard-boiled’ didn’t begin in the back alleys of New York or the mean streets of L.A., but more as ‘rural noir’ with Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest back in 1929.” You can enjoy that full essay here.

• Did you know Netflix has adapted S.A. Cosby’s 2023 novel, All the Sinners Bleed, as a nine-episode TV series? The show is to begin filming this coming November, with the finished product to debut in 2027.

• And here’s a trailer for Lynley, the new BBC/BritBox adaptation of Elizabeth George’s best-selling Inspector Lynley crime series. Starring Leo Suter and Sofia Barclay, the show is an updated version of the 2001-2008 BBC One drama The Inspector Lynley Mysteries, which featured Nathaniel Parker and Sharon Small. Lynley will premiere on BritBox come Thursday, September 4.

Bullet Points: Info Dump Edition

• It’s only the third week of October, but already American bookseller Barnes & Noble has announced what it says are the “Best Mystery Books of 2023.” Here are that chain’s 10 selections:

— After That Night, by Karin Slaughter (HarperCollins)
— The River We Remember, by William Kent Krueger (Atria)
— The Last Devil to Die, by Richard Osman (Pamela Dorman)
— The Raging Storm, by Ann Cleeves (Minotaur)
— The Only One Left, by Riley Sager (Dutton)
— Zero Days, by Ruth Ware (Gallery/Scout Press)
— Small Mercies, by Dennis Lehane (Harper)
— All the Sinners Bleed, by S.A. Cosby (Flatiron)
— You Shouldn’t Have Come Here, by Jeneva Rose (Blackstone)
— Murder Your Employer: The McMasters Guide to Homicide, by Rupert Holmes (Avid Reader Press)

Deadly Pleasures Mystery Magazine editor George Easter observes that, in addition to those, B&N’s “Best Fiction of 2023 list [contains] two titles that some consider mystery fiction”: Bright Young Women, by Jessica Knoll (Simon & Schuster/Marysue Rucci); and I Have Some Questions for You, by Rebecca Makkai (Viking).

• Author Max Allan Collins spreads the word that actor Todd Stashwick, who commanded such attention as the irksome Captain Liam Shaw in Season 3 of Star Trek: Picard, has been cast as Chicago private investigator Nathan Heller in the pilot for a podcast version of Collins’ longest-running crime series. Said pilot is adapted from Chapter 1 of Stolen Away (1991), the fifth Heller yarn.

• This page has frequently highlighted instances of stock photography being overused on crime and thriller novels. Here are two additional examples: Last Night at the Hollywood Canteen, by Sarah James (Sourcebooks Landmark, November 2024); Hard Girls, by J. Robert Lennon (‎Mulholland, February 2024).



Do publishers think readers don’t notice such blatant duplications, or that we just don’t care about them? I can’t decide.

• It’s sad to hear that the respected books Web site LitReactor is going out of business after a dozen years. Financing problems and the death of one of its co-founders are cited as reasons for LitReactor shutting down as of December 31. “The site will no longer be accessible after that,” we are informed. As it turns out, there were several links to LitReactor pieces in The Rap Sheet. I have already replaced those with archive pages from The Wayback Machine.

• Just in time for Halloween, Mystery Fanfare blogger Janet Rudolph has posted her updated (and remarkably lengthy) lists of mystery novels and short-story anthologies linked to that celebration.

• In a CrimeReads piece from 2019, Olivia Rutigliano argues that Bram Stoker’s 1897 horror novel, Dracula, is also “an incredibly complex, fascinating mystery.” Well, I for one am convinced.

• Longtime boob-tube fanatics should find more treats than tricks in this post from Comfort TV that sees David Hofstede digging up an assortment of haunted houses in classic television shows.

• And Caroline Crampton is back with the latest episode of her podcast, Shedunnit. The topic this time around is how “the supernatural and the rational come together in the murder mystery.” Works referenced include Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone, Margery Allingham’s Look to the Lady, John Dickson Carr’s The Red Widow Murders, and Gladys Mitchell’s Wraiths and Changelings.

• Texas Monthly’s Chris Vognar profiles Houston’s Murder by the Book as part of the magazine’s Indie Bookstore Week salute, writing:

For all of the foreboding tales within, Houston’s Murder by the Book feels soft and inviting, with massive windows up front and plenty of places inside to kick back and dig into something grisly. With its coffee mugs and T-shirts shouting out famous crime-solving heroes (plenty of “Holmes& Watson& Marple& Poirot” merch), the place looks downright friendly. “There’s a lot of natural light and, depending on the time of day, natural darkness,” says Lou Berney, an Edgar-winning thriller author, who always looks forward to reading from his novels at the venerable crime bookstore. “Events start out cheerful and end up kind of ominous and spooky. I love that.”

Don Winslow, a dean of crime fiction, visits Murder by the Book whenever he’s on tour, including a recent stop to discuss his new novel, City of Dreams. The British thriller master Ruth Ware came through in June to promote Zero Days. Best-selling novelists Michael Connelly and James Lee Burke are regulars. The store, a Houston literary staple since 1980, draws throngs of crime aficionados to these events, and at four thousand square feet, it has plenty of room for them to roam.

Murder by the Book harvests a sort of glee in terrible doings. It serves up bloodshed not just with a smile, but also with a flurry of knowledgeable recommendations based on devoted clients’ interests. “I never get out of there without buying three or four excellent novels I wouldn’t have found otherwise,” Berney says. It’s like Cheers, but with poison in the beer.

(Hat tip to In Reference to Murder.)

• Owlcation’s Ronald E. Franklin once more raises that eternal question: Were Erle Stanley Gardner’s Perry Mason and Della Street ever connected romantically? “The fact that his secretary never became Mrs. Della Mason,” he explains, “was certainly not due to lack of trying on Perry’s part—he proposed five separate times, but Della turned him down every time.” (Hat tip to The Bunburyist.)

• Speaking of Mason, a video games and sports Web site called JStationX has posted a piece about the 1960 Perry Mason episode “The Case of the Violent Village.” It’s pretty bland, overall, but mentions that Mason “made appearances in other novels written [by] Erle Stanley Gardner, such as the Cool and Lam series.” What? Thanks to an extraordinary bit of luck, I own all 30 of the Bertha Cool/Donald Lam detective novels. And though I haven’t worked my way through every single one of those yet, nowhere have I come across a cameo appearance by Los Angeles’ best-known fictional defense attorney. Can anyone tell me in which book Mason figures, if he does?

• Hard as this may be to believe, I completely failed to notice the 65th anniversary of 77 Sunset Strip’s ABC-TV premiere in 1958. Fortunately, blogger Terence Towles Canote’s did not.

• It was half a century ago this month that “Shaft made its move from big to small screen with the broadcast of ‘The Executioners’ as part of the CBS New Tuesday Night Movie series,” recalls Steve Aldous, author of The World of Shaft (2015). The show didn’t fare well in prime time, not well at all. “The series,” adds Aldous, “lasted for only seven feature-length episodes playing every third week as part of a rotating series with James Stewart’s country lawyer show Hawkins and a standalone CBS TV movie on a Tuesday night over five months.” A 111-day Hollywood writers strike in 1973 and an egregious watering-down of the sexy, ass-kicking protagonist Richard Roundtree had made famous in theaters were blamed for the show’s early demise.

• Meanwhile, Aldous has lately been stuffing his World of Shaft Facebook page with historical ephemera (newspaper clippings, magazine stories, etc.) related not only to the Shaft TV show, but also to the third and final Shaft film, Shaft in Africa, which marked its 50th anniversary this year, too.

• I’m only halfway through watching Season 3 of Hulu’s Only Murders in the Building, starring Steve Martin, Martin Short, and Selena Gomez. Yet already the streaming channel has picked up that mystery-comedy series for a fourth season.

• Season 8 of the BBC One TV series Shetland, with Scottish actress Ashley Jensen taking over as lead from Douglas Henshall (who left after seven seasons), is set to debut in the UK on Wednesday, November 1. You can watch a brief trailer below. So far, there hasn’t been any announcement of when the new set of episodes will reach American TV screens, but we are hoping to hear soon.



• This I didn’t see coming. From In Reference to Murder:

Margot Robbie’s LuckyChap and Brad Pitt’s Plan B production company are in talks to co-produce a remake of the classic 1934 comedy mystery, The Thin Man, after the rights recently became available. Previously, Rob Marshall and Johnny Depp were set to direct and star, respectively, in a remake, until Warner Brothers scrapped that project in 2012. Based on the Dashiell Hammett crime novel, The Thin Man is a murder mystery about a husband and wife who partner up to find a missing acquaintance, later discovered to be murdered. Directed by W.S. Van Dyke, the 1934 film starred William Powell as husband Nick Charles and Myrna Loy as wife Nora Charles and was nominated for four Academy Awards, including best picture and best actor for William Powell. (It was followed by five sequels.)

• The graphic novel version of Agatha Christie’s 1934 Hercule Poirot whodunit, Murder on the Orient Express—adapted and illustrated by Bob Al-Greene—was released in September and has been enjoying favorable notices since. BOLO Books’ Kristopher Zgorski, for instance, calls it “a beautiful and faithful recreation of the narrative we all know and love in visual format.” His fellow critic Lesa Holstine opines, “This is an excellent way to introduce Agatha Christie to fans of graphic novels or new readers of the author.” I have a copy of that paperback book myself, and have been wending my way through it before bed each night. The fact that I know how the story ends doesn’t inhibit my relishing this new treatment; nor am I bothered by Al-Greene having condensed portions of the text for visual-storytelling purposes. Frankly, the only thing I find slightly jarring is the artist’s portrayal of Poirot as having a completely bald noggin and an imposing mustache that sweeps up to the tops of his ears (but is still less peculiar than the cookie duster Kenneth Branaugh sported in his three Poirot pictures). I don’t remember either of those from the many book-cover illustrations of Christie’s brilliant Belgian sleuth.

• Although you may not have noticed, I followed through on my commitment to give this page’s right-hand blogroll a trim. But one of the sites I’d targeted, Alpha-60 books, managed to stave off the knife by posting a new review (of William Campbell Gault’s 1958 Joe Puma novel, Night Lady) right before I began pruning.

• In The Girl with All the Crime Books, critic and blogger Louise Fairbairn interviews E.S. (Elaine) Thomson, whose fifth Jem Flockhart/Will Quartermain historical mystery, Under Ground, is new on shelves in Great Britain this month. (It’s not slated for distribution in the States until next March.)

• Young Depression-era robbers Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow hold a prominent, infamous place in U.S. history. But how many remember Lucille Walker and Alexander Mackay, who “captured countless headlines as they led a six-week rampage of robberies across Los Angeles,” commencing in late 1930?

• Finally, let us pay our respects to California-born actress Suzanne Somers, who passed away on October 15. As A Shroud of Thoughts notes, she was most familiar for co-starring in the TV sitcoms Three's Company and Step by Step. However, my earliest memory of Somers comes from a 1974 Rockford Files episode, “The Big Rip-off,” that was broadcast three years before Three’s Company hit the airwaves, and in which the then-28-year-old blonde played a woman suspected of offing her husband. Her list of subsequent TV drama guest spots is short (Starsky and Hutch, The Six Million Dollar Man), but prior to Rockford she did have uncredited roles in the films Bullitt and Magnum Force. Eventually, Somers became a controversial spokesperson on subjects related to health and well-being. She died at age 76 after being diagnosed with stage II breast cancer. FOLLOW-UP: The Los Angeles Times says Somers “died of ‘breast cancer with metastasis to the brain,’ according to a report citing her death certificate.”

Favorite Crime Fiction of 2023, Part III: Fraser Massey

Fraser Massey is a journalist in London, England. A former columnist for Radio Times, Now, and Real People, he reviews crime fiction for the Aslef Journal. An early draft of his not-yet-published neo-noir thriller, Whitechapel Messiah, was shortlisted in the New Voices category at the inaugural Capital Crime Festival Awards in 2019.

• The Last Dance, by Mark Billingham (Atlantic Monthly):

Mark Billingham knows a thing or two about murder, as well he might after 22 years spent writing Tom Thorne police procedurals. Specifically, he knows what many other authors often forget: For every murder victim, there’s doubtless a grieving relative in need of comfort left behind.

Perhaps not many real-life police would wrap their arms around a despairing widow and assure her that one day things will feel better. But when Blackpool Detective Sergeant Declan Miller—Billingham’s new protagonist in The Last Dance—does, only a cold-hearted, cynical reader could fail to feel a lump in their throat. Miller’s tender-heartedness is understandable. We meet him as he returns to work early from compassionate leave, following the shooting death of his police inspector wife (and amateur ballroom dancing partner), Alex. Partly, Miller wants to keep an eye on detectives looking into her death, but mostly he just needs a distraction from his grief.

He’s assigned a new police partner, heavy metal music fan DS Sara Xiu, as well as a double murder in need of attention. Two seemingly unconnected guests have been found dead in adjoining rooms at the Sands Hotel. Miller knows instinctively that if he can find a link between those victims, he’ll be well on the way to solving this labyrinthine mystery. The case intrigues him, even more so when he discovers one of the deceased is the son of a crime boss Alex had been investigating at the time she died. Evidence suggests these crimes were the result of a bungled contract hit-job.

Don’t be misled into thinking that a novel about a grieving detective is going to be a thoroughgoing sob-fest. Yes, as Miller reunites with members of the dancing group (mostly ex-cops) to which he and his wife belonged, tears are shed. But one of this detective’s mechanisms for coping with his lingering pain is making wisecracks wherever possible. That plays well to Billingham’s background as a former stand-up comedian. The jokes start right off the bat, as he comments on his story’s setting: the rundown British seaside resort of Blackpool.

“To the casual observer,” he writes, “this might be Las Vegas.

“If that casual observer really squinted.

“And had never been to Las Vegas.”

The author’s enjoyment at introducing a fresh detective series after all those Tom Thorne novels is infectious.

• Ozark Dogs, by Eli Cranor (Soho Crime):

Noir fiction is said to flourish whenever faith in society and its institutions is at a particularly low ebb. In tough times, the argument goes, readers take refuge in stories that show how things could actually be far worse than they are. Perhaps that’s why cracking yarns by S.A. Cosby, Dennis Lehane, Jordan Harper, and Eli Cranor have all drawn favorable responses this year.

Cranor’s second novel (after 2022’s Edgar Award-winning Don’t Know Tough) presents us with two warring rural Arkansas families, the Ledfords and the Fitzjurls. Their feud goes back a generation, to when junkyard owner Jeremiah Fitzjurls’s son, Tommy, was convicted for the brutal slaying of Bunn Ledford’s eldest boy, Rudnick.

Bunn, a methamphetamine dealer by trade, has benefited from the meth epidemic that’s become such a scourge across rural America. He made his own product until his ramshackle drugs lab literally blew up in his face, leaving him both horribly disfigured and with no way to continue earning an income. It’s his second son, a white supremacist skinhead named Evail, who finally comes up with a desperate new moneymaking stratagem. Instead of manufacturing their own meth, they’ll purchase it from a Mexican drugs cartel over the border. When the Ledfords find themselves short of cash to embark on this enterprise, Evail offers to kidnap white teenage girls and trade them as sex slaves to pay for the drugs.

Bunn sees this as a fine opportunity to wreak some revenge on Jeremiah Fitzjurls, a loner and Vietnam War veteran who’s been struggling to bring up his 17-year-old granddaughter, Jo, ever since her father, Tommy, was sent to prison. But Jeremiah’s temperamentally unsuited to that role, and his overprotectiveness is driving her to find brand-new ways to misbehave. Evail intends to take advantage of her freedom by snatching her as his first victim to swap for 50 pounds of Mexican meth.

This is as black a noir yarn as you’ll find, and Cranor maintains an admirably relentless pace throughout his telling of it. He even saves the story’s most startling plot twist to puncture the only light element in these pages—the love story between Jo and her quarterback boyfriend, Colt Dillard (another Ledford relation, though she doesn’t know that), to whom she plans to lose her virginity on high school prom night.

Any romantics among this novel’s readers might want to skip that particular revelation.

• Past Lying, by Val McDermid (Atlantic Monthly):

Teasingly, Val McDermid opens her seventh and latest Detective Chief Inspector Karen Pirie novel with a Raymond Chandler quote: “The perfect detective story cannot be written.” Might she be setting out to prove the great man wrong?

One of Past Lying’s principal players, bestselling Tartan noir crime-fictionist Jake Stein, believes the perfect crime story must contain the perfect murder. Following Stein’s untimely demise due to a brain aneurysm, his papers are bequeathed to the National Library of Scotland. Among those is a fragment of a novel-in-progress in which a character claims to have devised the perfect murder—and then gone on to kill someone in order to test whether his theory would stand up. The victim sounds worryingly similar to Lara Hardie, an Edinburgh University student whose disappearance in the previous year has not yet been solved by police.

McDermid’s tale is set in April 2020, in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, when Scotland imposed rigorous lockdown conditions to halt the virus’ spread. As a consequence of those, Pirie and her team are only allowed to interview witnesses from a distance of two meters (six feet five inches)—or, to paraphrase McDermid, approximately the length of two German Shepherds or one Richard Osman. (The exceptionally tall author of the Thursday Murder Club novels is just one real-life figure McDermid mentions as she writes gleefully about the world of mystery thrillers.)

When Lara Hardie’s body turns up exactly where Stein’s unpublished book said it would be, Pirie has to decide whether the case can really be that simply solved. “It’s a three-layer problem,” declares her sergeant, Daisy Mortimer, producing a massive box of chocolates. The two detectives munch salted pralines, treacle toffees, nut clusters, pisco sours, and mint cracknels as they sift through the evidence. By the time Pirie grabs the last chocolate ginger, she’s worked out the answer.

Past Lying may not be the perfect crime story, but it’s one of the best this year and likely the greatest we’ll see set during the pandemic.

• Red Queen, by Juan Gómez-Jurado (Minotaur):

When the near-transparent corpse of a teenage boy is found in the home of Spain’s most prominent banker, the newly formed investigative team of civilian Antonia Scott and Inspector Jon Gutiérrez are brought in to catch the killer. The boy suffered a slow and painful death, with all the blood drained from his body.

That macabre killing, we learn, was the result of an abduction gone wrong carried out by a figure called Ezekiel, who has now claimed another victim—a textile tycoon’s daughter. Can Scott and Gutiérrez rescue her before Ezekiel takes another life?

Those mismatched partners in crime-solving are employed by a secret pan-European agency tasked with stopping the sort of major crimes that would spread panic across the continent if they became public knowledge. Scott’s a half-English/half-Spanish bona fide genius with an IQ of 242, the highest in Spain—and possibly in the world. (Older readers may compare her to American TV sleuth Adrian Monk, though Monk was never pitted against an opponent as nightmarishly cruel and disturbing as Ezekiel.) Gutiérrez, meanwhile, is a gay, food-loving, and corrupt cop who was caught red-handed planting evidence on a suspect. He’s been told that the only way he can escape incarceration is to work as Scott’s minder. He readily agrees, knowing that maintaining his freedom will allow him to continue consuming his mother’s delectable cod cheeks. As we read about Gutiérrez struggling to climb stairs, though, it’s hard not to wonder whether an enforced spell away from his mother’s home-cooking might actually do him good.

Red Queen is a stylish thriller, the first novel in a trilogy by journalist and author Gómez-Jurado, which between them in their original Spanish language versions have already sold more than 2 million copies. The English translation of the second entry, Black Wolf, is due out on both sides of the Atlantic in March 2024.

• Dead of Night, by Simon Scarrow (Kensington):

The ghost of Nazi chieftain Heinrich Himmler hovers ominously over this second World War II-era thriller starring Criminal Inspector Horst Schenke of Berlin’s Kriminalpolizei, or Kripo. It’s the early days of 1940. Schenke and his detectives are diligently dealing with the latest scams perpetrated by their city’s criminal element, while slowly becoming aware of the far greater atrocities being carried out in their name across Europe by Adolf Hitler’s government. All the while, they’re watched over by Himmler—a complete madman, as history records it, yet put in charge of maintaining German law and order—who keeps a close watch on Kripo activity via his deputy, Reinhard Heydrich.

Dead of Night is a fictionalized account of how the Aktion T4 eugenics program—a classified policy of Hitler and his henchmen to murder mentally and physically disabled children before there was a chance their blood might “contaminate” the Aryan gene pool—ultimately came to light. Even the Nazis, it seems, were worried at first that their monstrous plan to do away with innocent children might cause sufficient outrage to prompt an uprising.

In this novel, Schenke risks the wrath of Himmler and Heydrich by ignoring an instruction not to investigate the death of a doctor, and then looking into what happened to one of the early young patients sent for treatment in an Aktion T4 healthcare facility. Scarrow’s prose is admirably terse, allowing the full horror of the evidence Schenke uncovers to speak for itself. This is a terrifying story but an important and chilling reminder, if one be needed, of the evil ideology that lay behind the fascist policies that once held sway in Germany.

Scarrow’s previous Horst Schenke novel, Blackout, was released in 2021. An as-yet-untitled third installment in the series is set for publication in Great Britain this coming June. UPDATE: The release of that third novel has been postponed until March 2025.

Other 2023 Favorites: Small Mercies, by Dennis Lehane (Harper); All the Sinners Bleed, by S.A. Cosby (Flatiron); The Secret Hours, by Mick Herron (Soho Crime); Scorched Grace, by Margot Douaihy (Gillian Flynn); and City of Dreams, by Don Winslow (Morrow).

Bullet Points: Novedecennial Edition

• Today marks 19 years since The Rap Sheet was launched as a blog separate from January Magazine. I’m not really in the mood to make a big deal of this occasion; I would prefer to reserve that for our 20th-anniversary celebration. But let me share a couple of statistics. November of last year saw the publication of our 9,000th post. Over the five succeeding months, we’ve put up another 124. And as of today, The Rap Sheet has registered 10,084,287 pageviews. Thank you to everyone who has found value in this site over the years!

• In Reference to Murder brings word that “Netflix has ordered a series adaptation of S.A. Cosby’s [2023] novel, All the Sinners Bleed, from the Obamas’ Higher Ground and Amblin Television. The story follows the first Black sheriff in a small Bible Belt county, haunted by his past in the FBI and his devout mother’s untimely death, as he must lead the hunt for a serial killer who has quietly been preying on Black communities in Southern Virginia for years in the name of God. Joe Robert Cole (Black Panther) will adapt and serve as showrunner for the nine-part series.” Sinners placed on many best books of 2023 lists.

• Prolific novelist James Reasoner gives a hearty thumbs-up to the new, 12th issue of Men’s Adventure Quarterly, which is devoted to fictional private eyes. The contents include vintage tales by Michael Avallone, Frank Kane, Walter Kaylin, and G.G. Fickling (represented in these pages by “The Red Hairing,” the only Honey West short story); Reasoner’s own essay about detectives in Western fiction; a survey of new Sherlock Holmes pastiches by Paul Bishop; “plus a feature on early Sixties TV series 77 Sunset Strip and Hawaian Eye, both of which were favorites of mine, especially 77 Sunset Strip,” writes Reasoner. “I never missed an episode back in those days. If you’re the right age, you can hear the show’s theme song in your head right now, can’t you? I miss the Sixties just thinking about all this stuff!” I just bought a copy of the magazine here.

• In CrimeReads, Los Angeles lawyer Bruce Riordan celebrates Ross Macdonald’s 1958 crime novel, The Doomsters, as “a turning point in the history of crime fiction.” He adds: “After six well written, but not quite original, Lew Archer novels, Ross Macdonald was searching for something original. With The Doomsters, he broke away from the influence of Raymond Chandler, the writer who cast a giant shadow over Macdonald and American crime fiction.”

• Author Don Winslow (California Fire and Life, The Dawn Patrol, City in Ruins) has been named as the editor of Mariner Books’ The Best American Mystery and Suspense 2025 anthology.

• This will force me to locate and replace many Rap Sheet links, especially in our regular “Revue of Reviewers” posts: The excellent free review site New York Journal of Books, which debuted in 2010 “to fill the gap left by the newspaper book review sections that have folded in recent years,” just recently folded itself. Publishers Weekly quotes founder Ted Sturtz as blaming Donald Trump’s tariff chaos for his site’s failure. He observes that NYJB “relied on Amazon commissions and Google Adsense for revenue … The wide-ranging tariffs imposed by the Trump administration last month, he explained, ‘transform[ed] consumer behavior so that these revenues entirely collapsed. This was so quick and breathtaking that we in a very short ... time saw our revenues sink from a surplus to a fraction of our costs.’” He stresses: “Our actual undoing was not publishing industry conditions. It was the current tariff war.”

• The Rap Sheet dumped Twitter/X back in January. Now the Chicago Review of Books is doing the same, “because why be part of a crypto-neo-Nazi-hellsphere when we could, just, well, not.” Like this blog, CHIRB has moved its social media activities to Bluesky.

• Hart to Hart’s Stefanie Powers profiled by TV Guide in 1980.

• The British Crime Writers’ Association has announced that it has two new sponsors for its annual Dagger awards.

• And after much hemming and hawing, I have finally made arrangements to attend Bouchercon 2025 in New Orleans. I haven’t been to the Big Easy since the last Bouchercon held there, back in 2016. This time, my good friend and fellow Rap Sheeter Ali Karim will serve as International Fan Guest of Honor, so I could hardly excuse myself from the festivities. See a list of other attendees here.