The CrimeReads editors select their favorite crime novels, mysteries, and thrillers of the year. Check back in the coming days for more of the Best Books of 2021.
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PJ Vernon, Bath Haus
(Doubleday)
The great age of the gay thriller has arrived!!! For so long, gay characters were either either extremely problematic villains or overly respectable charmsters designed to soothe heterosexual audiences, as Vernon writes about here, but lately, gay thrillers are finally allowing queer characters the moral range of, well, real people. In Bath Haus, the perfect exemplar of this trend, restless Oliver knows he should be happy with his long-time doctor partner, but he finds himself straying to the local bath house nonetheless. When he’s attacked by a stranger in his moment of infidelity, Oliver focuses on hiding the truth from his boyfriend and evading the stranger’s continued pursuit, in a thriller that gives new meaning to the “fight or flight” response. –Molly Odintz, CrimeReads Senior Editor
Megan Abbott, The Turnout
(Dutton)
Abbott’s work is so intensely visceral, summary just can’t do it justice. This year she explores her signature forms of dread within a new world perfectly suited to her immense skills: ballet. A world of physical pain, deprivation, competition, and artistic expression. There she finds three complex and fascinating souls: Dara Durant, her husband Charlie, and her sister Marie. The three of them run the Durant School of Dance, inherited from an imposing mother and now operated with a strange new choreography by the three dancers whose lives have become so intertwined. An accident on the eve of the school’s Nutcracker performance throws the world into disarray and brings out long-dormant tensions and dark memories. Abbott has an uncanny skill with the evolving anxieties of intimate relationships, and with The Turnout she may just have her most deeply unsettling novel to date. –Dwyer Murphy, CrimeReads Editor-in-Chief
Colson Whitehead, Harlem Shuffle
(Doubleday)
After the soaring success of the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys, Whitehead was back this year with a crime novel of profound depth and complexity, set in 1960’s Harlem and focused on the life and ambitions of one Ray Carney, a furniture salesman who also moonlights in some casual fencing of stolen goods. The two activities serve two parts of Ray’s identity, the one respected, law-abiding, and on the rise, socially speaking; the other is his crook side, drawn in by a family of hustlers and himself vulnerable to that special thrill. He eventually falls in with a crew looking to pull a heist in Harlem’s most glamorous hotel, a job that gives Whitehead room to detail the Harlem era in meticulous, meaningful detail, bringing a kind of secret city into spectacular life. –DM
Alison Gaylin, The Collective
(William Morrow)
I’ve been a fan of Alison Gaylin’s work for quite some time, and it’s really gratifying to see The Collective turning her into a household name. In this breakthrough thriller, a grieving mother seeking revenge against the man responsible for her daughter’s death finds a like-minded group of grief-stricken vigilantes on the dark web. If she helps them, they’ll help her. But the kind of help they’re asking for might be more than anyone is willing to give… –MO
Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Velvet Was the Night
(Del Rey)
Moreno-Garcia brings 1970s Mexico City to vivid, startling life with a dizzying story of hidden depths and big emotions. A young women, an art student involved in the city’s turbulent political scene, disappears. Her neighbor, a devotee of romance and adventure magazines, decides to leave the confines of her home and go out in search of the young woman, moving through activist and artistic subcultures whose existence she hardly suspected. Her search is mirrored by a more sinister one, as a man named Elvis wants to find the same young woman but finds himself instead captivated by her neighbor and drawn into the woman’s lonely obsessions. These are deeply eccentric and fascinating characters who seem at times to have stepped out of an Elmore Leonard and into the chaotic politics of an exuberant and tumultuous Latin metropolis. That’s a heady mix, and Moreno-Garcia handles all the wildness and desperation with careful skill, creating a story that resonates with a genuinely edgy sensibility. –DM
Laura Lippman, Dream Girl
(William Morrow)
Lippman’s latest is atmospheric and truly frightening. Lippman took a break from fiction last year to publish a deeply thoughtful collection of essays, My Life as a Villainess, and her new book continues her exploration of older age and increasing vulnerability in a way that strongly resonates for children of aging parents. Dream Girl is described best (and most succinctly) by the publisher as having “echoes of Misery” (I’d tack on Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? to the list of comparisons, if one of the sisters was replaced by a writer having lots and lots of sex, or at least, memories thereof). A writer is recovering from an accident in his spare and hermetically sealed apartment, interacting only with his assistant and his nurse—that is, unless you believe the calls he’s getting from a character in his latest book are real…And then, of course, there’s the dead body he wakes up next to one morning. Once again Lippman has delivered a slow-burn thriller that is a quiet triumph of plotting and suspense. –MO
S.A. Cosby, Razorblade Tears
(Flatiron)
Cosby’s Razorblade Tears is hands-down the crime world’s breakout hit of the year, and with good reason: it’s as powerful a story as they come, told with great emotional depth and skill. Ike Randolph and Buddy Lee are an unlikely pair, both of them ex-cons but on opposite ends of some deep divides, but drawn together by the deaths of their sons and a mission for revenge. Cosby is tackling some of the most pressing subjects of our time—racial relations, sexuality, family trauma, rural divides—and he’s doing it packed into a story of impeccable pacing and suspense. The inner turmoil of fathers out for revenge and sons senselessly murdered brings to mind mythical and religious allegory, tapping into something essential and deeply-rooted in our collective past. Quite simply, this is a novel by a storyteller working in the great human tradition. –DM
Naomi Hirahara, Clark and Division
(Soho)
Hirahara’s latest is a revelation: a powerful historical novel that illuminates an obscured chapter of American history while also zeroing in on the most intimate of family dramas. In 1944 Chicago, we follow Aki Ito who, along with her parents, has been recently released from a California internment camp and relocated to a new city. Her older sister is supposed to be there waiting for them, but instead they receive brutal news: Rose is death. Her death was determined to be suicide, but none of it sits right with Aki, so she sets off on a journey through the city and its many immigrant enclaves to find a web of wartime corruption. Hirahara brings out the subtle textures of everyday life for Japanese-Americans living in a hostile society, torn between identities and family loyalties. The mystery at the heart of Clark and Division is as compelling as they get, but it’s the deeply felt humanity of Hirahara’s characters that will drive you forward page by page through this brilliant and heartbreaking story. –DM
Stuart Neville, The House of Ashes
(Soho)
In retrospect, Stuart Neville has perhaps been working towards the magnum opus that is The House of Ashes for his entire career — he started off with the kind of hard-boiled noir that’s not easily forgotten, then moved into domestic suspense just long enough to synthesize the dangers of domesticity with those of toxic sectarian conflict. In The House of Ashes, split between the present-day and the 1950s, follows a woman and her controlling husband to their new house in the Irish countryside, a home that’s been harboring dark secrets for far too long. –MO
Robyn Gigl, By Way of Sorrow
(Kensington)
This year, for the first time in my life, I started reading legal thrillers—and Robyn Gigl’s stunning debut is actually a straight-up legal thriller, not a psychological thriller masquerading as a courtroom drama. However, just because By Way of Sorrow is firmly in the legal camp doesn’t mean this isn’t one of the most strikingly inventive books you’ll read this year. In an incredibly well-plotted and twisty tale, a transwoman is accused of killing a powerful white man’s son, and Gigl’s lawyer protagonist takes on the complex defense, despite knowing she’ll be outed as herself transgender in such a high profile case. The suspense develops organically from the simple facts of the legal system: the accused woman is being held in a men’s prison, and her life depends on her transfer to a woman’s facility. Add in an epic conspiracy involving the rich and powerful, and you’ve got one of the best-plotted thrillers I’ve ever come across. –MO
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NOTABLE SELECTIONS
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Carolyn Ferrell, Dear Miss Metropolitan (Henry Holt & Co) · Gin Phillips, Family Law (Viking) · Catherine Ryan Howard, 56 Days (Blackstone) · Chris Offutt, Killing Hills (Grove) · Walter Mosley, Blood Grove (Mulholland) · Santiago Gamboa, The Night Will Be Long (Europa) · Rachel Howzell Hall, These Toxic Things (Thomas and Mercer) · Jean Hanff Korelitz, The Plot (Celadon) · Riley Sager, Survive the Night (Dutton) · Chandler Baker, The Husbands (Flatiron) · Nekesa Afia, Dead Dead Girls (Berkley) · Megan Collins, The Family Plot (Atria) · Josh Stallings, Tricky (Agora) · Lori Rader-Day, Death at Greenway (William Morrow) · Richard Osman, The Man Who Died Twice (Viking/Pamela Dorman) · Val McDermid, 1979 (Atlantic) · Peter Heller, The Guide (Knopf) · John Banville, April in Spain (Hanover Square Press) · Mette Ivie Harrison, The Prodigal Daughter (Soho) · Charlotte Carter, Rhode Island Red (Vintage Crime/Black Lizard) · Erin Mayer, Fan Club (Mira) · Lisa Jewell, The Night She Disappeared (Atria) · Lisa Unger, Confessions on the 7:45 (Park Row) · William Kent Kreuger, Lightning Strike (Atria) · James Kestral, Five Decembers (Hard Case) · Raquel V. Reyes, Mango, Mambo, and Murder (Crooked Lane) · Jeff Abbott, An Ambush of Widows (Grand Central).· Catie Disabato, U Up? (Melville House) · Kwei Quartey, Sleep Well, My Lady (Soho) · Percival Everett, The Trees (Graywolf Press) · Elle Cosimano, Finley Donovan is Killing It (Minotaur)· Amy Gentry, Bad Habits (HMH) · Nalini Singh, Quiet In Her Bones (Berkley) · Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Committed (Grove Press) · Francine Prose, The Vixen (Harper) · Caroline Kepnes, You Love Me (Random House) · Michael Nava, Lies With Man (Bywater Books) · Linwood Barclay, Find You First (William Morrow)
