As 2019 comes to a close, it’s time to take stock of the decade that was in crime fiction and mystery. Why? Because we can. Because the books are there to be read and re-read, debated and reconsidered. And because this was, in retrospect—and maybe many of you saw this as it was unfolding—a pretty monumental decade in the long, tumultuous, and often brilliant course of crime fiction history. This is more than simply an exercise in list-making and taste-advocating. Charting the future of the genre requires, also, a rounding up of accounts, the occasional week where we put aside our to-be-read stacks and decide what has really mattered to us—and to our beloved genre.
Some trends surfaced as we made our choices, and they’re worth noting. One, the remarkable rise of the psychological thriller heralds a shift from “stranger danger” thrillers to acknowledging that harm often lurks at home (or at work). Two, there are fewer cops and pros solving crimes, and more amateurs and Hitchcock-style every-people thrust into investigations of everyday mysteries. Three, traditional mysteries are back—and they’re being read by millennials. Four, crime and mystery books are increasingly global, activist, female, diverse, and hard to pigeonhole into any particular subgenre.
Before you you dive into the book selections, a few notes on the process. The task we set ourselves was, at the outset, more or less impossible. Ranking books is inherently, incredibly subjective. But we asked our editors to consult as many outside readers as possible—including the most adamant readers in our crime fiction community, aka the CrimeReads core audience—and to also take into special consideration those books that had a lasting, formative influence on the genre and its authors. We also selected crime and mystery books that seemed to adhere to the basic structure of the genre and continue its traditions, rather than literary works masquerading as noirs. And finally, in an effort to combat recency bias, and because we have a full slate of “best of 2019” content coming soon, we more or less excluded books that came out within the last calendar year from consideration.
Many worthy books were left off this list; some of them are listed below in our Notables selection, while others will have to live to be recommended another day. Crime fiction is growing and evolving all the time, and we’re constantly discovering new veins of the literature to read, new authors to appreciate. Over the coming days, we’ll also be looking at the best crime fiction series of the decade and the rising voices of crime literature. In short, much more to come. For now, here are our choices for best crime novels of the decade.
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The Best Crime Novels of the Last Decade
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Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead, by Sara Gran
(2011)
Gran’s first in the Claire DeWitt series was a shot of adrenaline straight into the arm of private eye fiction, a gleefully strange, esoteric, sometimes hallucinatory new rendition of a beloved genre. DeWitt is the self-proclaimed world’s greatest detective, learned in the techniques of Jacques Silette, the great master whose obscure theories and works inform her every move. She first honed her craft on the streets of New Orleans, and a murder investigation brings her back to that city in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina’s devastation. Gran is one of the foremost stylists at work in crime fiction today, and the DeWitt series gives her the space to create all the strange, brooding atmospherics readers can handle. A genuinely compelling mystery is hidden inside this novel, several compelling mysteries in fact, but it’s the strong, engaging voice that will really draw readers into the dark, enchanting world of DeWitt.
Gone Girl, by Gillian Flynn
(2012)
More than any other book in the decade, Gillian Flynn’s mega-hit Gone Girl captured the essence of female rage, as millions of well-dressed, seemingly content women used Flynn’s fearsome takedown of the patriarchy to unleash their inner discontent. There are so many reasons to praise this book, but to focus on the impact alone, Gone Girl not only ushered in a decade of female-authored and feminist-driven crime fiction and helped to re-popularize the psychological thriller, it also gave us arguably the best speech in crime history. David Fincher’s superb adaptation of the book has also helped to cement Gone Girl’s rich, complex legacy.
The Thief, by Fuminori Nakamura
(2012)
This moody noir follows a petty thief as he walks the streets of a cold and unfriendly city; he makes the mistake of opening his heart to a young woman and her son, only to be given a harsh reminder that human connections can be nigh-impossible to maintain in his walk of life. Nakamura’s eerie atmosphere and spare prose are on full display, and it makes sense that this book would also have established his writing in the US. The Thief is also a great representation of the revival of midcentury minimalism that’s helped define the style of the decade.
Night Prayers, by Santiago Gamboa
(2012)
Santiago Gamboa’s reputation has been growing globally in recent years, but in the U.S. he’s still relatively unknown except among those steeped in contemporary Latin American noir and the latest evolutions of la novela negra. In Night Prayers, Gamboa presents the reader with his usual narrator-proxy, Santiago Gamboa, cultural attache. He’s stationed in New Delhi, but his work takes him to Bangkok, where he launches into the investigation of a young man’s imprisonment on drug trafficking charges, and then to his sister’s disappearance under mysterious, sinister circumstances. Gamboa is a worthy heir to Roberto Bolaño, and his version of this mystery is infinitely, artfully complex, weaving together a somewhat bumbling investigation, a family’s intimate tragedies, and the story of the Colombian world diaspora in recent decades. Night Prayers is everything a searching, ambitious noir should be.
And When She Was Good, by Laura Lippman
(2012)
Lippman has made her reputation as one of the giants of crime fiction based in large part on the strength of her long-running, audacious private eye series featuring Tess Monaghan, but her standalone novels stand as towering achievements on their own right, and none is more powerful than her 2012 thriller, And When She Was Good. The story looks at the splintered life of a suburban mother with a career in lobbying who also runs an upscale paid escort service. The death of a similarly situated madame throws her life into upheaval and set in action a relentlessly engaging plot full of ex-cons, shady businessmen, murders, and corrupt figures from all walks of life. Running beneath that compulsive storyline is another one full of profound insights about aging, processing trauma, sex, identity, and reckoning with sins past and present.
Dare Me, by Megan Abbott
(2013)
Trying to decide on the Megan Abbott book-of-the-decade is like trying to figure out the best crime books of the decade (i.e. a semi-arbitrary exercise in futility), but Dare Me, Abbott’s soon-to-be-on-television noir ode to the dangerous world of cheerleading feels like the most iconic. Abbott came up on the crime world through her lovingly rendered historical noirs, and Dare Me is the book that proved Abbott could be just as dexterous and hard-boiled when writing about contemporary teenagers. Abbott took inspiration from Full Metal Jacket when writing the book, which also means this is the toughest book about cheerleaders around.
The Man Who Loved Dogs, by Leonardo Padura
(2014)
Trostky has a strange relationship with detective fiction. The dramatic tale of his assassination is both epic tragedy and compelling crime story; pursued by Stalin’s goons no matter how far away from the motherland his exile took him, Trotsky watched his family be winnowed away far from his protection until he, too, fell victim to Stalin’s assaults. Leonardo Padura’s The Man Who Loved Dogs is not the first crime book to feature Trotsky—Paco Ignacio Taibo’s work Four Hands has Trotsky as a character writing a detective novel—but The Man Who Loved Dogs is certainly the most epic, as we take a 600-page doom-laden journey through the worst moments of the Twentieth Century, waiting for the inevitable confrontation between Trotsky and his assassin, both men who loved dogs.
Every Man a Menace, by Patrick Hoffman
(2016)
When Hoffman’s second novel was released in 2016, a good deal of attention was given to the author’s continued work as a private investigator. But if you came to his fiction expecting a formulaic detective story, you’d be drastically mistaken. Every Man a Menace is a sprawling, kaleidoscopic crime novel of shifting perspectives and shifting fortunes, following various tendrils out from a global ecstasy ring. From San Francisco’s Mission District to Miami to northern California jails to Southeast Asia, Hoffman’s story slithers along gathering momentum and nuance, as readers slowly grasp the sheer audacity and achievement of the work. Lives intersect, fates get entangled, and the novel more than lives up to the promise of its title. This is crime fiction that masters both the grassroot particulars and the vast global scope.
The Long Drop, by Denise Mina
(2017)
If I had to pick a single favorite book from this decade, Denise Mina’s The Long Drop would be an obvious choice—not only does Mina’s book have one of the most mature visions of the meaning of violence that I’ve ever come across, but it’s also gorgeously written, in a style that transports the reader to a mid-century Scotland weighed down by history even as it attempts to reinvent itself. The Long Drop is based on the crimes of Peter Manuel, a real life serial killer, and takes place, for the most part, on one long night when Manuel went drinking with the husband and father of two of his victims, who may have paid Manuel for the privilege of being freed from the earthly burden of his dependents (and who never faced punishment or condemnation for that heinous crime). Also, there’s a scene near the end which reminds me of Peter Lorre’s speech during the trial in M that’s particularly brilliant.
Bluebird, Bluebird, by Attica Locke
(2018)
Bluebird, Bluebird, a modern masterpiece, particularly excels at representing the fraught, frictional relationships between race and justice, and freedom and oppressive social institutions in America. Darren Mathews is a black Texas Ranger living in East Texas, torn up about his allegiance to his state and his career. He’s tried to leave the state, but has not been able to leave for long. He’s loyal to his badge, but also to his family, and suddenly his ties to his identity put his job at risk. It’s amid all of this that he travels to investigate two murders—a black Northern lawyer, and a white Southern woman. It’s this crime that causes the already chafing, seething racial tensions and discriminations to dangerously boil over. It’s one of the richest, fullest, most gut-wrenching crime stories I’ve read. And it meets this terrible era in American history passionately and eloquently to beautifully, powerfully condemn it.
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Notable Selections
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Faithful Place, Tana French (2010) · Black Water Rising, Attica Locke (2010) · Havana Lunar, Robert Arellano (2010) · The Boy in the Suitcase, Lene Kaaberbol & Agnete Friis (2011) · The Sound of Things Falling, Juan Gabriel Vasquez (2011) · The Devotion of Suspect X, Keigo Higashino (2011) · The Drop, Michael Connelly (2011) · Rogue Island, Bruce DeSilva (2011)· The Cutting Season, Attica Locke (2012) · Bent Road, Lori Roy (2012) · The Twenty-Year Death, Ariel S. Winter (2012) · The Informationist, Taylor Stevens (2012) · The Impeachment of Abraham Lincoln, Stephen L. Carter (2012) · Live by Night, Dennis Lehane (2012) · The Shining Girls, Lauren Beukes (2013) · The Maid’s Version, Daniel Woodrell (2013) · Save Yourself, Kelly Braffet (2013) · Reconstructing Amelia, Kimberly McCreight (2013) · Live By Night, Dennis Lehane (2013) · The Last Policeman, Ben Winters (2013) · Little Green, Walter Mosley (2013) · The Wicked Girls, Alex Marwood (2013) · Ordinary Grace, William Kent Krueger (2013) · Big Little Lies, Liane Moriarty (2014) · The Bishop’s Wife, Mette Ivie Harrison (2014) · The Black Hour, Lori Rader-Day (2014) · How The Light Gets In, Louise Penny (2014) · The Ballad of a Small Player, Lawrence Osborne (2014) · The Secret History of Las Vegas, Chris Abani (2014) · The Wicked Girls, Alex Marwood (2014) · You, Caroline Kepnes (2014) · The Meursault Investigation, Kamel Daoud (2015) · Dear Daughter, Elizabeth Little (2015) · The Cartel, Don Winslow (2015) · Jane Steele, Lyndsay Faye (2015) · The Devil You Know, Elisabeth de Mariaffi (2015) · Woman with a Blue Pencil, Gordon McAlpine (2015) · Long and Faraway Gone, Lou Berney (2015) · Jane Steele, Lyndsay Faye (2016) · Girls On Fire, Robin Wasserman (2016) · Charcoal Joe, Walter Mosley (2016) · Darktown, Thomas Mullen (2016) · The Girl Before, Rena Olsen (2016) · The Wrong Side of Goodbye, Michael Connelly (2016) · You Will Know Me, Megan Abbott (2016) · Luckiest Girl Alive, Jessica Knoll (2016) · The Do-Right, Lisa Sandlin (2016) · Dark Matter, Blake Crouch (2016) · IQ, Joe Ide (2016) · The Widow, Fiona Barton (2016) · The North Water, Ian McGuire (2016) · The Sympathizer, Viet Thanh Nguyen (2016) · The Woman in Cabin 10, Ruth Ware (2016) · Heretics, Leonardo Padura (2017) · Six Four, Hideo Yokoyama (2017) · Blame, Jeff Abbott (2017) · Before the Fall, Noah Hawley (2017) · Lying in Wait, Liz Nugent (2017) · The Blinds, Adam Sternbergh (2017) · Conviction, Julia Dahl (2017) · The Force, Don Winslow (2017) · Heretics, Leonardo Padura (2017) · If I Die Tonight, Alison Gaylin (2017) · The Perfect Nanny, Leila Slimani (2017) · Where It Hurts, Reed Farrel Coleman (2017) · Wonder Valley, Ivy Pochoda (2017) · The Dry, Jane Harper (2017) · August Snow, Stephen Mack Jones (2017) · UNSUB, Meg Gardiner (2017) · Jar of Hearts, Jennifer Hillier (2018) · Robicheaux, James Lee Burke (2018) · My Sister, The Serial Killer, Oyinkan Braithwaite (2018) · The Lonely Witness, William Boyle (2018) · The Witch Elm, Tana French (2018) · The Wife, Alafair Burke, (2018) · November Road, Lou Berney (2018) · Past Tense, Lee Child (2018) · This is How It Ends, Eva Dolan (2018) · Miami Midnight, Alex Segura (2018) · Our Kind of Cruelty, Araminta Hall (2018) · The Night Visitor, Lucy Atkins (2018) · The Shape of the Ruins, Juan Gabriel Vasquez (2018)
