Yes, it’s only June, a mere six months into the year, barely past the solstice, but in those six months, as the world has faced unprecedented challenges and renewed calls for justice, a great number of great crime novels have come out. Rest assured, we’ll be back in the coming months with many more recommendations, but in the meantime we thought, why not take stock of the year in novels right now? We could all use a few more books in our lives. So, please find ahead our choices for the best crime novels, mysteries, and thrillers released so far in 2020. And because the proverbial cup was overflowing, we’ve also included a list of notable selections to fill out your bookshelves. Thanks to all the authors for their incredible work.
Elizabeth Little, Pretty as a Picture (Viking)
Elizabeth Little’s Pretty as a Picture is a perfect Hollywood thriller. An out-of-work editor who’s split with her longtime filmmaking partner gets a chance to work with a director renowned for the quality of his films and the tyranny of his productions. She heads to a remote island where production is in full swing, taking over from the previous editor who left suddenly and mysteriously, only to find the locals hostile to a film based on the death of one of their own decades earlier. Two teenage girls, the children of a chef and a makeup artists, have turned themselves into amateur sleuths investigating the murder on which the film is based, and soon recruit the editor to assist in their investigation, which gets twistier by the minute. Charming, self-aware, and not to be missed! –MO
Steven Wright, The Coyotes of Carthage (Ecco)
Another debut that reads like a third novel, Steven Wright’s The Coyotes of Carthage is an intricate and cynical tale of power, greed, and political corruption. When a political fixer messes up a major campaign, he’s given one last chance by his tough-as-nails boss to redeem himself—he’s headed to the South Carolina backwoods with a quarter mill in dark money, where his job is to convince the local populace to allow corporate interests to plunder the natural preserve that provides most of the town’s jobs. Given the townspeople’s historic proclivities, he must hire a white strawman to advocate for him, and picks a family that proves to be a wildcard in what turns into the ballot initiative from hell. –MO
Read Steven Wright on the worlds of fictional con artists.
Jess Kidd, Things in Jars (Atria)
What can I say? I like things in jars. And Jess Kidd’s playful novel of Victorian mythos and science truly lives up to its title. A resurrectionist-turned-doctor-turned-investigator is hired by a wealthy gentleman scientist to track down his daughter, who turns out to be not so much his daughter as more…one of his specimens. She’s been kidnapped by the nanny, a hardened criminal who’s terrible backstory emerges in the guise of bedtime stories to her captive charge, while Kidd’s heroine teams up with the handsome ghost of a dead Irish boxer to track down the child and save her from a terrible fate as either a preserved rarity or a side-show freak. –MO
Read Jess Kidd on the legacy of supernatural crime fiction.
Ivy Pochoda, These Women (Ecco)
An almost unbearable tension runs throughout Ivy Pochoda’s newest novel, These Women, as five women are slowly drawn together by an unseen presence, a man who has them all slated as victims. Set in South Los Angeles, the women cross social, economic, and familial lines, and each is given room to breathe and come alive on the page. That we feel the fullness of their lives is all the more poignant as we come to learn just how threatened those very lives are. Pochoda is one of the crime world’s most incisive, insightful voices today, and These Women is an achievement in empathy and suspense, a book that manages to be of-the-moment and to capture something timeless and graceful. –DM
Read Ivy Pochoda on lessons learned reading and writing during a pandemic.
Deepa Anappara, Djinn Patrol to the End of the Line (Random House)
Deepa Anappara’s debut is so beautifully written and self-assured, it’s hard to believe it’s a debut. When I was paging through to pick out an excerpt, I was struck by how well each small section stands on its own. The entirety, however, is a rare thing indeed. Anappara brings decades of journalistic experience and a deeply humanistic perspective to this tale of a young boy living in the outer slums of a large Indian city who decides to investigate after children from his neighborhood start to go missing. Anappara interweaves rising prejudice against Muslims, social critique of increasing inequality, and the daily grind of poverty into her compelling tale of intrepid and humorous amateur sleuths. –MO
Don Winslow, Broken (William Morrow)
“The truth is, you can read thousands of pages in Winslow’s impressive, decades-spanning body of work without ever coming across a boring character. That, it seems to me, is the secret to what makes these books resonate with readers. His characters feel strongly about life, the way it’s ordered, the way it’s conducted. They have opinions about sauce recipes, ocean swells, condo layouts, loyalty, west coast jazz, the way coffee is made and consumed, the way to drive, preferably on the Pacific Coast Highway, and a host of other issues, big and small. These little foibles, preferences, and codes make them real. They make you want to spend time with these people, wherever they fall under traditional rubrics of good or bad, criminal or not. There’s blood pumping beneath every page. In Broken, you get these very human moments in abundance.”
Read more about Winslow’s return to California Noir in our interview with the author.
Patrick Hoffman, Clean Hands (Atlantic)
In Clean Hands, a young lawyer working at a white shoe firm in New York has his IPhone stolen during rush hour in Grand Central. The phone contains confidential documents pivotal to a civil dispute between banks, and as the hardware passes through several hands, the information it contains becomes currency for criminal networks of many, many different cultural backgrounds operating out of New York City’s neighborhoods like noir fiefdoms. The firm calls in its fixer, an ex-CIA hand with a team trained in crisis management. Soon, a widening conspiracy comes into focus. Clean Hands is Hoffman’s first book to take on New York as its central setting. It feels particularly timely in the city’s moment of crisis, as Hoffman’s crooks and conspirators fan out across an intricately, lovingly-drawn grid with as deep a roster of hustlers as any Elmore Leonard ever conceived. –DM
Read more about Hoffman’s intricate, essential crime novels in our interview with the author.
Hye-Young Pyun, Law of Lines (Arcade)
This is one of those books that leaves you staring into nothing, thinking “oh, the humanity,” for at least…30 minutes before starting another book. In this cat-and-mouse thriller of desperate people on the edge of ruin in South Korea’s harsh labor market, two women are brought together after suffering loss. One is in search of the debt collector who drove her father to suicide in a failed insurance fraud, while the other investigates her sister’s past trying to find clues to why her sister would drown herself. This book is full of love and loss, betrayal and sacrifice, exploitation and kindness. I kind of feel like crying just thinking about it. It’s so good, y’all. –MO
Kwei Quartey, The Missing American (Soho)
Kwei Quartey’s The Missing American is an extremely entertaining international thriller featuring a new series heroine Emma Djan, who joins, then quickly leaves, the police force after an unpleasant encounter with her corrupt and predatorial commanding officer and joins a private detective agency instead. An American man who goes to Ghana to consummate an online romance disappears, and Emma is soon on the case, tracing his disappearance to the talented internet scam artists of Ghana’s criminal underworld. Full of rich details and sly humor, The Missing American is perfect for the armchair traveler. –MO
Read Kwei Quertey on the role of the supernatural in African crime fiction.
Jennifer Hillier, Little Secrets (Minotaur)
Hillier is always walking the fine, tense line between thriller and horror, and one of the great pleasures of reading her work is the knowledge that the monsters, and the monstrous acts, will come, but you really have no idea who they are, and once you do, inevitably little slivers of humanity shine through. In Little Secrets, we meet a seemingly perfect couple whose world is shattered when their son is kidnapped. A year later, our protagonist, Marin, hires a private detective to pick up the case after the FBI has dropped it. Instead of finding her child, she learns a new, threatening secret about her family. That’s where the edges really get frayed. We go along as Marin finds out just how extreme she’s willing to live now that she’s lost nearly everything. It’s an invigorating ride, and Hillier handles it with the utmost assurance. She’s as skilled a writer as any working in crime today, and her stories keep getting more and more ingenious. Little Secrets is simultaneously devastating and jolting. It’s a book you won’t soon forget.
Read Jennifer Hillier on how being a parent made her a better thriller writer.
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Notable Selections
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Victor del Arbol, Breathing through the Wound (Other Press) · Jessica Barry, Don’t Turn Around (Harper) · Paul Vidich, The Coldest Warrior (Pegasus) · Sara Sligar, Take Me Apart (MCD / FSG) · Liz Moore, Long Bright River (Riverhead) · Graham Moore, The Holdout (Random House) · Christopher Bollen, A Beautiful Crime (Harper) · Walter Mosley, Trouble Is What I Do (Mulholland) · Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Untamed Shore (Agora) · Kate Elizabeth Russell, My Dark Vanessa (William Morrow) · Harlan Coben, The Boy from the Woods (Grand Central) · Mindy Mejia, Strike Me Down (Atria) · Samantha Downing, He Started It (Berkley) · Richard Santos, Trust Me (Arte Publico Press) · Clare Beams, The Illness Lesson (Doubleday) · Sheena Kamal, No Going Back (William Morrow) · Janelle Brown, Pretty Things (Random House) · Lucy Foley, The Guest List (William Morrow) · Scott Turow, The Last Trial (Grand Central) · Abir Mukherjee, Death in the East (Pegasus Books) · Megan Campisi, Sin Eater (Atria) · Andrea Bartz, The Herd (Ballantine) · Sarah Pinborough, Dead to Her (William Morrow) · Emily Beyda, The Body Double (Doubleday) · Stephanie Wrobel, Rose Gold (Berkley) · William Boyle, City of Margins (Pegasus) · Janelle Brown, Pretty Things (Random House)
