Another year in the books and the world of crime fiction is a little wiser, a little more mature, its tastes and approaches more varied than ever before. Psychological thrillers continue their ascent, while 2019 was also a year of sweeping sagas, cold case investigations, indictments of recent history, and the reimagining of classic texts and setups. Contemporary icons like Laura Lippman and Kate Atkinson were back with new mysteries, while Attica Locke cemented her reputation among the decade’s very best. One of the most ambitious crime series in a generation came to a dramatic close, as Don Winslow released the third in the Cartel trilogy, and Steph Cha took up the mantle of “social noir” with a staggering new take on Los Angeles in the 1990s. It was a year for ambitious storytellers and for dedicated readers, whose “to-be-read” stacks kept on growing and growing.
In the coming days and weeks, we’ll be breaking down the year’s best books—according to our editors and their trusted circles of advisors and accomplices—in a number of categories, starting here with our choices for best novels from the big “crime” umbrella of crime, mystery, and thrillers. We’ll be back soon with our selections for the best new International Crime Fiction, True Crime, Noir, Psychological Thrillers, Espionage Fiction, and more. Some books will appear on multiple lists, some genre borders will be blurred. We hope you enjoyed the year in books. We know we did. It’s an exiting time to be reading crime fiction.
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The 10 Best Crime Novels of 2019
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Lisa Lutz, The Swallows (Ballantine)
The Swallows is a fresh, unique spin on genres that have already been reworked a million times: it’s a prep-school-set coming-of-age novel, but also a psychological thriller. And also a comedy. Alex Witt is a reluctant but tough new teacher at an exclusive boarding school who stumbles upon the school’s creepy subculture after a class writing assignment goes awry. Gemma is a popular girl who plans to sabotage a school tradition called “The Darkroom.” And soon, the students and teachers at the academy find their secrets slowly revealed and their thirst for revenge growing. Witty and caustic, winsome and clever, Lutz’s novel productively re-stages these familiar genres with the purpose of illuminating how various institutions excuse the oppression and silencing of women and girls.
Laura Lippman, Lady in the Lake (William Morrow)
Lippman’s new standalone mystery, set in 1960s Baltimore, is clearly a tale near and dear to her heart. A housewife leaves her husband to pursue a career as a reporter, and finds herself facing criticism from her own community even as she embarks on a passionate and transgressive affair and becomes obsessed with a dead woman found frozen in a fountain. Lady in the Lake is not baby boomer nostalgia—quite the contrary; the book is both empathetic to individuals and harshly critical of the divides and prejudices of the setting. A must-read!
Nina Revoyr, A Student of History (Akashic)
Revoyr’s latest is just barely a crime novel, but uses enough of the angles and atmospherics of noir to count, with a story that’s somewhere in between Sunset Boulevard and the darker regions of The Great Gatsby. Rick Nagano is a Los Angeles graduate student who, through a few chance opportunities, comes into the employ of one of the city’s oldest, richest, and most secretive families, trusted with the memoirs of its reigning matriarch. Transgressions ensue, as Rick begins to penetrate a new social strata and sees a hidden, monied Los Angeles kept well-hidden from most eyes. Revoyr is a subtle observer of human foibles and social structures alike, and the result is one of the most insightful, and the most entertaining books of the year.
Attica Locke, Heaven, My Home (Mulholland)
Attica Locke’s sequel to Bluebird, Bluebird, her Edgar-winner novel of crime and reckonings in East Texas, has a powerful premise—Texas Ranger Darren Matthews heads out to Lake Caddo to track down the missing son of a member of the Aryan Brotherhood, but with a secret mission: to collect evidence against the boy’s father and other members of the white supremacist gang before Trump can shut down the Rangers’ investigation. As Matthews searches for the boy in the Cajun-influenced town of Jefferson and its environs, he discovers a sinister effort on the part of the Aryan Brotherhood to take over land in the near-by historic free black town of Hopetown. Steeped in the music, history, swampy bayous, and piney woods of East Texas, Locke’s latest is not to be missed.
Don Winslow, The Border (William Morrow)
The finale to Winslow’s narco epic series does not disappoint. The Power of the Dog (2005), The Cartel (2015), and now The Border (2019) make up one of the most ambitious works in modern crime fiction, an epic narrative of the ill-fated War on Drugs and an achievement that rivals Ellroy’s history of the Los Angeles underworld. The Border goes as far as any work of fiction can in explaining how we’ve reached the current quagmire: a region engulfed in violence, the spread of an opioid epidemic, the militarization of police forces across the Americas, and the rise of opportunistic political regimes that capitalize on the suffering. Winslow also delivers on the human moments, with aching portraits of the war’s victims: a young boy from a tough Central American capital, making his way north on the train known as La Bestia; addicts on Staten Island; undercover agents putting in years to make cases, only to see their work bartered away. It’s an astonishingly rich mosaic of humanity.
Steph Cha, Your House Will Pay (Ecco)
Cha’s Your House Will Pay is one of the year’s most ambitious crime novels, an electric depiction of racial tensions and civil unrest in 1990s Los Angeles. Cha begins with the stories of two families and returns time and again to the texture of their everyday lives, but meanwhile shows the escalating racial tensions and civil unrest radiating outward from those families’ point of intersection—a violent encounter one night in Los Angeles. Your House Will Pay manages to be both an intimate, personal snapshot of a moment in time and also a novel of ideas, politics, and deeply felt emotion.
Kate Atkinson, Big Sky (Little, Brown)
Jackson Brodie returns! And is more downtrodden than ever…Fresh off the heels of 2018’s successful stand-alone spy novel Transcription, Atkinson returns to her beloved series character, as he attempts to enjoy a quiet life on the English coast. When Brodie’s hired to investigate the suspected infidelities of a trophy wife, he quickly pegs the suspicious husband as the real shady character in the marriage. Throw in a local ring of human traffickers, some surprisingly independent trophy wives, and a scrappy duo of policewomen and you’ve got Kate Atkinson gold.
Ruth Ware, The Turn of the Key (Gallery/Scout)
In Ware’s ode to Henry James’ Turn of the Screw, a young woman arrives at a mysterious manor to begin a new job as nanny to the scions of a wealthy family. She is immediately turned off by the intrusive creepiness of the decked-out smart house, and things quickly go from bad to worse with her new employers and disobedient charges, but nothing could prepare either Ware’s protagonist or her readers for the final twist at the end.
Alan Bradley, The Golden Tresses of the Dead (Bantam)
The Golden Tresses of the Dead is the final installment of a ten-book mystery series beloved by many, not just me and my sister. Set in the English countryside in the 1950s, the series, following the investigations of the precocious preteen detective, chemistry wiz, and amateur poisoner Flavia de Luce, culminates with the long-awaited wedding of Flavia’s older sister Ophelia to the dashing Dieter Schrantz. But things take a slight turn for the macabre when a human finger is found inside the wedding cake. This novel marks a turn in Flavia’s career, as well—after proving her knack for deduction, she starts a professional detective business with her family’s gardner, Arthur Dogger. The disaster at the wedding is going to be her first official case. It’s been a delight to see Flavia mature (but also hone her skills as a sleuth), this past decade—but the series, which is fabulously well-written and well-researched in its presentation of chemical phenomena, is also extremely meaningful because of the nature of its protagonist: a creative and clever girl who believes in her skills enough to navigate underestimation, condescension, and dismissal even when others would prefer her to stay silent.
Rachel Howzell Hall, They All Fall Down (Forge)
Rachel Howzell Hall’s latest thriller (her first standalone) takes a classic scenario straight out of the Agatha Christie playbook and gives it a modern, subversive twist, as seven strangers answer an invitation to a few nights at a private estate on a lush, remote spit of land off the coast of Mexico. The clash of personalities and secrets is immediate, as the guests discover that their weekend getaway isn’t quite so tranquil as they’d hoped. Howzell Hall has spent the last few years establishing herself as one of the most promising voices in detective fiction with her Elouise Norton series. Here she proves that she knows her way around a traditional mystery, too, with a few thriller twists for good measure.
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Notable Selections
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Adrian McKinty, The Chain · Karin Slaughter, The Last Widow · Michael Connelly, The Night Fire · Linwood Barclay, Elevator Pitch · Wendy Walker, The Night Before · William Kent Krueger, This Tender Land · Emma Donoghue, Akin · Craig Johnson, Land of Wolves · David Koepp, Cold Storage · John Vercher, Three-Fifths · Elizabeth Hand, Curious Toys · Lee Child, Blue Moon · John Connolly, A Book of Bones · Erica Wright, Famous in Cedarville · Rene Denfeld, The Butterfly Girl · John Grisham, The Guardians · Martha Grimes, The Old Success · Sujata Massey, The Satapur Moonstone · Ausma Zehanat Khan, A Deadly Divide · Samantha Downing, My Lovely Wife · Anna Pitoniak, Necessary People · James Ellroy, This Storm · Barbara Bourland, Fake Like Me · Erin Kelly, Stone Mothers · JoAnn Chaney, As Long as We Both Shall Live · Denise Mina, Conviction · Sara Collins, Confessions of Frannie Langton · Hilary Davidson, One Small Sacrifice · Jean Kwok, Searching for Sylvie Lee · Lauren Wilkinson, American Spy · Chanelle Benz, The Gone Dead · Aya de Leon, Side Chick Nation · Lori Roy, Gone Too Long · Anthony Horowitz, The Sentence is Death · Nathan Ripley, Your Life Is Mine · Alison Gaylin, Never Look Back · David Gordon, The Hard Stuff · Patrick Coleman, The Churchgoer · Kristen Lepionka, The Stories You Tell · Wil Medearis, Restoration Heights · Jo Nesbo, Knife · Rob Hart, The Warehouse · Alex Segura, Miami Midnight · C.J. Box, Bitterroots · Haylen Beck, Lost You · Annie Ward, Beautiful Bad · Joseph Knox, The Smiling Man · Stephen Mack Jones, Lives Laid Away · Lyndsay Faye, The Paragon Hotel · Miriam Toews, Women Talking · Laura Sims, Looker · Steph Post, Miraculum · Amy Gentry, Last Woman Standing · James Lee Burke, The New Iberia Blues · Philip Kerr, Metropolis · Young-ha Kim, Diary of a Murderer · Un-Su Kim, The Plotters · Jessica Barry, Freefall · Ausma Zehanat Khan, A Deadly Divide · Melissa Scrivner Love, American Heroin · Karen Lord, Unraveling · Donna Leon, Unto Us A Son Is Given · Abir Mukherjee, Smoke and Ashes · Niklas Natt Och Dag, The Wolf and the Watchman · Greg Iles, Cemetery Road · William Boyle, A Friend Is a Gift You Give Yourself · Angie Kim, Miracle Creek · Alafair Burke, The Better Sister
