The CrimeReads editors make their picks for the year’s best fiction.
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Jessica Knoll, Bright Young Women
(Simon & Schuster)
Jessica Knoll’s brilliant, blistering third novel is a tart new addition to the growing oeuvre of novels critiquing our fetishization of serial killers and focusing on their victims as whole people with interrupted lives, not props in their murderous dramas. Bright Young Women is Knoll’s take on Ted Bundy, as we follow the residents of a sorority house during and after a horrific attack by a serial-killing misogynist who will soon become as famous for his adoring fans as for his murders. The novel is split between two perspectives: a supremely self-possessed student who faces the daunting challenge of preserving her sorority sisters’ dignity in death, and a shy young woman who finds love, then seeks vengeance. Set in the late 70s, the novel’s grasp of the era is pitch-perfect, and Knoll’s craft in both plotting and dialogue is at a peak. I don’t think I’ll stop thinking about this book for quite some time. –MO
Colson Whitehead, Crook Manifesto
(Doubleday)
In the Crook Manifesto, the second installment of his Harlem Trilogy, Whitehead returns to the misadventures of Ray Carney, who’s quickly ascending to the status of éminence grise in the small business community of 1970s Harlem, but with that crooked side of his still lurking. Here, the catalyst for his explorations of the city’s dark heart is something simple: his daughter really, really wants to see the Jackson 5 at Madison Square Garden. That’s where Carney’s passage back over to the criminal world begins. Along the way we’re thrown in with a cast of schemers and operators, together making up the fabric of a shadow society. Whitehead writes the city of that era with such assurance, we begin to catch glimpses of the profound, pulsing whole: of New York in its most essential, corruptible form. –DM
Megan Abbott, Beware the Woman
(Putnam)
Beware the Woman is a stylish, sensual thriller that unfolds like a fever dream, with Abbott’s uncanny talents on display like never before. From the first page, we’re launched into a rich feeling of claustrophobia, even as the wilderness expands around us. A pregnant woman accompanies her new husband on a visit to his father’s remote house in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. A creeping sense of dread warns her that all is not right here, and she soon finds herself in an increasingly vulnerable situation. Abbott handles every new suspicion and revelation with a craftsman’s care, but what really elevates this novel is the pitch-perfect atmosphere, crafted with an immediacy and a physicality that make the reading at once disorienting and utterly thrilling. –DM
Hannah Michell, Excavations
(One World)
Hannah Michell’s literary thriller is a master class in capturing both great love and corporate greed. Sae, Michell’s complex heroine, is shocked when her husband Jae dies in the horrific collapse of a luxury tower. She puts her old journalism skills to work to find out who was truly responsible for the malfeasance after her husband’s memory is tarnished with accusations of incompetence, and soon finds herself on a odyssey through Seoul’s most powerful circles, high and low, as she seeks answers and resolution. Key to uncovering the truth is a trip down memory lane, as Sae recalls meeting her husband in their days as student protestors, and his subsequent suffering during a time of great government repression. Excavations is both gorgeously written and extraordinarily well-planned, with a delirious, emotional ending that will leave your shattered. –MO
Catherine Chidgey, Pet
(Europa)
As you’ll also see from the best international fiction of the year list (to be published next week on CrimeReads), publisher Europa has been having a banner year, and Catherine Chidgey’s Pet in particular has met with universal acclaim. Capturing the complexities of 1980s girlhood and the the twisted manipulations of a narcissistic schoolteacher, Pet is both a capsule of its era and a novel for our own times, where people allow populist authority figures to dictate their preferences and prejudices (ahem). I never thought I’d find a book to hold up to the contained brilliance of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, but Pet has done that and more. –MO
Deepti Kapoor, Age of Vice
(Riverhead)
What an epic read. Deepti Kapoor’s Age of Vice is a vast take-down of the corruption of the wealthy, told from three main perspectives: a reluctant scion of an infamous family, a loyal manservant who cannot forget what he has witnessed, and a curious (but possibly corruptible) journalist. Kapoor’s genius is not only in her characterization, but also the carefulness of her plotting, setting up the convergence of characters and the real-life consequences of their moral choices with perfect interior logic and pacing. We need more stories about money, the having of it and the absence, as the world becomes increasingly economically stratified—we are in a new Gilded Age (perhaps, as Deepti Kapoor titles it, an Age of Vice) and Kapoor is an exemplary voice in exploring the woes of capitalism. –MO
Jordan Harper, Everybody Knows
(Mulholland)
Harper’s Everybody Knows is noir at its absolute finest: at once perfectly in line with the long tradition of cynical, world-weary Angelenos delving into the moral abyss, and a thoroughly modern story about the city’s dominant industry and all the sins and compromises that are being covered up every day in order to keep the thing humming along. The story’s plot follows a public relations crisis, but soon enough the ‘case’ is spiraling outward to reveal something even more corrupt at the fabric of the entertainment industry. Harper approaches it all with an insider’s steely resolve, so at times it can seem like we’re reading a particularly heinous exposé, but his writing retains an air of dark poetry that only accentuates and elevates the disturbing material at hand. –DM
S.A. Cosby, All the Sinners Bleed
(Flatiron Books)
S.A. Cosby does Thomas Harris!! And proves that the serial killer novel is back with his cleverly plotted and socially relevant take on the hunt for a monstrous killer. Cosby goes Southern Gothic with the backstory, focusing on the sins of society and how indifference and prejudice are the true culprits behind the most terrible acts. In true Cosby fashion, the novel manages to touch on all manner of hot button topics.
The novel begins with a school shooting, where a white police officer kills the shooter: a Black man who was a former student at the school, and who claims his victim, a popular teacher, was hiding a terrible secret. When the town sheriff, the first Black man elected to the post in the small Southern town, begins to investigate the teacher’s horrific acts, the townspeople are deeply resistant to the truth, and meanwhile, he’s got a showdown coming between right-wingers determined to protect a Confederate monument and the protestors who want it gone. A fast-paced book that will also have you asking deep questions about the nature of faith, All the Sinners Bleed is one of my favorite books of the year. –MO
Eliza Clark, Penance
(Harper)
Eliza Clark’s had a boomer year in the US, with her incredibly disturbing avant-garde thriller Boy Parts soon followed up by the release of Penance, an intriguing take on the Slenderman case and the ways in which pain ricochets and spreads into violence. Penance features the friendship of three young women, two of whom attack the third in a crime of shocking brutality that is made even more sensational by the gender and age of the perpetrators. Megan Abbott and others have long used the psychological thriller genre to draw attention to the disconnect between what we’d like teenage girls to be and who they truly are, and Eliza Clark’s is a fitting addition to this tradition. As just one example of Clark’s take on childhood and cruelty: one character does some truly horrendous things to some SIM characters. You may never think of pool ladders the same way again. –MO
Rebecca Makkai, I Have Some Questions For You
(Viking)
Makkai’s powerhouse novel has all the draw and momentum of the wildly entertaining mystery that it is, but lurking behind the plot is a series of escalating existential questions about trauma, memory, and the ever-shifting terrain of the past. Bodie Kane, a producer and podcaster, is tempted back to her old high school in New Hampshire, where she soon finds herself drawn into the uncertainties surrounding the investigation into her former roommate’s murder. Makkai brings to the story a vertiginous sensation of falling again and again into new doubts and desires, one that brings to mind Hitchcock at his best and forces the reader constantly to double back and wonder where the story has taken them, really. I Have Some Questions For You is a smart, sophisticated mystery, crafted with verve. –DM
Jesse Q Sutanto, I’m Not Done With You Yet
(Berkley)
Just like its title, I’m Not Done with You Yet is delicious perfection, full of twists, turns, and deeply satisfying reversals. While many authors have found themselves compelled to explore writer’s block in fiction, I don’t know that anyone has done it in such a fun way as Sutanto. Jane, Sutanto’s dark horse of a narrator, has a few solid efforts under her belt, but she hasn’t felt truly inspired to write since her days at Oxford, where she was spurred on to ever greater creative heights by her best friend at the time, Thalia. Years later, Thalia comes to town to promote her new book, and Jane is ready to confront her old roommate and get her writing mojo back. Each has their secrets, and only one of them can win. When I think of the platonic ideal of the thriller, I believe I will now picture this book. –MO
Tananarive Due, The Reformatory
(Mulholland)
Tananarive Due has been crafting brilliant literary horror for decades, but The Reformatory should be the novel that turns her from well-known in literary circles to a household name. Set in the infamous Florida reformatory known as the Dozier School, where Due’s own uncle spent time incarcerated, the novel is an evocative mixture of historical fiction and gothic tropes. Her narrator, Robbie Stephens, Jr., is sent to the reformatory for standing up for his sister against sexual harassment from the son of a powerful white family. Upon his arrival, he quickly encounters the many residents of the prison-like property, including scores of ghosts who refuse to find peace unless they first secure vengeance. Haunting, atmospheric, and tightly plotted, this novel will linger in your mind long after you turn the last page. –MO
Adam Sternbergh, The Eden Test
(Flatiron Books)
Sterbergh’s portrait of a marriage on the precipice (or perhaps a few feet over it) is a high-water mark in the modern psychological thriller, a perfectly calibrated series of feigns and suspicions that ratchets up to something almost unbearably tense, and yet also, counterintuitively, an absolute joy to read. That’s because Sterbergh’s work has an undergirding of wit and sophistication, traits that allow him to balance gimlet-eyed observations about relationships and those who seek to fix them against the absurdity of the modern condition. The Eden Test is, on the one hand, a retreat for couples who need to reconnect (or maybe call it quits). It’s also the very opposite of a retreat: a pressure cooker where trust is nonexistent and every interaction is exposed down to its deepest paradoxes. In other words, it’s the perfect concept for a psychological thriller, and Sternbergh pulls it off with a fine appreciation for dread and human folly. –DM
Walter Mosley, Every Man a King
(Mulholland)
Mosley has a seemingly endless reserve of invention. No matter which series, which characters, which city serves as the setting, Mosley manages again and again to reimagine what the private eye novel is capable of doing, and to bring to that process a sense of style and linguistic care that does the noir tradition proud. In his latest novel, King Joe Oliver goes down the mean streets on a case that soon entangles him with white nationalists and shadowy Russian cabals, a dark vision of modern American politics and business, and one that rings eerily true. Mosley’s plots are expertly crafted, but it’s on the sentence level where he really sings, and Every Man a King is full of electric writing and provocative, surprising ideas. –DM
Ivy Pochoda, Sing Her Down
(MCD)
Pochoda’s neo-western thriller makes for a wild, revelatory ride, one that’s rich with complex characters and an acerbic social critique that won’t soon be forgotten. Two women, brought together in an Arizona jail, earn an unexpected freedom, only to find their fates wrapped up together, thanks largely to the force of one’s obsession. The story moves from burnt-out desert to the beat-down streets of Los Angeles, all the while preserving an almost unbearable tension and charged atmosphere worthy of the best in the western tradition. Readers move along waiting for that final stand-off, but Pochoda is doing something larger in the background, painting a vivid, incisive portrait of our modern corruption. –DM
Bret Easton Ellis, The Shards
(Knopf)
Bret Easton Ellis’ first novel in over a decade is as good as it is long, and it is quite long. The Shards takes place in Ellis’ heyday, set in 1981 to a soundtrack that evokes the record collections of all your coolest, meanest friends, in a semi-fictionalized Los Angeles beset by raging fires and an apparition-like serial killer. As the antagonist moves in on the rarified circle of friends at the center of the novel, they obliviously pass their time doing coke next to swimming pools and sleeping with each others’ mothers while emotionally picking each other apart (and occasionally playing tennis, or at least wearing tennis clothes). The suspense comes from a very Bret Easton Ellis question: will his characters fall victim to a murderer, or simply destroy themselves? This novel was well worth the wait, and I’m sure will find itself stunningly adapted soon enough. –MO
Dwyer Murphy, The Stolen Coast
(Viking)
While many have been characterizing this excellent novel as noir, I prefer to consider my colleague Dwyer Murphy’s latest as evoking the elegant, midcentury spirit of an Audrey Hepburn film, with sparkling wit, seedy destinations, charming characters, rumpled suits, and a fantastic set-up. In The Stolen Coast, lawyer Jack makes his real money from a smuggling operation run in concert with his ex-spy father: together, the two help people on the run get the documents and transportation they need to stay out of the hands of the law. Business is good, but Jack can’t keep himself from being entangled in an ambitious diamond heist pitched to him by his hustler ex, back in town and ready to get Jack to agree to pretty much anything. –MO
Rafael Frumkin, Confidence
(Simon & Schuster)
Not since Geek Love have I seen such an effective skewering of the search for inner peace and the inevitable American wish for shortcuts. Rafael Frumkin’s Confidence tells the story of two boys who meet in juvenile detention and find a shared love for scamming (and for each other). As their intense relationship develops, their scams get bigger and bigger, culminating in a Theranos-like (as Electric Lit called it) scheme to provide “instant enlightenment” to their customers via cleverly repackaged and completely ineffective technology. It is both a beautiful queer love story and a hilarious and cutting sendoff of the American Dream. In the history book The King of Confidence, Miles Harvey posits that the quintessential American folk hero of the 19th century was the grifter, seen as one who rebels against a system stacked against them, and Frumkin’s novel proves that statement just as worthy a descriptor of the 21st century: either you’re a scammer, or you’ve been scammed. –MO
Eli Cranor, Ozark Dogs
(Soho)
Cranor’s sophomore novel is an absolutely relentless, hair-raising thriller that manages to be just as full of emotion as it is adrenaline. In a small-town in Arkansas, a young woman is kidnapped the night of the homecoming game, launching her grandfather into a mad search for the one good thing in his life and maybe the possibility of some redemption. But this is a dark, tough story and nobody gets out unscathed. Cranor has staked himself a claim as one of the premier noir writers coming up today, but with Ozark Dogs, it’s the family feeling—that ache of love, obligation, and lineage—that really draws us into the story and drives us toward the fateful end. This is Southern Noir at its finest, and Cranor is an author on a rapid rise. –DM
Lindsay Hunter, Hot Springs Drive
(Roxane Gay Books)
Of particular note in the literary thriller genre are those few works interested in exploring female hunger, and I commend Lindsay Hunter on her fascinating take on appetites of all kinds in this latest work and in her oeuvre. Hot Springs Drive features two neighboring families who become deeply, and unhealthily, entwined, until one mother ends up dead and the other shocked by her own subtle, strange, part in the crime. I shouldn’t say too much lest I ruin the many surprises this novel has in store, but I will add that Hunter’s grasp of character is both intuitive and deliberate, with in-depth, complex portrayals of characters both flawed and sympathetic. –MO
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NOTABLE SELECTIONS 2023
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Angie Kim, Happiness Falls (Hogarth) · Lou Berney, Dark Ride (William Morrow) · Dennis Lehane, Small Mercies (Harper) · William Kent Krueger, The River We Remember (Atria) · James Ellroy, The Enchanters (Knopf) · Tod Goldberg, Gangsters Don’t Die (Counterpoint) · Andrea Bartz, The Spare Room (Ballantine) · Ruth Ware, Zero Days (Gallery/Scout) · Polly Stewart, The Good Ones (Harper) · Laura Lippman, Prom Mom (William Morrow) · Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Silver Nitrate (Random House) · Naomi Hirahara, Evergreen (Soho) · David Joy, Those We Thought We Know (Putnam) · Richard Osman, The Last Devil to Die (Pamela Dorman) · Ashley Winstead, Midnight Is the Darkest Hour (Sourcebooks) · Leah Konen, You Should Have Told Me (Putnam) · Scott Von Doviak, Lowdown Road (Hard Case Crime) · Heather Chavez, Before She Finds Me (Mulholland) · A.F. Carter, Boomtown (Mysterious Press) · Jonathan Lethem, Brooklyn Crime Novel (Ecco) · Marie NDiaye, Vengeance Is Mine (Translated by Jordan Stump) (Astra House) · Raul Palma, A Haunting in Hialeah Gardens (Dutton) · Juli Zeh, About People (Translated by Alta L. Price) (World Editions) · Nicola Lagioia, The City of the Living (Translated by Ann Goldstein) (Europa) · Chandler Baker, Cutting Teeth (Flatiron Books) · Dan McDorman, West Heart Kill (Knopf) · Lori Rader-Day, The Death of Us (William Morrow) · Ausma Zehanat Khan, Blood Betrayal (Minotaur) · Nita Prose, The Mystery Guest (Ballantine) · Caz Frear, Five Bad Deeds (Harper) · Alexis Soloski, Here in the Dark (Flatiron) · Tania Malik, Hope You Are Satisfied (Unnamed Press) · Laura Lippman, Prom Mom (William Morrow) · Brendan Slocumb, Symphony of Secrets (Anchor Books) · Eleanor Catton, Birnam Wood (FSG) · Chloe Mehdi, Nothing Is Lost (Europa) · Eliza Clark, Boy Parts (Harper) · C.J. Leede, Maeve Fly (Tor Nightfire) · Rose Wilding, Speak of the Devil (Minotaur) · Adorah Nworah, House Woman (Unnamed Press) · Mirza Waheed, Tell Her Everything (Melville House) · Katie Williams, My Murder (Riverhead) · Bali Kaur Jaswal, Now You See Us (William Morrow) · Tara Ison, At the Hour Between Dog and Wolf (Ig Publishing) · Juan Martinez, Extended Stay (University of Arizona Press) · Chris Offutt, Code of the Hills (Grove Press) · Paul Goldberg, The Dissident (FSG) · Parini Shroff, The Bandit Queens (Ballantine) · Michael Bennett, Better the Blood (Atlantic Monthly Press) · Christoffer Carlsson (transl. Rachel Willson-Broyles), Blaze Me a Sun (Hogarth) · Stephen Graham Jones, Don’t Fear the Reaper (Saga) · Hank Phillippi Ryan, The House Guest (Forge) · Rachel Cochran, The Gulf (Harper) · Rachel Koller Croft, Stone Cold Fox (Berkley) · Thomas Mallon, Up With the Sun (Knopf) · Samantha Downing, A Twisted Love Story (Berkley Books) · Paz Pardo, The Shamshine Blind (Atria) · Peter Swanson, The Kind Worth Saving (William Morrow) · Joyce Carol Oates, 48 Clues into the Disappearance of My Sister (Mysterious Press) · Christopher Bollen, The Lost Americans (Harper) · James A. McLaughlin, Panther Gap (Flatiron) · V. Castro, The Haunting of Alejandra (Del Rey) · Alice Slater, Death of a Bookseller (Scarlet) · Don Winslow, City of Dreams (William Morrow) · Molly Odintz, Scott Montgomery, Hopeton Hay eds, Austin Noir (Akashic Books) · Nisha Bose, Dirty Laundry (Ballantine) · Kwei Quartey, Last Seen in Lapaz (Soho) · Margot Douaihy, Scorched Grace (Zando, Gillian Flynn Books) · Samantha Jayne Allen, Hard Rain (Minotaur) · Daniel Weizmann, The Last Songbird (Melville House) · Clémence Michallon, The Quiet Tenant (Knopf) · Danielle Trussoni, The Puzzle Master (Random House) · Josh Haven, The Siberia Job (Mysterious Press) · Cara Black, Night Flight to Paris (Soho) · Gigi Pandian, The Raven Thief (Minotaur) · Jinwoo Chong, Flux (Melville House) · Elle Cosimano, Finlay Donovan Jumps the Gun (Minotaur) · Jesse Q. Sutanto, Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice for Murderers (Berkley) · Sarah Penner, The London Seance Society (Park Row) · Benjamin Stevenson, Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone (Mariner) · Azma Dar, Spider (Datura) · Wendy Heard, You Can Trust Me (Bantam) · Nick Medina, Sisters of a Lost Nation (Berkley) · Kyle Dillon Hertz, The Lookback Window (Simon & Schuster) · Amanda Peters, The Berry Pickers (Catapult) · Katherine Schellman, The Last Drop of Hemlock (Minotaur) · Katherine Howe, A True Account: Hannah Masury’s Sojourn Amongst the Pyrates, Written by Herself (Holt) · Laura Picklesimer, Kill for Love (Unnamed Press)
