Another terrible year for the world and another great year for books! While we have plenty of spinoff lists to come before the end of the year, it’s time to share the CrimeReads editors’ picks for the best crime and mystery novels of the year, full stop. The list below has a strong presence from a number of small presses, and as always with this list, leans into the editors’ shared love of noir (sorry not sorry). Another theme seems to be a sharply relevant combination of despair and hope (heavy on the despair, but then again, a little hope is always more useful than too much). There’s also plenty of love, mixed in with the suffering, and often, a cause of it. And there’s anger, too: fury at our current state of affairs, and righteous purpose in our quests for justice. Without further ado, here are the 10 best crime books of 2024.
Karen Jennings, Crooked Seeds
(Hogarth)
In near-future South Africa, a woman must come to terms with her mother’s favoritism and her brother’s Apartheid-era crimes when skeletons are uncovered from beneath her childhood home. Crooked Seeds is as short as it is devastating—a perfect match for our own bleak era, and a testament to the power of fiction to help us understand our own suffering, and our own sins. Of particular note: Jennings’ elegant use of nature’s depletion to underscore the moral failures of the self.–MO
Colin Barrett, Wild Houses
(Grove)
Barrett’s debut novel is a taut, atmospheric masterpiece: a meditation on small-town life and stuckness and the sudden moments of violence and danger that pierce the whole thing straight through. Barrett’s short stories have taken on similar material, but here, with the breadth of a novel, his writing has a new openness and as much style as ever. The story follows Dev, a young man in a small town in Ireland, leading a rather organized and quiet life, until one night that quiet is shattered by the arrival of a man who’s been badly beaten by a pair of local goons. The violence and the dread soon permeate the town. All that quiet desperation and melancholy becomes tinged with a new danger. Barrett’s prose, controlled but still electric, lights up page after page in this propulsive, emotionally powerful novel. –DM
Nicola Yoon, One of Our Kind
(Knopf)
At the start of One of Our Kind, Jasmyn and King Williams move into a highly selective gated community catering to wealthy and successful Black families. However, despite the neighborhood’s claim to be a Black utopia, none of Jasmyn’s new neighbors are interested in social justice or, indeed, Black culture as a whole. The town’s secret, when finally discovered, is both completely logical and absolutely jaw-dropping.
Joseph Kanon, Shanghai (Scribner)
Nobody writes sophisticated, atmospheric spy fiction quite like Joseph Kanon, and his newest book, Shanghai, is one of the best entries in a storied career. Kanon’s story takes us into the hothouse of global politics in 1938, beginning on a luxurious ocean liner and soon disembarking in the bustling trading port of Shanghai, where a young man joins his uncle in a thriving casino business, but soon finds himself tangled up in the local conspiracies. Shanghai is vividly depicted, and the dread of an oncoming world war adds another layer of meaning to the daily bustle of a port city at the crossroads of political players. Kanon is quite simply a master storyteller. –DM
Megan Nolan, Ordinary Human Failings
(Little Brown)
This book will haunt me until the end of time—and for good reason, given the heart-wrenching combination of desperate characters, exploitative situations, and no good ends in sight. In Nolan’s sophomore effort, a child is murdered, another child is held responsible for the killing, and a cynical hack of a tabloid journalist puts the family of the accused up in a hotel and gets them piss-drunk, night after night, trying to get ahold of the right set of details to make his story a sensation. Megan Nolan’s strength is in her “there but for the grace of God” storytelling: everything is understandable, nothing is excusable, and none of us are immune from the potential to wreck our own or others’ lives. –MO
Attica Locke, Guide Me Home
(Mulholland)
In the culminating novel in Locke’s award-winning Highway 59 series, readers find Darren Matthews retired from the Texas Rangers but still in the crosshairs of an investigation. Though he may be dedicated to restful country living, Matthews can’t help but pull on loose threads when a new case comes calling in the form of his supremely untrustworthy mother telling a story about a missing sorority sister. Matthews takes on the case, and as always with Locke’s novels, the story becomes something different and quite profound about the state of modern America, race, and family. And Guide Me Home particularly distinguishes itself on that last count, as more than one family secret unravels and the generations wrestle with their legacies. Now complete, the Highway 59 trilogy stands as a high water mark in modern mystery. –DM
Asako Yuzuki, Butter
Translated by Polly Barton
(Ecco)
In this sumptuous tale, a gourmand hedonist and suspected serial killer becomes the object of a journalist’s fixation, and perhaps, an inspiration. The killer is known as a woman whose unending appetites for rich cuisine have led to the deaths of multiple paramours. Did she murder them, or could they simply not keep up? Why is it always a woman’s job to enforce healthy limits, to care for men? Why is it not a man’s job to care for himself? And what can we learn from these simple, rebellious acts of indulgence? This book is best paired with a multi-course meal among friends. –MO
Christopher Bollen, Havoc
(Flatiron)
In Bollen’s earlier novels, he was working largely in the vein of Patricia Highsmith, bringing class tensions to light amidst mysterious and criminal goings-on in rarefied enclaves and expat communities. In his latest, Havoc, he’s using a setup that seems straight out of Agatha Christie – a luxury hotel on the banks of the Nile, a closed cast of characters – bringing a new level of psychological depth to the wildly compelling and suspenseful scenario. An elderly (and manipulative) widow bounding between luxury hotels takes up residence on the Nile, charming the staff and guests. She works her way into the lives of two new arrivals: a young mother and her eight-year-old son. But the son, as it turns out, is not so easily manipulated, and we soon find ourselves in a complex game of cat-and-mouse. Bollen brings plenty of style to the story, with a narration that takes its own twists and turns alongside the rapidly unfolding mystery. But as ever, with Bollen the psychological insight is the real star here, and Havoc proves itself to be one of the most memorable mysteries in recent memory. –DM
(Ed. note – Havoc earns a special distinction: in our internal staff polls, Havoc is the first novel ever chosen as an end-of-year favorite by all three CrimeReads editors: Molly Odintz, Olivia Rutigliano, and Dwyer Murphy. We tend to have rather different taste.)
Ajay Close, What Doesn’t Kill Us
(Sarabande)
Ajay Close uses the crime genre to examine the history of second-wave feminism and intentional communities in 1970s Leeds in this pitch-black period piece that reads a bit like Iris Murdoch had a love child with Ursula K. LeGuin. As a gruesome serial killer stalks the streets, and the city seems unlikely to ever halt the string of murders, the residents of a women’s housing collective grow increasingly fed up with the violence of the patriarchy, and ready to enact some violence of their own. Close has an incredible ear for dialogue and character, and dissects with ease the many internal disputes and blatant contradictions of the era’s politics, for a book that feels both of its time, and freshly relevant. Also, to all my former housemates: I finally found a positive depiction of a cooperative to recommend on this site! –MO
Nilanjana Roy, Black River
(Pushkin Press)
This one received rave reviews when it came out in England, and I’m sure it will gain just as much praise on this side of the pond. Black River joins a host of great crime books coming out of South Asia, with a timely and urgent message about prejudice and injustice. At the start of Roy’s novel, a Hindu child is found dead in a remote village, a Muslim man is chosen as a convenient scapegoat for the crime; the detectives assigned to the case struggle to keep the accused man from being lynched while they search for the true culprits. —MO
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NOTABLE SELECTIONS 2024
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Vanessa Chan, The Storm We Made (S&S/Marysue Ricci Books) · Kate Brody, Rabbit Hole (Soho Crime) · Thomas Perry, Hero (Mysterious Press) · Elizabeth Gonzalez James, The Bullet Swallower (Simon & Schuster) · Lea Carpenter, Ilium (Knopf) · Duane Swierczynski, California Bear (Mulholland) · Amina Akhtar, Almost Surely Dead (Mindy’s Book Studio) · Jahmal Mayfield, Smoke Kings (Melville House) · Francis Spufford, Cahokia Jazz (Scribner) · E.A. Aymar, When She Left (Thomas & Mercer) · Aggie Blum Thompson, Such a Lovely Family (Forge) · Jennifer Croft, The Extinction of Irena Ray (Bloomsbury) · Chris Bohjalian, The Princess of Las Vegas (Doubleday) · Joyce Carol Oates, Butcher (Knopf) · Tana French, The Hunter (Viking) · Gigi Pandian, A Midnight Puzzle (Minotaur) · Elle Cosimano, Finlay Donovan Rolls the Dice (Minotaur) · Sophie Wan, Women of Good Fortune (Gallery) · Sara Koffi, While We Were Burning (Putnam) · Don Winslow, City in Ruins (William Morrow) · Kellye Garrett, Missing White Woman (Mulholland) · Chanel Cleeton, The House on Biscayne Bay (Berkley) · Megan Miranda, Daughter of Mine (S&S/Marysue Ricci Books) · Robyn Gigl, Nothing But the Truth (Kensington) · Tasha Coryell, Love Letters to a Serial Killer (Berkley) · Chris Whitaker, All the Colors of the Dark (Dutton) · Eli Cranor, Broiler (Soho) · Yasmin Zaher, Coin (Catapult) · Wanda Morris, What You Leave Behind (William Morrow) · Flynn Berry, Trust Her (Viking) · Peter Swanson, A Talent for Murder (William Morrow) · Alejandro Nodarse, Blood in the Cut (Flatiron) · John Copenhaver, Hall of Mirrors (Pegasus) · Maxim Loskutoff, Old King (W.W. Norton) · Henry Wise, Holy City (Atlantic Monthly Press) · Liz Moore, The God of the Woods (Riverhead) · John Fram, No Road Home (Atria) · Nicholas Meyer, Sherlock Holmes and the Telegram From Hell (Mysterious Press) · Jesse Q. Sutanto, You Will Never Be Me (Berkley) · Marcie Rendon, Where They Last Saw Her (Bantam) · Kate Atkinson, Death at the Sign of the Rook (Doubleday) · Jordan Harper, The Last King of California (Mulholland) · Alan Bradley, What Time the Sexton’s Spade Doth Rust (Bantam) · Danielle Trussoni, The Puzzle Box (Random House) · Nick Harkaway, Karla’s Choice (Viking) · Lev AC Rosen, Rough Pages (Forge) · Hesse Phillips, Lightborne (Pegasus) · Alia Trabucco Zerán, Clean (translated by Sophie Hughes) (Riverhead) · Sarah Jost, The Estate (Sourcebooks) · Kotaro Isaka, Hotel Lucky Seven (translated by Brian Bergstrom) (Overlook) · Jane Pek, The Rivals (Vintage) · Alex Segura, Alter Ego (Mulholland) · William Boyd, Gabriel’s Moon (Atlantic) · Alice Bell, Displeasure Island (Doubleday) · Vincent Tirado, We Came to Welcome You (William Morrow)
