Usually, when it comes time to round up the best crime novels of the year, we cap it at 10, but this year brought such a wide variety of excellent releases that we decided to up the number to 20. And it’s that variety, rather than any particular trends, that truly distinguishes 2022 from previous years. This year’s list includes plenty of hard-boiled noir, insightful psychological thrillers, lush historical journeys, and stunning traditional mysteries. There’s also some old ladies kicking ass, a social-justice oriented procedural, two works in translation, and the most noir depiction of a football game since North Dallas Forty. Scroll to the bottom to see our list of notables for more great reads.
Fernanda Melchor, Paradais
Translated by Sophie Hughes
(New Directions)
Fernanda Melchor’s Paradais is brutal poetry, distilled. It’s also a visceral examination of classism, fatphobia, and most of all misogyny. In a luxury apartment complex, two boys on the cusp of manhood while away a long summer drinking together. Franco Andrade, a resident of the complex who lives with his grandparents but is ostracized by the rest of the community, is overweight, undersocialized, and sexually obsessed with his neighbor; he steals liquor from his family and shares it with Polo, the teenage gardener of the complex, who yearns to join the cartels and make something of himself instead of wasting his youth trimming grass for rich people. Franco has a fantasy that becomes more and more like a plan: he’s going to break into his neighbor’s home and force himself on the object of his desires. Polo’s pissed off, drunk, and just angry enough to help Franco out. Like other works out this summer, including Liska Jacobs’ brilliant The Pink Hotel, Paradais warns against considering any luxurious abode as “safe” when the mere existence of such enclaves intensifies the inequalities that will eventually lead to their own demise. –MO
Eli Cranor, Don’t Know Tough
(Soho)
Cranor’s debut novel is one of the most powerful noirs to come along in years, a finely chiseled slice of upended Americana and a deeply felt study in the ties that bind us and tear us apart. Small-town Arkansas football is the setting, so you know the stakes are going to be high, but Cranor brings to his story so many moments of quiet, cutting grace. The dread is allowed to subtly build in the background, until quite suddenly you’re drowning it. The story is built with rugged, overlapping fabrics: the outsider coach, the hard case player with talent and demons, the town and its yearning to win, with all the violence and heartache that implies—all these human moments come together in sensational fashion to yield a story that’s genuinely shocking, told in language that’s rich, compelling, and finely wrought. Cranor shows himself to be a craftsman of the highest order, and an author whose stories we’re going to be anticipating for years to come. –DM
Katie Gutierrez, More Than You’ll Ever Know
(William Morrow)
This book is full of so much love. Lore Rivera has everything a woman is told to want: a husband who loves her, two children who work hard to succeed, and a career that values her. When her husband’s business falls prey to a recession, she finds herself suppressing her own success to make her husband feel better. Meanwhile, she meets another man in Mexico City who finds her success a turn-on. Soon enough, she’s got two husbands; soon after that, one husband finds out and kills the other. Forty years after, a true crime journalist becomes obsessed with the case and gets Lore to finally agree to an interview baring all. A fascinating meditation on love, career, and family that’s also a stunning page-turner. –MO
Kate Atkinson, Shrines of Gaiety
(Doubleday)
Kate Atkinson’s Shrines of Gaiety takes us into the roaring 20s for a delightful and bawdy portrait of underworld Soho. In this London neighborhood dedicated to all manner of ways of having fun, including the illicit, a nightclub owner struggles to hold on to her hard-earned success as she faces challenges from rivals, lawyers, and even her own children. Atkinson once again proves herself to be one of the best at writing literary genre fiction with a complex emotional center. –MO
John Vercher, After the Lights Go Out
(Soho)
There’s a joke about booksellers that this (former) bookseller happens to agree with: when asked for a good beach read recommendation, a bookseller will nearly always recommend something absolutely devastating and emotionally brutal. By that metric, for this book is guaranteed to make you sob, After the Lights Go Out is truly the perfect beach read. A biracial MMA fighter caring for his father with Alzheimers starts to wonder if his own mind is also starting to go after suffering repeated traumatic brain injuries in the cage. He’s about to start fighting again after a short-term ban for steroids, and his cousin has an epic fight lined up to get him back in the game. This is a stunning book about loving that which is destroying you. Also, if you are worried, the dog does not die. I repeat, the dog does not die. –MO
Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Daughter of Doctor Moreau
(Del Rey)
I can’t get enough of Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s playful takes on classic genres. In her latest, the Island of Doctor Moreau gets a Yucatan-set treatment, steeped in sultry atmospherics and set during the lead-up to the Mexican Revolution as the hacienda system begins to crumple. Carlota Moreau loves her scientist father, whose injections keep her alive; she loves her fur-covered playmates, whose ailments can be ascribed to their mishmash of human and animal genes; she even cares for the drunken plantation overseer who facilitates the gruesome experiments. But her character was raised to be pampered, not tested, and her loyalties will soon face a breaking point as the goals of her father, his patron, and those they torture pull Carlota in opposite directions. –MO
Gabino Iglesias, The Devil Takes You Home
(Mulholland)
Gabino Iglesias’s break-out novel is pure noir, as bleak and brutal as they come. A man living a hard-scrabble life on the margins finds himself in need of quick cash after a personal tragedy. He first finds work as a hitman before stumbling across another opportunity—the chance to hijack a narco-convoy coming up from Mexico. Beautifully written and absolutely devastating, The Devil Takes You Home heralds the ascent of a major crime writer. –MO
Deanna Raybourn, Killers of a Certain Age
(Berkley)
As the tag-line for this incredible series launch reminds us, women of a certain age may be invisible to society, but sometimes, that’s their greatest asset. As Killers of a Certain Age begins, four trained assassins are readying for their retirement after four decades of taking out terrible people in a most elegant manner. Unfortunately, the bosses have planned a rather more permanent end to their careers than they would like, so the women must go rogue and take on their former employers to find out why they’re been selected as targets. The lively banter between old friends, mixed with plenty of action sequences, will keep you turning the pages long into the night, and I’m hoping these feisty heroines make it to the screen soon to continue their adventures. –MO
Adam White, The Midcoast
(Hogarth)
White’s debut is a tense family drama punctuated with page after page of careful and poignant observations that add up to something larger than the (always gripping) story. The lush surroundings don’t hurt, either. A high school English teacher agrees to a weekend visit to see old friends, Ed and Steph Thatch, who have experienced a tremendous and somewhat implausible rise up the ranks of Maine society, to the point where they’re hosting an extravagant reception for the Amherst lacrosse team. Wandering through the sprawling estate, our protagonist finds some deeply disturbing photographs, which look even more suspicious a short time later, when the state police show up to crash the party, and soon he’s launched into an investigation of just exactly how his old friends put together their new fortune, and what they were willing to do to keep it. With The Midcoast, White has staked himself a claim as a gifted observer of American privilege and corruption, a fine literary tradition that was overdue its Maine epic. –DM
Ausma Zehanat Khan, Blackwater Falls
(Minotaur)
In Blackwater Falls, a teenage girl who’s a Syrian refugee is found murdered and posed as the Madonna in a church; it’s up to Khan’s Muslim detective to solve the murder and protect her community from both violent attack and more subtle aggressions. A variety of approaches to identity make this a complex novel of interiority, while clashes between characters become prime moments to parse out these differences. Ausma Zehanat Khan is known for her social justice oriented procedurals that ask deep questions about the relationship between communities and police, and Blackwater Falls continues her habit of considering the exact issues I want to see procedurals address.–MO
Brendan Slocumb, The Violin Conspiracy
(Anchor)
What an absolutely perfect mystery The Violin Conspiracy is, and one that reaches deep into the history of race and inequality in America in its investigation of a seemingly simple crime. A classical violinist – often the only Black musician included in elite musical ensembles – finds out that his own violin, a family heirloom, is a rare Stradivarius once gifted to his ancestor by a slave owner. After discovering the violin’s now-astronomical worth, the descendants of the slave-owning family decide to sue the violinist to recover “their” property. Meanwhile, the violin itself is stolen, and it’s up to the musician to both prove his ownership and recover the stolen instrument. The ending will shock you. But perhaps the ending shouldn’t be so surprising, given the lengths to which white supremacy will go to justify pre-existing inequalities or secure a place at the top. –MO
Alex Segura, Secret Identity
(Flatiron)
Alex Segura’s newest novel is a marvel of atmospherics, a vividly imagined glimpse into the world of 1970s comic books in New York City and the mean streets that ran between the office buildings and kept a subculture pumping away. At the story’s heart is a fierce protagonist, Carmen Valdez, who longs to tell her stories with superheroes and is determined not to be pushed aside. When a colleague is killed—and her own participation in an important work is erased—Carmen is forced into the sleuth mode, and the story becomes a clever reinvention of 1970s private eye fiction. The set pieces are intricate and thrilling and the backdrop is lovingly rendered. Secret Identity feels like the novel Segura was born to write. His love of both noir and comics shines through and makes this book one of the most enjoyable, rewarding reads of the year. –DM
Kellye Garrett, Like a Sister
(Mulholland)
Garrett’s Like a Sister is a noir odyssey through the streets of New York, the dark corners of American pop culture, and, of course, a family history. At the center of the story, there are two sisters: one a reality TV star, who turns up dead in a Bronx playground; the other a Columbia grad student who knows that the version of her sister’s death she’s being fed by the police and the media just doesn’t make sense, so she undertakes her own quest for answers. Garrett is a masterful plotter, with a sharp ear for dialogue and a pitch perfect sense of how to dole out clues in the most satisfying fashion imaginable. Like a Sister is one of those rare stories that will leave you feeling exhilarated and utterly devastated. –DM
Lawrence Osborne, On Java Road
(Hogarth)
Osborne’s On Java Road is a cosmopolitan journey through the latest tumult in Hong Kong, a story with atmosphere to spare: the mysterious flares of street protests, the calls of support from building rooftops late at night, and wandering through the urban jungle, an expat journalist with a Greene-like world weariness and an old friendship that makes him a target for a bit of intrigue. The old friend is one of Hong Kong’s scions, who has recently started a relationship with a young woman from a monied family, who spends her nights in the streets, protesting mainland impositions and putting her life on the line. A strange relationship arises between the three, and soon a new, more intimate violence visits them, as Osborne’s story becomes almost unbearably tense. And yet the prose is always finely wrought, maintaining a kind of elegance against the coming storm of passion and venality. Osborne reminds us why he’s the modern master of expat noir. –DM
Wanda Morris, Anywhere You Run
(William Morrow)
Wanda Morris burst onto the scene last year with her impeccably plotted legal thriller, All Her Little Secrets, and her new novel keeps a legally-minded heroine as one of its leads but takes us back to 1964. When Violet Richards is raped by a white man, she takes her revenge, then goes on the run, soon followed by her sister Marigold, who aspires to be a lawyer but first must make a decision about her unwanted pregnancy. A southern setting where voting and abortion are both increasingly restricted feels…rather like today, if I’m honest. Wanda Morris, too, has noted the parallels, and there is a sense of political urgency that helps speed this thriller along. –MO
Dwyer Murphy, An Honest Living
(Viking)
A rain-spattered love letter to a bygone New York, a wry homage to a classic of the genre, and a delightfully meta work of neo-noir, Dwyer Murphy’s brilliantly assured debut is the story of an unwitting attorney-turned-private investigator who gets tangled up in a crime of obsession between a reclusive author and her antiquarian bookseller husband. The mystery is beautifully constructed, the writing crackles on every page, and Murphy’s portrait of early 2000s New York City is nothing short of exquisite. If you’re looking to lose yourself inside a smart, atmospheric literary crime novel this winter, An Honest Living will not disappoint. [Murphy is an editor at CrimeReads, a sister site of Lit Hub’s] –Dan Sheehan, Bookmarks Editor at Lit Hub
Kaoru Takamura, Lady Joker, vol. 2
(Soho)
One of the more ambitious crime fictions in recent years came to a conclusion this year with the second volume of its English translation. A kaleidoscopic vision of crime and corruption in modern Japan, Lady Joker is a reimagining of the unsolved Glico-Morinaga kidnapping, but told with such bravado, such scope, that it ends up being a story of a nation. Takamura exposes the syndicates and corporations, the local operators and national politicians, all without losing an eye on the devastating impact felt by the victims and even passing bystanders. Lady Joker is a literary achievement and an utterly gripping, page-turning thriller. –DM
Winnie M. Li, Complicit
(Emily Bestler Books)
Winnie Li stunned the crime and literary worlds with her intense debut, Dark Chapter, based around a traumatic incident in the author’s own life and nominee for the Edgar Award for Best First Novel. Now she’s back with another story that mines her own experiences, this time centered on the toxicity of the film industry. Complicit is both a #metoo thriller and a complex literary achievement that sheds an important light on Hollywood’s darkest secrets and brings an essential and underrepresented perspective—that of an Asian-American film producer—to the fore. –MO
Danya Kukafka, Notes on an Execution
(William Morrow)
Danya Kukafka’s Notes on an Execution deserves to stand along Ivy Pochoda’s These Women, Nicola Maye Goldberg’s Nothing Can Hurt You, and Carolyn Ferrell’s Dear Miss Metropolitan as victim-focused narratives that call out the exploitation of women’s suffering in crime stories. In Notes on an Execution, serial killer Ansel Packer is counting down to his execution. And the women in his life are also counting down. They are also wondering: with a different life, who would Ansel be? More importantly, who would his victims have been, had they clung to life instead? –MO
Lan Samantha Chang, The Family Chao
(Norton)
I loved Lan Samantha Chang’s The Family Chao, a moving, gripping drama about a Chinese-American family that turns into a surprising murder mystery. Well, that’s too simple a description—it’s a deep, psychological story about a family, their restaurant, and the forces that pull them apart and drive them together, one of which happens to be a crime, and another of which is a disappearance (of a beloved dog). Inspired by The Brothers Karamazov, it contains beautifully realized characters and perfectly-designed conflicts, breathtakingly restaging Dostoyevskian themes to meaningfully tell a new story about family, identity, race, racism, and the American Dream. –OR
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Notable Selections
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Sebastian J. Plata, Seeing Strangers (Agora) · Rachel Howzell Hall, We Lie Here (Thomas and Mercer) · Chris Bohjalian, The Lioness (Doubleday) · Adrian McKinty, The Island (Little Brown) · Lisa Lutz, The Accomplice (Ballantine) · Marie Rutkoski, Real Easy (Henry Holt) · Calla Henkel, Other People’s Clothes (Doubleday) · Bethany C. Morrow, Cherish Farrah (Dutton) · Grace D. Li, Portrait of a Thief (Tiny Reparations) · Tara Isabella Burton, The World Cannot Give (Simon & Schuster) · Don Winslow, City on Fire (William Morrow) · Gary Philips, One Shot Harry (Soho) · Gigi Pandian, Under Lock and Skeleton Key (Minotaur) · María Gainza, Portrait of an Unknown Lady, Translated by Thomas Bunstead (Catapult) · Isabel Cañas, The Hacienda (Berkley) · Wayne Johnson, The Red Canoe (Agora Books) · Jennifer Hillier, Things We Do In The Dark (Minotaur) · Danya Kukafka, Notes on an Execution (William Morrow) · Robyn Gigl, Survivor’s Guilt (Kensington) · Barbara Bourland, The Force of Such Beauty (Dutton) · John Darnielle, Devil House (MCD) · Samantha Allen, Patricia Wants to Cuddle (Zando) · Paul Vidich, The Matchmaker (Pegasus) · Rob Hart, The Paradox Hotel (Ballantine) · Mia P. Manansala, Homicide and Halo-Halo (Berkley) · Moses McKenzie, Olive Grove in Ends (Little Brown) · Dan Fesperman, Winter Work (Knopf) · Alma Katsu, The Fervor (Putnam) · Blitz Bazawule, The Scent of Burnt Flowers (Ballantine Books) · Candace Wuehle, Monarch (Soft Skull) · Silje Ulstein, Reptile Memoirs translated by Alison McCullough (Grove) · Ashley Winstead, The Last Housewife (Sourcebooks) · Kirsten Miller, The Change (William Morrow) · Elizabeth Day, Magpie (Simon & Schuster) · Javier Cercas, Even the Darkest Night, translated by Ann McLean (Knopf) · Ruth Ware, The It Girl (Gallery/Scout) · Dervla McTiernan, The Murder Rule (William Morrow) · Louise Welsh, The Second Cut (Canongate) · Chris Offutt, Shifty’s Boys (Grove) · Paraic O’Donnell, The Maker of Swans (Tin House) · Anna Pitoniak, Our American Friend (Simon & Schuster) · Hannah Morrissey, The Widowmaker (Minotaur) · Margarita Montemore, Acts of Violet (Flatiron) · Richard O’Rawe, Goering’s Gold (Melville House) · Kelly J. Ford, Real Bad Things (Thomas & Mercer) · Amina Akhtar, Kismet (Thomas & Mercer) · Grant Morrison, Luda (Del Rey) · Jonathan Ames, The Wheel of Doll (Mulholland Books) · David Handler, The Lady in the Silver Cloud (Mysterious Press) · Rijula Das, Small Deaths (Amazon Crossing) · Val McDermid, 1989 (Atlantic Monthly Press) · Chloe Gong, Foul Lady Fortune (Margaret K. McElderry Books) · Jess Kidd, The Night Ship (Atria) · Lev A. C. Rosen, Lavender House (Forge) · David Gordon, The Wild Life (Mysterious Press) · Marcie R. Rendon, Sinister Graves (Soho) · Ava Barry, Double Exposure (Pegasus) · Katy Hays, The Cloisters (Atria) · Erika T. Wurth, White Horse (Flatiron) · Donna Leon, Give Unto Others (Atlantic Monthly Press) · Louise Penny, A World of Curiosities (Minotaur) · Lauren Nossett, The Resemblance (Flatiron) · T Greenwood, Such a Pretty Girl (Kensington) · Joanna Margaret, The Bequest (Scarlet) · Ewan Morrison, How to Survive Everything (Harper Perennial) · Craig Henderson, Welcome to the Game (Atlantic Monthly Press) · Amanda Jayatissa, You’re Invited (Berkley) · Michael Mann and Meg Gardiner, Heat 2 (William Morrow) · Harini Nagendra, Bangalore Detectives Club (Pegasus) · Sarai Walker, The Cherry Robbers (Harper) · V. Castro, Mestiza Blood (Flame Tree Press)
