What is noir, anyway? Some define it simply as “starts bad, gets worse;” others believe that noir implies a certain bleak atmosphere, and many find noir to refer to murky morality and no happy endings. Noir is, perhaps, like obscenity—difficult to define, but you know it when you see it.
When we set out to assemble a list of the year’s best noir, we were both impressed at the diversity of subgenres represented, and surprised that the classic gumshoe made few appearances. Below, you’ll find art world noir, rural noir, Detroit noir, Los Angeles noir, gentrification noir, church noir, and other variations on a theme. Each of these works exists in the ambiguous edges of morality, the spaces between people, and the porous boundaries of thought and action. Each is bleak, beautiful, and and imbued with distinct authorial style. We hope you cry your heart out enjoy these modern classics.
Barbara Bourland, Fake Like Me (Grand Central)
Barbara Bourland’s art-world thriller is both elegant and visceral. Bourland’s down-on-her-luck protagonist has just started making a career for herself in the cut throat art world when all the paintings for an upcoming and lucrative show are destroyed in a house fire. She heads upstate to an artist’s colony haunted by the mysterious death of a beloved sculptor, and soon becomes obsessed with the dead artist’s work. While not strictly noir, Fake Like Me is imbued with the intensity of artistic struggle in a manner that resonates with the high stakes and sharp precipices of classic crime writing.—Molly Odintz, CrimeReads associate editor
Un-su Kim, The Plotters (Doubleday)
Everyone loves a good hit man noir, and The Plotters is one of the best thrillers I’ve ever read, featuring contract killers or otherwise. A colorless assassin is getting sick of his job after a contract goes out against the closest thing he has to a friend, and a new romance may push him into active rebellion. Also of note: there are two cats in this book, named Desk and Lamp, and they are treated royally.—MO
James Sallis, Sarah Jane (Soho Press)
I’ve already preached the gospel of Sallis around these parts, but a new book is another chance to get readers in the fold as well as a pleasure in itself. Sarah Jane paradoxically feels spirited and serious at the same time. Sallis likes a wanderer, and Sarah Jane is rootless and restless–there was a military stint, and a brief marriage, and several years roaming the country getting work here and there as a short-order chef. When she lands in a town in need of a sheriff, her life takes yet another turn. Sallis’s mastery of noir means no matter what happens to Sarah Jane the dark side of life is omnipresent, a force she needs to reckon with and ultimately control.—Lisa Levy, CrimeReads contributing editor
Marcie Rendon, Girl Gone Missing (Cinco Puntos)
Marcie Rendon burst onto the crime scene with her debut, Murder on the Red River, in which her pool-shark protagonist Cash takes on a double murder at a reservation. In her second, Girl Gone Missing, Cash is newly at college, and in between pool games and gawking at hippies, Cash begins investigating the mysterious disappearance of a number of blonde women who are fellow students. Marcie Rendon, a member of the White Earth Nation, has previously worked as a community activist and written several works of nonfiction, including two children’s books.—MO
Leye Adenle, When Trouble Sleeps (Cassava)
Amaka returns! Leye Adenle burst onto the international crime scene with his debut Easy Motion Tourist, an intricate, fast-paced thriller that takes us through the underworld of Lagos as a British tourist teams up with a human rights attorney named Amaka to get the bottom of a wave of violence targeting sex workers in the Nigerian capital. In the second installment of the series, When Trouble Sleeps, Adenle picks up right where he left off, as Amaka continues to investigate and bring down those who would threaten Lagos’ most vulnerable population; this time, however, Adenle ups the stakes with a complex political subplot that dovetails perfectly with the main mystery for a stunning conclusion. You can read an interview with Adenle here.—MO
Stephen Mack Jones, Lives Laid Away (Soho Press)
Stephen Mack Jones’s August Snow is still making waves as one of the most innovative and exciting new PI novels to come around in some time, a bold new take on the classic form and a deserved spotlight on Detroit. In this year’s second installment, August Snow is the only man who knows Mexicantown well enough to investigate a human trafficking ring taking advantage of ICE raids. This is noir as it was meant to be: incisive, socially conscious, distinctly situated, told with style.—Dwyer Murphy, CrimeReads managing editor
Steph Cha, Your House Will Pay (Ecco)
Cha’s new standalone, about the long shadows of history and the need for reconciliation, is both a reckoning and a space for healing. When a young Korean-American woman living in Los Angeles learns her mother was responsible for a racially motivated and deadly shooting, she decides to make amends with the victim’s family, 25 years later. This one does what the best noirs do, i.e., make you want to cry your heart out over the humanity of it all.—MO
Wil Medearis, Restoration Heights (Hanover Square Press)
Medearis’ debut is a novel of ideas wrapped up in a detective story, as a young art handler living in Bed-Stuy goes on the search for a missing heiress whose world has intersected with his own at a number of surprising points. Hidden forces abound in Medearis’ New York: new buildings going up, neighborhoods melting away, relationships torn apart, all of it rendered with a melancholic prose that flares up in righteous indignation, as more and more secrets make themselves known. Medearis is a novelist of real energy and ambition, and Restoration Heights is the kind of biting social critique that crime fiction has always excelled at and made necessary.—DM
Patrick Coleman, The Churchgoer (Harper Perennial)
Patrick Coleman combines evangelical malpractice, noirish cynicism, and seedy southern California underworlds in this debut novel. When Mark Haines, a former youth pastor who has succumbed to a more hedonistic life, meets a young drifter who seems inauspiciously connected to a failed robbery, he suddenly finds himself captivated by the young woman, following her trail into the depths of California drug trade and straight into the Evangelical megachurch of his past. With a palpable nod to Raymond Chandler, this forceful mystery is an exploration of religion, responsibility, and the inverted forces at play in the modern world.—Olivia Rutigliano, CrimeReads editorial fellow
Laura McHugh, The Wolf Wants In (Spiegel & Grau)
McHugh is one of the most talented practitioners of rural noir we have, and Wolf takes on the biggest tragedy to hit small-town America in eons: the opioid crisis. As in her previous novels, Arrowwood and The Weight of Blood, family ties weigh heavy in Wolf. In the way of small towns, everyone is related by blood or marriage, and solving a murder consists of unraveling those ties to see who has the most to gain.—LL
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Notable Selections
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William Boyle, A Friend is a Gift You Give Yourself · Kevin Barry, Night Boat to Tangiers · Lisa Sandlin, The Bird Boys · Joseph Knox, The Smiling Man · Ken Bruen, Galway Girl · Jake Hinkson, Dry County · Michael Hughes, Country · Craig Johnson, Land of Wolves · James Ellroy, This Storm · Matthew McBride, End of the Ocean · Don Winslow, The Border · Laura Lippman, The Lady in the Lake · John Galligan, Bad Axe Country · Ace Atkins, The Shameless · Brian Panowich, Like Lions · Dylan Struzan, A Bloody Business · Phillip Kerr, Metropolis · Greg Iles, Cemetary Road · Lori Roy, Gone Too Long
