My obsession with crime novels stretches back to 1997, when a chance pick up of a James Lee Burke novel at Gatwick Airport - a book judged entirely by its cover - has led me to reading (and listening to) thousands of books, and ultimately this blog.
It´s difficult to narrow these books down to 10, but lists sell! Some of these books stand in their own right and some represent series, where this is the case, I will indicate that and also name the first book in the series. I´ve restricted the list to "modern" novels, with the cut off for that at 1997. I might well go back in time with a different list later. They´re presented in the chronological order in which they´re published.
To get to this list, I went back through the archives of the blog, perused my book shelves and Audible catalogues. And there are so many great writers and books, it was incredibly hard to narrow down to 10. At one point, I thought about extending it to 20, but that defeats the object of the exercise, which is about making difficult decisions. So, over a couple of hours the list shifted back and forth, with books moving in and out. I have, however, indulged myself with a bubbling under list below. After all, people do have a lot of time on their hands right now.
Tell No One by Harlan Coben - 2001
Tell No One is a 3am book. A novel so gripping that you´re not going to be able to put it down until you´ve finished it. I believe it played a hugely influential role in generating a (sort of) new sub-genre I call "extraordinary things happening to ordinary people", where cops and private investigators play a secondary role while an everyman protagonist tries to figure a terrible situation out usually alone. It´s exactly the set-up that made The Stranger such a smash hit on Netflix. In this case, the protagonist is suburban doctor David Beck who is suddenly thrust into a mystery surrounding the circumstances of his late wife, Elizabeth. It twists and it turns and takes the reader for a hell of a ride. The French made a good movie of the story - Ne Le Dis a Personne - which will pass a couple of hours. Coben has been a prolific writer. I lover his earlier series of novels featuring wise-cracking sports agent Myron Bolitar. And also The Woods (review) a later standalone.
The Broken Shore by Peter Temple - 2005
The late Peter Temple made his name in the 1990s with a series of books featuring PI Jack Irish, which are good rather than great. The Broken Shore is "a staggeringly good novel" , one at the time I declared the best I read in 2007. It´s a truly great novel with an outstanding sense of place, memorable characters and delivers what I can best describe as a "feeling" that burns away at you. "It's a classic mystery theme: a rich man murdered in his own home. Piled on top of this is racism, corruption in officialdom, complex, dangerous family links and social division. The best books are always those that tell you something about the human condition. This one has it in spades." The (sort of) follow up, Truth, is also riveting.
The Turnaround by George Pelecanos - 2008
George Pelecanos is best known for his television work, as a script writer on series such as The Wire and the Deuce. As good as those shows are I always feel slightly resentful that they might be preventing Pelecanos from writing novels, because the body of work he´s produced from the early Nick Stefanos series to the standalone and Strange and Quinn novels of the new millennium is as good as anything out there. Pelecanos´ novels are set in the Washington DC you don´t see on CNN, away from Congress and the White House where ordinary folk are trying to make their way in one of the most divided cities in the US and tells compelling stories about those people´s lives. As I wrote in the original review, "Pelecanos has an extraordinary facility for the minutiae of human life and in writing with empathy for his characters. He is not judgmental, avoids hyperbole and in doing so shows life as it is, rather than stylising and editorialising it for a modern audience that is used to being led by the nose by the media." While I chose The Turnaround for this top 10 it could easily have been The Way Home or
The Blackhouse by Peter May - 2009
There must be publishers all over London who shiver whenever they think of the opportunity they missed when they passed on The Black House. Peter May´s Lewis Trilogy has been one of the most successful series of the last decade, but came close to never seeing the light of day. May, who already had a number of thrillers published felt he had produced his best work in The Blackhouse, which was written after he´d worked on a TV series on Lewis. During an interview in 2013, he told me: "It came as a huge shock, then, to have it rejected by all the major publishing houses in the UK. I simply couldn’t understand why no one wanted to publish it, and if it hadn’t been for the enthusiasm of my French publisher who bought world rights in the book, and ultimately sold it all over the world, it would have languished unpublished as a file buried somewhere in my computer archives." The Blackhouse as well as The Lewis Man and The Chessmen was eventually picked up by Quercus, and has sold millions. "May hit on an irrepressible formula in the trilogy: haunting, insistent storylines with the sharp bite and twisting narrative of the very best mystery stories; beautifully cut characters - and in particular leading man Fin MacLeod, a detective and Lewis native recently returned to his home island, and Marsaili, his childhood sweetheart; and an arresting and fascinating backdrop in Lewis, one of the most distant and least known parts of the United Kingdom." These are atmospheric, mesmeric novels.
When Will There Be Good News by Kate Atkinson - 2008
Kate Atkinson´s Jackson Brodie series is a quirky departure from the crime/mystery norm. Her brooding PI does solve mysteries but there is nothing conventional about either him or the narratives - his investigations are often either accidental or reluctant and the stories are as much about Jackson or other characters navigating their lives than they are about the crime. All five books in the series are hugely entertaining and insightful, and I recommend all starting with Case Histories. But WWTBGN is my personal favorite solely due to 16-year-old Edinburgh babysitter Reggie Chase who all but bullies Jackson into looking into the disappearance of her boss, Dr Joanna Hunter, and ´the baby´. Despite her youth and shortness of stature Reggie is a force of nature, and she allows Atkinson to show the utter brilliance of her dialogue. For that reason, this book works particularly well on audio
Revelation by CJ Sansom - 2008
Matthew Shardlake, hunchback Tudor lawyer and investigator, first shuffled onto the scene in 2003 Dissolution when he is commissioned to find the killer of one of Thomas Cromwell´s agents at a south coast monastery during Henry VIII´s closure of the religious houses. Seven novels have followed of which the fourth is Revelation, "a novel so good, so atmospheric, so engaging, I can still feel the disappointment of having finished it a full week after reaching The End". Each of the books provoked a similar response as Sansom - also known for his brilliant post Spanish Civil War spy novel Winter In Madrid - is so skilled at bringing alive the sounds and smells of Tudor England and detailing the claustrophobic, murderous intrigue of the Henrician court. He also knows how to spin a great mystery. Read all seven - I´ve also reviewed Sovereign, Lamentation and Heartstone, in which Shardlake somehow contrives to be on board the Mary Rose as it sinks. Great characters, marvellous narrative and beautifully atmospheric. The very best of historical crime fiction.
Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn - 2006
Gillian Flynn, regrettably, does not write many novels. But those she does write deliver enough of an emotional punch to carry several books. Sharp Objects (review) is a seriously disturbing book. It is accomplished "in every facet of the writing. Characterisation, dialogue, context, backdrop and story-telling are all first class". It´s scarcely believable that Sharp Objects - the story of damaged reporter Camille Preaker returning to her rural home town to look into a murder - was a debut. Flynn followed this up with Dark Places, also excellent and genuinely upsetting, before the celebrated Gone Girl launched her into the big time. These books are not for the faint-hearted but all three are worthy of your time and €s, and HBO´s 2018 adaptation starring Amy Adams is suitably creepy and also worth consideration.
The Wolf in Winter by John Connolly - 2014
Never listen to the advice, ´never judge a book by its cover´. I bought Connolly´s first Charlie Parker mystery, Every Dead Thing in 1999 purely on the basis of its striking and creepy anatomically-themed cover and the fact the book was set in Maine, a state I´d visited for the first time the previous summer. I loved the mixture of the troubled gumshoe detective and the supernatural themes that Connolly has increasingly woven into his books and have never looked back. Connolly has written 16 more books, all of which I listened to again during a summer of driving in 2019, and - as with all the best books - found something new and interesting to enjoy in each. Parker´s is an involved and complex story: grief for a family lost to violence has given way to a destructive determination to see the vulnerable protected and justice served everywhere. It is almost enough to kill him but he survives and in A Wolf in Winter undergoes "a moment of transformation", the ending of a path "out of grief and out of hopelessness", where he's been transformed into "something else. Parker's been intensely damaged and is entering a new phase." (review) I was lucky enough to meet Connolly when he came to Madrid a few years back and he signed my first edition Every Dead Thing. He also granted me an interview in which he talked extensively about Parker. I believe that I have reviewed more his books than of any other author, including: The Reapers, The Lovers, The Whisperers, A Song of Shadows, A Time of Torment,. Each is rich in plot, lavish in characterisation - Connolly takes care drawing even those who appear briefly - and deeply atmospheric. If you´re looking for a new series for lockdown and don´t mind a touch of the supernatural, you could do worse.
The Secret Place by Tana French - 2014
Tana French started dazzling readers in 2007 with In the Woods, the first of six Dublin Murder Squad novels she has so far written. There are a number of reasons these books have been so successful. First they have such a convincing sense of place, each offering a fascinating vignette into some slice of Irish life (the first I read, Broken Harbour, focused on the shattered dreams of an emerging middle class following the collapse of the so called Celtic Tiger economy.) Second the mystery is always a belter. This gift was also on brilliant display in the 2018 standalone novel The Wych Elm. But it is the pyschological element of the novels that sets them apart. French is brilliant at people, and this book is held triumphantly aloft by both the developing relationship between two detectives, the veteran Antoinette Conway and the wannabe Stephen Moran as well as the relationships between the schoolgirls at the centre of the mystery. The Secret Place takes place in the mysterious world of the boarding school, betting successfully that a place that is rife with secrets and lies would be fertile territory for murder.
I Know Who Did It by Steve Mosby - 2016
Steve Mosby has been scaring me since 2007 when his majestically creepy The 50/50 Killer was published introducing me to a world that is so very similar to our own, but without being our own. Since then Mosby has specialized in writing brilliant, off beam thrillers in which at least a part of his sport appears to be keeping the reader from every settling. For instance, as much as things always look familiar, the books never quite seem to be set in an identifiable place. It´s as if the narrative has been set up someone just on the edge of conciousness, where the thin line between real life and nightmares exist. SO these books are not for the faint hearted. But if you want super smart writing, tight and tense plots and memorable characters Mosby is for you. I Know Who Did It is a "powerful and shocking story. (Mosby) plays with the concepts of both place and time to very unsettling effect. He also brings to life characters that offer piercing insight into the human condition." It´s brilliant. As are: Cry for Help, Still Bleeding, and The Nightmare Place . For the longest time, Mosby was the most underrated author I knew, but a change of name - to Alex North - brought him huge and overdue success with The Whisper Man.
The Lost Man by Jane Harper
I´ve basically been ranting at everyone I´ve met that they just have to read The Lost Man, Jane Harper´s spellbinding Outback tale. "At the heart of The Lost Man is a tight, perfectly constructed mystery at its core: how did a popular, healthy, seemingly contented family man, one with intricate knowledge of the dangers of the Australian outback end up dying of dehydration just a few kilometres from his own vehicle which contained everything he needed to survive?" As Harper draws readers towards the answer she unveils an incredible talent for painting complex, richly drawn characters and creating a sense of a place that is as strong as anything I´ve read anywhere. I thought her debut novel, The Dry , was pretty special but this is quite exceptional. Weirdly, I didn´t much like her second book, Force of Nature, at all.
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