Booklist’s Best Crime 2015

 

May is Mystery Month over at Booklist and to celebrate they’ve put together “Best of” reading lists with loads of Macmillan titles!
Plus, Booklist Reader has a special feature on one of our favorite mystery authors…

The Year’s Best Crime Novels: 2015

opens in a new window

THE LONG WAY HOME by Louise Penny
With her beloved series hero, former Montreal Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, now retired, Penny moves from finding reasons to get Gamache back to his beloved village of Three Pines to taking him on a road trip, first to Europe and then to the wilds of Canada’s upper St. Lawrence River. As always, Penny dexterously combines suspense with psychological drama, overlaying the whole with an all-powerful sense of landscape as a conduit to meaning. Another gem from an endlessly inventive writer.

THE WHITES by Harry Brandt
Richard Price returns as Harry Brandt with the story of Billy Graves, an aging NYPD cop who suspects that one of his cronies in the Wild Geese, a legendary anti-crime unit from the nineties, may now be killing the crooks who got away back in the day. With one-of-a-kind characters and settings so real you can smell them, The Whites isn’t about cops and killers as much it’s about the damage we all carry, the sins we’ve all committed, and the heartbreaking unlikeliness of forgiveness. An unrelenting, moving story of crime and social justice.

Best Crime Fiction Debuts

AN APPETITE FOR VIOLETS by Martine Bailey
Set in the 1770s, Bailey’s debut stars Biddy Leigh, undercook at Mawton Hall in Cheshire, England, who accompanies the master’s wife on a trip to Italy, where she falls in love with a chef and is thrown into a murder case. A delectable dish for foodies and the Downton Abbey crowd.

NIGHT OF THE JAGUAR by Joe Gannon
Gannon places a classic hard-boiled detective in the middle of 1980s Nicaragua, with its poisonous politics, and tells the story of the times in emotion-drenched, wonderfully lyrical prose.

opens in a new windowTop 10 Crime Fiction Audiobooks

THE BLACK-EYED BLONDE by Benjamin Black, read by Dennis Boutsikaris
Boutsikaris steps into Marlowe’s shoes as he narrates the search for a dead man who might not be dead at all. Set in the 1950s and true to Chandler’s creation, this is a memorable visit to the mean streets.

DESTROYER ANGEL by Nevada Barr, read by Barbara Rosenblat
When Anna Pigeon’s friends are kidnapped on a camping trip, she stalks the attackers. Rosenblat extracts fear, humor, and tension from each word as she narrates this atmospheric tale.

RUNNER by Patrick Lee, read by Raul Esparza
A chance meeting between an ex–Special Forces op and a runaway girl triggers this adrenaline-filled thriller. Esparza expertly handles both the nonstop action and the evolving emotional dilemmas.

M C Beaton’s Agatha Raisin series and Rhys Bowen’s Molly Murphy mysteries are part of Joyce Saricks’ Core Collection: Essential Cozies on Audio and in Print.

In a new segment, Booklist Reader has together a guide to all things C.J. Box! Calling him “a must-read author for fans of character-driven mysteries and tightly plotted thrillers set in the modern American West,” it includes his standalone novels from Minotaur:

BLUE HEAVEN
THREE WEEKS TO SAY GOODBYE
BACK OF BEYOND
THE HIGHWAY
BADLANDS (available July 28, 2015)   2 starred reviews!

Looking for a read-alike? Try Paul Doiron’s Mike Bowditch series. The most recent book, THE PRECIPICE (available June 16, 2015), is a June 2015 LibraryReads pick!