Over the coming days, we’ll also be looking at the best crime fiction series of the decade and the rising voices of crime literature. Crime fiction is growing and evolving all the time, and we’re constantly discovering new veins of the literature to read, new authors to appreciate. Many worthy books were left off this list some of them are listed below in our Notables selection, while others will have to live to be recommended another day.
BEST BOOKS TO READ 2017 FICTION FULL
And finally, in an effort to combat recency bias, and because we have a full slate of “best of 2019” content coming soon, we more or less excluded books that came out within the last calendar year from consideration. We also selected crime and mystery books that seemed to adhere to the basic structure of the genre and continue its traditions, rather than literary works masquerading as noirs. But we asked our editors to consult as many outside readers as possible-including the most adamant readers in our crime fiction community, aka the CrimeReads core audience-and to also take into special consideration those books that had a lasting, formative influence on the genre and its authors. Ranking books is inherently, incredibly subjective. The task we set ourselves was, at the outset, more or less impossible. Four, crime and mystery books are increasingly global, activist, female, diverse, and hard to pigeonhole into any particular subgenre.īefore you you dive into the book selections, a few notes on the process. Three, traditional mysteries are back-and they’re being read by millennials. Two, there are fewer cops and pros solving crimes, and more amateurs and Hitchcock-style every-people thrust into investigations of everyday mysteries. One, the remarkable rise of the psychological thriller heralds a shift from “stranger danger” thrillers to acknowledging that harm often lurks at home (or at work). Some trends surfaced as we made our choices, and they’re worth noting. Charting the future of the genre requires, also, a rounding up of accounts, the occasional week where we put aside our to-be-read stacks and decide what has really mattered to us-and to our beloved genre.
This is more than simply an exercise in list-making and taste-advocating.
And because this was, in retrospect-and maybe many of you saw this as it was unfolding-a pretty monumental decade in the long, tumultuous, and often brilliant course of crime fiction history. Because the books are there to be read and re-read, debated and reconsidered. As 2019 comes to a close, it’s time to take stock of the decade that was in crime fiction and mystery.