Declan Hughes
Lists, twice, naughty, not nice. But before I get to my selection of the best crime fiction I read this year (gentle reminder that far too much is published annually for two Declans to be comprehensive, let alone one) I want to note a few seasonal treats in prospect.
Dalziell and Pascoe Hunt the Christmas Killer is the title story in an enticing collection of short fiction from the late Reginald Hill. Traditional mystery readers will welcome Collins Crime Club’s 50th-anniversary reissue of Tied Up in Tinsel by Ngaio Marsh and Bodies from the Library 4, a cosy collection of Golden Age tales, while Harper Collins is offering two Christies for Christmas in handsome new hardcover livery: The Mysterious Affair at Styles and The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. The latter comes with an introduction by Louise Penny, whose latest Armand Gamache novel, A World of Curiosities, forms the first instalment of my holiday reading, followed by grand master Jerome Charyn’s indecently alluring Big Red, charting Rita Hayworth’s turbulent Hollywood adventures, The Dazzle of the Light, Georgina Clarke’s 1920s mystery inspired by a notorious, all-female London crime syndicate, and The Life of Crime, Martin Edwards’s massive new history of the genre.
Irish writers kept the home fires burning steadily throughout 2022, with absorbing new titles from Queens of Crime Catherine Ryan Howard (the film industry satire Run Time), Arlene Hunt (fear and loathing among the daytime TV set in While She Sleeps) and Jo Spain (the ingenious Lapland-set saga The Last to Disappear). I liked the second in Catherine Kirwan’s Cork-based Finn Fitzpatrick series (Cruel Deeds) and Her Last Words, an accomplished debut psychological thriller from EV Kelly. John Connolly’s The Furies delivers two violent, funny, deliriously chilling Charlie Parker novels under one cover, while WC Ryan’s supernatural vein continues with The Winter Guest, an intelligent, atmospheric country house mystery set during the Irish War of Independence.
Alison Gaylin’s meticulously plotted, ferociously driven page-turner The Collective explores a network of women who conspire to avenge the unpunished murders of their children. Laura Lippman’s dazzling Seasonal Work and Other Killer Stories mark the full range of her extraordinary talents on display. Mick Herron’s funhouse mirror vision of the British security state continues in the beautifully written, indecently entertaining Bad Actors. Punishment is a cool, pithy, mordantly amusing collection of stories drawn from the 20 years Ferdinand von Schirach spent as a criminal defence lawyer. Alex Marwood’s darkly topical, by Maxwell out of Epstein The Island of Lost Girls pulses with mythic energy and devilishly clever storytelling.
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A Season in Exile has the welcome return of Oliver Harris’s reliably reckless sleuth Nick Belsey in a brilliantly plotted and paced thriller whose poetic texture and anarchic verve set it apart. The Book of the Most Precious Substance by Sara Gran is an odyssey through the dusty world of rare books and the bewitching arcana of sex magic, a funny, charming, troubling, genuinely erotic novel. Dear Little Corpses is the 10th of Nicola Upson’s series featuring Golden Age author Josephine Tey as detective; balancing an elegant lightness of touch with psychological acuity and depth, this captivating, emotionally devastating book is my crime novel of the year.
Declan Burke
Nicola White concluded her trilogy of police procedurals based on true Irish crimes with 1980s-set The Burning Boy (Profile Books, £8.99), which followed on from The Rosary Garden (2013) and A Famished Heart (2020). The personal and professional lives of detectives Vincent Swan and Gina Considine intersect when they investigate a murder in the Phoenix Park, near an area notorious for being a cruising spot in “the twilight world of the homosexual”.
Modelled on The Brothers Karamazov, and set in Wisconsin, Lan Samantha Chang’s The Family Chao (One, £16.99) employs the murder of an immigrant patriarch to investigate identity, racism and the social role of the immigrant, and also asks hard questions about the sacrifices required if the American Dream is to be fully realised.
Brian McGilloway’s The Empty Room (Constable, £16.99) revolves around Dora Condron, a woman whose life is turned upside-down when her 17-year-old daughter Ellie goes missing, delivering a finely calibrated account of loss, grief and simmering rage.
William Boyle’s Shoot the Moonlight Out (No Exit Press, £9.99) reads like an Elmore Leonard homage, in which a richly detailed depiction of Brooklyn’s hardscrabble world serves as the backdrop to a very satisfying noir.
Set just off the Australian coast, Adrian McKinty’s The Island (Orion, £12.99) is a thrilling, high-concept blend of Deliverance and Lord of the Flies in which American tourist Heather battles in-bred locals to keep her stepchildren alive after a woman is killed in a tragic accident.
In Johnny Gogan’s Station to Station (Lepus Print, €13), former Irish diplomat Jack Lennon finds himself in over his head in southern Spain when a visiting Irish minister goes rogue and becomes a self-styled “Don Quixote on another wild goose chase”.
Winnie M Li’s Complicit (Orion, £12.99) is narrated by a former film industry employee called Sarah, who considers herself one of “the fortunate, the un-raped”. The American Dream becomes a nightmare for Sarah, the daughter of Hong Kong immigrants, in a gripping novel that transcends the immediacy of its #metoo backdrop to deliver a broadside against the movie industry and the patriarchal system it embodies.
With The Eye of the Beholder (Canongate, £11.99), Margie Orford offers a standalone psychological thriller in which the artist heroine specialises in “making beauty out of what had been broken” to expose heinous crimes against young women and girls.
Conner Habib’s Hawk Mountain (Doubleday Ireland, £11.99) was one of the most impressive debuts of the year. Set in New England, it explores the long-term consequences of bullying as Todd, now in his 30s, and the father of a young boy, encounters his high school nemesis, although the inevitable reckoning is as innovative as it is poignant.
The Bullet That Missed (Penguin Viking, £22) is the third offering from Richard Osman in his Thursday Murder Club series, in which a group of retirees investigate cold case murders. If you haven’t yet dipped into an Osman novel, take the plunge — dryly funny and delightfully plotted, Osman has created characters that read like the Famous Five by way of Mick Herron’s acid wit.
Equally humorous is Disorientation (Picador, £13.99), the debut from Taiwanese-American author Elaine Hsieh Chou, which is narrated by Ingrid Yang, a Taiwanese-American graduate student who discovers that a revered Chinese-American poet is actually a white man in “yellow face”. A romp that skewers casual racism, cultural colonisation and the pretensions of highbrow literary scholarship, Disorientation is a brutally funny satire that explodes “the good little immigrant myth”.
Benjamin Stevenson’s Everyone In My Family Has Killed Someone (Penguin Michael Joseph, £17.99) offers value for money, being a number of books condensed into one. Its narrator, Ernie Cunningham, writes books about how to write crime novels, which knowledge comes in handy when Ernie and his extended family head off to a remote ski lodge and discover a body the next morning — a victim who appears to have burned to death in a snowdrift. Meta-narrative genre mischief-making at its finest.
Another author writing about writing, albeit in a more serious vein, is Anthony J Quinn, whose Murder Memoir Murder (Dalzell Press, £11.99) is an investigation into his own past growing up in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, when the Quinn family home was invaded by IRA men who hijacked the family car and afterwards used it during the shooting dead of an off-duty RUC policeman. The result is breathtakingly honest true crime writing.
Finally, Tariq Godard’s High John the Conqueror (Repeater, £12.99) is a surreal tale set in modern Wessex, in which DCI Terry Balance investigates the disappearance of a host of teenagers when he is informed that “posh people are taking our children”. An irreverent and impressionistic take on the police procedural, it might well be the most original crime novel of the year.
