Given this year’s headlines, it’s unsurprising that our appetite for cosy crime continues unabated, with the latest title in Richard Osman’s Thursday Murder Club series, The Last Devil to Die (Viking), topping the bestseller lists. Janice Hallett’s novels The Mysterious Case of the Alperton Angels, which also features a group of amateur crime-solvers, and The Christmas Appeal (both Viper) have proved phenomenally popular, too.
Hallett’s books, which are constructed as dossiers – transcripts, emails, WhatsApp messages and the like – are part of a growing trend of experimentation with form, ranging from Cara Hunter’s intricate Murder in the Family (HarperCollins), which is structured around the making of a cold case documentary, to Gareth Rubin’s tête-bêche The Turnglass (Simon & Schuster). Books that hark back to the golden age of crime, such as Tom Mead’s splendidly tricksy locked-room mystery Death and the Conjuror (Head of Zeus), are also on the rise. The late Christopher Fowler, author of the wonderful Bryant & May detective series, who often lamented the sacrifice of inventiveness and fun on the altar of realism, would surely have approved. Word Monkey (Doubleday), published posthumously, is his funny and moving memoir of a life spent writing popular fiction.
Notable debuts include Callum McSorley’s Glaswegian gangland thriller Squeaky Clean (Pushkin Vertigo); Jo Callaghan’s In the Blink of an Eye (Simon & Schuster), a police procedural with an AI detective; Scorched Grace by Margot Douaihy (Pushkin Vertigo), featuring queer punk nun investigator Sister Holiday; and the caustically funny Thirty Days of Darkness (Orenda) by Jenny Lund Madsen (translated from the Danish by Megan E Turney).
There have been welcome additions to series, including a third book, Case Sensitive (Zaffre), for AK Turner’s forensic investigator Cassie Raven, and a second, The Wheel of Doll (Pushkin Vertigo), for Jonathan Ames’s LA private eye Happy Doll, who is shaping up to be the perfect hardboiled 21st-century hero.
Other must-reads for fans of American crime fiction include Ozark Dogs (Headline) by Eli Cranor, a powerful story of feuding Arkansas families; SA Cosby’s Virginia-set police procedural All the Sinners Bleed (Headline); Megan Abbott’s nightmarish Beware the Woman (Virago); and Rebecca Makkai’s foray into very dark academia, I Have Some Questions for You (Fleet). There are shades of James Ellroy in Jordan Harper’s Hollywood-set tour de force Everybody Knows (Faber), while Raymond Chandler’s hero Philip Marlowe gets a timely do-over from Scottish crime doyenne Denise Mina in The Second Murderer (Harvill Secker).
As Mick Herron observed in his Slow Horses origin novel, The Secret Hours (Baskerville), there’s a long list of spy novelists who have been pegged as the heir to John le Carré. Herron must be in pole position for principal legatee, but it’s been a good year for espionage generally: standout novels include Matthew Richardson’s The Scarlet Papers (Michael Joseph), John Lawton’s Moscow Exile (Grove Press) and Harriet Crawley’s The Translator (Bitter Lemon).
Historical crime has also been well served. Highlights include Emma Flint’s excellent Other Women (Picador), based on a real 1924 murder case; Laura Shepherd-Robinson’s story of a fortune teller’s quest for identity in Georgian high society, The Square of Sevens (Mantle); and SG MacLean’s tale of Restoration revenge and retribution, The Winter List (Quercus). There are echoes of Chester Himes in Viper’s Dream (No Exit) by Jake Lamar, which begins in 1930s Harlem, while Palace of Shadows (Mantle) by Ray Celestin, set in the late 19th century, takes the true story of American weapons heiress Sarah Winchester’s San Jose mansion and transports it to Yorkshire, with chillingly gothic results.
The latest novel in Vaseem Khan’s postcolonial India series, Death of a Lesser God (Hodder), is also well worth the read, as are Deepti Kapoor’s present-day organised crime saga Age of Vice (Fleet) and Parini Shroff’s darkly antic feminist revenge drama The Bandit Queens (Atlantic).
While psychological thrillers are thinner on the ground than in previous years, the quality remains high, with Liz Nugent’s complex and heartbreaking tale of abuse, Strange Sally Diamond (Penguin Sandycove), and Sarah Hilary’s disturbing portrait of a family in freefall, Black Thorn (Macmillan), being two of the best.
Penguin Modern Classics has revived its crime series, complete with iconic green livery, with works by Georges Simenon, Dorothy B Hughes and Ross MacDonald. There have been reissues by other publishers, too – forgotten gems including Celia Fremlin’s 1959 holiday‑from-hell novel, Uncle Paul (Faber), and Richard Wright’s The Man Who Lived Underground (Vintage). Finished in 1942 but only now published in its entirety, the latter is an account of an innocent man who takes refuge from racist police officers in the sewers of Chicago – part allegorical, part brutally realistic and, unfortunately, wholly topical.
• To browse all crime and thriller novels included in the Guardian and Observer’s best books of 2023 visit guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
