I have posted my top ten crime fiction books of the year for a long time here and at a previous WordPress.com site. I figured I would carry on the tradition, adding in some other books that stuck with me and linking to the reviews I wrote at Reviewing the Evidence for most of them. You can find a more-or-less complete list of books I’ve read at LibraryThing.
Attica Locke / BLUEBIRD, BLUEBIRD
Kristen Lepionka / THE LAST PLACE YOU LOOK
Peter Blauner / PROVING GROUND
Laurie King / LOCKDOWN
Tim Hallinan / FOOLS’ RIVER
Julia Keller / FAST FALLS THE NIGHT
Garry Disher / SIGNAL LOSS
Agnete Friis / WHAT MY BODY REMEMBERS
I’ll add a short comment for the two that I did not review at RTE.
Thomas Mullen / LIGHTNING MEN
Second in a series about the first African American police officers in Atlanta. This one deals with redlining and how crime crossed borders even if homeowners couldn’t. Even better than the first.
Jane Harper / THE DRY
The heat is palpable in this thriller set in Australia where a drought has affected the residents of a small town to the point that people aren’t really surprised that a man has snapped and killed his entire family, sparing only the baby. But of course there’s more to the story than that. I’m pleased to see another book by this author is soon to be released.
In other genres, I loved Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower. For some reason I read several dystopian future novels in this year of Trump, but this is the one that seemed most hopeful and philosophically interesting. I enjoyed revisiting Margaret Drabble with her Year of the Flood, not dystopian but about people growing old and dying. Zadie Smith’s Swing Time and Ali Smith’s Autumn were both good for different reasons.
In non-fiction, I got a lot out of David Harvey’s Brief History of Neoliberalism, Whitney Phillips’s This is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things, and Zeynep Tufekci’s Twitter and Tear Gas.
Here’s wishing for a 2018 full of good books and (one must hope) better news.
photo courtesy of David
