Now, as I peruse the titles remaining, I’m struck by the fence-swinging most of them busted out on an emotional level. There’re a couple just super-sweet rides on the list, but for the most part, the novels included here moved me… I must be getting soft. Two more notes. First, there is a tie included, and no, I don’t rank them numerically (they’re alphabetical by title), so you won’t know where they fell. Second, there’s a bonus non-mystery/crime novel selection thrown in because it’s just one of the best books I read this year – Deal with it.
At the End of the Road by Grant Jerkins. This one took its time winding up, but once the wire was tripped, it uncoiled fast and nasty. Contains perhaps my single favorite scene of the year. Neither Wonder Woman nor Drano will ever be the same to me.
Choke Hold by Christa Faust. The latest book to feature Faust’s heroine Angel Dare has got so much going on beneath the furious momentum of plot, so much to chew underneath the violence, and so much to admire beyond the wry genre-subversion, it probably deserves a second read.
Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead by Sara Gran. Are you sick and tired of me fawning over Sara Gran yet? Too bad. Her books rock on so many different levels I can hardly keep up. I’m going to have to learn a bunch more phrases for praises if she keeps writing. Did I mention Claire DeWitt is going to be a series? Quick – jump on board so you too can say you got in on the ground floor.
Cold Shot to the Heart byWallace Stroby. Stroby’s plotting, pacing and execution goes down just as clean, neat and perfectly as the jobs the professional thief at the cold heart of his thriller usually pull off. Of course this book’s about the one that didn’t go so hot, and features one of the year’s best villains – the assassin hired to take out our heroine after she’s double crossed. Love, love, love the workaday professional vibe he pulls off without overloading us with tech talk.
The Devil All the Time by Donald Ray Pollock. An American Gothic fever dream of violence, retribution, religion and redemption, where the glorious and the grotesque lie side by side. Grab your bible and your gun, give thanks and pray for mercy. This is strong stuff.
Dust Devils by Roger Smith. Cape Town, South Africa is the new wild-west, and Smith’s take-no-prisoners tours through the underworld just keep getting stronger - like Dutch Leonard on the far end of a crank binge. Trying to come up with a clever catch-phrase for Smith’s Cape Flats chronicles - Tell me what you think - Apocalypse Now without all the sanity! Makes City of God seem like paradise!
The End of Everything by Megan Abbott. This coming of age portrait features a young girl who takes it upon herself to look into the abduction of her best friend, and of course finds out all the wrong things. Spending a couple hundred pages immersed in the electrically-charged tweenage headspace of Lizzie, so vivid, volatile and recklessly alive, left me dizzy, strung-out and wanting to go again.
Fun and Games by Duane Swierczynski is everything that’s good about drugs. Lucky for us, it’s only the first of a trilogy that only gets trippier. Hell and Gone followed five months later and Point and Shoot is due soon. Sorry, big D, but since you made this year’s best-of I’ll have to scrub what I’m sure will be a home-run from 2012’s list.
The Killer Is Dying by James Sallis. You say cryptic, I say lyrical. You say confusing, I say subtle. The three barely connecting narrative strands featuring a hired killer, a homicide cop and a teenager living by his wits and running scams in suburban Phoenix, serve to form a donut ‘round the mystery at the center of the story. I was never less than fully engaged by the characters and Sallis’ sparse prose.
Mama's Boy by Rick DeMarinis. Alright, not a mystery novel, but the probability that you’ve not heard of DeMarinis or any of his wonderful books is a crime. This story of a boy in the 1950’s who joins the Air Force to escape being a dentist is ribald, sweet and hilarious. If you’re frustrated by the frequent side trips into characters exhibiting just one more stripe of weird Americana, you’re missing the point.
The Terror of Living by Urban Waite. A debut novel that wears its influences on its sleeve, but c’mon, wears them like Don Draper wears a suit. It’s a modern-day western with more than an echo of Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men, but transfers the action (and there’s plenty of that) to the wild n’ woolly Canadian border. Like NCFOM, Terror concerns an everyman caught in a mess, pursued by a lawman and a psychotic killer employed by international drug-runners. Strong prose, fast pace and sturdy stock characters who rise above their station. Great debut.
You Believers by Jane Bradley cuts through all the suffocating layers of mawkish sentimentality often sent to muffle a tale that has aspirations of spiritual uplift and that revolves around a terrifying reality or a horrifying crime. Cuts through em with a single stroke and they fall away like Pilgrim’s burden to reveal something beautiful. I dare you to read the first page and try to stop.
Jedidiah Ayres writes fiction and keeps the blog Hardboiled Wonderland.
