365 True Things: 100/Reading

When I am working, whether proofreading or editing a book, I have a hard time sitting down and reading anything but a shlocky mystery. But I do love shlocky mysteries.

I also love lists. So here, for a fast-and-sassy blog post, is a selected compilation of several "best crime and thrillers of 2014" lists—for my own future reference, since I've got work in for the next couple of months and will certainly need to take a mystery break during that time.

From the Guardian:

• Sarah Hilary's Someone Else's Skin and Eva Dolan's Long Way Home, police procedurals set in the UK
• Paul Mendelson's The First Rule of Survival, set in Cape Town
• Caroline Kepnes's You, "an unsettling masterpiece of stalker fiction"
• Antonia Hodgson's The Devil in the Marshalsea, "the spellbinding story of a desperate man who must solve a murder to get himself out of jail"
• Ray Celestin's The Axeman's Jazz, about a jazz-loving serial killer (based on a true story)

From NPR:

• Matthew Palmer's The American Mission, a thriller set mostly in the Democratic Republic of the Congo
• Helen Giltrow's The Distance, a thriller about a society woman with a secret life
• Celeste Ng's Everything I Never Told You, about a mixed-race family in a small Ohio town in 1977
• Tom Rob Smith's The Farm, "a novel of doubt and secrets set in a bleak yet beautiful Swedish landscape"
• Ruth Rendell's The Girl Next Door, "a [psychological] mystery about the present-day discovery of a long-buried tin box"
• Adam Brookes's Night Heron, an espionage thriller set in China
• James Ellroy's Perfidia, set in Los Angeles during the few weeks after Pearl Harbor
• Kim Zupan's The Ploughmen, about a Montana sheriff's deputy and the remorseless killer he is assigned to keep an eye on
• Robert Galbraith's The Silkworm, about the murder of an author who is universally disliked

From Kirkus Reviews:

• Louise Penny's The Long Way Home, set in Quebec
• Chelsea Cain's One Kick, about a young woman, herself kidnapped and held captive as a girl, who sets out to rescue other kidnapped children

And there are many more, but I'll leave it at that. It's interesting how little overlap there is on most of these lists. So much good writing out there!