Marilyn's Mystery Reads

Best movies, best television shows, best podcasts.  Now it’s time for my list of best mysteries of 2022.

As always, my choices for the best of the best are a mix of domestic and foreign mysteries, police procedurals and private detectives and amateur sleuths.  Interestingly though, and for the first time, more than half of the fourteen books take place either partly or totally outside the United States.

That statistic definitely speaks not only to the increasingly important role that mysteries/thrillers/crime novels play in today’s publishing business but also to how widely the genre has reached across the globe.  Certainly, even ten or fifteen years ago a grouping such as this would have consisted almost exclusively of American mysteries, with perhaps a British one or two completing the list.  But notice the various countries that have a place on my list now.

THE GATEKEEPER by James Byrne (Algeria/United States), GIRLS WHO LIE by Eva Björg Egisdóttir (England/Iceland), LOOK CLOSER by David Ellis (England), SILENT PARADE by Keigo Higashino (Japan), PORTRAIT OF A THIEF by Grace Li (United States/China), THE DYING DAY by Vaseem Khan (India), GONE BY MORNING by Michele Weinstat Miller (United States), THE SHADOWS OF MEN by Abir Mukherjee (India), DO NO HARM by Robert Pobi (United States), DIE AROUND SUNDOWN by Mark Pryor (Germany), THE LEFT-HANDED TWIN by Thomas Perry (United States), KILLERS OF A CERTAIN AGE by Deanna Raybourn (England/Europe/Caribbean), COLD AS HELL by Lilja Sigurdadóttir (Iceland), NINE LIVES by Peter Swanson (United States).

All of these novels, not surprisingly, are reviewed on this blog.  I invite you to take a peek at my reviews; hopefully, you’ll be intrigued enough to read one, several, or even all of them.  I promise that regardless of the book(s) you choose, you are in for a treat.

Wishing you a happy holiday season and a wonderful 2023.

Marilyn