Sometimes I want to spend time with characters I can root for, ordinary people vaulted into extraordinary situations. Other times I want to savor every sentence and have all of my senses challenged. Or maybe I just want to be swept away by a breakneck plot. For me, these 10 crime novels were the pinnacle of pleasure reading this year.

Dead in the Frame

by Stephen Spotswood

At Midnight Comes the Cry

by Julia Spencer-Fleming

Let’s start with the series sleuths. It’s always a treat to revisit the 1940s-era exploits of Lillian Pentecost, detective par excellence, and her right-hand woman, Will Parker. DEAD IN THE FRAME, the fifth and most sharply plotted in Spotswood’s beloved-to-me series, tests both as never before when Lillian is arrested for the murder of an odious antagonist. AT MIDNIGHT COMES THE CRY brings back the longtime Millers Kill police chief Russ Van Alstyne and his wife, the Rev. Clare Fergusson, for their most fraught adventure yet. Spencer-Fleming explores everything from new parenthood to a white supremacist militia, always stressing the ways in which everyone, no matter how loathsome, deserves our empathy.

Vera Wong’s Guide to Snooping (on a Dead Man)

by Jesse Q. Sutanto

Glory Daze

by Danielle Arceneaux

Two newer amateur detectives of a certain age are already reaching iconic status. Sutanto’s VERA WONG’S GUIDE TO SNOOPING (ON A DEAD MAN) further establishes the prickly, opinionated and utterly delightful Vera as a woman who cannot be messed with, but whose emotional tent is large enough to hold anyone she designates as “family.” Glory Broussard is equally astringent, her talents and foibles as a human and a crime-solver on full display in Arceneaux’s sublime GLORY DAZE as she investigates the death of her former husband, and gets far more than she bargained for.

Notes on Surviving the Fire

by Christine Murphy

History Lessons

by Zoe B. Wallbrook

The category of dark academia is more about aesthetics than actual scholarship, but two standout debuts reveal deeper truths about higher education. Murphy’s NOTES ON SURVIVING THE FIRE approaches the aftermath of campus sexual assault, and the desire for vengeance, in a wonderfully mordant, nonlinear manner. It’s one of the best depictions of how trauma cracks the psyche that I’ve read recently. HISTORY LESSONS takes a more orderly approach to murder in academia, but Wallbrook’s seemingly gentle mystery has real satirical bite.

Her One Regret

by Donna Freitas

Death Takes Me

by Cristina Rivera Garza

Two books — one published last month, the other published in Spanish two decades ago and just translated into English this year — delve deeply into the ways in which women’s thoughts and actions can be brutally suppressed. In HER ONE REGRET, Freitas addresses a topic little discussed in fiction — that of regretting motherhood — with compassion, demonstrating the consequences of her characters’ choices while also delivering a fingernails-bitten-to-the-quick mystery. And Rivera Garza’s DEATH TAKES ME, ably translated by Sarah Booker and Robin Myers, examines the scourge of femicide in boldly metafictional terms, showing how the transformation of visceral violence into a tidy narrative can minimize the actual harm at great peril.

Heartwood

by Amity Gaige

Urgency thrums through every page of HEARTWOOD, and not only because it centers a solo female hiker who goes missing on the Appalachian Trail. Gaige probes questions about survival and agency through three unforgettable characters: Valerie, the hiker; Bev, the game warden searching for her; and Lena, the retired scientist who becomes ensnared in the case. Our reviewer, Michelle Ruiz, said it best: “The real suspense of ‘Heartwood’is whether all three women will make it out of their metaphorical woods.”

Hollow Spaces

by Victor Suthammanont

If Suthammanont’s debutis anything to go by, he is destined for a major career as a novelist. HOLLOW SPACES begins where most legal thrillers end: at the conclusion of a trial, with the acquittal of a lawyer in the murder of his colleague (and lover). By flipping the conventional narrative, Suthammanont shows how the acquittal ripples across the lives of the murdered woman’s family, the accused man and especially his own children, who decades later decide to solve the crime once and for all. It turns out they are ill prepared for the revelations they uncover about their father — and themselves.