The Ten Best Crime Novels
Barry Forshaw - The Independent
Feb 21, 2008
1 What the Dead Know - Laura Lippman
A psychological crime thriller in which a woman reappears after being abducted many years previously; it's built on a puzzle, but is also about identity - a sophisticated book.
Orion
2 Child 44 - Tom Rob Smith
Tom Rob Smith is a name to watch. A young Russian policeman who justifies the nasty things he has to do for the national good turns against the state when his wife is accused.
Simon and Schuster
3 The Broken Shore - Peter Temple
Winner of the highly prized Duncan Lawrie Dagger, this is a about a damaged detective who's trying to solve a mystery involving Aborigines accused of murder. A clever novel.
Quercus
4 Sharp Objects - Gillian Flynn
A failing journalist is sent back to her home town, where she suffers a poisonous relationship with her mother. It's a clever story about the past and changing attitudes to class in the US.
Orion
5 The Art of Drowning - Frances Fyfield
Fyfield creates male characters who make male readers uncomfortable because the subject is violence towards women. It's a tremendously exciting thriller, with a grisly ending.
Sphere
6 The Girl with the Dragon - Stieg Larsson
This novel about a slightly autistic, computer-hacking, multi- tattooed punk girl, has been a hit in Sweden. Larsson, who died recently, makes her a very strong if unlikely heroine.
Quercus
7 Restless - William Boyd
A woman discovers that her mother has a chequered past and has to unpeel the layers of her mother's life and her own. A literary novel using crime or spy thriller conventions.
Bloomsbury
8 The Naming of the Dead - Ian Rankin
In his final Rebus novel, Rankin gives us a showdown between the detective and his great rival, Rafferty, recalling Sherlock Holmes and Moriarty - but taking in Gleneagles and G8.
Orion
9 Cold in Hand - John Harvey
Something of a state-of-the-nation novel and not comfortable reading. Harvey deals with social issues, but here shows Britain falling apart at the seams. Brilliant and unnerving.
William Heineman
10 Stalin's Ghost - Martin Cruz Smith
The author of Gorky Park uses a reported sighting of the ghost of Stalin to illustrate this story set in Putin's Russia, where people are glamorising life under the former dictator.
Macmillan
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Copyright 2008 by The Independent
