The Best Books of 2019: Mystery!

As will become quickly, appallingly apparent, reading new mainstream murder mysteries was very much a numbers game in 2019: of the ten books on this list, only one is what the industry tellingly refers to as a “standalone” novel - all the others are the latest entries in long-running series. This is of course both a positive (is there anything more comforting to the reader than a long-running series?) and a negative (is there anything more potentially derivative than the same characters engaged in their 300th whodunit?), and it made crafting this list extra tricky:

10 Tombland by CJ Sansom (Mulholland) - This is the 7th of Samsom’s adventures of the doggedly honorable Tudor-era lawyer Matthew Shardlake, and one of the longest at nearly 900 pages, but once again the author’s amazing ability to flesh out the era, in this case the shaky rule of young King Edward VI, makes the reader feel welcome.

9 The Stone Circle by Elly Griffiths (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) - This is the 11th of Griffiths’   Ruth Galloway novels does two things that will make it forbidding to new readers: it takes its time, and it makes a series of explicit references to a much earlier book in the series. The more ruminative narrative is the winning element here, albeit mostly for long-time series fans.

8 The Satapur Moonstone by Sujata Massey (Soho Crime) - This is only the second of Sujata Massey’s utterly delightful novels starring Perveen Mistry, 1920s Bombay’s only female lawyer, here called in to investigate death and potential murder among royal women in purdah in a remote princely state. Readers of The Widows of Malabar Hill will rejoice to have Mistry back.

7 A Bitter Feast by Deborah Crombie (William Morrow) - This is the 18th Duncan Kincad & Gemma James novel from Deborah Crombie, and it plunks its readers down squarely the middle of its characters’ messy lives - or rather, in their attempt to escape those messy lives by vacationing in the lovely Cotswolds, only to have murder follow them.

6 Almost Midnight by Paul Doiron (Minotaur) - This is the 10th Paul Doiron novel featuring heroic game warden Mike Bowditch, although Doiron’s skill at hiding such a fact is considerably more advanced than most of his mystery-genre colleagues. And his story this time around - about Maine wolves and Maine monsters - is his signature blend of touching and tough.

5 The Bitterroots by CJ Box (Minotaur) - This is the 5th CJ Box novel featuring determined, downtrodden former police investigators Cassie Dewell and Cody Hoyt, and as usual in this series, the author’s terrific handling of prickly characters and awe-inspiring natural settings make it a fairly easy jumping-on point for new readers.

4 The Body in the Wake by Katherine Hall Page (Morrow) - The hands-down winner in this year’s Back to the Well Marathon is this, Katherine Hall Page’s staggering 25th novel featuring high-spirited amateur detective Faith Fairchild, this time investigating a murder at Penobscott Bay in Maine, and the miracle here isn’t that anybody even bothers to commit a crime within three time zones of Faith Fairchild but rather that Page somehow manages to keep each of these novels feeling so fresh when by rights they should waft of very stale Limburger.

3 The Vanishing Man by Charles Finch (Minotaur) - This is the 12th historical mystery by Charles Finch featuring amateur consulting detective Charles Lennox, here featuring in a prequel set at the beginning of his career as he deals with a mysterious art theft that leads to a mysterious murder, and here done, thankfully, with a good deal of building intrigue.

2 The American Agent by Jacqueline Winspear (Harper) - This is the 15th adventure of Jacqueline Winspear’s redoubtable heroine Maisey Dobbs, this time investigating the death of an American journalist during the London Blitz, and although that “15th” will rightly raise suspicions, the many fans of this series need not worry: #15 is every bit as infectiously enjoyable as #1 was.

1 The Hunting Party by Lucy Foley (Morrow) - This is the … wait, hang on a minute: this latest novel from Lucy Foley, the best mystery novel of 2019, about a group of old Oxford school chums whose retreat to a secluded chalet in the Scottish Highlands is interrupted by a murder, is not the latest entry in a series that’s been running since Operation Desert Storm. Instead, it’s a hugely involving page-turner that hasn’t spawned any sequels - yet.