This year the trend for cosy crime novels with added bells and whistles has continued unabated, offering everything from metafiction to ghosts who solve their own murders. Bella Mackie’s second novel, What a Way to Go (Borough), is one of the best. Hedge fund boss Anthony Wistern is universally loathed, so when he dies mysteriously there are plenty of suspects. The narrative baton is passed between his widow Olivia, the obsessive crime blogger Sleuth, and Anthony himself – who, from the dingy limbo of a “processing centre”, must figure out how he perished in order to transition to the afterlife. It’s a delightful blend of whodunnit, Succession-style family infighting, and Jilly Cooperesque social comedy.
There’s more fun to be had with irredeemable characters in Jonny Sweet’s debut The Kellerby Code (Faber). Edward Jevons is in self-hating thrall to his posh, entitled university friends. He’s in love with Stanza, but his already fragile mental state is undermined by the discovery that she and Robert – to whom Edward has repeatedly confessed his adoration – are an item. As events at Stanza’s ancestral home spiral out of control, the pressure becomes unbearable. Very dark and very funny: perfect for fans of Saltburn.
Other notable debuts this year include The List of Suspicious Things by Jennie Godfrey (Hutchinson Heinemann). In 1979, during the Yorkshire Ripper’s killing spree, 12-year-old Miv decides to take matters into her own hands by making a list of anyone or anything she deems worthy of investigation in order to find the monster. She ends up uncovering several mysteries a great deal closer to home in this poignant coming-of-age story embedded in an examination of the impact of one man’s crimes on the surrounding community.
American author Tracy Sierra’s debut Nightwatching (Viking) begins with a woman and her young children in an isolated house, hiding from a terrifying intruder – and worse, when she does manage to escape and asks for help, nobody believes her. This is an intelligent, excoriating and almost unbearably tense look at what can happen when men choose to assume that a woman is hysterical rather than taking her seriously.
IS Berry is a former CIA agent, and her remarkably assured first novel, The Peacock and the Sparrow (No Exit), has a palpable authenticity. Set in Bahrain during the first Arab spring, where ageing, cynical CIA spy Shane Collins’s private life is as complicated as his work, this captivatingly twisty tale has shades of both John le Carré and Graham Greene.
An established author in his own right, le Carré’s youngest son Nick Harkaway has slid into the gap in his father’s oeuvre between The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963) and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974). In Karla’s Choice (Viking), a Soviet assassin comes to London to kill Hungarian publisher Laszlo Banati, but subsequently changes his mind. Banati, however, is missing, and Smiley is lured out of retirement to find him and discover why the Soviets wanted him dead: a mission that puts the shabby, self-effacing hero back on the trail of his old nemesis, Karla. Le Carré fans will certainly applaud Harkaway’s success at channelling his late father’s voice in this excellent addition to the canon.
Bonehead (Hodder & Stoughton) is the final novel by the late Mo Hayder. As a teenager, police officer Alex survived a coach crash that killed six of her classmates; now she has returned to the village where it happened, determined to discover the truth. Rumours still abound, particularly about the faceless, mummified woman who is said to haunt the nearby wood. A bittersweet reminder of quite how dark, audacious and genuinely shocking Hayder’s imagination could be.
In a departure from his series set in 1920s India, Abir Mukherjee’s first standalone novel, Hunted (Harvill Secker), is set in contemporary America, where a suicide bomber in a California shopping mall creates a national emergency. With a fast pace and deftly juggled multiple storylines, this is a true white-knuckle ride. All the Colours of the Dark by Chris Whitaker (Orion) is another exceptional US-set novel from a British author. Complex, compelling and very moving, it’s the story of a decades-long search for a missing girl. Young Joseph Macauley was kidnapped by a sexual predator and locked up in total darkness with a girl called Grace; after he escapes, he devotes his life to finding her.
Ian Rankin, whose 25th Rebus novel, the excellent Midnight and Blue (Orion), was published in October, struck a chord with many readers when he remarked that “there is almost no necessity for a crime novel to be more than 300 pages”. In an era when books are becoming ever longer, readers who value concision can do no better than the first two novels in Simon Mason’s commendably streamlined Finder series, Missing Person: Alice and The Case of the Lonely Accountant (Riverrun), in which enigmatic ex-cop Talib searches for both meaning and people. His downtime reading choices – respectively, Henry James’s What Maisie Knew and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde – provide a literary counterpoint to the plots, as Talib must reconcile the opposing narratives he’s presented with in order to arrive at the truth.
• To browse all crime and thrillers included in the Guardian and Observer’s best books of 2024 visit guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
