The Year’s Best Crime Novels: 2008.

Ott, Bill (author).

FEATURE. First published May 1, 2008 (Booklist Magazine).
In addition to being the title of one of this year’s 10 best crime novels, Down into Darkness also captures the mood of much of our list. Before all you cozy fans start writing letters of protest, let's face this issue squarely. As crime fiction continues to attract more and more writers of a distinctly literary bent who want to use the genre to build multifaceted characters and to explore sensitive social issues and address questions of profound moral ambiguity, it is almost inevitable that darker worldviews and less formulaic plots will come to dominate “best” lists. Our annual top 10 list is not a roundup of subgenres; it's one magazine's opinion as to the richest crime fiction of the year, and given who's writing crime novels today and what they're writing about, it's a simple fact that the dice are loaded, for the moment at least, in the direction of darker, more complex fare. But don't get us wrong: sometimes a good cozy hits the spot just perfectly. Just not this year on this list.

With outstanding new entries in long-running series now occupying their own category (see below), the field is opened considerably to new or relatively new talent, and sure enough, this year's top 10 is dominated by writers who are making their first appearance on our annual honor roll. Only Kent Harrington has appeared on the top 10 before, his Red Jungle (2005) preparing the soil for this year's The Good Physician. That leaves nine new faces—at least new to this list—and what a stellar group it is.

Those 10 novels, along with our 6 best crime fiction debuts and 5 best new installments in long-running series, should be more than enough to take mystery fans through a full course of summer reading. The sunshine and the sand in your shoes should help offset any lingering effects from Lawrence's darkness, Stansberry's ancient rain, and Cain's heartsickness. —Bill Ott

Top 10

The Good Physician . By Kent Harrington. 2008. Dennis McMillan, $35 (9780939767601).

Harrington's unflinching examination of the humanity of the terrorist and the inhumanity of terrorism follows the transformation of a doctor at the American embassy in Mexico City, who is also a diffident CIA employee, from dilettante to reluctant antiterrorist to disgusted man of action. A powerful yet remarkably subtle novel in which Harrington heaps plagues upon all the ideological houses whose bombs spray their shrapnel across our landscape.