The primary purpose of Deadly Pleasures Mystery Magazine (and this website) is to find the best mysteries, crime novels and thrillers of the year and to make you aware of them.
The process starts with compiling a list we call The DP List (you will find a link to that list called “Year’s Best” on this website. We rely on starred reviews in the four principal library journals (Publishers Weekly, Kirkus, BookList and Library Journals). To get on The DP List, a novel must have garnered at least one starred review. If it only gets one starred review it has to also get a very favorable review in Deadly Pleasures Mystery Magazine to get on the list. We are adding another criterion this year: a mention of the amazon.com Best Mysteries of the Month lists (Both Larry Gandle and I have high confidence in the lists that come out each month) Every once in a while there is an exceptional novel that was missed by the library journals and which is deemed worthy to be put on the list. These usually are novels published abroad (Canada, Australia and the U.K.) that have not yet been published in the U.S. It always takes awhile at the beginning of the year to get many novels on The DP List, but as the year goes on, it fills out nicely.
The second step in the process is the reading and reviewing by our staff of reviewers. We are able to determine some of the best of the year by this process, but we always miss some.
The third step in the process is one that Larry Gandle and I take on (with help from J. Kingston Pierce of The Rap Sheet website). It begins in November and continues through to the end of the year. It is compiling all of the “Best of the Year” lists that are published during that period of time. Then I compile a report from those lists of the books that have been mentioned most on the “Best” lists. The report I call The Best of the Best.
Fourth Step. I then use The DP List, DP reviewers’ reviews, and the Year-End report of The Best of the Best to come up with a preliminary Barry Award Nominations list with four categories (Best Novel, Best First Novel, Best Paperback Original and Best Thriller). I ask for input (suggestions for additions and deletions to the preliminary list) from the Barry Award committee members. Then we vote on our 6 top choices. This results in The Barry Award Nominations, which represent Deadly Pleasures Best of the Best List. I just wanted you all to be aware of the time and effort that goes into the Barry Awards nominations. It isn’t an off-the-cuff activity.
Stay tuned for the announcement of the Barry Award nominations a week from today, on January 29th.
For a further peak behind the curtain, here is my preliminary draft of The DP List for 2022. Not all of the titles will remain on the list. It depends on whether there are more Starred Reviews and favorable reviews in DP forthcoming for titles with only one starred review.
DP LIST 2022 – Rough Draft
If a title is preceded by **, it is permanently on the list. If a title only has one starred review, it will need another starred review or a very positive review in the magazine to get permanent status.
Titles listed garnered starred reviews in the four library journals (Publisher’s Weekly, Kirkus, Booklist and Library Journal), appear on the monthly amazon.com best mysteries of the month lists (AZ) and/ or receive a glowing review in Deadly Pleasures as indicated. These books are the best of the best for 2022.
I hope you make good use of this list to guide your reading.
Best Novels
FIND ME, Alafair Burke (Harper, $26.99, January). She calls herself Hope Miller, but she has no idea who she actually is. Fifteen years ago, she was found in a small New Jersey town thrown from an overturned vehicle, with no clue to her identity. Doctors assumed her amnesia was a temporary side effect of her injuries, but she never regained her memory. Hope eventually started a new life with a new name in a new town that welcomed her, yet always wondered what she may have left behind—or been running from. Manhattan defense lawyer Lindsay Kelly, Hope’s best friend and the one who found her after the accident, understands why Hope wants a new beginning. But she worries how her friend will fare in her new East Hampton home, far away from everything familiar. Lindsay’s worst fears are confirmed when she discovers Hope has vanished without a trace—the only lead a drop of blood found where she was last seen. Even more ominously, the blood matches a DNA sample with a connection to a notorious Kansas murderer. PW
SOMETHING TO HIDE, Elizabeth George (Viking, $29.00, January). When a police detective is taken off life support after falling into a coma, only an autopsy reveals the murderous act that precipitated her death. She’d been working on a special task force within North London’s Nigerian community, and Acting Detective Superintendent Thomas Lynley is assigned to the case, which has far-reaching cultural associations that have nothing to do with life as he knows it. In his pursuit of a killer determined to remain hidden, he’s assisted by Detective Sergeants Barbara Havers and Winston Nkata. They must sort through the lies and the secret lives of people whose superficial cooperation masks the damage they do to one another. PW
**THE FINAL CASE, David Guterson (Knopf, $27.00, January). A girl dies one late, rainy night a few feet from the back door of her home. The girl, Abeba, was born in Ethiopia. Her adoptive parents, Delvin and Betsy Harvey—conservative, white fundamentalist Christians—are charged with her murder. Royal, a Seattle criminal attorney in the last days of his long career, takes Betsy Harvey’s case. An octogenarian without a driver’s license, he leans on his son—the novel’s narrator—as he prepares for trial. Kirkus & AZ
A NARROW DOOR, Joanne Harris (Pegasus, $26.95, January). It’s an incendiary moment for St Oswald’s school – for the first time in its history, a headmistress is in power, the gates opening to girls. Rebecca Buckfast has spilled blood to reach this position. Barely forty, she is just starting to reap the harvest of her ambition. As the new regime takes on the old guard, the ground shifts. And with it, the remains of a body are discovered. But Rebecca is here to make her mark. She’ll bury the past so deep it will evade even her own memory, just like she has done before. PW
**RECKLESS GIRLS, Rachel Hawkins (St. Martin’s Press, $27.99). Six stunning twentysomethings are about to embark on a blissful, free-spirited journey — one filled with sun-drenched days and intoxicating nights. But as it becomes clear that the group is even more cut off from civilization than they initially thought, it starts to feel like the island itself is closing in, sending them on a dangerous spiral of discovery. When one person goes missing and another turns up dead, the remaining friends wonder what dark currents lie beneath this impenetrable paradise – and who else will be swept under its secluded chaos. BL & AZ
**SILENT PARADE, Keigo Higashino (Minotaur, $27.99, January). A popular young girl disappears without a trace, her skeletal remains discovered three years later in the ashes of a burned out house. There’s a suspect and compelling circumstantial evidence of his guilt, but no concrete proof. When he isn’t indicted, he returns to mock the girl’s family. And this isn’t the first time he’s been suspected of the murder of a young girl, nearly twenty years ago he was tried and released due to lack of evidence. Detective Chief Inspector Kusanagi of the Homicide Division of the Tokyo Police worked both cases.The neighborhood in which the murdered girl lived is famous for an annual street festival, featuring a parade with entries from around Tokyo and Japan. During the parade, the suspected killer dies unexpectedly. His death is suspiciously convenient but the people with all the best motives have rock solid alibis. DCI Kusanagi turns once again to his college friend, Physics professor and occasional police consultant Manabu Yukawa, known as Detective Galileo, to help solve the string of impossible-to-prove murders.
LJ & PW
**THE MIRROR MAN, Lars Kepler (Knopf, $28.95, January). Sixteen-year-old Jenny Lind is kidnapped in broad daylight on her way home from school and thrown into the back of a truck. She’s taken to a dilapidated house, where she and other girls face horrors far beyond their worst nightmares. Though they’re desperate to escape, their captor foils everyone of their attempts. Five years later, Jenny’s body is found hanging in a playground, strung up with a winch on a rainy night. As the police are scrambling to find a lead in the scant evidence, Detective Joona Linna recognizes an eerie connection between Jenny’s murder and a death declared a suicide years before. PW & DP
THE ACCOMPLICE, Lisa Lutz (Ballantine, $28.00, January). Owen Mann is charming, privileged, and chronically dissatisfied. Luna Grey is secretive, cautious, and pragmatic. Despite their differences, they form a bond the moment they meet in college. Their names soon become indivisible—Owen and Luna, Luna and Owen—and stay that way even after an unexplained death rocks their social circle. They’re still best friends years later, when Luna finds Owen’s wife brutally murdered. The police investigation sheds light on some long-hidden secrets, but it can’t penetrate the wall of mystery that surrounds Owen. To get to the heart of what happened and why, Luna has to dig up the one secret she’s spent her whole life burying. BL
THE MURDER RULE, Dervla McTiernan (William Morrow, $27.99, May). In 2019 Hannah Rokeby cons her way into the Innocence Project clinic run by Professor Rob Parekh at the University of Virginia. Why? The answer lies in her mother’s diary from 1994 when she worked as a cleaner in Maine. There she met uber-rich Tom Spencer and his friend Michael Dandridge. Now Tom is dead and Michael is in prison following the rape and murder of Sarah Fitzhugh for which he protests his innocence. Hannah is convinced that Michael is a murderer who ruined her mother’s life so she is going to do everything she can to slyly sabotage the Innocence Project’s work on behalf of Dandridge. The story is told mostly by Hannah, interspersed with extracts from her mother Laura’s diary. DP
THE DARK FLOOD, Deon Meyer (Atlantic Monthly, $27.00, May). Having jeopardized their careers in an unauthorized investigation that threatened to reveal the corruption in South Africa’s halls of power, Benny Griessel and Vaughn Cupido have been demoted from the elite Hawks police unit. Assigned to investigate the disappearance of Callie de Bruin, a young university student and brilliant computer programmer, they hit dead ends until the trail, including the death of a fellow officer, leads to a series of gun heists and the alarming absence of certain weapons from the police registry. As Griessel and Cupido intensify their search for de Bruin, real estate agent Sandra Steenberg confronts her own crisis: state corruption has caused the real estate market to crash. When billionaire Jasper Boonstra contacts her to represent a major property he wants to sell, she pushes aside her concerns about his notorious reputation. And then Boonstra himself disappears. DP
**ONE-SHOT HARRY, Gary Phillips (Soho Crime, $24.95, April). LOS ANGELES, 1963: African American Korean War veteran Harry Ingram earns a living as a news photographer and occasional process server: chasing police radio calls and dodging baseball bats. With racial tensions running high on the eve of Martin Luther King’s Freedom Rally, Ingram risks becoming a victim at every crime scene he photographs. When Ingram hears about a deadly automobile accident on his police scanner, he recognizes the vehicle described as belonging to his good friend and old army buddy, a white jazz trumpeter. The LAPD declares the car crash an accident, but when Ingram develops his photos, he sees signs of foul play. Ingram feels compelled to play detective, even if it means putting his own life on the line. Armed with his wits, his camera, and occasionally his Colt .45, “One-Shot” Harry plunges headfirst into the seamy underbelly of LA society, tangling with racists, leftists, gangsters, zealots, and lovers, all in the hope of finding something resembling justice for a friend. Kirkus & BL
**MR. CAMPION’S WINGS, Mike Ripley (Severn House, $28.99, January). Cambridge, 1965. The honorary doctorate ceremony for Albert Campion’s wife takes a dramatic turn when Lady Amanda is arrested by Special Branch for breaking the Official Secrets Act. Never before having taken much interest in his wife’s work in cutting-edge aircraft design, Mr Campion sets out to discover more about the top-secret Goshawk Project in which Amanda is involved. He quickly realizes he is not the only one keen to learn the secrets of the project. When a badly mutilated body is discovered at the Goshawk Project’s hangar – the result, it would appear, of a bizarre accident – Campion is drawn into a turbulent mix of industrial espionage and matters of national security. And as he attempts to get to the bottom of the deadly goings-on, it seems that the bicycles and punts are almost as dangerous as the aircraft. PW & DP
**WHEN YOU ARE MINE, Michael Robotham (Scribner,$24.99, January). Philomena McCarthy is a young, ambitious police office with the elite Metropolitan Police in London. When she responds to a domestic violence call, she finds the victim, Tempe Brown, trying to protect her abuser, a married man named Darren Goodall, a decorated Scotland Yard detective afraid of no one. As Philomena pursues the case against him, she not only encounters resistance from her police force colleagues but also becomes dangerously entangled with the victim—who is not at all whom she appears to be—much to the increasing endangerment of herself and Henry, her fiancée. Complicating matters is Philomena’s estranged father Edward McCarthy, a powerful man who has built a criminal empire along with his brothers. Philomena has long tried to pursue her career as a police officer without her father’s involvement, but as she falls under suspicion of stalking and harassing Goodall, her father becomes involved. Kirkus, PW, AZ & DP
**REAL EASY, Marie Rutkoski (Henry Holt, $26.99, January). It’s 1999 and Samantha has danced for years at the Lovely Lady strip club. She’s not used to mixing work and friendship – after all, between her jealous boyfriend and his young daughter, she has enough on her plate. But the newest dancer is so clueless that Samantha feels compelled to help her learn the hustle and drama of the club: how to sweet-talk the boss, fit in with the other women, and make good money. One night, when the new girl needs a ride home, Samantha agrees to drive: a simple decision that turns deadly. Georgia, another dancer drawn into the ensuing murder and missing person investigation, gathers information for Holly, a grieving detective determined to solve the case. Georgia just wants to help, but her involvement makes her a target. As Holly and Georgia round up their suspects, the story’s point of view shifts between dancers, detectives, children, club patrons – and the killer. Kirkus, PW & AZ
**SECRET IDENTITY, Alex Segura (Flatiron, $27.99, March). It’s 1975 and the comic book industry is struggling, but Carmen Valdez doesn’t care. She’s an assistant at Triumph Comics, which doesn’t have the creative zeal of Marvel nor the buttoned-up efficiency of DC, but it doesn’t matter. Carmen is tantalizingly close to fulfilling her dream of writing a superhero book. That dream is nearly a reality when one of the Triumph writers enlists her help to create a new character, which they call “The Lethal Lynx,” Triumph’s first female hero. But her colleague is acting strangely and asking to keep her involvement a secret. And then he’s found dead, with all of their scripts turned into the publisher without her name. Carmen is desperate to piece together what happened to him, to hang on to her piece of the Lynx, which turns out to be a runaway hit. But that’s complicated by a surprise visitor from her home in Miami, a tenacious cop who is piecing everything together too quickly for Carmen, and the tangled web of secrets and resentments among the passionate eccentrics who write comics for a living. PW, BL & Kirkus
A GAME OF FEAR, Charles Todd (Morrow, $28.99, February). Spring, 1921. Scotland Yard sends Inspector Ian Rutledge to the sea-battered village of Walmer on the coast of Essex, where amongst the salt flats and a military airfield lies Benton Abbey, a grand manor with a storied past. The lady of the house may prove his most bewildering witness yet. She claims she saw a violent murder—but there is no body, no blood. She also insists she recognized the killer: Captain Nelson. Only it could not have been Nelson because he died during the war. Everyone in the village believes that Lady Benton’s losses have turned her mind—she is, after all, a grieving widow and mother—but the woman Rutledge interviews is rational and self-possessed. And then there is Captain Nelson: what really happened to him in the war? The more Rutledge delves into this baffling case, the more suspicious tragedies he uncovers. PW
**DESOLATION CANYON, P. J. Tracy (Minotaur, $27.99). LAPD Detective Margaret Nolan is struggling to move forward after the death of her brother in Afghanistan and taking a life in the line of duty. Her stoic parents offer little support – they refuse to address anything difficult, and she’s afraid their relationship is eroding beyond the point of recovery. The days off are the hardest, because they give Margaret time to think. A moment of weakness leads to cocktails with a colleague?an attraction she knows could be dangerous ?at the luxurious Hotel Bel-Air bar. A stroll through the grounds leads to a grim discovery beneath the surface of Swan Lake: the body of a successful attorney who made his fortune in international trade. PW & AZ
**THIS MIGHT HURT, Stephanie Wrobel (Berkley, $26.00, February). Natalie Collins hasn’t heard from her sister in more than half a year. The last time they spoke, Kit was slogging from mundane workdays to obligatory happy hours to crying in the shower about their dead mother. She told Natalie she was sure there was something more out there. And then she found Wisewood. On a private island off the coast of Maine, Wisewood’s guests commit to six-month stays. During this time, they’re prohibited from contact with the rest of the world—no Internet, no phones, no exceptions. But the rules are for a good reason: to keep guests focused on achieving true fearlessness so they can become their Maximized Selves. Natalie thinks it’s a bad idea, but Kit has had enough of her sister’s cynicism and voluntarily disappears off the grid. BL, LJ & PW
Best First Novels
SHUTTER, Ramona Emerson (Soho Crime, $27.95, August). Rita Todacheene is a forensic photographer working for the Albuquerque police force. She is almost supernaturally good at capturing details. In fact, Rita has been hiding a secret: she sees the ghosts of crime victims who point her toward the clues that other investigators overlook.
As a lone portal back to the living for traumatized spirits, Rita is terrorized by nagging ghosts who won’t let her sleep and who sabotage her personal life. Her psychologically harrowing ability was what drove her away from her hometown on the Navajo reservation, where she was raised by her grandmother. When Rita is sent to photograph the scene of a supposed suicide on a highway overpass, the furious, discombobulated ghost of the victim—who insists she was murdered—latches onto Rita, forcing her on a quest for revenge against her killers, and Rita finds herself in the crosshairs of one of Albuquerque’s most dangerous cartels. DP
**THE MAID, Nita Prose (Ballantine, $27.00, January). Molly Gray is not like everyone else. She struggles with social skills and misreads the intentions of others. Her gran used to interpret the world for her. Since Gran died a few months ago, twenty-five-year-old Molly has been navigating life’s complexities all by herself. No matter—she throws herself with gusto into her work as a hotel maid. Her unique character, along with her obsessive love of cleaning and proper etiquette, make her an ideal fit for the job. But Molly’s orderly life is upended the day she enters the suite of the infamous and wealthy Charles Black, only to find it in a state of disarray and Mr. Black himself dead in his bed. Before she knows what’s happening, Molly’s unusual demeanor has the police targeting her as their lead suspect. She quickly finds herself caught in a web of deception, one she has no idea how to untangle. LJ, BL & AZ
Best Paperback Originals
THE DAY HE LEFT, Frederick Weisel (Poisoned Pen Press, $16.99, March). Annie has fallen out of the habit of listening to her husband. She and Paul have been married for a long time; it’s easy to nod as he drones on, responding to his voice while completely ignoring every word he says. That becomes a problem, of course, when Paul disappears and the police have questions. Was Paul having issues at work? Is there any reason to think he might harm himself? Annie doesn’t know. But someone does. An unsettling photo found amongst Paul’s things turns the investigation toward his job as a middle school teacher and a troubled girl who is hiding secrets of her own. But what exactly happened to Paul on the day he left for work and never made it to the classroom? PW
Best Thrillers
**BOX 88, Charles Cumming (Mysterious Press, $27.95, January). Lachlan Kite is a member of BOX 88, an elite transatlantic black ops outfit so covert that not even MI6 and the CIA are certain of its existence — but even the best spy can’t anticipate every potential threat in a world where dangerous actors lurk around every corner. At the funeral of his childhood best friend, Lachlan falls into a trap that drops him into the hands of a potentially deadly interrogation, with his pregnant wife, also abducted, being held as collateral for the information he’s sworn on his own life to protect. Kirkus, PW & BL
**ONE STEP TOO FAR, Lisa Gardner (Dutton, $27.00, January). This novel sends missing persons expert Frankie Elkin into a national forest in Wyoming looking for a young man who disappeared without a trace. But when the search team encounters immediate threats to their survival, Frankie realizes she’s up against something very dark—and she’s running out of time.
Kirkus, BL, AZ & DP
**SIERRA SIX, Mark Greaney (Berkley, $28.00, February). Before he was the Gray Man, Court Gentry was Sierra Six, the junior member of a CIA action team. In their first mission they took out a terrorist leader, at a terrible price. Years have passed. The Gray Man is on a simple mission when he sees a ghost: the long-dead terrorist, but he’s remarkably energetic for a dead man. A decade of time hasn’t changed the Gray Man. He isn’t one to leave a job unfinished or a blood debt unpaid. PW & DP
BAD ACTORS, Mick Herron (Soho Crime, $27.95, May). In London’s MI5 headquarters a scandal is brewing that could disgrace the entire intelligence community. The Downing Street superforecaster—a specialist who advises the Prime Minister’s office on how policy is likely to be received by the electorate—has disappeared without a trace. Claude Whelan, who was once head of MI5, has been tasked with tracking her down. But the trail leads him straight back to Regent’s Park itself, with First Desk Diana Taverner as chief suspect. Has Taverner overplayed her hand at last? Meanwhile, her Russian counterpart, Moscow intelligence’s First Desk, has cheekily showed up in London and shaken off his escort. Are the two unfortunate events connected? Over at Slough House, where Jackson Lamb presides over some of MI5’s most embittered demoted agents, the slow horses are doing what they do best, and adding a little bit of chaos to an already unstable situation. DP
**THE RUNAWAY, Nick Petrie (Putnam, $27.00, January). War veteran Peter Ash is driving through northern Nebraska when he encounters a young pregnant woman alone on a gravel road, her car dead. Peter offers her a lift, but what begins as an act of kindness soon turns into a deadly cat-and-mouse chase across the lonely highways with the woman’s vicious ex-cop husband hot on their trail. The pregnant woman has seen something she was never meant to see . . . but protecting her might prove to be more than Peter can handle. Kirkus & DP
THE MATCHMAKER, Paul Vidich (Pegasus, $25.95, February). Berlin, 1989. Protests across East Germany threaten the Iron Curtain and Communism is the ill man of Europe. Anne Simpson, an American who works as a translator at the Joint Operations Refugee Committee, thinks she is in a normal marriage with a charming East German. But then her husband disappears, and the CIA and Western German intelligence arrive at her door. Nothing about her marriage is as it seems. She had been targeted by the Matchmaker—a high level East German counterintelligence officer—who runs a network of Stasi agents. These agents are his “Romeos” who marry vulnerable women in West Berlin to provide them with cover as they report back to the Matchmaker. Anne has been married to a spy, and now he has disappeared, and is presumably dead. BL
COLD FEAR, Brandon Webb & John Mann (Bantam, $28.00, June). Sequel to STEEL FEAR. Disgraced Navy SEAL Finn is on the run. A wanted man since he jumped ship from the USS Abraham Lincoln, he’s sought for questioning in connection to war crimes committed in Yemen by a rogue element in his SEAL team. But his memory of that night—as well as the true fate of his mentor and only friend, Lieutenant Kennedy—is a gaping hole. Finn learns that three members of his team have been quietly redeployed to Iceland, which is a puzzle in itself; the tiny island nation is famous for being one of the most peaceful, crime-free places on the planet.
His personal mission is simple: track down the three corrupt SEALs and find out what really happened that night in Yemen. But two problems stand in his way. On his first night in town a young woman mysteriously drowns—and a local detective suspects his involvement. What’s worse, a SEAL-turned-contract-killer with skills equal or better to his own has been hired to make sure he never gets the answers he’s looking for. And he’s followed Finn all the way to the icy north. DP