I’ve already read some outstanding 2022 product so this list will be in two parts. The first is a list of excellent novels that I’ve read and recommend to you. The second list contains ones that I look forward to reading with the expectation that they will be as good as anticipated.
2022 Books Read and Recommended
THE MIRROR MAN, Lars Kepler (Knopf, $28.95). 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.
This is very dark and so it comes with that warning. But it is also quite engaging and suspenseful. Publisher’s Weekly Starred Review January release.
SIERRA SIX, Mark Greaney (Berkley, $28.00). 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.
Readers of DP will note that I rate Mark Greaney the best of a current crop of great action thriller writers. This one has more character development than normal.
Publishers Weekly Starred Review February release.
THE DARK FLOOD, Deon Meyer (Atlantic Monthly Press, $27.00). 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.
I know that this will be on my list of Best of 2022. Great book! May release.
THE MURDER RULE, Dervla McTiernan (William Morrow, $27.99). 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. Quite a departure in style for one of my favorite authors. May release.
WHEN YOU ARE MINE, Michael Robotham (Scribner, Kindle, $12.99, no U.S. paper edition available on amazon yet??). 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. Part police procedural, part psychological suspense, all wrapped up in Robotham’s fine writing. Kirkus Starred Review January release.
BAD ACTORS, Mick Herron (Soho Crime, $27.95). 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.
It took me awhile, but now I’m a huge fan of this series now and enjoy every word of its delicious storytelling. Another that will be on my Best of 2022 list. May release.
SHUTTER, Ramona Emerson (Sho Crime, $27.95). 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.
A fascinating debut with beautiful prose. You’ll have to wait for this one though — it doesn’t come out until August.
Looking Forward to Reading
BEAT THE DEVILS by Josh Weiss (Grand Central, $28.00). USA, 1958. President Joseph McCarthy sits in the White House, elected on a wave of populist xenophobia and barely‑concealed anti‑Semitism. The country is in the firm grip of McCarthy’s Hueys, a secret police force evolved from the House Un-American Activities Committee. Hollywood’s sparkling vision of the American dream has been suppressed; its remaining talents forced to turn out endless anti‑communist propaganda.
LAPD detective Morris Baker—a Holocaust survivor who drowns his fractured memories of the unspeakable in schnapps and work—is called to the scene of a horrific double‑homicide. The victims are John Huston, a once‑promising but now forgotten film director, and an up‑and‑coming young journalist named Walter Cronkite. Clutched in the hand of one of the dead men is a cryptic note containing the phrase “beat the devils” followed by a single name: Baker. Did the two men die in an attack fueled by better-dead-than-red sentiment, as the Hueys are quick to conclude, or were they murdered in a cover-up designed to protect—or even set in motion—a secret plot connected to Baker’s past? March release.
IN THE BLOOD, Jack Carr (Atria/Emily Bester, $28.99). A woman boards a plane in the African country of Burkina Faso having just completed a targeted assassination for the state of Israel. Two minutes later, her plane is blown out of the sky. Over 6,000 miles away, former Navy SEAL James Reece watches the names and pictures of the victims on cable news. One face triggers a distant memory of a Mossad operative attached to the CIA years earlier in Iraq—a woman with ties to the intelligence services of two nations…a woman Reece thought he would never see again. Reece enlists friends new and old across the globe to track down her killer, unaware that he may be walking into a deadly trap. May release.
ONE STEP TOO FAR, Lisa Gardner (Dutton, $27.00). 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 & BookList Starred Reviews January release.
COLD FEAR, Brandon Webb & John Mann (Bantam, $28.00). 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. June release.
DO NO HARM, Robert Pobi (Minotaur, $27.99). Lucas Page is a polymath, astrophysicist, professor, husband, father of five adopted children, bestselling author, and ex-FBI agent―emphasis on “ex.” Severely wounded after being caught in an explosion, Page left the FBI behind and put his focus on the rebuilding the rest of his life. But Page is uniquely gifted in being able to recognize patterns that elude others, a skill that brings the F.B.I. knocking at his door again and again. Lucas Page’s wife Erin loses a friend, a gifted plastic surgeon, to suicide and Lucas begins to realize how many people Erin knew that have died in the past year, in freak accidents and now suicide. Intrigued despite himself, Page begins digging through obituaries and realizes that there’s a pattern―a bad one. These deaths don’t make sense unless the doctors are being murdered, the target of a particularly clever killer. This time, the FBI wants as little to do with Lucas as he does with them so he’s left with only one option―ignore it and go back to his normal life. But then, the pattern reveals that the next victim is likely to be…Erin herself. August release.
From the U.K.
STANDING ALONE, Stephen Leather (Hodder & Stoughton, £16.99, January, 2022). A Navy SEAL has gone rogue, selling his skills to the highest bidder as a professional assassin. Ryan French no longer cares who he kills so long as the price is right. His former bosses want him taken down, but they’re not prepared to get their hands dirty so they need a Brit to do the job.
SAS trooper Matt “Lastman” Standing is a lethal killing machine with experience in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. It’s not a mission he wants, but Standing made a bad choice in his past and it has come back to haunt him. Now he’s hunting French in the lawless Wild West forests of Humboldt County, where the US produces most of its legal – and illegal – cannabis. January release.
BETRAYAL, David Gilman (Head of Zeus, £18.99, January, 2022). Sequel to THE ENGLISHMAN. It has been many years since Dan Raglan served in the French Foreign Legion, but the bonds forged in adversity are unbreakable and when one of his comrade calls for help, Raglan is duty-bound to answer. a fellow-legionnaire, now an intelligence officer at the Pentagon, disappears. He leaves only this message: should he ever go missing, contact Raglan. But Raglan’s not the only one looking for the missing man. From the backstreets of Marseilles, Raglan finds himself following a trail of death that will lead him to Florida, to the camaraderie of a Vietnam vet in Washington D.C., and into the heart of a bitter battle in the upper echelons of the US intelligence community. January release.
THE BOTANIST, M. W. Craven (Constable, £16.99, June). Detective Sergeant Washington Poe can count on one hand the number of friends he has. And he’d still have his thumb left. There’s the insanely brilliant, guilelessly innocent civilian analyst, Tilly Bradshaw of course. He’s known his beleaguered boss, Detective Inspector Stephanie Flynn for years as he has his nearest neighbour, full-time shepherd/part-time dog sitter, Victoria. And then there’s Estelle Doyle. It’s true the caustic pathologist has never walked down the sunny side of the street but this time has she gone too far? Shot twice in the head, her father’s murder appears to be an open and shut case. Estelle has firearms discharge residue on her hands, and, in a house surrounded by fresh snow, hers are the only footprints going in. Since her arrest she’s only said three words: ‘Tell Washington Poe.’ Meanwhile, a poisoner the press have dubbed the Botanist is sending high profile celebrities poems and pressed flowers. The killer seems to be able to walk through walls and, despite the advance notice he gives his victims, and regardless of the security measures the police take, he seems to be able to kill with impunity.
It’s still a mystery to me why this fine series is not published in the U.S. June release.