5: The Thirty Best Contemporary US Crime Novels

Before you ask ‘Where’s James Ellroy?’, remember that the criterion here is work written in the twenty-first century – and while Perfidia (2014) has its considerable virtues, it’s hardly the equal of L.A. Confidential, published in 1990. And Thomas Harris’s Hannibal Rising (2006) is some distance in achievement from 1988’s Silence of the Lambs…

The titles below are in no particular order, and I had wry discussions with both J Kingston Pierce and Craig Sisterson about the foolhardy task of compiling such a list.

Dennis Lehane – Shutter Island

Sara Paretsky – Critical Mass

Tom Franklin – Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter

Robert Crais – Suspect

Attica Locke – Black Water Rising

Daniel Woodrell – Winter’s Bone

Greg Iles – Natchez Burning

Michael Connelly – The Lincoln Lawyer

James Lee Burke – Jolie Blon’s Bounce

Gillian Flynn – Gone Girl

Bill Beverly – Dodgers

Thomas H Cook – Sandrine’s Case

Harlan Coben – Gone for Good

John Hart – Down River

Megan Abbott – Die a Little

James Sallis – Drive

Peter Swanson – The Girl with a Clock for a Heart

Derek B Miller – Norwegian by Night

Don Winslow – The Power of the Dog

James Carlos Blake – The Rules of Wolfe

Laura Lippman – I’d Know You Anywhere

Walter Mosley – Little Scarlet

George Pelecanos – Right as Rain

Martin Cruz Smith – Wolves Eat Dogs

Dan Fesperman – The Double Game

Richard Price – The Whites

David Morrell (Canadian, but US-adopted) – Murder as a Fine Art

Wiley Cash – A Land More Kind Than Home

Michael Farris Smith – Desperation Road

And an entry by a non-crime writer:

Michael Chabon – The Yiddish Policemen’s Union