Books

As crime fiction lovers, we all have different tastes. Cosy crime fiction has been resurgent in 2023 – no surprise given the chaos going on around the world, with the cost of living crisis, climate change and too many wars happening. We can escape from all that into good books where, hopefully, the do-badders receive

A couple of weeks ago, we covered the bestselling audiobooks of 2023. Now, the 30-plus-year-old bimonthly magazine AudioFile has released its annual list for the best audiobooks of 2023. This year’s list includes 53 titles spread out over nine categories: Fiction, Nonfiction & History, Biography & Memoir, Mystery & Suspense, Sci-Fi, Fantasy & Horror, Children

There have been a lot of great crime shows in 2023. It sounds like a platitude, but when we opened this category for nominations we simply couldn’t have envisaged that this shortlist would emerge. The genre is popular and with all the streaming platforms plus the existing broadcasters catering to it, there has been so

Happy Singh Soni is not, well, happy: He is longing for more. And, given his condition at the outset of Celina Baljeet Basra’s debut novel, why wouldn’t he be? His home, a Punjabi farming village that is being steadily encroached upon by an expanding theme park, is no place for a young man with ambition—of

Ann-Marie Cahill will read anything and everything. From novels to trading cards to the inside of CD covers (they’re still a thing, right?). A good day is when her kids bring notes home from school. A bad day is when she has to pry a book from her kids’ hands. And then realizes where they

The Corpse with the Opal Fingers is the 13th book in the Cait Morgan series by Cathy Ace. This series features a globe-trotting duo, Welsh-Canadian professor of criminal psychology, Cait Morgan and her husband, Bud Anderson who is a retired cop. These books are traditional whodunnits written in a style similar to Agatha Christie’s Hercule

Author Ying Chang Compestine mixes a smart, clever heroine into her own take on the Rapunzel story, inspired by Chinese culture and food as well as Compestine’s own childhood. In a world of myriad fairy-tale retellings, Ra Pu Zel and the Stinky Tofu stands out as delightful, energetic and unique: a fairy tale you will

Last week, the New York Times released its 100 Notable Books of 2023. That wasn’t their only contribution to this year’s Best Books of Year list landscape, though: today, they posted their 10 Best Books of 2023. These are the five fiction and five nonfiction books that the staff of the New York Times agree

After decades of being a largely underserved area of scientific study, fungi are finally having their moment. The phenomenon feels not unlike the overnight appearance of a mushroom; all it took were the right conditions for the right fruiting body. The conditions: a reading public amid COVID-19 lockdown in spring 2020, aching for connection. The

Yesterday, it was announced that 2023’s Booker Prize winner was Irish writer Paul Lynch. His book that won, Prophet Song, is a Dublin-set dystopian novel in which a mother struggles with her country’s totalitarianism. On writing the book, Lynch said, “This was not an easy book to write. The rational part of me believed I

If you follow us on social media, you’ll know that one of our missions here at Crime Fiction Lover is to support independent authors and publishers, so there’s no way we’d ever run an awards fest without celebrating the indies out there. These are the folks that bring fresh blood to the genre, and a

Kelly is a former librarian and a long-time blogger at STACKED. She’s the editor/author of (DON’T) CALL ME CRAZY: 33 VOICES START THE CONVERSATION ABOUT MENTAL HEALTH and the editor/author of HERE WE ARE: FEMINISM FOR THE REAL WORLD. Her next book, BODY TALK, will publish in Fall 2020. Follow her on Instagram @heykellyjensen. View

It’s Black Friday, which means there are a lot of deals to sort through! We’ve gathered up some of the best Black Friday deals on Amazon for readers, including sales on ereaders, reading lights, bookish games, reading chairs, bookshelves, headphones for audiobook listeners, and even a KitchenAid mixer to pair with a good cookbook.

Right? I mean, who knew? Could playgroup noir become a thing? We like to stay ahead of the curve but English author Katherine Faulkner might soon be appearing on literary festival panels around the world discussing this new corner of crime fiction. Her novel The Other Mothers made quite a splash on its Kindle and

Have you voted in the Crime Fiction Lover Awards 2023 yet? If not, perhaps today’s the day to make your picks. Here we look at the six books on our Book of the Year shortlist and one of the comments we keep hearing is: “It’s so hard to choose…” That’s because they’re all fantastic and

Chinese American author Jean Kwok writes not just about her cultural identity as an emigre but about her life experiences, including as a professional ballroom dancer. Kwok’s books have risen up the bestseller lists and received many accolades, and even appear in academic reading lists. So The Leftover Woman has a lot to live up

The Crime Fiction Lover Awards 2023 are underway and as a reader you’re invited to vote on which books will win the accolades this year. Here we look at the six novels nominated by readers for our Best Debut shortlist. For all the shortlists, and for information on voting, follow this link. When you’re ready

With the publication of exquisite literary gems like Foster and Small Things Like These, Irish writer Claire Keegan’s reputation among American readers is slowly, but steadily, growing. The three elegantly-crafted stories collected in So Late in the Day: Stories of Women and Men will only enhance that increasing regard. In the title story, Cathal, a

It’s Best Books of Year season, and the New York Times has just put out their contribution: 100 Notable Books of 2023. These are the books selected by the staff of The New York Times Book Review as the standouts among thousands of new books that they received this year. The list is split into

A line from Jessica Johns’ haunting, atmospheric and beautiful debut novel, Bad Cree, has been tumbling around in my head since I set the book down. “That’s the thing about the [prairie]. . . . It’ll tell you exactly what it’s doing and when, you just have to listen.” Johns’ protagonist, a young Cree woman

New Zealand author Paul Cleave has won multiple awards and been on bestseller lists, but isn’t yet a household name as a crime fiction author in Britain or North America. That could change – each new novel offers something different and he is a master of twisty tales that put characters through the wringer. And, let’s

As long as piracy has existed, it has been shrouded in myth, legend and rumor, which compromises the reliability of primary texts describing its major figures. Author Katherine Howe tackles this historical pitfall in her newest novel, A True Account. Hannah Masury, nicknamed “Hannah Misery” by the clientele at the waterfront inn where she works

Back in 2019, we were infatuated with Australian author Chris Hammer’s novel, Scrublands. Set in a drought-shrivelled town in New South Wales, this brutal whydunnit has been made into a four-part crime drama which begins airing Thursday 16 November in Australia via Stan. At 9pm on Saturday 18 November, it will be Hammer time in

Thomas the Tank Engine once sang that there were jobs for everyone – jobs a plenty. Over here in our genre, a ‘job’ means something different and indeed there are crimes for everyone in this week’s On the Radar column. We’ve got murder by drowning and murder by arson. We’ve got drug heists and art

When Mandy Matney graduated from journalism school at the University of Kansas in 2012 and her parents asked her to choose a celebratory vacation spot, she picked Hilton Head, South Carolina. During that trip, Matney remembers glancing at the local newspaper and thinking how nice it would be to have a job there. “They’re talking

Committed is a spy story cum conspiracy thriller with some psychological noir in the mix, and perhaps this isn’t surprising given the author’s background. The British writer Chris Merritt is a former diplomat, a psychologist specialising in PTSD and works as a cyber security consultant. As well has spanning genres, his new novel begins a

HGTV’s “Home Town” creator Erin Napier’s Heirloom Rooms: Soulful Stories of Home, in which she tells stories of her own home renovations alongside anecdotes and home images from a bevy of friends. The book proceeds room by room, from front porch to back porch, with refreshingly unstaged shots of interiors, like an image of vintage

RBMedia, one of the world’s top producers of audiobooks, has released a list of the ten bestselling audiobooks of the year. Some of the titles line up with bestsellers in print, like the newest book in Rebecca Yaros’s hit romantasy series The Empyrean. Others, though, seem to have found unique success with this format. Gigi,

Two men, connected by blood but at very different stages of life, are the unbroken thread that runs through Michael Connelly’s latest novel, Resurrection Walk. We’re talking half-brothers Hieronymus ‘Harry’ Bosch and Mickey Haller, the Lincoln Lawyer, of course. Fans of this author’s books (or the separate Amazon, Freevee and Netflix series that feature them),

A Toni Morrison Treasury caters to preschoolers and young readers with a collection of eight children’s books that the late Nobel Prize-winning writer wrote with her son, Slade Morrison. Each one is illustrated by an artist chosen by Toni herself; they include Joe Cepeda, Pascal Lemaitre, Giselle Potter, Sean Qualls and Shadra Strickland. As Oprah