BaM 2020 Gift Guide
My favorite mysteries / mystery-adjacent books this year sloppily reviewed for your pleasure.
Hey friends,
It being December and everything being stupid, here is a mystery (and adjacent) gift guide.
Gift guides normally feature frontlist (books that were recently published), but I think backlist (older books that are still in print) deserve love. So: Shot/Chaser. The Shot is a book from this year, The Chaser is a backlist title I think would feel cozy snuggled up beside it in a present.
One last disclaimer: I ask more kindly than ever that if you intend to purchase anything you listed here that you please do not buy from Amazon. The best way to shop—always and forever true—is directly from an indie, and they very likely can order, ship, AND giftwrap for you. The second best way—which supports an indie after they take a middleman cut—is bookshop.org. I’d love for you to support the indie closest to your heart, but if you want to do me a solid, shop Booksmith—they employ me, and this newsletter wouldn’t exist without my access to industry knickknacks.
This is already way too long, so no coda at the end, it’ll be back next time.
SHOT: Rumaan Alam / Leave the World Behind
Fair warning: this book fucked me up. A young Brooklyn family rents a home in the Hamptons. One night, an elderly couple knock on the door. They are the owners of the home, asking to stay the night because something, they understand vaguely, has gone terribly wrong Out There. They’re locked in together—isolated, afraid, no reliable information, and doing their best to act normal, and things … spiral. Hilarious, horrifying, eerily prescient.
CHASER: Iain Reid / Foe
If you watched I’m Thinking of Ending Things on Netflix, you know Iain Reid. Near future, a farm in the middle of nowhere, Junior and Hen, living a quiet life. A stranger arrives, indicating that Junior has been selected to leave the farm. Two years elapse in a blink while Hen contemplates his departure, unraveling slowly. Reid is surgically precise with his slow reveals and I loathe his talent, truly. Deeply unsettling.
SHOT: Tana French / The Searcher
If you’re here, you’re likely already are on the Tana Train. So I’ll just say: rumors of this book being boring are greatly exaggerated. It’s quieter, a little contemplative. Sometimes, I got the feeling that Tana backfilled to show she was hip to the moment (the protag is a retired cop). Still and all, she’s the best at what she does, and a medium-good Tana French stands out among its peers. I love her.
CHASER: Jane Harper / The Lost Man
I won’t keep flogging Jane Harper to death, but this is my favorite of hers and I think it belongs cuddled up next to Tana in general and this Tana specifically. Isolation, contemplation, broken men, complicated pasts, wry and heartbreaking observations on humanity and connection. Plus murder!
SHOT: Sarah Weinman / Unspeakable Acts: True Tales of Crime, Murder, Deceit, and Obsession
This is a broad collection of essays about pop culture and crime and why those things are inextricably linked, from some of the smartest journalists and writers in the game. Yes it’s about crime, but it’s also about humanity and justice and Slender Man. If I were still working a book sales floor, I would be flinging this at everyone.
CHASER: Rachel Monroe / Savage Appetites: True Stories of Women, Crime, and Obsession
I consume true crime by squinting one eye through spread fingers because crime media doesn’t exist in a vacuum—it is an ecosystem profiting from misery, and this is about that. Monroe takes a scalpel to four well-known crime stories, finding tiny aspects to probe and macerate. You’ll come away feeling differently about yourself, and isn’t that what good essays do? One of my favorite collections of all time.
Honorable mention: I went back and forth as to whether to list Patrick Radden Keefe’s Say Nothing as the pair here—he does the intro to Unspeakable Acts, and his book is incredible.
SHOT: Megan Miranda / The Girl from Widow Hills
Megan Miranda is flawless. No one does a twist like her, no one fucks with format like her, no one understands girls disappearing—literally and metaphorically—like her. This one is about a fictional Baby Jessica type, a little girl who is swept away at night and found days later clinging to a storm drain. It’s a perfect addition to the Miranda canon, and it made me more grateful than ever that I am not prone to sleepwalking.
CHASER: Oyinkan Braithwaite / My Sister, the Serial Killer
The connection between these books is a little tenuous but I feel they share something spiritual so, just go with me. Braithwaite, like Miranda, fucks with form, delivering a deadpan dark comedy that turns the black widow trope inside out. There’s no mystery at first glance—just one scarily beautiful girl who murders her boyfriends, and her nurse sister who cleans up the messes. And it gets weird. It also uses humor to mask pain, but I don’t know anything about that. I love this one.
SHOT: Ruth Ware / One By One
Ruth Ware excels at bottle episodes. A remote ski chalet in the French Alps, a few staff, the guests. An avalanche. And a murder. The guests work for a tech startup—eyes emoji—and they’re on a corporate retreat. When one person disappears on the slopes shortly before the avalanche hits, bedlam ensues, and Ware ratchets it to eleven as is her wont—reliable as the tides.
CHASER: Lucy Foley / The Hunting Party
A group of former college student friends ring in the new year at a remote estate in the Scottish Highlands, idyllically drinking champagne around a crackling fire. But when the NYE party hits—and a blizzard with it—the secrets start coming, and things get wild. STRONGLY in the Ware tradition here, but sexier, a little trippier.
Honorable mention: Foleys new one, The Guest List.
SHOT: Wendy Walker / Don’t Look for Me
Wendy deserves a longer post, but for now, her newest was one of my favorites this year. A woman walks away. She leaves her car and her family and her dissolving marriage behind for a hotel and then she is gone, just like that. Her daughter never quite believes the agreed-upon story, and goes hunting. It’s a masterclass in suspense and misdirection with the beating heart of a family underneath.
CHASER: Alice Feeney / I Know Who You Are
Aimee, an actress, comes home one day to find all her husband’s possessions—including his keys and wallet—intact, but the man himself nowhere to be found. Feeney is a former BBC journalist, superb at observing the little things that make a person, and she knows how to tell a good goddamn story.
Honorable mention: Feeney’s newest, His & Hers.
SHOT: Gilly Macmillan / To Tell You the Truth
I already wrote a whole paean to Gilly's newest, but here’s a quick recap. The protag is a famous writer, a hot mess express, desperate to finish her new book. The self-absorption, warped brain, and focus required for that task create a vacuum in her life, leaving her vulnerable to people who move in and take control. Creepy and serpentine and great.
CHASER: Barbara Bourland / Fake Like Me
I love Barbara’s books. Fake Like Me has a kind of warped summer camp feel to it, following an artist to a residency in a remote Upstate New York. A painter’s studio is destroyed in a fire, leaving her only three months to recreate seven huge works. But her role model’s suspicious death at the same residency looms large. Sexy and dreamy and creepy.
SHOT: Emma C Eisenberg / The Third Rainbow Girl: The Long Life of a Double Murder in Appalachia
Two women were killed in 1980 in rural West Virginia while attending a festival called The Rainbow Gathering. Eisenberg grew up in the area, and when she stumbled across the crime, it sparked a reckoning with her life, her community, her truth. A gorgeous memoir/true crime mashup in the style of The Fact of a Body, which I also love.
CHASER: Claudia Dey / Heartbreaker
I’m doing a fiction with a nonfiction here, but stay with me. Pony Darlene Fontaine (and if that name doesn’t make you want to read the book, then we are different people) is a teenager living in a remote area founded years ago by a cult leader. They’re so isolated they’ve frozen in time in the 80s, and everything feels … off. Pony’s mother was the only outsider in town, landing there by accident. Until one frigid morning when she walks off, barefoot, into the snow. Weird and wild (there are bits from the dog’s perspective), beautiful and moving, totally unique.
SHOT: Robert Kolker / Hidden Valley Road
The true story of a terrifyingly American mid-century family with 12 kids, six of whom have schizophrenia, and the way they impacted research on the topic forever. A deliriously readable narrative about the history of psychology, the soul of America, and a mother holding on for dear life. Kolker wrote the definitive book on the Long Island serial killer, which might be why the vibe feels true crime. Regardless, maybe my favorite book of the entire year: propulsive, fascinating.
CHASER: Sarah Weinman / The Real Lolita: A Lost Girl, an Unthinkable Crime, and a Scandalous Masterpiece
This is a book about Sally Horner, the girl that inspired Lolita, the titular character in Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. Horner was abducted at age 11 by Frank La Salle, pretending to be her father. Weinman is as relentless in hunting down Horner’s story as Nabokov was in swearing he didn’t know about her case (he absolutely did).
Okay that’s it for now! Back to regular format in two weeks. xoxo.