Crime Fiction Dossier

3 Favorite Books of 2007 - Part 5

Read this post to see what this is all about. For more favorites, see here.

John Lescroart, author of The Suspect

• Ken Follett - The Pillars of the Earth
• Bill Buford - Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany
• T. Jefferson Parker - Storm Runners

Otto Penzler, proprietor of New York's Mysterious Bookshop

• James Lee Burke - The Tin Roof Blowdown
• Thomas Perry, Silence
• Lee Child - Bad Luck and Trouble

Karen E. Olson, author of Dead of the Day

• Laura Lippman - What the Dead Know
• Peter Spiegelman - Red Cat
• Gillian Flynn - Sharp Objects. I was late to the party on this one, but I read it in June and it still haunts me.

Michael Homler, Editor at St. Martin's Press

• Jess Walter - The Zero. My absolute favorite this year. This book does and has everything in it.
• Michael Chabon - The Yiddish Policemen's Union. You can't go wrong with Chabon.
• David Hadjou - The Ten Cent Plague (pub date 2008). A great book about censorship and the history of the American comic book during an era few know a lot about except for the people that were there.

Victor Gischler, author of Shotgun Opera

• Joe Meno - The Boy Detective Fails
• Vicki Hendricks - Cruel Poetry
• Al Guthrie - Hard Man

3 Favorite Books of 2007 - Part 4

Read this post to see what this is all about. For more favorites, see here.

T. Jefferson Parker, author of Storm Runners

Fantastic books, all three.

• Marcus Sakey - The Blade Itself. My favorite crime novel [of the year].
• Cormac McCarthy - The Road. My favorite novel.
• Joan Didion - The Last Thing He Wanted. I was blessed to discover this, which blew me right out of my crib.

Julia Spencer-Fleming, author of All Mortal Flesh

• Lee Child - Bad Luck and Trouble. And not just because I saved Jack Reacher's life at the New England Crime Bake jury trial. The final tally was 1 to acquit, 1 to convict, and 18 hung! Since a hung jury is as good as an acquittal, even while Reacher admitted to two more murders on the stand, I considered the outcome quite fortuitous. Although what roomful of women is going to flip the switch on Jack Reacher?
• Jennifer Crusie and Bob Mayer - Agnes and the Hitman. They call it romantic adventure; I call it funny, sexy, compelling. Oh, to one day write a book in this league!
• Kate Braestrup - Here If You Need Me. The memoir of the first female chaplain in the Maine Warden's Service. So real; so moving.

Mark Tavani, Senior Editor at Ballantine Books

• Cormac McCarthy - The Road.
• Lawrence Wright - The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11
• David Maraniss - Clemente

James Rollins, author of The Judas Strain

• Khaled Hosseini - The Kite Runner. Yes, I finally got around to reading this...loved it.
• Cormac McCarthy - The Road. Read this before it was an Oprah pick, and it's the first book in a long time that I read in one sitting. Brutal and brilliant.
• Allison Bechdel - Fun House. A literary graphic novel...spectacular.

Charlie Stella, author of Mafiya

• Craig McDonald - Head Games
• George V. Higgins - The Digger's Game
• Rick Marinick - In for a Pound

3 Favorite Books of 2007 - Part 3

Read this post to see what this is all about. For more favorites, see here.

Thomas Perry, author of Silence

Your rules for this list indicate that you don't like rules. So I'll live up to them. Here are three picks in no particular order.

• Joseph Mitchell - McSorley's Wonderful Saloon (with an introduction by Calvin Trillin). These are essays Mitchell wrote between his arrival in New York the day after the stock market crash in 1929 and his death in 1996. He was a fine prose stylist with a supernaturally good eye and ear.
• Azar Nafisi - Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books. A brilliant professor of literature recounts her long struggle to run a seminar on Western works in her home after it became impossible to carry on at the university in post-revolution Iran. Her humanity and intelligence are demonstrated both in her contemplation of events, and in her discussions of the great works and why they're useful to real people in an emergency.
• Ray Banks - Saturday's Child (pub. date 2008). This is one of several new crime novels from the UK that Harcourt has been publishing lately, and it's terrific. Another is Hard Man by Allan Guthrie. The sensibilities of these writers are grim and funny, and the world they portray is just alien enough to us to make it worth exploring.

Richard Pine, literary agent and founding partner at InkWell Management

• Michael Chabon - The Yiddish Policemen's Union. A brilliant and completely original novel that's also a thoroughly entertaining read.
• Theresa Schwegel - Person of Interest. With this book I experienced the great joy of discovering the work of a novelist who is both new to me and wildly talented.
• Denise Mina - The Dead Hour. The second installment in the wonderful Paddy Meehan series; it's as good as any UK crime fiction I've read in years.

Paul Guyot, screenwriter and short story writer

• James Lee Burke - The Tin Roof Blowdown. It'll be a joke (again) if this doesn't win the Edgar.
• Stewart O'Nan - Last Night at the Lobster. A tiny little story where nothing happens, and it's brilliant.
• Michael Craig - The Professor, the Banker, and the Suicide King - Inside the Richest Poker Game of All Time. Entertaining and suspenseful enough to be a novel, but every word is true.

Elaine Flinn, author of Deadly Vintage

• Judith Freeman - The Long Embrace: Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved. This was so engrossing, I spent most of my reading time (?!) catching up on Chandler, which led me back to Hemingway, le Carré and Cain -- which left little time for much else.

Ace Atkins, author of White Shadow

• Daniel Woodrell - Winter's Bone. An absolute little masterpiece.
• Elmore Leonard - Up in Honey's Room. Proving time and again why he's still the best.
• Dashiell Hammett - The Big Knockover. More than 80 years later, few can reach his level. He makes it look so damn easy.

3 Favorite Books of 2007 - Part 2

Read this post to see what this is all about. For more favorites, see here.

George Pelecanos, author of The Night Gardener

• Willy Vlautin - Northline (pub. date 2008). The second novel from Richmond Fontaine's bandleader is a stunner.
• Don Carpenter - Hard Rain Falling. Long out of print, a lost American classic. Get it any way you can.
• Richard Lange - Dead Boys. The best short story collection I've read in years. Lange's voice is singular and earned.

Ken Bruen, author of Priest

• Craig McDonald - Head Games
• Megan Abbot - Queenpin
• Duane Swierczynski - The Blonde

Hallie Ephron, Crime fiction book reviewer for the Boston Globe and author of Writing & Selling Your Mystery Novel

• Leonie Swann - Three Bags Full
• Donald Westlake - What's So Funny?
• William Landay - The Strangler

Keith Kahla, Senior Editor at St. Martin's Press

• Joe R. Lansdale - Lost Echoes. You don't have to have roots in East Texas to love Lansdale's writing, but it sure doesn't hurt.
• Juan Rulfo - Pedro Paramo (trans. by Margaret Sayers Peden). I read the earlier translation twenty five years ago and have been meaning to read this newer one for more than a decade. It's brilliant by the way.
• Colin Cotterill - Anarchy and Old Dogs. Could be any of the books in this series but this is the one I read most recently.

Steve Brewer, author of Cutthroat

• Charlie Huston - The Shotgun Rule. Probably the most memorable book I've read this year
• Olen Steinhauer - Victory Square. Fifth and final book in his incredible Eastern Europe series. I've read them all
• John Ridley - The Drift. A gritty 2002 novel about a deranged railroad bum who pulls himself together long enough to hunt for a missing girl. Unforgettable.

3 Favorite Books of 2007 - Part 1

Here is the first batch. More will come in subsequent days. (Read this post to see what this is all about.)

David J. Montgomery, mystery/thriller critic for the Chicago Sun-Times

Even though this was my idea, that doesn't make it any easier to choose. But here are three I loved.

• Laura Lippman - What the Dead Know. Probably the book of the year. The best thing yet from a writer who just keeps getting better.
• J.K. Rowling - Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. A superb conclusion to a wonderful series -- when it comes to the pure joy of reading, Harry Potter is tops for me.
• Philip Hawley, Jr. - Stigma. A superb thriller -- but even more impressive, it's a debut. Few first novels show such poise and polish, but Stigma has both in spades. A delight to read.

Tess Gerritsen, author of The Bone Garden

• Chris Mooney - Remembering Sarah
• C.J. Box - Blue Heaven (pub date 2008)
• Linwood Barclay - No Time for Goodbye

John Hart, author of Down River

I rarely read in the genre when I am writing (which is pretty much all of the time) so this list is fairly eclectic. But, I loved each of these books.

• Michael Chabon - The Amazing Adventures of Cavalier and Clay
• Nathaniel Philbrick - In the Heart of the Sea
• Max Brooks - World War Z

Reed Farrel Coleman, author of Soul Patch

I have to say that this was a very difficult year to choose as I rededicated myself to reading and found some amazing books. But my three top books that I read in 2007 were:

• Michael Chabon - The Yiddish Policemen's Union
• Daniel Woodrell - Tomato Red
• Peter Spiegelman - Red Cat

Charles Ardai, editor of Hard Case Crime and author of Songs of Innocence

• Donald E. Westlake - The Mercenaries. Westlake's first novel, and somehow I'd never read it, maybe because the title (implying a story about stubble-cheeked tough guys toting machine guns through some hostile jungle) turned me off. As it turns out, the book has not a single mercenary in it -- and it's a terrific novel. We will be reprinting it in Hard Case Crime in 2009, under the title the author originally meant the book to have. (Can't reveal it yet.)
• Elise Blackwell - Grub. Not a crime novel; a scathing, funny, sad, scabrous novel about writers struggling with their craft, their art, their profession, and their demons.
• Fredric Brown - The Fabulous Clipjoint. A classic that I finally read. Absolutely knocked me on my ass.

3 Favorite Books of 2007

I did something similar to this a few years ago and it was a lot of fun, so I've resurrected it this year. I'm asking a slew of authors and other publishing people to name their 3 favorite books they read in 2007. The books don't have to be crime fiction, or fiction at all. They don't even have to have been published in 2007. The only requirement is that the person read it this year and it was one of their favorites.

I'll be posting the picks periodically over the next couple weeks as the responses come in and I get everything together.

Note: Agents and editors were barred from picking their own books.