Margaret Thatcher’s war on the unions forms the backdrop to Joe Thomas’s Red Menace (MacLehose, (£20) – a sequel to last year’s White Riot – as “spycop” Parker goes undercover to investigate riots, corrupt policing and racial profiling.
The winner of the Theakstons Crime Novel of the Year, Jo Callaghan’s In the Blink of an Eye (Simon & Schuster, £9.99), finds widowed detective Kat Frank teamed with AIDE, an artificial intelligence entity, in a futuristic police procedural.
An austere civil servant becomes enmeshed in a missing people case in Andrew Hughes’s Emma, Disappeared (Hachette Ireland, £14.99), which features one of Irish crime fiction’s most audacious femmes fatales to date.
Set in academia, Jo Spain’s The Trial (Quercus, £20) is a thriller rooted in a drug trial that promises to deliver a cure for Alzheimer’s, but which undercover detective Dani MacLochlainn suspects is costing lives.
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Opening in June 1914, Robert Harris’s Precipice (Hutchinson Heinemann, £16.99) revolves around British prime minister Herbert Asquith and the aristocratic Venetia Stanley, whose torrid affair becomes a matter of national security as war looms.
Chris Brookmyre deftly blends Agatha Christie and Raymond Chandler in The Cracked Mirror (Abacus, £22), in which two characters from very different worlds combine to investigate a series of murders.
Gabriel’s Moon (Viking, £20), by William Boyd, begins in 1960 with an interview with Patrice Lumumba in Congo, whereupon its eponymous hero, a travel writer, is plunged into the shadowy world of a cold war spy thriller.
Bahrain’s Arab Spring of 2012 provides the backdrop to former CIA operations officer IS Berry’s debut, The Peacock and the Sparrow (No Exit Press, £9.99), in which a career spy running to seed becomes a reluctant witness to seismic events.
Graeme McCrae Burnet’s A Case of Matricide (Saraband, £14.99), set in a nondescript French town, is a downbeat but wholly satisfying conclusion to the Georges Gorski trilogy, a series of police procedurals that are as influenced by Albert Camus as Georges Simenon.
Kate Summerscale’s The Peepshow: The Murders at 10 Rillington Place (Bloomsbury Circus, £22), a true-crime investigation of Britain’s infamous serial killer Reg Christie, is as deeply immersive as the best fiction.
An undercover cop infiltrates a London gangland family in Jane Casey’s stand-alone thriller The Outsider (Hemlock Press, £8.99), only to discover a plot designed to incite racial hatred and social revolution.
The late John le Carré's George Smiley returns to the Cold War fray in Nick Harkaway’s Karla’s Choice (Penguin Viking, £22), a novel that serves as a worthy prequel to Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.
Declan Burke is an author and journalist. His current novel is The Lammisters (No Alibis Press)
There was a wealth of fantastic crime fiction in 2024; here are a few of my favourites.
CS Robertson’s The Trials of Marjorie Crowe examines the depths of pain and healing through sensitively written characters who anchor a meticulously crafted mystery. The surprise ending of A Stranger in the Family, the latest in Jane Casey’s consistently excellent Maeve Kerrigan series, has me eagerly awaiting the next instalment. Kellye Garrett’s Missing White Woman showcases black men and women pragmatically navigating white communities both online and off. The rare thriller to make hashtag culture and media central to its action, rather than forcing it in.
Daniel Weizmann’s Cinnamon Girl evokes a Los Angeles of lost dreams with nuance. This is a surprisingly gentle, almost innocent novel, and all the better for it. In The Sequel, Jean Hanff Korelitz skewers the publishing world through a cynical central character, while delivering a tightly woven thriller. It’s delicious. Equally tasty is Neil DA Stewart’s macabre Test Kitchen. Stewart has crafted a wild ride here. It’s a mystery served with dashes of horror and comedy that contribute to it being one of the most original works of speculative crime fiction served up this year.
Elizabeth Mannion is a critic
Conspiracies often stalked through 2024′s best crime fiction. While Abigail Dean’s moving Day One exhumes the resentments beneath UK conspiracists, Attica Locke’s Guide Me Home mines a legacy running back to Hammett’s Red Harvest for a fiercely tender story amid “America’s latest madness, its toe-dip into dystopia, fascism under the guise of a return to better days”. Abir Mukherjee leaves his usual historical settings for Hunted, a lean, compassionate novel about families caught in cult-like violence. Weaving together national secrets and familial betrayals, Anna Pitoniak’s deft spy thriller The Helsinki Affair suggests how little has changed since the cold war, simply because “certain people were enjoying themselves too much to stop”.
Two Irish standouts tapped a supernatural vein: as it builds to furious violence, Stuart Neville’s Blood Like Mine centres on a hauntingly affecting maternal relationship, and John Connolly’s Charlie Parker makes a poignant return in The Instruments of Darkness, where even minor characters are drawn vividly and empathetically.
Fiona McPhillips (When We Were Silent) and Ian McDonald (The Wilding) offered more Irish highlights. Among Americans, Jahmal Mayfield (Smoke Kings) and Deborah J Ledford (Havoc) stood out, while Alex Segura’s Alter Ego deserves to come across the Atlantic in 2025.
Brian Cliff is a critic
