Riot Recommendation: 21 of Your Favorite Recent Works of Crime Fiction
Condom dresses and space helmets have debuted on fashion runways. A dead body becomes the trend when a coat made of human skin saunters down fashion’s biggest stage. The body is identified as Annabelle Leigh, the teenager who famously disappeared over a decade ago from her boyfriend’s New York City mansion. This new evidence casts suspicion back on the former boyfriend, Cecil LeClaire. Now a monk, he is forced to return to his dark and absurd childhood home to clear his name. He teams up with Ava Germaine, a renegade ex-model. And together, they investigate the depraved and lawless modeling industry behind Cecil’s family fortune.
Crime fiction as a genre was first defined in the 19th century; The Murders in the Rue Morgue by Edgar Allen Poe was published in 1841, and that locked-room mystery is now considered one of the first detective stories. From those early days to the Golden Age of crime, the rise of hardboiled American crime fiction, and beyond, readers have kept up faithfully with beloved sleuths like Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot, and Philip Marlowe. Today a new class of crime solvers has joined the ranks of crime favorites, a class that includes Joe Ide’s IQ, Attica Locke’s Darren Matthews, and Tana French’s Dublin Murder Squad.
With so much excellent—and thankfully, if slowly, more diverse—crime fiction to choose from, we were curious to know which works have kept our readers turning those pages. We asked you to share the best recent crime fiction you’d read lately, and now we have quite the reading list!
Anatomy of a Scandal by Sarah Vaughan
Blacktop Wasteland by S.A. Cosby
Broken by Don Winslow
The Coyotes of Carthage by Steven Wright
Give Me Your Hand by Megan Abbott
Heaven, My Home by Attica Locke
Hollywood Ending by Kellye Garrett
House of the Rising Sun by James Lee Burke
The Infinite Blacktop by Sara Gran
IQ by Joe Ide
The Missing American by Kwei Quartey
My Sister, The Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite
Once You Go This Far by Kristin Lepionka
The Silence of the White City by Eva Garcia Saenz
Sunburn by Laura Lippman
They All Fall Down by Rachel Howzell Hall
Trouble the Saints by Alaya Dawn Johnson
Vera Kelly is Not A Mystery by Rosalie Knecht
What You Want to See by Kristen Lepionka
The Witch Elm by Tana French
Your House Will Pay by Steph Cha
