May is Mystery Month at Booklist! Check out our recent mystery award winners (plus Talia’s “Spring the Trap: Mysteries That Won’t Let Go” webinar titles) and see which Macmillan titles made Booklist‘s “Best of” reading lists for 2017.

The Year’s Best Crime Novels: 2017 (full list) — Top 10 Crime Novels & Best Crime Fiction Debuts

LET THE DEVIL OUT by Bill Loehfelm
New Orleans rookie cop and loose cannon Maureen Coughlin is tasked with helping the FBI track a white supremacist group. Will Maureen go rogue again, or will she channel what she calls her “killing feeling” into doing good police work? Not only has Loehfelm created the most compelling, complex patrol cop in the genre; he has also reenergized New Orleans as a setting for the best in crime fiction, edgy, dangerous, but pulsing with life.

THE DRY by Jane Harper
Harper’s small-town, big-secrets page-turner tells the story of Aaron Falk, who returns to his Australian hometown to attend the funeral of a friend believed to have shot his wife and son and then killed himself. Falk begins to question the details of the crime and, together with the town’s police sergeant, undertakes an investigation that unearths secrets new and old, some involving Falk’s father. A stunning debut reminiscent of Peter Corliss’ Cliff Hardy series.

Find out what inspired Jane Harper to write THE DRY in Booklist Reader’s “Clues to My Crime” column!

THREE YEARS WITH THE RAT by Jay Hosking
Neuroscientist Hosking turns in a startlingly fine performance with his first novel, about a man so determined to find his missing sister that he risks his own reality to solve the mystery of her disappearance. It’s quickly apparent that this is one of those mind-bending thrillers in which time and space are fluid concepts, but Hosking draws us in completely to his labyrinthine narrative.

For titles reviewed from May 1, 2016 through April 15, 2017.

Top 10 Crime Fiction Audiobooks: 2017 (full list)

BEHIND HER EYES by Sarah Pinborough, read by Bea Holland and others
A fine cast of narrators voices this complex, riveting story of a love triangle based on obsession and deceit.

A GREAT RECKONING by Louise Penny, read by Robert Bathurst
Using realistic voices and impeccable nuances, Bathurst portrays a cast of quirky characters in this atmospheric, multilayered mystery.

For titles reviewed from April 1, 2016 through April 15, 2017.

Plus, Benjamin Black’s EVEN THE DEAD, read by John Keating, is listed as a great listen-alike for Celtic Noir!

Trend Alert: Suburban Suspense (full list)

BEHIND CLOSED DOORS by B. A. Paris
The marriage of Grace Harrington and Jack Angel seemed perfect, except for what went on behind closed doors. On their honeymoon, Grace’s new husband, Jack, reveals his psychopathic nature, using Grace’s deep love for her special-needs sister, Millie, as leverage in concocting a depraved scheme that will ruin both women.

COME SUNDOWN by Nora Roberts
Alice Bodine turns up at her family’s Montana ranch and luxury resort battered, bruised, and with no memory of her old life, 25 years after running away. Her niece puts Alice’s return together with the recent murders of two women and suspects that someone very twisted may be living nearby.

TRULY MADLY GUILTY by Liane Moriarty
Moriarty handles neighborhood secrets, indiscretions, and twists like no one else. A spontaneous barbecue upends the lives of three couples in suburban Sydney. From the start, readers know that something terrible has happened—Erika can’t quite remember the details, Clementine doesn’t want to remember them, and their husbands are struggling with the aftermath. But it’s not until midway through the story that Moriarty shows her hand.

A Hard-Boiled Gazetteer to the Pacific Rim (full list)

AUSTRALIA

THE BROKEN SHORE by Peter Temple
This first in a series stars Melbourne homicide detective Joe Cashin, who has been temporarily reassigned to his hometown in rural Australia while he recovers from injuries only slowly explained. But despite its remote landscape, the little town of Port Munro generates some big-city crime. Evoking a view of the continent that is more Ian Rankin than Crocodile Dundee, Temple tells a troubling tale of race and class conflict—with an even darker crime at the heart of it. This deeply intelligent thriller starts slowly, builds inexorably, and ends unforgettably.

CRUCIFIXION CREEK by Barry Maitland
Sydney homicide detective Harry Belltree is as hard-boiled as they come, a kind of Australian Dirty Harry with a little of Lawrence Block’s Matt Scudder, who once said to a killer he was about to dispatch, “I just don’t want you to be alive anymore.” This installment in Maitland’s unsparingly dark series provides backstory, explaining how Harry got to be Harry and how he developed his investigative style: shake the tree, see who falls out, and kill them. So old school you can smell the cordite. readmoreremove