Best of 2025

I did almost as poorly at keeping up with the year in crime fiction as I did with keeping up with this newsletter, but I do have five favorites. Whether due to coincidence, a trend, or something in the water, all of them are family crime stories, no two alike.

Best Novels

Saint of the Narrows Street by William Boyle - If you’re not reading Bill Boyle, you’re missing out on one of the great crime fiction voices of the past decade. While his novels are not connected, they’re all from the same Brooklyn neighborhood, and Saint of the Narrows Street may be his finest exploration of it yet. Spanning decades in the lives of an Italian-American family, it begins with the accidental killing of a bad man and follows the generational repercussions of the incident and its cover-up. Boyle digs deep into his flawed, haunted characters as they grapple with maintaining the lie.

Crooks by Lou Berney - The most purely fun novel I read this year. The cover may suggest The Godfather, but this is an entirely different sort of crime family. After mob-connected Buddy Mercurio and his shoplifter wife Lillian are forced to leave Las Vegas for Oklahoma City, four of their five children grow up to carry on the family business in diverse ways: Jeremy relies on his looks and charm as he seduces and mooches off older women in California; Raymond is a henchman who becomes the boss in Las Vegas and tries to go legit; Tallulah is an acrobat who does heists for the Russian mob; and Alice is a lawyer pulled back into the criminal world while investigating a blackmail scheme. Their stories unfold individually, almost as stand-alones, until they are beautifully tied together in the end.

King of Ashes by S.A. Cosby - Now here’s a family crime saga that does recall The Godfather, updated by the king of modern Southern noir. Roman Carruthers is a successful investment manager in Atlanta when he gets the news that his father is in a coma following a car accident. Roman returns home to the family crematorium business and finds himself tangling with gangsters thanks to the Fredo of the family, his younger brother Dante. Dark, violent, and suspenseful, King of Ashes is epic tragedy as crime novel.

El Dorado Drive by Megan Abbott - The three sisters at the center of Abbott’s latest don’t think of themselves as criminals, but to varying degrees they know there’s something shady about The Wheel, a pyramid scheme promising a big payment following an initial investment and the recruitment of enough new members to fatten the stack. When one of the members is murdered, the others are as concerned with keeping The Wheel covered up as they are with having a killer in their midst. Abbott’s latest is a slow burn that milks suspense from its characters’ economic anxiety as it builds to to a twisty whodunit resolution.

Friends Helping Friends by Patrick Hoffman - Bunny Simpson hasn’t seen his Uncle Willard in years, until Bunny’s arrested for assault and takes a deal to inform on his white supremacist uncle in exchange for his freedom. That’s the family angle, but the heart of Hoffman’s novel comes down to the title phrase, which plays as both ironic—friends helping friends get deeper and deeper into shit—and touching, when the friends in question have multiple opportunities to help themselves by screwing over the others, and can never quite bring themselves to do it, defying expectations at every twist and turn.

Best Single-Author Collections

It’s hard to imagine two different examples of the form than Gran’s playful collection of meta takes on the mystery genre and Blackwell’s thorny noir excursions. Gran exhumes childhood memories of back page brain teasers, Encyclopedia Brown minute mysteries, and Choose Your Own Adventure novels, weaving them with her longtime protagonist Claire DeWitt’s surreal world of existential detection, proving once again that she is a genre of one. Blackwell’s on-the-edge characters find themselves in situations that are somehow simultaneously gritty and hyperreal, a fractured reflection of the desperation and rot of whatever passes for the American Dream these days.

Best Anthology

The self-immolation of Down & Out Books and the apparent hiatus of Shotgun Honey leaves Rock and a Hard Place little competition as the leading publisher of indie crime fiction. In addition to Whatever Kills the Pain and reissues of noir favorites by Eryk Pruitt and Nick Kolakowski, RHP has been at the forefront of the socially conscious anthology. Following Under the Thumb: Stories of Police Oppression and The One Percent, a collection devoted to the true villains of our era, the billionaires (including my own “Most Likely to Succeed,” full disclosure), comes this volume set at the intersection of crime and climate change. Edited by Anthony Award-winner Curtis Ippolito, On Fire and Under Water pits the helplessness of ordinary people against the grim reality of a planet rapidly becoming uninhabitable, featuring standouts from the abovementioned CW Blackwell, Mary Thorson, and Richie Narvaez, among others.