Friday, December 11, 2009

December 9, 2009
Notable Crime Books of 2009
By Marilyn Stasio, New York Times

Like the inhabitants of Lake Wobegon, every single one of my friends is exceptional, and I assume the same applies to your crowd. Which means that all our exceptional friends are expecting exceptional books for Christmas.
Lucky for us, some favorite authors came through with genre-stretchers this year. Tops on my list: THE SCARECROW (Little, Brown, $27.99), Michael Connelly’s cri de coeur for the journalism profession he once practiced as a crime reporter for The Los Angeles Times. The techno-savvy serial killer who stalks through this thriller serves as a grim metaphor for the implacable forces Connelly sees as draining the life from the nation’s newspapers.

Although it’s much harder to pull off something astonishing in a longstanding private-eye ­series, Sara Paretsky manages to do just that in her new V. I. Warshawski novel. HARDBALL (Putnam, $26.95 - in NZ Hodder $38.99) reaches back to the incendiary summer of 1966, when civil rights marches set off race riots in Chicago, to solve a case involving a youth who served as a bodyguard to Martin Luther King. The way Paretsky tells it — with fist raised in moral outrage — the anger is still fresh because the pain never goes away.

Read Stasio's full selection at NYT.
And The Bookman on Hardball here.

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