The best fast-paced mysteries with a strong sense of place

Now that I’ve published a thriller, I’m often asked about my favorite novel in the crime/mystery genre, and people are sometimes surprised when I name Donna Tartt’s 1992 bestseller, The Secret History.

The story of five friends studying Classics at an isolated Vermont college makes a lot of best-of lists, but because the book is so gorgeously written, with such a high level of literary skill, people sometimes forget that there’s a murder in the very first line. In many ways, it’s an unconventional take on the genre—definitely more of a whydoneit than a whodunit—and as with most of the novels I love, I’m less interested in the mechanics of the plot than in the characters and setting.

The descriptions of the Green Mountains are lush and evocative, and the scenes when the main character, Richard, almost freezes to death in an unheated warehouse during a New England winter, are some of the most chilling (literally) I’ve ever read.

I love all of Rebecca Makkai’s work, but this novel, published earlier this year, absolutely blew me away.

Makkai is adept at keeping the pages turning, but it wasn’t just the story of podcaster Bodie Kane and the murder of her high school classmate that drew me in as much as the atmosphere. The novel is set in a New England winter, and Makkai does a fantastic job of using the darkness and isolation of the season to create thematic resonance.

I’ve only been to New England a few times and don’t know it well at all, but this novel makes me feel like I’ve been there.

I’ve never been to the west of Ireland at all, but like the other writers on this list, French is a master at drawing you into a story until you feel like it’s part of you.

The plot of In the Woods is complex, with two different timelines and a multiplicity of characters, but it’s the early scenes, of Adam Ryan and the disappearance of his childhood friends in the woods near their homes, that have stayed with me the most strongly over the years. The woods where Adam and his friends are both a real place and a metaphor for childhood itself, in its darkness and tangled terror.

I think I’ve read all of Laura Lippman’s novels, both the Tess Monaghan series and the standalones, but this is hands-down my favorite.

On the surface, it’s high-concept subject matter: the story of a girl who was abducted by a serial killer and then let go, told in dual timelines. I was compelled by the thrilling and fast-paced plot, but again, the scenes I remember best are of the main character’s childhood in the 1980s, as she attempts to maneuver an adult world she can’t yet understand.

The novel is set in a part of southern Maryland that resembles my home state of Virginia, and I love the way Lippman evokes a bucolic landscape turned suddenly sinister.

If I’d written this list a year ago, I probably couldn’t have found a way to include Megan Abbott, even though she’s one of my favorite writers.

Though setting is important to her work, it’s rarely given the place-based specificity we find in her newest novel, Beware the Woman, set in the wilderness of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. I’ve vacationed in the UP and it truly is a wild place, the perfect background for this story of a pregnant woman spending an increasingly creepy week with the husband and father-in-law she’s not sure she can trust.

The woods that crowd around the family’s remote home seem threatening at first, but then come to offer the promise of escape from a domestic environment with its own set of perils. As in all these novels, setting is more than a scenic backdrop. It’s the world the reader lives in, and a crucial element of story.