Here are 69 books that The Best Mystery Stories of the Year 2022 fans have personally recommended if you like
The Best Mystery Stories of the Year 2022.
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I’m a psychologist by profession and I’m fascinated by the way personalities develop and change with life events. In novels, I’m drawn towards wounded characters who are searching for something to make them feel whole. Common issues I see in my psychotherapy work include imposter syndrome, low self-esteem, feelings of not being good enough. Many people try to hide their vulnerability behind a mask, faking confidence or bravado, or pretending to be something they’re not. But these fictional characters take it up a level, one small step at a time, until the lies build and they end up in a web of deceit with no way out.
Published in 1990, this book reflects the era in which it was written and may be slightly over-written for modern tastes. The short chapters draw you through the story as we see inside the heads of different characters, so the reader is often one step ahead of Allie, the protagonist. As Allie’s subdued flatmate starts to idolise her, I was keen to discover whether easy-going Allie would realise something was wrong. When their roles start to change halfway through the novel, it seemed things could only go one way and I started turning the pages faster. This is an interesting early example of the genre and I can see why it was made into a film.
After a messy break-up, Allie Jones finds herself living alone in her New York City apartment, no one to share her bed with--and more urgently, no one to share her rent. The solution seems clear: she needs a roommate. And Hedra Carlson seems perfect--she's shy, quiet. . .safe. But soon Hedra's disturbing envy of Allie's looks and social life becomes unsettling. She wears Allie's clothes, even buys a wig in Allie's color and style. Then the obscene phone calls begin, Allie's credit cards vanish, and she discovers Hedra is living a…
Janet and I have traveled extensively and found inspiration and story ideas at every destination. As writers for more than 10 years and as fans of classic detective stories, we feel qualified to tackle this genre.
Not a detective story, but one that will get your heart racing and blood boiling. Set in New York City a rich family hires a babysitter who goes off the deep end. Women authors give a different point of view to crime stories and this one is proof of that.
A child is left in the care of a disturbed babysitter in “surely one of the finest pure terror-suspense stories ever written” (The New York Times).
Bunny’s parents shouldn’t have brought her to New York City, but her father has an important speech to make, and her mother couldn’t bear to be away from their darling nine-year-old daughter. And when her mommy and daddy leave for the speech, Bunny will stay in the hotel with a babysitter, sound asleep and perfectly safe. What could possibly go wrong?
The sitter is Nell, a plain young woman from Indiana. She puts Bunny…
As an economics professor, I’ve spent the past twenty years researching why cities build upward. Though I mostly look at cities through the lens of statistics and data, every building has a personal and dramatic story that exists behind the numbers. And no matter where you go in the world, great cities with their towering skyscrapers all owe a debt to New York—every city wants its own version of the Empire State Building to signal its economic might. New York is the world’s metropolis. As the (now cliché) song line goes, “If I can make there, I’ll make it anywhere,” is a true today as a century ago.
When I walk through the streets of Manhattan, I’m constantly awed by the variety and density of its buildings. I wonder how such a city could have ever been built. New cities today lack the soul and character. But when you look at why these buildings exist, you see that they are there for a more mundane purpose: as shelter. The Garment District, for example, was created to house massive sweatshops to clothe America. Gotham’s apartment towers enclose the beds on which residents sleep.
Many of these structures were built by a group of family-run development companies. The founders of these enterprises invariably began as immigrants trying to hustle their way up the economic ladder. They started as teenagers working in the sweatshops or hawking newspapers and, bit by bit, erected their own real estate empires. Tom Schactman’s book tells how entrepreneurial spirit, along with New York’s rapid economic growth,…
A portrait of Manhattan real estate and of the multimillionaires who are its masters, describing a world of high risks and huge rewards. Skyscrapers embody the romance of our times. The inspired gamblers who built the structures that transformed not only Manhattan but also the world took great risks. Some of the most colourful failed, while others founded family dynasties among the wealthiest in America, from the Astors and Rockefellers to the Roses and Trumps. From penniless Russian Jewish immigrants to society patricians, from penthouses to tenements, real estate and its manipulations - the buildings, the strategies, even the disasters…
In 2006, I told a friend I wanted to write a book about grieving the death of a friend. Despite the fact that I’d never written a book before, she gave me her enthusiastic approval. Six months later she was dead. She inspired me to turn that book idea into a series of little books: the Friend Grief series. Just as I was finishing the last one, I began work on a full-length book that took me back to my work in the early days of AIDS. When COVID began, I returned to writing about friend grief. And I lost over a dozen friends while I wrote the book.
One of the many wistful and beautiful photos in this book caught my eye in an exhibit at the New York Historical Society in 2021.
Her photography, and the attendant essays, evoke not only the isolation of quarantine, but the ways we rediscovered the desire for human connection. What could be easier than meeting a friend, careful to stay 6’ apart? Or sadder?
In April 2020, when New York was in lockdown and the epicentre of the pandemic, Renate Aller created the project side walk. She hosted friends and neighbors on her sidewalk or visited them in their street, her camera in self timer mode, recording these masked encounters at a safe 6 feet distance. With voices muted by masks we learn to communicate with our eyes and body language, finding our bearings in a new emotional landscape. These sidewalk visits created a deep sense of community where community had been forced apart. This project is in the spirit of Rainer Maria Rilke:…
No matter the genre, I have always loved surprises in a story. I want characters to do the unexpected and plots to take me to, “Oh, I didn’t see that one coming.” Because that’s how life is, how my own life has been. Due to connections we didn’t understand and secrets people around us have kept (or we didn’t bother to uncover) the unexpected always jumps out in front of us. I also like characters who are either discovering or re-focusing their power in ways that are beneficial to themselves and others. Again, this has been my life’s story and I want my characters to search for that same balance.
Claire is seven years old when her college-age sister is found dead at a resort on the Caribbean island of Saint X.
Years later, Claire is living and working in New York City when a brief but fateful encounter brings her together with a man originally suspected of murdering her sister. This book is not your standard Thriller; the cast of characters is large and the plot complex, but the author pulls it off.
It’s also not a book to keep you up all night. Try three or four nights. The writing is brilliant in ways not often seen in the genre and I was forced to slow down and give myself over to the story. It’s one I will never forget.
'Hypnotic, delivering acute social commentary on everything from class and race to familial bonds and community . . . I devoured Saint X in a day.' Oyinkan Braithwaite (author of My Sister, the Serial Killer), New York Times
Claire is only seven years old when her college-age sister Alison vanishes from the luxury resort on the Caribbean island of Saint X on the last night of her family's vacation. Several days later Alison's body is found in a remote spot on a nearby cay, and two local men, employees at the resort, are arrested. But the evidence is slim, the…
I moved to New York when I was 15 and fell in love with the city. I was starting high school then, and arriving in Manhattan felt like the world opened up to me. Suddenly, I could ride the subway anywhere I wanted, see the best theater in the world, and feel as if anything was possible. The female journey has also been a topic I have long been fascinated by, and when I began my journalism career and became a wife and mother, the need to explore those dynamics grew ever more pressing. I recommend these books because they combine my two favorite topics—New York and women’s history.
This book is a fictionalized story of one of the most sought-after artists' models in New York City in the early decades of the twentieth century and of her relationship with the Frick family, whose paintings and sculptures make up one of America’s most famous art collections.
I love Fiona Davis’ writing, which immediately pulls the reader in, and I can’t get enough of this tale of female strength and grit and its peek inside the wondrous world of fine art.
Fiona Davis, New York Times bestselling author of The Lions of Fifth Avenue, returns with a tantalizing novel about the secrets, betrayal, and murder within one of New York City's most impressive Gilded Age mansions.
Eight months since losing her mother in the Spanish flu outbreak of 1919, twenty-one-year-old Lillian Carter's life has completely fallen apart. For the past six years, under the moniker Angelica, Lillian was one of the most sought-after artists' models in New York City, with statues based on her figure gracing landmarks from the Plaza Hotel to the Brooklyn Bridge. But…
Where Are Your Boys is the book I always wanted to write. Watching emo bands like My Chemical Romance and Paramore soar from suburbs to stardom during my high school years inspired me to take writing seriously, that a kid like me growing up in New Jersey with few connections to the media industry could find a backdoor in, because those bands did, too. With its dense population, adjacency to New York City, and a multitude of record stores and all-ages shows, New Jersey was the setting for much of emo's 2000s boom and the home of My Chemical Romance and many other important bands.
Like nothing I'd ever read before. An incredible fusing of the familiar and the fantastic. Much of it takes place in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, during the 2010s, on the same subways and sidewalks I frequented. I interviewed author Geoff Rickly extensively for my book, as his band Thursday is central to its plot. I thought I knew Geoff's story pretty well. Turns out, I had no idea.
This book is surrealist, and it's autofiction. I could tell you how great it is by stressing you don't need to know anything about Geoff or his band to be spellbound by it. But I think the best praise I could give is how it made me consider all the extraordinary things that are happening around me all the time
Geoff Rickly’s debut novel Someone Who Isn’t Me is a feverish journey through the psyche of someone who no longer recognizes himself. When Geoff hears that a drug called ibogaine might be able to save him from his heroin addiction, he goes to a clinic in Mexico to confront the darkest and most destructive versions of himself. In this modern reimagining of the Divine Comedy, survival lurks in the darkest corners of Geoff’s brain, asking, will he make it? Can anyone?
With a name like Susan Wands, it was inevitable that I would be drawn to the occult and to the world of tarot cards. In high school, I was drawn to a set of tarot cards, not knowing that this deck, the Ryde Waite deck, was illustrated by Pamela Colman Smith. Pamela was the co-creator of the world’s best-selling tarot deck, and I became obsessed with her and her life story. I have written a historical fantasy series, the Arcana Oracle Series, based on Pamela’s life and lectured worldwide on the Golden Dawn, Tarot, and Magical Women.
I was intrigued by the magical abilities in the “Hands” of each one of the three protagonists in this book. Tamara uses her hands for tarot readings to tell people’s futures, while Phyllis’s hands have a super-power strength for knife-throwing, and Dev has “Saint’s Hands” have a sort of spidey-sense, helping his work as a police spy.
I was intrigued by Tamara’s tarot readings as part of this crime story, with the weaving in of black people’s stories of trauma, the double-edged sword of passing for white, and Juju assassins. This alternate history is a nebula of magic, criminals, and an exploration of how love heals people.
This book was the 2021 Winner of the World Fantasy Award. It was an unexpected winner, but I can see how Johnson’s gritty writing pulled people in. Trigger warning: if you have nerves about reading about knives as weapons, you may want to…
The dangerous magic of The Night Circus meets the powerful historical exploration of The Underground Railroad in this timely and unsettling novel, set against the darkly glamorous backdrop of New York City, where an assassin tries to fight her fate at the dawn of World War II.
Amid the whir of city life, a young woman from Harlem is drawn into the glittering underworld of Manhattan, where she's hired to use her knives to strike fear among its most dangerous denizens.
Ten years later, Phyllis LeBlanc has given up everything - not just her own past, and Dev, the man…
My fascination with things that go bump in the night probably stems from having read too many scary books in my younger years, when I devoured anything that made me want to hide under the blankets. My love of reading followed me into college, where I earned a B.A. in English from the University of Michigan and later a law degree from DePaul University in Chicago. My passion for reading—and, later, writing—psychological thrillers remained. Today, I write full-time and have five psychological thriller and suspense novels published with Bookouture–Hachette UK, including several that have made it into the Top 100 Books in the Amazon US, UK, and AU Kindle stores!
I love all of Mary Kubica’s books because of her straightforward writing style and the Chicago-area settings. InLocal Woman Missing,a peaceful, suburban neighborhood transforms into a harrowing place where people go missing and we question how well we really know our neighbors. Told from multiple points of view and timelines, the twists abound as the reader uncovers what happened to the missing women and girl. The ending was chilling, and I didn’t see it coming, which is exactly what I want from a psychological thriller.
'DARK AND TWISTY' Riley Sager 'A JAW-DROPPING TWIST THAT I NEVER SAW COMING' Joshilyn Jackson
You'll never find her. Don't even try.
When a local mother and her six-year-old daughter, Delilah, suddenly vanish, their close-knit suburban community is rocked by fear and suspicion. How could such a terrible thing have happened in their small town?
Then, eleven years later, Delilah shockingly reappears. Everyone wants to know what really happened to her. But there are secrets hidden deep in the past - and when the truth about those missing years begins to surface, no one is prepared for what they're about…
I have spent my professional career attempting to reform the justice system and create safer communities. For nearly two decades, I served as the executive director of the Center for Court Innovation (now the Center for Justice Innovation). Now, I co-edit a policy journal called Vital City that attempts to spark new thinking about how to achieve public safety. Over the years, I have worked with numerous city, state, and federal officials. I have seen that most of the people working within government are trying their best in difficult circumstances. I have also seen that it is enormously difficult to change government systems and solve complicated social problems.
Like many New Yorkers, I am fascinated by the history of the city.
The Cost of Good Intentionsdetails the run-up to a crucial turning point for the city: the fiscal crisis of 1975.
Written by a high-ranking city official after the fact, the book is an insightful analysis of how local government, particularly under Mayor John Lindsay, attempted to respond to a range of significant challenges, including the civil right movement, rising crime, and changing economic conditions.
Despite the best of intentions, the administration’s reach ended up exceeding its grasp, laying the groundwork not only for the fiscal crisis and for an era of declining public trust in government.
This book is about public policy making in New York during the zenith of the great liberal experiment, from 1960, Mayor Robert Wagner's third term, through John V. Lindsay, Abraham Beame, and, finally, to Edward Koch and the inevitable return of fiscal conservatism.
The bigger they come the harder they fall. When New York City fell and its intricate, often exotic, budget gimmickry came unstuck, they foundations of every other large city in America shook. If we are not to relive this history it is important to learn the lessons taught so cogently and entertainingly in this book.
