Best Crime Fiction 2012

Published on by Margaret8 Comments

Kerrie of Mysteries in Paradise is collecting our best crime fiction reading for 2012.The titles can have been published any time, but must be crime fiction.

I read 61 crime fiction books in 2012 – see the full list here.

My top ten are as follows. (Inevitably this post includes six of the books I’ve already identified as my ‘best’ books read in 2012.)

Books with 5 stars:

  1. After the Funeral by Agatha Christie, first published in 1963. Poirot investigates the death of Cora Abernethie, who had announced at the funeral of her brother Richard that he had been murdered.
  2. The Crimson Rooms by Katherine McMahon, published in 2010 – historical crime fiction set in London in 1924, with Britain still coming to terms with the aftermath of the First World War. Evelyn Gifford, one of the few pioneer female lawyers takes on two cases, one child custody case and the other a murder case.
  3. Fatherland by Robert Harris, published in 2009,  a fast-paced thriller set in Germany in 1964, a murder mystery, beginning with the discovery of the naked body of an old man, lying half in the Havel, a lake on the outskirts of Berlin. The homicide investigator is Xavier March of the Kriminalpolizei (the Kripo) and the victim is Josef Buhler, one of the former leading members of the Nazi Party who had been instrumental in devising €˜the final solution’.
  4. Silent Voices by Ann Cleeves, published in 2011, a Vera Stanhope mystery, set in Northumbria. It begins with Vera’s discovery of a dead woman in the sauna of her local gym.

Books with 4.5 stars:

  1. The Chalk Circle Man by Fred Vargas, published in 2010, a very cleverly constructed and quirky murder mystery set in Paris  where strange blue chalk circles start appearing on the pavements. Only Commisaire Adamsberg takes them €“ and the increasingly bizarre objects found within them €“ seriously. 
  2. Hickory Dickory Dock by Agatha Christie, a Poirot mystery, first published in 1955, set in a London students’ lodging house where death strikes. There are plenty of suspects and red herrings and some interesting reflections on crime and the psychology of behaviour.
  3. The Girl on the Stairs by Louise Welsh, published in 2012. It’s set in Germany, a dark, psychological thriller, full of atmosphere and claustrophobic tension.
  4. One, Two, Buckle My Shoe by Agatha Christie, first published in 1940, in which Hercule Poirot and Inspector Japp investigate the apparent suicide of Mr Morley, Poirot’s Harley Street dentist, who was found dead in his surgery, shot through the head and with a pistol in his hand.
  5. The Redeemed by M R Hall, published in 2011. Coroner Jenny Cooper investigates the death of a man found lying outside a Bristol church with a sign of the cross gouged into his flesh, It looks to her like another grisly, routine suicide, but the unexpected arrival of an enigmatic Jesuit priest reveals deeper levels of mystery.
  6. The Sixth Lamentation by William Brodrick, published in 2010, it looks back  to the Second World War in occupied France, telling a dramatic tale of love and betrayal, full of suspense, and interwoven stories.

What's In a Name 5 Challenge Completed

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I always enjoy this Challenge – my thanks to Beth for hosting the event. I’ve read a mixture of fiction and non-fiction, including three crime fiction books and two memoirs.

The categories and the books I’ve read are as follows:

A book with a topographical feature in the title: The Hanging Valley by Peter Robinson (crime fiction).

A book with something you’d see in the sky in the title: Blue Lightning by Ann Cleeves (crime fiction).

A book with a creepy crawly in the title: The Parasites by Daphne du Maurier.

A book with a type of house in the title: Death at the President’s Lodging by Michael Innes (crime fiction).

A book with something you’d carry in your pocket, purse, or backpack in the title: A Card from Angela Carter by Susannah Clapp (memoir).

A book with something you’d find on a calendar in the title: The Day Gone By: an Autobiography by Richard Adams.

The ‘Best’ Books I Read in 2012

Published on by Margaret11 Comments

2012 has been a good year for reading for me.

Throughout the year I’ve kept a record of what I thought was the ‘best’ book of the month – ‘best’ meaning the one I enjoyed the most, the one that kept me wondering what happens next, the one I was the most engrossed in, the one that I thought was really memorable and didn’t want to stop reading.

These are the books:

  • January: The Help by Kathryn Stockett – I loved it. I saw the film before I read the book ‘“ Octavia Spencer won a Golden Globe award as best supporting actress for her performance as Minny – and even though I knew the story I still found the book full of tension and completely absorbing. It’s set in Jackson, Mississippi in 1962, where black maids raise white children, but aren’t trusted not to steal the silver. 5/5


  • February: Little Boy Lost by Marghanita Laski – Once I started reading I didn’t want to put it down; I just had to know what happened. It’s the story of Hilary Wainwright, who is searching for his son, lost five years earlier in the Second World War. 5/5


  • March: Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen – I’ve read this many times before, but each time I still think it’s wonderful. It’s a novel based on character, plot and is a study of society in the late 18th/early 19th centuries, but above all it is a love story. 5/5


  • April: The Village by Marghanita Laski – this chronicles life in an English village immediately after the end of the Second World War. It’s a novel exploring the issues of class and social mobility, family relationships, parental control and the position of women. 5/5


  • May: The Redeemed by M R Hall – the third in the series about Jenny Cooper, a Coroner investigating suspicious deaths. She finds herself one of the suspects in this book as well as delving into supernatural and the fight between good and evil. 4.5/5


  • June: The Secret River by Kate Grenville – this book completely captivated me and I could hardly wait to get back to it each time I had to put it down. It’s historical fiction, straight-forward story-telling following William Thornhill from his childhood in the slums of London to his new life in Australia in the early 19th century. Dramatic, vivid and thought-provoking. 5/5


  • July: The Crimson Rooms by Katharine McMahon – historical crime fiction set in London in 1924, with Britain still coming to terms with the aftermath of the First World War.  I was fascinated by the account of early women lawyers, represented by Evelyn, the central character. It clearly shows the prejudice these women had to overcome just to qualify as lawyers, never mind the difficulties of persuading law firms to employ them and clients to accept them. Beautifully written and full of imagery. 5/5


  • August: The Girl on the Stairs by Louise Welsh – full of suspense and increasing tension a dark, psychological thriller.  I really enjoyed this book. Are Jane’s fears justified or is she delusional? The uncertainties and ambiguities kept me guessing to the end. 4.5/5


  • September: The Sixth Lamentation by William Brodrick –  this is historical fiction and it’s also a mystery. It looks back  to the Second World War in occupied France, telling a dramatic tale of love and betrayal, full of suspense, and interwoven stories. 4.5/5


  • October: The Chalk Circle Man by Fred Vargas – This is a very cleverly constructed and quirky mystery, peopled with eccentric characters, and set in Paris, where Commissaire Adamsburg is faced with solving three murders. 4.5/5


  • November: Standing in Another Man’s Grave by Ian Rankin – the latest of his Rebus books. Rebus, now retired, is working in a Cold Case Unit.  I liked it ‘“ I liked it a lot. It was like meeting up again with an old acquaintance. Rebus is older and fatter but he hasn’t really changed. I was engrossed in the book and liked the way Rankin included characters from earlier books, such as Big Ger Caffety and in particular Malcolm Fox. 4/5


  • December: Silent Voices by Ann Cleeves – the fourth in her DI Vera Stanhope series. Vera is a truly eccentric individual, intelligent, single minded and dedicated to her job, single and with no family responsibilities. This is an excellent book, one that kept me turning the pages and exercising my brain as I tried to unravel the mystery of the death of a woman found in the sauna room of Vera’s local gym. 5/5

The Day Gone By: an Autobiography by Richard Adams

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This book has been sat waiting patiently for me to read it for some years now. I can’t remember when I bought it, but I bought it because I loved the other books by Richard Adams that I’d read – Watership Down, the story he originally told to his children to while a way a long car journey, Shardik, The Plague Dogs, and The Girl in a Swing.

The Day Gone By is his memoir of his early life from his 1920s childhood at home with his parents in Newbury, Berkshire, to his time at boarding school, then life at university in Oxford and his service in World War Two, up to his return home in 1946 and his first meeting with the girl who became his wife.

He was born in 1920, the youngest child of George and Lilian Adams. The early chapters are about his earliest memories, full of wonder at the natural world around him. It was his father, a doctor, who taught him to recognise and love birds and the countryside. These chapters convey vividly his family’s idyllic post-Victorian pastoral lifestyle. His talent for storytelling came out when he went away to pep school at Horris Hill at the age of 8:

To Horris Hill’s lack of electric light I owe more than I can tell. Indeed, it may very well have been the greatest blessing of my life, for it was this that made me a dormitory story-teller. The shadowy, candle-lit dormitories of winter; or those same dormitories in the fading twilight after sunset; these were the settings for a story-teller such as no electrically lit room could ever provide. (page 138)

At first the stories he told were from those he’d read, but when he had no more to tell he was forced to make them up. During the day he began thinking about what he was going to tell the other boys at night.

The Day Gone By is a detailed account of his early life throwing light on the society in which he lived, the class structure and attitudes and above all the changes that were brought about by the Second World War. His experiences during the war are equally as detailed, conveying the effect it had on his life:

To anyone at all who lived through it, in whatever capacity, the Second World War was an enormous, shattering experience. It was – and I say this in all seriousness – difficult to believe it was really over; one could not remember what things had been like before. Anyway, that no longer mattered much: they weren’t ever going to be the same again. (page 379)

His style of writing changed in the section on his wartime experiences, almost as though he was using the language he spoke at the time. I liked his reflections on life; his opinions on the terrible suffering and cruelties of the war years are especially moving.

The Day Gone By: an Autobiography by Richard Adams. Penguin Books. 1991. 399 pages.

This is the last book completing the What’s In a Name? 5 Challenge – a book with something you’d find on a calendar in the title.