The REAL Chi Trib Best Crime List

Jeff Pierce is right--the Chicago Tribune’s best “mystery-related” books of the year selections are few and unworthy. My own crime fiction list, which will run in the paper on December 24 for reasons too complicated to go into, contains the following:

• Liberation Movements, by Olen Steinhauer
• Red Sky Lament, by Edward Wright
• The Virgin of Small Plains, by Nancy Pickard
• Death in the Garden, by Elizabeth Ironside
• A Corpse in the Koryo, by James Church
• Memory Book, by Howard Engel
• Gentlemen & Players, by Joanne Harris
• The Last Spymaster, by Gayle Lynds
• Winter’s Bone, by Daniel Woodrell
• Sorrow’s Anthem, by Michael Koryta
• The Fallen, by T. Jefferson Parker
• Carte Blanche, by Carlo Lucarelli;
translated by Michael Reynolds
• Ask the Parrot, by Richard Stark

(The Boy Detective Fails, however, is on my long list ...)