As of this writing, I have read 109 books this year – my most ever in a single calendar year!  Of those 109, I’ve had the misfortune of picking only 10 standouts.

Small Things Like These – Claire Keegan

Claire Keegan’s quiet novel about a coal merchant’s courageous actions affected me on a deep level. This was the first novel that secured its spot on my year-end list way back in May.

Broken Harbour – Tana French

Tana French is an exceptional storyteller and the fourth entry into her Dublin Crime Squad series may be her best. A locked-room style mystery with well developed characters is her bread and butter at this point. Her protagonist, Mick Kennedy, has stuck with me all year.

Everyone In This Room Will Someday Be Dead – Emily Austin

I struggled picking just one out of the three Emily Austin novels I read in 2024 (one of which isn’t out until January) as they were all tremendous, but I feel like Everyone In This Room Will Someday Be Dead was the best choice as that is the novel that introduced me to her wonderful storytelling. It’s funny, heartbreaking and the closest anyone has ever come to nailing what it feels like to be inside my head somedays.

City in Ruins – Don Winslow

Don Winslow sure went out with a bang when it came to his last novel. City In Ruins wraps up his acclaimed Danny Ryan trilogy with a heart-wrenching finale sure to leave his fans reeling.

The Wager – David Grann

David Grann is back with a white-knuckle tale of survival against the ruthlessness of nature. If the crew of The Wager didn’t have it hard enough with the barren wasteland they had landed upon, they had to worry about each other’s true intentions and the fact that they simply could not trust each other.

What Moves The Dead – T. Kingfisher

A re-telling of Edgar Allen Poe’s masterpiece, The Fall of the House of Usher, T. Kingfisher offers her own glimpse into the madness that took place inside a mansion in a remote countryside. There is a sequel that I feel fell short, but the first book in the duology is nothing short of excellent.

Us Against You – Frederik Backman

The second book in Backman’s Beartown trilogy somehow manages to improve on the greatness of the first novel by upping the stakes and allowing the simmering pot of resentment between the neighboring towns boil over. The first novel was strong enough to be a standalone, and this could have felt like a cash grab, but the author succeeds in every way.

Satan Loves You – Grady Hendrix

I had considered myself a pretty big fan of Grady Hendrix but until this year, I had yet to completely read his entire catalog. I finally got my hands on his first full-length novel Satan Loves You and boy was I missing out. Hendrix had fully developed his sense of humor and storytelling from the get-go. How do you make Satan someone to identify with? Write about job dissatisfaction and that should get you most of the way there.

Everyone On This Train Is A Suspect – Benjamin Stevenson

Benjamin’s second novel in his Ernest Cunningham series completely knocked my socks off. It’s both stunningly clever and uproariously funny. I had a really great time with this one. I know it’s been said to death, but if you’re a fan of Rian Johnson’s Knives Out series, you’re going to devour this one.

The Gathering – C.J. Tudor

A vampyr anthropologist is called to investigate the death of a local human believed to be committed by a member of the colony of vampyres residing outside of a remote Alaskan town. Despite their professed innocence, will a cull be authorized or will the colony take matters into their own hands? This is genre fiction at its best. It feels like a thriller from the mid-2000s that a studio would take a chance on before everything became a franchise sequel or a superhero movie.

Honorable Mentions:

Interesting Facts About Space (Emily Austin); We Could Be Rats (Emily Austin); The Plague Year: America in the Time of COVID (Lawrence Wright) Something Is Killing The Children Vol. 4 (James Tynion), Bury Your Gays (Chuck Tingle).