December 9, 2009
Notable Crime Books of 2009
By Marilyn Stasio, New York Times

Like the inhabitants of Lake Wobegon, every single one of my friends is exceptional, and I assume the same applies to your crowd. Which means that all our exceptional friends are expecting exceptional books for Christmas.
Lucky for us, some favorite authors came through with genre-stretchers this year. Tops on my list: THE SCARECROW (Little, Brown, $27.99), Michael Connelly’s cri de coeur for the journalism profession he once practiced as a crime reporter for The Los Angeles Times. The techno-savvy serial killer who stalks through this thriller serves as a grim metaphor for the implacable forces Connelly sees as draining the life from the nation’s newspapers.

Although it’s much harder to pull off something astonishing in a longstanding private-eye ­series, Sara Paretsky manages to do just that in her new V. I. Warshawski novel. HARDBALL (Putnam, $26.95 - in NZ Hodder $38.99) reaches back to the incendiary summer of 1966, when civil rights marches set off race riots in Chicago, to solve a case involving a youth who served as a bodyguard to Martin Luther King. The way Paretsky tells it — with fist raised in moral outrage — the anger is still fresh because the pain never goes away.

Read Stasio's full selection at NYT.
And The Bookman on Hardball here.