Review | Jack Batten’s top 5 crime fiction books for 2022

The Star’s Whodunit columnist Jack Batten has reviewed dozens of crime fiction books over the year. Here, his top five best books of 2022, and the reviews he wrote.

City On Fire, by Don Winslow (Reviewed on April 23)

Rhode Island is the U.S.’s smallest state by area. This means its organized crime has a miniature, small-town feel. The criminals are organized into two easily defined groups, the Irish and the Italians. Everybody on either side knows one another socially and there are occasional outbreaks of peace. But mostly, in scrapping it out for what can be illegally accumulated from Providence’s loansharking, construction unions, vending machines, gambling and prostitution, there is, proportionally speaking, plenty of murder. Don Winslow’s compelling novel covers two hectic years of the Irish and Italians duking it out. The book is expert and convincing, with plenty of plot surprises, and even offers one character who almost qualifies as a hero.

Nine Lives, by Peter Swanson (Reviewed March 19)

Diving into the plot of a Peter Swanson novel is rather like getting involved, if not quite in a game of chess, then in a particularly sharp game of checkers. Swanson’s earlier bestselling “Eight Perfect Murders” qualified as a solid book of this type. “Nine Lives” is even better. The puzzle begins when nine people who live in different areas of the United States receive identical pieces of mail: a simple list of the nine recipients’ names. One of them is a woman who happens to be an FBI agent. Her curiosity is aroused. She gets even more concerned when one person from the list turns up dead, probably murdered. Does the agent start sleuthing? Of course, but this is, in effect, just the equivalent of one checker that gets moved in a plot of many more moves to come.

Give Unto Others by Donna Leon (Reviewed March 19)

This is Donna Leon’s 36th book featuring Commissario Guido Brunetti of Venice. It is unarguably one of the most humane — and absorbing — of the series. The setting is the immediate present with the various pains and tragedies it keeps bringing. The pandemic has so reduced Venice that the locals even miss the tourists, and one character, an honourable senior citizen, suffers that most heartbreaking of diseases, a dementia that includes “devastation of memory, dignity, reason.” In the book’s plot, a friend from Brunetti’s childhood asks a favour of him. A relatively simple chore, the commissario decides, but inexorably the investigation involves him and his police colleagues in a circle of guilt in both legal and moral terms. The dilemmas demand the best of Brunetti, which is what he delivers.

The Locked Room, by Elly Griffiths (Reviewed June 18)

This is the inimitable Elly Griffiths’s thirteenth book (in thirteen years) featuring the Norfolk forensic archeologist Ruth Galloway. It’s set in today’s tumultuous times, most vividly including COVID-19 and all its horrors. That may not sound like much of a recommendation, but oddly enough it most definitely is, with its description of a contemporary affliction that is freshly enlightening. The book also includes the following treats: a more conventional murder plot (if anything in a Griffiths book can be labelled “conventional”); more updating of Ruth’s romance with Harry Nelson, the copper; the discovery of a mysterious new branch in the Galloway family tree; and further excitements that are beyond imagining by anyone except the fecund Ms Griffiths.

Desert Star by Michael Connelly (Reviewed Dec. 17)

(Editor’s note: This is Jack’s final pick before stepping aside from his regular column after 24 years, comments cribbed from his final column.) The magnificent Michael Connelly’s new “Desert Star” is as brilliant as all the rest of the books in his Bosch series, but what you are now reading here is not a formal review of “Desert Star.” I found myself in a curious physical and psychological state in reading the new Connelly book. Physically, I didn’t need to hold a pen in my hand to make notes for a written review. I wasn’t called on to pass judgment on the book or to consider where the novel stacked up in the Bosch canon. I loved “Desert Star.”

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