Best books of 2021: Crime fiction
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Girl A
by Abigail Dean, HarperCollins £8.99/Penguin Publishing Group $27
Family horrors pervade Girl A. Lex has escaped from her gruesome family environment and undertakes to convert the domestic home into a community centre. This, however, involves the co-operation of her fellow survivors of familial mistreatment. Dean’s novel is both an excoriating picture of psychological trauma and a transfixing crime narrative.
Sunset Swing
by Ray Celestin, Mantle £16.99
Celestin’s debut The Axeman’s Jazz immediately attained cult status, and successive books also impressed. But this is his most dizzying accomplishment, a truly epic crime chronicle. Set in a pulsing 1960s Los Angeles, Celestin’s novel creates a joint picture of the histories of organised crime and jazz, full of coruscating detail.
Winter Counts
by David Heska Wanbli Weiden, Simon & Schuster £14.99/HarperCollins $16.99
In South Dakota’s Rosebud Native American Reservation, Virgil Wounded Horse is a sort of “equaliser” for his people, in lieu of a derelict American legal system. But attempts to stop the spread of drugs on the reservation lead to violence, bloodshed — and a moral quandary for Virgil. Virtuoso fare.
Books of the Year 2021
All this week, FT writers and critics share their favourites. Some highlights are:
Monday: Business by Andrew Hill
Tuesday: Politics by Gideon Rachman
Wednesday: Economics by Martin Wolf
Thursday: Fiction by Laura Battle
Friday: History by Tony Barber
Saturday: Critics’ choice
Razorblade Tears
by SA Cosby, Headline £18.99/Flatiron Books $26.99
A tense thriller set in the American South that folds in issues of bigotry, class and sexuality. After the dual murder of their sons, two fathers in rural Virginia, both ex-cons, undertake a blood-drenched odyssey of revenge, encountering hostility from Hells Angels, the LGBTQ+ community and even formidable political forces.
The Survivors
by Jane Harper, Little, Brown £14.99/Flatiron Books $27.99
Harper’s The Dry established her as the leading Australian crime writer. The Survivors has a new locale: not scrubby outback but a Tasmanian coastal town. A murder brings back unbidden memories for Keiran, all too pertinent in the present. Harper takes on board corrosive issues of guilt, memory and responsibility.
Tell us what you think
What are your favourites from this list — and what books have we missed? Tell us in the comments below
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