My colleagues will tell you that 2025 was a great year for the genre, and you can trust them on that. However, for me it wasn’t a great year for reading, partly due to illness. But I did discover some very fine crime novels that are worth talking about and I’m looking forward to 2026.

5 – Broken by Jón Atli Jónasson

Translated by Quentin Bates and written by one of the screenwriters behind that excellent Icelandic film, The Deep, Broken is the story of two outsider cops. Dóra is a detective relegated to lesser cases because some time back she was shot in the head. It’s left her thinking and acting differently, but that doesn’t necessarily make her less effective at crime solving. Rado, meanwhile, is a Serbian immigrant in Iceland, married to a Pole, also a detective. As East Europeans run organised crime in the country, he too is often excluded. So they’re given the case of Morgan, a missing teenage girl who has been questioning her gender. All the while, they are being watched by the Groke, a mysterious hitman character, plus a turf war is brewing among local drug gangs.

Broken is an unusual read, driven by two unconventional characters. They’re both broken, in a sense, but Rado comes to feel it’s his duty to look after Dóra, who gets into deep trouble without realising it. Meanwhile, his own family is falling apart. That’s the powerful emotional hook in this novel, which has a deep currents to it yet has a restrained feel at the surface, which reminds me of books by another great Icelander, Arnaldur Indridason. Read the full review here.
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4 – Marble Hall Murders by Anthony Horowitz

I love crime stories by Anthony Horowitz and I love the way he writes. Marble Hall Murders follows on from Magpie Murders and Moonflower Murders, and features his 1950s private detective Atticus Pünd and contemporary book editor Susan Ryeland. If you’ve read the books or seen the TV series, you’ll know that Susan edits books about Atticus Pünd but in doing so gets wrapped up in parallel present day mysteries. Now, a new writer is taking on the Pünd series under license and Eliot Crace seems to be weaving clues relating to his own grandmother’s death into the story. Miriam Crace was a famous children’s author who died 20 years prior. Eliot creates a Pünd mystery set in Nice, France, featuring characters similar to members of his family and in his story the matriarch of the family, Lady Margaret Chalfont, appears to have been poisoned.

The trips back in time to 1950s Nice are delightful, with the ever-polite but always sharp Atticus Pünd working with sûreté detective Frédéric Voltaire. We get close to that cosy vibe evident in television series. But the sections that take place in the present day have a different tone. Susan is in a world of greed and violence, tinged with madness. The modern characters are less likeable too. It should be on television in the coming year. Read the review here.
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3 – The Burning Grounds by Abir Mukherjee

Since the very beginning, we’ve loved Abir Mukherjee’s series with Captain Sam Wyndham of the Imperial Police and his police colleague Surendranath Banerjee, set in 1920s Calcutta. The Burning Grounds has done nothing to diminish this. I must admit, I haven’t quite finished the book but I’ve only got a few chapters to go and it’s easily one of my top novels of the year.

Wyndham and Suren are both living under a cloud as the novel opens – the latter isn’t even a serving policeman anymore. When the wealthy Indian entrepreneur JP Mullick is found with his throat cut, dumped at the Burning Ghats by the river, Wyndham is pressed into service by his superiors. He relishes a case that brings him into contact with the glamorous film star Estelle Morgan. Meanwhile, Suren’s cousin Dolly – possibly the only female photographer in the city – has gone missing. You know how these things go. Somehow Estelle is connected to Mullick is connected to Dolly and there’s high danger the closer our interepid investigators get to the truth.

In a way, the mystery here – overlong in the middle, I think – plays second fiddle to the author’s wonderful depiction of a booming colonial city in a country edging towards independence. From the shanty towns to the halls of imperial law and commerce, not a sound, colour, texture or odour is omitted. In parts, as Wyndham courts Estelle Morgan, it’s reminiscent of The Great Gatsby with the ostentatious wealth of the ex pats on full show.
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2 – Small Fires by Ronnie Turner

What an outstanding book this is. It could easily have been my number one if it were a little more a crime novel and a little less… something else. Because it really is something else. Ronnie Turner has imagined a world we view as though through a stained glass window, full of colourful folklore, freaky legends and surreal superstitions, which is incredibly chilling but oh-so appealing to lovers of gothic storytelling.

Sisters Lily and Della Pedley have been acquitted of murdering their parents in the Southwest of England. To avoid the stigma they move to an island called God-Forgotten off the Scottish coast. Is this where Satan was cast down by God? It might well be. The sisters begin to learn of the island’s strange traditions and Della, who has a bit of the shadow about her, seems to fit right in. Meanwhile, Lily befriends a young man called Silas, who is the sensitive type and sets himself apart from the other folk. When three young women from the mainland arrive all bodes ill, not least due to tales of the Warden, who it’s said harvests three souls each year…

We love crime novels with a little folk horror mixed in. Ritual killing driven by near forgotten beliefs seems scarier than more prosaic murders which get detectives, profilers and forensics experts sniffing around. There’s none of that in Small Fires, a story so deeply textured by Turner’s imaginings and unique style that you can hardly tell which century it takes place in. It’s almost as though that’s part of the mystery. Loved it. Read the review here.

1 – The Impossible Thing by Belinda Bauer

Oooo. This one’s a good egg. And in fact it centres on an egg. An unusual red one, stolen from a lad called Nick who lives in the Welsh valleys. He recruits his neurodivergent buddy, Patrick, to help him find it and soon they’re caught up in a dangerous game involving collectors of rare eggs, which is now illegal.

But a century ago it wasn’t, and other half the story takes place in 1920 at a farm near Bempton Cliffs in Yorkshire. Tiny Celie Sheppard is the only one able to scramble down the rock face to steal the red egg laid each spring by a specific guillemot – prized by agents like George Ambler, who sell to collectors in London. Luckily, neighbours prevent Ambler from exploiting Celie and by fetching the eggs she earns enough to save her mother and brothers from eviction.

What you get with The Impossible Thing is essentially a mystery in the form of a dangerous egg hunt for Patrick and Nick, and two coming-of-age stories set a century apart. There’s lots of conniving, a little skulduggery, pictures of rural poverty and Britain’s class system then and now, family drama and a bit of romance too. Highly original, very moving and so very well written – it’s my book of the year. Read the review here.
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Click here to see the 2025 top fives from our entire team of contributors.