Christmas Book Ideas: Crime Novels

The 12 days of Christmas book ideas continues.   I am providing book suggestions to help you wade through the millions of books out there to come up with book ideas for your own Christmas present list or to get something for someone else. On the fifth day of Christmas it is… crime fiction.

Crime fiction is an ever popular category and one that has much to offer. A couple of the big books this year were actually published pre-2014, but were released as films this year, increasing their popularity. Those are Gone Girl and Before I Go To Sleep. Both are worth a go.

I Am Pilgrim is a good read (although I seem to recall a scene involving some rats which will not be ideal for anyone with a phobia of them!) and a page-turner. I also really enjoyed Mercy, which is the first in a series of books set around a Copenhagen detective – although I thought the second book in the series was fairly dire, but don’t let that put you off reading the first one though. Or there’s a book I have previously recommended, A Killing in the Hills, which is a brooding crime novel set in the USA.  You could also try The Alienist, which is set in nineteenth century New York and involves murder and mayhem.

You could also go back to some classics, such as Agatha Christie’s first crime novel Why Didn't They Ask Evans?, which nearly got Christie cast out of the Mystery Writers Guild - for reasons I shall not explain because it would rather give away the plot! You could also try some Dorothy L Sayers such as Clouds of Witness

Links to the above and some other suggestions are below: