Christmas Books: 5 of the best crime novels from 2018

From Mick Herron's London Rules to Ian Rankin's In House of Lies, here are five of the best
Mark Sanderson29 November 2018

Looking to buy some truly gripping crime novels as Christmas presents this year?

From Ian Rankin's In House of Lies to Robert Crais' The Wanted, Mark Sanderson picks his five favourites from 2018.

London Rules

London Rules (John Murray, £12.99)

London Rules (John Murray, £12.99) by Mick Herron is the latest — and so far the best — bulletin from that twilight home for burned-out spies by the Barbican, Slough House.

It opens with a group of young men spilling out of a Jeep and shooting up an isolated village — which, on page three, turns out to be not in Helmand but Derbyshire.

The frantic fall-out from this farrago injures a cross-dressing Farage-like rabble-rouser; a poster-boy Muslim mayor-in-waiting with a jihadi younger brother; and an unctuous PM: “Hell, you could stick your dick in a dead pig’s mouth and get away with it if your timing was right.” If you haven’t read Herron yet you should.

The Wanted

The Wanted (Simon & Schuster, £14.99)

The Wanted (Simon & Schuster, £14.99) is the 21st case for Robert Crais’s wisecracking PI Elvis Cole.

A concerned mother — finding a $40,000 Rolex under her troubled son’s bed — hires Cole to trace its origins. What he uncovers takes him all over contemporary LA and exposes a very nasty secret.

Aided and abetted by Pike, his super-fit sidekick, Cole discovers doing the right thing often means disregarding the demands of serving police officers. What follows is brutal, bromantic and breathless. Crais, a veteran screenwriter, just keeps getting better and better.

All This I Will Give to You

All This I Will Give to You (Amazon Crossing, £8.99)

The best crime novel in translation I read this year was Dolores Redondo’s All This I Will Give to You (Amazon Crossing, £8.99) in which a Spanish novelist discovers his dead husband is not all he seemed. It’s not only a much-needed, and clever, corrective to Scandinavian gloom but also a moving exploration of grief.

Breathe

Breathe (Hodder, £17.99)

The best debut of the year was surely Dominick Donald’s deeply impressive Breathe (Hodder, £17.99) in which a police probationer gropes his way through the great smogs of Fifties London on the trail of a multiple killer.

In House of Lies

In House of Lies (Orion, £20)

Ian Rankin’s In a House of Lies (Orion, £20) opens with four boys discovering the corpse of a private investigator in a car. The dead man’s lover just happens to have been the son of a police officer, with whom Detective Inspector Rebus was on friendly terms.

The result is a complex procedural that grips from the first sentence. The large cast includes gangster Big Ger Cafferty and — hurrah! — Brillo, his devoted rescue dog. No one in Britain writes better crime novels today.

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