I’ve long believed that crime fiction runs along a spectrum between order and chaos, where the two seemingly disparate states are always intertwined, ever-changing, never settled. It makes sense that a genre offering a window into the way we really function in society and behave with one another would embrace constraints while also constantly subverting them. This year’s standout authors understood the assignment: to push boundaries, to reflect the world in its messy glory rather than in tidy narratives.

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The God of the Woods

By Liz Moore

My crime novel of the year is “The God of the Woods,”which I had the great fortune of reading while at a writing residency. Somehow that change of scene — in a picturesque environment akin to the Adirondack summer camp where the 13-year-old daughter of the camp’s wealthy founders disappears one night in 1975 — heightened my attention to Moore’s note-perfect story, which is about the price of power, the enormity of loss and the ease of scapegoating. I expect to be thinking about this novel years from now.

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Cahokia Jazz

By Francis Spufford

The narrative audacity of “Cahokia Jazz” isn’t altogether surprising for anyone who has read Spufford’s previous novels. Here he sets out to chronicle a vanished world that never had the chance to blossom, and allows it to breathe through the jagged, jazzy rhythms of hard-boiled detective fiction. In Spufford’s brilliant telling, 1920s-era Cahokia is a thriving, Indigenous-led American state roiling with racial tension. When an outsider arrives to investigate a murder, the ties that bind this supposed utopia can only blow apart.

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