Publisher's Weekly Best of 2009 Fiction:
The Scarecrow
Michael Connelly
Reporter Jack McEvoy decides to go out with a bang, after he's laid off from the L.A. Times, in a nail-biting thriller that charts the demise of print journalism and shows why Connelly is one of today's top crime authors.
The Fate of Katherine Carr
Thomas H. Cook
Edgar-winner Cook eloquently explores the often cathartic act of storytelling as George Gates, a former travel writer who after seven years still broods over his eight-year-old son's murder, looks into the unsolved disappearance of reclusive poet Katherine Carr 20 years earlier.
Spooner
Pete Dexter
Dexter's crowd-pleasing wiles are razor sharp in this long-awaited novel, the madcap and touching, assured and (ahem) dexterous story of a very Dexter-like Warren Spooner.
Dark Places
Gillian Flynn
Flynn tops her impressive debut, Sharp Objects, with a second crime thriller, centered on the slaying of a mother and two daughters in their Kansas farmhouse witnessed by the youngest, surviving daughter. It builds to a truth so twisted even the most astute readers won't see it coming.
The Man in the Wooden Hat
Jane Gardam
Octogenarian Gardam bookends her much-lauded Old Filth with this witty and very British love story, taking on with aplomb loyalty, lust, ambition and longing as she excavates the holes in all of our hearts.
Ravens
George Dawes Green
Two con men hold a family hostage in rural Georgia in order to get half of their $318 million lottery winnings in this masterful, often comic novel of psychological suspense, Green's first since 1995's The Juror.
Tinkers
Paul Harding
George Crosby's deathbed reveries wander through memories of his own life as a boy and the lives of his father and grandfather, in this sumptuously written first novel that has been the darling of indie bookstores.
The Believers
Zoë Heller
Heller zeroes in on a liberal Jewish Greenwich Village family whose perfect lefty household falls into some hilarious setups as the dysfunctions pile up and eventually spill over when the patriarch's feet of clay are revealed. Hilarious, readable and atmospheric.
The Vagrants
Yiyun Li
Wrenching and bleak are understatements for Li's magnificent gothic account of life in provincial 1979 China, centering on the execution of a counterrevolutionary. For all the morbid happenings—and there are many of them—the novel's immediately involving and impossible to walk away from.
How to Sell
Clancy Martin
Martin's peerless debut novel about a naïve Canadian's crooked education in the jewelry business is horrifying and sad and very funny. Truth is always elusive; here, it's a dire liability, too.
New World Monkeys
Nancy Mauro
An outstandingly original debut that takes the ridiculous (a couple kill a wild pig on their move to the burbs that turns out to be their new town's beloved mascot) and renders it psychological in this sendup of academia, advertising, peeping toms and young marrieds.
The Last War
Ana Menendez
A deeply moving story of a photojournalist in Istanbul waiting to join her war correspondent husband in Iraq. Her reluctance, suspicions and flashbacks of their time spent in Afghanistan create a dark background for the brilliance of her descriptions and observations.
Nemesis
Jo Nesbø
Oslo Insp. Harry Hole discovers that a bank robbery is linked to the apparent suicide of a woman friend he hasn't seen in years in this lush crime saga from the Norwegian author.
Lark and Termite
Jayne Anne Phillips
This elegant unraveling of parallel narratives—a grunt's Korean War tour of duty and the story of a family struggling through hard times nine years later—is at once intensely personal and loaded with themes of identity, duty and renewal, all the while maintaining a tight coil of suspense.
The Cry of the Sloth
Sam Savage
The increasingly desperate letters dispatched by the editor of a middling literary magazine provide a glimpse into the soul of a minor writer ravaged by existential dread. As Savage slowly deflates the narrator's self-importance, he provides a caustic and supremely funny portrait of a man in decline.
Drood
Dan Simmons
Narrated by Wilkie Collins, this unsettling and complex thriller imagines a frightening sequence of events that prompts Collins's friend and fellow author, Charles Dickens, to write The Mystery of Edwin Drood, Dickens's last, uncompleted novel.
Cutting for Stone
Abraham Verghese
Verghese's move to fiction is sweeping and fabulous, starting in India, settling in Ethiopia and moving on to the U.S. in a magnificent epic that follows twin boys as they negotiate medical training, revolution, the search for their roots and their relationship with each other.
The Little Stranger
Sarah Waters
A finalist for the Man Booker Prize, this subtle, creepy haunted house story chronicles the decline of an aristocratic county family after WWII as seen through the less than reliable eyes of a bachelor doctor, whose mother once served as a maid at the family's manor.
Sag Harbor
Colson Whitehead
Whitehead's intellect, gorgeous prose, measured nostalgia and sheer storytelling prowess raises the bar for coming-of-age novels. It's as sublime as you're likely to read.
Once the Shore
Paul Yoon
The eight stories in Yoon's remarkable collection revolve around the inhabitants of a small South Korean island rocked by Japanese occupation and later by the Korean War and are no less powerful for their quiet introspection. Yoon's delicate exploration of heartache places him high in the firmament of old souls.
