New York Times: Best Mysteries (and Other Books) Since 2000

The New York Times recently published an interactive database showing its Book Review editors’ picks for best books and notable books by year and genre since 2000. So you can find the best and/or notable picks for 2021, for example, or the best narrative nonfiction or horror fiction of the past 23 years. Here’s a gift link to explore for yourself.

My interest, naturally, is in the best and notable mysteries of the past couple of decades. Here’s the complete list of 21 mysteries from Book Review editors, followed by the editors’ summaries. Titles link to the New York Times Book Review articles on each book.

Also, because many of these books are new to me, I did not identify which feature women in the lead roles. This can sometimes be difficult to tell from brief summaries and I don’t want to steer you wrong. Of course, the summaries can help with that. I can enthusiastically recommend the books by Laura Lippman and Sue Grafton as they’re on my GOAT list.

1. THE HEAVEN & EARTH GROCERY STORE by James McBride (2023) “McBride’s latest, an intimate, big-hearted tale of community, opens with a human skeleton found in a well in the 1970s, and then flashes back to the past, to the ’20s and ’30s, to explore the town’s Black, Jewish and immigrant history.”
2. THE BANGALORE DETECTIVES CLUB by Harini Nagendra (2022) “This first book in an effervescent new mystery series turns the clock back a century, to 1920s India, where a solitary, bookish, Sherlock Holmes-loving young wife uses her penchant for logic games to solve a garden-party murder.”
3. CASE STUDY by Graeme Macrae Burnet (2022)
   “Did an unorthodox therapist drive a woman to suicide? This novel of purportedly found documents, including journals and biographical interludes, takes on this psychological mystery while exploring through its nested narratives the possibilities of fiction.”
4. THE AOSAWA MURDERS by Riku Onda (2020)
   “Onda’s strange, engrossing novel — patched together from scraps of interviews, letters, newspaper articles and the like — explores the sweltering day that 17 members of the Aosawa family died after drinking poisoned sake and soda.”
5. A SEPARATION by Katie Kitamura (2017)
   “Deceptions pile on deceptions in this coolly unsettling postmodern mystery, in which a British woman travels to a Greek fishing village to search for her estranged husband, who has disappeared.”
6. SIX FOUR by Hideo Yokoyama (2017)
   “A former criminal investigator, now working in police media relations, faces angry reporters, the nagging 14-year-old case of a kidnapped girl, and his own teenage daughter’s disappearance.”
7. ILUSTRADO by Miguel Syjuco (2010)
   “A murder mystery punctuated with serious philosophical musings, this novel traces 150 years of Filipino history, posing questions about identity and art, exile and duty.”
8. ARTHUR & GEORGE by Julian Barnes (2006)
   “A metaphysical mystery starring Arthur (Conan Doyle), spiritual detective.”
9. RUMPOLE RESTS HIS CASE by John Mortimer (2003)
   “For a while it looked as though Horace Rumpole, Mortimer’s curmudgeonly London barrister, might have breathed his last in this collection, in which he defends his usual assortment of eccentric clients.”
10. JOLIE BLON’S BOUNCE by James Lee Burke (2002)
    “A former plantation overseer, whose biblical name of Legion suggests this diabolical villain’s capacity for evil, gets a little too close to Burke’s Cajun detective, Dave Robicheaux, in a Southern Gothic tale that uncovers the traditions of sexual sadism in a Louisiana bayou town.”
11. THE LAST KASHMIRI ROSE by Barbara Cleverly (2002)
    “The seductive beauty and secret dangers of India under the British Raj are evoked in this exotic debut whodunit, which sends a dashing Metropolitan Police officer to Bengal in 1922 to investigate the deaths of five cavalry officers’ wives, each a victim of her own worst nightmare.”
12. Q IS FOR QUARRY by Sue Grafton (2002)
    “Building on the skimpy facts in a true (and still unsolved) 1969 homicide of an unknown woman whose body was dumped in a quarry in Santa Barbara County, Grafton creates a sensitive assignment for her private eye, Kinsey Millhone, and two old geezer-cops who are obsessed with this sad case.”
13. THE STONE MONKEY by Jeffery Deaver (2002)
    “In a labyrinthine plot that is a marvel of intricate game construction, Deaver pits his genius sleuth, Lincoln Rhyme, against a shape-shifting villain known as the Ghost, who sank a ship of illegal Chinese immigrants off the coast of Long Island and is now hellbent on eliminating all witnesses to the atrocity.”
14. IN A STRANGE CITY by Laura Lippman (2001)
    “The Baltimore sleuth Tess Monaghan is on hand when the mysterious figure who visits the grave of Edgar Allan Poe each year on his birthday is joined by a second Poe Toaster who is murdered on the spot, necessitating a witty survey of local legends surrounding the father of the American mystery story.”
15. OPEN SEASON by C. J. Box (2001)
    “In this sinewy first novel set in the Bighorn Mountains, the author articulates his concern for endangered lives and liberties in the laconic voice of Joe Pickett, the new game warden of Twelve Sleep County, Wyo., and a stand-up guy who isn’t intimidated by poachers, survivalists, or his own preternaturally smart child.”
16. THE BOTTOMS by Joe R. Lansdale (2000)
    “This mesmerizing period mystery, narrated by the 11-year-old son of a country constable, draws on the lyrical storytelling idiom of regional folk legend to filter the horror of race violence and serial murder in a small East Texas town during the Depression.”
17. DEEP SOUTH by Nevada Barr (2000)
    “The National Park ranger Anna Pigeon finds herself smothering in the thick vegetation — and thicker intrigue — of the Natchez Trace when she opens an investigation into the macabre prom-night death of a high school girl, and finds herself tangled in the roots of old blood feuds and race hatreds.”
18. LEGACY OF THE DEAD by Charles Todd (2000)
    “Guilt and retribution are themes sounded when Ian Rutledge, a detective dispatched to Scotland to identify the bones of an English aristocrat, discovers that the woman charged with murdering the noblewoman and kidnapping her child is the fiancée of a soldier he executed during the Somme battles.”
19. PURPLE CANE ROAD by James Lee Burke (2000)
    “Nobody writes about the bad old days down South like Burke, whose obsession with the undead past digs up a half-buried domestic murder and draws his Louisiana sheriff’s deputy, Dave Robicheaux, into a violent confrontation with two corrupt cops who seem to have killed his mother.”
20. THE REMORSEFUL DAY by Colin Dexter (2000)
    “When it comes time for a great detective like Inspector Morse to pack it in, he deserves a splendid elegy with all the bells and whistles, and that’s what the brilliant and irascible Oxford copper gets in this cunningly plotted whodunit about the bondage slaying of a nurse — the perfect finale to a grand career.”
21. THE SIBYL IN HER GRAVE by Sarah Caudwell (2000)
    “Wit, erudition and stylistic elegance imprint the fourth and final outing for the legal scholar Hilary Tamar and his (or her) young colleagues, who put their heads together on an amusing whodunit that involves an insider trading scheme and somehow necessitates a holiday in Cannes for the sleuths.”

Of note: There’s a separate category for thrillers and I can’t always tell why one book is categorized as a thriller versus a mystery. For example, I reviewed Stephen King’s book Holly on this site as a mystery but it’s on the thrillers list in this database.