There aren’t many books exactly like Natasha Bache’s 12 Ways To Kill Your Family at Christmas (One More Chapter, £9.99). It’s a holiday murder mystery, set at a snowed-in manor home, where – a prologue reveals – 10 people die, one by one. True, that set-up is familiar, but the writing is less so: few holiday mysteries go quite so gleefully over the top.
The narrator-protagonist is daughter-in-law Olivia, who, with her husband, Miles, and their two teens, has long suffered Miles’s family’s toxicity. Worst of all is his controlling mother, Jeannie, who thinks Olivia is beneath Miles and scorns her career writing orc-centric romantasy novels. As the dreaded annual two-week Christmas endurance contest begins – one Olivia hopes will be their last before emigrating to Australia – she’s way behind deadline for her next novel.
After a long evening endured only with much Champagne, the visit truly goes off the rails: Jeannie and her husband, George, announce they’ve changed their wills, disinheriting Miles and several others. Is it any wonder people begin dying?
The murders begin unsuspiciously when George falls while hanging Christmas lights. As things escalate, the deaths quickly leave ordinary far behind. Soon, the family’s snowed in, the police seem helpless, and everyone’s a suspect. Though Bache eventually reveals a plausibly surprising culprit, much of the pleasure here is in watching the body count climb, gratifyingly beyond taste and sense.
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The summer of 1977 is etched in New York lore as much for its crime as for the thriving culture scene. A veteran of that scene, Gabriel Rotello, captures it all with abandon in The CBGB Conspiracy (Koehler, £22), stocked with downtown kids drawn by the city’s post-Stonewall freedoms and by the hope of mixing with “everybody from the pre-Beats to the proto-punks”. The city’s bleak near-collapse dominates histories of the era, but Rotello emphasises the underlying hope that fuelled the scene’s energy.
The death by apparent overdose of young writer Lucien Lowe sparks a crisis among his friends, none of whom believe the official story. When the cops don’t even bother gathering evidence, instead callously writing him off as just another dead junkie in a city collapsing under its own weight, his friends – led by his uptown girlfriend, Julie, and fledging fashion designer, Finn – take matters into their own hands. After first brushing them off as “a couple of little Miss Marples,” NYPD detective Benny Cherin helps them track down the truth through thickets of corruption.
The CBGB Conspiracy is satisfying crime fiction, entertaining and heartfelt. That’s because Rotello anchors his story so well in a momentous time and place – with real players (artists like William S Burroughs and Patti Smith, villains like Roy Cohn), events (the citywide Blackout, the Son of Sam), and places (CBGB’s and the gay baths that populated the city before the Aids crisis) – for which he has a clear-eyed, bone-deep, and persuasive affection.
A very different historical mystery, Abir Mukherjee’s The Burning Grounds (Harvill, £18.99) is his sixth set in 1920s Calcutta, again featuring Sam Wyndham of the Imperial Police and his sometime-colleague Surendranath Banerjee. Here the two are estranged by the messy aftermath of a previous case. Wyndham is now a barely tolerated outcast within the force and isn’t what you’d call excessively sentimental: “My antipathy extends far beyond my own kind. It is catholic in scope and liberal in application and encompasses almost everyone everywhere.”
He’s handed a murder case that quickly escalates when the body is identified as a famed businessman and philanthropist. Before Wyndham can make progress, Banerjee appears on his doorstep. Conflicted about working for the Empire, he’s no longer a cop, but reluctantly asks Wyndham for help finding his missing cousin. The two strike an uneasy truce and discover their cases are closely related.
Before long, the story involves several murders, a stalled film production, a rising Hollywood actress, and spies both British and Soviet (“any ideology which advocated shooting the aristocracy couldn’t be all bad”). Once Mukherjee lines up his pieces, what opened like a leisurely historical mystery takes on a frantic urgency, deftly adapting classic plot lines of corruption, blackmail, and moral compromise to the complexities of India under the late stages of British rule. With wit and empathy, Mukherjee smartly grounds all of these elements in his characters’ experiences, giving this sharp, emotionally engaging novel a satisfying conclusion.
Steph Cha, the series editor of Best American Mystery and Suspense, introduces the 2025 volume (Mariner, £12.99) by acknowledging the challenge of writing and reading mystery fiction against the “absurd scrolling backdrop of open malfeasance and blatant injustice” that’s consuming the US. Right now, “Best American” anything can feel like an oxymoron, but the stories Cha and this year’s guest editor, Don Winslow, have selected show that crime writing is making the most of conditions in the US, unchecked though political crime is there.
The selected stories range widely, from simmeringly angry to drily witty. With its wily narrator – you wouldn’t trust her with much, but you still want to see her dodge what’s coming – Twist Phelan’s story Good Shoes models how to distil a messy lifetime into 10 pages.
Noir lovers will enjoy PI Gussie Diamond and the working ladies at the centre of Ann Aptaker’s story Neon Women. When her client Marsha St Clair’s ex-husband is found dead in a Times Square puddle, Gussie wonders why a senior Homicide cop is on the scene. A visit to the Hot Nights Club, with its “deafening throb of desperation”, provides the answer as Aptaker captures a very pre-Disneyfied Times Square.
Amid a very different landscape, Erika Krouse’s wildly original Eat My Moose depicts Colum and Bonnie’s thriving business in Alaska. It’s not one they can advertise: they travel across Alaska’s vast interior, providing off-the-books euthanasia services. Krouse gives this already unexpected set-up a moving hook, worth this collection’s price of admission.
Don’t be put off by the title of Samir Machado de Machado’s The Good Nazi (translated by Rahul Bery, Pushkin, £12.99). After a sneaky build, this delivers a real contender for the year’s most satisfying closing line.
This brief, meticulous novel opens with the Graf Zeppelin stopping in Recife on its way to Rio, after three days flying above the Atlantic Ocean in idle luxury, with an attentive chief steward and Commander Hugo Eckener at the helm. Several new passengers board in Recife, including coffee importer Otto Klein, joining an eclectic mix who’d boarded in Germany. Many (but not all) wear swastika pins, demonstrating their “affiliation to the party which was gradually permeating every aspect of German daily life”. Most of them will make it to Rio; Klein will not.
When Klein is found dead inside a locked WC, Eckener is glad his passengers include Berlin police detective Bruno Brückner and Dr Voegler. The latter quickly identifies the cause of death: cyanide. Hoping to avoid a scandal, Eckener asks Brückner to solve the case before their flight ends and Brazilian authorities take over.
Brückner navigates the case through a series of interviews marked by those insufferable pin-wearing travellers’ casual Nazi diatribes. Their conversations, though, provide essential ballast for the conclusion, with its fierce sense of justice and a twist that can only be called perfect. In a year like 2025, it’s good to see the worst take a loss.
