Booklist Mystery Month Resources

Every May Booklist turns their attention to Crime Fiction. When you group Mystery, Suspense and Thrillers all together, you easily have the most popular genres for library patrons. Which means, you need to be looking at the information they compile each and every May to stay up to date on the wide offerings in these popular reading areas.

So, just in case you haven’t seen any of it, I wanted to point out a few of lists and article to get you started before Mystery Month ends:

• A list of the best crime series narrators by Joyce Saricks
• The Booklist list of the Top 10 Crime Novels of the Year
• A guide to the novels of the late great Ruth Rendell by Rebecca Vnuk
• Brothers and Sisters of Salander-- crime novels with hackers by Bill Ott
• Ten True Crime options for mystery fans by Karen Kleckner Keefe
• Three Asian Detective series by Erin Downey Howerton [features one of my personal favorite mystery series]

This is just a sampling of what there is to offer.  You can use this Mystery Month tag to pull everything up in The Booklist Reader.

And don’t forget, with your library’s subscription to Booklist in print, you have digital access to search the archives for past year’s Mystery Month resources. At the very least, I highly suggest checking past year’s May 1 issues for the Top Crime Novels of the Year annual list [in print or online]. You can find some great backlist, under the radar titles for you Crime readers who are fresh out of “new to them” titles.

Finally for a more comprehensive discussion of crime fiction, please look at the assignments and notes from the ARRT Crime Fiction Genre Study, which I led during 2014 and 2015.