• The Last Good Kiss, by James Crumley. Crumley is not for the faint-hearted. If there is an opposite of the “cozy” mystery genre, this is it. But Crumley has the soul of a poet and his hard-drinking private eye protagonist knows a lot about life. The novel also features the consensus best first sentence in all crime literature: “When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon.” I have a signed first edition of the hard cover, purchased for far too much at Printers Row Rare and Fine Books in Chicago.
• LaBrava, by Elmore Leonard. My favorite Leonard novels are those, like this one, set in Miami Beach. Leonard gets the mix of seedy and sublime that makes South Beach so seductive. Joe LaBrava is ex-Secret Service and an amateur photographer who falls for and helps a former film noir actress who seems clearly modeled after Jane Greer, the real life beauty who suckered Robert Mitchum in “Out of the Past.” Once you’ve read all of Leonard, consider reading the novel that Leonard said taught him how to write crime fiction: George V. Higgins’  The Friends of Eddie Coyle.
• Head Games, by Craig McDonald. Criminally underappreciated, although this debut novel (published in 2008) did get an Edgar nomination. It had a Madison publisher – Bleak House Books – and a protagonist named Hector Lassiter, a crime author who “lives what he writes and writes what he lives.” This tale involves the head of Pancho Villa, a visit to the set of Orson Welles’ “Touch of Evil,” tequila bottles, dead bodies, and more. 
• The Long Goodbye, by Raymond Chandler. If I had to pick one title from the great early masters – Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain – this would be it. It was Chandler’s most ambitious novel, and the author’s personal favorite. Chandler’s detective protagonist, Philip Marlowe, helps a friend flee to Mexico, not knowing the friend’s wife has been murdered. Then the friend shows up dead – or does he?
• The Good German, by Joseph Kanon. Kanon is my favorite espionage writer. He manages to create the atmosphere that a writer like Alan Furst gets so much credit for, but Kanon is also able to keep the plots hopping. “The Good German” was his third novel and is vastly superior to the movie version that starred George Clooney. It’s set in postwar Berlin and involves a missing scientist and conflicting alliances with the approach of the Cold War. 

In Summer of the Dead, Julia Keller continues her vivid description of life in Appalachia and the strong characters she has developed such as Bell Elkins. Her stories contain complex characters with surprising twists that will keep you guessing as to who committed the murder. Keller’s writing is tight and it will draw you quickly from page to page. In fact, it's likely that you'll know you need to put the book down and go to sleep for the night and good luck with that!

Secret Chord by Geraldine Brooks. In this latest offering from the Pulitzer Prize winner, Geraldine Brooks turns her hand to a fictional biography of the Israelite king, David, Using the story of his life from the Hebrew Bible, Brooks fleshes out the life of this most complicated of characters in sometimes moving, sometimes shocking ways. David was a deeply flawed man. He was also the Beloved of God. A great read even if you already know how it ends!