Newspaper Article

Best crime and thriller books of 2015

Lawson, Mark

2015

Overview

From Girl on the Train to Girl in the Spider's Web -- a look back on a year that lived up to the hypeVote: What was your favourite book of the year?Best of culture in 2015: see this year's cultural highlights, chosen by the Guardian's writers and critics In [Ruth Rendell]'s absence, that manuscript was shepherded to publication by Val McDermid, who was on strong form herself in Splinter the Silence (Little, Brown), a case that takes co-investigators Jordan & Hill into an increasingly violent world. Belinda Bauer, another writer who follows in Rendell's footsteps, confirmed her star status with The Shut Eye (Bantam), in which a grieving mother is contacted by a psychic who may be a psychopath. Dark Corners may not be the last we hear of Rendell's characters, given the tendency for crime narratives to be continued posthumously by other hands. If these transactions are to happen -- and the practice raises considerable ethical and technical challenges -- then it is hard to imagine a better ghostwriter than David Lagercrantz, whose The Girl in the Spider's Web (MacLehose) convincingly extended the life of the late Stieg Larsson's great character, Lisbeth Salander.

• Publisher: Guardian News & Media Limited
• Subject: Rendell, Ruth