My Favorite Mystery, Thriller, & Horror Books of 2020

oh hello today we are talking about my best reads of 2020 for mystery thriller horror suspense that kind of genre family of books and uh yeah it's it was a good year for this category for me mostly though i will say i talked about this a little bit in my romance list mystery and romance are two genre families where i know what i like pretty well like i know my tropes i can find things on the back of books and i'm like i'm gonna like that in romance there is a bounty of books that fall with my preferences available to me like there's just a lot of them in mystery thriller horror i know what i like but there's not as much of a supply of it so it's harder for me to have as many books and i'm like oh yeah like it's always harder for me to get the books that i really love in that category so anyway i did have many many uh mystery thriller horror picks this year though that i really did enjoy and uh this was also a year where i finished off reading my all-time favorite author agatha christie's ubra so you will be seeing a lot of her on this list so with that being said i should mention best to me means favorite and of 2020 means books i read in 2020 not published this year so just caveat there anyway with that being said let's dive on in with number 10 and that is partners in crime by agatha christie so this is a collection of tommy and tuppence short stories and i did not love the secret adversary which is the first in the tommy and tuppence series it was just okay to me like it just it was fine partners in crime i found to be incredibly charming it was written in the 20s and it just has that sort of jolly j adventure type vibe to it they are interconnected which i think is really fun so basically the setup is tommy is working for kind of the equivalent of the secret service one of bmis i don't know which like in my five there's i don't know which ones are which i'm sorry he's working for like the secret service and he's like a not i guess kind of like a spy and they come to him with a proposition which is to basically take over this detective agency which is known to have ties to the russians so there's a lot of sort of like red scare commie stuff in this book because they also know that tuppence uh has quite the knack for mystery solving as well they suggest that she can come in to this business with him so they are running this detective agency under an alias and there's just a bunch of short stories that are just fun some of them are more thrillery so they're more having to do with the sort of russian kami subplot thing and then some of them are just straight up you know people off the street coming in asking them to solve a whodunit for them so i just really i found this very charming uh very fun like this is christy in her really fun mode and it just put a smile on my face and i also love that there's sort of a meta element to these stories because they are assuming the personas of various famous fictional detectives so like sherlock holmes or whoever some of whom i was familiar with some of whom were less familiar to me but very excitingly at one point they do a poirot so in this universe in the tommy and tuppence universe poirot is a fictional detective i don't know i just enjoyed that sort of like whoa what is what is happening anyway so all i had to say number 10 i definitely thought this was a really fun a fun version of what christy does number nine is also an agatha christie and also tommy and tuppence this is n or m which is the next book in the series and is a book that is set about 20 years later when tommy and tuppence are parents they are in middle age and britain is entering world war ii and one of the interesting things about this book is that it is one of the only books that christy wrote during world war ii that directly references what is going on so like for instance in the middle of this book the uh battle of dunkirk like the saving of everybody dover from the fisherman's boats like all of that happens so like it's a book written in real time where christie herself doesn't know how world war ii is going to end and that sort of anxiety is projected onto the characters so i just thought that this had a really nice sort of psychology to the characters added in it's really fun to see tommy and tubbins go from these sort of like carefree you know hapless 20-somethings in the 20s to now being parents of two kids who are serving in the war like their son is a soldier their daughter is in secret service kind of thing tommy gets recruited by his old bosses to go on an undercover mission to the seaside town to try to uncover these two uh essentially traitors to the british crown who are helping out the germans and so i just it's a thriller it's it has a mystery it's it does that thing that christy does in some of these thriller books where it's a very effective combination of a spy thriller with a whodunit plot kind of engine in it and i think she just does those really well i just really i was very moved by this book just with all the kind of knowing when this was written in history and sort of all the things surrounding it i just thought that this was a really fun mystery with some real like underlying heft to it that i personally really enjoyed also i'm just a christie fan girl so any kind of book that has something unique about it from her is going to be interesting to me so that is number nine number eight is the shadows by alex north and i would describe this as a serial killer thriller with paranormal elements to it that i thought that he really effectively incorporated into the story so basically the setup is as children there was this group who had this sort of charismatic creepy af little ringleader who was teaching them how to use their dreams to enact real life things on their enemies and there ends up being a murder and the kid is thought to be the murderer the ringleader is thought to be the murderer but then his paranormalness allows him to escape into the dream world so it's like this question of like is like is there a good ghost that's kind of like the setup here is we're trying to find out is there an actual paranormal element happening or not and then we're flashing forward in time to the present day with one of the kids and the serial murderer may be back and you know again is it a good ghost is it is this is it the actual original kid or is it just copycats um inspired by his sort of legacy so it i'm not always big on the back and forth timeline but this is an example of where i think it is done really really well i think that the creepy elements of this are really effective and genuinely like a genuinely creepy kid like he he kicked me out and i had a couple of moments of going audible like oh it kind of it took me by surprise in a few places um and i just thought that this was a really good version of this kind of serial killer thriller i do like a serial killer thriller so i'm a sucker for that but yeah i just thought that this had some nice family elements to it yeah just all around i thought that this was a great version of what it was really fun and i actually listened to this on audio and thought that the audio was really good number seven is when no one is watching by alyssa cole i absolutely love alyssa cole in romance and this is her first foray outside of that genre into the thriller space now like this is it says a thriller it is marketed as a thriller i'm gonna tell you right now and i've been saying i think that this is a horror novel not a thriller and i think that your expectations for the pacing of this will be much better met if you expect it to be a horror novel and not a thriller because it doesn't have the like boom boom boom suspensey kind of pacing i would expect from a thriller it has a slow crank up to the the action and once things kick off like things kick off and you know it gets real intense and real yeah it's a lot but it does take a while to get there so i think that thinking of this as a horror novel will set you up for much better success than thinking of it as a thriller this has been called a gentrification thriller and i think that this is basically a book take on the ideas of the movie get out but set in brooklyn not in like the suburbs and uh basically kind of what what are the implications of all of these white people moving into this historically black neighborhood and could there be something more sinister underlying why that is happening i think that the character work in this is really lovely as somebody who's experienced the loss of a parent at a young age i thought that there's a piece of this of uh the mother the main one of the main character's mother's being sick and and i appreciated all of that i thought that was handled really well there's like a romantic side plot that i thought was incorporated really nicely into this overall i just think that there's an atmosphere of menace and creepiness that is really effective in this book i think the thematic content is wonderful and i also really enjoy she has a kind of the equivalent of the next door app postings from that included in this and i thought that was really smart and uh well observed as well so overall i think that this is a wonderful first entry into a new genre from alyssa cole who i've literally never read a bad book for melissa cole she is just like very i think she's a masterful writer of genre fiction and uh if you have this is your first encounter with her and you're open to romance i would certainly recommend her other books because they are also very well written so anyway number seven excited to see more from her in the genre in the future number six is eight perfect murders by peter swanson now this is i guess the second time on this list we're talking about a meta quality to a book and we will definitely get that with my top pick for this genre but i absolutely love this book as a meta commentary on the mystery genre itself that is something that i tend to really enjoy in mystery books where there's an awareness on the part of the characters of the conventional beats of a whodunit this one the whole premise of this is that this bookstore owner had this old blog post about eight perfect murders in these eight mystery thriller books and somebody a serial killer possibly they can't quite tell if it's actually a serial killer but in theory maybe there's a serial killer who is using that list to serial kill people again i really like a serial killer book so that works for me and just the overall discussions of these different books that what makes them a perfect murder just that discussion of the whodunit genre in sort of a meta-textual way was something that i really enjoyed but i do want to give a caveat and i put the list of books you need to watch out for in my goodreads review so i'll refer you to there this spoils the plot of a good like dozen classic mysteries so if you have not read those mysteries and you have any intention of reading them i would do a little research because there's also like three great christies that get spoiled in this and then there were none murder of roger aykroyd and i think the abc murders all three of them have their twists spoiled by this book so definitely do some research to make sure you're not gonna accidentally get spoiled before you read this because there are some great books that are mentioned in here but these i just really just really really enjoyed this i thought this was fun and smart and it does a thing where you you as the reader know where it's going if you've read a lot of mystery and the book tells you that it knows that you know where it's going so i some people won't like that because it's not surprising enough we'll get to that later in this list but for me i enjoy that as a big reader of this genre like it's hard to surprise me and i enjoy it when a book like acknowledges that and just rolls with it so anyway i really like this one and i thought that it was just a lot of fun number five is the pale horse by agatha christie and there was a big adaptation of this at the end of last year in the uk and then it came out in the us at the beginning of this year and i think the adaptation is interesting i prefer the book and the adaptation goes in a very different direction than the book so i will just say that but i this book was the rare agatha christie where she fooled me because i am pretty good at this point i just i mean i've read all of her books at this point and um i'm good at kind of figuring out who is likely to have done it so it's rare for me to have like a oh like wasn't i didn't see that coming and she did that because she fooled me as to what kind of agatha christie i was reading and i just loved that like i loved thinking i was going down one path and it ended up being another the setup for this is basically there's this uh inn called the pale horse that ostensibly may have some ties to the occult that people are using to kill off people in their lives and our main characters are trying to figure out if that's actually true what's really going on like are there shady things happening in this little town so it's a it's a pair uh christy with insinuations of paranormal activity it's always fun and yeah anyway i just like i said this one had to be this high up just because it it's so rare for her to pull the wool over my eyes of what direction she's going from her kind of you know bag of typical plot she uses so i was just delighted to be a little bit surprised by that number four is the southern book club's guide to slaying vampires by grady hendrix this is a horror novel that is basically i i think i part part of why i love this so much is that this is a horror novel set in the white suburban south of the 90s which is where i grew up and so like i recognized the characters in this like no other uh sort of the nouveau riche white flight of that era that was that's my background so the kind of the racial commentary that he is making with this horror novel i think is so incisive and smart and real like i just love there's basically this is using a vampire like the metaphor here is vampirism and essentially like the racial tensions of the american south and the 90s this vampire is preying on different people in this community based on their own fragility and sort of the social order our protagonists are kind of basically nice white ladies who are in this book club together where they read all these like kind of in-rule true crime books and uh this vampire starts insinuating his way into their lives and into their husbands businesses one of them kind of is seeing what is happening and it's sort of about her her attempt to try to undermine him and again i just thought that this was it's it's thematic and commentary elements i just thought were really really smart really well done there's a lot of sort of graphic horror elements to this in terms of like ich factor so know that and also definitely big content warnings on child predation sexual assault so just know that about this book as well but this has some dark humor to it and i just thought this was a page turner in a way that not all books of its kind are i couldn't put this down like i read this in one day because i was just sucked in by it so really enjoyed his writing and i will definitely seek out more from him in the future i also interviewed him for a bookcon panel um so i will link to that video somewhere it's still up on my channel um and he was very charming to talk to so all in all really enjoyed this number four number three is a controversial pick because this is my first book that i've read from a very popular author and i think that this may be her least popular book because people like her for thriller and this is really more of a whodunit and that is one by one by ruth ware so this is the first time i've ever read something from ruth ware and i really enjoyed this as a very in my mind one of the most effective versions of a contemporary isolated closed circle mystery that i've ever read now if you come to this book expecting to have a thrill like a thriller i think you will be disappointed and if you are somebody who more than anything in mystery thriller values being completely surprised again i don't know that this is something you'll love because i don't know that this was like super hard to figure out but that to me is not the joy of a mystery the joy is seeing how authors follow these plot types and use these character types in ways that i enjoy like if they can do that effectively i don't need to be completely shocked by how things unfold because realistically i you you kind of know i don't know sorry maybe this is a whole other topic that i can talk about at a separate time but um that's just not something that i value in my mystery reading so yeah i do i think if she was gonna make this a little more surprising probably one more point of view in this would have been helpful but i think that this is a really good version of what it is which is a bunch of people who know each other get isolated together somebody dies you gotta figure out who done it because more people are dying i love that plot and this delivers that plot really well the setup for this one is that they are all it is a bunch of people who work together they are on a corporate retreat in the alps and they all have some monetary motives where it would be beneficial possibly to off one or more of the people who are there and they get snowed in there's an avalanche and like chaos ensues so i just thought this was a good version of what it was like one of the best versions of this trope to be honest of a contemporary writer that i've read and it makes me very excited to try more from earth where so for me this is my number three pick of the year i feel like that's kind of controversial so do with that what you will number two is my last christie on this list and that is the man in the brown suit from her and this is one of her sort of uh political thrillers it does have a murder mystery element in there but it it's really more of a political thriller and i just tonally this book just worked for me it is her in the 20s writing her sort of light fun thriller things that she did in this era and just sort of there's a lot of kind of world hopping or like world tripping elements like we're going from england to south africa on a cruise and we're trying to solve some international intrigue along the way i do want to give warnings for uh a lot of of its time elements in this book in terms of the attitudes towards colonialism and the sort of implied racism that goes along with that so i do just want to make people aware of that before they pick it up for me it didn't ruin my enjoyment of the book because i feel like it's contextualized in in its time this was written in the 20s but just something to know and uh yeah this is her just her i really love the main character of this one one of her sort of bright young things and i think it's a great version of her sort of plucky female protagonist she does um and this is probably my favorite of her thriller type books of this ilk so i definitely had to put it very high up on the list for that reason okay and then we get to my number one choice which is going to be very controversial because i think i am in the minority of people who just really love this book and thought it was interesting and doing cool things i just i want to mention off the bat people have problems with this book because they think well two things one some people don't enjoy the meta quality of this book which is something i love we've already talked about that on this list so if you don't like that in your mystery where when i say meta it's a it's a mystery that is commenting on its own genre so it has a self-awareness in the text of reader expectations about how mysteries work so if you don't like that you won't like this book and then this book calls its shots in several places and then does and doesn't deliver on it and so if you are looking for something that is wholly unpredictable or you want an ending i don't even know i can't really get into specifics without giving it away but i think some people don't like the ending of this because of some of the meta textual elements to it so with all that being said i love this book and that is the eighth detective by alex pavesi this book kind of rue on me as i was reading it because it basically reads like a set of interconnected short stories this the framing device for this is this woman has gone to this greek isle to meet with this reclusive author who wrote this uh collection of short stories in the 1930s and 40s it's like 20 or 30 years later and her publishing house wants to put out like a anniversary edition of these sort of classic short stories or whatever so she's going to interview this author about his process so we're getting each of the seven short stories as the book unfolds and then we have interstitials with the woman who's there to interview the author and like their dynamics so you know at first i was like okay this is interesting and there they read each of these short stories reads very much like a classic whodunit the author of those short stories has this theory about like using mathematical equations to set up the variables to a mystery novel um so like you get a lot of discussion about sort of the theory of how mystery plots work and like the different character types in them and then this just has a bunch of different really classic whodunit setups there's a locked room mystery this has one of my favorite isolated clothes circle mysteries i've ever read the what like we were talking about earlier where everybody's trapped together somebody dies you got to figure out who done it this has one of my favorite takes on that trope i've ever seen i love that short story and then i loved how i was having questions about the stories as we were going and then as the story builds on itself in the framing device we get more and more insights that validate and then subvert some of those questions that and a a reader who has read a lot of mystery is likely to have as the book goes along so that sort of engagement of alex bowasi the actual author and me reading about these short stories written by this fake author and his fake detect like that whole dynamic i love like i love that kind of dance between me the actual reader and the actual author in a meta way in his text so like i was way into this i really enjoyed it it is not gonna be a book for everyone but it's the most interesting mystery i read this year by far and when i was looking through my list i was like yeah i feel like i have to put this at the top because this was the most engaging in a mystery thriller horror kind of realm that i read this year like this really i found this really intellectually engaging and it also gave me some of just the pure pleasure idness of a book in the genre that i enjoy so for me the eighth detective by alice pavasi is my top pick for mystery thriller horror for this year and with that those were my best of favorites of 2020 reading in this family of genres and definitely let me know if you've read any of these what you think in the comments below or maybe what your favorite book in mystery thriller was this year and yeah i think that that will do it for me so if you enjoyed this video please like subscribe follow me on the social medias if you are so inclined i have all that information listed in the description box below and i think that that will do it i hope you are having an absolutely lovely day today and i will just talk to you soon bye you

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Length: 22min 46sec (1366 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 31 2020