Books where one of the best things about my 2024 so I’m going to remind myself of the books that I enjoyed the most. I haven’t gone back and looked at the ratings I gave at the time. I’m going with the books that stuck in my memory. From the 182 books that I read in 2024, I’ve picked out twelve to bring to your attention. I hope at least one of them hooks your curiosity.

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Favourite Short Story Collection

‘You Like It Darker’ was Stephen King at his storytelling best. The twelve stories in the book, some quite short, some almost novel length (well, not Stephen King novel length but longer than the average novella) cover a lot of ground. They’re more speculative fiction than horror but it’s not their genre that distinguishes them but how the stories are told. I was fascinated by Stephen King’s ability to ground me firmly in a stranger’s reality, bringing people, places and periods alive and then introduce a small change or an anomaly or a What-If? speculation, that led me and the main characters into strange places where they had to function under stress and where they often discovered who they really were. When the stories were over, what lingered in my mind were not the woo-woo elements of the tale but the people and what encountering those woo-woo elements had done to them.

The stories aren’t clustered around any common theme except, perhaps, that life can always get darker, often when you least expect it. As Stephen King puts in it one story, “The world is full of rattlesnakes. Sometimes you step on them and they don’t bite. Sometimes you step over them and they bite anyway.”

My review is HERE

Favourite Urban Fantasy Novel

‘The Gathering’ caught me by surprise. It’s a departure from C. J. Tudo and it worked wonderfully well. It is a fascinating mix of small-town police procedural and speculative fiction thriller. It takes place in winter in Deadhart, a remote Alaskan town (population 873 -living) that is about to be cut off from the rest of the world by a fierce snowstorm. It’s told through the eyes of a lone outsider, Detective Barbara Atkins, a specialist in vampyrs, whose job is to investigate a killing and determine if the local vampyr colony should be culled. 

It’s a story about a murder and the fear that it breeds and the desire for violence that it conjures. It’s a mystery with roots that go back all the way to the lawless days when the town arose to serve the needs of miners. It’s a story of a vampire species who lived in the Alaskan hills long before the first white human arrived and who shared the fate of the indigenous peoples around them: genocide and confinement to reservations, with the added twist of becoming a Federally protected endangered species. It’s a story of unacknowledged atrocities, of dark secrets, of intergenerational guilt that has festered into fear-fueled hate and of long-delayed revenge. It’s a story of monsters, many of whom are human.

My review if HERE

Favourite Thriller

I went into ‘The Undiscovered Deaths Of Grace McGill’ with no expections, just the hope of an entertainging mystery novel with a touch of style. I got so much more than that. This was astonishingly good. Beautifully told. Startlingly original. Full of unexpected things that kept changing my understanding of who Grace was and what was going on, yet it never felt like one of those clever-clever, distorted-into-a-pretzel-shaped-puzzle novels. because the emotions in it where deep and familiar and all of the people felt real. I also loved that the stylish title that had drawn me to the book turned out to mean much more than I thought it would.

My review is HERE

Favourite Horror

This was my first time reading a Shirley Jackson novel. I understand now why she’s so revered. ‘The Haunting Of Hill House‘ was as engaging as it was disturbing. I loved it. The prose was wonderful. The story was disturbing. Eleanor, the main character, was a masterful creation. The ending was perfect. It doesn’t get better than this.

My review is HERE

Favourtite Mainstream Novel

‘Four Seasons In Japan‘ is a rich, complex yet accessible and engaging book. The language is simple but vivid. I found myself slowing my reading to savour the images and emotions in the same way that I linger over perfectly drawn anime frames.

It was immersive in a different way than I’m used to. Instead of dunking me abruptly into a strange world and throwing stimuli at me until my senses were awash with the place, this book invited me to take a seat for a while and focus on all the small details and slow but inexorable changes that define a person or a place. It was calm without being passive.

My review is HERE

Favourite AI Novel

‘William‘ was a perfect Halloween read. One of the most original, surprising and menacing pieces of dark fiction I’ve listened to in a long time.It was 220 pages of pure pleasure.  It also made a great audiobook. The story‘ takes place on Halloween, in a house that is all Gothic Victorian Mansion on the outside and all Smart Home, high-security technology on the inside – much like the story itself. This is a novel that, like ‘Frankenstein’ considers the consequences for the creator of bringing a new, independent intelligence into the world. Except, both the creator and the creation that Mason Coile conjures are totally modern and instinctively duplicitous.It is a story not just about the dark potential of AI but of the dangerous hubris of those who create them.

My review is HERE

Favourite Award Winning Novel

‘The Friend‘ was a remarkable listening experience. It was an intimate six-hour long monologue, spoken to a dead friend. That probably sounds a little dull, perhaps even a bit of chore to listen to but that wasn’t my experience at all. To me it felt like one of those rare occaisions when you meet someone new and fascinating so you spend the whole day and long into the night listening to them talk, building a picture of them. lost in who they are becoming in your mind.

‘The Friend‘ is such a wonderful, effortless flow of remembrance and reflection that, at first, it hardly felt like grief, except that it was being spoken into a void, a presence lost and now, at best, imagined. I loved the narrator’s taken-for-granted erudition, her seamlessly integrated wit, and her self-awareness which refused to let self-deception hold sway but insisted on trying to say only what was true.

I wasn’t at all surprised to find that it had won the 2018 National Book Award.

My review is HERE

Favourite Golden Age Mystery

I love Joshephine Tey’s books, so I was expecting something good but ‘The Franchise Affair’ was even better than I’d thought it would be. I loved the writing, the originality of the story and the deep insights into characters who all came to feel real to me. 

The story is deeply embedded in the culture of rural England as it was a few years after the end of World War II, yet the novel felt modern and fresh.

The quality of the prose pulled me into the story from the first page. Tey effortlessly captured the character of a small English Market Town that has recently been through some hard times but whose inhabitants have never doubted that they would muddle through somehow. 

Despite what is implied by the publisher’s synopsis, ‘The Franchise Affair‘ is not a thriller or a detective story. It is a beautifully written, civilised, empathetic account of the consequences of vicious lies aimed at the vulnerable.

My review is HERE

Favourite Speculative Fiction Novel

I’m including ‘Camp Zero‘ here because, as well as enjoying it as I read it, I’ve found that the people and the situations have lingered in my memory. provided a depressingly plausible vision of life in 2050 that I’m glad I’m unlikely to live long enough to see. 

What made it both plausible and depressing is that this isn’t an apocalyptic tale of dramatic destruction but rather a continuation of both the slow erosion by climate change of the way of life that people at the start of the twenty-first century took for granted and the widening of the gap between the choices available to the very wealthy and the choices the rest of us have to cope with. 

What made the novel engaging was its focus on three sets of people trying to build lives for themselves in the midst of this slow-motion disintegration and whose paths are all converging on Camp Zero, where Americans have hired men to build a new campus in the far north of Canada, next to a long-abandoned small town. One story follows Rose, a sex worker at the camp, who has a secret agenda. One story follows Grant, the son of a leading member of the wealthy elite, who, following a trauma, has fled his family and its wealth to take up a job teaching job at the still-under-construction campus. The third story follows an all-female group of scientists in the American military who have been sent on a long-term mission to White Alice a polar DEW station in Northern Canada left over from the Cold War. I found myself caring about all three sets of people even when they did things I didn’t like.

My review is HERE

Favourite Historical Fiction

Seeing’The List Of Suspicious Things‘ listed as historical fiction when it’s set in a time period that I lived through made me realised how old I am.. I hesitated to pick it up because it seemed to be about a teenage girl’s self-appointed quest to find the Yorksire Ripper and I worried it might be gory or voyeuristic.

It turned out that the book was really about what it was like to be a teenage girl in Yorkshire in the 1970s. It was a joy to read, even though the topics it covered (racism, violence against women, bullying) were often unpleasant. It felt honest. It portrayed people that I recognises: the speech patterns, the things not said, looks exchanged and the attitudes that we used to take for granted. It’s also a nuanced depictions of how friendships develop between teenage girls and of how friendships and small acts of kindness can sustain hope.

This could easily have been a “look how bad we were back then” but instead it’s infused with a love of time, place and people that says “We weren’t perfect but we were mostyl doing our best”

Favourite “I didn’t see that coming.” Novel

From the start, I found ‘The Maid‘ strangely compelling. By the end of the book, I was ready to nominated Molly as my neurodivergent character of the year. I like that while Molly’s interior voice showed her difference clearly, the main focus was on her emotions, her hopes, her personal code and her strength. 

‘The Maid’ is a mystery story that is told entirely from Molly’s perspective, Molly doesn’t find it easy to read people and her actions in social situations often strike people as odd. I tought this would make it challenging to deliver a mystery story with pace and surprising twists but Nita Prose managed both. The story was so well-written that I soon became heavily invested in Molly to the extent that, when she was being taken to the police station, I was anxious on her behalf. I was also quietly confident that once she understood her situation, she’d find a way through. 

I loved the way Molly worked things out. It was entirely consistent with her personality and her capabilities but it still caught almost everyone around her by surprise. I’m planning on reading the second book in the serie sin 2025.

Favourite Christmas Mystery

‘The Christmas Party’ was my last Christmas read of 2024 and it was by far the best. It was a solid mystery, told mainly in the present day but with crucial flashbacks to the last time everyone had met, on Christmas Eve twelve years earlier. It’s a twist on the locked room mystery in that, if there was a murder, then the murderer is one of the six people currently snowed in at an isolated lochside house in Scotland. Add in a twist that one of the six has no memory of most of the party twelve years ago and so considers herself a suspect and this becomes a rubrics cube of possible murder suspects.

My review is HERE

Favourite New (to me) Author

I read my first Kim M. Watt book in August 2024 and fell into a whole world of mystery, magic and mirth that let me to read seven of her novels from covering three of her series in five months. I love the gentle humour and the engaging characters, human and non-human, and the very English flavour of the stories. Her website is HERE. Take a look and see if her books are for you.