Despite the blockbuster names, it’s difficult to imagine a more unlikely pairing than Patterson, known for stripping away everything but the absolute essentials from his fiction, and Clinton, a gifted orator never known for keeping it short.

The Year’s Best Crime Novels: 2018

If you’re looking for trends in today’s crime fiction, look no further than one word: stand-alone.

Top 10 Crime Fiction for Youth: 2018

This year’s top 10 crime fiction for youth, reviewed in Booklist between May 1, 2017, and April 15, 2018, run the gamut—you’ll find enterprising kid detectives, a fedora-clad pigeon, a wildly unreliable narrator, frank commentary on social justice, and plenty more.

Top 10 Crime Fiction Audiobooks: 2018

From secret agents in Nazi Germany to hackers in London, these 10 audiobooks, reviewed from May 15, 2017, through May 1, 2018, showcase involving plots and expert narration.

A Hard-Boiled Gazetteer to the Weather

This year we take another step in a slightly different direction, examining not just place as such but a particular aspect of place: the weather.

Another Look at: Elizabeth Scott’s Living Dead Girl

Well beneath the clamor of giant series celebrating anniversaries this year (Harry Potter turns 20; The Hunger Games turns 10) rumbles another book turning 10, one far less well known but, to all who have read it, one that no number of elapsed years will allow them to forget.

Creating Sammy Keyes

Sammy Keyes’ creator, Wendelin Van Draanen, remembers how, as a child, she was “a rule follower.” So it’s ironic that her much-loved sleuth, the star of 18 books newly republished in redesigned paperback editions, is a middle-grader with a big mouth, infinite curiosity, and plenty of attitude.

The Back Page: My Friend Bernie Gunther

Novelist Philip Kerr’s death on March 23 from cancer at the young age of 62 came as a blow to the author’s devoted fans across the world.