Charles Philipp Martin's 3 favorite reads in 2026

Dennis Lehane has always been a writer I could rely on: never a false move, never a tired plot, never a phoned-in novel with cliched prose. While some of his books (Mystic River, for instance) are wide and sweeping in their scope, Small Mercies is more fine-tuned, focusing on the horrific relations between the Black and Irish communities in Boston. Set against the inflammatory conflicts of the 1974 desegregation crisis, the book tells the story of a mother with a missing daughter. In her determination to find the truth, she invades the sanctity of a local gangster and sparks a different kind of violence.

Small Mercies is revelatory if you haven't examined the dismal history of racism in the Northeast. Yet it's not didactic or preachy: it's an entertaining crime novel by a master of the genre.

I'm amazed that more people haven't put Belinda Bauer up there with the top crime novelists. She's won plenty of awards, but her stuff should be mentioned along with Tana French, Val McDermid, Benjamin Black, and old hands like James Lee Burke and Dennis Lehane. Rubbernecker takes a wonderfully slim and elegant premise - a neurodivergent anatomy student is convinced that the cadaver he's dissecting was a murder victim. There's more, which I won't spoil, but the point is that her characters are wonderfully fleshed-out and real, and the suspense as taut as a good thriller should be. Add to that a fine literary style that's far from the Ludlum school of dreary punched-up prose. I'd recommend this and any book by Belinda Bauer.

Gerald Elias wrote a fine series on violinist-amateur-detective Daniel Jacobus, but his short stories are very often humorous, more helium than neon. In this collection he's created a man who's living the ideal life: retired, traveling all over with a devoted wife who's every bit as smart as he is, and sampling good food everywhere while solving crimes. Each story has ex-NYPD police Chief Maury Gross pressed into service by a local police department in places as far afield as Utah, Seattle, the Napa Valley, and New Orleans. Along with his wife Bobbi, he uses his formidable powers of deduction to see what the local cops don't and pin the crime on the right perp.

Concise, clever crime tales told in a witty style - Murder on Vacation is premier vacation reading. If you're a mystery fan, get this one, and pack it in your weekender the next time you take a break. Short stories are the way to go when you're relaxing by the pool -- you really weren't going to try bringing along Middlemarch again, were you?