The Books I Enjoyed Most in 2024

Forgive me; it has been six weeks since I wrote anything here. First, my husband and I went to Ecuador, and then, when we got back, it was close enough to Christmas that the holidays seemed to absorb all my energy. Because I’ve been busy, I haven’t been diligent about keeping up with the book-related blogs that I subscribe to. Still, I’ve tried to keep up with the scores of titles that readers and writers have posted as their favorite books of 2024. These lists have inspired me to tell you about my favorites. I hope I’ll embolden you to comment below on one or more of the books you’ve enjoyed most this past year. You can simply list the author and title or add as many details as you like—but no spoilers, please.

Mysteries

I read a lot of mysteries. I try new writers when they win prizes, get great reviews, or are recommended by friends, and I have about thirty authors whose books I have followed for years, reading or listening to each new one without fail. Many of my favorite writers have died over my decades of reading crime fiction. I have mourned them and I continue to miss their books, but I find new writers to take their places.

Oddly, no book by one of the special Thirty is on my list of favorites for 2024. I liked all the new ones I read this past year—in fact, I devoured them. However, perhaps because I have read all these writers’ books, each new one gets compared to the many I’ve read before, and I’m never sure that the latest one is quite as good as a favorite I read five, ten, or fifteen years ago! 

This year, I discovered four series I had never tried, and I invested a lot of 2024 reading or listening to one book after another from all four. Instead of having to wait a year or two to continue the story of characters I’d become attached to, I could jump right into the next book they appeared in. This process will continue during 2025 since I still have unread books to read in all four series.

The series I’ve enjoyed so much in 2024 are:

Ann Cleeves’s Vera Stanhope series (1999-ongoing)

I have read Cleeves’s other books but never began on these until this year.

Peter Grainger’s DC Smith series (2016-ongoing)

Set in a small English city in Norfolk, these books feature a police team led by a brilliant sergeant.

Val McDermid’s Karen Pirie series (2007-ongoing)

McDermid has written many other mysteries in series and as standalone novels. In Karen Pirie, she has created a detective who focuses on cold cases from the past.

Mick Herron’s Slough House series (2010-ongoing)

Unlike the other three, these are not police procedurals, my favorite sort of mystery (and what I write myself), but novels about a group of discredited British spies who still manage to solve domestic terrorism cases and usually survive the evil policies of MI5.

Apart from Peter Grainger’s books, the series I’ve listed are or have been on TV, which started me reading them. I usually enjoy seeing the film version of a book I’ve read, but reading the book version of a film I’ve seen is almost always dull. So now that I’m on the seventh of Herron’s Slough House books, I have been watching with delight the television programs made from his first four novels.

Other genres

Katherine Addison (pen name of Sarah Monette), The Goblin Emperor (2024)

As a child, I loved stories with magic, and I’ve never grown out of them, so I often try fantasy novels. Although set in a world of elves and goblins, this book contains very little magic. It’s mainly about the complications of learning to lead a country when most of the imperial court is hostile to you.

Emily Henry, Funny Story (2024)

Henry writes contemporary romances with likable men and women facing realistic problems. So far, she always gives her protagonists happy endings! This one is my favorite of the four of her books I’ve read.

Barbara Kingsolver, Unsheltered (2018)

This novel is set in New Jersey in the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries. Like many of Kingsolver’s books, it addresses complicated family relationships while conveying the wonder and power of nature and the need to respect it. I so much enjoyed listening to Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead (2022) that I looked for another book of hers that I hadn’t already read and found this one. It was moving and thought-provoking, with satisfying characters.

Liz Moore, The God of the Woods (2024)

This is a mystery in the sense that it’s about a policewoman trying to solve the disappearance of two children from the same family, fourteen years apart. But it’s much more complex than a whodunnit. I had trouble when I started listening to it because the chapters jump from viewpoint to viewpoint and back and forth in time. I urge anyone experiencing this problem to persevere. Not only is the book exciting and emotionally powerful, but its magnificent setting in the Adirondacks is as important as any character in the book.

Jojo Moyes, One Plus One (2014)

I find this English novelist’s books uneven and have left several unfinished. But this one delighted me. I am fascinated by stories that examine social class differences, and this book brings together a wealthy single man whose life allows him to be utterly self-centered until he gets himself into a crisis and a working-class mother with two challenging kids, a slew of problems, and no money to help her cope with them.

Ann Napolitano, Hello Beautiful (2023)

This excellent novel received lots of praise, including from me. See my review: https://wordpress.com/post/kimhaysbern.com/3355.

Natasha Pulley, The Mars House (2024)

I discussed this book about a colony on Mars and its refugees from Earth in a previous post: https://wordpress.com/post/kimhaysbern.com/3651

Jo Walton, Lent (2020)

Jo Walton is a Welsh woman living in Canada, and her books have won many awards. She writes fantasy, often set in periods of alternative history (like England after Hitler conquered it). She likes to play with time and create alternate realities. Lent is about Girolamo Savonarola, an important historical figure in fifteenth-century Florence, and features many of his real-life contemporaries. Savonarola is trying to remake the city, and the powers he draws on to do so are miraculous . . . or magical. In this book, history and fantasy are woven together brilliantly.

I reviewed another of Walton’s books in an earlier post: https://kimhaysbern.com/2021/04/19/diverging-lives/