Books I Loved This Year

by Sandra Parshall

I’m not sure what it says about my reading taste that two of my favorite 2012 novels were a massive historical about a cold political schemer in Henry VIII’s court and a merciless, thoroughly modern drama about a high school cheerleading squad.

Hilary Mantel’s Bring Up the Bodies is the sequel to the extraordinary Wolf Hall. It continues the story of Thomas Cromwell, first Earl of Essex, a man of low birth who rose to become Henry VIII’s chief minister and to play an indispensable role in England’s break with the Catholic Church. Mantel tells the story from Cromwell’s point of view, in a sly, wry, witty voice that I suspect has made most readers like the man despite his sometimes reprehensible behavior.

Dare Me by Megan Abbott is something completely different. High school, as we all know, is a universe apart, inhabited by not-quite-adults whose clique-dominated lives barely intersect with their parents’ world. Athletes and cheerleaders reign supreme, and each group has its anointed leader. In Dare Me, the power structure within the cheerleader squad begins to wobble when a young, attractive female coach named Colette takes charge and challenges the queen bee status of head cheerleader Beth. Addy, Beth’s longtime sidekick, gets caught between Beth and the coach in a little war that eventually turns lethal. Nobody on the planet writes about adolescent girls with a clearer eye than Megan Abbott does. This is a terrifying, pitch-perfect psychological drama, and the author pulls it off with no onstage violence.

While Megan Abbott enthralls the reader by drilling deep into the psyches of her characters, Gillian Flynn keeps pages turning with misdirection and outright deception in Gone Girl. Published in June, Gone Girl is still riding high on bestseller lists in the U.S. and around the world. Why? The husband and wife protagonists are both unsympathetic. Anyone who has read a lot of suspense will figure out what’s happening long before the end. But I kept on reading, pulled along by Flynn’s sharp prose and her surefootedness on tricky ground. 

One book I loved that didn't get nearly enough attention from readers was So Much Pretty, an absorbing debut novel by Cara Hoffman. Stacy Flynn, a young journalist looking for a big break, moves to the rural, insular New York community of Haedon to investigate the effect on the environment of the area's main employer, a dairy farm. But she is drawn into the mysterious disappearance of a local girl and begins trying to fill in the blanks in the girl's past. Hoffman creates and sustains an atmosphere heavy with menace and secrets, and she turns the countryside of upstate New York into a toxic trap for natives and visitors alike.

I read Sister by Rosamund Lupton early this year, but it was published in 2011. A simple plot description -- it's about a woman searching out the truth behind her beloved younger sister’s supposed suicide -- makes it sound like a hackneyed amateur sleuth tale, but Sister is much more than that. Like Abbott, Lupton explores characters and their relationships more deeply than most mystery writers would ever try to.

This year I read (or, more often, listened to) a number of Scandinavian crime novels, and I suppose I have Stieg Larsson to thank for that. I found Larsson’s “Girl” novels almost unreadable, but their popularity in the U.S. opened the door to American publication for other authors from that part of the world. I enjoyed The Hypnotist and The Nightmare by Lars Keplar (a husband-wife writing team), 1222 by Anne Holt, The Caller by Karin Fossum, and especially The Stonecutter by Camilla Lackberg, a wonderful Swedish writer I discovered last year with The Ice Princess.

Other books by favorite writers I enjoyed this year were The Buzzard Table by Margaret Maron, Catch Me by Lisa Gardner, The Pain Nurse by Jon Talton, Mad River by John Sandford, Trust Your Eyes by Linwood Barclay, The Crime of Julian Wells by Thomas H. Cook, and Say You’re Sorry by Michael Robotham.

My favorite crime novel of the year, though, was Criminal by Karin Slaughter. I’ve read her books from the beginning, and I think her growth as a writer has been phenomenal. In this complex story of murder, ambition, betrayal, greed, and family secrets, Slaughter deftly shifts between time periods covering forty years and explores the darkest reaches of her characters’ hearts without stalling the pace for a second. Georgia Bureau of Investigation agent Will Trent is at the center of the story along with his partner Faith, but the long law enforcement career and personal life of Faith’s mother, Amanda Wagner, tie the past and present together. This is Karin Slaughter’s best book yet. Will is a fabulous character, and I was happy to hear a few months ago that a series of television movies based on the books is in the works. I can only hope the casting of Will is an improvement over the casting of Jack Reacher.

What were your favorite books this year?

...a book by its cover

Sandra Parshall

Have you ever been so entranced by a book’s cover that you bought the book on the spot? Or so revolted that you put the novel back on the shelf without so much as opening it to the first page?

Writers dream of having the first kind of cover and live in fear that they’ll end up with the second. Tales of bad covers abound – writers gnashing their teeth and sobbing to sympathetic colleagues, “I hate it! And I can’t get them to change it!”

Yes, believe it or not, those wise, all-knowing folks who run publishing houses sometimes insist on covers that anyone with functional eyesight should be able to see as awful and off-putting. If a writer is well-established, fans won’t care; they’ll buy the book regardless of the mess on the cover. If an author is a first-timer or someone still trying to break out of the midlist, he or she may worry that a bad cover will hold down sales. Seeing your beloved baby dressed in an ugly frock can take a lot of the pleasure out of promoting the book.

I’ve just been through my own nail-biting wait for a final cover for Broken Places, the third Rachel Goddard mystery that will be published in February. If you’ve already looked for the book online (bless you for that!), you probably think the cover will look like this.


But that’s a dummy cover, put forth by the distributor before I had even finished writing the novel. These days information about new books goes out long in advance, while final covers may not be available until just before the books are printed. There’s nothing wrong with the dummy cover, and I wouldn’t be embarrassed to have it on the book, but it seems too pretty and sedate for a novel that is, I promise you, intense. The book will go to the printer soon, and I learned last week that the final cover will look like this.


It still needs tweaking -- my name will be made more visible, and a review quote will be added (fortunately, it's had some nice pre-publication reviews; snippets are now posted on my web site ) -- but this is pretty much what the published cover will look like. I think it’s scary and perfectly tailored to the story. (Yes, a fire plays a vital part in the plot.)

While waiting for my own cover, I was obsessed with the whole subject of mystery covers and looked at hundreds, both on my bookshelves and online. Some are hauntingly beautiful. Some are truly awful. Some are simply bland, doing nothing to sell the story. What I find most fascinating are the differences between covers on various editions of the same book. If you go to my web site, you can see the US cover of The Heat of the Moon (which I like), along with the radically different UK cover (which I don’t like), and the Japanese cover (which I love).

Karin Slaughter’s books not only have different covers in different countries, but often the title is changed. These, for example, are covers for the same book.


Tana French’s covers are markedly similar from country to country. These two remind me of the cover of my second book, Disturbing the Dead (on the sidebar to the left).


Lee Child’s cover designs in different editions often have similar graphics, although the colors are different.


Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo has had many looks in many countries, but this is the one that captured the Anthony Award this year for Best Cover Art. It's on the US hardcover edition from Knopf.


I think it's rather blah compared with some of the book’s other covers, especially the third one below.

When Laura Lippman wrote paperback originals, all her covers had a variation of this design, with the picture sandwiched between two blocks of text.


On her first few hardcovers, the designs bore little similarity to one another, but now her covers have settled into a pattern, with the title in a box overlaying the art.



Ruth Rendell/Barbara Vine has published so many books that she’s probably keeping an army of cover artists in regular work. Her covers, like Larsson’s and French’s, look strikingly different on different editions.





Some publishing imprints, primarily those that put out cozy and humorous mysteries, have distinct styles they use for all their authors’ books. An Obsidian mystery often has an uncluttered look with a woman as the focus, like this Elaine Viets cover.


Berkley Prime Crime, a Penguin imprint like Obsidian, usually puts extremely detailed and realistic art on its cozies, depicting the inviting environment of the story rather than characters. The cover of my friend Avery Aames’s first Cheese Shop Mystery, to be published next July, is a good example.

Some writers are one of a kind, and their covers often reflect that. Megan Abbott, for example, writes hardboiled mysteries set in the first half of the 20th century, and you know when you pick up an Abbott novel that you’ll be transported back to an earlier era.


Returning to my original questions: How much does a book’s cover matter to you? If you haven’t read the author before, will an enticing cover draw you in? Will an ugly cover make you put the book down without giving the story a chance? What are the elements that make a cover work for you? What’s the most striking book cover you’ve ever seen?

Writers, share your own bad cover stories!

Blunt Talk about Women at Bouchercon

Sandra Parshall

Sara Paretsky’s big black hat, red feather boa, and interesting footwear caused a lot of comment at Bouchercon last Friday, but as always, her words had the power to make you forget the visuals. Along with moderator Barbara Fister and writers Mary Saums, Kate Flora, and Liza Cody, Paretsky turned a panel with the deceptively dull title “Telling Women’s Stories” into a riveting dissection of women’s roles in fiction and real life.

Paretsky, who joined with other female mystery writers to found Sisters in Crime 24 years ago in response to “being slighted at conferences” and overlooked by reviewers, sounded as if she’s given up on feminism. She said she believes SinC has brought a lot of women readers to mystery by making them aware of books that will appeal to them, but she questions ”whether feminism has made much of an impact” on society. Joking that she was “raised in the woods by wolves” and has “never felt at home in civilized society,” Paretsky spoke in the past tense of being a feminist who was “angry all the time” about the unequal treatment of women. Now she’s more focused on general issues of power and justice – and her protagonist, V.I. Warshawski, has changed along with her.

Other women on the panel agreed that inequality remains rampant in society at large, in the publishing world, and on the pages of novels. Mary Saums said she’s weary of witnessing “everyday abuses of women’s rights.” For the first 45 years of her life, Saums said, she was a “nice” woman, but she finally reached a point when she’d had enough of conforming to expectations. “Women have a right to be who they are,” she declared to applause from the audience.

All of the panelists deplored the prevalence of women characters as victims of brutal crimes in fiction, but none seemed to find it surprising. Paretsky pointed out that “the notion of a woman taking up space in the world still offends some men at such a visceral level” that they want to strike out, “slash and destroy.” Both men and women, Liza Cody said, “are quite comfortable with the idea of women as victims,” but men don’t want to read about male victims.

Kate Flora said she finds it “deeply troubling” that female authors are “increasingly writing about women as victims” of graphic violence. In her own Thea Kozak series, Flora is “exploring what it means to be a modern woman.” In a new series, her male detective owes his sensibilities to his mother, who “taught him to see” the reality of men’s and women’s roles in society.

Mary Saums perceives “a new wave of anti-female feeling in the book business” and some of it is coming from women. Popular female thriller writers are treated as the equals of their male counterparts, but some of those women, according to Saums, are openly critical of Sisters in Crime and “talk down to us.”

In society, Liza Cody fears, too many young women are moving backward. Rather than claiming the right to be unique individuals, they’re “trying to compete with porn stars” in a bid for male attention. (I couldn’t help thinking of the young female cops on TV shows who teeter around crime scenes on five-inch heels and lean menacingly over interrogation room tables with their cleavage fully exposed, inches from the suspects’ faces. The porn star effect is everywhere these days.)

Paretsky observed that both male and female writers all seem to want their women characters to be “five-six and 118 pounds.” She believes publishers are “not thoughtful” about what they publish, but simply put out more of what’s already selling until it stops selling. If books in which women are savaged happen to be selling, publishers will put out more of them. Publishers follow trends instead of taking the lead and breaking new ground.

The mostly female audience responded to the panel with frequent applause, and when the floor was opened to questions, a couple of the women present seized the chance to make speeches of their own.

All this was in marked contrast to an earlier panel called “The Dark Side of the Fair Sex” that featured Megan Abbott as moderator with panelists Chelsea Cain, Sophie Littlefield, and the lone man, Derek Nikitas. Cain, who writes about a gorgeous female serial killer named Gretchen Lowell and the mentally unbalanced male cop who both desires Gretchen and wants to lock her up, seemed amused by readers’ reactions to her characters. (She reported that her grandmother’s comment after reading the first book was that “it’s nicely bound.”) All of the panelists write dark, gritty stories about women who don’t meet society’s expectations, but I didn’t sense the struggle and frustration that was palpable when Paretsky, Saums, Flora, and Cody spoke. Why the difference? That’s food for thought in itself.