Black Crime Fiction & Thriller Books

What we publish

Crime novels where the institution is the second suspect, and usually the one that gets away. The detective is rarely a police officer, and when he is, the department is an obstacle. The mystery often resolves into something that cannot be prosecuted, because the reassurance the form usually delivers would be a lie.

Two traditions meet in this list. Black crime fiction out of Chicago and the American South, and Caribbean crime fiction rooted in Jamaica and the wider region. What makes Black crime fiction different is the long version of that argument. Caribbean crime fiction covers the other half.

The Eli Mercer series

Chicago’s South Side. An investigator whose obstacles are as often procedural as they are violent, in a city that has decided in advance which deaths are worth the paperwork. In A Quiet Death, a judge is dead and the city would prefer he stayed that way: a buried past, and the price of looking at something everyone else has agreed not to see. More from Miles Bishop

Literary mystery

In The Gospel According to Silence, Avery Cole sings prosperity gospel to arenas. She goes home to bury her father and learns what his church was built on, and who paid for it. More from L.J. Porter

Speculative thriller

In Collision of Possibilities, five strangers survive a car crash on a Chicago overpass that should have killed them. Three days later each receives the same message: TRIAL COMPLETE. SUBJECTS RETAINED. The crash was not an accident, their memories of it were manufactured individually, and the system that built them helped one of them write it. A thriller about surveillance, consent, and what happens when technology stops predicting outcomes and starts choosing them.

Elle Woodfield writes literary suspense about ordinary people pushed past their limits, set in a Chicago that behaves like a living organism. More from Elle Woodfield

Place as witness

A city in a crime novel is usually scenery — a mood, a weather system, a reason for the lighting to be bad.

In the books we publish it functions as evidence. The South Side is not shorthand for danger; it is a place with a documented history of redlining, disinvestment and selective policing, and that history explains the crime more completely than the criminal does. The same is true of a church in the American South, or a parish in Jamaica. Ask what a place was built on and you usually have your motive.

Every institution keeps a record. The question worth asking is what the record was designed to leave out.

Where to start

If you read procedurals, start with A Quiet Death — it is book one and it does not withhold its own ending to sell you the sequel.

If you prefer literary mystery to police work, start with The Gospel According to Silence.

If it is Caribbean crime fiction you are after, our guide to Caribbean crime fiction sorts the starting points by mood, from a classic island whodunit to Kingston noir, and the nine-novel reading list gives you the shelf in order.