2012, the second year of my blog, and 141 books reviewed. Blimey. So how on earth to summarise all those?

Well, for an overview of the year, you could check out the Puzzlies page which gives a month-by-month breakdown. But I’m going to try and summarise things into various categories. Now the pickier of you may notice some books that weren’t, for example, books of the month. As is often the case, some books have stuck in the memory and others were flashes in the pan, and I think this reflects this.

Let’s start off with some one-off awards.

Best Example of Clown Noir – Honk, Honk, My Darling by James Finn Garner

Most Misleading Cover – The Hanover Square Affair by Ashley Gardner

The “Did She Think She Was Being Clever” Award – Endless Night by Agatha Christie

The “Half A Good Book” Award – The Case Of The Man Who Died Laughing by Tarquin Hall

Best Thriller Featuring Zombies – Cadaver In Chief by Steve Hockensmith

Best Reason To Buy A Book – One quarter of the profits from A Wake Of Vultures by Mary Earnshaw goes towards the University of Liverpool Africa Endowment Fund

Right, on to the proper awards – well, as proper as these things get…

Best New Novel

I do, on occasion, review newly released fiction – I’m including books released in 2011 in this list, btw, in case you feel like a quibble.

Shortlist:

• The Cadaver Game by Kate Ellis
• The Last Policeman by Ben H Winters
• Death On A Longship by Marsali Taylor
• The Midwife’s Tale by Sam Thomas
• Nine Man’s Murder by Eric Keith

Winner:

Very hard to choose but I think I’ll go for Death On A Longship, marrying a genuine puzzle plot with an engrossing and colourful background in the Shetlands.

Best Historical Mystery

I can’t really restrict this to one per author, but I’ll try.

Shortlist:

• A Spark Of Death by Bernadette Pajer
• Suffer Little Children by Peter Tremayne
• Heresy by S J Parris
• A Murder In Thebes by Anna Apostolou aka Paul Doherty
• The House of Crows by Paul Doherty
• The Midwife’s Tale by Sam Thomas

Winner:

Again, could be any of them, but it’s the very-hard-to-find A Murder In Thebes. An evocation of a long-lost era combined with a simple-but-clever locked roof mystery. Hopefully coming to an e-reader near you soon.

Biggest Disappointment

Not the worst book of the year – not that sort of person, and if I was, then it would be five very different books – but books that seemingly had a lot of potential but…

Shortlist:

• Ghostly Murders by Paul Doherty
• Still Life by Louise Penny
• The Devil’s Edge by Stephen Booth
• Archie Meets Nero Wolfe by Robert Goldsborough
• Mistress of the Art of Death by Ariana Franklin

Winner:

Bit of explanation here. Ghostly Murders was lacking any real mystery. The next two have such ardent fans, I was surprised how flat (and rather dull) the books were and the Wolfe book hasn’t inspired me to visit the back catalogue that inspired it. But the biggest disappointment was the “winner” of this category, Mistress of the Art of Death, a medieval version of the modern-day serial killer nonsense, rather than an actual mystery – unlike the second book in the series that inspired me to read this.

Favourite Author

Just going to consider multi-reviewed authors here:

Shortlist:

• Peter Tremayne – 6 reviews
• Martin Edwards – 6 reviews
• Kate Ellis – 7 reviews
• Paul Doherty – 25 reviews
• Agatha Christie – 10 reviews

Winner:

Right, first of all, I recommend everyone goes out there and reads something by each of these authors. As a starter, you could do a lot worse than Suffer The Children, All The Lonely People, The Cadaver Game, The House of Crows and Mrs McGinty’s Dead as starting points. But of course the winner is Paul Doherty. Big surprise.

Classic Mystery Of The Year

I trust I don’t need to clarify what I mean by classic…

Shortlist

• The Mystery of the Yellow Room by Gaston Leroux
• Mrs McGinty’s Dead by Agatha Christie
• Green For Danger by Christianna Brand
• The Four of Hearts by Ellery Queen
• No Coffin For The Corpse by Clayton Rawson

Winner:

Surprising that there’s no Carr on the list, but that’s something that I mean to correct next year. But in the meantime, the winner is Green for Danger, now available from MysteriousPress.com.

The Grand Puzzly for 2012

Only to be awarded for the best book that has already won a monthly Puzzly. The candidates are:

• World’s Greatest Sleuth! by Steve Hockensmith
• A Spark Of Death by Bernadette Pajer
• All The Lonely People by Martin Edwards
• The House of Crows by Paul Doherty
• A Murder in Thebes by Anna Apostolou aka Paul Doherty
• The Last Policeman by Ben H Winters
• Good as Dead by Mark Billingham
• Birthdays for the Dead by Stuart MacBride
• Death On A Longship by Marsali Taylor
• The Seven Wonders of Crime by Paul Halter
• The Midwife’s Tale by Sam Thomas
• Nine Man’s Murder by Eric Keith

Winner:

Crikey, this is difficult. Twelve quite different books – even the two Doherty works are from opposite ends of the spectrum. I’ll go for the one that I simply couldn’t put down when I was reading it and was an astonishing debut for a writer who continues to produce crime fiction of the highest order, marrying character and puzzle seamlessly – All The Lonely People by Martin Edwards.

The Best Mystery of 2012

And so to this final award – not necessarily the best novel of 2012 but the best out-and-out play-along-and-solve-the-multi-clued mystery novel of the year. I’m restricting this to recent novels, rather than the classics as, after all, this is the point of the blog.

Shortlist:

• Death On A Longship by Marsali Taylor
• Nine Man’s Murder by Eric Keith
• The Demon of Dartmoor by Paul Halter
• The Magician’s Death by Paul Doherty
• Suffer Little Children by Peter Tremayne

Winner:

Ugh, why am I torturing myself like this? OK, can’t separate two of them, so congratulations to both Paul Halter and Eric Keith.

Right, that’ll do. So, dear reader, if you go out and read everything listed here (apart from the disappointed category), you’ll be certain of a good read.

See you next year!