Good morning. My colleagues at the Book Review published their list of the 50 best thrillers of the 21st century this past week. I’ve asked Tina Jordan, the editor of the Book Review, to tell us about it. I’ll be back next Saturday. — Melissa
Edge of your seat
I’m more or less addicted to thrillers. And I’ve always been this way. I was one of those kids who lived for Encyclopedia Brown books (and firmly believed it was cheating to skip ahead to the last page for the solution). I plowed through all the yellow-spined Nancy Drews I could find. Then, when I was in sixth grade, my teacher began reading Agatha Christie’s “Cat Among the Pigeons” to the class every day after lunch. Was it appropriate for a bunch of 12-year-olds, given the number of people in the novel who are coshed, bludgeoned and shot? Possibly not! But I was hooked: I asked my mother to drive me to the Emily Fowler Public Library and promptly checked out as many Christies as I could carry. From there I moved on to Sherlock Holmes, “The Turn of the Screw” and Margaret Millar’s novels. Now, as a grown-up who works at The New York Times Book Review, I’m immersed in exciting projects all the time. But none was as much fun for me as the list we published this week of the 50 best thrillers of the 21st century. They’re still the books I turn to when I want to relax and escape. Sometimes I want to play a mental chess game by picking up a good mystery or police procedural, trying to match wits with a detective. One of my all-time favorites made our list: Tana French’s “Broken Harbor” (No. 20), which is not just the story of a murder investigation, but also a devastating day-by-day portrait of a man’s descent into mental illness after Ireland’s 2008 financial crisis. (If someone tells me they “don’t read thrillers,” I hand them a French novel.) When I’m not in the mood for anything so cerebral, I like to lose myself in the twists and turns of a fast-moving crime novel — the kind that I can finish in one gulp, like S.A. Cosby’s “Razorblade Tears” (No. 8) or Oyinkan Braithwaite’s bracing “My Sister, the Serial Killer” (No. 6), which might be the only comic serial-killer thriller I’ve ever read. I’m also a sucker for deeply unnerving “bad seed” thrillers — you know, the ones where the kids were born evil. There are three of them here, all excellent: Lionel Shriver’s “We Need to Talk About Kevin” (No. 14), Ashley Audrain’s “The Push” (No. 47), and my single favorite book on the list, “Defending Jacob” (No. 30), William Landay’s nerve-racking tale of murder told, in part, through courtroom testimony. The main character, Andy, is certain that his son didn’t stab a classmate to death; his wife, remembering the way other children always seemed to get badly hurt around Jacob, isn’t so sure.
We put the 50 thrillers list together by polling hundreds of writers, booksellers, editors, Bookstagrammers and librarians. When we sent them their ballots, we said, Hey! Let us know if we can publish yours. A surprising number said yes. Those ballots, it turns out, are a rich source of recommendations. I love Jane Harper’s atmospheric thrillers, where the settings — desolate, parched stretches of rural Australia — are as important as the characters. When I saw a book on her ballot that I hadn’t heard of, Val McDermid’s “A Place of Execution,” I snapped it up. It might be the creepiest police procedural I’ve ever read, set in a remote English village “so cut off from the rest of the world, they might still be worshiping the corn goddess,” as the detective says. Now I’ve ordered William Boyle’s “Saint of the Narrows Street,” since Jordan Harper, whose ice-cold noir novels I particularly enjoy, had it on his ballot. If I pace myself, I can mine these ballots for months.
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Lemon and Thyme Grilled Chicken BreastsMy favorite way to grill chicken breasts is to pound them into cutlets and cook them quickly, so the edges char but the interior stays juicy. And marinating them first with plenty of garlic and other aromatics adds enough flavor to forgo a sauce. I do both these things in my recipe for lemon and thyme grilled chicken breasts, which also work beautifully cooked under the broiler. Either way, serve the cutlets on a bed of sliced tomatoes, cucumbers or arugula to soak up all the garlicky drippings.
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