Pile By the Bed lists the Top 5 crime fiction novels of 2019 and 5 more honourable mentions

Pile by the Bed reviews Lady in the Lake by Laura Lippman, a timely historical crime novel that explores Baltimore in the 1960s.

Laura Lippman steps into To Kill a Mockingbird territory in her latest legal thriller Wilde Lake. But this is not a coming of age story about a girl who sees her lawyer father do the right thing. Quite the opposite. Where Wilde Lake delves into the past, and it spends a lot of its time there, it is to highlight how much we miss and reinterpret as children and how those events may look different in the harsher light of adulthood. Luisa Brant has recently fought a bruising political battle with her now ex-boss to become the first ever female district attorney of Howard County, Maryland. The win was particularly bittersweet as it was that same boss who had hired her during a particularly low period in her life. Lu is also the daughter of the most famous, and still loved prosecutor in the state’s history. So expectations are high but from her first murder trial, a seemingly open and shut case involving the killing of a woman by a local with a mental illness, things start to unravel. At the same time as the contemporary case, Lippman takes readers through Lu’s childhood. Starting with an incident involving her brother…