The Best They’ve Ever Read

If you're looking for great crime novels to absorb you during reading time, here's a gold mine of suggestions. It's a list compiled and maintained by the owners of Partners & Crime Mystery Booksellers, a store in New York City that's sadly closing September 20, 2012. I've printed the list for future reference, and here describe my first three picks.

A Vietnam War novel from 1984

This is the kind of novel I would've stumbled on in an independent bookstore, if only those wonderful, passionate indie booksellers still dominated the brick-and-mortar landscape. Instead, I discovered "Fragments" by Jack Fuller online, while looking into a 1962 Vietnam pocket guide reissued by Oxford's Bodleian Libraries. Here's how the discovery happened.