What Are The Best Romance Crime Novels Of All Time?

Sherry Thomas' Lady Sherlock series

Jealousy is kind of the root of so much of sports romance. Athletes are typically super competitive, so there's already that rivalry element in place. Plus most sports have a really close knit team, so everyone knows each other’s business. And then there’s the fans. In Kulti by Mariana Zapata, the jealousy is slowly revealed because the main character is a retired soccer star turned coach, and the other main character is on his team of young female soccer players. This means that initially any sign of jealousy is squashed under his respect for her, his ages difference from her, and his overall grumpy demeanor. But every now and again his jealousy will peek through in the form of very protective actions, and somewhat rude comments. It’s all very tense because of the power dynamics at play here, and the fact that they have to keep their relationship a secret, so every time his professionalism wavers it’s a huge deal. And it pays off in legendary fashion.

I have noticed many cozy mysteries follow this structure. There are many books with amateur female sleuths who run a bakery, are booksellers, or are librarians, and they fall in love with the local detective or sheriff. I call this sub-trope amateur female sleuths who are romantically involved with law enforcement. The Hannah Swensen series by Joanne Fluke featuring Mike Kingston is a great example of a good and also frustrating amateur female sleuth series.

Right now I’m reading ‘Court of Mist and Fury’ by Sarah J. Maas. It’s the sequel to ‘A Court of Thorns and Roses’ and I am absolutely loving it right now. The characters’ emotions are so intense to read in this book and the stakes are even higher than before. Plus the romance is getting even better which is making it hard to put down. Another darker but equally as romantic book is ‘Shadow and Bone’ by Leigh Bardugo. I really enjoyed this because it had just the right mix of magic and adventure, and I loved how the characters got pulled into the world and the epic journey that they were on. Plus there was just the right amount of romantic tension to make it a super binge-worthy read and have me turning page after page.

It’s really nice to see the cover art evolve away from the somewhat symbolic distant images of wheelchair users or a solitary, hazy figure. The new covers actually show us the characters. There are now a number of covers that feature couples: one of them uses a cane, another has crutches leaning against a wall, and in several instances a character is shown to be neurodiverse and their body language to be appropriately quirky. It’s an assertion that these are novels about these people. And on the shelves, that makes them look more ‘normal’ than their predecessors did. I wouldn’t want to judge a book by its cover, but here, I see increasingly progressive covers and I hope that what they promise is what’s inside.

I'm basically planning to camp out in this comment section.

Oh, the novels of Renaissance romance are just so beautifully, magically crafted to contain so much passion and politics and poetry. One of my absolute favorites of all time has to be The Duchess of Malfi by John Webster, which, yes, is rather outside the mainstream of typical romance novels in being very dark indeed. Yet it is such an utterly fascinating and so very intense novel, and this particularly in terms of its exploration of the power of love. Written as it was by a playwright (of another epoch), the novel offers a powerful sense of drama, and remains as forceful and as moving as ever. As for arcadian romance, Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit by John Lyly is another absolute treasure, above all for the dialogues which are so full of wit and of sparkle. For a more grounded exploration of the tortured conflicting feelings of love, however, it would be hard to think of anything better than Arcadia by Sir Philip Sidney. The rather cardboard characters in this sprawling, rather idealized novel of a half-dozen or so love stories all involving rather knight-like shepherds are so beautifully and imperiously mapped out against the backdrop of a completely fictional idyllic rural context, with all their conversations consisting of the sharpest and wisest repartee, and their glances at each other swimming with hidden meanings. Another different approach to the romance novel of the Renaissance era is found in ‘Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit’ by John Lyly. Most readers would consider it to be outside the genre of romance yet there are many great dialogues regarding the complexities of love and friendship. For something totally different, maybe one of the most celebrated poems of the Renaissance era would be ‘The Faerie Queene’ by Edmund Spenser. Written as an allegorical romance featuring knights, damsels, enさ chantresses and fantastical quests, it is a magnificent read with lots of romance woven throughout the very moral tales of the imaginary land of Faerie. Yes, it is written in a very rich and dense language but after a while you can fall into its rhythm and be transported by a mighty wave of beautiful poetry. I love Renaissance romances, including their imperfections. The great love stories of the past are not as neat as modern tales with happy endings. Rather, they are fraught with the agony and politics of love and contain many unpredictable human interactions. Every time I return to a book I have read before, I discover something new about the human experience and the time period in which the author lived.

So my go to litmus test for a new book are reviews from trusted friends. Aggregating all reviews via some algorithm is basically useless to me. I’ve read highly rated “The Fake Mate” by Lana Ferguson. It’s an omegaverse light story set in a hospital which is completely foreign to me, but apparently works. This is a very steamy, funny book with a protective, grumpy hero. It’s manages to walk a fine line between good tropes and new original ideas. For the most part it succeeds in being a great read, a fake relationship to silence office gossip that has a great twist of werewolf biology. If you’re looking for something with a paranormal twist but written with a really contemporary feel then this one deserves its high ratings.

I’m a big supporter of author-run collectives or micro-presses. While ‘Heartspell Media’ (founded by authors for authors) and ‘Snowy Wings Publishing’ (a cooperative) are by no means perfect, they’re operating on a different ethos than the bigger conglomerates. For the most part, they’re much more collaborative, transparent, and responsive to feedback than their larger counterparts. As many are written by and for people within the genre of supernatural romance, they get the particular struggles of this genre too. They may not have the same marketing budget as the bigger companies, but they more than make up for it with their passion for the genre and their community-oriented spirit. Not only are the covers for books published by these presses frequently stunning because they hire from within the supernatural romance fan art community, but also the release dates for new books are generally coordinated so that authors are supporting each other. It feels much more like you’re buying from a family-run business than a large corporation. For those who want to be able to feel connected to the creative process of a particular author, these are the best place to go to find new voices. You’re not just buying a book; you’re supporting an entire ecosystem of artists and writers who are writing because they love the genre as much as you do. That emotional connection is powerful.

A Thriller! At first glance Michael Connelly’s novel “The Lincoln Lawyer” seems to be more of a legal drama but in Goodreads ratings it is categorized as a Thriller. It is a great Thriller story because of the cat-and-mouse game between Mickey Haller, a defense attorney, and his very evil client. The procedural details of the story are very interesting and there is a very good “franchise” twist in the plot. Connelly creates a tough, mobile world when Mickey Haller practices law out of the back of his car. It is well-written, lean and highly realistic. This is not a ‘suspense’ novel in the sense of a lot of jump-scared-type scenes. Rather, it is a slow developing dread at what has been going on and how he was manipulated, followed by the intricacies of the law as Haller searches for a way out of the trap set for him.