Seven of the funniest crime novels

Jamie Harrison has lived in Montana with her family for more than thirty-five years. She's worked as a caterer, a gardener, and an editor, and is the author of seven novels, including the Jules Clement series: The River View (August 2024) and four other novels set in the fictional town of Blue Deer, Montana: The Edge of the Crazies, Going Local, An Unfortunate Prairie Occurrence, and Blue Deer Thaw, all reissued in July 2024. The Center of Everything (2020) and the The Widow Nash (2017) share two key characters; The Widow Nash was awarded the Mountains & Plains Independent Booksellers Association Reading the West Book Award, and was a finalist for the High Plains Book Award.

At Electric Lit Harrison tagged seven books that "prove that wanting to kill someone can be funny." One title on the list:

Case Histories by Kate Atkinson

No one can can layer looping threads and tragedy and glee like Kate Atkinson—a plot can feel exuberant, almost out of control, and then it clicks into place like a final watch gear—and few writers are as empathetic and stylish as they torture their protagonist in amusing ways. I wrote four novels in the mid-nineties, and for a long time forgot the joy in reading mysteries. Case Histories and the four other novels in the series gave it back to me. Spending time with Jackson Brodie—sad, lustful, dented, and often very, very, wrong—is an undiluted pleasure.

Read about another entry on the list.

Case Histories is among Jaclyn Moriarty's top ten books about new beginnings, four books that changed Carmel Reilly, Fiona Barton's eight best cold-case mysteries, and Shirley Henderson's six best books.

--Marshal Zeringue