Crime Fiction Author Guides
Discover the crime authors and novels that define a city, a setting, or a subgenre — from Las Vegas noir to small-town stalker thrillers. Curated recommendations from Phillip Strang, author of 150+ crime novels.
The best crime novels set in the Hamptons understand a fundamental truth: that enormous wealth does not insulate people from violence — it merely makes the violence more elegantly dressed.
There is something almost too perfect about the Hamptons as a crime fiction setting. The best crime novels set in...
The Best Crime Novels Set in Cape Cod prove that paradise and murder make the most irresistible of bedfellows — and that the Atlantic fog conceals far more than sea spray.
Cape Cod is one of those rare places in American geography that has always felt slightly apart from the mainland — physically, culturally,...
The best crime novels set in Nevada understand something that lesser thrillers miss entirely: in a state defined by artifice and emptiness, the truth is always the most dangerous thing in the room.
Nevada is one of American crime fiction’s most underused and misunderstood settings. Too many writers...
The best crime novels set in Alaska don’t just use the landscape as backdrop — they weaponise it, making the frozen wilderness as much a threat as any murderer.
Alaska is unlike any other setting in crime fiction. The best crime novels set in Alaska share a defining quality: the land itself is...
No American state does crime fiction quite like Louisiana — and the Best Crime Novels Set in Louisiana prove that the bayou is as much a character as the killers who haunt it.
Louisiana has always been a place where the rules bend. The heat warps judgment, the swamps swallow secrets, and the culture...
Florida has always been America’s most brilliantly contradictory state — and the best crime novels set in Florida know exactly how to weaponise that contradiction against the reader.
No landscape in American crime fiction delivers quite the same disorienting charge as Florida: the blinding sunshine...
No other American state has produced crime fiction with quite the same cocktail of glamour and rot — and the Best Crime Novels Set in California prove that the Golden State’s darkest stories are also its most essential.
California has always been crime fiction’s most fertile ground. From...
The best crime novels set in Minneapolis don’t just use the city as backdrop — they make its frozen ambition, buried histories, and scarred neighbourhoods as essential to the story as the crime itself.
Minneapolis is an underused setting in crime fiction, which makes finding the genuine standouts...
The best crime novels set in Philadelphia don’t just use the city as backdrop — they let its contradictions, its crumbling row houses, its steel-jawed political machinery, and its bruised working-class pride become the engine of every murder, every betrayal, every moral reckoning on the page.
Philadelphia...
The best crime novels set in Denver prove that the Mile High City is far more than a gateway to the Rockies — it is a place where hard-boiled ambition, civic corruption, and Western grit collide in fiction of genuine force and atmosphere.
Denver has long been underrated as a crime fiction setting, but...
Kansas City has always been more than jazz and barbecue — it is a city of contradictions, and the Best Crime Novels Set in Kansas City exploit every one of them, from its sunlit River Market to its shadow-drenched back alleys.
When readers go looking for the Best Crime Novels Set in Kansas City, they...
The Best Crime Novels Set in St Louis prove that America’s Gateway City — scarred, resilient, and perpetually underestimated — is one of the most compelling backdrops in contemporary crime fiction.
St Louis is a city that wears its contradictions proudly: grand Victorian architecture shadowing...