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.
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...
The best crime novels set in Anchorage use Alaska’s unforgiving landscape not as backdrop but as weapon — a place where isolation amplifies every motive and the wilderness itself becomes a suspect.
Anchorage is a city that defies easy categorisation: part frontier outpost, part modern metropolis,...
The best crime novels set in Sacramento prove that California’s capital city harbours shadows as deep as any Los Angeles back alley — and the fiction that maps those shadows is long overdue for serious attention.
Sacramento is not the California of Raymond Chandler’s sun-drenched myths or...
The best crime novels set in San Diego prove that paradise has always been the perfect backdrop for murder — sun-bleached streets and Pacific breezes conceal some of the darkest fictional crimes in American crime writing.
San Diego rarely gets the literary attention lavished on Los Angeles or San Francisco,...
The Best Crime Novels Set in Honolulu strip away the postcard glamour to reveal a city defined by colonial tension, ethnic complexity, and corruption simmering beneath an eternal summer sky.
Honolulu is one of the most misunderstood settings in crime fiction. Tourists arrive expecting leis and luaus;...
The Best Crime Novels Set in Pittsburgh reveal a city that crime fiction was born to inhabit — where rusted bridges, blue-collar grief, and institutional rot combine to produce some of the most authentic and electrifying American noir being written today.
Pittsburgh is not a pretty city in the conventional...