2022 was a killer year for crime fiction. Get it?

Debut authors with delicious whodunit twists and experienced writers with fresh settings and thrilling mysteries that went far beyond the usual “dead girl” tropes.

So, this week, I’m tackling three of my favorite first-timers. Next week I’ll bring you three of the better knowns with the deeper backlists.

I promise that Grace D. Li’s “Portrait of a Thief” is like no other crime novel you’ve read.  Five Chinese American college students are persuaded to retrieve treasures that were stolen from China and displayed in museums around the world.  

The art history details are absorbing and the specifics of the museum heists are so intricate that when I learned Li was a fan of films like Ocean Eleven and Fast and Furious, the novel made even more sense.

I loved Brendan Slocumb’s "The Violin Conspiracy" because it ushered me into a world I so rarely encounter in any fiction - let alone crime fiction.

Slocumb is an accomplished musician so when he places his central character, a Black violinist, in a musician’s practice room or concert hall, the prose rings with eloquence and authenticity.

The mystery, the abduction of a rare Stradivarius violin with a dark and stained past, is intriguing. Although I thought I’d solved it, I was startled by the ending.

Okay, this one is tricky because although this author’s pen name, James Kestrel, is new to crime fiction, he has published a half-dozen novels under a different name.

But “Five Decembers” was so expertly plotted and original that I had to include it on this list.

The setting is Honolulu, 1941 on the eve of the attack on Pearl Harbor. A detective has been called to investigate the deaths of a couple found murdered, and his crime solving will lead him to Hong Kong, where he is marooned after the Japanese bombing.

What happens to him there is breathtaking.

— Kerri Miller | MPR News