Four crime novels featuring characters' struggles

The son of two librarians, Mark Stevens was raised in Lincoln, Massachusetts, and has worked as a reporter, as a national television news producer, and in public relations. The Fireballer (2023) was named Best Baseball Novel by Twin Bill literary magazine and named a Best Baseball Book of the Year by Spitball Magazine. His novel Antler Dust was a Denver Post bestseller in 2007 and 2009. Buried by the Roan, Trapline, and Lake of Fire were all finalists for the Colorado Book Award (2012, 2015, and 2016, respectively), which Trapline won. Trapline also won the Colorado Authors League Award for Best Genre Fiction.

Stevens’s short stories have been published in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, Mystery Tribune, and Denver Noir. In both 2016 and 2023, Stevens was named Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers’ Writer of the Year. He hosts a regular podcast for Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers and has served as president of the Rocky Mountain chapter for Mystery Writers of America.

His new novel is No Lie Lasts Forever.

[The Page 69 Test: The Fireballer; Q&A with Mark Stevens; My Book, The Movie: The Fireballer; Writers Read: Mark Stevens (June 2025)]

At CrimeReads Stevens tagged four top crime novels featuring characters' struggles. One title on the list:

Blood on the Tracks by Barbara Nickless

Blood on the Tracks starts out as a thriller, morphs into a mystery, and turns back again into a movie-ready action-packed finish. But “movie” sounds like this story follows the normal arcs. It doesn’t – because it’s a film. It’s no redemption story. It’s more complicated than that. It’s untidy and chaotic–in a good way. It’s ambitious and sprawling. The story swoops from big picture (hey, stop that train!) to intimate. It’s both violent and raw. Blood on the Tracks is about the ghosts of war, racism, class, rank, a harrowing search for identity and, of course, truth and justice. It rolls all those topics, and more, into a multi-faceted manhunt, at first, and clue-finding mystery. Railroad Police Special Agent Sydney Rose Parnell is a complex and interesting character. She’s haunted for many reasons, including the fact that she worked in corpse retrieval during the war in Iraq and she was also involved in a situation covering up certain atrocities over there. Sydney Rose is so relatable because her demons feel real. (This was Nickless’ debut, the first of many outstanding books.)

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue