The best in 2008

Everyone has been posting their lists of 2008, so here's another one, maybe a bit eclectic and not everything on it is new or even from this century, but... you know me. In no particular order:

Reed Farrel Coleman: Soul Patch
Dave Zeltserman: Small Crimes
Peter Ackroyd: his new biography on Edgar Allan Poe (is it only called Poe?)
Megan Abbott: Queenpin
Duane Swierczynski: The Blonde
Jimmy Sangster: Foreign Exchange
Christa Faust: Money Shot
Mika Waltari as Kristian Korppi: Kuolleen silmät/The Dead Man's Eyes (the collection of Waltari's early horror stories)
Jorma Napola: Ruuvikierre (one of the first Finnish private eye novels from 1962)
Ross Macdonald: The Instant Enemy (I think I promised somewhere that I'd write more about this entry in the Lew Archer series which I recently reread, but it seems I never got around to doing it; it's great, even though not one of the best Archers)
Jonathan Littell: The Kindly Ones (out in Finnish as Hyväntahtoiset): the book that pretty much kept me from posting anything original on this blog: a 900-page novel about a Nazi officer, horrendous, but very well written and immaculately thought out; I wrote a review on it, it's here (in Finnish)

I'm sure there are others. These - except Macdonald and Littell - I have mentioned on this blog, but it seems I don't write about every novel or short story I read. (And on Ackroyd and Faust I only offered a slight piece not worth linking to.)