Best Crime Fiction Books

Kenzie and Gennaro are hired to protect a psychologist who has received death threats from a patient. As they investigate, they are drawn into a twenty-year pattern of murders in Dorchester and Charlestown — and into personal danger that will alter the series permanently.

Brighton, the 1930s. Pinkie Brown is a seventeen-year-old gang leader, a Catholic who believes in damnation and acts accordingly. After a murder, he marries Rose, a waitress who could testify against him, intending to kill her after she can no longer be called as a witness. Ida Arnold, a cheerful hedonist, pursues him. Greene's darkest and most theologically exact novel.

Lionel Essrog has Tourette's syndrome and works for a small Brooklyn detective agency run by Frank Minna. When Frank is murdered, Lionel — compelled by tics, verbal eruptions, and the inability to leave a pattern unresolved — investigates his mentor's death. A genre novel about the detective impulse as a form of neurological necessity.

In an alternative history, Jewish refugees settled in Sitka, Alaska after World War II instead of Palestine. Now the Federal District of Sitka is about to revert to Alaskan jurisdiction, and detective Meyer Landsman has a body in his hotel room and a chess piece near the corpse. A genre novel that is also a meditation on home, diaspora, and the limits of belonging.

Two investigations fifty years apart — a contemporary Lisbon detective uncovering a murdered girl's story, and a German SS officer managing Portugal's wartime wolfram trade — whose threads converge in a single act of historical violence.

Thai detective Sonchai Jitpleecheep investigates the murder of an American Marine in Bangkok — a case involving jade smuggling, exotic snakes, and the city's sex industry, narrated with Buddhist equanimity and dark humour.

Boston private investigators Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro are hired to find a missing government worker who stole documents from a state senator. What begins as a routine job draws them into Dorchester's gang wars, racial politics, and the violence that underlies South Boston's civic surface.

Edinburgh detective John Rebus investigates a series of murders of young girls while receiving taunting messages from a person who seems to know his past. The first Inspector Rebus novel — shorter and darker than the later series, more psychological thriller than police procedural.

The long-awaited sequel to Shantaram, returning to Lin and the Bombay underworld for another epic of crime, philosophy, love, and the city that never lets its inhabitants go.