Best Crime Fiction Books

Toby, charming and fortunate, wakes up in his cousin's home after a violent attack that has left him changed. When a skull is found in the wych elm in the garden, Toby becomes entangled in a decades-old death — and begins to question everything he believed about himself and his family.

A dying aviation billionaire hires Harry Bosch to find out whether he fathered a child decades ago — a secret heir who could inherit a fortune. At the same time, working as a volunteer detective for a small police force, Bosch hunts a serial rapist. Two very different cases, one relentless investigator.

David Kelsey maintains a double life: during the week he lives in a boarding house and works as a chemist; on weekends he retreats to a house he has secretly bought and furnished for a woman named Annabelle — who doesn't love him and has married someone else. A study in erotic obsession so complete that the obsessive has replaced reality with a private fiction. One of Highsmith's most psychologically acute portraits of a particular masculine pathology.

At a retired actor's cocktail party a mild old clergyman drops dead, his glass holding no trace of poison and his killing apparently without motive. When a second guest dies the same way, Poirot joins the host's amateur sleuthing to explain a murder with no discernible reason.

A brilliant infectious-disease doctor has vanished — along with enough engineered pathogen to start a global pandemic. Convinced that humanity is a disease the planet must be cured of, he intends to release it. Lucas Davenport and his daughter Letty race across continents to find him before he can carry out a plan to kill millions.

Senator Taryn Grant — the sociopath Lucas Davenport tangled with years ago — is now in the Senate, and just as dangerous. When she tries to murder a colleague who got in her way, Lucas, now a U.S. Marshal, sets out to stop her, knowing she has the money, the power, and the private muscle to make a marshal disappear.

Two pharmacists are gunned down, and Harry Bosch goes undercover into the brutal world of opioid pill mills to find the killers. At the same time, a death-row inmate claims new DNA proves Bosch framed him decades ago — and to save his own integrity, Bosch must prove that the conviction was clean.

As the Republican National Convention descends on St. Paul, a crew of professional thieves plans to rob the millions in cash flowing through the political machine. But a separate, more personal danger is closing in: a vicious criminal with a grudge has set his sights on Letty, Lucas Davenport's teenage daughter.

In 1979, a group of privileged prep-school students filmed a sexual assault, then one of them was murdered. A decade later, the convicted killer is released and the old tape resurfaces as blackmail — and Kinsey Millhone is hired into the case. Meanwhile, the predator from her last investigation is still hunting her.

Detective Lindsay Boxer and the Women's Murder Club hunt a killer whose seemingly random murders share a chilling hidden link — and a vendetta against the police themselves. As the body count rises, the case reaches into Lindsay's own family and past.

A house explosion that kills a family draws Lindsay Boxer and the Women's Murder Club into the path of a radical group targeting the rich and powerful. As bombings and assassinations escalate toward a deadly climax, the case exacts a devastating personal cost on the club itself.

After a shootout leaves Lindsay Boxer facing a career-ending lawsuit, she retreats to the coastal town of Half Moon Bay — only to stumble onto a string of brutal murders of wealthy couples. As her trial looms in San Francisco, two cases close in on her at once.

The fourth and final Bruce Medway novel, returning to Benin — where the series began — as Medway investigates a brutal murder connected to the region's vodoun culture and its underworld of ritual and violence. A fitting close to the West African series, darker and more interior than the earlier books.

Retired FBI profiler Terry McCaleb is pulled back into the work to consult on a ritualistic murder — and the evidence he uncovers points, impossibly, to LAPD detective Harry Bosch. As McCaleb builds a case against a man he respects, Bosch is locked in a high-profile trial, unaware that an old colleague has turned his expert eye on him.

A simple job — find a woman's missing sister so a will can be settled — turns sinister when Kinsey Millhone realizes Elaine Boldt didn't just go to Florida for the winter. A trail of a burglary, an apartment fire, and a body leads Kinsey to suspect she's chasing not a missing person but a murder.

A simple good deed for an elderly couple drops Jack Reacher into the middle of a brutal gang war between Ukrainian and Albanian mobs. Lee Child's twenty-fourth Reacher thriller is among the most violent in the series, trading subtlety for relentless, body-stacking momentum.

A mild-mannered art-history professor leads a secret life as a predator, photographing and murdering women and burying them where no one will look. When his careful concealment begins to unravel, Lucas Davenport closes in on a killer whose ordinary surface hides a monstrous appetite.

Alex Cross returns to his North Carolina hometown to help defend a cousin accused of a horrifying murder. But Starksville holds more than one secret, and as Cross digs into the case he unearths buried truths about his own family — and the father he believed was long dead.

When $5,000 appears in her bank account, Kinsey Millhone realizes she's being framed — set up to look like she took a bribe in an arson investigation. To clear her name, she must turn detective on her own case, untangling a wealthy family's secrets and the personal enemy who engineered her downfall.

A world-famous supermodel and a teenage boy are found dead after a glittering party, and the case drags Lucas Davenport into the glamorous, treacherous world of high fashion. As the bodies and the suspects multiply, Davenport must sort the truth from the beautiful lies of people who have built their lives on appearances.

Between jobs and restless, Lucas Davenport agrees to help a presidential candidate he respects, hunting a credible threat of assassination as the Iowa caucuses approach. Somewhere in the heartland, a pair of true believers has decided that killing is justified to change the country — and Lucas has only days to find them.

Seventeen years ago, Bailey Fowler was convicted of murdering Jean Timberlake in the small coastal town of Floral Beach — then he escaped. Recaptured at last, he swears he's innocent, and his dying father hires Kinsey Millhone to prove it. But Floral Beach has kept its secrets for a long time, and it does not want them dug up.

Now writing for a small consumer-watchdog news site, Jack McEvoy becomes a suspect when a woman he once spent a night with is found murdered. Clearing his name, he uncovers a killer who finds his victims through the data sold by consumer DNA-testing companies — and a terrifying new frontier where your genes are for sale.

Just as Alex Cross prepares to leave the police force, his partner John Sampson asks for help: an Army buddy is on death row for murders he didn't commit. Their investigation uncovers a trio of killers operating inside the military and a conspiracy that reaches the highest ranks.