Best Crime Fiction Books

A Russian national is shot dead on the shore of Lake Superior, his body riddled with old Soviet-era bullets. The killing pulls Lucas Davenport into a Cold War mystery that never quite ended, and into an uneasy partnership with a sharp Russian investigator as he hunts a secret that has been hidden for decades.

When Alex Cross's niece is found brutally murdered, his birthday celebration turns into a personal manhunt that leads to a secret club where Washington's most powerful indulge their darkest appetites — a trail that climbs toward the very highest levels of government.

When a fellow investigator dies suddenly, Kinsey Millhone inherits his unfinished case: building the civil suit against David Barney, a man acquitted of murdering his wealthy wife six years ago. As Kinsey reconstructs the old crime, she must decide whether Barney is a killer who beat the system — or an innocent man twice accused.

The first Bruce Medway novel, introducing the fixer and sometime investigator who operates in West Africa's underworld of corrupt business, smuggling, and sudden violence. Medway is hired to find a missing German businessman in Benin — a job that quickly becomes far more dangerous than advertised. The first of four West African thrillers that established Robert Wilson's reputation before the Falcón series.

Two wealthy elderly women are bludgeoned to death in their homes, and at first the killings look like random burglaries gone wrong. But Lucas Davenport sees a pattern: someone is murdering rich old women and quietly stripping their homes of valuable antiques, a long con built on the assumption that no one is watching.

A federal judge known for his charitable work is gunned down alongside his two young sons in his own home. The killing is precise, professional, and baffling — the judge had no obvious enemies. Lucas Davenport and Virgil Flowers dig into a respected man's hidden life to find a motive for the unthinkable.

Nelson Dyar, a bored New York bank teller, moves to Tangier hoping to escape his life — and descends into a world of currency smugglers, drug dealers, and nihilistic expatriates that ends in catastrophe.

Newly retired from the LAPD, Harry Bosch can't let go of the one case that haunts him: the unsolved murder of a young woman connected to a violent movie-set robbery. Without a badge, working alone, he reopens the investigation — and discovers that the case reaches into the FBI and the shadow of national security.

A website appears featuring photographs of the children of powerful politicians, surrounded by extremist political rants. It could be protected speech — or a coded call for assassination. Lucas Davenport is quietly assigned to find out who is behind it before the implied threat against a senator's child becomes real.

Two bodies are found hanging from a tree in rural Minnesota — a black man and a white woman — and the scene screams racial hate crime. Newly appointed to a roving post with the state's Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, Lucas Davenport is sent to investigate, and discovers that the truth is stranger and more personal than the politics suggest.

Reacher witnesses a woman pushed under a bus in a staged suicide and refuses to let it lie. Lee and Andrew Child's twenty-seventh Reacher thriller widens into a conspiracy involving a corrupt private prison, weaving multiple storylines toward a violent collision.

When the CEO of a major bank is shot dead on a hunting trip, the list of suspects is a who's who of ambitious executives, each with motive and opportunity. Lucas Davenport must navigate a world of corporate intrigue and personal rivalry to find a killer hiding among the ruthless men and women competing to take the dead man's place.

A string of ritual knife killings is cutting down public officials across the country, the victims linked by their roles in crimes against Native Americans. Lucas Davenport joins forces with a tough New York detective to hunt the assassins — and to untangle a conspiracy with roots in decades of injustice.

A dirty political trick — incriminating material planted on a senate candidate's computer — explodes into something far worse when the operative behind it disappears and a body turns up. Lucas Davenport is pulled into a high-stakes election-year investigation where the players are wealthy, ruthless, and willing to kill to win.

NYPD Detective Michael Bennett faces a hostage crisis when a criminal mastermind seizes mourners at a former First Lady's funeral inside St. Patrick's Cathedral. As Bennett negotiates for the lives of the powerful, his wife is dying at home and his ten adopted children need him too.

An entire family is slaughtered in an affluent Minnesota suburb, the savagery of the killings a message in itself. Lucas Davenport's investigation leads to a Mexican drug cartel, a laundering operation, and a stolen fortune — and to cartel enforcers who treat torture and murder as ordinary business.

Bruce Medway takes on a job in Ivory Coast that involves a dead American, a missing consignment of weapons-grade materials, and the fractious politics of West African civil conflict. The second Medway novel deepens the portrait of the region's corruption and violence while sending its protagonist deeper into danger than the first book managed.

When a narcotics detective is found dead of an apparent suicide, Harry Bosch isn't satisfied with the easy answer. His unauthorized investigation leads from the LAPD's own ranks to the Mexican border and a deadly new drug called black ice, into a case the department would rather he leave alone.

A sixteen-year-old American boy, Frank Pierson, appears at Tom Ripley's door in France claiming to have pushed his wheelchair-bound millionaire father off a cliff. Ripley, intrigued, takes the boy under his wing and accompanies him to Berlin — where they attend transvestite clubs in West Berlin, encounter kidnappers, and where Ripley must decide how much he cares about what happens to this strange, guilty young man.

A young Chicago lawyer takes on the appeal of a Mississippi death-row inmate convicted of a Klan bombing decades earlier. The catch: the condemned man is his own grandfather, an unrepentant racist, and the clock to execution is running down to weeks.

Retired from the LAPD and at odds with the department, Harry Bosch is asked by his half-brother, defense attorney Mickey Haller, to investigate a murder Haller's client is accused of committing. For a lifelong cop, working for the defense is a betrayal of everything he believes — but if the client is innocent, the real killer is still free.

Robert Forester has been watching a young woman, Jenny, through her kitchen window each evening — not prurient but drawn to the warmth of her domestic life, which contrasts with his disintegrating own. When Jenny discovers him, she is not frightened — she is fascinated. The novel spirals into false accusation, murder, and the complete unravelling of social reality as everyone around Robert becomes convinced he is responsible for things he didn't do.

Harry Bosch catches two cases at once: a cold-case DNA hit that impossibly points to a suspect who was only eight years old at the time, and the fatal fall of a city councilman's son — investigated at the personal request of Bosch's oldest enemy. With his own retirement clock ticking, Bosch works both to the bone.

With the recession gutting his business, Mickey Haller has turned to foreclosure defense — until one of his clients, a woman fighting to keep her home, is accused of murdering the banker trying to take it. The case drags Haller back into the criminal courtroom, defending a client whose guilt is far from clear.