Best Crime Fiction Books

A foreign film director is found dead in a luxury Bangkok hotel. Sonchai's investigation leads him to the heroin trade, a Tibetan Buddhist master in Kathmandu who is also a drug lord, and a meditation on the nature of attachment — the root of suffering in Buddhist teaching, and also the engine of the drug trade. The fourth Sonchai novel, expanding the series to Nepal.

A lawyer faked his own death, vanished with ninety million dollars, and built a new life in Brazil. Four years later the bounty hunters find him. Now Patrick Lanigan must outwit the vengeful partners, the FBI, and a murder charge using the one weapon he never stopped sharpening: the law.

Alex Cross is in the dock. Charged with murder after a deadly shooting and suspended from duty, he faces a trial that could end his career and send him to prison. But even as he fights for his freedom, he can't ignore a string of disappearances pointing to a predator hiding behind a screen.

A disbarred lawyer serving time in federal prison claims to know who murdered a federal judge. In exchange for his freedom, he offers the FBI the killer's name. But Malcolm Bannister has a far more intricate game in play, and almost nothing is what it seems.

In 1946 Mississippi, a decorated war hero walks into church and shoots his town's beloved Methodist minister dead, then refuses to say why. As his family fights to save the farm and his lawyer fights to save his life, the reason behind the killing reaches back to a hellish wartime ordeal.

Laid off from the Los Angeles Times, crime reporter Jack McEvoy has two weeks left and one last story to chase. What looks like a routine murder becomes the trail of a serial killer who hides in the digital world — a data-center engineer who stalks his victims through the information they never knew they'd left behind.

In a small Tennessee town, Jack Reacher saves a hapless IT manager from a kidnapping and uncovers a ransomware plot with national-security stakes. The Sentinel marks the first Reacher novel co-written by Lee Child and his brother Andrew, beginning the series handover.

A hostage crisis at a powerful Washington law firm shatters a young attorney's gilded life. After a homeless man takes him captive at gunpoint, Michael Brock abandons his six-figure track to fight for the city's dispossessed, uncovering a wrongful eviction his own firm helped engineer.

An eccentric billionaire leaves his eleven-billion-dollar fortune to an illegitimate daughter no one knew existed, a missionary deep in the Brazilian wilderness. A burned-out, alcoholic lawyer is sent to find her, and the search becomes a journey toward redemption far from any courtroom.

When Renée Ballard's badge, gun, and ID are stolen, the theft becomes a personal crisis on top of her cold-case work — including a decades-old serial-killer case she's chasing through genetic genealogy. Help arrives from an unexpected volunteer: Maddie Bosch, Harry's daughter, now a patrol officer ready to take up the family calling.

Ray Garrett's wife has died — a probable suicide — and her father, Ed Coleman, blames Ray and has tried to shoot him in Rome. The novel follows the two men as they circle each other through Venice and its islands — Coleman hunting Ray, Ray unable to leave, drawn back to a man who wants to kill him in a city that seems to conspire with grief.

A young man comes to Kinsey Millhone with a fragment of buried memory: as a six-year-old, he believes he saw two men digging a hole in the woods — perhaps burying a child kidnapped twenty-one years ago. The recollection is unreliable, the witness is suspect, but Kinsey can't let it go, and the past begins to surface.

A pair of killers obsessed with vampirism drain their victims of blood across the country, while the Mastermind who shattered Alex Cross's life in Roses Are Red continues to taunt him from the shadows. Cross must close two cases at once — one grotesque, one personal — in this two-front thriller.

Sonchai is sent to Dubai and beyond to investigate a human organ-trafficking operation — the harvesting and sale of kidneys, corneas, and hearts from the living poor to the wealthy dying. The fifth Sonchai novel takes the series global, from Bangkok to Shanghai to Dubai, asking what Buddhist teachings have to say about the commodification of the human body.

Two dead men, seemingly unconnected: a sleazy private investigator Kinsey Millhone knew, shot in a parking lot, and a homeless man found dead on the beach with Kinsey's name and number in his pocket. As Kinsey untangles how they're linked, she discovers the homeless man was family — and that he left her a fortune.

A Secret Service agent recruits Jack Reacher to do the impossible: assassinate the Vice President-elect — on paper — to expose the holes in his protection before a real killer exploits them. As credible death threats mount, Reacher's war game becomes a desperate race to stop an assassination for real.

A luxury-hotel murder scene yields a shocking clue: a news photo places Lindsay Boxer's own husband, Joe, at the scene — with another woman. When Joe vanishes, Lindsay must investigate the man she married, uncovering a possible double life tangled in espionage and national security.

An imprisoned serial killer's reign of terror seems to be over — until a copycat begins killing in his style, and reporter Cindy Thomas, writing a book about the original murderer, finds herself drawn dangerously close to both. Lindsay Boxer and the Women's Murder Club race to stop a protégé finishing his mentor's work.

When her longtime mentor and former partner Warren Jacobi is brutally stabbed to death, Lindsay Boxer vows to find his killer at any cost. The murder links to a string of clue-leaving killings — and to a brutal cartel that has drawn her husband Joe to Mexico, as Yuki prosecutes a case of her own.

A pair of arsonists is burning wealthy families alive in their own homes, leaving taunting Latin clues amid the ashes. As Lindsay Boxer hunts the fire-setters, the cold case of a missing young man — the son of a former governor — resurfaces to test the Women's Murder Club on two fronts.

A young man is found dead on a houseboat in London. Three women — each damaged, each with a connection to the dead man — become suspects in an investigation that reaches back through years of loss and resentment.

A passenger plane is shot out of the sky over Washington, and Alex Cross is drawn into the hunt for whoever turned the capital's airspace into a killing ground. As the investigation deepens, a separate executioner is at work — and the title is no idle threat: someone wants Cross dead.

As Alex Cross plans his long-awaited wedding to Bree Stone, a sniper begins assassinating Washington's most corrupt politicians and power brokers, dividing a city that half-cheers the killings. Then Cross's oldest nemesis, Kyle Craig, returns to turn the chaos into a personal trap.

A criminal genius named Thierry Mulch becomes obsessed with Alex Cross, watching his every move and orchestrating an elaborate campaign to prove he can outthink and destroy him. As Mulch closes in, the danger gathers around the one thing Cross can't protect: his family.