Best Crime Fiction Books

When Washington's police chief — Cross's friend and mentor — is gunned down, Alex Cross steps back into the force to find the killer. But the murder is only the start: a wave of vigilante killings is sweeping the capital, as someone decides the law is too slow and begins executing criminals in the streets.

A shady stranger hires Kinsey Millhone to deliver a $25,000 check to a teenage boy — a simple errand that turns out to be anything but. The client, John Daggett, is a drunk, a liar, and an ex-con responsible for deaths he never paid for, and when he turns up drowned, Kinsey is left to untangle who wanted him dead.

A killer who stages elaborate murders for a watching audience terrorizes Washington, just as Alex Cross is trying to build a peaceful life with Bree Stone. Then his oldest nemesis, the brilliant Kyle Craig, escapes and resurfaces — with a new face and a single obsession: destroying Cross.

Alex Cross and John Sampson set out on a wilderness canoe trip to clear their heads, but their old enemy M has other plans. Stalked through the Montana backcountry by snipers and drones, the two friends fight for their lives, while Bree pursues a dangerous trafficking case of her own back home.

Investigating an insurance fraud that turns deadly, Kinsey Millhone finds herself drawn deep undercover into the world of staged-accident scams — and trapped in the orbit of a volatile, dangerous man whose jealousy could get her killed. To get out, she'll have to play a role and pray her cover holds.

The origin story of Hannibal Lecter: from his aristocratic Lithuanian childhood through the traumatic events of the Second World War that broke something fundamental, to the first murders in post-war Europe and Japan. A prequel that traces the specific losses and grievances that created the most celebrated fictional cannibal.

Thierry Mulch has Alex Cross's entire family — Bree, Nana Mama, and the children — and forces Cross to dance to his commands or watch them die. Desperate and half-broken, Cross must obey a madman's escalating demands while racing to find the people he loves before it's too late.

After Michael Bennett helps capture a ruthless South American crime lord, the man swears vengeance from his cell — and makes good on it. With his family in danger, Bennett flees the city for a small town upstate, but his enemy's reach is long, and the war he has started will not stay behind him.

A town in the Nevada desert is wiped off the map as a demonstration of power, and a mastermind threatens to destroy the world's great cities unless he is paid billions. Alex Cross joins forces with MI6 and Interpol to stop the Wolf — and the returning Weasel — in a globe-spanning race against catastrophe.

A killer who signs emails 'Mary Smith' is murdering Hollywood stars and sending taunting accounts of each crime to a celebrity reporter. Alex Cross, pulled from a family vacation, hunts a murderer whose motive proves more painful and personal than the glamorous victims suggest.

A widow hires Kinsey Millhone to find out what was troubling her husband, a respected detective, in the weeks before he died. The job takes Kinsey to the small Sierra town of Nota Lake, where the questions she asks are not welcome — and where someone is willing to hurt her badly to keep the answers buried.

A respected doctor vanishes nine weeks before Kinsey Millhone is hired to find him, his nursing-home empire already under investigation for Medicare fraud. As Kinsey untangles his disappearance, a separate danger creeps in from a charming new acquaintance whose interest in her turns out to be anything but innocent.

A wealthy woman's daughter vanishes, and soon young people in the Twin Cities Goth scene begin turning up dead. The only witness describes a shadowy figure no one else can find — a phantom. Lucas Davenport must determine whether the killer is real, imagined, or something stranger still.

A wealthy father hires Kinsey Millhone for a simple job: collect his wayward daughter Reba from prison and ease her back into respectable life. But Reba is wild, loyal to the wrong people, and tangled with a married money launderer — and Kinsey finds herself caught between minding her client and helping the woman she's come to like.

The fifth and final Ripley novel. An American couple, David and Janice Pritchard, move to the village near Ripley's Belle Ombre and begin investigating the disappearance of Dickie Greenleaf — whose killing, thirty years earlier, is the foundational crime of the entire series. Ripley must manage this threat with the same composure he has brought to every crisis, in a novel that is both a thriller and a late meditation on how long a constructed life can hold.

A meticulous killer who calls himself the Teacher is murdering New York's rich and entitled, punishing the rude and the privileged in a campaign of class rage. Detective Michael Bennett must stop him before the lessons turn into a citywide bloodbath — all while raising ten children at home.

Women Jack Reacher once knew in the army are turning up dead — no wounds, no poison, no cause of death the experts can name, just a chilling signature. When the FBI's profile of the killer points squarely at Reacher himself, he must catch the real murderer to clear his own name.

Patients are dying at a San Francisco hospital under circumstances that look less like misfortune than murder, each death marked by a strange symbolic token. As Lindsay Boxer hunts a killer hiding behind a white coat, Yuki Castellano fights a wrenching malpractice trial with the hospital — and the truth — on the line.

A gunman opens fire on a crowded San Francisco commuter ferry, and one of the wounded is someone Lindsay Boxer loves. As the club races to understand the shooter, a separate horror unfolds: children are vanishing from wealthy neighborhoods, taken by someone who knows exactly how to disappear.

A killer is murdering young mothers and their children in San Francisco parking garages, terrorizing the city. At the same time, a brazen jewel thief is robbing the rich and famous — and the two cases pull Lindsay Boxer in directions that test her judgment, and Yuki's, to the breaking point.

Sonchai encounters a man of extraordinary physical capability — an American military asset, a product of a black-ops enhancement programme — whose presence in Bangkok is connected to CIA operations that go back to the Vietnam War and forward into a disturbing future of human augmentation. The sixth Sonchai novel, the darkest and most politically charged.

Alex Cross's first case as an FBI agent pits him against the Wolf, a Russian crime lord running a business that abducts people to order and sells them to the highest bidder. As Cross learns the Bureau's ropes, a custody battle over his youngest son threatens the family he is fighting to protect.

Three disgraced former judges run a blackmail scam from inside a Florida prison, extorting closeted, wealthy men through fake letters. When one of their marks turns out to be a CIA-backed presidential candidate, their petty hustle collides with the most ruthless power players in Washington.

A string of murders — a federal judge, a lawyer, others who should have had nothing in common — draws Alex Cross and John Sampson into a conspiracy that reaches toward the highest levels of power. As Cross weighs a life-changing career decision, a familiar shadow returns to test him one more time.