Best Crime Fiction Books

Alex Cross races to catch two serial killers simultaneously — one targeting children in his own Washington DC neighbourhood, another assassinating celebrities in an escalating pattern. Patterson's dual-threat plot is the Alex Cross series at its most propulsive.

Disgraced journalist Mikael Blomkvist investigates the decades-old disappearance of a wealthy family's niece, partnering with the brilliant and deeply damaged Lisbeth Salander.

A communist spy embedded in the South Vietnamese army narrates his journey from the fall of Saigon through Los Angeles exile to reeducation camp, examining what it means to be perpetually between worlds.

Four retirement village residents — including a former spy and a retired psychiatrist — meet weekly to solve cold cases, and find themselves entangled in a very live one.

San Francisco detective Lindsay Boxer, recently diagnosed with a blood disease, teams up with a journalist, an assistant DA, and a medical examiner to catch a serial killer targeting newlywed couples. The first Women's Murder Club novel launched a beloved second Patterson series.

Lara is trained from birth to be a spy-bride sent to destroy the Bridge Kingdom from within, but when she arrives she must choose between the mission she was raised for and the truth she discovers.

The novel that introduced Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson to the world. A locked-room murder in London, a flashback to Mormon Utah, and the birth of the world's only consulting detective make this the essential origin of the greatest figure in detective fiction.

The death of a former Slough House officer's child pulls the team into an operation in Oxford, where old enemies are surfacing and the landscape of British intelligence is quietly being dismantled by people who see it as a procurement opportunity.

Poirot and Hastings return to Styles Court for the last time. Poirot is elderly and gravely ill, but he has identified a murderer who has never been convicted — and he intends to act. Written during World War II, published posthumously in 1975.

Sixteen years after artist Amyas Crale was poisoned, his daughter asks Poirot to clear her mother's name. Poirot interviews the five witnesses who were present that summer, and each gives a different account of the same events.

A populist politician is using terrorism for political gain. Slough House is pulled into the middle of a crisis that combines the worst instincts of Westminster with the worst capabilities of the intelligence world — and the rules, as always, are being made by whoever has the most to hide.

An orphan boy escapes the workhouse only to fall in with a gang of London pickpockets led by the scheming Fagin. Dickens's second novel is his most socially radical — a direct attack on the Poor Laws and a vivid portrait of the Victorian criminal underworld.

When one of the slow horses is kidnapped, Slough House is suddenly, involuntarily useful to Diana Taverner and Regent's Park. But the price of their cooperation may be higher than anyone at Slough House anticipated.

River Cartwright's legendary grandfather David — the Old Bastard, founder of a generation of British intelligence — appears to be losing his mind. But the intelligence world doesn't really lose its old warriors: it uses them up, and someone is using David Cartwright very deliberately.

A government inquiry into past intelligence operations unearths secrets from the Berlin Wall era. Two young civil servants conducting the inquiry find themselves trapped in a room with testimony that someone powerful wants to remain buried.

The second Sherlock Holmes novel weaves stolen treasure, a mysterious four-man pact, and a chase through the fog-bound Thames into a tightly plotted adventure. Watson falls in love with their client while Holmes remains coldly analytical — a contrast that gives the story much of its warmth.

A bus crash in a South Dakota blizzard strands Reacher in a small town where a witness to a drug case is under threat, a nearby military installation holds a dangerous secret, and Reacher has 61 hours before everything goes wrong. Child's countdown structure turns each chapter into a timer.

The Chipping Cleghorn Gazette carries a curious advertisement: a murder is announced and will take place on Friday evening at 6:30pm at Little Paddocks. The village assumes it's a party game. When the appointed time arrives and shots are fired, Miss Marple must untangle a mystery where even the victim's identity is uncertain.

Diana Taverner's position as First Desk is under threat, someone is running a hostile influence operation through Westminster, and the slow horses of Slough House are, as usual, in the middle of something they were never meant to touch.

Members of Reacher's old Special Investigations unit are being murdered one by one, and someone has wired $30,000 into Reacher's bank account — the unit's old distress signal. For the first time in the series, Reacher assembles a team to find out who is hunting his people.

Detective Mick 'Scorcher' Kennedy investigates the brutal murder of a young family in a half-built ghost estate — and discovers a connection to his own past he cannot afford to acknowledge.

When Aristide Leonides, the wealthy patriarch of a three-generation household, is poisoned in his own home, his granddaughter Sophia asks her fiancé Charles Hayward to uncover which family member is responsible. Christie called this one of her personal favourites.

A man arrested for a current murder offers a confession to a cold case as a bargaining chip — the 1993 disappearance of Marie Gesto, a case Harry Bosch has never stopped working. But as the confession is entered and the case is closed, Bosch's instincts tell him something is wrong.

Undercover detective Frank Mackey's carefully constructed life unravels when the suitcase of the girl he loved — and believed had abandoned him twenty-two years ago — is found in a derelict house on Faithful Place.