Best Crime Fiction Books

Lucas Davenport investigates a series of bodies found in an isolated Minnesota field — a killer who has been operating undetected for years in small-town America.

On a New York City subway at 2am, Reacher spots a woman exhibiting the eleven behavioural signs of a suicide bomber. What follows spirals into a conspiracy reaching back to Afghanistan and forward into a senator's carefully constructed political future.

Reacher stops at a town called Mother's Rest with no reason other than curiosity about the name. A journalist searching for a missing colleague pulls him into something far darker — a secret that explains the town's strange, unsettled atmosphere and that proves to be genuinely horrifying.

A sniper kills five random people in a midwestern city. The evidence is overwhelming. The suspect is in custody. He asks for one thing: Jack Reacher. Reacher arrives not to help the man get off, but to make sure justice is done — only to discover that something about the case does not add up.

Retired FBI profiler Will Graham, who was nearly killed capturing Hannibal Lecter, is called back to help catch a serial killer called the Tooth Fairy — and must return to Lecter's cell to get inside the new killer's mind.

Hercule Poirot receives a taunting letter predicting a murder — and the victim's name begins with A, the murder location begins with A, and a copy of the ABC railway guide is left at the scene. The killer works alphabetically, and the police assume a serial killer with no motive. Poirot is certain the obvious answer is a decoy.

A man shot ten years ago in a drive-by shooting finally dies of his wound — the bullet lodged too close to his spine to remove — making it a homicide a decade after the fact. Bosch and his new partner Lucia Soto must reconstruct a crime that the city has long since moved on from.

Eleven-year-old Mark Sway witnesses a lawyer's suicide and learns a dangerous secret — the location of a murdered Senator's body. Now the mob wants Mark dead, the federal government wants him as a witness, and Mark is too smart to trust either side. He hires his own lawyer: Reggie Love, a Memphis attorney who believes him.

Harry Bosch comes out of retirement to join the LAPD's Open-Unsolved Unit, working cold cases. His first assignment: the 1988 murder of sixteen-year-old Rebecca Verloren, whose case was buried in ways a DNA match on the murder weapon has just made impossible to ignore.

Harry Bosch is being sued for wrongful death by the family of a man he shot — a man he believed was the Dollmaker, a serial killer who preyed on prostitutes. As the civil trial grinds forward, a new body surfaces with the Dollmaker's signature, suggesting Bosch may have killed the wrong man.

San Francisco private detective Sam Spade is hired by a woman who calls herself Miss Wonderly to follow a man — and within twenty-four hours his partner Miles Archer is dead, he is tangled with the San Francisco police and a group of international criminals, and at the centre of it all is a statuette of a black bird supposedly worth a fortune.

Detective Antoinette Conway and her partner Stephen Moran catch what looks like a routine domestic killing — but someone in the Murder Squad is pushing hard to close the case fast, and Conway can't tell who to trust.

A cipher message leads Holmes to Birlstone Manor and a suspicious death, before the novel pivots to the Pennsylvania coalfields and the brutal secret society known as the Scowrers. The fourth and final Holmes novel draws on the real Molly Maguires to give its American backstory genuine historical weight.

A failed bank robber takes a group of apartment hunters hostage at an open house. When police arrive, the hostage-taker has vanished and no one in the group is talking. Told across multiple perspectives and timelines, Anxious People is a comedy-mystery about failure, loneliness, and the quiet kindnesses people extend to strangers when no one is watching.

An eccentric host gathers four sleuths and four people who have gotten away with murder for a dinner of bridge. By evening's end the host is dead in his chair, stabbed while his guests played cards — and one of the four murderers has killed again, in the same room, unseen.

A dog turns up a child's bone on a Hollywood hillside, and Harry Bosch is drawn into a cold case two decades old: the murder of a boy whose body was buried and forgotten. As Bosch reconstructs a short, brutal life, the case tests his faith in the work — and a new love forces a reckoning about his future.

Jack Reacher is accidentally grabbed off a Chicago street alongside a woman he barely knows — an FBI agent named Holly Johnson. Their kidnappers are a heavily armed militia group with a survivalist compound in Montana and a plan that amounts to mass murder. Reacher has no weapon, no help, and an 800-mile journey between him and the militia's endgame.

Hitchhiking through the Texas heat, Reacher accepts a ride from Carmen Greer — a woman fleeing an abusive husband who is due home from prison. By the time Reacher understands the full picture of the Greer family, the Echo County ranch, and the three hired killers heading for it, he is already too involved to walk away.

Poirot takes his holiday at Smugglers' Island off the Devon coast — and finds himself surrounded by the usual Christie ensemble: the glamorous actress everyone resents, the various husbands and wives with complicated relationships, and the idle rich who have all the time in the world for grudges. When the actress is found strangled, everyone on the island claims an alibi.

Hamburg, 1996. Reacher is pulled from his regular Army assignment and placed in a clandestine inter-agency team — the so-called night school — tasked with identifying an unknown buyer who is about to pay $100 million for something unknown. A prequel-in-spirit showing Reacher at his military peak.

Reacher decides to visit the New Hampshire town where his father was born — and finds no record of the Reacher family ever existing there. Simultaneously, a young Canadian couple becomes trapped at a remote motel where nothing is as it appears. A rare entry in the series that invites the reader to think about who Reacher really is.

A near-impossible sniper shot attempted against the French president — from 1,400 yards — points to one of four living marksmen, including Reacher's old adversary John Kott. Reacher is sent to Paris and London to find the shooter before a G8 summit becomes a killing ground.

Tom Ripley is insulted at a party by Jonathan Trevanny, a picture framer in Fontainebleau with a terminal blood disease, and decides to arrange a small act of vengeance: he has Jonathan recruited, through an intermediary, to carry out a Mafia killing on a train. Jonathan, desperate for money for his family, agrees — and Ripley watches, and then becomes involved in ways he didn't plan. Widely considered the best novel in the Ripley series.

Minneapolis detective Lucas Davenport hunts a serial killer who is following his own macabre rules — a game of cat and mouse that introduces one of crime fiction's most enduring protagonists.