Best Crime Fiction Books

Philip Marlowe, private detective, is hired by the aging General Sternwood to deal with a blackmailer — and finds himself drawn into a Los Angeles underworld of pornography, gambling, and murder involving the General's two dangerous daughters, Vivian and Carmen.

LAPD detective Harry Bosch investigates the murder of a Vietnam veteran found dead in a drainpipe in the Hollywood Hills — and discovers a trail leading to a daring bank heist tied to the tunnels both men once crawled through in the war.

When a young woman's body is found in the library at Gossington Hall, the owners call on their friend Miss Jane Marple. Investigating from St Mary Mead, the village spinster must determine who the victim was before she can determine who killed her.

New York City in the far future is a vast enclosed city of eight million people who rarely venture outside. Detective Elijah Baley is assigned to investigate a murder at a Spacer enclave — and is given a robot partner named R. Daneel Olivaw. Asimov's fusion of science fiction and classic detective fiction, set in one of his most vividly imagined futures.

Easter in Three Pines: a séance in the old Hadley house ends in death, and Chief Inspector Gamache must determine whether it was fright, murder, or something more sinister. The third Gamache novel deepens the series' psychological and spiritual preoccupations.

When a local antiques dealer is murdered and a consignment of heroin goes missing, the Thursday Murder Club has a new case. But this investigation is personal — one of their own is directly connected to the dead man — and the answers they find will test the friendship at the heart of the group.

A year after a boy was murdered on the grounds of a Dublin girls' boarding school, a card appears on the school's anonymous message board: 'I know who killed him.' Detective Stephen Moran sees his chance to make the Murder Squad.

In Money, Mississippi — the town where Emmett Till was murdered — a series of killings leave white supremacists dead alongside the mutilated body of a Black man who keeps disappearing from the morgue. Two Black detectives from the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation investigate while an elderly woman has been recording the names of lynching victims for fifty years.

A Hollywood film producer is found shot dead in the trunk of his Rolls-Royce in the hills above Mulholland Drive. The method — two bullets, body in the trunk — is a classic mob signature. Bosch's investigation pulls him from the Hollywood entertainment industry into the organized crime networks of Las Vegas.

A detour through rural Nebraska puts Reacher between the Duncan family — a violent local crime dynasty that controls everything for miles — and the frightened community that has lived under their thumb for decades. A stripped-back Reacher story with the feel of a modern western.

Jake Brigance returns to defend Drew Gamble, a sixteen-year-old who killed his mother's abusive boyfriend — a decorated local deputy — in the small town of Clanton, Mississippi. The third Jake Brigance novel is Grisham's richest portrait of the fictional Ford County he has built over three decades.

Reacher hitches a ride with three strangers on a Nebraska highway and quickly determines that one of them is a killer. An FBI roadblock, a missing woman, and a trailer full of secrets turn a routine ride into something far more dangerous.

After a wealthy man's funeral, his scatty younger sister blurts out that he was murdered — and the next day she is brutally killed herself. Was her remark idle nonsense, or did it sign her death warrant? Hercule Poirot infiltrates the grieving family to find out.

An American family on holiday in Petra, Jordan, is controlled by a tyrannical matriarch, Mrs Boynton. When she is found dead at an archaeological dig, Poirot must determine which of her long-oppressed family members finally snapped.

A spiteful old millionaire summons his estranged family home for Christmas, then is found with his throat cut behind a bolted door, the room a wreck and a pool of blood spreading across the floor. Hercule Poirot, dining nearby, is drawn into a very bloody locked-room puzzle.

Alex Cross races to find a serial kidnapper called Casanova who keeps intelligent, accomplished women as captives in an underground harem — while simultaneously discovering that his own niece Naomi has become one of Casanova's victims.

A brilliant, obsessive madman abducts a prominent psychiatrist and her two daughters, holding them captive while he plays a deadly game of wits with the police. Lucas Davenport faces a kidnapper smarter than anyone he has hunted — a man who knows more about the human mind, and how to break it, than Davenport himself.

A retired detective haunted by an unsolved massacre — a stolen Mercedes driven into a crowd of job-seekers — is taunted back into the hunt when the killer contacts him directly. Stephen King's Edgar Award-winning leap into the pure crime thriller.

The murder of a Hong Kong immigrant liquor store owner in South Los Angeles leads Bosch into a confrontation with triad extortion networks — and then to Hong Kong itself, when a video surfaces appearing to show his daughter Maddie in danger.

While vacationing in London, CIA analyst Jack Ryan foils an IRA assassination attempt on the Prince of Wales and becomes the target of a vengeful splinter faction determined to kill him and his family on American soil.

A young bride buys an English seaside house and finds it uncannily familiar — she knows where a hidden door once was and recoils from a memory of a strangled woman on the stairs. Miss Marple warns her to let sleeping murder lie, but the past will not stay buried.

Two strangers meet on a train: Guy Haines, an architect trying to escape his unhappy marriage, and Charles Bruno, a wealthy charming sociopath. Bruno proposes a perfect crime — they will swap murders, each killing the other's problem person. Guy refuses, but Bruno kills his wife anyway, then demands Guy complete the bargain. Highsmith's debut novel and the template for her entire career: the complicity between the guilty and the innocent, the creeping contamination of violence.

Three years after the trial that made his name, Jake Brigance is handed a stunning case: a dying white millionaire hangs himself and leaves his entire fortune to his Black housekeeper, cutting out his family. The contested will reopens old wounds in a Mississippi town still divided by race.

When Kinsey Millhone's elderly neighbor needs live-in care, a seemingly perfect nurse named Solana Rojas arrives to look after him. But Solana is not who she claims — she is a predator who steals identities and bleeds the vulnerable dry, and Kinsey is the only one who senses the danger before it's too late.