Best Crime Fiction Books

A box of Kinsey Millhone's old belongings surfaces with a returned letter that overturns everything she believed about her first marriage. The husband she walked out on after he was accused of a brutal beating may have been innocent — and her own testimony wrong. When he's shot and left for dead, Kinsey must confront her past.

Jack Reacher goes undercover to infiltrate a criminal's fortress on the Maine coast, working with the DEA to rescue an agent inside. But his real reason is personal: the operation is run by a man Reacher believed he had killed years ago, and the chance to finish an old job is one he cannot refuse.

Eighteen years ago, the body of an unidentified young woman was found dumped near a quarry, her murder never solved and her name never known. Now two ailing retired detectives ask Kinsey Millhone to help them close the case that has haunted them — to give a forgotten Jane Doe back her name before they run out of time.

Tom Ripley has settled into comfortable French country life at his villa Belle Ombre with his wealthy wife Héloïse. He is co-managing a scheme to sell forged paintings attributed to a dead artist named Derwatt. When an American collector arrives convinced the paintings are fraudulent, Ripley must manage the situation — which escalates, as Ripley situations always do. The second Ripley novel, fifteen years after The Talented Mr. Ripley.

Beautiful Elinor Carlisle stands in the dock, accused of poisoning her rival in love. The motive, means and opportunity all point to her alone — and the case against her looks airtight. Only Hercule Poirot, brought in by a doubting doctor, believes there may be another truth.

Crime journalist Camille Preaker is sent back to her small Missouri hometown to cover the murders of two young girls, and back into the orbit of her controlling mother Adora and half-sister Amma. Flynn's debut is a novel about women's violence against women, and the ways trauma writes itself permanently on the body.

US Marshal Teddy Daniels arrives at Ashecliffe Hospital for the criminally insane on Shutter Island to investigate the disappearance of a patient — and finds himself questioning his own grip on reality as the investigation deepens and the island refuses to give up its secrets.

When a fellow defense attorney is murdered, Mickey Haller inherits his entire practice overnight — including a high-profile Hollywood double-murder trial. But the killer may not be finished, and as Haller prepares his defense, LAPD detective Harry Bosch warns him that he could be the next target.

When a series of brutal murders in Copenhagen is linked by small figures made of chestnuts left at each scene, detectives Naia Thulin and Mark Hess discover a connection to the missing daughter of a prominent politician — a girl who has been gone for a year and is assumed dead.

Ian Rankin's twelfth Inspector Rebus novel. When a wealthy Edinburgh student vanishes, John Rebus follows two strange clues — a tiny carved coffin found in a village called Falls, and an online role-playing game run by an enigmatic 'Quizmaster' — into a dark, intricate investigation.

Mickey Haller takes the case of a man accused of killing a prostitute — only to discover the victim was a woman he once represented, a client he thought he had saved from the life. Haunted by guilt over her death, Haller mounts a defense that becomes a personal reckoning before the only gods that matter: the jury.

A coffee on a New York street corner draws Jack Reacher into a kidnapping case for a ruthless private military contractor. Lee Child's tenth Reacher thriller turns a tiny observation into a twisting hunt that crosses the Atlantic to a tense English finale.

A bomb destroys an apartment building in Seville, killing dozens and injuring hundreds. The investigation pulls Falcón into the world of Islamist extremism, Spanish intelligence, and the specifically Sevillian world of the Moorish quarter — the Barrio Santa Cruz — where the city's Christian and Islamic histories are still legible in the architecture. Wilson's most politically charged Falcón novel, written in the aftermath of the 2004 Madrid bombings.

Arriving for lunch at a country house, Hercule Poirot walks in on what looks like a staged tableau: a man dying beside the pool, his wife standing over him with a revolver. It is too neat to be true — and the truth, hidden among a tangle of lovers, runs far deeper.

Pulled over late at night, Mickey Haller is arrested when the body of a former client is found in the trunk of his Lincoln. Charged with murder and unable to make bail, Haller must defend the most important client of his career — himself — from a jail cell, against a system convinced he is guilty.

A West Point class ring in a pawn shop window sends Jack Reacher across the West to find the woman who earned it. Lee Child's twenty-second Reacher thriller becomes a quieter, more humane mystery about opioids, sacrifice, and the wounded veterans the country forgot.

Cal Hooper, a retired Chicago detective, buys a fixer-upper in rural Ireland seeking quiet and distance from his old life. A boy named Trey asks him to find his missing brother — and what Cal uncovers pulls him into a community with deep roots and older loyalties than he understands.

Digging swimming pools in the Florida Keys, Jack Reacher is found by a dying detective and pulled into a decades-old mystery from the Vietnam War. Lee Child's third Reacher thriller blends a propulsive hunt with one of the series' nastiest villains.

A vicar's son finds a man dying at the foot of a cliff. The stranger's last gasped words — 'Why didn't they ask Evans?' — make no sense, but they will not leave Bobby Jones alone. With the dauntless Lady Frankie at his side, he sets out to learn who Evans is and what they should have asked.

In the frozen north woods of Wisconsin, a family is butchered and their house burned. Lucas Davenport, living in self-imposed exile at his cabin, is pulled into the hunt for a killer known as the Iceman — a predator who knows the snowbound country far better than the law does, and who will kill again to protect his secret.

Eight years ago, divorce attorney Laurence Fife was poisoned, and his wife Nikki went to prison for it. Now released, Nikki hires private investigator Kinsey Millhone to find out who really killed him — a cold case that will lead Kinsey to a second poisoning, an old web of betrayals, and the first kill of her own career.

Framed as a story Alex Cross wrote about his own family's past, this historical novel follows Ben Corbett, a Washington lawyer sent by President Roosevelt to investigate a resurgence of Ku Klux Klan terror in 1906 Mississippi — where he confronts lynching, injustice, and a town's buried conscience.

A crusading civil-rights attorney who made his name suing the LAPD is shot dead on the Angels Flight funicular railway. Harry Bosch catches a case that could set the whole city alight — and that forces him to investigate the police department he serves, knowing the wrong answer could spark a second Los Angeles riot.

Sonchai is sent a snuff film by an anonymous source — a murder so perfectly executed that it functions as art. The investigation leads into the world of the Thai sex industry, the Buddhist concept of karma and rebirth, and a case that forces Sonchai to examine his own complicity in the system he polices. The third Sonchai novel, the most Buddhist in its philosophical dimension.