Best Crime Fiction Books

Alex Cross hunts a killer who treats murder as a game. Geoffrey Shafer, a British diplomat in Washington, plays a fantasy role-playing contest called The Four Horsemen, earning points for real killings — and when the hunt turns personal, Cross's own happiness becomes the prize.

Mickey Haller has turned to freeing the wrongly convicted, and his investigator is none other than Harry Bosch. Their newest case: a woman serving life for killing her husband, a sheriff's deputy. As Bosch digs into the evidence and Haller prepares to overturn the conviction, they find powerful forces determined to keep the truth buried.

A group of wealthy tech vigilantes calling themselves 'the Five' begins murdering people they deem deserving of death — and announcing each killing online with self-righteous manifestos. Lucas Davenport and Virgil Flowers join forces to stop a band of killers who believe they are doing the world a favor.

A string of bank robberies turns lethal when a meticulous mastermind kills hostages even after his instructions are followed to the letter. Alex Cross chases a criminal who plans every move with terrifying precision — and ends on a revelation that reshapes the series.

Thirty-four years ago, Violet Sullivan put on her party dress, drove off on the Fourth of July, and was never seen again. Her daughter, only seven at the time, hires Kinsey Millhone to find out what happened. To solve it, Kinsey must reconstruct a vanished summer — and Grafton steps outside Kinsey's narration to show it unfolding.

The killer Lucas Davenport thought he had stopped has resurfaced in New York City, leaving a trail of bodies in the urban shadows. Davenport travels east to help hunt him down — and is drawn into a second, separate investigation into a cabal of rogue cops who have decided to mete out their own brand of justice.

A pre-dawn pharmacy robbery turns deadly, and the only witness who can identify the killers is Lucas Davenport's wife, Weather. As the robbers move to silence her before she can testify, Davenport finds himself in the most personal fight of his career — protecting the woman he loves from men with everything to lose.

When a bank robber is gunned down in a police operation, her ruthless husband swears revenge — not just on the cops who killed her, but on their families. As the killings begin, Lucas Davenport realizes the vendetta is being aided from inside the system, and that everyone he loves may be a target.

In 1997, still a major in the army's military police, Jack Reacher is sent undercover to a small Mississippi town to investigate a brutal murder near a secretive army base. What he uncovers — a cover-up that reaches high up the chain of command — will end his military career and set him on the road for good.

Twenty years ago, during the chaos of the 1992 Los Angeles riots, a Danish photojournalist was shot dead in an alley, her killing lost among hundreds of others. Now a bullet links her case to other crimes, and Harry Bosch finally has a thread to pull — the single piece of evidence that can explain a murder everyone else forgot.

Walter Stackhouse reads in the newspaper about the case of Melchior Kimmel, a bookseller accused of staging his wife's death as a bus accident. Walter, trapped in his own unhappy marriage, becomes obsessed with Kimmel's method. When his wife subsequently dies in similar circumstances, Kimmel turns the tables — he begins investigating Walter with the intensity of someone who recognises a mirror image.

Two boyhood friends from a Mississippi coast immigrant community grow up on opposite sides of the law: one becomes a prosecutor, the other heir to a violent crime syndicate. Their collision in a Biloxi courtroom caps a sweeping saga of family, corruption, and vengeance.

The nameless narrator of The Sympathizer arrives in 1980s Paris with his blood brother Bon, navigating the Vietnamese exile community, Algerian drug networks, and French intellectual life while still haunted by his double-consciousness and the interrogations he survived.

Set partly in WWII Lisbon — neutral Portugal as the espionage capital of Europe — and partly in the present day, as Javier Falcón investigates a case that connects to wartime intelligence operations. Wilson returns to the Portugal of A Small Death in Lisbon to interweave Falcón's modern investigation with the wartime story of an SOE agent and the shadowy world of competing intelligence services in neutral Lisbon.

Ian Rankin's gripping introduction to Malcolm Fox. Fox works for Edinburgh's Complaints department — the cops who investigate other cops — until an investigation into a colleague drags him into a web of corruption, murder, and conspiracy that turns the hunter into the hunted.

As midnight gunfire rings in the New Year over a pandemic-weary Los Angeles, a man is shot dead in the chaos — and Renée Ballard links the killing to a cold case that draws in Harry Bosch. At the same time, she hunts a pair of serial rapists called the Midnight Men, working a department and a city near breaking point.

Philip Carter serves six years in an American federal prison for a crime he didn't commit — a financial conspiracy his employer framed him for. He comes out changed: harder, drug-dependent, capable of violence in ways he wasn't before. A novel about what prison does to a person and what happens when that person returns to a life that has changed without him.

Exiled to the LAPD's overnight shift after filing a harassment complaint, Detective Renée Ballard works the cases no one else wants and hands them off by dawn. But two brutal crimes in a single night — the beating of a young woman and a deadly nightclub shooting — are ones she refuses to let go, even if it costs her what's left of her career.

The widow of Harry Bosch's friend Terry McCaleb asks him to look into the retired profiler's death, which she refuses to believe was natural. Bosch's investigation collides with an FBI hunt for a resurrected serial killer — the Poet — and pulls him into the deadliest pursuit of his career, alongside agent Rachel Walling.

At the funeral of his old mentor, Harry Bosch is handed the dead man's secret: a murder book he stole decades ago and never returned, a case he hid for reasons no one understands. With Renée Ballard, Bosch sets out to learn why his mentor took the file — and to finally close the case he left undone.

When DNA evidence frees a convicted child-killer after twenty-four years, defense attorney Mickey Haller is recruited to do the unthinkable: switch sides and prosecute the retrial. With his ex-wife as co-counsel and Harry Bosch as investigator, Haller must convict a man the system already let go.

Falcón is called to investigate a domestic murder-suicide in a Seville suburb — a prominent businessman apparently shot his wife and then himself. The investigation reveals the case is far more complex, pulling Falcón into the world of Seville's wealthy elite and the corruption that underlies the city's surface prosperity. The third Falcón novel deepens the detective's psychological portrait while delivering Wilson's most tightly plotted thriller.

Howard Ingham, an American writer, has come to Tunisia to work on a screenplay. His fiancée doesn't arrive. A colleague dies ambiguously. One night Ingham may have killed an intruder with a typewriter. He isn't certain. Set almost entirely in Hammamet, Tunisia, this is Highsmith's most existential novel — the question of whether Ingham committed a crime becomes less important than the question of whether it matters to him that he might have.

Athens, 1960s. Rydal Keener, a young American drifting through Greece on his father's money, encounters Chester MacFarland — a small-time con man on the run with his wife Colette. When Chester accidentally kills a man and Rydal witnesses it, the two become fatally linked. A thriller set across Greek landscapes — Athens, Crete, Istanbul — exploring the father-son dynamic between two men who are drawn to each other and threatening to each other.