Best Mystery Books

A young woman marries the brooding Maxim de Winter and moves to his grand estate Manderley, where the memory of his glamorous first wife Rebecca poisons every room and every relationship.

Joe Coutts, thirteen years old, watches his mother return from a violent assault on an Ojibwe reservation in North Dakota. The attacker cannot be prosecuted because of a jurisdictional tangle: the crime may have occurred on tribal land, federal land, or state land, and each has different rules about who can prosecute. Joe sets out to find justice himself.

DEA agent Art Keller's decades-long war against the Sinaloa Cartel, from the 1970s through 9/11. A massive, novelistic account of the Mexican drug trade — cartel politics, US government corruption, CIA involvement, and the human cost on both sides of the border.

Richard Preston's harrowing true account follows the 1989 appearance of a lethal strain of the Ebola virus in a primate research facility in Reston, Virginia—just outside Washington, D.C.—and traces the virus's earlier outbreaks in Central Africa, where it killed with near-total lethality. It is one of the most terrifying science books ever written.

The attempted assassination of Bob Marley in Kingston, Jamaica in December 1976 is the still point around which this vast, polyphonic novel turns — following gang members, CIA operatives, journalists, and ghosts across three decades and multiple continents in dense, overlapping Jamaican voices.

An escaped Australian convict arrives in Bombay with a false passport, becomes a slum doctor, makes friends and enemies among the city's criminals, and discovers a city that unmakes and remakes him completely.

Tom Ripley, a charming and resourceful small-time fraudster, is sent to Italy to retrieve a wealthy young American from his life of idleness — and finds it far easier to become his target than to bring him home.

A double narrative: the murder of a Mormon woman and her infant daughter by fundamentalist brothers who believed they were acting on divine revelation, intertwined with the full history of the Latter-day Saint movement from Joseph Smith to the present day. A rigorous examination of religious fundamentalism and faith.

A mysterious death, a missing fortune, and a damaged woman bring twelve men together in a Hokitika hotel on the New Zealand West Coast in 1866. Catton's structurally extraordinary novel uses astrological charts to determine its form, with each section exactly half the length of the previous one.

The story of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, told through the abduction and murder of Jean McConville and the lives of IRA members Dolours Price and Gerry Adams.

A spectral hound haunts the Baskerville family across the Dartmoor moors, and when the new baronet arrives to claim his inheritance, Holmes sends Watson ahead while working in secret. Conan Doyle's masterpiece fuses gothic atmosphere with rigorous detective logic into the most complete and satisfying Holmes story.

In the city of Camorr — a fantasy Venice — a gang of elite con artists and thieves called the Gentlemen Bastards pull off elaborate heists while a supernatural criminal element threatens everything.

Private detectives Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro are hired to investigate the disappearance of a four-year-old girl from a Boston neighbourhood. The case pulls them into drug trafficking, police corruption, and a moral dilemma at the end that has no right answer.

Detective Cassie Maddox is pulled back into undercover work when a murder victim is found bearing her exact face — and carrying the identity Cassie once used as an alias.

Rebus investigates a murder that connects to the unsolved Bible John killings of the 1960s while simultaneously investigating the oil industry in Aberdeen and a copycat killer. The book that won the Gold Dagger and established Rebus as a major series.

Kenzie and Gennaro are hired to protect a psychologist who has received death threats from a patient. As they investigate, they are drawn into a twenty-year pattern of murders in Dorchester and Charlestown — and into personal danger that will alter the series permanently.

A collection of long-form journalism from The New Yorker, profiling extraordinary people who exist outside or at the edges of the law — a wine fraud artist, a drug lord's hitwoman, a whistleblower, a private investigator, a con artist. Keefe's best magazine work gathered in a single essential volume.

Brighton, the 1930s. Pinkie Brown is a seventeen-year-old gang leader, a Catholic who believes in damnation and acts accordingly. After a murder, he marries Rose, a waitress who could testify against him, intending to kill her after she can no longer be called as a witness. Ida Arnold, a cheerful hedonist, pursues him. Greene's darkest and most theologically exact novel.

A private detective named Guy Roland discovers he has no past—his memory was erased, and even his name is a fiction. He begins investigating his own identity, tracing himself through prewar and wartime Paris to discover who he was before the amnesia. Winner of the Prix Goncourt. Modiano's most emblematic novel.

Lionel Essrog has Tourette's syndrome and works for a small Brooklyn detective agency run by Frank Minna. When Frank is murdered, Lionel — compelled by tics, verbal eruptions, and the inability to leave a pattern unresolved — investigates his mentor's death. A genre novel about the detective impulse as a form of neurological necessity.

Inspector Grant, bedridden after an accident, investigates the murder of the Princes in the Tower — a 400-year-old cold case. Voted the greatest mystery novel of all time by the Crime Writers' Association, Tey's intellectual detective story is a meditation on history, rumour, and how received narratives harden into fact.