Best Mystery Books

In an alternative history, Jewish refugees settled in Sitka, Alaska after World War II instead of Palestine. Now the Federal District of Sitka is about to revert to Alaskan jurisdiction, and detective Meyer Landsman has a body in his hotel room and a chess piece near the corpse. A genre novel that is also a meditation on home, diaspora, and the limits of belonging.

Seven Shakespeare students at a prestigious arts conservatory navigate obsession, rivalry, and moral collapse until one of them turns up dead after a production of Othello — narrated a decade later from a prison cell.

Dublin judge Andrew Fitzsimons and his wife Lydia kill a young woman named Annie and must maintain their respectable life while concealing the crime — told from multiple unreliable perspectives including Lydia's chilling first-person narration.

Lila Mae Watson is the first Black female elevator inspector in a segregated American city. When an elevator she has certified in good order falls in free-fall, she becomes a suspect in a larger conspiracy involving the city's two warring schools of elevator inspection: the Empiricists and the Intuitionists.

Two investigations fifty years apart — a contemporary Lisbon detective uncovering a murdered girl's story, and a German SS officer managing Portugal's wartime wolfram trade — whose threads converge in a single act of historical violence.

Thai detective Sonchai Jitpleecheep investigates the murder of an American Marine in Bangkok — a case involving jade smuggling, exotic snakes, and the city's sex industry, narrated with Buddhist equanimity and dark humour.

Twelve stories from The Strand Magazine collected into the first Holmes short story anthology, including A Scandal in Bohemia, The Red-Headed League, and The Speckled Band. The short story format reveals Conan Doyle's genius at compression — twelve complete puzzles delivered at full intensity.

Ten strangers with guilty secrets are lured to an island mansion, and one by one they are murdered according to a nursery rhyme — with no apparent killer among them.

Wall Street Journal reporter John Carreyrou tells the complete story of how Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos defrauded investors and endangered patients with a blood-testing technology that didn't work.

In postwar Barcelona, a young boy discovers a mysterious novel by a nearly forgotten author, and his obsession with the book's creator leads him deep into a dark labyrinth of secrets, loves, and betrayals.

The late Michelle McNamara chronicles her obsessive investigation into the East Area Rapist, later called the Golden State Killer — a serial criminal who terrorized California in the 1970s and 80s.

In 1920s Oklahoma, members of the Osage Nation were being systematically murdered for their oil wealth in a conspiracy that eventually drew in J. Edgar Hoover's nascent FBI.

Hercule Poirot is stranded on the snowbound Orient Express when a fellow passenger is murdered — and soon discovers that every suspect has an alibi and none of them can be trusted.

The intertwined stories of the 1893 Chicago World's Fair — one of the most ambitious construction projects in American history — and the serial killer H.H. Holmes, who used the fair's crowds as cover for his murders.

Hercule Poirot investigates the murder of a wealthy village squire in what became the most controversial and celebrated mystery novel ever written.

The most hated woman in Three Pines is found dead at the village curling match, electrocuted in a sealed outdoor space — and Chief Inspector Gamache discovers that almost everyone had reason to want her dead.

Pippa Fitz-Amobi reopens the supposedly closed case of Andie Bell's murder as her senior capstone project — and discovers the truth is far more dangerous than anyone expected.

Hercule Poirot investigates a murder aboard a luxury Nile steamer, where every passenger has a motive and the truth is buried beneath layers of deception.

Lucas Davenport and Virgil Flowers investigate a drug smuggling operation off the Florida coast that is leaving federal agents dead — a crossover entry between Sandford's two major series.

A man lives alone in a vast, labyrinthine House of endless halls filled with statues, tides, and clouds, keeping meticulous journals of a world he believes to be complete — until anomalies in his journals suggest a truth he has been prevented from remembering.

Chief Inspector Armand Gamache of the Sûreté du Québec investigates the suspicious death of a beloved woman in the idyllic village of Three Pines.

Criminal defense attorney Mickey Haller operates out of the back seat of his Lincoln Town Car, traveling between Los Angeles courthouses. When a wealthy Beverly Hills client hires him to fight a serious assault charge, Haller begins to suspect the man is guilty of something far worse — and that he has defended it before.

An abandoned girl raises herself in the marshes of North Carolina and becomes the prime suspect when a local man is found dead.

Three mothers in an Australian coastal community navigate school politics, marriage, friendship, and the fallout from a murder at the kindergarten trivia night.