Best Mystery Books

A travel journalist on a luxury cruise witnesses what she believes is a woman being thrown overboard — but there is no record of any missing passenger.

An agoraphobic child psychologist who has not left her Manhattan brownstone in ten months witnesses what she believes is a murder through her window — and no one believes her.

A thriller writer is invited to a bachelorette party in a remote glass house in the English woods, and the weekend turns violent in ways she didn't see coming.

An alcoholic woman who commutes daily past her ex-husband's house becomes entangled in the disappearance of a woman she had been secretly watching from the train.

Symbologist Robert Langdon arrives in Prague to attend a lecture by noetic scientist Katherine Solomon, whose groundbreaking manuscript on human consciousness could shatter everything we believe. When she vanishes amid a brutal murder, Langdon races to recover it.

A Harvard symbologist and a French cryptologist race through Paris and London decoding clues that lead to a secret that could shake the foundations of Christianity.

The fifth Robert Langdon thriller. At the Guggenheim in Bilbao, billionaire futurist Edmond Kirsch promises to answer humanity's oldest questions — where we come from and where we are going — but is silenced before he can. Langdon and museum director Ambra Vidal race across Spain to release his discovery.

Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon wakes in a Florence hospital with no memory of the past few days and must decode a mystery rooted in Dante's Inferno before a bioterrorist threat kills millions.

In a suburban neighborhood, two women have disappeared: doula Shelby Tebow and Kate Lemmon. Eleven years later, Kate's daughter Delilah, who also vanished, appears — but she cannot remember where she has been.

A successful New York woman's carefully constructed life begins to unravel as dark secrets from her teenage years resurface.

Marco and Anne Conti leave their infant daughter Cora home alone while attending a dinner party next door — checking on her every 30 minutes. When they return at midnight, Cora is gone.

Mia Dennett, daughter of a prominent Chicago judge, is kidnapped by Colin Thatcher — a man hired to deliver her to someone else. Instead, Colin takes her to a remote Minnesota cabin, and over weeks in isolation, something neither of them expected begins to develop.

Surgeon Nora Sinclair has buried a terrible secret from her childhood, but when a series of murders begins to mirror that hidden past, she is forced to confront whether she is the hunter or the hunted.

Six people at a backyard barbecue. Something happened. The novel spends its first half not telling you what, building the mundane detail of three couples' intertwined friendships, then reveals the event and its aftermath.

The novel that introduced Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson to the world. A locked-room murder in London, a flashback to Mormon Utah, and the birth of the world's only consulting detective make this the essential origin of the greatest figure in detective fiction.

The death of a former Slough House officer's child pulls the team into an operation in Oxford, where old enemies are surfacing and the landscape of British intelligence is quietly being dismantled by people who see it as a procurement opportunity.

Poirot and Hastings return to Styles Court for the last time. Poirot is elderly and gravely ill, but he has identified a murderer who has never been convicted — and he intends to act. Written during World War II, published posthumously in 1975.

Sixteen years after artist Amyas Crale was poisoned, his daughter asks Poirot to clear her mother's name. Poirot interviews the five witnesses who were present that summer, and each gives a different account of the same events.

On November 15, 1959, Herbert Clutter, his wife, and two of their children were murdered in their farmhouse in Holcomb, Kansas — and Truman Capote's six-year investigation into the crime, the investigators, and the killers Perry Smith and Dick Hickock produced the work that invented the literary nonfiction genre.

A populist politician is using terrorism for political gain. Slough House is pulled into the middle of a crisis that combines the worst instincts of Westminster with the worst capabilities of the intelligence world — and the rules, as always, are being made by whoever has the most to hide.

An orphan boy escapes the workhouse only to fall in with a gang of London pickpockets led by the scheming Fagin. Dickens's second novel is his most socially radical — a direct attack on the Poor Laws and a vivid portrait of the Victorian criminal underworld.

When one of the slow horses is kidnapped, Slough House is suddenly, involuntarily useful to Diana Taverner and Regent's Park. But the price of their cooperation may be higher than anyone at Slough House anticipated.

River Cartwright's legendary grandfather David — the Old Bastard, founder of a generation of British intelligence — appears to be losing his mind. But the intelligence world doesn't really lose its old warriors: it uses them up, and someone is using David Cartwright very deliberately.

The fourth and final Cemetery of Forgotten Books novel follows Alicia Gris, a secret police operative in Franco's Spain, as she investigates a missing government official whose disappearance connects to a network of Barcelona's literary and intellectual life across decades — resolving the mysteries of the entire series.