Best Mystery Books

1634. A merchant ship departs Batavia for Amsterdam carrying a disgraced detective, his bodyguard, a mysterious prisoner, and a demon that appears to be killing the passengers. Samuel Pipps must solve an impossible mystery from the ship's hold while his bodyguard Arent Hayes investigates on deck above. Turton's locked-room mystery at sea.

A woman disappears from a container ship. Her half-brother tends bar at a remote hotel on Vancouver Island. A financier runs a Ponzi scheme that will destroy hundreds of lives. Mandel's companion novel to Station Eleven weaves together haunted characters across a story of fraud, ghosts, and the way money makes certain people invisible.

The third Housemaid novel follows Millie Calloway into a new domestic situation — a family with secrets that rival any she has encountered before. As Millie uncovers the truth about the Calloway household, she finds herself in danger of becoming the victim rather than the survivor, with a child's life tangled in the web.

When a local antiques dealer is murdered and a consignment of heroin goes missing, the Thursday Murder Club has a new case. But this investigation is personal — one of their own is directly connected to the dead man — and the answers they find will test the friendship at the heart of the group.

Nicholas Urfe, a young Englishman who has taken a teaching position on a remote Greek island, becomes entangled in the elaborate psychological games of Maurice Conchis, a wealthy and enigmatic recluse who stages increasingly disturbing theatrical scenarios — blurring the line between performance and reality.

In an alternate-history United Isles of America, Joel attends Armedius Academy alongside Rithmatists — students who can bring chalk drawings to life as warriors. When Rithmatist students begin disappearing, Joel and his unconventional mentor Professor Fitch must investigate before the killings reach the school itself.

A year after a boy was murdered on the grounds of a Dublin girls' boarding school, a card appears on the school's anonymous message board: 'I know who killed him.' Detective Stephen Moran sees his chance to make the Murder Squad.

In Money, Mississippi — the town where Emmett Till was murdered — a series of killings leave white supremacists dead alongside the mutilated body of a Black man who keeps disappearing from the morgue. Two Black detectives from the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation investigate while an elderly woman has been recording the names of lynching victims for fifty years.

Essex County Prosecutor Paul Copeland has carried the mystery of his sister's disappearance at summer camp for twenty years. When a corpse surfaces that appears to be her supposed killer — still alive until recently — every assumption unravels.

Ten years ago, fifteen-year-old Ellie Mack disappeared. Her mother Laurel has never recovered. When Laurel starts dating a charming widower named Floyd and meets his young daughter — who looks eerily like Ellie — the questions she buried begin to surface. A domestic thriller about obsessive love, missing daughters, and the families we construct from grief.

A Hollywood film producer is found shot dead in the trunk of his Rolls-Royce in the hills above Mulholland Drive. The method — two bullets, body in the trunk — is a classic mob signature. Bosch's investigation pulls him from the Hollywood entertainment industry into the organized crime networks of Las Vegas.

A detour through rural Nebraska puts Reacher between the Duncan family — a violent local crime dynasty that controls everything for miles — and the frightened community that has lived under their thumb for decades. A stripped-back Reacher story with the feel of a modern western.

Jake Brigance returns to defend Drew Gamble, a sixteen-year-old who killed his mother's abusive boyfriend — a decorated local deputy — in the small town of Clanton, Mississippi. The third Jake Brigance novel is Grisham's richest portrait of the fictional Ford County he has built over three decades.

Reacher hitches a ride with three strangers on a Nebraska highway and quickly determines that one of them is a killer. An FBI roadblock, a missing woman, and a trailer full of secrets turn a routine ride into something far more dangerous.

A Tokyo copywriter receives a photograph of a meadow with a strange sheep — one with a star on its back — and is blackmailed by a sinister political operative into finding it. The sheep chase takes him to Hokkaido, to a remote mountain hotel, and into territory that is no longer entirely real. The first major Murakami novel and the beginning of his characteristic blend of the mundane and the uncanny.

An American family on holiday in Petra, Jordan, is controlled by a tyrannical matriarch, Mrs Boynton. When she is found dead at an archaeological dig, Poirot must determine which of her long-oppressed family members finally snapped.

Former military operative Maya Stern installs a nanny cam after her husband is murdered — and sees him on the footage two weeks later, alive and playing with their daughter.

Three editors at a Milan publishing house, bored with the occult manuscripts they process, invent an elaborate conspiracy theory connecting the Knights Templar to every secret society in history — only to find their fiction taking on a terrifying life of its own.

Will Klein's brother Ken disappeared eleven years ago after a girl was murdered — and everyone assumed he was guilty. Now that girl's sister has been murdered, and Ken may be connected again.

Alex Cross races to find a serial kidnapper called Casanova who keeps intelligent, accomplished women as captives in an underground harem — while simultaneously discovering that his own niece Naomi has become one of Casanova's victims.

The murder of a Hong Kong immigrant liquor store owner in South Los Angeles leads Bosch into a confrontation with triad extortion networks — and then to Hong Kong itself, when a video surfaces appearing to show his daughter Maddie in danger.

Marc Seidman wakes in hospital — shot, his wife dead, his infant daughter missing. Six months later a ransom demand arrives, and the investigation into who took his daughter opens questions about who his wife actually was.

A tech startup's team-building ski trip in the French Alps turns deadly when an avalanche traps employees in a luxury chalet with no rescue in sight — and someone is killing them off while they wait. An Agatha Christie-style closed-room mystery in a contemporary setting, with a cast of colleagues who each have reasons to want each other dead.

Two strangers meet on a train: Guy Haines, an architect trying to escape his unhappy marriage, and Charles Bruno, a wealthy charming sociopath. Bruno proposes a perfect crime — they will swap murders, each killing the other's problem person. Guy refuses, but Bruno kills his wife anyway, then demands Guy complete the bargain. Highsmith's debut novel and the template for her entire career: the complicity between the guilty and the innocent, the creeping contamination of violence.