Best Mystery Books

Ten years ago, Hannah's Oxford roommate April — beautiful, charismatic, and impossible to ignore — was murdered by the college porter. The case seemed closed. Now the porter has died in prison claiming innocence, and new evidence suggests the wrong man was convicted. Hannah must revisit the most disorienting year of her life.

Gavin Sasaki, a journalist demoted after fabricating a quote, returns to his Florida hometown to investigate a decade-old mystery involving his high school jazz quartet and a girl who disappeared. Mandel's third novel is her most explicitly crime-shaped and demonstrates the quality that would make Station Eleven great: the ability to make nostalgia and grief do the work of suspense.

The third Cemetery of Forgotten Books novel returns to Daniel Sempere and reveals the backstory of Fermín Romero de Torres — his imprisonment in Montjuïc Castle during the early Franco years — connecting the series' mysteries to the specific historical violence of the Spanish Civil War's aftermath.

Eighteen years ago, Bel Price's mother vanished without a trace. Now a true crime documentary crew arrives to revisit the cold case — and Rachel Price suddenly reappears, alive, turning everything Bel thought she knew about her family upside down.

Cal Hooper, a retired Chicago detective, buys a fixer-upper in rural Ireland seeking quiet and distance from his old life. A boy named Trey asks him to find his missing brother — and what Cal uncovers pulls him into a community with deep roots and older loyalties than he understands.

Anton Waker, who has spent years laundering documents and facilitating his family's criminal enterprises, tries to go straight by taking an office job — only to find that the past is not easily outrun. Mandel's second novel is more overtly thriller-shaped than her debut, with multiple timelines and unreliable perspectives dissolving into a portrait of complicity.

A Norton Aircraft wide-body transatlantic flight arrives in Los Angeles with three dead and fifty-six injured after a mysterious in-flight incident nobody can explain. Quality Assurance VP Casey Singleton has 72 hours to reconstruct what happened before a damaging television news investigation airs — and before the company loses a billion-dollar sale to China.

Stan and Joy Delaney — retired tennis coaches and parents of four adult children — seem to have the perfect marriage. Then Joy disappears, and each of her children has a theory about what happened. Told across multiple perspectives over the year before and after Joy's disappearance, the novel dissects a family's myths about itself.

Sonchai is sent a snuff film by an anonymous source — a murder so perfectly executed that it functions as art. The investigation leads into the world of the Thai sex industry, the Buddhist concept of karma and rebirth, and a case that forces Sonchai to examine his own complicity in the system he polices. The third Sonchai novel, the most Buddhist in its philosophical dimension.

A CIA agent is found murdered in a Bangkok brothel, his body covered in religious tattoos. Detective Sonchai Jitpleecheep investigates — navigating between the American intelligence community, the Thai sex industry, the Buddhist spirit world, and his mother's complex position as a mamasan. The second Sonchai novel deepens the portrait of Bangkok as a city where Western and Thai moral frameworks operate in permanent collision.

Medway is drawn into the toxic world of Nigerian oil money and the corruption that surrounds it — a missing girl, a lethal cargo, and the specific violence of Lagos. Winner of the CWA Gold Dagger for Best Crime Novel of the Year. The third and finest Medway novel.

Five original F. Scott Fitzgerald manuscripts are stolen from Princeton's rare books vault. A young novelist struggling with her career is recruited by an insurance company to befriend a Florida bookseller suspected of brokering their sale. Grisham's most bookish novel — more literary caper than legal thriller.

An Andean village where three people have disappeared. A corporal and his assistant investigate: the suspects are Shining Path guerrillas, but the mystery deepens into something older and stranger—the Andean world of pishtacos (fat-extracting demons) and ancient violence. Vargas Llosa's novel about Peru's civil conflict as seen from the highlands.

Harry Dresden investigates a series of brutal murders during the full moon — and discovers that werewolves in Chicago are far more complicated than folklore suggests.

Lewis spent a year embedded with Sam Bankman-Fried and FTX before the cryptocurrency exchange's catastrophic collapse. The result is a portrait of the man at the centre of one of the largest financial frauds in history — a portrait that refuses easy categorisation of SBF as either visionary or villain.

Seven years after the events of The Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal Lecter is living freely in Florence under an assumed identity, pursued simultaneously by a vengeful Mason Verger — the only surviving victim — and by Clarice Starling, now an embattled FBI agent.

Harlem, 1960s: Ray Carney sells furniture by day and fences stolen goods on the side, telling himself he's only "slightly bent." Whitehead's crime novel is a departure from his recent literary fiction — a Harlem panorama that celebrates a world and an era while examining the costs of respectability.

Edinburgh detective John Rebus investigates a series of murders of young girls while receiving taunting messages from a person who seems to know his past. The first Inspector Rebus novel — shorter and darker than the later series, more psychological thriller than police procedural.

Lilia Albert has been disappearing her whole life — taken by her father as a child, re-disappearing every few years, leaving behind whoever has come to love her. Her most recent boyfriend follows her across the country trying to understand why. Mandel's debut shows the same intelligence as her later work applied to the same questions: identity, memory, the people who vanish.

Harry Dresden, Chicago's only professional wizard and private detective, investigates a pair of murders that required enormous magical power — and discovers something far darker than a simple killer.

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.

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.

Two timelines converge around the Montglane Service, a chess set once owned by Charlemagne whose pieces are said to grant limitless power — one story following a nun during the French Revolution, another a computer expert in the 1970s drawn into a deadly global game.

A group of friends gather on a private Greek island for a holiday with a faded Hollywood actress. Within days, one of them will be dead — and the narrator, playwright Elliot Chase, must reconstruct what happened before the killer strikes again.