Best Mystery Books

A brilliant, obsessive madman abducts a prominent psychiatrist and her two daughters, holding them captive while he plays a deadly game of wits with the police. Lucas Davenport faces a kidnapper smarter than anyone he has hunted — a man who knows more about the human mind, and how to break it, than Davenport himself.

A retired detective haunted by an unsolved massacre — a stolen Mercedes driven into a crowd of job-seekers — is taunted back into the hunt when the killer contacts him directly. Stephen King's Edgar Award-winning leap into the pure crime thriller.

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.

A young bride buys an English seaside house and finds it uncannily familiar — she knows where a hidden door once was and recoils from a memory of a strangled woman on the stairs. Miss Marple warns her to let sleeping murder lie, but the past will not stay buried.

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.

When Kinsey Millhone's elderly neighbor needs live-in care, a seemingly perfect nurse named Solana Rojas arrives to look after him. But Solana is not who she claims — she is a predator who steals identities and bleeds the vulnerable dry, and Kinsey is the only one who senses the danger before it's too late.

Inspector Javier Falcón of the Seville homicide squad is called to the scene of a man found dead in front of a painting of Goya's Saturn Devouring His Son — eyes burnt out, posed with deliberate horror. The investigation pulls Falcón into his own family history, specifically the life of his celebrated father, the painter Francisco Falcón. Set against Seville's streets and its Moorish architecture, the first Falcón novel establishes one of crime fiction's most psychologically complex detectives.

Grayson and Jameson Hawthorne find themselves on separate, dangerous missions — Grayson drawn into a high-stakes game that threatens everything his family built, Jameson on a globe-trotting adventure that tests the limits of his recklessness. A dual POV expansion of the Hawthorne brothers' world.

A New Year's Eve death on a military base in 1990 pulls Major Jack Reacher into a murder investigation as the Cold War ends. Lee Child rewinds the clock to Reacher's army days, delivering a tense, procedural prequel and a rare look at the man in uniform.

A sequel to The Family Upstairs: Rachel Rimmer goes to France to attend the funeral of a woman who may have been her mother — and discovers connections to the dark Chelsea house of her past. Simultaneously, Detective Inspector Samuel Owusu investigates a body found in the Thames. Two investigations converge on the same terrible story.

Quincy Miller has spent twenty-two years on death row for the murder of a small-town Florida lawyer, a crime he insists he did not commit. When a handwritten letter reaches a small innocence organisation, its director takes on the case — knowing that the real killer is still out there and still dangerous.

Suspended from the LAPD and ordered into therapy after assaulting his commanding officer, Harry Bosch turns his enforced downtime toward the one case he could never close: the unsolved murder of his own mother, a prostitute killed when he was a boy. The investigation forces him to confront the wound that made him.

On an island that is the last refuge of humanity after an apocalyptic fog killed the rest of the world, someone has murdered the scientist maintaining the barrier that keeps the fog at bay. If the murderer isn't found in 107 hours, the barrier falls and everyone dies. Turton's most structurally inventive mystery: a closed-room that is an entire civilisation.

A glamorous film star buys a grand house in St. Mary Mead, and at her welcome party a starstruck local woman is poisoned. The intended victim seems obvious — yet the truth lies in a frozen look on the actress's face and a single line of poetry that Miss Marple cannot forget.

When the universally disliked Colonel Protheroe is found shot dead in the vicarage study, the quiet English village of St. Mary Mead erupts with suspects, false confessions and gossip — and an elderly spinster proves the sharpest mind for miles around.

When Emily Inglethorp is found dead at Styles Court, her stepson calls in his Belgian refugee friend Hercule Poirot to investigate. Christie's debut novel introduces one of fiction's most beloved detectives and establishes the country-house mystery template.

Crime reporter Jack McEvoy refuses to believe his twin brother, a homicide detective, killed himself. Digging into the death, McEvoy uncovers a pattern: detectives across the country dying in staged suicides, each marked with a line of Edgar Allan Poe. He has stumbled onto a serial killer — and a story that could destroy him.

Journalist Jon Ronson tumbles down a rabbit hole into the world of psychopaths — meeting diagnosed psychopaths, the psychiatrists who identify them, the CEOs who may be among their number, and the critics who question whether the entire diagnostic enterprise makes sense. The result is a darkly funny, genuinely unsettling investigation into madness, power, and the humans who get to decide who is sane.

Rowan Caine writes a letter from prison, claiming to be innocent of the child's death she is accused of. She was a nanny at a remote Scottish smart-house — a high-tech home that watched her every move, recorded every conversation, and whose previous nannies kept leaving without explanation. A locked-room thriller for the surveillance age.

From the window of a parallel train, elderly Elspeth McGillicuddy watches a man strangle a woman — then the other train is gone and no body is ever found. Only her friend Miss Marple believes her, and only Miss Marple will prove it.

Boston private investigators Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro are hired to find a missing government worker who stole documents from a state senator. What begins as a routine job draws them into Dorchester's gang wars, racial politics, and the violence that underlies South Boston's civic surface.

Chloe Davis grew up in the shadow of her father's crimes — he was a serial killer who murdered six girls in their Louisiana town. Twenty years later, when girls start disappearing again, Chloe must decide whether history is repeating itself.