Best Crime Fiction Books

Reacher witnesses a woman pushed under a bus in a staged suicide and refuses to let it lie. Lee and Andrew Child's twenty-seventh Reacher thriller widens into a conspiracy involving a corrupt private prison, weaving multiple storylines toward a violent collision.

When the CEO of a major bank is shot dead on a hunting trip, the list of suspects is a who's who of ambitious executives, each with motive and opportunity. Lucas Davenport must navigate a world of corporate intrigue and personal rivalry to find a killer hiding among the ruthless men and women competing to take the dead man's place.

A string of ritual knife killings is cutting down public officials across the country, the victims linked by their roles in crimes against Native Americans. Lucas Davenport joins forces with a tough New York detective to hunt the assassins — and to untangle a conspiracy with roots in decades of injustice.

A dirty political trick — incriminating material planted on a senate candidate's computer — explodes into something far worse when the operative behind it disappears and a body turns up. Lucas Davenport is pulled into a high-stakes election-year investigation where the players are wealthy, ruthless, and willing to kill to win.

NYPD Detective Michael Bennett faces a hostage crisis when a criminal mastermind seizes mourners at a former First Lady's funeral inside St. Patrick's Cathedral. As Bennett negotiates for the lives of the powerful, his wife is dying at home and his ten adopted children need him too.

An entire family is slaughtered in an affluent Minnesota suburb, the savagery of the killings a message in itself. Lucas Davenport's investigation leads to a Mexican drug cartel, a laundering operation, and a stolen fortune — and to cartel enforcers who treat torture and murder as ordinary business.

Bruce Medway takes on a job in Ivory Coast that involves a dead American, a missing consignment of weapons-grade materials, and the fractious politics of West African civil conflict. The second Medway novel deepens the portrait of the region's corruption and violence while sending its protagonist deeper into danger than the first book managed.

When a narcotics detective is found dead of an apparent suicide, Harry Bosch isn't satisfied with the easy answer. His unauthorized investigation leads from the LAPD's own ranks to the Mexican border and a deadly new drug called black ice, into a case the department would rather he leave alone.

A sixteen-year-old American boy, Frank Pierson, appears at Tom Ripley's door in France claiming to have pushed his wheelchair-bound millionaire father off a cliff. Ripley, intrigued, takes the boy under his wing and accompanies him to Berlin — where they attend transvestite clubs in West Berlin, encounter kidnappers, and where Ripley must decide how much he cares about what happens to this strange, guilty young man.

A young Chicago lawyer takes on the appeal of a Mississippi death-row inmate convicted of a Klan bombing decades earlier. The catch: the condemned man is his own grandfather, an unrepentant racist, and the clock to execution is running down to weeks.

Retired from the LAPD and at odds with the department, Harry Bosch is asked by his half-brother, defense attorney Mickey Haller, to investigate a murder Haller's client is accused of committing. For a lifelong cop, working for the defense is a betrayal of everything he believes — but if the client is innocent, the real killer is still free.

Robert Forester has been watching a young woman, Jenny, through her kitchen window each evening — not prurient but drawn to the warmth of her domestic life, which contrasts with his disintegrating own. When Jenny discovers him, she is not frightened — she is fascinated. The novel spirals into false accusation, murder, and the complete unravelling of social reality as everyone around Robert becomes convinced he is responsible for things he didn't do.

Harry Bosch catches two cases at once: a cold-case DNA hit that impossibly points to a suspect who was only eight years old at the time, and the fatal fall of a city councilman's son — investigated at the personal request of Bosch's oldest enemy. With his own retirement clock ticking, Bosch works both to the bone.

With the recession gutting his business, Mickey Haller has turned to foreclosure defense — until one of his clients, a woman fighting to keep her home, is accused of murdering the banker trying to take it. The case drags Haller back into the criminal courtroom, defending a client whose guilt is far from clear.

A foreign film director is found dead in a luxury Bangkok hotel. Sonchai's investigation leads him to the heroin trade, a Tibetan Buddhist master in Kathmandu who is also a drug lord, and a meditation on the nature of attachment — the root of suffering in Buddhist teaching, and also the engine of the drug trade. The fourth Sonchai novel, expanding the series to Nepal.

A lawyer faked his own death, vanished with ninety million dollars, and built a new life in Brazil. Four years later the bounty hunters find him. Now Patrick Lanigan must outwit the vengeful partners, the FBI, and a murder charge using the one weapon he never stopped sharpening: the law.

Alex Cross is in the dock. Charged with murder after a deadly shooting and suspended from duty, he faces a trial that could end his career and send him to prison. But even as he fights for his freedom, he can't ignore a string of disappearances pointing to a predator hiding behind a screen.

A disbarred lawyer serving time in federal prison claims to know who murdered a federal judge. In exchange for his freedom, he offers the FBI the killer's name. But Malcolm Bannister has a far more intricate game in play, and almost nothing is what it seems.

In 1946 Mississippi, a decorated war hero walks into church and shoots his town's beloved Methodist minister dead, then refuses to say why. As his family fights to save the farm and his lawyer fights to save his life, the reason behind the killing reaches back to a hellish wartime ordeal.

Laid off from the Los Angeles Times, crime reporter Jack McEvoy has two weeks left and one last story to chase. What looks like a routine murder becomes the trail of a serial killer who hides in the digital world — a data-center engineer who stalks his victims through the information they never knew they'd left behind.

In a small Tennessee town, Jack Reacher saves a hapless IT manager from a kidnapping and uncovers a ransomware plot with national-security stakes. The Sentinel marks the first Reacher novel co-written by Lee Child and his brother Andrew, beginning the series handover.

A hostage crisis at a powerful Washington law firm shatters a young attorney's gilded life. After a homeless man takes him captive at gunpoint, Michael Brock abandons his six-figure track to fight for the city's dispossessed, uncovering a wrongful eviction his own firm helped engineer.

An eccentric billionaire leaves his eleven-billion-dollar fortune to an illegitimate daughter no one knew existed, a missionary deep in the Brazilian wilderness. A burned-out, alcoholic lawyer is sent to find her, and the search becomes a journey toward redemption far from any courtroom.

When Renée Ballard's badge, gun, and ID are stolen, the theft becomes a personal crisis on top of her cold-case work — including a decades-old serial-killer case she's chasing through genetic genealogy. Help arrives from an unexpected volunteer: Maddie Bosch, Harry's daughter, now a patrol officer ready to take up the family calling.