Best Crime Fiction Books

A widow hires Kinsey Millhone to find out what was troubling her husband, a respected detective, in the weeks before he died. The job takes Kinsey to the small Sierra town of Nota Lake, where the questions she asks are not welcome — and where someone is willing to hurt her badly to keep the answers buried.

A respected doctor vanishes nine weeks before Kinsey Millhone is hired to find him, his nursing-home empire already under investigation for Medicare fraud. As Kinsey untangles his disappearance, a separate danger creeps in from a charming new acquaintance whose interest in her turns out to be anything but innocent.

A wealthy woman's daughter vanishes, and soon young people in the Twin Cities Goth scene begin turning up dead. The only witness describes a shadowy figure no one else can find — a phantom. Lucas Davenport must determine whether the killer is real, imagined, or something stranger still.

A wealthy father hires Kinsey Millhone for a simple job: collect his wayward daughter Reba from prison and ease her back into respectable life. But Reba is wild, loyal to the wrong people, and tangled with a married money launderer — and Kinsey finds herself caught between minding her client and helping the woman she's come to like.

The fifth and final Ripley novel. An American couple, David and Janice Pritchard, move to the village near Ripley's Belle Ombre and begin investigating the disappearance of Dickie Greenleaf — whose killing, thirty years earlier, is the foundational crime of the entire series. Ripley must manage this threat with the same composure he has brought to every crisis, in a novel that is both a thriller and a late meditation on how long a constructed life can hold.

A meticulous killer who calls himself the Teacher is murdering New York's rich and entitled, punishing the rude and the privileged in a campaign of class rage. Detective Michael Bennett must stop him before the lessons turn into a citywide bloodbath — all while raising ten children at home.

Women Jack Reacher once knew in the army are turning up dead — no wounds, no poison, no cause of death the experts can name, just a chilling signature. When the FBI's profile of the killer points squarely at Reacher himself, he must catch the real murderer to clear his own name.

Patients are dying at a San Francisco hospital under circumstances that look less like misfortune than murder, each death marked by a strange symbolic token. As Lindsay Boxer hunts a killer hiding behind a white coat, Yuki Castellano fights a wrenching malpractice trial with the hospital — and the truth — on the line.

A gunman opens fire on a crowded San Francisco commuter ferry, and one of the wounded is someone Lindsay Boxer loves. As the club races to understand the shooter, a separate horror unfolds: children are vanishing from wealthy neighborhoods, taken by someone who knows exactly how to disappear.

A killer is murdering young mothers and their children in San Francisco parking garages, terrorizing the city. At the same time, a brazen jewel thief is robbing the rich and famous — and the two cases pull Lindsay Boxer in directions that test her judgment, and Yuki's, to the breaking point.

Sonchai encounters a man of extraordinary physical capability — an American military asset, a product of a black-ops enhancement programme — whose presence in Bangkok is connected to CIA operations that go back to the Vietnam War and forward into a disturbing future of human augmentation. The sixth Sonchai novel, the darkest and most politically charged.

Alex Cross's first case as an FBI agent pits him against the Wolf, a Russian crime lord running a business that abducts people to order and sells them to the highest bidder. As Cross learns the Bureau's ropes, a custody battle over his youngest son threatens the family he is fighting to protect.

Three disgraced former judges run a blackmail scam from inside a Florida prison, extorting closeted, wealthy men through fake letters. When one of their marks turns out to be a CIA-backed presidential candidate, their petty hustle collides with the most ruthless power players in Washington.

A string of murders — a federal judge, a lawyer, others who should have had nothing in common — draws Alex Cross and John Sampson into a conspiracy that reaches toward the highest levels of power. As Cross weighs a life-changing career decision, a familiar shadow returns to test him one more time.

An investigator for the agency that polices judicial misconduct receives a chilling tip: a sitting Florida judge is a meticulous serial killer who has eluded detection for years. As Lacy Stoltz digs into his hidden list of victims, she realizes her own name may be added to it.

Brad Thor's seventh Scot Harvath thriller. Counterterrorism operative Scot Harvath races across Europe and the Middle East to recover a lost secret about the origins of Islam — a revelation powerful enough to change history, and one that ruthless enemies will kill to keep buried.

A killer is murdering entire families in their homes, vanishing without a trace, and the press has dubbed him the most meticulous murderer in history. As Alex Cross hunts him, a celebrated true-crime writer who has made Cross his subject inserts himself into the investigation — with an agenda of his own.

Kinsey Millhone reports a shoplifting team she spots in a department store — a small good deed with deadly consequences. When one of the women is soon found dead, an apparent suicide, her grieving fiancé hires Kinsey, and the trail leads into a sophisticated organized-theft operation run by people who do not forgive interference.

Cassie Black, an ex-convict trying to go straight, agrees to one last high-stakes heist in Las Vegas — the score that will fund a new life and let her reclaim the daughter she gave up. But the job goes wrong, and a ruthless fixer is dispatched to recover what she took, hunting her across the desert in a deadly cat-and-mouse.

A kidnapper is abducting the children of New York's wealthiest families and quizzing them on the suffering of the poor — and when they fail his lessons in inequality, they die. Detective Michael Bennett and FBI agent Emily Parker race to stop a killer who has turned class guilt into a death sentence.

A devious divorcée cons Kinsey Millhone into helping locate an estranged son, the first thread in a web of deceit. Meanwhile, a dead colleague's files reveal a coded list — the record of a methodical killer who has murdered women for years without detection. The lone 'X' marks the series' darkest, most ruthless adversary.

Newly married, Lindsay Boxer barely has time for a honeymoon before a newborn baby vanishes and a terrified teenager stands accused. As Lindsay races to find the missing child, Yuki prosecutes a brutal assault case and Lindsay's own marriage is tested by the relentless pull of the job.

Severed heads are unearthed in the garden of a San Francisco mansion, and a vigilante is executing the city's drug dealers with a gun stolen from the police evidence locker. Newly pregnant and stretched thin, Lindsay Boxer must solve two cases that both seem to point uncomfortably close to home.

Lindsay Boxer gives birth just as three cases collide: a professor who dreams murders before they happen, a corpse that vanishes from the morgue, and a star athlete accused of a brutal killing. New motherhood and the relentless job pull Lindsay in every direction at once.