Best Crime Fiction Books

Dublin judge Andrew Fitzsimons and his wife Lydia kill a young woman named Annie and must maintain their respectable life while concealing the crime — told from multiple unreliable perspectives including Lydia's chilling first-person narration.

Lila Mae Watson is the first Black female elevator inspector in a segregated American city. When an elevator she has certified in good order falls in free-fall, she becomes a suspect in a larger conspiracy involving the city's two warring schools of elevator inspection: the Empiricists and the Intuitionists.

Two investigations fifty years apart — a contemporary Lisbon detective uncovering a murdered girl's story, and a German SS officer managing Portugal's wartime wolfram trade — whose threads converge in a single act of historical violence.

Thai detective Sonchai Jitpleecheep investigates the murder of an American Marine in Bangkok — a case involving jade smuggling, exotic snakes, and the city's sex industry, narrated with Buddhist equanimity and dark humour.

Twelve stories from The Strand Magazine collected into the first Holmes short story anthology, including A Scandal in Bohemia, The Red-Headed League, and The Speckled Band. The short story format reveals Conan Doyle's genius at compression — twelve complete puzzles delivered at full intensity.

Ten strangers with guilty secrets are lured to an island mansion, and one by one they are murdered according to a nursery rhyme — with no apparent killer among them.

Hercule Poirot is stranded on the snowbound Orient Express when a fellow passenger is murdered — and soon discovers that every suspect has an alibi and none of them can be trusted.

The most hated woman in Three Pines is found dead at the village curling match, electrocuted in a sealed outdoor space — and Chief Inspector Gamache discovers that almost everyone had reason to want her dead.

Lucas Davenport and Virgil Flowers investigate a drug smuggling operation off the Florida coast that is leaving federal agents dead — a crossover entry between Sandford's two major series.

In the broiling summer of 1974, as Boston erupts over court-ordered busing, hard-edged Southie mother Mary Pat Fennessy goes searching for her missing teenage daughter — a search that drags her into the city's racial fault lines and the secrets of her own neighborhood.

Chief Inspector Armand Gamache of the Sûreté du Québec investigates the suspicious death of a beloved woman in the idyllic village of Three Pines.

Criminal defense attorney Mickey Haller operates out of the back seat of his Lincoln Town Car, traveling between Los Angeles courthouses. When a wealthy Beverly Hills client hires him to fight a serious assault charge, Haller begins to suspect the man is guilty of something far worse — and that he has defended it before.

When the US government launches a covert military operation against Colombian drug cartels, Deputy National Security Advisor Jack Ryan uncovers a political conspiracy to disavow the soldiers involved — leaving them to die in the jungle rather than admit the mission existed.

A welder stumbles on a drug deal gone wrong in the Texas desert and takes the money, setting off a chain of pursuit involving a psychopathic killer and an aging sheriff who can no longer understand the world he patrols.

The Thursday Murder Club investigates a decade-old unsolved murder of a television journalist — while navigating a threat from a dangerous hitman who has targeted the Club itself.

Lisbeth Salander, recovering from near-fatal wounds, faces a murder trial while Mikael Blomkvist races to expose the secret government faction that has controlled and abused her since childhood.

The Thursday Murder Club investigates again when Elizabeth's long-lost ex-husband arrives at Coopers Chase with stolen diamonds and a death threat.

DC homicide detective and forensic psychologist Alex Cross is called to investigate when a brilliant, media-obsessed killer kidnaps two children from a prestigious private school — drawing Cross into the most complex and personal case of his career.

A hitman who only kills bad people takes one last job but finds himself entangled with an unexpected companion and a plot to destroy him.

Dublin Murder Squad detective Rob Ryan investigates a child murder in the woods where, as a boy, he survived a mysterious incident that left his two friends vanished and his memory blank.

Alex Cross races to catch two serial killers simultaneously — one targeting children in his own Washington DC neighbourhood, another assassinating celebrities in an escalating pattern. Patterson's dual-threat plot is the Alex Cross series at its most propulsive.

Disgraced journalist Mikael Blomkvist investigates the decades-old disappearance of a wealthy family's niece, partnering with the brilliant and deeply damaged Lisbeth Salander.

A communist spy embedded in the South Vietnamese army narrates his journey from the fall of Saigon through Los Angeles exile to reeducation camp, examining what it means to be perpetually between worlds.

Four retirement village residents — including a former spy and a retired psychiatrist — meet weekly to solve cold cases, and find themselves entangled in a very live one.