Best Crime Fiction Books

San Francisco detective Lindsay Boxer, recently diagnosed with a blood disease, teams up with a journalist, an assistant DA, and a medical examiner to catch a serial killer targeting newlywed couples. The first Women's Murder Club novel launched a beloved second Patterson series.

Lara is trained from birth to be a spy-bride sent to destroy the Bridge Kingdom from within, but when she arrives she must choose between the mission she was raised for and the truth she discovers.

The novel that introduced Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson to the world. A locked-room murder in London, a flashback to Mormon Utah, and the birth of the world's only consulting detective make this the essential origin of the greatest figure in detective fiction.

Poirot and Hastings return to Styles Court for the last time. Poirot is elderly and gravely ill, but he has identified a murderer who has never been convicted — and he intends to act. Written during World War II, published posthumously in 1975.

Sixteen years after artist Amyas Crale was poisoned, his daughter asks Poirot to clear her mother's name. Poirot interviews the five witnesses who were present that summer, and each gives a different account of the same events.

An orphan boy escapes the workhouse only to fall in with a gang of London pickpockets led by the scheming Fagin. Dickens's second novel is his most socially radical — a direct attack on the Poor Laws and a vivid portrait of the Victorian criminal underworld.

The second Sherlock Holmes novel weaves stolen treasure, a mysterious four-man pact, and a chase through the fog-bound Thames into a tightly plotted adventure. Watson falls in love with their client while Holmes remains coldly analytical — a contrast that gives the story much of its warmth.

A bus crash in a South Dakota blizzard strands Reacher in a small town where a witness to a drug case is under threat, a nearby military installation holds a dangerous secret, and Reacher has 61 hours before everything goes wrong. Child's countdown structure turns each chapter into a timer.

The Chipping Cleghorn Gazette carries a curious advertisement: a murder is announced and will take place on Friday evening at 6:30pm at Little Paddocks. The village assumes it's a party game. When the appointed time arrives and shots are fired, Miss Marple must untangle a mystery where even the victim's identity is uncertain.

Members of Reacher's old Special Investigations unit are being murdered one by one, and someone has wired $30,000 into Reacher's bank account — the unit's old distress signal. For the first time in the series, Reacher assembles a team to find out who is hunting his people.

Detective Mick 'Scorcher' Kennedy investigates the brutal murder of a young family in a half-built ghost estate — and discovers a connection to his own past he cannot afford to acknowledge.

When Aristide Leonides, the wealthy patriarch of a three-generation household, is poisoned in his own home, his granddaughter Sophia asks her fiancé Charles Hayward to uncover which family member is responsible. Christie called this one of her personal favourites.

A man arrested for a current murder offers a confession to a cold case as a bargaining chip — the 1993 disappearance of Marie Gesto, a case Harry Bosch has never stopped working. But as the confession is entered and the case is closed, Bosch's instincts tell him something is wrong.

Undercover detective Frank Mackey's carefully constructed life unravels when the suitcase of the girl he loved — and believed had abandoned him twenty-two years ago — is found in a derelict house on Faithful Place.

Lucas Davenport investigates a series of bodies found in an isolated Minnesota field — a killer who has been operating undetected for years in small-town America.

On a New York City subway at 2am, Reacher spots a woman exhibiting the eleven behavioural signs of a suicide bomber. What follows spirals into a conspiracy reaching back to Afghanistan and forward into a senator's carefully constructed political future.

Reacher stops at a town called Mother's Rest with no reason other than curiosity about the name. A journalist searching for a missing colleague pulls him into something far darker — a secret that explains the town's strange, unsettled atmosphere and that proves to be genuinely horrifying.

A sniper kills five random people in a midwestern city. The evidence is overwhelming. The suspect is in custody. He asks for one thing: Jack Reacher. Reacher arrives not to help the man get off, but to make sure justice is done — only to discover that something about the case does not add up.

Retired FBI profiler Will Graham, who was nearly killed capturing Hannibal Lecter, is called back to help catch a serial killer called the Tooth Fairy — and must return to Lecter's cell to get inside the new killer's mind.

Hercule Poirot receives a taunting letter predicting a murder — and the victim's name begins with A, the murder location begins with A, and a copy of the ABC railway guide is left at the scene. The killer works alphabetically, and the police assume a serial killer with no motive. Poirot is certain the obvious answer is a decoy.

A man shot ten years ago in a drive-by shooting finally dies of his wound — the bullet lodged too close to his spine to remove — making it a homicide a decade after the fact. Bosch and his new partner Lucia Soto must reconstruct a crime that the city has long since moved on from.

Eleven-year-old Mark Sway witnesses a lawyer's suicide and learns a dangerous secret — the location of a murdered Senator's body. Now the mob wants Mark dead, the federal government wants him as a witness, and Mark is too smart to trust either side. He hires his own lawyer: Reggie Love, a Memphis attorney who believes him.

Harry Bosch comes out of retirement to join the LAPD's Open-Unsolved Unit, working cold cases. His first assignment: the 1988 murder of sixteen-year-old Rebecca Verloren, whose case was buried in ways a DNA match on the murder weapon has just made impossible to ignore.

Harry Bosch is being sued for wrongful death by the family of a man he shot — a man he believed was the Dollmaker, a serial killer who preyed on prostitutes. As the civil trial grinds forward, a new body surfaces with the Dollmaker's signature, suggesting Bosch may have killed the wrong man.