Best Crime Fiction Books

San Francisco private detective Sam Spade is hired by a woman who calls herself Miss Wonderly to follow a man — and within twenty-four hours his partner Miles Archer is dead, he is tangled with the San Francisco police and a group of international criminals, and at the centre of it all is a statuette of a black bird supposedly worth a fortune.

Detective Antoinette Conway and her partner Stephen Moran catch what looks like a routine domestic killing — but someone in the Murder Squad is pushing hard to close the case fast, and Conway can't tell who to trust.

A cipher message leads Holmes to Birlstone Manor and a suspicious death, before the novel pivots to the Pennsylvania coalfields and the brutal secret society known as the Scowrers. The fourth and final Holmes novel draws on the real Molly Maguires to give its American backstory genuine historical weight.

A failed bank robber takes a group of apartment hunters hostage at an open house. When police arrive, the hostage-taker has vanished and no one in the group is talking. Told across multiple perspectives and timelines, Anxious People is a comedy-mystery about failure, loneliness, and the quiet kindnesses people extend to strangers when no one is watching.

An eccentric host gathers four sleuths and four people who have gotten away with murder for a dinner of bridge. By evening's end the host is dead in his chair, stabbed while his guests played cards — and one of the four murderers has killed again, in the same room, unseen.

A dog turns up a child's bone on a Hollywood hillside, and Harry Bosch is drawn into a cold case two decades old: the murder of a boy whose body was buried and forgotten. As Bosch reconstructs a short, brutal life, the case tests his faith in the work — and a new love forces a reckoning about his future.

Jack Reacher is accidentally grabbed off a Chicago street alongside a woman he barely knows — an FBI agent named Holly Johnson. Their kidnappers are a heavily armed militia group with a survivalist compound in Montana and a plan that amounts to mass murder. Reacher has no weapon, no help, and an 800-mile journey between him and the militia's endgame.

Hitchhiking through the Texas heat, Reacher accepts a ride from Carmen Greer — a woman fleeing an abusive husband who is due home from prison. By the time Reacher understands the full picture of the Greer family, the Echo County ranch, and the three hired killers heading for it, he is already too involved to walk away.

Poirot takes his holiday at Smugglers' Island off the Devon coast — and finds himself surrounded by the usual Christie ensemble: the glamorous actress everyone resents, the various husbands and wives with complicated relationships, and the idle rich who have all the time in the world for grudges. When the actress is found strangled, everyone on the island claims an alibi.

Hamburg, 1996. Reacher is pulled from his regular Army assignment and placed in a clandestine inter-agency team — the so-called night school — tasked with identifying an unknown buyer who is about to pay $100 million for something unknown. A prequel-in-spirit showing Reacher at his military peak.

Reacher decides to visit the New Hampshire town where his father was born — and finds no record of the Reacher family ever existing there. Simultaneously, a young Canadian couple becomes trapped at a remote motel where nothing is as it appears. A rare entry in the series that invites the reader to think about who Reacher really is.

A near-impossible sniper shot attempted against the French president — from 1,400 yards — points to one of four living marksmen, including Reacher's old adversary John Kott. Reacher is sent to Paris and London to find the shooter before a G8 summit becomes a killing ground.

Tom Ripley is insulted at a party by Jonathan Trevanny, a picture framer in Fontainebleau with a terminal blood disease, and decides to arrange a small act of vengeance: he has Jonathan recruited, through an intermediary, to carry out a Mafia killing on a train. Jonathan, desperate for money for his family, agrees — and Ripley watches, and then becomes involved in ways he didn't plan. Widely considered the best novel in the Ripley series.

Minneapolis detective Lucas Davenport hunts a serial killer who is following his own macabre rules — a game of cat and mouse that introduces one of crime fiction's most enduring protagonists.

Philip Marlowe, private detective, is hired by the aging General Sternwood to deal with a blackmailer — and finds himself drawn into a Los Angeles underworld of pornography, gambling, and murder involving the General's two dangerous daughters, Vivian and Carmen.

LAPD detective Harry Bosch investigates the murder of a Vietnam veteran found dead in a drainpipe in the Hollywood Hills — and discovers a trail leading to a daring bank heist tied to the tunnels both men once crawled through in the war.

When a young woman's body is found in the library at Gossington Hall, the owners call on their friend Miss Jane Marple. Investigating from St Mary Mead, the village spinster must determine who the victim was before she can determine who killed her.

New York City in the far future is a vast enclosed city of eight million people who rarely venture outside. Detective Elijah Baley is assigned to investigate a murder at a Spacer enclave — and is given a robot partner named R. Daneel Olivaw. Asimov's fusion of science fiction and classic detective fiction, set in one of his most vividly imagined futures.

Easter in Three Pines: a séance in the old Hadley house ends in death, and Chief Inspector Gamache must determine whether it was fright, murder, or something more sinister. The third Gamache novel deepens the series' psychological and spiritual preoccupations.

When a local antiques dealer is murdered and a consignment of heroin goes missing, the Thursday Murder Club has a new case. But this investigation is personal — one of their own is directly connected to the dead man — and the answers they find will test the friendship at the heart of the group.

A year after a boy was murdered on the grounds of a Dublin girls' boarding school, a card appears on the school's anonymous message board: 'I know who killed him.' Detective Stephen Moran sees his chance to make the Murder Squad.

In Money, Mississippi — the town where Emmett Till was murdered — a series of killings leave white supremacists dead alongside the mutilated body of a Black man who keeps disappearing from the morgue. Two Black detectives from the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation investigate while an elderly woman has been recording the names of lynching victims for fifty years.

A Hollywood film producer is found shot dead in the trunk of his Rolls-Royce in the hills above Mulholland Drive. The method — two bullets, body in the trunk — is a classic mob signature. Bosch's investigation pulls him from the Hollywood entertainment industry into the organized crime networks of Las Vegas.

A detour through rural Nebraska puts Reacher between the Duncan family — a violent local crime dynasty that controls everything for miles — and the frightened community that has lived under their thumb for decades. A stripped-back Reacher story with the feel of a modern western.