Best Crime Fiction Books

Jake Brigance returns to defend Drew Gamble, a sixteen-year-old who killed his mother's abusive boyfriend — a decorated local deputy — in the small town of Clanton, Mississippi. The third Jake Brigance novel is Grisham's richest portrait of the fictional Ford County he has built over three decades.

Reacher hitches a ride with three strangers on a Nebraska highway and quickly determines that one of them is a killer. An FBI roadblock, a missing woman, and a trailer full of secrets turn a routine ride into something far more dangerous.

After a wealthy man's funeral, his scatty younger sister blurts out that he was murdered — and the next day she is brutally killed herself. Was her remark idle nonsense, or did it sign her death warrant? Hercule Poirot infiltrates the grieving family to find out.

An American family on holiday in Petra, Jordan, is controlled by a tyrannical matriarch, Mrs Boynton. When she is found dead at an archaeological dig, Poirot must determine which of her long-oppressed family members finally snapped.

A spiteful old millionaire summons his estranged family home for Christmas, then is found with his throat cut behind a bolted door, the room a wreck and a pool of blood spreading across the floor. Hercule Poirot, dining nearby, is drawn into a very bloody locked-room puzzle.

Alex Cross races to find a serial kidnapper called Casanova who keeps intelligent, accomplished women as captives in an underground harem — while simultaneously discovering that his own niece Naomi has become one of Casanova's victims.

A brilliant, obsessive madman abducts a prominent psychiatrist and her two daughters, holding them captive while he plays a deadly game of wits with the police. Lucas Davenport faces a kidnapper smarter than anyone he has hunted — a man who knows more about the human mind, and how to break it, than Davenport himself.

A retired detective haunted by an unsolved massacre — a stolen Mercedes driven into a crowd of job-seekers — is taunted back into the hunt when the killer contacts him directly. Stephen King's Edgar Award-winning leap into the pure crime thriller.

The murder of a Hong Kong immigrant liquor store owner in South Los Angeles leads Bosch into a confrontation with triad extortion networks — and then to Hong Kong itself, when a video surfaces appearing to show his daughter Maddie in danger.

While vacationing in London, CIA analyst Jack Ryan foils an IRA assassination attempt on the Prince of Wales and becomes the target of a vengeful splinter faction determined to kill him and his family on American soil.

A young bride buys an English seaside house and finds it uncannily familiar — she knows where a hidden door once was and recoils from a memory of a strangled woman on the stairs. Miss Marple warns her to let sleeping murder lie, but the past will not stay buried.

Two strangers meet on a train: Guy Haines, an architect trying to escape his unhappy marriage, and Charles Bruno, a wealthy charming sociopath. Bruno proposes a perfect crime — they will swap murders, each killing the other's problem person. Guy refuses, but Bruno kills his wife anyway, then demands Guy complete the bargain. Highsmith's debut novel and the template for her entire career: the complicity between the guilty and the innocent, the creeping contamination of violence.

Three years after the trial that made his name, Jake Brigance is handed a stunning case: a dying white millionaire hangs himself and leaves his entire fortune to his Black housekeeper, cutting out his family. The contested will reopens old wounds in a Mississippi town still divided by race.

When Kinsey Millhone's elderly neighbor needs live-in care, a seemingly perfect nurse named Solana Rojas arrives to look after him. But Solana is not who she claims — she is a predator who steals identities and bleeds the vulnerable dry, and Kinsey is the only one who senses the danger before it's too late.

Inspector Javier Falcón of the Seville homicide squad is called to the scene of a man found dead in front of a painting of Goya's Saturn Devouring His Son — eyes burnt out, posed with deliberate horror. The investigation pulls Falcón into his own family history, specifically the life of his celebrated father, the painter Francisco Falcón. Set against Seville's streets and its Moorish architecture, the first Falcón novel establishes one of crime fiction's most psychologically complex detectives.

A New Year's Eve death on a military base in 1990 pulls Major Jack Reacher into a murder investigation as the Cold War ends. Lee Child rewinds the clock to Reacher's army days, delivering a tense, procedural prequel and a rare look at the man in uniform.

Quincy Miller has spent twenty-two years on death row for the murder of a small-town Florida lawyer, a crime he insists he did not commit. When a handwritten letter reaches a small innocence organisation, its director takes on the case — knowing that the real killer is still out there and still dangerous.

Suspended from the LAPD and ordered into therapy after assaulting his commanding officer, Harry Bosch turns his enforced downtime toward the one case he could never close: the unsolved murder of his own mother, a prostitute killed when he was a boy. The investigation forces him to confront the wound that made him.

A glamorous film star buys a grand house in St. Mary Mead, and at her welcome party a starstruck local woman is poisoned. The intended victim seems obvious — yet the truth lies in a frozen look on the actress's face and a single line of poetry that Miss Marple cannot forget.

When the universally disliked Colonel Protheroe is found shot dead in the vicarage study, the quiet English village of St. Mary Mead erupts with suspects, false confessions and gossip — and an elderly spinster proves the sharpest mind for miles around.

When Emily Inglethorp is found dead at Styles Court, her stepson calls in his Belgian refugee friend Hercule Poirot to investigate. Christie's debut novel introduces one of fiction's most beloved detectives and establishes the country-house mystery template.

Crime reporter Jack McEvoy refuses to believe his twin brother, a homicide detective, killed himself. Digging into the death, McEvoy uncovers a pattern: detectives across the country dying in staged suicides, each marked with a line of Edgar Allan Poe. He has stumbled onto a serial killer — and a story that could destroy him.

A broke, freshly minted law graduate takes on a billion-dollar insurance company over a denied claim that cost a young man his life. With nothing but nerve and a paralegal sidekick, Rudy Baylor walks into his first-ever trial against a battalion of corporate lawyers.

From the window of a parallel train, elderly Elspeth McGillicuddy watches a man strangle a woman — then the other train is gone and no body is ever found. Only her friend Miss Marple believes her, and only Miss Marple will prove it.