Best Crime Fiction Books

Boston private investigators Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro are hired to find a missing government worker who stole documents from a state senator. What begins as a routine job draws them into Dorchester's gang wars, racial politics, and the violence that underlies South Boston's civic surface.

A wealthy financier dies of poisoning with a curious handful of rye in his jacket pocket. When two more deaths follow a pattern straight out of a nursery rhyme, Miss Marple arrives with a personal stake and a chilling theory about who is keeping the rhyme.

A killer is torturing and murdering victims with terrible precision, and the clues suggest he is enacting the fantasies of three of the most notorious serial killers ever locked away in a Minnesota security hospital. To catch him, Lucas Davenport must consult the very monsters whose dreams the killer is making real.

When two small skeletons are unearthed beneath a demolished Minneapolis house, the bones reopen a case that has haunted Lucas Davenport since he was a young patrol cop — the disappearance of two girls he could never forget. Now, decades later, he gets a second chance to catch a killer he was sure got away.

Gary Soneji, the kidnapper from Along Came a Spider, escapes prison and launches a final campaign of revenge against Alex Cross — while across the Atlantic, FBI agent Thomas Pierce hunts a mutilation killer known only as Mr. Smith. Two manhunts converge in one of Patterson's most audacious thrillers.

A cold, brilliant professional killer takes a job for an obsessed lawyer who wants a rival dead — and when the hit spirals into a string of bodies, Lucas Davenport finds himself matched against one of the most formidable assassins he has ever faced. Clara Rinker kills without passion and without mistakes, and she does not intend to be caught.

The second Harlem Shuffle novel — Ray Carney navigates 1970s Harlem through three interlinked stories spanning 1971, 1973, and 1976, as the neighbourhood burns, rebuilds, and transforms around him.

Libby Day survived the massacre of her family when she was seven years old and testified that her teenage brother Ben was responsible. Twenty-five years later, a true crime enthusiast group called the Kill Club convinces her to reinvestigate — and what she uncovers suggests the conviction was built on a child's traumatized misremembering.

Vic Van Allen is the model suburban husband — except that he allows his wife Melinda to carry on a series of affairs openly, to prevent her from leaving him. When one of her lovers is found dead, Vic lets it be known that he killed him. He didn't — but the bluff establishes something. A portrait of suburban American life as a theatre of controlled violence, and one of Highsmith's most chilling studies in the psychology of a particular kind of man.

A brilliant, drug-addled pathologist and a charming, sociopathic actor strike a murderous bargain. As bodies turn up with their eyes destroyed, Lucas Davenport — himself sunk in a deep depression — must climb out of his own darkness to outthink a pair of killers as theatrical as they are deadly.

A obsessed fan murders a reclusive novelist for his unpublished notebooks, then buries the loot — until, decades later, a teenage boy unearths it, and a paroled killer comes hunting. Stephen King's literary-obsession thriller and the second Bill Hodges novel.

A wealthy family needs its long-lost black sheep found before a fortune can be divided. Kinsey Millhone traces Guy Malek — vanished eighteen years ago, now a gentle, born-again man — and reunites him with the brothers who never wanted him back. Then Guy is murdered, and the family's old wounds turn lethal.

Professional assassin Clara Rinker has retired to a quiet life in Mexico — until a hit meant for her kills her lover instead. Bent on vengeance against the people who tried to kill her, she returns to the United States on a one-woman war, and the FBI recruits Lucas Davenport, the one cop who truly understands her, to stop her.

A humble charwoman is beaten to death and her lodger is sentenced to hang for it. But the policeman who built the case cannot shake his doubts and begs Hercule Poirot to look again. Buried in an old newspaper, Poirot finds a clue that links a long-dead scandal to a quiet English village.

A box of Kinsey Millhone's old belongings surfaces with a returned letter that overturns everything she believed about her first marriage. The husband she walked out on after he was accused of a brutal beating may have been innocent — and her own testimony wrong. When he's shot and left for dead, Kinsey must confront her past.

Jack Reacher goes undercover to infiltrate a criminal's fortress on the Maine coast, working with the DEA to rescue an agent inside. But his real reason is personal: the operation is run by a man Reacher believed he had killed years ago, and the chance to finish an old job is one he cannot refuse.

Eighteen years ago, the body of an unidentified young woman was found dumped near a quarry, her murder never solved and her name never known. Now two ailing retired detectives ask Kinsey Millhone to help them close the case that has haunted them — to give a forgotten Jane Doe back her name before they run out of time.

Tom Ripley has settled into comfortable French country life at his villa Belle Ombre with his wealthy wife Héloïse. He is co-managing a scheme to sell forged paintings attributed to a dead artist named Derwatt. When an American collector arrives convinced the paintings are fraudulent, Ripley must manage the situation — which escalates, as Ripley situations always do. The second Ripley novel, fifteen years after The Talented Mr. Ripley.

Beautiful Elinor Carlisle stands in the dock, accused of poisoning her rival in love. The motive, means and opportunity all point to her alone — and the case against her looks airtight. Only Hercule Poirot, brought in by a doubting doctor, believes there may be another truth.

Crime journalist Camille Preaker is sent back to her small Missouri hometown to cover the murders of two young girls, and back into the orbit of her controlling mother Adora and half-sister Amma. Flynn's debut is a novel about women's violence against women, and the ways trauma writes itself permanently on the body.

US Marshal Teddy Daniels arrives at Ashecliffe Hospital for the criminally insane on Shutter Island to investigate the disappearance of a patient — and finds himself questioning his own grip on reality as the investigation deepens and the island refuses to give up its secrets.

When a fellow defense attorney is murdered, Mickey Haller inherits his entire practice overnight — including a high-profile Hollywood double-murder trial. But the killer may not be finished, and as Haller prepares his defense, LAPD detective Harry Bosch warns him that he could be the next target.

When a series of brutal murders in Copenhagen is linked by small figures made of chestnuts left at each scene, detectives Naia Thulin and Mark Hess discover a connection to the missing daughter of a prominent politician — a girl who has been gone for a year and is assumed dead.

Ian Rankin's twelfth Inspector Rebus novel. When a wealthy Edinburgh student vanishes, John Rebus follows two strange clues — a tiny carved coffin found in a village called Falls, and an online role-playing game run by an enigmatic 'Quizmaster' — into a dark, intricate investigation.