Best Crime Fiction Books

Mickey Haller takes the case of a man accused of killing a prostitute — only to discover the victim was a woman he once represented, a client he thought he had saved from the life. Haunted by guilt over her death, Haller mounts a defense that becomes a personal reckoning before the only gods that matter: the jury.

A coffee on a New York street corner draws Jack Reacher into a kidnapping case for a ruthless private military contractor. Lee Child's tenth Reacher thriller turns a tiny observation into a twisting hunt that crosses the Atlantic to a tense English finale.

A bomb destroys an apartment building in Seville, killing dozens and injuring hundreds. The investigation pulls Falcón into the world of Islamist extremism, Spanish intelligence, and the specifically Sevillian world of the Moorish quarter — the Barrio Santa Cruz — where the city's Christian and Islamic histories are still legible in the architecture. Wilson's most politically charged Falcón novel, written in the aftermath of the 2004 Madrid bombings.

Arriving for lunch at a country house, Hercule Poirot walks in on what looks like a staged tableau: a man dying beside the pool, his wife standing over him with a revolver. It is too neat to be true — and the truth, hidden among a tangle of lovers, runs far deeper.

Pulled over late at night, Mickey Haller is arrested when the body of a former client is found in the trunk of his Lincoln. Charged with murder and unable to make bail, Haller must defend the most important client of his career — himself — from a jail cell, against a system convinced he is guilty.

A West Point class ring in a pawn shop window sends Jack Reacher across the West to find the woman who earned it. Lee Child's twenty-second Reacher thriller becomes a quieter, more humane mystery about opioids, sacrifice, and the wounded veterans the country forgot.

Cal Hooper, a retired Chicago detective, buys a fixer-upper in rural Ireland seeking quiet and distance from his old life. A boy named Trey asks him to find his missing brother — and what Cal uncovers pulls him into a community with deep roots and older loyalties than he understands.

Digging swimming pools in the Florida Keys, Jack Reacher is found by a dying detective and pulled into a decades-old mystery from the Vietnam War. Lee Child's third Reacher thriller blends a propulsive hunt with one of the series' nastiest villains.

A vicar's son finds a man dying at the foot of a cliff. The stranger's last gasped words — 'Why didn't they ask Evans?' — make no sense, but they will not leave Bobby Jones alone. With the dauntless Lady Frankie at his side, he sets out to learn who Evans is and what they should have asked.

In the frozen north woods of Wisconsin, a family is butchered and their house burned. Lucas Davenport, living in self-imposed exile at his cabin, is pulled into the hunt for a killer known as the Iceman — a predator who knows the snowbound country far better than the law does, and who will kill again to protect his secret.

Eight years ago, divorce attorney Laurence Fife was poisoned, and his wife Nikki went to prison for it. Now released, Nikki hires private investigator Kinsey Millhone to find out who really killed him — a cold case that will lead Kinsey to a second poisoning, an old web of betrayals, and the first kill of her own career.

Framed as a story Alex Cross wrote about his own family's past, this historical novel follows Ben Corbett, a Washington lawyer sent by President Roosevelt to investigate a resurgence of Ku Klux Klan terror in 1906 Mississippi — where he confronts lynching, injustice, and a town's buried conscience.

A crusading civil-rights attorney who made his name suing the LAPD is shot dead on the Angels Flight funicular railway. Harry Bosch catches a case that could set the whole city alight — and that forces him to investigate the police department he serves, knowing the wrong answer could spark a second Los Angeles riot.

Sonchai is sent a snuff film by an anonymous source — a murder so perfectly executed that it functions as art. The investigation leads into the world of the Thai sex industry, the Buddhist concept of karma and rebirth, and a case that forces Sonchai to examine his own complicity in the system he polices. The third Sonchai novel, the most Buddhist in its philosophical dimension.

A CIA agent is found murdered in a Bangkok brothel, his body covered in religious tattoos. Detective Sonchai Jitpleecheep investigates — navigating between the American intelligence community, the Thai sex industry, the Buddhist spirit world, and his mother's complex position as a mamasan. The second Sonchai novel deepens the portrait of Bangkok as a city where Western and Thai moral frameworks operate in permanent collision.

Medway is drawn into the toxic world of Nigerian oil money and the corruption that surrounds it — a missing girl, a lethal cargo, and the specific violence of Lagos. Winner of the CWA Gold Dagger for Best Crime Novel of the Year. The third and finest Medway novel.

Retired FBI profiler Terry McCaleb is recovering from a heart transplant when a woman asks him to investigate a murder: her sister's. The victim was McCaleb's heart donor. Bound by an unpayable debt to the dead, McCaleb takes the case — and uncovers a connection between the murder and his own second chance at life that is more sinister than he could imagine.

Bobby Callahan barely survived the car crash that left him broken and partly amnesiac, but he's certain it wasn't an accident — someone tried to kill him, and he can't remember why. He hires Kinsey Millhone to find out. Then Bobby dies, and a case of attempted murder becomes a case of murder.

Five original F. Scott Fitzgerald manuscripts are stolen from Princeton's rare books vault. A young novelist struggling with her career is recruited by an insurance company to befriend a Florida bookseller suspected of brokering their sale. Grisham's most bookish novel — more literary caper than legal thriller.

Now a private psychologist, Alex Cross is pulled back into the field when his old partner asks for help with a sadistic rapist. The case reopens the oldest wound of Cross's life — the unsolved murder of his wife Maria — and sets him on the trail of the mob enforcer who may have pulled the trigger.

Working the late show — the LAPD's lonely overnight shift — Detective Renée Ballard finds a stranger going through old files at her station. He is Harry Bosch, chasing the long-cold murder of a teenage runaway no one else cares about. Two relentless detectives, a generation apart, join forces over a girl the system forgot.

An Andean village where three people have disappeared. A corporal and his assistant investigate: the suspects are Shining Path guerrillas, but the mystery deepens into something older and stranger—the Andean world of pishtacos (fat-extracting demons) and ancient violence. Vargas Llosa's novel about Peru's civil conflict as seen from the highlands.

On an afternoon flight from Paris to London, a moneylender is found dead in her seat, apparently killed by a poisoned dart from a blowpipe. The cabin was sealed, the passengers few — and one of them is Hercule Poirot, who slept through the perfect murder.

Renée Ballard, now running the LAPD's revived cold-case unit, recruits a retired Harry Bosch with an irresistible lure: the chance to finally solve the case that has haunted him for years — the slaughter of an entire family, buried in the desert. As they chase two cold cases, Bosch confronts his white whale.