Best Crime Fiction Books

Brady Hartsfield should be a vegetable in a hospital bed — but something has awakened in him, a power to reach into minds and drive the vulnerable to suicide. Bill Hodges and Holly Gibney face their oldest enemy one last time in the trilogy's chilling finale.

Kinsey Millhone is hired to find an elderly woman lost in the Mojave Desert — and learns, at the same time, that a man she once helped put away has placed a contract on her life. With a hit man closing in, Kinsey hires bodyguard Robert Dietz, and two cases collide as she races to stay alive.

When Letty, Lucas Davenport's adopted daughter, gets a desperate call from a young drifter she once helped, Lucas is drawn into the hunt for a roving cult led by a charismatic monster called Pilate — a band of killers preying on the 'travelers' who drift along the margins of America.

Now a U.S. Marshal with a roving national brief, Lucas Davenport takes on his first big case: hunting a vicious robber who stole millions from a drug cartel and left a trail of bodies. But Lucas isn't the only one chasing the money — the cartel has sent two of its most ruthless killers to find the thief first.

Seven years after the events of The Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal Lecter is living freely in Florence under an assumed identity, pursued simultaneously by a vengeful Mason Verger — the only surviving victim — and by Clarice Starling, now an embattled FBI agent.

Harlem, 1960s: Ray Carney sells furniture by day and fences stolen goods on the side, telling himself he's only "slightly bent." Whitehead's crime novel is a departure from his recent literary fiction — a Harlem panorama that celebrates a world and an era while examining the costs of respectability.

Private investigator Holly Gibney takes the case of a missing young woman and follows a trail to a pair of genteel, elderly academics hiding monstrous appetites in their basement. Stephen King gives his most beloved recurring heroine a chilling, twisty case of her own.

Wendell Jaffe drowned himself five years ago, leaving behind a collapsed investment fraud and a paid-out life insurance policy. So why has someone just seen him alive in Mexico? Kinsey Millhone is hired to find out — a case that will lead her south of the border and, unexpectedly, to the discovery that she has a living family she never knew.

A grieving mother asks Kinsey Millhone to investigate her daughter's death, ruled undetermined but never explained. As Kinsey digs into Lorna Kepler's hidden life and works the small hours when the city's darker business is done, she's drawn into a nocturnal world — and toward a choice that tests her own moral code.

Edinburgh detective John Rebus investigates a series of murders of young girls while receiving taunting messages from a person who seems to know his past. The first Inspector Rebus novel — shorter and darker than the later series, more psychological thriller than police procedural.

At a remote archaeological dig in Iraq, the famous archaeologist's beautiful, fearful wife is found bludgeoned in her room — a room no stranger could have entered unseen. A nurse narrates the strange events, and Hercule Poirot happens to be passing through the desert.

What begins as a routine hunt for a bail-jumping debt collector turns horrifying when Lucas Davenport discovers the fugitive is a murderer — and worse, a cannibal who has buried his victims across the desert. The chase runs from Louisiana to Las Vegas to Los Angeles, with marshals Bob and Rae at Lucas's side.

Reacher finally reaches Virginia to meet the woman whose voice intrigued him, only to find himself arrested, framed, and told he may have a daughter. Lee Child's eighteenth Reacher thriller is a personal, fugitive-on-the-run story with unusually high emotional stakes.

A meticulous predator stalks the Twin Cities, killing women and keeping grisly trophies, his crimes spanning years without ever drawing notice. Lucas Davenport joins forces with a fierce, terminally ill investigator determined to catch the killer before her own time runs out — a hunt that becomes as personal as it is urgent.

Alex Cross hunts a killer who treats murder as a game. Geoffrey Shafer, a British diplomat in Washington, plays a fantasy role-playing contest called The Four Horsemen, earning points for real killings — and when the hunt turns personal, Cross's own happiness becomes the prize.

Mickey Haller has turned to freeing the wrongly convicted, and his investigator is none other than Harry Bosch. Their newest case: a woman serving life for killing her husband, a sheriff's deputy. As Bosch digs into the evidence and Haller prepares to overturn the conviction, they find powerful forces determined to keep the truth buried.

A group of wealthy tech vigilantes calling themselves 'the Five' begins murdering people they deem deserving of death — and announcing each killing online with self-righteous manifestos. Lucas Davenport and Virgil Flowers join forces to stop a band of killers who believe they are doing the world a favor.

A string of bank robberies turns lethal when a meticulous mastermind kills hostages even after his instructions are followed to the letter. Alex Cross chases a criminal who plans every move with terrifying precision — and ends on a revelation that reshapes the series.

Thirty-four years ago, Violet Sullivan put on her party dress, drove off on the Fourth of July, and was never seen again. Her daughter, only seven at the time, hires Kinsey Millhone to find out what happened. To solve it, Kinsey must reconstruct a vanished summer — and Grafton steps outside Kinsey's narration to show it unfolding.

The killer Lucas Davenport thought he had stopped has resurfaced in New York City, leaving a trail of bodies in the urban shadows. Davenport travels east to help hunt him down — and is drawn into a second, separate investigation into a cabal of rogue cops who have decided to mete out their own brand of justice.

A pre-dawn pharmacy robbery turns deadly, and the only witness who can identify the killers is Lucas Davenport's wife, Weather. As the robbers move to silence her before she can testify, Davenport finds himself in the most personal fight of his career — protecting the woman he loves from men with everything to lose.

When a bank robber is gunned down in a police operation, her ruthless husband swears revenge — not just on the cops who killed her, but on their families. As the killings begin, Lucas Davenport realizes the vendetta is being aided from inside the system, and that everyone he loves may be a target.

In 1997, still a major in the army's military police, Jack Reacher is sent undercover to a small Mississippi town to investigate a brutal murder near a secretive army base. What he uncovers — a cover-up that reaches high up the chain of command — will end his military career and set him on the road for good.

Twenty years ago, during the chaos of the 1992 Los Angeles riots, a Danish photojournalist was shot dead in an alley, her killing lost among hundreds of others. Now a bullet links her case to other crimes, and Harry Bosch finally has a thread to pull — the single piece of evidence that can explain a murder everyone else forgot.