Best Crime Fiction Books

Walter Stackhouse reads in the newspaper about the case of Melchior Kimmel, a bookseller accused of staging his wife's death as a bus accident. Walter, trapped in his own unhappy marriage, becomes obsessed with Kimmel's method. When his wife subsequently dies in similar circumstances, Kimmel turns the tables — he begins investigating Walter with the intensity of someone who recognises a mirror image.

Two boyhood friends from a Mississippi coast immigrant community grow up on opposite sides of the law: one becomes a prosecutor, the other heir to a violent crime syndicate. Their collision in a Biloxi courtroom caps a sweeping saga of family, corruption, and vengeance.

The nameless narrator of The Sympathizer arrives in 1980s Paris with his blood brother Bon, navigating the Vietnamese exile community, Algerian drug networks, and French intellectual life while still haunted by his double-consciousness and the interrogations he survived.

Set partly in WWII Lisbon — neutral Portugal as the espionage capital of Europe — and partly in the present day, as Javier Falcón investigates a case that connects to wartime intelligence operations. Wilson returns to the Portugal of A Small Death in Lisbon to interweave Falcón's modern investigation with the wartime story of an SOE agent and the shadowy world of competing intelligence services in neutral Lisbon.

Ian Rankin's gripping introduction to Malcolm Fox. Fox works for Edinburgh's Complaints department — the cops who investigate other cops — until an investigation into a colleague drags him into a web of corruption, murder, and conspiracy that turns the hunter into the hunted.

As midnight gunfire rings in the New Year over a pandemic-weary Los Angeles, a man is shot dead in the chaos — and Renée Ballard links the killing to a cold case that draws in Harry Bosch. At the same time, she hunts a pair of serial rapists called the Midnight Men, working a department and a city near breaking point.

Philip Carter serves six years in an American federal prison for a crime he didn't commit — a financial conspiracy his employer framed him for. He comes out changed: harder, drug-dependent, capable of violence in ways he wasn't before. A novel about what prison does to a person and what happens when that person returns to a life that has changed without him.

Exiled to the LAPD's overnight shift after filing a harassment complaint, Detective Renée Ballard works the cases no one else wants and hands them off by dawn. But two brutal crimes in a single night — the beating of a young woman and a deadly nightclub shooting — are ones she refuses to let go, even if it costs her what's left of her career.

The widow of Harry Bosch's friend Terry McCaleb asks him to look into the retired profiler's death, which she refuses to believe was natural. Bosch's investigation collides with an FBI hunt for a resurrected serial killer — the Poet — and pulls him into the deadliest pursuit of his career, alongside agent Rachel Walling.

At the funeral of his old mentor, Harry Bosch is handed the dead man's secret: a murder book he stole decades ago and never returned, a case he hid for reasons no one understands. With Renée Ballard, Bosch sets out to learn why his mentor took the file — and to finally close the case he left undone.

When DNA evidence frees a convicted child-killer after twenty-four years, defense attorney Mickey Haller is recruited to do the unthinkable: switch sides and prosecute the retrial. With his ex-wife as co-counsel and Harry Bosch as investigator, Haller must convict a man the system already let go.

Falcón is called to investigate a domestic murder-suicide in a Seville suburb — a prominent businessman apparently shot his wife and then himself. The investigation reveals the case is far more complex, pulling Falcón into the world of Seville's wealthy elite and the corruption that underlies the city's surface prosperity. The third Falcón novel deepens the detective's psychological portrait while delivering Wilson's most tightly plotted thriller.

Howard Ingham, an American writer, has come to Tunisia to work on a screenplay. His fiancée doesn't arrive. A colleague dies ambiguously. One night Ingham may have killed an intruder with a typewriter. He isn't certain. Set almost entirely in Hammamet, Tunisia, this is Highsmith's most existential novel — the question of whether Ingham committed a crime becomes less important than the question of whether it matters to him that he might have.

Athens, 1960s. Rydal Keener, a young American drifting through Greece on his father's money, encounters Chester MacFarland — a small-time con man on the run with his wife Colette. When Chester accidentally kills a man and Rydal witnesses it, the two become fatally linked. A thriller set across Greek landscapes — Athens, Crete, Istanbul — exploring the father-son dynamic between two men who are drawn to each other and threatening to each other.

Toby, charming and fortunate, wakes up in his cousin's home after a violent attack that has left him changed. When a skull is found in the wych elm in the garden, Toby becomes entangled in a decades-old death — and begins to question everything he believed about himself and his family.

A dying aviation billionaire hires Harry Bosch to find out whether he fathered a child decades ago — a secret heir who could inherit a fortune. At the same time, working as a volunteer detective for a small police force, Bosch hunts a serial rapist. Two very different cases, one relentless investigator.

David Kelsey maintains a double life: during the week he lives in a boarding house and works as a chemist; on weekends he retreats to a house he has secretly bought and furnished for a woman named Annabelle — who doesn't love him and has married someone else. A study in erotic obsession so complete that the obsessive has replaced reality with a private fiction. One of Highsmith's most psychologically acute portraits of a particular masculine pathology.

At a retired actor's cocktail party a mild old clergyman drops dead, his glass holding no trace of poison and his killing apparently without motive. When a second guest dies the same way, Poirot joins the host's amateur sleuthing to explain a murder with no discernible reason.

A brilliant infectious-disease doctor has vanished — along with enough engineered pathogen to start a global pandemic. Convinced that humanity is a disease the planet must be cured of, he intends to release it. Lucas Davenport and his daughter Letty race across continents to find him before he can carry out a plan to kill millions.

Senator Taryn Grant — the sociopath Lucas Davenport tangled with years ago — is now in the Senate, and just as dangerous. When she tries to murder a colleague who got in her way, Lucas, now a U.S. Marshal, sets out to stop her, knowing she has the money, the power, and the private muscle to make a marshal disappear.

Two pharmacists are gunned down, and Harry Bosch goes undercover into the brutal world of opioid pill mills to find the killers. At the same time, a death-row inmate claims new DNA proves Bosch framed him decades ago — and to save his own integrity, Bosch must prove that the conviction was clean.

As the Republican National Convention descends on St. Paul, a crew of professional thieves plans to rob the millions in cash flowing through the political machine. But a separate, more personal danger is closing in: a vicious criminal with a grudge has set his sights on Letty, Lucas Davenport's teenage daughter.

In 1979, a group of privileged prep-school students filmed a sexual assault, then one of them was murdered. A decade later, the convicted killer is released and the old tape resurfaces as blackmail — and Kinsey Millhone is hired into the case. Meanwhile, the predator from her last investigation is still hunting her.

Detective Lindsay Boxer and the Women's Murder Club hunt a killer whose seemingly random murders share a chilling hidden link — and a vendetta against the police themselves. As the body count rises, the case reaches into Lindsay's own family and past.