Best Mystery Books

FBI trainee Clarice Starling is sent to interview the imprisoned Dr. Hannibal Lecter — brilliant psychiatrist and cannibalistic serial killer — hoping to gain insight into a new killer called Buffalo Bill, who is making suits of human skin.

A young woman marries the brooding Maxim de Winter and moves to his grand estate Manderley, where the memory of his glamorous first wife Rebecca poisons every room and every relationship.

Joe Coutts, thirteen years old, watches his mother return from a violent assault on an Ojibwe reservation in North Dakota. The attacker cannot be prosecuted because of a jurisdictional tangle: the crime may have occurred on tribal land, federal land, or state land, and each has different rules about who can prosecute. Joe sets out to find justice himself.

Ronan Farrow's account of his investigation into Harvey Weinstein and the machinery built to silence his accusers. Part exposé, part spy thriller, it reveals the surveillance, intimidation, and corporate complicity arrayed against the reporting that helped ignite the #MeToo movement.

DEA agent Art Keller's decades-long war against the Sinaloa Cartel, from the 1970s through 9/11. A massive, novelistic account of the Mexican drug trade — cartel politics, US government corruption, CIA involvement, and the human cost on both sides of the border.

Richard Preston's harrowing true account follows the 1989 appearance of a lethal strain of the Ebola virus in a primate research facility in Reston, Virginia—just outside Washington, D.C.—and traces the virus's earlier outbreaks in Central Africa, where it killed with near-total lethality. It is one of the most terrifying science books ever written.

The attempted assassination of Bob Marley in Kingston, Jamaica in December 1976 is the still point around which this vast, polyphonic novel turns — following gang members, CIA operatives, journalists, and ghosts across three decades and multiple continents in dense, overlapping Jamaican voices.

An escaped Australian convict arrives in Bombay with a false passport, becomes a slum doctor, makes friends and enemies among the city's criminals, and discovers a city that unmakes and remakes him completely.

Tom Ripley, a charming and resourceful small-time fraudster, is sent to Italy to retrieve a wealthy young American from his life of idleness — and finds it far easier to become his target than to bring him home.

A double narrative: the murder of a Mormon woman and her infant daughter by fundamentalist brothers who believed they were acting on divine revelation, intertwined with the full history of the Latter-day Saint movement from Joseph Smith to the present day. A rigorous examination of religious fundamentalism and faith.

A mysterious death, a missing fortune, and a damaged woman bring twelve men together in a Hokitika hotel on the New Zealand West Coast in 1866. Catton's structurally extraordinary novel uses astrological charts to determine its form, with each section exactly half the length of the previous one.

The story of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, told through the abduction and murder of Jean McConville and the lives of IRA members Dolours Price and Gerry Adams.

A spectral hound haunts the Baskerville family across the Dartmoor moors, and when the new baronet arrives to claim his inheritance, Holmes sends Watson ahead while working in secret. Conan Doyle's masterpiece fuses gothic atmosphere with rigorous detective logic into the most complete and satisfying Holmes story.

In the city of Camorr — a fantasy Venice — a gang of elite con artists and thieves called the Gentlemen Bastards pull off elaborate heists while a supernatural criminal element threatens everything.

Titus Crown, the first Black sheriff of Charon County, Virginia, investigates a serial killer whose victims are all Black children — while navigating the racial politics of a small Southern county where his authority is perpetually contested and his investigation uncovers a conspiracy that reaches into the town's most trusted institutions.

Based on the true diary of Martha Ballard, this is the story of a colonial midwife in 1789 Maine who investigates a murder — and challenges a justice system that cannot imagine women as witnesses to their own lives.

Private detectives Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro are hired to investigate the disappearance of a four-year-old girl from a Boston neighbourhood. The case pulls them into drug trafficking, police corruption, and a moral dilemma at the end that has no right answer.

Philadelphia police officer Mickey Fitzpatrick patrols the Kensington neighbourhood — the epicentre of the opioid epidemic — while searching for her estranged sister, a drug user who has gone missing as a serial killer targets women on the street.

The epic conclusion to Don Winslow's Cartel trilogy. Now head of the DEA, Art Keller takes his decades-long war against the Mexican cartels to Washington itself, where the corruption he has fought for forty years reaches into politics, banking, and the highest levels of power.

Two years after settling in Ardnakelty, retired Chicago cop Cal Hooper has built a quiet life with Lena and a near-father bond with teenager Trey Reddy. Then Trey's feckless father Johnny returns with an English moneyman and a scheme about gold in the hills — and a death follows that tests every loyalty Cal has.

Detective Cassie Maddox is pulled back into undercover work when a murder victim is found bearing her exact face — and carrying the identity Cassie once used as an alias.