Best Mystery Books

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.

A Norton Aircraft wide-body transatlantic flight arrives in Los Angeles with three dead and fifty-six injured after a mysterious in-flight incident nobody can explain. Quality Assurance VP Casey Singleton has 72 hours to reconstruct what happened before a damaging television news investigation airs — and before the company loses a billion-dollar sale to China.

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.

Stan and Joy Delaney — retired tennis coaches and parents of four adult children — seem to have the perfect marriage. Then Joy disappears, and each of her children has a theory about what happened. Told across multiple perspectives over the year before and after Joy's disappearance, the novel dissects a family's myths about itself.

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.

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.

A prequel to We Were Liars — the story of Carrie Sinclair, grandmother to the original novel's narrator, and the summer of 1987 when the secrets that would haunt the Sinclair family for generations were first buried.

Harry Dresden investigates a series of brutal murders during the full moon — and discovers that werewolves in Chicago are far more complicated than folklore suggests.

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.

Lewis spent a year embedded with Sam Bankman-Fried and FTX before the cryptocurrency exchange's catastrophic collapse. The result is a portrait of the man at the centre of one of the largest financial frauds in history — a portrait that refuses easy categorisation of SBF as either visionary or villain.

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.