Best Mystery Books

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.

Lilia Albert has been disappearing her whole life — taken by her father as a child, re-disappearing every few years, leaving behind whoever has come to love her. Her most recent boyfriend follows her across the country trying to understand why. Mandel's debut shows the same intelligence as her later work applied to the same questions: identity, memory, the people who vanish.

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.

Harry Dresden, Chicago's only professional wizard and private detective, investigates a pair of murders that required enormous magical power — and discovers something far darker than a simple killer.

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.

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.

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.