Best Mystery Books

When the CEO of a major bank is shot dead on a hunting trip, the list of suspects is a who's who of ambitious executives, each with motive and opportunity. Lucas Davenport must navigate a world of corporate intrigue and personal rivalry to find a killer hiding among the ruthless men and women competing to take the dead man's place.

A string of ritual knife killings is cutting down public officials across the country, the victims linked by their roles in crimes against Native Americans. Lucas Davenport joins forces with a tough New York detective to hunt the assassins — and to untangle a conspiracy with roots in decades of injustice.

A dirty political trick — incriminating material planted on a senate candidate's computer — explodes into something far worse when the operative behind it disappears and a body turns up. Lucas Davenport is pulled into a high-stakes election-year investigation where the players are wealthy, ruthless, and willing to kill to win.

NYPD Detective Michael Bennett faces a hostage crisis when a criminal mastermind seizes mourners at a former First Lady's funeral inside St. Patrick's Cathedral. As Bennett negotiates for the lives of the powerful, his wife is dying at home and his ten adopted children need him too.

An entire family is slaughtered in an affluent Minnesota suburb, the savagery of the killings a message in itself. Lucas Davenport's investigation leads to a Mexican drug cartel, a laundering operation, and a stolen fortune — and to cartel enforcers who treat torture and murder as ordinary business.

Bruce Medway takes on a job in Ivory Coast that involves a dead American, a missing consignment of weapons-grade materials, and the fractious politics of West African civil conflict. The second Medway novel deepens the portrait of the region's corruption and violence while sending its protagonist deeper into danger than the first book managed.

When a narcotics detective is found dead of an apparent suicide, Harry Bosch isn't satisfied with the easy answer. His unauthorized investigation leads from the LAPD's own ranks to the Mexican border and a deadly new drug called black ice, into a case the department would rather he leave alone.

A sixteen-year-old American boy, Frank Pierson, appears at Tom Ripley's door in France claiming to have pushed his wheelchair-bound millionaire father off a cliff. Ripley, intrigued, takes the boy under his wing and accompanies him to Berlin — where they attend transvestite clubs in West Berlin, encounter kidnappers, and where Ripley must decide how much he cares about what happens to this strange, guilty young man.

Retired from the LAPD and at odds with the department, Harry Bosch is asked by his half-brother, defense attorney Mickey Haller, to investigate a murder Haller's client is accused of committing. For a lifelong cop, working for the defense is a betrayal of everything he believes — but if the client is innocent, the real killer is still free.

Robert Forester has been watching a young woman, Jenny, through her kitchen window each evening — not prurient but drawn to the warmth of her domestic life, which contrasts with his disintegrating own. When Jenny discovers him, she is not frightened — she is fascinated. The novel spirals into false accusation, murder, and the complete unravelling of social reality as everyone around Robert becomes convinced he is responsible for things he didn't do.

Logan Ortega-Barnes arrives in the remote town of Snakebite, Oregon when her fathers' paranormal TV show faces accusations of causing local teenagers' deaths. Partnered unwillingly with Ashley, the daughter of the man everyone blames, Logan discovers that the truth about Snakebite's darkness is stranger than any television episode.

Harry Bosch catches two cases at once: a cold-case DNA hit that impossibly points to a suspect who was only eight years old at the time, and the fatal fall of a city councilman's son — investigated at the personal request of Bosch's oldest enemy. With his own retirement clock ticking, Bosch works both to the bone.

With the recession gutting his business, Mickey Haller has turned to foreclosure defense — until one of his clients, a woman fighting to keep her home, is accused of murdering the banker trying to take it. The case drags Haller back into the criminal courtroom, defending a client whose guilt is far from clear.

A foreign film director is found dead in a luxury Bangkok hotel. Sonchai's investigation leads him to the heroin trade, a Tibetan Buddhist master in Kathmandu who is also a drug lord, and a meditation on the nature of attachment — the root of suffering in Buddhist teaching, and also the engine of the drug trade. The fourth Sonchai novel, expanding the series to Nepal.

Alex Cross is in the dock. Charged with murder after a deadly shooting and suspended from duty, he faces a trial that could end his career and send him to prison. But even as he fights for his freedom, he can't ignore a string of disappearances pointing to a predator hiding behind a screen.

Kate Mascarenhas's inventive debut. In 1967, four women invent time travel; decades later, one of them is found dead, and a locked-room murder unfolds across time. A genre-blending novel exploring how time travel would reshape the human mind, relationships, and a female-led institution.

Laid off from the Los Angeles Times, crime reporter Jack McEvoy has two weeks left and one last story to chase. What looks like a routine murder becomes the trail of a serial killer who hides in the digital world — a data-center engineer who stalks his victims through the information they never knew they'd left behind.

In a small Tennessee town, Jack Reacher saves a hapless IT manager from a kidnapping and uncovers a ransomware plot with national-security stakes. The Sentinel marks the first Reacher novel co-written by Lee Child and his brother Andrew, beginning the series handover.

When Renée Ballard's badge, gun, and ID are stolen, the theft becomes a personal crisis on top of her cold-case work — including a decades-old serial-killer case she's chasing through genetic genealogy. Help arrives from an unexpected volunteer: Maddie Bosch, Harry's daughter, now a patrol officer ready to take up the family calling.

Ray Garrett's wife has died — a probable suicide — and her father, Ed Coleman, blames Ray and has tried to shoot him in Rome. The novel follows the two men as they circle each other through Venice and its islands — Coleman hunting Ray, Ray unable to leave, drawn back to a man who wants to kill him in a city that seems to conspire with grief.

A young man comes to Kinsey Millhone with a fragment of buried memory: as a six-year-old, he believes he saw two men digging a hole in the woods — perhaps burying a child kidnapped twenty-one years ago. The recollection is unreliable, the witness is suspect, but Kinsey can't let it go, and the past begins to surface.

A pair of killers obsessed with vampirism drain their victims of blood across the country, while the Mastermind who shattered Alex Cross's life in Roses Are Red continues to taunt him from the shadows. Cross must close two cases at once — one grotesque, one personal — in this two-front thriller.

Sonchai is sent to Dubai and beyond to investigate a human organ-trafficking operation — the harvesting and sale of kidneys, corneas, and hearts from the living poor to the wealthy dying. The fifth Sonchai novel takes the series global, from Bangkok to Shanghai to Dubai, asking what Buddhist teachings have to say about the commodification of the human body.

Two dead men, seemingly unconnected: a sleazy private investigator Kinsey Millhone knew, shot in a parking lot, and a homeless man found dead on the beach with Kinsey's name and number in his pocket. As Kinsey untangles how they're linked, she discovers the homeless man was family — and that he left her a fortune.