Best Mystery Books

A meticulous killer who calls himself the Teacher is murdering New York's rich and entitled, punishing the rude and the privileged in a campaign of class rage. Detective Michael Bennett must stop him before the lessons turn into a citywide bloodbath — all while raising ten children at home.

Women Jack Reacher once knew in the army are turning up dead — no wounds, no poison, no cause of death the experts can name, just a chilling signature. When the FBI's profile of the killer points squarely at Reacher himself, he must catch the real murderer to clear his own name.

Patients are dying at a San Francisco hospital under circumstances that look less like misfortune than murder, each death marked by a strange symbolic token. As Lindsay Boxer hunts a killer hiding behind a white coat, Yuki Castellano fights a wrenching malpractice trial with the hospital — and the truth — on the line.

A gunman opens fire on a crowded San Francisco commuter ferry, and one of the wounded is someone Lindsay Boxer loves. As the club races to understand the shooter, a separate horror unfolds: children are vanishing from wealthy neighborhoods, taken by someone who knows exactly how to disappear.

A killer is murdering young mothers and their children in San Francisco parking garages, terrorizing the city. At the same time, a brazen jewel thief is robbing the rich and famous — and the two cases pull Lindsay Boxer in directions that test her judgment, and Yuki's, to the breaking point.

Sonchai encounters a man of extraordinary physical capability — an American military asset, a product of a black-ops enhancement programme — whose presence in Bangkok is connected to CIA operations that go back to the Vietnam War and forward into a disturbing future of human augmentation. The sixth Sonchai novel, the darkest and most politically charged.

Alex Cross's first case as an FBI agent pits him against the Wolf, a Russian crime lord running a business that abducts people to order and sells them to the highest bidder. As Cross learns the Bureau's ropes, a custody battle over his youngest son threatens the family he is fighting to protect.

A string of murders — a federal judge, a lawyer, others who should have had nothing in common — draws Alex Cross and John Sampson into a conspiracy that reaches toward the highest levels of power. As Cross weighs a life-changing career decision, a familiar shadow returns to test him one more time.

In 2005, a young archaeologist discovers two skeletons and an ancient ring near Carcassonne; in 1209, a young woman becomes the guardian of three books containing the secret of the Holy Grail during the brutal Cathar Crusade — two women separated by eight centuries but bound by the same ancient mystery.

Robert Langdon is called to Washington D.C. under false pretenses and plunged into a frantic one-night race through the Capitol's corridors of power. Freemason symbolism, Ancient Mysteries, and a villain whose identity reshapes the entire narrative — Brown's most American thriller.

A Cambridge group therapist becomes obsessed with a charismatic Greek Tragedy professor she suspects of murder, convinced he is connected to the ritualistic killings of young women who belong to his secret society — The Maidens.

A killer is murdering entire families in their homes, vanishing without a trace, and the press has dubbed him the most meticulous murderer in history. As Alex Cross hunts him, a celebrated true-crime writer who has made Cross his subject inserts himself into the investigation — with an agenda of his own.

Kinsey Millhone reports a shoplifting team she spots in a department store — a small good deed with deadly consequences. When one of the women is soon found dead, an apparent suicide, her grieving fiancé hires Kinsey, and the trail leads into a sophisticated organized-theft operation run by people who do not forgive interference.

Cassie Black, an ex-convict trying to go straight, agrees to one last high-stakes heist in Las Vegas — the score that will fund a new life and let her reclaim the daughter she gave up. But the job goes wrong, and a ruthless fixer is dispatched to recover what she took, hunting her across the desert in a deadly cat-and-mouse.

A kidnapper is abducting the children of New York's wealthiest families and quizzing them on the suffering of the poor — and when they fail his lessons in inequality, they die. Detective Michael Bennett and FBI agent Emily Parker race to stop a killer who has turned class guilt into a death sentence.

A devious divorcée cons Kinsey Millhone into helping locate an estranged son, the first thread in a web of deceit. Meanwhile, a dead colleague's files reveal a coded list — the record of a methodical killer who has murdered women for years without detection. The lone 'X' marks the series' darkest, most ruthless adversary.

Newly married, Lindsay Boxer barely has time for a honeymoon before a newborn baby vanishes and a terrified teenager stands accused. As Lindsay races to find the missing child, Yuki prosecutes a brutal assault case and Lindsay's own marriage is tested by the relentless pull of the job.

Severed heads are unearthed in the garden of a San Francisco mansion, and a vigilante is executing the city's drug dealers with a gun stolen from the police evidence locker. Newly pregnant and stretched thin, Lindsay Boxer must solve two cases that both seem to point uncomfortably close to home.

Lindsay Boxer gives birth just as three cases collide: a professor who dreams murders before they happen, a corpse that vanishes from the morgue, and a star athlete accused of a brutal killing. New motherhood and the relentless job pull Lindsay in every direction at once.

Brutal crimes are being committed by people in San Francisco police uniforms, and the evidence points inside Lindsay Boxer's own department. As the corruption spreads and trust collapses, Lindsay must investigate the colleagues she works beside every day — and decide who, if anyone, she can still believe.

Healthy men are dropping dead of sudden heart attacks that prove to be murders, the work of a killer with an intimate, deadly method. As Lindsay Boxer hunts the cause, she also faces the trial of a man accused of a devastating bombing — and the wreckage of her own marriage after Joe's betrayal.

A young mother and her baby daughter vanish, and all eyes turn to the husband — a man whose calm is unnerving and whose story doesn't add up. As Lindsay Boxer races to find the missing pair, the case twists toward something darker and stranger than a simple domestic tragedy.

Guns are flowing north across the border and San Francisco cops are turning up dead, the two facts tangled in a conspiracy bigger than anything Lindsay Boxer has faced. As the body count rises and the danger reaches her own circle, Lindsay races to expose a network that wants her silenced.

New York is reeling from a series of escalating, high-tech terror attacks, and no one can predict where the next blow will fall. As the city teeters on the edge of panic, Michael Bennett races against a sophisticated enemy who seems always one step ahead — and whose endgame could be catastrophic.