Best Mystery Books

Alex Cross is hunting multiple killers at once — a meticulous murderer of beautiful women, a savage 'beating' killer, and a vengeful plastic surgeon Cross once arrested. As the cases multiply, Cross finds himself the target, framed and pursued, with his name and freedom suddenly on the line.

A tip leads to a trap, and a detective dies in Michael Bennett's place. Someone has marked Bennett for death, and as the attempts on his life escalate and reach toward his children, he must find the enemy hunting his family before the next ambush succeeds.

The mayor of New York makes Michael Bennett an offer he can't refuse: find the mayor's missing daughter, and the city will go easy on Bennett's own son, who is in serious trouble of his own. But the search pulls Bennett into a dangerous web of cybercrime and foreign intrigue with stakes far beyond one missing girl.

An assassin is in New York with the most audacious target imaginable: the President of the United States, in the city for a high-stakes summit. As world leaders gather and tensions with Russia simmer, Michael Bennett has only days to find a killer before an assassination triggers global catastrophe.

Scientist Henry Pierce gets a new phone number and starts receiving calls for a woman named Lilly — an escort who seems to have vanished. Unable to let it go, Pierce begins investigating her disappearance, and his obsessive curiosity drags him out of his ordered world and into a dangerous one that does not want to be examined.

After Alex Cross watches a killer he helped convict go to his execution, a new murder appears bearing the dead man's signature — and a taunting note signed simply 'M.' As the killings mount and grow personal, Cross must wonder whether he sent an innocent man to die, or whether something far more cunning is at work.

Alex Cross is gravely wounded and out of action, leaving John Sampson to carry the weight. As a coordinated wave of attacks threatens the capital and the people Cross loves, Sampson must protect his oldest friend, hold the line, and stop a conspiracy — all without the partner who has always had his back.

A glamorous Washington socialite and a private-school headmaster are found shot dead in a car outside a gala, their secret connection a mystery. Alex Cross knew the dead woman — and as he investigates her hidden life, the case pulls him into a web of power, money, and old secrets that someone will kill to protect.

In witness protection on the California coast, Michael Bennett thought distance would keep his family safe from crime lord Manuel Perrine. He was wrong. Perrine's reign of terror reaches across the country, and Bennett must hunt the man who has sworn to destroy everything he loves.

Jack Reacher wakes up injured, handcuffed to a rail, with no memory of how he got there or who is holding him. With nothing to go on but his own instincts, he must work out who took him, why, and how to turn the tables — before his captors decide he is more trouble alive than dead.

When a single mother turns up dead in a small English town's river — a place with a dark history of women's deaths — her sister arrives to investigate and care for the dead woman's teenage daughter, uncovering secrets that implicate almost everyone.

The President's two children vanish, and Alex Cross is thrown into a frantic search under impossible pressure. At the same time, a lone operative is moving to poison Washington's water supply — two catastrophes converging on a city, and on a detective who can't be everywhere at once.

It's Christmas Day, and Alex Cross wants nothing more than to spend it with his family. Instead he's called to two crises at once — a desperate man holding his own family hostage, and a terrorist plot poised to strike Washington during the holidays — forcing Cross to choose, again, between his home and his duty.

Walking between two Colorado towns named Hope and Despair, Jack Reacher is run out of Despair the moment he arrives — which only makes him want to know why. The secretive, company-owned town is hiding something behind its locked gates, and Reacher is exactly the wrong man to tell to keep moving.

When Michael Bennett's close friend, FBI agent Emily Parker, vanishes in Washington, D.C., he drops everything to find her. Far from home and outside his jurisdiction, Bennett uncovers that the woman he thought he knew had powerful enemies — and that her disappearance is only the beginning.

The President of the United States is assassinated, plunging Washington into chaos and crisis. Alex Cross is drafted onto the high-pressure task force hunting the killer — but as the investigation unfolds, it becomes clear that Cross himself is somehow at the center of a far larger conspiracy.

Someone is murdering San Francisco's homeless, and the case leads Lindsay Boxer somewhere she never expected. As a mysterious illness saps her strength and Yuki Castellano takes a bold new turn in her career, the club confronts a killer whose identity overturns every assumption.

Three schoolteachers vanish on their way home, and one turns up dead. Meanwhile a witness insists she has seen a man who should not exist: a Serbian war criminal long believed dead, now walking the streets of San Francisco. Lindsay Boxer and Joe pursue two hauntings of the present and the past.

As San Francisco prepares for the holidays, a whisper reaches the police: a criminal mastermind known only as Loman is planning something enormous for Christmas. With the clock ticking toward the big day, Lindsay Boxer and the Women's Murder Club race to uncover a plot that keeps shifting shape.

On a single morning, drug kingpins are gunned down by snipers in three different cities at once. As Lindsay Boxer works the San Francisco killing and Cindy Thomas chases the story nationwide, the club uncovers a coordinated network of vigilante assassins — and a moral question with no easy answer.

Detective Lindsay Boxer leads the Women's Murder Club into the high-profile murder investigation of a wealthy San Francisco couple, a case that draws intense scrutiny and personal danger. As the pressure mounts, the question is whether Lindsay, Cindy, Claire, and Yuki will all be standing when it's over.

A glittering San Francisco socialite couple is found dead with no apparent cause — no wound, no poison the lab can name. As Lindsay Boxer chases a killer who leaves no trace, Cindy Thomas pursues a story everyone else ignores: the murder of a beloved homeless street preacher known as Bagman Jesus.

Twelve-year-old Harriet Cleve Dufresnes sets out to solve the murder of her brother Robin, who was hanged from a tree in the family's backyard when she was a baby. Tartt's second novel is a Mississippi Gothic that explores childhood, violence, and the limits of the stories we tell ourselves.

A doctor is found executed at a scenic overlook above Los Angeles, and the discovery that he had access to radioactive cesium turns a murder into a potential terrorism crisis overnight. Harry Bosch must solve the case before federal agents take it over — and before the missing material can be used to kill thousands.