Best Mystery Books

The intertwined stories of the 1893 Chicago World's Fair — one of the most ambitious construction projects in American history — and the serial killer H.H. Holmes, who used the fair's crowds as cover for his murders.

Hercule Poirot investigates the murder of a wealthy village squire in what became the most controversial and celebrated mystery novel ever written.

The most hated woman in Three Pines is found dead at the village curling match, electrocuted in a sealed outdoor space — and Chief Inspector Gamache discovers that almost everyone had reason to want her dead.

Pippa Fitz-Amobi reopens the supposedly closed case of Andie Bell's murder as her senior capstone project — and discovers the truth is far more dangerous than anyone expected.

Hercule Poirot investigates a murder aboard a luxury Nile steamer, where every passenger has a motive and the truth is buried beneath layers of deception.

A retired intelligence agent known only as Pilgrim is pulled back in for one last mission: track down a terrorist who has synthesised a virus capable of wiping out civilisation, using only a trail of evidence as thin as smoke.

Lucas Davenport and Virgil Flowers investigate a drug smuggling operation off the Florida coast that is leaving federal agents dead — a crossover entry between Sandford's two major series.

A man lives alone in a vast, labyrinthine House of endless halls filled with statues, tides, and clouds, keeping meticulous journals of a world he believes to be complete — until anomalies in his journals suggest a truth he has been prevented from remembering.

In the broiling summer of 1974, as Boston erupts over court-ordered busing, hard-edged Southie mother Mary Pat Fennessy goes searching for her missing teenage daughter — a search that drags her into the city's racial fault lines and the secrets of her own neighborhood.

Chief Inspector Armand Gamache of the Sûreté du Québec investigates the suspicious death of a beloved woman in the idyllic village of Three Pines.

Criminal defense attorney Mickey Haller operates out of the back seat of his Lincoln Town Car, traveling between Los Angeles courthouses. When a wealthy Beverly Hills client hires him to fight a serious assault charge, Haller begins to suspect the man is guilty of something far worse — and that he has defended it before.

An abandoned girl raises herself in the marshes of North Carolina and becomes the prime suspect when a local man is found dead.

Three mothers in an Australian coastal community navigate school politics, marriage, friendship, and the fallout from a murder at the kindergarten trivia night.

A welder stumbles on a drug deal gone wrong in the Texas desert and takes the money, setting off a chain of pursuit involving a psychopathic killer and an aging sheriff who can no longer understand the world he patrols.

The Thursday Murder Club investigates a decade-old unsolved murder of a television journalist — while navigating a threat from a dangerous hitman who has targeted the Club itself.

The conclusion of the Inheritance Games trilogy finds Avery Grambs confronting the final deadly game of the Hawthorne brothers as she races to solve the mystery of Tobias Hawthorne's true intentions before time runs out.

Lisbeth Salander, recovering from near-fatal wounds, faces a murder trial while Mikael Blomkvist races to expose the secret government faction that has controlled and abused her since childhood.

Avery Kylie Grambs continues navigating the Hawthorne brothers' games and the mystery of why billionaire Tobias Hawthorne left her his entire fortune.

The Thursday Murder Club investigates again when Elizabeth's long-lost ex-husband arrives at Coopers Chase with stolen diamonds and a death threat.

A seemingly airtight case against a beloved teacher accused of murder begins to unravel when impossible evidence suggests someone — or something — else was responsible.

DC homicide detective and forensic psychologist Alex Cross is called to investigate when a brilliant, media-obsessed killer kidnaps two children from a prestigious private school — drawing Cross into the most complex and personal case of his career.

On their fifth wedding anniversary, Nick Dunne's wife Amy disappears, and the investigation reveals two people who may be nothing like who they claimed to be.

Dublin Murder Squad detective Rob Ryan investigates a child murder in the woods where, as a boy, he survived a mysterious incident that left his two friends vanished and his memory blank.

Alex Cross races to catch two serial killers simultaneously — one targeting children in his own Washington DC neighbourhood, another assassinating celebrities in an escalating pattern. Patterson's dual-threat plot is the Alex Cross series at its most propulsive.