Editors Reads

Best Mystery Books

243 expert-reviewed books — page 8 of 11

The Blind Man of Seville book cover

The Blind Man of Seville

by Robert Wilson

4.2

Inspector Javier Falcón of the Seville homicide squad is called to the scene of a man found dead in front of a painting of Goya's Saturn Devouring His Son — eyes burnt out, posed with deliberate horror. The investigation pulls Falcón into his own family history, specifically the life of his celebrated father, the painter Francisco Falcón. Set against Seville's streets and its Moorish architecture, the first Falcón novel establishes one of crime fiction's most psychologically complex detectives.

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The Brothers Hawthorne book cover

The Brothers Hawthorne

by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

4.2

Grayson and Jameson Hawthorne find themselves on separate, dangerous missions — Grayson drawn into a high-stakes game that threatens everything his family built, Jameson on a globe-trotting adventure that tests the limits of his recklessness. A dual POV expansion of the Hawthorne brothers' world.

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The Family Remains book cover

The Family Remains

by Lisa Jewell

4.2

A sequel to The Family Upstairs: Rachel Rimmer goes to France to attend the funeral of a woman who may have been her mother — and discovers connections to the dark Chelsea house of her past. Simultaneously, Detective Inspector Samuel Owusu investigates a body found in the Thames. Two investigations converge on the same terrible story.

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The Guardians book cover

The Guardians

by John Grisham

4.2

Quincy Miller has spent twenty-two years on death row for the murder of a small-town Florida lawyer, a crime he insists he did not commit. When a handwritten letter reaches a small innocence organisation, its director takes on the case — knowing that the real killer is still out there and still dangerous.

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The Last Murder at the End of the World book cover
4.2

On an island that is the last refuge of humanity after an apocalyptic fog killed the rest of the world, someone has murdered the scientist maintaining the barrier that keeps the fog at bay. If the murderer isn't found in 107 hours, the barrier falls and everyone dies. Turton's most structurally inventive mystery: a closed-room that is an entire civilisation.

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The Mysterious Affair at Styles book cover
4.2

When Emily Inglethorp is found dead at Styles Court, her stepson calls in his Belgian refugee friend Hercule Poirot to investigate. Christie's debut novel introduces one of fiction's most beloved detectives and establishes the country-house mystery template.

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The Psychopath Test book cover

The Psychopath Test

by Jon Ronson

4.2

Journalist Jon Ronson tumbles down a rabbit hole into the world of psychopaths — meeting diagnosed psychopaths, the psychiatrists who identify them, the CEOs who may be among their number, and the critics who question whether the entire diagnostic enterprise makes sense. The result is a darkly funny, genuinely unsettling investigation into madness, power, and the humans who get to decide who is sane.

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The Turn of the Key book cover
4.2

Rowan Caine writes a letter from prison, claiming to be innocent of the child's death she is accused of. She was a nanny at a remote Scottish smart-house — a high-tech home that watched her every move, recorded every conversation, and whose previous nannies kept leaving without explanation. A locked-room thriller for the surveillance age.

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A Drink Before the War book cover

A Drink Before the War

by Dennis Lehane

4.1

Boston private investigators Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro are hired to find a missing government worker who stole documents from a state senator. What begins as a routine job draws them into Dorchester's gang wars, racial politics, and the violence that underlies South Boston's civic surface.

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Dark Places book cover

Dark Places

by Gillian Flynn

4.1

Libby Day survived the massacre of her family when she was seven years old and testified that her teenage brother Ben was responsible. Twenty-five years later, a true crime enthusiast group called the Kill Club convinces her to reinvestigate — and what she uncovers suggests the conviction was built on a child's traumatized misremembering.

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Deep Water book cover

Deep Water

by Patricia Highsmith

4.1

Vic Van Allen is the model suburban husband — except that he allows his wife Melinda to carry on a series of affairs openly, to prevent her from leaving him. When one of her lovers is found dead, Vic lets it be known that he killed him. He didn't — but the bluff establishes something. A portrait of suburban American life as a theatre of controlled violence, and one of Highsmith's most chilling studies in the psychology of a particular kind of man.

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Everything I Never Told You book cover
4.1

Lydia Lee — the favourite daughter of a mixed-race family in 1970s Ohio — is found dead in the local lake. The investigation into how she got there unravels the secrets and silences at the heart of the Lee family: the expectations her parents poured into her, the loneliness she could not admit, and the ways families fail each other while trying to love.

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In the Lake of the Woods book cover
4.1

John Wade, a Vietnam veteran and politician, retreats to a lakeside cabin after a catastrophic election defeat. Then his wife Kathy disappears. The novel assembles evidence — testimonies, documents, O'Brien's own speculations — without ever resolving what happened.

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Jamaica Inn book cover

Jamaica Inn

by Daphne du Maurier

4.1

Mary Yellan arrives at Jamaica Inn on the Cornish moors to live with her aunt, and finds a place of terror run by her brutal uncle Joss Merlyn, who is involved in wrecking ships on the coast for their cargo.

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Missing You book cover

Missing You

by Harlan Coben

4.1

NYPD Detective Kat Donovan finds a dating website profile that appears to be her father — the man who went missing eighteen years ago. Following it leads her into something far darker than she expected.

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Ripley Under Ground book cover

Ripley Under Ground

by Patricia Highsmith

4.1

Tom Ripley has settled into comfortable French country life at his villa Belle Ombre with his wealthy wife Héloïse. He is co-managing a scheme to sell forged paintings attributed to a dead artist named Derwatt. When an American collector arrives convinced the paintings are fraudulent, Ripley must manage the situation — which escalates, as Ripley situations always do. The second Ripley novel, fifteen years after The Talented Mr. Ripley.

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Sharp Objects book cover

Sharp Objects

by Gillian Flynn

4.1

Crime journalist Camille Preaker is sent back to her small Missouri hometown to cover the murders of two young girls, and back into the orbit of her controlling mother Adora and half-sister Amma. Flynn's debut is a novel about women's violence against women, and the ways trauma writes itself permanently on the body.

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Shutter Island book cover

Shutter Island

by Dennis Lehane

4.1

US Marshal Teddy Daniels arrives at Ashecliffe Hospital for the criminally insane on Shutter Island to investigate the disappearance of a patient — and finds himself questioning his own grip on reality as the investigation deepens and the island refuses to give up its secrets.

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Stay Close book cover

Stay Close

by Harlan Coben

4.1

Three people — a suburban mother hiding her past, a detective haunted by an unsolved case, and a paparazzo watching a nightclub — are all circling the same disappearance from seventeen years ago.

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The Book of Illusions book cover

The Book of Illusions

by Paul Auster

4.1

David Zimmer loses his wife and sons in a plane crash and, through grief, becomes obsessed with the silent films of Hector Mann, a forgotten comedian from the 1920s — until a letter arrives claiming that Mann is still alive.

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The Chestnut Man book cover

The Chestnut Man

by Søren Sveistrup

4.1

When a series of brutal murders in Copenhagen is linked by small figures made of chestnuts left at each scene, detectives Naia Thulin and Mark Hess discover a connection to the missing daughter of a prominent politician — a girl who has been gone for a year and is assumed dead.

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The Death of Mrs. Westaway book cover
4.1

Hal is a tarot card reader barely surviving on Brighton pier. When a solicitor's letter arrives informing her she's named in a will she has no right to inherit, Hal travels to Trepassen House — a decaying Cornish mansion where the eccentric Westaway family is gathering — and decides to pretend to be the granddaughter she isn't.

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The Hidden Assassins book cover

The Hidden Assassins

by Robert Wilson

4.1

A bomb destroys an apartment building in Seville, killing dozens and injuring hundreds. The investigation pulls Falcón into the world of Islamist extremism, Spanish intelligence, and the specifically Sevillian world of the Moorish quarter — the Barrio Santa Cruz — where the city's Christian and Islamic histories are still legible in the architecture. Wilson's most politically charged Falcón novel, written in the aftermath of the 2004 Madrid bombings.

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