Most Read Amateur Sleuth Books

Avery Grambs is a pragmatic high-school senior with a plan for her future — one that has nothing to do with sudden wealth or handsome strangers. Then billionaire Tobias Hawthorne dies and leaves almost his entire fortune to Avery, a girl he never met. Overnight she goes from getting by to being worth billions, on one strange condition: she must move into Hawthorne House, the sprawling, secret-filled mansion where the tycoon's sharp, disinherited family still lives. The Hawthornes were raised on riddles, ciphers, and elaborate puzzle-hunts of their patriarch's design, and they are certain Avery's inheritance is the old man's final game. None of them know why she was chosen — least of all Avery. As she's drawn deeper into the mansion's hidden passages and coded clues, she finds herself caught between two very different Hawthorne grandsons, and realizes that solving the puzzle of her own inheritance may be the only way to stay alive. Twisty, addictive, and packed with clues, The Inheritance Games is the first book in Jennifer Lynn Barnes's bestselling YA mystery series.

• love triangle
• coming of age
• mystery box

In a peaceful retirement village, four unlikely friends meet weekly to discuss unsolved crimes. But when a real murder occurs on their doorstep, the Thursday Murder Club finds themselves in the middle of their first live case. With their unique skills and sharp wits, this group of septuagenarians sets out to catch a killer, proving that age is just a number when it comes to solving mysteries.

• found family
• multiple povs
• epistolary

Avery survived her first weeks in Hawthorne House, but Tobias Hawthorne's puzzles are far from solved — and the deeper she digs, the clearer it becomes that his final game was about much more than money. Working with the four grandsons and caught between Grayson and Jameson, Avery follows a trail of clues into the family's buried history. The twisty second book in Jennifer Lynn Barnes's Inheritance Games series.

• mystery box
• love triangle

When she was seven years old, Libby Day survived the night her mother and two sisters were slaughtered in their Kansas farmhouse. Her testimony helped send her fifteen-year-old brother, Ben, to prison for the murders — and for twenty-four years, Libby has lived off the dwindling sympathy of strangers: numb, broke, and doing everything she can not to think about any of it. Then the money runs out, and a secretive group of true-crime obsessives who call themselves the Kill Club comes looking for her. They are convinced Ben is innocent, that Libby's childhood account was coerced, and they will pay her to dig back into the case. Desperate for cash, Libby starts tracking down the people from that winter — and the more she learns, the less certain she becomes about what she really saw that night. Told across the single, terrible day in 1985 and Libby's grim present-day investigation, Gillian Flynn's Dark Places is a pitch-black thriller about family, poverty, and the lies we tell to survive the truth.

• dual timeline
• multiple povs
• unreliable narrator

The third book in Jennifer Lynn Barnes's Inheritance Games trilogy brings Avery Grambs's high-stakes puzzle to its conclusion. Avery has almost made it: she is weeks away from officially inheriting Tobias Hawthorne's billions, if she can simply survive to the finish line. But holding a fortune this large paints a target on her back, and the closer she gets, the more dangerous the game becomes. Living in Hawthorne House with the four brothers who once treated her as a puzzle to be solved, Avery is now something else entirely — an ally, a friend, and, to one of them, far more. When a ruthless new player arrives making impossible demands, Avery and the Hawthornes must outthink an adversary who knows their weaknesses and is willing to threaten everything, and everyone, they love. Twisty and satisfying, The Final Gambit delivers the last clues, the biggest reveals, and the payoff to the trilogy's central mystery and romance.

• mystery box

Jess arrives in Paris to find her half-brother Ben vanished from a suspiciously lavish apartment, with bleach in the air and blood on his cat. His evasive neighbors all know something — and none will say what. A claustrophobic, twist-driven thriller told through the residents of one Parisian building.

• multiple povs
• unreliable narrator
• mystery box
• betrayal

Chloe Davis thought she left her traumatic past behind, but when teenage girls start disappearing in her town, she's forced to confront the chilling possibility that history is repeating itself. Her own father confessed to similar crimes two decades ago, leaving Chloe to wonder if she's seeing ghosts or if a new killer is at large. As she prepares for her wedding, Chloe must determine if her paranoia is getting the best of her, or if she's about to unmask a murderer for the second time in her life.

• unreliable narrator

Sookie Stackhouse is a telepathic waitress in the small Louisiana town of Bon Temps, where vampires have recently come out of hiding after the invention of synthetic blood. When Bill Compton, a vampire, walks into the bar where she works, Sookie is drawn to him partly because his mind is silent to her telepathy — a rare relief. Their romance develops against a backdrop of small-town suspicion and a string of murders targeting women who have been intimate with vampires, pulling Sookie into a mystery that puts her own life at risk.

Vera Wong is a lonely tea shop owner in San Francisco who finds a dead body in her store and decides she is better equipped to solve the crime than the police. After swiping a flash drive from the scene, she begins investigating her new customers to find the killer. Instead of a murderer, she finds a group of people who desperately need her motherly care and a good cup of tea.

• found family
• mystery box
• mentor figure

FBI trainee Clarice Starling is sent to interview Dr. Hannibal Lecter — brilliant psychiatrist, incarcerated cannibal — for insight into an active serial killer known as Buffalo Bill, who abducts and skins young women. Lecter will help, but only in exchange for Starling's own buried memories. A landmark psychological thriller and the basis for the Oscar-winning film, built on one of crime fiction's most unforgettable duels.

• mentor figure

Journalist Lo Black is on assignment aboard a luxury cruise ship when she witnesses a body being thrown overboard from the cabin next to hers. However, all passengers are accounted for, and the ship's crew insists no one was ever in Cabin 10. As Lo struggles with her own anxieties and the crew's dismissals, she must determine if she's losing her mind or if a killer is still on board.

• unreliable narrator
• locked room

The Thursday Murder Club finds their quiet year interrupted by a wedding, but festivities quickly turn sinister when a guest fears for their life. Elizabeth's encounter ignites a new investigation as a ruthless villain seeks an uncrackable code. The gang must race against time to solve a complex puzzle and prevent a murder.

• found family

Sookie Stackhouse finds a naked, amnesiac Eric Northman on the side of the road, the powerful vampire reduced to a shadow of his usual arrogant self. As she hides him from the witches who stole his memories, Sookie is drawn into a supernatural turf war that threatens her life and complicates her feelings. Protecting this gentler version of Eric proves dangerous once she realizes someone is still hunting him.

• forced proximity
• love triangle

The Thursday Murder Club finds themselves embroiled in another mystery when a decade-old cold case resurfaces, involving a local news legend and a murder without a body. Simultaneously, Elizabeth faces a deadly ultimatum: kill or be killed. As the stakes rise, the club must race against time, chasing clues and navigating dangerous threats to solve the mystery and protect one of their own.

• found family

Telepathic waitress Sookie Stackhouse heads to Dallas to help the local vampire nest find a missing member of their community. While she navigates the dangerous politics of the undead, she must also contend with a fanatical anti-vampire cult determined to strike a blow against them. It is a deadly assignment, and Sookie's survival depends on managing both her mind-reading gift and the demands of the powerful vampires who now consider her indebted to them.

• love triangle
• betrayal
• sacrifice
• survival

Sookie Stackhouse heads to Mississippi to track down her missing vampire boyfriend, Bill, who has disappeared under suspicious circumstances. Her search leads her to Club Dead, an exclusive hangout for the supernatural elite where secrets are the local currency. When she finally finds him, she faces a brutal choice between loyalty and self-preservation, while her working relationship with Eric Northman deepens.

• love triangle
• quest
• betrayal
• forbidden love

A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A Jimmy Fallon’s Book Club Finalist for 2024 | A Goodreads Choice Awards Finalist | A GMA Buzz Pick | A USA Today Bestseller One of Amazon's Top 10 Best Books of April, One of Jimmy Fallon's favorite books for Spring 2024, The Top LibraryReads pick for March 2024, A Publishers Marketplace 2024 BuzzBook, One of NPR's Books We Love Frances Adams always said she’d be murdered. She was right. In 1965, Frances Adams is at an English country fair where a fortune-teller makes a bone-chilling prediction: One day, Frances will be murdered. It is a prediction that sparks her life’s work—trying to solve a crime that hasn’t happened yet. Nearly sixty years later, Annie Adams is summoned to a meeting at the sprawling country estate of her wealthy and reclusive great-aunt Frances. But by the time Annie arrives in the quaint English village of Castle Knoll, Frances is found murdered, just like she always said she would be. Annie is determined to catch the killer, but thanks to Frances’s lifelong habit of digging up secrets and lies, it seems every endearing and eccentric villager might just have a motive for her murder. Can Annie safely unravel the dark mystery at the heart of Castle Knoll, or will dredging up the past throw her into the path of a killer? As Annie gets closer to the truth, and closer to danger, she starts to fear she might inherit her aunt’s fate instead of her fortune.

• dual timeline
• mystery box
• betrayal

Cocktail waitress Sookie Stackhouse is used to dealing with the unusual, but this time it's personal. Her brother Jason is about to undergo his first were-panther change, and a mysterious sniper is targeting the local shapeshifter community. When Jason becomes a suspect, Sookie must race against the full moon to find the real killer before she becomes the next target.

• love triangle
• revenge
• secret identity
• morally grey

Sookie Stackhouse travels to New Orleans to settle the estate of her cousin Hadley, only to find herself entangled in the dangerous politics of the vampire queen of Louisiana. As she digs into Hadley's secret life, Sookie becomes the target of unknown enemies who will stop at nothing to keep the past buried. With her ex-boyfriend Bill caught in the middle, she must navigate a web of supernatural threats to survive the inheritance.

• betrayal
• court intrigue
• fake dating
• survival

Stephanie Plum is down on her luck and needs cash fast, so she takes a job as a bounty hunter. Her first assignment is to track down a former lover and local cop, Joe Morelli, who's wanted for murder. Navigating the gritty streets of Trenton, Stephanie finds herself in over her head as she tries to bring Morelli to justice, all while dealing with a cast of colorful characters.

• fish out of water
• reluctant hero

Sophie-Anne Leclerq, Queen of Louisiana, has been left politically and financially exposed by the hurricane that wrecked her state — and she is about to stand trial, accused of murdering her husband, the King of Arkansas. She summons Sookie Stackhouse to a vampire summit in the northern city of Rhodes, where undead power players from across the central United States are gathering, and puts the telepathic waitress to work reading the minds of the humans who travel in their entourages. Sookie arrives with her weretiger boyfriend, Quinn, and finds a hotel full of rival delegations, old debts, and vampires who would rather she did not hear what she can hear. Outside, the anti-vampire Fellowship of the Sun is picketing the summit. Inside, Sookie and Barry the Bellboy — the only other telepath she has ever met — begin to sense that someone means to do far worse than protest. The seventh Sookie Stackhouse novel turns the series' small-town Louisiana intrigue into a locked-hotel political thriller, and closes with the most destructive night the Southern Vampire Mysteries have yet staged.

Riding the success of his surprise bestselling memoir, "accidental author" Ernest Cunningham joins a crime-writing festival aboard the Ghan, the famous train crossing the Australian outback — where one of his far more famous fellow authors is murdered. Trapped on a moving train full of writers who all know how to plot the perfect crime, Ern must find the killer. A witty locked-room homage to Murder on the Orient Express, and the second Ernest Cunningham mystery.

• locked room

Retired Steve Wheeler enjoys his quiet life in the New Forest, but his daughter-in-law Amy thrives on adventure. When Amy's easy protection job on a private island turns deadly, Steve's peaceful routine is shattered. A new detective duo forms as they race across the globe, trying to outwit a dangerous killer.

• reluctant hero
• found family
• quest

The supernatural community of Bon Temps is stepping out of the shadows as weres and shifters publicly reveal themselves, but the announcement brings immediate bloodshed. When a mutilated body is discovered outside Merlotte's, Sookie Stackhouse must investigate a crime that threatens the fragile peace between humans and the supernatural. As an ancient and deadly race prepares for war, Sookie realizes she is a central piece in a game far more dangerous than she imagined.

Sookie Stackhouse is picking up the pieces in Bon Temps after a vampire summit explosion and the devastation of a hurricane. While searching for her missing boyfriend, she finds herself caught in the middle of a violent power struggle between supernatural factions. As old alliances shift and new threats emerge, Sookie must navigate a world where betrayal comes from those she trusts most.

A chilling serial killer is stalking Boston, leaving a trail of ritualistic violence in their wake. Detective Jane Rizzoli and her partner Thomas Moore are racing against time to stop the murders. Their investigation points to a doctor with a hidden past, who may be the killer's next target – or know more than she's letting on.

• revenge
• secret identity

Sookie Stackhouse is still recovering from a brutal fae conflict when new threats emerge in Bon Temps. While her bond with vampire Eric Northman draws unwanted attention from a dangerous new vampire king, a vengeful fae remains on the loose. Sookie must navigate shifting supernatural politics and family secrets that refuse to stay buried.

Four women in law enforcement and journalism form an unlikely alliance to hunt a serial killer preying on newlyweds in San Francisco. When the official investigation stalls, they create the Women's Murder Club to work outside the system. Their determined pursuit leads them to a shocking truth, but the killer's identity and motives are far from what they initially suspected.

• found family

A killer is working through the alphabet. In Andover, a shopkeeper named Ascher is found dead; in Bexhill, a waitress named Barnard; in Churston, a wealthy man named Clarke.

• secret identity
• morally grey
• multiple povs
• mystery box

Middle-school teacher Yuko Moriguchi uses her final class lecture to reveal that two of her own students murdered her small daughter, and to begin a quiet, meticulous revenge. Told through shifting confessions that keep darkening the story, Kanae Minato's cold, bestselling Japanese psychological thriller probes grief, cruelty, and justice.

• revenge
• multiple povs