Most Read Crime Books

Five years ago, Andie Bell was murdered in the quiet town of Little Kilton. Everyone knows the story: her boyfriend, Sal Singh, killed her and then took his own life. The case is closed. But Pippa Fitz-Amobi has never quite believed it. When she chooses the murder as the subject of her senior capstone project, she tells herself she is only reopening old questions for a school assignment. The deeper Pip digs, the less the official version holds together. With the help of Ravi Singh, Sal's younger brother, who has spent years living under the weight of his brother's supposed guilt, she starts tracing the last hours of Andie's life through interviews, old messages, and secrets the town would rather keep buried. Someone notices. As anonymous threats begin to arrive, it becomes clear that the truth is still dangerous, and that the real killer may be much closer than anyone imagined. Told through Pip's project log, transcripts, and maps alongside the narrative, Holly Jackson's debut is a tightly plotted whodunit that helped define a wave of modern young-adult crime fiction. It is a story about the cost of certainty, the pull of an unsolved case, and how far an ordinary teenager will go to be sure she has found the truth.

Alicia Berenson's life looks perfect. A celebrated painter married to an in-demand fashion photographer, she lives in a grand house overlooking a park in one of London's most desirable neighbourhoods. Then, one evening, her husband Gabriel returns home late and Alicia shoots him five times in the face — and from that moment never speaks another word. Her refusal to explain, or even to talk, turns a domestic tragedy into a public sensation and hardens into an unsolvable mystery. Alicia is confined to the Grove, a secure forensic unit in North London, where she paints and stays silent. Theo Faber, a criminal psychotherapist who has been fascinated by her case for years, engineers a job at the unit and sets out to reach her, convinced that if he can only get Alicia to speak, he can uncover the truth of that night. Told through Theo's obsessive investigation and Alicia's own private diary, Alex Michaelides's debut is a tautly plotted psychological thriller that draws on Greek tragedy and builds to one of the genre's most talked-about twists.

• unreliable narrator

A murder inside the Louvre pulls symbologist Robert Langdon into an overnight chase across Paris and London, chasing a trail of clues hidden in the works of Leonardo da Vinci.

• mystery box

On their fifth wedding anniversary, Nick Dunne's wife, Amy, vanishes, leaving behind a trail of clues that suggest a struggle. As the police investigation intensifies and media frenzy grows, Nick becomes the prime suspect. However, Amy's diary entries reveal a different side to their marriage, forcing readers to question everything they thought they knew about the couple and the disappearance.

• unreliable narrator
• dual timeline

Ten strangers, each invited under a different pretext, arrive on an isolated island off the Devon coast. None of them has met their absent host, the elusive U. N. Owen, and as the boat that brought them departs, they settle in for what promises to be an unusual stay. After dinner on the first evening, a recorded voice fills the room, accusing every guest of having caused a death and escaped justice. Soon afterward, one of them dies. As a storm cuts the island off from the mainland, the remaining guests realize their deaths are being staged to mirror the verses of an old nursery rhyme that hangs framed in each bedroom. One by one, the survivors fall, and with no way to summon help and no sign of any other living soul, suspicion turns inward. Each person studies the others, certain that the killer is among them, while the rhyme counts steadily down. Trapped, watched, and unable to trust anyone, they must reckon with the secrets that brought them here even as the circle of the living shrinks. Christie builds a closed, methodical puzzle in which guilt, fear, and isolation press on every character, and the question is not only who will be next but how anyone could orchestrate such a sequence of deaths on a deserted island. It is a tightly constructed account of crime and consequence with no series detective to set things right.

• locked room

Ketterdam is a bustling hub of international trade where anything can be had for the right price — and no one knows that better than Kaz Brekker, a young criminal prodigy who runs the streets of the Barrel with cold precision. When Kaz is offered a payout large enough to set him up for life, the catch is a heist no one has ever survived: break into the impregnable Ice Court in Fjerda and free a prisoner whose knowledge could tip the balance of world power. The job is impossible for any one person, so Kaz assembles a crew of six dangerous outcasts — a convict, a sharpshooter, a runaway, a spy, a Grisha Heartrender, and a demolitions expert — each with their own reasons for taking the risk and their own secrets to protect. Told through rotating points of view, the novel unfolds as an intricate caper thick with double-crosses and improvised gambles, gradually revealing the old wounds and hard-won loyalties that bind the crew together. Set in the same world as the Shadow and Bone trilogy but standing fully on its own, Six of Crows pairs a twisting heist plot with morally complicated characters who feel real in their damage and their wit. It launched the Six of Crows duology and became one of the defining fantasy series for young adult readers.

• heist
• found family
• morally grey
• multiple povs

When five students file into detention at Bayview High — Bronwyn the overachiever, Addy the prom queen, Nate the criminal, Cooper the athlete, and Simon, the outcast who runs the school's notorious gossip app — only four walk out alive. Simon dies from an allergic reaction that looks less and less like an accident, and the police quickly zero in on the four students left in the room: each of them was about to be exposed by one of Simon's next posts, and each had a reason to want him silenced. As the investigation drags on and the media descends, the four suspects are forced into uneasy alliance, piecing together what really happened even as the secrets Simon meant to reveal threaten to come out anyway — from each other, if not from him. Told in alternating first-person chapters, One of Us Is Lying is a fast-paced YA mystery about the personas built to survive high school and what happens when they start to crack. Karen M. McManus's bestselling debut launched a series and was adapted into a television show, and it remains a touchstone of the modern YA thriller boom.

• multiple povs

Rachel Watson takes the same commuter train into London every morning, and every morning it pauses at the same signal, giving her a clear view of a house four doors down from the home she once shared with her ex-husband. From the window she watches a young couple she has never met, inventing perfect lives for them and clinging to the fantasy as her own life falls apart under the weight of divorce and drinking. Then one morning she sees something shocking from the train, and days later the woman she has been watching is reported missing. Convinced she holds a piece of the puzzle, Rachel inserts herself into the investigation and into the lives of the people involved, even as her blackouts leave her unable to trust her own memory of that night. Told in the alternating, unreliable voices of three women, Paula Hawkins's debut is a taut psychological thriller about addiction, obsession, and the gap between the lives we imagine and the ones people actually live behind closed doors.

• unreliable narrator
• multiple povs

Pip Fitz-Amobi is supposed to be moving on. College is weeks away, the podcast that once thrilled her now feels like a burden, and the toll of her past cases has followed her home in ways she can barely admit. Then the messages start: an anonymous stalker leaving chalk figures and dead pigeons, asking a single chilling question. The police dismiss her fears, but Pip recognizes the pattern. It matches an old case she thought was long closed, and it is pointing straight at her. As the threat closes in, Pip is forced to confront how far the justice she believes in has actually reached, and how much of herself she has lost chasing the truth for other people. This final book pushes her to a breaking point and asks what a good girl does when the system fails and the danger is personal. The devastating conclusion to Holly Jackson's A Good Girl's Guide to Murder trilogy trades tidy whodunit for something rawer and more morally fraught. It is a darker, more intense read than the earlier books, closing Pip's arc with choices that leave no one, including the reader, entirely comfortable.

Pip Fitz-Amobi swore she was done with detective work. The case that made her a local celebrity nearly cost her everything, and she has promised herself, her family, and Ravi Singh that she will not go looking for trouble again. But when Jamie Reynolds, the older brother of her friend Connor, disappears the night of the town's memorial for the Bell and Singh case, the police treat him as an adult who simply walked away, and no one else will look for him. So Pip does. This time she brings her audience with her, documenting the search in real time on her true-crime podcast as the episodes climb the charts. Following Jamie's last movements pulls her into a tangle of secret online relationships, a controversial figure from the town's past, and a stalker whose obsession may have turned deadly. The larger her platform grows, the more the investigation escapes her control, and the more she has to weigh how much of other people's pain she is willing to broadcast. The second book in Holly Jackson's bestselling trilogy deepens Pip's story with darker stakes and sharper questions about the ethics of true crime. It is a fast, twisting mystery that sets up the series' devastating finale while standing as a gripping disappearance case in its own right.

Crooked Kingdom picks up in the aftermath of the crew's audacious Ice Court job. Back in Ketterdam and double-crossed out of their promised reward, Kaz Brekker and his band of outcasts find themselves hunted by rival gangs, corrupt merchants, and foreign powers all circling the city. To collect what they're owed — and to rescue one of their own — Kaz must spin a con more dangerous than any heist, playing Ketterdam's ruthless power brokers against one another. As the schemes escalate, the novel deepens each character's backstory and tests the loyalties that hold the crew together, building toward a conclusion that pays off the duology's threads of revenge, grief, and hard-won trust. Told through the same rotating viewpoints as Six of Crows, Crooked Kingdom trades some of the first book's tight caper structure for a sprawling, city-wide chess match. The second and final volume of the Six of Crows duology, it closes out one of the most beloved character arcs in modern young adult fantasy while standing as a satisfying payoff to the crew's story.

• found family
• morally grey
• multiple povs
• revenge

Camille Preaker, a reporter for a second-rate Chicago paper, is sent back to her small Missouri hometown of Wind Gap to cover the murder of one preteen girl and the disappearance of another. Fresh out of a psychiatric hospital, Camille is poorly equipped to return to the place where she grew up, and to the mother she has spent her adult life avoiding. Adora, her cold and hypochondriac mother, still presides over a decaying mansion; her half-sister Amma, a precocious thirteen-year-old, is a stranger who veers between doll-like obedience and wild rebellion. As Camille reports the story, the town's suspicions, secrets, and her own buried history begin to press in on her. To solve what is happening to Wind Gap's daughters, she has to confront the damage done to her own body and mind. Gillian Flynn's debut is a taut, disquieting psychological thriller about violence between women, the wounds families inflict, and the stories a town tells to protect itself. Its narrator is unreliable in the most literal sense — her skin is a record of the words she has carved into it — and the mystery closes in on home.

• unreliable narrator

A destitute, brilliant former law student in St. Petersburg murders a pawnbroker to test his theory that extraordinary men are above the moral laws governing ordinary people — and is then consumed by paranoia as he tries to outmaneuver both the police and his own conscience.

• morally grey
• unreliable narrator

Returning from the Middle East aboard the famed Orient Express, the Belgian detective Hercule Poirot expects a quiet three-day journey across Europe. The train is unusually full for the season, carrying a cross-section of strangers: an English governess, a stiff army colonel, a voluble American widow, an aging Russian princess, a wealthy man's young secretary, and a businessman named Ratchett who confides to Poirot that his life has been threatened and tries to hire him as a bodyguard. Poirot refuses. In the night the train runs into a snowdrift in the wilds of Yugoslavia and stops dead, cut off from the world. By morning Ratchett lies dead in his locked compartment, stabbed a dozen times, and the killer can only be one of the passengers still trapped aboard. At the request of his friend M. Bouc, a director of the railway line, Poirot agrees to investigate. With no police, no escape, and the snow holding everyone in place, he questions each traveller and weighs a tangle of contradictory clues, false alibis, and a scrap of evidence pointing to an old American tragedy. As the accounts refuse to align, Poirot must reason his way toward a solution that tests his own sense of justice.

A wedding on a windswept island off the coast of Ireland should be the event of the year. Jules Keegan, a driven magazine publisher, is marrying Will Slater, a charismatic television survival star, before a select gathering of university friends, family, and staff. The setting is spectacular and remote — reachable only by boat, with a ruined chapel, a peat bog, and no way off once the weather turns. As the champagne flows, the polished surface begins to crack. Old rivalries, buried humiliations, and secrets that several guests would kill to keep resurface across the long day and into the night. When the lights go out during the reception and a body is discovered, everyone on the island becomes a suspect — because almost everyone had a reason. Told through multiple points of view and a timeline that circles between the days before the wedding and the night of the murder, Lucy Foley's bestselling thriller is a modern take on the Agatha Christie closed-circle mystery: atmospheric, sharply attuned to class and status, and built to keep readers guessing until the final reveal.

• dual timeline

When a physicist is found murdered at CERN with an ancient Illuminati symbol branded into his chest, Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon is summoned to help. The investigation reveals that the secretive brotherhood has stolen a canister of antimatter—a substance powerful enough to level a city—and hidden it somewhere beneath Vatican City. The countdown to detonation begins just as the cardinals gather in conclave to elect a new pope. Paired with physicist Vittoria Vetra, the murdered scientist's adopted daughter, Langdon follows an ancient "Path of Illumination" marked in the churches and sculptures of Rome. As the clock runs down, four kidnapped cardinals are murdered one by one in symbolic, brutal fashion, and Langdon must outpace a ruthless assassin to find the antimatter before it destroys the heart of the Catholic Church. The first novel to feature Robert Langdon, Angels & Demons sets his globe-spanning template: a race against time through real cities and monuments, threaded with art history, religious symbolism, and the age-old clash between science and faith.

Ellie Mack was the perfect daughter, fifteen, bright, adored, days from an idyllic summer, when she walked out one afternoon and simply never came home. A decade later her mother, Laurel, is a woman held together by habit: her marriage over, her other children distant, the case long cold. When Laurel meets Floyd, a warm and attentive man, in a London cafe, she is startled to feel alive again. But his youngest daughter, Poppy, is disquietingly precocious, and bears an unsettling resemblance to the girl Laurel lost. As Laurel is drawn deeper into Floyd's life, the coincidences multiply, and the truth about what happened to Ellie edges into view. Told through shifting perspectives, Lisa Jewell's bestselling thriller is a tense, emotionally raw story about a mother's love and the darkness that can hide behind an unremarkable front door.

In the quiet English village of King's Abbot, gossip travels fast and few secrets stay buried. The local doctor, James Sheppard, records the unsettling events that follow when wealthy widower Roger Ackroyd is found stabbed to death in the locked study of his country house, Fernly Park. The death comes close on the heels of two others: a woman who took her own life and the man she may have been protecting. Ackroyd had been on the verge of learning a dangerous truth, and his murder leaves the household riddled with suspects, debts, blackmail, and motive. Retired to a nearby cottage where he tends his marrows, the Belgian detective Hercule Poirot is persuaded to abandon his vegetables and take the case at the request of Ackroyd's anxious niece, whose fiance has vanished under suspicion. Recounted by Sheppard, who becomes Poirot's confidant and assistant, the investigation moves through a closed circle of relatives, servants, and neighbours, each guarding something. As Poirot applies his methodical order and method to scattered clues, an inquisitive village chorus, led by the doctor's sharp-eyed sister Caroline, supplies rumour and revelation in equal measure. The result is a tightly plotted puzzle that rewards close attention and ends on a resolution readers have argued over ever since.

• unreliable narrator

A criminal defense attorney must decide whether to defend her own husband when he becomes the prime suspect in his mistress's murder.

• unreliable narrator
• multiple povs
• betrayal
• morally grey

On a bleak December midnight, a grieving scholar is visited by a mysterious raven that answers his every question with one word: "Nevermore." As he questions the bird about his lost love, Lenore, the refrain drives him toward despair. Edgar Allan Poe's hypnotic Gothic poem of grief, memory, and madness.

In 1920s Oklahoma, members of the oil-rich Osage Nation were murdered one by one in a conspiracy that reached into their own families and the institutions meant to protect them. David Grann's acclaimed investigation follows Osage survivor Mollie Burkhart and FBI agent Tom White through one of the most chilling and consequential crimes in American history.

Korede, a diligent Lagos nurse, has a problem: her beautiful younger sister Ayoola keeps killing her boyfriends and calling Korede to clean up. The arrangement holds until Ayoola sets her sights on the kind doctor Korede secretly loves, forcing Korede to choose between her sister and the man she wants. Oyinkan Braithwaite's debut is a sharp, darkly comic thriller about loyalty, envy, and the pull of family, told in short, propulsive chapters.

• morally grey

Disgraced financial journalist Mikael Blomkvist has just lost a libel case against a powerful industrialist when he is hired by Henrik Vanger, the aging head of one of Sweden's wealthiest families, for a strange private assignment. Forty years earlier, Henrik's teenage grand-niece Harriet vanished from the family's island estate during a gathering from which no one could have left. Henrik is convinced she was murdered by someone in his own family, and he wants Blomkvist to find out the truth. Blomkvist's investigation soon intersects with Lisbeth Salander, a fierce, brilliant, and deeply guarded young hacker with a photographic memory and a violent past of her own. Together, this unlikely pair begins pulling at threads that the Vanger family has kept buried for decades, uncovering a trail of corporate corruption, hidden cruelty, and a series of crimes far darker than a single missing girl. The first novel in Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy and a defining work of Nordic noir, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is a dense, chilling crime thriller about violence against women, institutional rot, and the outsiders who refuse to look away. Its unforgettable heroine, Lisbeth Salander, became one of modern crime fiction's most iconic characters.

• revenge
• morally grey

First Lie Wins is Ashley Elston's adult debut, a #1 New York Times bestseller and Reese's Book Club pick that turns a con-artist premise into a taut game of identity and control. "Evie Porter" looks like any nice Southern girl with a doting boyfriend and a tidy house — except the name, the backstory, and the life are all fabrications handed to her by a shadowy employer known only as Mr. Smith. Sent to get close to a target named Ryan Sumner, Evie does what she always does: learns the town, learns the man, and waits for the job. But this time the mark gets under her skin, and she starts to imagine a life she might actually keep. Then a woman walks into town claiming to be the real Evie Porter, and the carefully built lie begins to come apart. Told in a braided present-and-past structure, the novel slowly reveals how Evie became who she is and steers toward a serpentine confrontation with the boss she has never met. Sharp, propulsive, and full of misdirection, it is a standout entry in contemporary domestic and psychological suspense.

• secret identity
• unreliable narrator
• dual timeline

To everyone who knows them, Jack and Grace Angel are the perfect couple. Jack is handsome, charming, and wildly successful — a barrister who has never lost a case defending abused women. Grace is elegant and devoted, endlessly available to her husband and never, ever seen without him. Their friends are a little envious. What none of them can imagine is what waits on the other side of the Angels' beautiful front door. Because behind closed doors, Grace's dream marriage is a meticulously constructed cage. Every detail of her life is controlled, monitored, and weaponized by a man whose public compassion is a mask for something monstrous. And with her beloved younger sister Millie, who has Down syndrome, due to move in soon, Grace is running out of time to find a way out. Told in tautly alternating chapters that cut between the couple's whirlwind courtship and Grace's present-day imprisonment, B.A. Paris's Behind Closed Doors is a claustrophobic domestic thriller about coercive control and the quiet desperation of a woman fighting to save herself and the person she loves most.

• dual timeline

Anna Fox, a child psychologist, hasn't left her New York townhouse in nearly a year. Housebound by crippling agoraphobia, she passes her days drinking too much wine, mixing it with her medication, watching old black-and-white thrillers, and spying on her neighbors through a camera lens. Then a new family moves in across the way, and one night Anna sees something through her window that she was never meant to see. What she thinks she witnessed — and whether anyone will believe a heavily medicated, hard-drinking recluse — becomes the center of a spiraling mystery in which nothing, including Anna's own memory, can be trusted. A.J. Finn's twisty bestselling debut is a claustrophobic, cinematic homage to classic Hitchcockian suspense.

• unreliable narrator

More than twenty years ago, the disappearance of teenage Julia shattered her family and drove her two sisters apart. Today Claire is the pampered wife of a wealthy Atlanta architect, insulated from the world, while Lydia is a single mother scraping by, an ex-addict who has not spoken to Claire in almost two decades. The two women have built entirely separate lives around the same old wound. Then Claire's husband is murdered in front of her, and the careful surface of her marriage begins to peel away, exposing secrets she can barely comprehend. Forced back into contact, the estranged sisters start pulling at a thread that leads straight back to Julia, and to a darkness far worse than either of them imagined. As the truth surfaces, Claire and Lydia must decide how far they will go for the truth, and for each other. Karin Slaughter's Pretty Girls is a standalone psychological thriller, ferociously paced and unflinchingly dark, about family, grief, and the violence that can hide behind an ordinary life. Be warned: it earns its reputation as one of her most disturbing novels.

Strange Pictures is the English-language debut of Uketsu, the masked, voice-altered Japanese YouTuber whose puzzle-horror videos made him a phenomenon. Translated by Jim Rion, it is a mystery told through drawings: a handful of crude, unsettling sketches — a pregnant blogger's doodles, a schoolboy's picture of his apartment block, an art teacher's final sketch before his death — each of which conceals a clue the reader is invited to decode. The novel unfolds as a set of seemingly separate cases spread across years and narrators. On their own, each drawing is merely odd; read closely, and the smudges, stray lines, and off details begin to point toward something deliberate and sinister. As the sections accumulate, hidden threads draw the stories together into a single, carefully engineered whole, and the reader realizes the pictures have been hiding a connected truth all along. Part detective story, part interactive riddle, Strange Pictures rewards patient, attentive reading. It is a spare, eerie, cleverly constructed book that treats the reader as a fellow investigator rather than a spectator — a Japanese bestseller that turns the simple act of looking at a picture into an act of deduction.

A group of old university friends, now in their thirties, keep up a tradition of ringing in the New Year together. This year they travel to a remote hunting lodge at Loch Corrin, deep in the Scottish Highlands, for three days of champagne, fine food, and the comfortable cruelties of people who have known each other far too long. Then a historic blizzard seals the estate off from the outside world — and by New Year's Day, one of them is dead. Told through the voices of several guests and the lodge's isolated staff, and crisscrossing between the party itself and the frozen aftermath when the body is found, the novel slowly peels back a decade of buried resentments, betrayals, and secrets. As the snow traps everyone together, it becomes clear that the killer is one of the group. Lucy Foley's atmospheric, slow-burn thriller uses its claustrophobic setting and rotating perspectives to ask how well any of us really know our closest friends.

• forced proximity

Book two of S.T. Abby's dual-POV Mindf*ck series. Lana Myers is methodically killing the men who destroyed her life, while FBI profiler Logan Bennett — unknowingly hunting her — falls for her. Here, a second predator called the Boogeyman turns his sights on the woman Logan loves. A dark, bingeable romantic thriller meant to be read in order.

• revenge
• anti hero
• morally grey
• villain protagonist