Most read Noir books

Disgraced financial journalist Mikael Blomkvist is hired by aging industrialist Henrik Vanger to solve the forty-year-old disappearance of his teenage grand-niece Harriet from the family's island estate. Joined by Lisbeth Salander, a brilliant and dangerous young hacker, he uncovers decades of buried cruelty and corporate corruption. The first novel in the Millennium trilogy and a defining work of Nordic noir.

• revenge
• morally grey
• mystery box
• anti hero

A woman returns to her childhood home after her father's sudden death, only to discover unsettling secrets about his life and the circumstances surrounding his demise. As she digs deeper, she uncovers a web of lies and betrayals that force her to question everything she thought she knew about her family and herself. The truth proves to be far more dangerous than she could have imagined.

• unreliable narrator
• multiple povs
• morally grey
• revenge

Centuries from now, human consciousness can be digitised and stored on a "stack" implanted at the base of the skull, then re-sleeved into a new body at will. Death is negotiable for those who can afford it; the wealthy are effectively immortal. Takeshi Kovacs — a former Envoy, an elite and dangerous kind of soldier — is killed on his home world and wakes up hundreds of light-years away in a borrowed body on Earth, downloaded into a job he did not choose. His new employer is Laurens Bancroft, one of the near-immortal super-rich, who was found with his head blown off. Bancroft was restored from a backup, but the backup predates his death, so he has no memory of it — and he does not believe the police verdict of suicide. He hires Kovacs to find out who killed him, and why. What follows is a hard-boiled murder investigation set in a neon, rain-slicked future, unfolding through virtual torture, designer drugs, corporate conspiracy, and the philosophical vertigo of a world where the self can be copied, edited, and deleted. Violent, cerebral, and stylish, Altered Carbon is a landmark of modern cyberpunk and the first novel in the Takeshi Kovacs trilogy.

• anti hero
• morally grey
• fish out of water

Titus Crown, the first Black sheriff of Charon County, Virginia, faces a crisis when a school shooting exposes a long-running serial killer in his community. As he hunts the murderer, Titus must navigate the town's racial tensions and a local church's dark influence while protecting his own secrets. It is a stark look at justice and history in the American South.

• morally grey
• revenge

When their sons — a married gay couple — are murdered, two hardened ex-cons, one Black and one white, set aside their mutual distrust and their own prejudice to hunt the killers. S.A. Cosby's ferocious Southern revenge thriller about grief, race, masculinity, and fatherhood.

• revenge
• anti hero
• redemption arc
• morally grey

A foreign student is found dead in Besźel, and Inspector Borlú expects a routine case. Then the trail crosses into Ul Qoma, a city that shares his streets and that he has been trained never to see, under the watch of Breach.

• mystery box
• morally grey
• betrayal

Private eye Philip Marlowe takes a simple blackmail job for a dying millionaire and his two wild daughters, only to sink into a Los Angeles underworld of pornography, gambling, and murder. Raymond Chandler's debut novel introduced Marlowe and helped define the hardboiled detective story.

Pop culture journalist Jack Sparks mocks an exorcism in Italy, then a chilling video appears on his YouTube account that he swears he never made. Not long after, he is dead, and the files he left behind tell the rest.

• unreliable narrator
• mystery box
• survival

Melbourne is under a strict curfew as a new virus wave hits, confining residents to their homes and a five-kilometer radius. When Lou's son, Samuel, fails to return home by nightfall, her panic intensifies as he becomes unreachable. Lou cannot involve the police due to her own hidden past, forcing her to search for Samuel herself. She races against time and the city's lockdown, knowing her secrets could jeopardize everything.

• unreliable narrator
• mystery box
• survival

The internationally acclaimed #1 bestselling thriller, now in English “This rollercoaster of a novel is highly imaginative and totally unique. I devoured it ― no pun intended! ― in one sitting. By turns gory, shocking, macabre and often very funny, you won’t be able to put it down. Just be grateful you’re not on the menu…” ―Alex Michaelides #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Silent Patient Four childhood friends, eager for a taste of city life, swap rural Brazil for an apartment in Copacabana, Rio. But they have no idea of the fate that awaits them there. . . . Dante, Piglet, Miguel, and Hugo are your average students trying to make ends meet with part-time jobs, excited about the bright futures at their fingertips. So when their rent skyrockets, they struggle to keep their new lives and big dreams afloat. They need to make money however they can. In order to keep their apartment, the friends adopt an unorthodox plan and are soon sucked into a dark world of secret dinner parties catering to the twisted fantasies of Rio’s elite. What starts as a joke quickly spirals out of their control. As the four friends fall deeper into this dark underworld and earn more money, the stakes get higher and the consequences deadlier, revealing the devious depths that lurk within each of them and threatening not only their friendship but also their lives.

A mild-mannered Texas deputy narrates his own descent into murder, hiding a cold psychopathy behind a folksy, underestimated facade.

• unreliable narrator
• villain protagonist
• anti hero

Published in 1946 under Boris Vian's American pseudonym "Vernon Sullivan," this scandalous hard-boiled novel follows Lee Anderson, a light-skinned Black man passing as white, who arrives in a small Southern town bent on a calculated, seductive revenge against the white community that lynched his brother. A lurid, deliberately provocative noir about racism, hatred, and the corrosive logic of vengeance.

• revenge

Seventeen years ago, the wealthy Primrose family was slaughtered in their beds, and the family's young live-in chef, Bill Kareama, was swiftly arrested, convicted, and imprisoned for the crime. The nation moved on. But true-crime podcaster Sloane Abbott has never been convinced the case was as simple as it looked. Determined to reopen it for her show, Sloane seeks out TK Phillips, the prison psychologist who once assessed Bill and has his own reasons for staying silent. As Sloane records, questions, and provokes, long-buried secrets about the Primroses, the investigation, and the man behind bars begin to surface — and it becomes clear that someone would prefer the past stay exactly where it is. J.P. Pomare's twisting standalone thriller braids past and present into a taut examination of guilt, media, and the stories we tell about crime.

• dual timeline

Clayton Burroughs became a sheriff to escape his family's drug empire on Bull Mountain, Georgia. When an ATF agent arrives with a plan to shut the mountain down, Clayton's secret agenda pits brother against brother.

• family saga
• betrayal

Meet Maud: an 88-year-old Swedish widow-in-all-but-name who has lived alone in her late father's Gothenburg apartment for seventy years — and who has quietly gotten away with murder more than once. This darkly funny linked-story collection follows her as she dispatches nosy neighbors, thwarts an old flame's engagement, and turns the world's habit of overlooking elderly women into the perfect alibi.

Nine years ago, five affluent Melbourne families gathered at a backyard pool party — and something unspeakable happened that shattered their marriages and friendships. Now, at an uneasy reunion, the charismatic and much-resented Baz King goes missing, and almost everyone has a motive. A biting Australian domestic noir told in shifting perspectives, moving between that catastrophic afternoon and the present, about how witnessing the worst can reshape a life.

• multiple povs
• dual timeline

When his partner Miles Archer is killed on a routine tailing job, San Francisco detective Sam Spade becomes a police suspect. He must outwit liars and killers who all want a jewel-crusted black falcon.

• betrayal
• anti hero
• morally grey
• secret identity

A corpse lies in room 526 of the Paradox, a time-travel hotel, and only security chief January Cole can see it. With time technology about to go private and the bidders under attack, she has to find a killer no one else can spot.

• unreliable narrator
• mystery box

Inspector Indira Ramos is finally ready to return to Madrid after nearly three years away, but a secret she's hiding from her partner Iván Moreno makes facing him almost impossible. Their reunion comes fast: fingerprints belonging to Spain's most notorious fugitive turn up at a gas station, and Indira is certain the killer whose old crime has just expired under the statute of limitations has struck again.

A brutal murder in a remote church in northern Sweden pulls tax lawyer Rebecka Martinsson back to her childhood home. Her former spiritual mentor has been found mutilated, and the local police suspect a member of his congregation. As Rebecka investigates, she uncovers a web of secrets and lies within the isolated religious community, forcing her to confront her own past.

• mystery box
• reluctant hero

A forger must con his way out of a mental institution.