Best Detective Novel

Dashiell Hammett's first novel, Red Harvest, appeared in 1929 after serialization in Black Mask. Its narrator is the unnamed Continental Op, a detective who arrives in Personville, a western mining town known as Poisonville. An inquiry there draws him into a system in which criminal interests and po...

Confined to a hospital bed, Inspector Alan Grant turns to a historical question in Josephine Tey's The Daughter of Time, published in 1951. The Scottish writer has her detective investigate whether Richard III was responsible for the disappearance of the Princes in the Tower. Historical accounts and...

Keigo Higashino's The Devotion of Suspect X, a Japanese crime novel published in 2005, is a full-length entry in the Detective Galileo series. It reveals the concealment of a killing early, shifting attention from discovering a culprit to understanding how the cover-up works. Physicist Manabu Yukawa...

Two apparently impossible murders draw Dr. Gideon Fell into John Dickson Carr's The Hollow Man, published in 1935 and issued in the United States as The Three Coffins. Sealed or closely observed locations seem to rule out an ordinary explanation of the killings. Fell, a scholar and amateur investiga...

Published in 1986 under Ruth Rendell's Barbara Vine pseudonym, A Dark-Adapted Eye examines a family's past through the retrospective narration of Faith Severn. A journalist's investigation into a murder and execution from decades earlier prompts a return to the history of the troubled Coverdale fami...

Tana French's 2007 debut novel In the Woods introduces the Dublin Murder Squad through Detective Rob Ryan's investigation of a girl's killing near an archaeological site. Ryan conceals a connection to the area: as a child, he was found in the same woods after two companions disappeared. His unresolv...

Published in 1950, Agatha Christie's A Murder Is Announced turns a newspaper notice into the starting point for a Miss Marple mystery. In the fictional English village of Chipping Cleghorn, an advertisement names the time and place of a murder. Curious residents gather, expecting some kind of entert...

A wealthy family's missing heir brings California private investigator Lew Archer into The Galton Case, Ross Macdonald's 1959 detective novel. Hired to locate Anthony Galton after a long absence, Archer follows an inquiry that develops into questions about murder and inheritance. Establishing who so...

Published in 2009, China Miéville's The City & The City combines detective fiction with weird fiction. Inspector Tyador Borlú investigates a murder involving Besžel and Ul Qoma, two fictional cities that overlap geographically while remaining separate jurisdictions. Their residents are trained to "u...

Ruth Rendell's A Fatal Inversion, published in 1987 under her Barbara Vine name, begins with the discovery of human remains on an English country property. The narrative moves between the present and the experiences of young people who shared an inherited house there during the 1970s. It received th...

A Taste for Death is a 1986 detective novel by P. D. James featuring Scotland Yard commander and poet Adam Dalgliesh. The investigation begins when two men, one of them a government minister, are found with their throats cut in the vestry of a London church. The novel combines police procedure with...

Curtain: Poirot's Last Case is an Agatha Christie detective novel featuring Hercule Poirot and Captain Arthur Hastings. Christie wrote it during the Second World War and arranged for its publication near the end of her career; it appeared in 1975, before her death in 1976. Returning to Styles, the s...

Murder Must Advertise is a 1933 detective novel by Dorothy L. Sayers featuring the aristocratic investigator Lord Peter Wimsey. Wimsey enters a London advertising agency under an assumed identity after a copywriter dies in suspicious circumstances, then examines connections among office rivalries, d...

The Black Echo is Michael Connelly's 1992 debut novel and the first book featuring Los Angeles Police Department detective Hieronymus "Harry" Bosch. Bosch investigates the death of a fellow Vietnam War veteran found in a drainage pipe and discovers links to their wartime service as tunnel soldiers a...

Faithful Place is a 2010 crime novel by Tana French and the third book associated with the Dublin Murder Squad. Its narrator, undercover detective Frank Mackey, returns to the working-class Dublin neighborhood he left as a teenager after evidence emerges concerning the disappearance of his first lov...

Sidetracked is a crime novel by Swedish author Henning Mankell featuring police inspector Kurt Wallander. First published in Swedish in 1995, it follows Wallander and his colleagues as they investigate a sequence of ritualized killings while also confronting the death of a young woman who sets herse...

Strong Poison is a 1930 detective novel by Dorothy L. Sayers featuring Lord Peter Wimsey and introducing mystery novelist Harriet Vane. Harriet is tried for poisoning her former lover with arsenic, but the jury cannot reach a verdict, giving Wimsey limited time to identify another explanation before...

Journey Under the Midnight Sun is a crime novel by Japanese author Keigo Higashino, originally published in Japan in 1999. Beginning with the murder of a pawnbroker in an abandoned building in Osaka, it follows the consequences of the unresolved case across roughly two decades. The book uses shiftin...

Cards on the Table is a 1936 detective novel by Agatha Christie featuring Hercule Poirot. The victim, the collector Mr. Shaitana, invites four people he suspects of having committed undetected murders and four investigators to dinner, then arranges separate bridge games before being stabbed. Because...

Bluebird, Bluebird is a 2017 crime novel by American writer Attica Locke and the first book centered on Texas Ranger Darren Mathews. Mathews travels to the fictional East Texas town of Lark to investigate the deaths of a Black lawyer from Chicago and a local white woman. The novel combines a murder...

Endless Night is a 1967 standalone suspense novel by Agatha Christie, narrated in the first person by Michael Rogers. Michael dreams of building a house on a piece of English land known as Gipsy's Acre and marries the wealthy Ellie Goodman, despite warnings that the property is cursed. Rather than f...

The Underground Man is a 1971 detective novel by Ross Macdonald featuring private investigator Lew Archer. Set in Southern California during a destructive wildfire, it begins with a missing child and expands into an investigation of murder, inheritance, and concealed events from an earlier generatio...

Black Cherry Blues is a 1989 crime novel by James Lee Burke and the third book centered on Louisiana detective Dave Robicheaux. The story follows Robicheaux from New Iberia to Montana after he learns of a possible murder connected to oil exploration and becomes implicated in another killing. Combini...

Broken Harbour is a 2012 crime novel by Tana French and the fourth entry in her Dublin Murder Squad series. Detective Mick Kennedy investigates an attack on a family in an unfinished housing development outside Dublin, where a father and two children are dead and the mother is critically injured. Th...

Some Buried Caesar is a 1939 detective novel by Rex Stout featuring private investigator Nero Wolfe and his assistant and narrator, Archie Goodwin. After a roadside automobile accident, Wolfe becomes involved in events surrounding a prize bull and a murder at a rural exposition in upstate New York....

The Body in the Library is a 1942 detective novel by Agatha Christie featuring the amateur investigator Miss Marple. Colonel and Mrs. Bantry awaken to find the body of an unidentified young woman in the library of their country house near St. Mary Mead, prompting an inquiry into the victim's identit...

One Step Behind is a crime novel by Henning Mankell featuring Swedish police inspector Kurt Wallander. First published in Swedish in 1997, it follows the investigation of three young people murdered while wearing historical costumes near a nature reserve, alongside the death of one of Wallander's co...

The Crooked Hinge is a 1938 detective novel by John Dickson Carr featuring Dr. Gideon Fell. Set around an English country estate, its plot concerns two men who each claim to be the rightful heir and survivor of the sinking of the Titanic, followed by a seemingly impossible murder. The novel combines...

A Study in Scarlet is an 1887 novel by Arthur Conan Doyle and the first published story to feature Sherlock Holmes and Dr. John Watson. It introduces their meeting, their shared rooms at 221B Baker Street, and Holmes's method of drawing investigative conclusions from close observation. The narrative...