Noteworthy Crime Fiction
Explore the most noteworthy crime fiction books that will keep you on the edge of your seat. Discover gripping mysteries, thrilling plots, and unforgettable detectives in this curated list.
Book
A Place of Execution
by Val McDermid
Police Inspector George Bennet, who investigated the never-solved disappearance of thirteen-year-old Alison Carter from her cloistered village decades ago, finds shattering new evidence, leading writer Catherine Heathcote to investigate further.
Book
A Conspiracy of Paper
by David Liss
Benjamin Weaver, a Jew and an ex-boxer, is an outsider in eighteenth-century London, tracking down debtors and felons for aristocratic clients. The son of a wealthy stock trader, he lives estranged from his family—until he is asked to investigate his father’s sudden death. Thus Weaver descends into the deceptive world of the English stock jobbers, gliding between coffee houses and gaming houses, drawing rooms and bordellos. The more Weaver uncovers, the darker the truth becomes, until he realizes that he is following too closely in his father’s footsteps—and they just might lead him to his own grave. An enthralling historical thriller, A Conspiracy of Paper will leave readers wondering just how much has changed in the stock market in the last three hundred years. . . .
Book
Deep South
by Nevada Barr
Nevada Barr's ever-popular Anna Pigeon series is consistently praised as "exceptional" (Denver Post), "stunning" (Seattle Times), and "superb" (New York Times Book Review). In Deep South, Park Ranger Anna Pigeon heads to Mississippi, only to encounter terrible secrets in the heart of the south… Anna Pigeon finally gives in to her bureaucratic clock and signs on for a promotion. Next thing she knows, she's knee-deep in mud and Mississippi. Not exactly what she had in mind. Almost immediately, as the new district ranger on the Natchez Trace, Anna discovers the body of a young prom queen near a country cemetery, a sheet around her head and a noose around her neck. It's a morbind reminder of the town's prejudiced past, which the locals insist is long dormant. As fast as the ever-encroaching kudzu vines of the region, the roots of this story run deep-and threaten to suffocate anyone in the way, including Anna...
Book
Black Dog
by Stephen Booth
When the body of smart and sexy 15-year-old Laura Vernon is found in Northern England's Peak District, Detective Constable Ben Cooper investigates. Uneasily teamed with ambitious newcomer Detective Constable Diane Fry, Cooper tests a town's family ties, friendships, and loyalties--and finds in order to understand the present they must unearth the past.
Book
The Kidnapping of Rosie Dawn
by Eric Wright
"Joe Barley, an English teacher and sometime private eye," investigates when Rosie Dawn, exotic dancer and mistress of a fast-food place, disappears.--Cover.
Book
Bone House
by Betsy Tobin
In this stunning debut, Betsy Tobin spins a classic tale of gothic suspense. Immersing readers in Elizabethan England, she masterfully evokes a heady place where science and superstition walk hand-in-hand and sensuality and violence are masked by the merest veneer of gentility. ...some people are the center of their world, and others are the spokes. The center of one village was Dora, the great-bellied prostitute whose lush curves gave solace to men even as her compassion and honesty drew the company of women. So when Dora is found dead in an icy ravine, her loss impacts everyone. So, too, does it torment a young chambermaid at the Great House. Determined to discover the truth, she ?nds that Dora left behind many unanswered questions, along with a huge, slow-witted son, a boy of eleven trapped in a man's body. The deeper she digs, the more the mystery of Dora's life is revealed, until a terrible secret is laid bare.
Book
The Bottoms
by Joe R. Lansdale
In Depression-era East Texas, young Harry Crane discovers the body of a mutilated woman. As his father, the town constable investigates, Harry and his sister Tom think it was the work of the legendary Goat Man.
Book
The Company
by Arabella Edge
"The Company is a novel based on the 1629 voyage of the Dutch East India Company flagship Batavia, bound for the colonies with a cargo of untold riches. Among the passengers is Cornelisz, a man ousted from polite society by sordid rumors of necromancy. Corrupt to the very marrow of his soul, Cornelisz considers himself God's equal, the rightful heir to gold, silver - even another man's wife. So twisted is he by lust and greed that he incites a mutiny, running the ship aground on a reef." "All is lost - the ship is wrecked, its passengers dying, the treasure trashed at the bottom of the sea. "The apothecary will heal us," the survivors pray, believing themselves lucky to be alive. In the name of benevolence, Cornelisz seizes command of their island refuge. The brave castaways stir with hope - until the killing begins. For forty frenzied days, Cornelisz decides who shall live and who shall die, leaving his victims with just one wish - that they had gone down with the ship."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Book
A Dangerous Road
by Kris Nelscott
In February, 1968, African-American P.I. Smokey Dalton is hired by white Laura Hathaway to find out why he's in her mother's will. Amid his investigation, riots erupt from a Memphis sanitation workers' strike, and Smokey's childhood friend, Martin Luther King, Jr., is due in town for a march. Martin's Press.
Book
Ode to a Banker
by Lindsey Davis
When a wealthy Athenian banker is found gruesomely murdered, Marcus Didius Falco must scour the seedy streets of ancient Rome to hunt down the killer.
Book
The Black Maria
by Mark Graham
Civil War veteran and Philadelphia police investigator Wilton McCleary knows that the murder of a girl in "Shantyville"the city's seamy red light district is connected to a wealthy industrialist family, but now he has to prove it.
Book
Sidetracked
by Henning Mankell
A teenage girl self-immolates, the former Minister of Justice is murdered and scalped, and suddenly Inspector Kurt Wallander finds himself searching for Sweden's first serial killer.
Book
Forty Words for Sorrow
by Giles Blunt
Long after others had given up on Katie Pine as just another runaway teenager, her dead body is found, and then when another death occurs, John Cardinal and his new partner Lisa Delorme start investigating the possibility of a serial killer in the cold of a Canadian winter.
Book
Scene of Crime
by Jill McGown
DCIs Lloyd and Hill investigate the death of Estelle Bignall, the wife of the local doctor and aspiring playwright).
Book
The Office of the Dead
by Andrew Taylor
Concludes the mystery surrounding a female serial killer, this time going further back in time as Wendy helps her friends, the Byfields, see the truth behind sins of the past, including a woman burned at the stake.
Book
The Earthquake Bird
by Susanna Jones
Lucy Fly, a young English girl living and working in Tokyo as a translator, finds herself the prime suspect in the murder of Lily Bridges, a young woman that she befriended who had fled from trouble in Yorkshire.
Book
Havana Heat
by Carolina Garcia-aguilera
When Miami P.I. Lupe Solano overhears a mysterious conversation at a posh dinner party, she finds herself drawn into a hunt for a legendary masterpiece, the eighth Unicorn Tapestry, a piece of art that someone will do anything, even murder, to possess. Reprint.
Book
Street Level
by Bob Truluck
Winner of the 1999 St. Martin's Press/ PWA Award for Best First Private Eye Novel When we meet private detective Duncan Sloan he's just handed back a five thousand-dollar check meant as advance payment on a job. The wealthy prospective client wants Sloan to find a woman with an eyeball tattooed on her bottom. All he knows is the tattoo, that she's very young, white and probably somewhere in or near Orlando, Florida, Sloan's hometown. Thanks but no thanks; that's not enough. But when the five grand reappears in Sloan's mailbox, he uses it for a Costa Rican vacation and never mind the job. Pike, however tracks him down. When he explains the assignment, Sloan finds it bizarre enough to say "yes." Isaac Pike is the only son of a top-ranked tycoon. He is also gay. Because he genuinely wants to be a father, he has deposited sperm with a reputable clinic while he searches for a suitable mother. But a paroled convict working at the clinic steals the sperm, impregnates a teenager with it, and blackmails Pike - send money or we abort the child. Although Pike's idea of a suitable mother is not quite a waif from an Orlando trailer park, he is decent enough to be genuinely concerned about both mother and child. Sloan pursues the thief and his buddies and, he hopes, the girl, through the Florida city's sad neighborhoods and outlying cheap motels, calling on his drug-enhanced informers and a contact in the police. Getting closer brings him to the mangled bodies of the young mother-to-be's relatives, and closer to his own danger as well. On he goes -- Duncan Sloan may be a reluctant detective, but when he's wound up he's hard to stop. Street Level is Bob Truluck's first novel. It was chosen as the Best First Private Eye Novel of 1999 in the contest sponsored by Private Eye Writers of America and St. Martin's Press.
Book
Death in the Steel City
by Thomas Lipinski
CENTER> Sins of the Father Pittsburgh is a stew of ethnic divisions and, for some, a heritage of crime, punishment, and revenge. This is the legacy left to Carroll Dorsey, the son of a powerful political boss who is on his deathbed. Now a P.I. working the same streets where he once played as a boy, Dorsey is determined to look forward and not back as he makes a living in the city he's always called home. But nothing is as it seems when Dorsey is retained by an old gentlemanly Jewish gangster to search for the man's long-lost lover. As Dorsey traces the life, times, and disappearance of a magnificent woman with a Lena Horne smile, he finds himself immersed in the most agonizing case of his career. For as he winds his way through broken families, broken neighborhoods, and broken promises, to the scene of a horrifying triple homicide, Dorsey is forced to confront a crime carried out fifty years ago--one that reaches far too close to home...Pittsburgh is a stew of ethnic divisions and, for some, a heritage of crime, punishment, and revenge. This is the legacy left to Carroll Dorsey, the son of a powerful political boss who is on his deathbed. Now a P.I. working the same streets where he once played as a boy, Dorsey is determined to look forward and not back as he makes a living in the city he's always called home. But nothing is as it seems when Dorsey is retained by an old gentlemanly Jewish gangster to search for the man's long-lost lover. As Dorsey traces the life, times, and disappearance of a magnificent woman with a Lena Horne smile, he finds himself immersed in the most agonizing case of his career. For as he winds his way through broken families, broken neighborhoods, and broken promises, to the scene of a horrifying triple homicide, Dorsey is forced to confront a crime carried out fifty years ago---one that reaches far too close to home...Pittsburgh is a stew of ethnic divisions and, for some, a heritage of crime, punishment, and revenge. This is the legacy left to Carroll Dorsey, the son of a powerful political boss who is on his deathbed. Now a P.I. working the same streets where he once played as a boy, Dorsey is determined to look forward and not back as he makes a living in the city he's always called home. But nothing is as it seems when Dorsey is retained by an old gentlemanly Jewish gangster to search for the man's long-lost lover. As Dorsey traces the life, times, and disappearance of a magnificent woman with a Lena Horne smile, he finds himself immersed in the most agonizing case of his career. For as he winds his way through broken families, broken neighborhoods, and broken promises, to the scene of a horrifying triple homicide, Dorsey is forced to confront a crime carried out fifty years ago---one that reaches far too close to home...
Book
Straw Men
by Martin J. Smith
"Eight years after being convicted of a vicious attack that left a young policewoman near death, unable to remember her past, a psychopath known as the Scarecrow is freed on DNA evidence, and the victim, Teresa Harnett, begins to be harassed by threatening phone calls and turns to psychologist Jim Christensen to help her remember the truth."--Amazon.com
Book
Death of a Red Heroine
by Qiu Xiaolong
Qiu Xiaolong's Anthony Award-winning debut introduces Inspector Chen of the Shanghai Police. A young “national model worker,” renowned for her adherence to the principles of the Communist Party, turns up dead in a Shanghai canal. As Inspector Chen Cao of the Shanghai Special Cases Bureau struggles to trace the hidden threads of her past, he finds himself challenging the very political forces that have guided his life since birth. Chen must tiptoe around his superiors if he wants to get to the bottom of this crime, and risk his career—perhaps even his life—to see justice done.
Book
Death Dances to a Reggae Beat
by Kate Grilley
General manager of a radio station on the Caribbean island of St. Chris, Kelly Ryan is delighted by her new life in paradise, until she stumbles upon the corpse of a tourist, a loud-mouthed woman found impaled by a spear.
Book
Death of a Songbird
by Christine Goff
Lark Drummond's luxury hotel is packed with hundreds of birding convention-goers. When Lark accompanies fellow birdwatcher Rachel Stanhope one afternoon, their outing turns ugly when Lark witnesses the murder of her business partner through her spotting scope. With help from the other members of their birdwatching group, Lark and Rachel set out to find the killer.