The best thriller & mystery books

Ten strangers lured to a remote island. One by one they begin to die. A perfect, impossible puzzle.

A brilliant mathematician hides the evidence of a murder committed by the woman he secretly loves -- in a cat-and-mouse game where we know the killer from the first page.

Lisbeth Salander lies in a hospital bed, shot in the head -- and the Swedish establishment wants her buried before she can testify.

A disgraced journalist and an unconventional hacker uncover decades of dark secrets within a powerful Swedish dynasty.

A famous painter shoots her husband and never speaks another word. Her therapist is determined to unravel her silence -- but some truths are better left unspoken.

A Victorian pickpocket is hired to help con an heiress -- but no one in this story is quite who they appear to be.

A retired Argentine detective reopens a twenty-five-year-old murder case -- and finds that its long shadow has fallen over every life it touched, including his own.

A murdered woman shares not just Detective Cassie Maddock's alias but her face -- so Cassie goes undercover as the dead woman to find her killer.

A brilliant but anonymous intelligence officer comes out of hiding when a bioterrorist threatens to release a plague that could kill millions.

Defense attorney Mickey Haller works out of the back seat of his Lincoln Town Car -- until a high-profile murder case turns out to be the most dangerous of his career.

Poirot investigates the murder of a wealthy man in a quiet English village -- and the solution is one of the most audacious reveals in the history of detective fiction.

A struggling writer moves into a bestselling author's home to finish her series -- and finds a manuscript that reveals what the bedridden author may have done.

Three childhood friends from a Boston neighborhood -- one of whom was abducted and damaged at eleven years old -- are reunited by a murder that forces each of them to navigate incomplete information and old loyalties.

Slough House is where MI5 sends its failures -- the agents who made career-ending mistakes and are now given pointless administrative work until they quit. When a young man is kidnapped and set to be executed online, the slow horses somehow end up involved.

Three women in a seaside town. A dead body at a school trivia night. Everyone is hiding something.

The brutal 1959 murders of a Kansas farming family -- and the two men who committed them. The book that invented true crime.

Precious Ramotswe opens Botswana's first and only female-run detective agency -- armed with a van, a kettle, and extraordinary common sense.

Federal agent Aaron Falk returns to his drought-stricken hometown for a funeral -- and finds himself entangled in a murder that echoes a twenty-year-old secret.

Private detective Holly Gibney investigates a string of disappearances in a quiet college town -- and uncovers a horror hiding behind a respectable facade.

A disgraced spy is pulled back from retirement to find a Soviet mole at the very top of British intelligence.

A charming, resourceful imposter travels to Italy and finds he wants someone else's life badly enough to take it.

The Pope is dead. Behind the locked doors of the Sistine Chapel, 118 cardinals will elect his successor. They are holy men. They are also ruthless political operators. And one of them is hiding something that could tear the Church apart.

A body found on Thanksgiving morning in Three Pines -- a village so small it doesn't appear on maps -- brings Chief Inspector Armand Gamache to a community that is not quite what it seems.

A detective is assigned a murder case in the same woods where his two childhood friends vanished twenty years ago.

A Franciscan friar and his novice investigate a series of mysterious deaths in a medieval Italian abbey.

Four retirees in a luxury retirement village spend their Thursdays going over cold case files -- until a real murder lands on their doorstep.

The first winter snow falls, and Oslo detective Harry Hole finds a severed head placed beside a snowman -- the killer's calling card.

New York, 1896. A psychiatrist and a journalist chase a serial killer preying on boy prostitutes -- using the radical new science of the mind.

A US Marshal arrives at a remote asylum for the criminally insane to investigate an impossible escape -- and begins to question everything he knows.

A woman in white appears on a moonlit road, a sinister baronet controls everyone around him, and two people try to expose a conspiracy that has swallowed someone whole.

A burned-out British agent is sent on one final mission into East Germany -- but nothing about it is what it seems.

A Texas hunter stumbles onto a drug deal gone wrong and takes the money -- and the killer who comes for it is unlike anything the law has seen.

Seven Shakespeare students at a prestigious conservatory spend a year performing the tragedies -- and then one of them dies.

In Stalin's Soviet Union, a MGB officer realizes a serial killer is hunting children -- in a country where the state insists crime does not exist.

A reporter returns to her small hometown to cover the murders of two young girls -- and confronts a past she carved into her own skin.

In 1930s Japan, an artist draws up a plan to murder six women and create from their parts a single perfect figure. Forty years later, no one has solved it.

Jack and Grace Angel have the perfect marriage. But no one has ever seen Grace alone -- and there is one room in their house that is always locked.

Hotel maid Molly Gray finds a dead man in a suite she is cleaning -- and becomes the prime suspect, despite having no idea what happened.

A single mother befriends both her boss and his wife, not realising she is being drawn into something she cannot explain and cannot escape.

After a political defeat, a man retreats to a remote Minnesota lake with his wife -- and then she vanishes. What follows is not a conventional mystery.

In an alternate 1985, literary detective Thursday Next must stop a villain who has kidnapped Jane Eyre out of the original manuscript.

On their fifth anniversary, Nick Dunne's wife vanishes. The story he tells doesn't quite add up.

An agoraphobic woman spends her days watching neighbours through the window -- until she witnesses something she shouldn't have.

Every morning Christine wakes with no memory of her past. Every night she forgets again. But her secret journal says: Don't trust Ben.

The Darker family gathers on a tidal island for grandmother Nana's 80th birthday. When the tide cuts them off, family members start dying one by one.

A lucky man survives a brutal assault and retreats to his family's crumbling estate -- where a skull turns up in the old wych elm in the garden.

A retired tennis coach disappears, her husband becomes the prime suspect, and their adult children are forced to examine what they actually know about their parents.

A woman tries to warn her ex-husband's new fiancee -- but nothing about this situation is what it appears to be.

James Bond faces a Soviet paymaster across a baccarat table in a high-stakes game where losing means death.

Two women, years apart, move into an architect's obsessively minimalist house -- and both find that its beautiful rules come at a cost.

A woman who watches the world from a commuter train window becomes entangled in the disappearance of a stranger.

A murder in the Louvre launches Harvard professor Robert Langdon into a desperate race to decode a centuries-old conspiracy hidden in plain sight.

A writer is invited to an isolated hen party in the English countryside by a friend she has not spoken to in years -- and it ends in death.