Best mystery novels
A puzzle with fair clues, and someone stubborn enough to work it.
Ranked by how often each title comes up across 14 reading lists on NextBook — not by our opinion of them.
1 of 12recommended on 3 listsAltered Carbon
Richard K. Morgan
The purest noir on this list: a murder, a client who can afford anything, and an investigator who solves it largely by absorbing punishment. Miller would recognise the method.
2 of 12recommended on 3 listsAncillary Justice
Ann Leckie
Swap the noir for imperial etiquette and you get the same interest in how large powers grind up small people, narrated by something that used to be a starship.
3 of 12recommended on 3 listsBig Little Lies
Liane Moriarty
Moriarty is after the same thing, how much a nice street conceals, but she is funny about it, and she lets the women be people rather than suspects.
4 of 12recommended on 3 listsGone Girl
Gillian Flynn
The book that taught a generation to distrust the grieving spouse on camera. Flynn does it with more venom, and with a twist that reorganises everything you have already read.
5 of 12recommended on 3 listsHyperion
Dan Simmons
The Shrike is what the protomolecule aspires to: an incomprehensible thing the whole book circles and never explains. Structured as seven pilgrims' stories.
6 of 12recommended on 3 listsLeviathan Wakes
James S.A. Corey
A missing-persons case in the asteroid belt that opens onto something much worse, half of it narrated by a hat-wearing detective who is pure noir in a vacuum suit.
7 of 12recommended on 3 listsNeuromancer
William Gibson
The noir instincts Miller carries around came from here: a burnt-out operator, a job that is really a trap, and orbital real estate owned by people you will never meet.
8 of 12recommended on 3 listsThe Girl on the Train
Paula Hawkins
Another suburban disappearance where the person closest to the truth is the one nobody will believe. Hawkins runs it on three unreliable women instead of one guilty couple.
9 of 12recommended on 3 listsThe Secret History
Donna Tartt
Tartt's students also let books rearrange their lives until someone dies of it. Same conviction that reading is not a safe hobby.
10 of 12recommended on 3 listsThe Silent Patient
Alex Michaelides
Built backwards from its reveal, exactly as Lapena builds hers. The pleasure is watching a clean deception assembled in plain sight and still not seeing the seam.
11 of 12recommended on 2 listsBefore I Go to Sleep
S.J. Watson
If the hook was a wife realising her husband's account of that night does not hold, Watson stretches that single doubt across an entire marriage and an entire memory.
12 of 12recommended on 2 listsCaliban's War
James S. A. Corey
The direct sequel, and the book where the series finds its permanent shape: new viewpoint characters worth loving, Avasarala swearing at everyone, the same braided crisis.
Start from one you already loved
A genre is a blunt instrument. Pick the mystery book you actually liked and we’ll rank the next one by what you liked about it.
- Books like The Secret HistoryDonna Tartt
- Books like The Shadow of the WindCarlos Ruiz Zafón
- Books like Leviathan WakesJames S.A. Corey
- Books like The Couple Next DoorShari Lapena
- Books like Behind Closed DoorsB. A. Paris
- Books like The Bone SeasonSamantha Shannon
- Books like Altered CarbonRichard K. Morgan
- Books like Revelation SpaceAlastair Reynolds
- Books like One of Us is LyingKaren M. McManus
- Books like PiranesiSusanna Clarke
- Books like And Then There Were NoneAgatha Christie
- Books like The Mysterious Benedict SocietyTrenton Lee Stewart
- Books like The ExpanseJames S. A. Corey
- Books like Truly DeviousMaureen Johnson
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