The 25 Best Mystery Novels of the Past 25 Years
Our columnist names his favorites. Do they match yours?
Crime fiction has thrived in the past 25 years, gaining more readers, introducing new writers and producing works likely to become future classics. This list favors writers who have come to the fore in recent decades over more seasoned authors (some of whom have nonetheless produced outstanding titles in the 21st century). Each book below, whichever its subgenre, tells a terrific story in an especially memorable way.
All Things Cease to Appear (2016)
By Elizabeth Brundage
Lyrical, moving and shocking, this novel turns on the murder of a college professor’s wife in an upstate New York farmhouse in the 1970s. “All Things Cease to Appear” shifts in time as it changes tone, from noir to gothic to near spiritual. It’s a police procedural, a study in suspense and a spin of the karmic roulette wheel. Sound extraordinary? It is.
Big Sky (2019)
By Kate Atkinson
Jackson Brodie, a put-upon English private eye, is the hero of Kate Atkinson’s sometimes-funny, sometimes-grim series of finely written mysteries. Here, the detective’s attention shifts between a client who fears a stalker and the possibly homicidal man he meets by chance and talks out of suicide. “It was a good day,” Jackson thinks, “when you saved someone’s life. Even better when you didn’t lose your own.”
Birnam Wood (2023)
By Eleanor Catton
In this outstanding literary thriller, New Zealand guerrilla gardeners growing crops on public land catch the eye of a U.S. billionaire who offers to finance their utopian dreams. The alleged philanthropist proves more hustler than humanitarian and has the high-tech tools to take control of the lives of those who threaten his schemes.
Bluebird, Bluebird (2017)
By Attica Locke
Darren Matthews, a black Texas Ranger, heads to the small town of Lark to investigate two murders that may be linked by racism. “This land is my land, too, my state, my country,” the officer makes clear. “I can stand my ground.” Attica Locke sets up a dramatic triptych of novels with this mystery, a sequence she brings to stunning closure.
Bury Your Dead (2010)
By Louise Penny
Louise Penny’s enduring series, featuring Chief Inspector Armand Gamache of the Sûreté du Québec, began in 2005. In this sixth entry, the murder of a history buff pulls Armand into an investigation that resurrects old controversies surrounding Quebec’s origins. The Gamache saga had great appeal from the start; with “Bury Your Dead,” the author found her mature style and hit her accomplished stride.
Dark Sacred Night (2018)
By Michael Connelly
Michael Connelly keeps his continuing oeuvre young by introducing new characters who forge connections with his veteran Los Angeles detective Harry Bosch. “Dark Sacred Night,” one of the most affecting books in the Connelly canon, teams Harry with LAPD night-shift exile Renée Ballard to investigate the death of a teenage Hollywood sex worker.
Death of a Red Heroine (2000)
By Qiu Xiaolong
Inspector Chen Cao of the Shanghai Police Bureau first appeared in this groundbreaking work by Qiu Xiaolong, set in the aftermath of the Chinese government’s crackdown on the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests. The poetry-writing Chen must investigate the killing of a woman who has been hailed as a “model worker,” but his inquiries are hampered by government officials. The detective does his humane best within limited options.
Elegy for April (2010)
By John Banville (as Benjamin Black)
The Irish novelist John Banville first used the pen name Benjamin Black in 2006 when he began writing a series of psychologically dense mystery novels set in 1950s Dublin featuring a moody consultant pathologist named Quirke. “Elegy for April” finds a newly sober Quirke in pursuit of a missing doctor with a reckless streak.
Find You First (2021)
By Linwood Barclay
In the 1990s, Linwood Barclay was arguably the funniest newspaper columnist in Canada. Today, he’s one of the world’s best suspense novelists, mixing thrills, humor and poignancy. “Find You First” springs from a millionaire’s plan to contact children he may have once sired as a sperm donor. His generous notion provokes the schemes of some of his other would-be heirs.
The Hunter (2024)
By Tana French
Cal Hooper, an ex-cop from Chicago, has moved to a West Irish village for a quiet life restoring furniture. Assisting him is Trey, a teenager grieving her dead brother. Trey’s long-absent father appears with a scheme that may pull them all into disaster. Tana French made her name with outstanding police procedurals; in this book she focuses on a smaller cast, widens her emotional range and stirs in rough-hewn humor.
IQ (2016)
By Joe Ide
“IQ” is Isaiah Quintabe, a big-brained, Sherlock Holmes-inspired private investigator from East Long Beach, Calif. In this first outing in Joe Ide’s character-driven series, IQ must protect a fading rap star from an assailant while pondering the death of his own older brother in a suspicious hit-and-run accident.
The It Girl (2022)
By Ruth Ware
The English author Ruth Ware, a star of contemporary mystery fiction who favors a traditionalist approach, blends the mechanisms of Agatha Christie with the psychological acuity of later writers such as Ruth Rendell. “The It Girl,” perhaps her best book, has a young woman revisiting the decade-old murder of her best Oxford frenemy after a journalist suggests the wrong man was blamed.
The Last Equation of Isaac Severy (2018)
By Nova Jacobs
A dark, delightful and sui generis treat comes in this clever “novel in clues” probing the death of a Southern California mathematician and chaos theorist who is electrocuted in his backyard Jacuzzi. Suicide? Murder? Cosmic jest? Isaac Severy has entrusted a secret about his esoteric research to his granddaughter Hazel, who tries to solve the enigma of her grandfather’s demise.
The Long Drop (2017)
By Denise Mina
This versatile Scottish author has written crackling police procedurals, a reporter-sleuth series, a Raymond Chandler pastiche and historical fiction. “The Long Drop,” based on actual Glasgow events of the 1950s, scrutinizes a notorious murderer and his strange connection to a family member of some of the victims.
Magpie Murders (2016)
By Anthony Horowitz
This witty master of metafictional mysteries writes books that are pleasurable puzzles. “Magpie Murders” is the first in a series that involves Susan Ryeland, a book editor on the hunt for the missing last chapter of a murdered writer’s final book.
One-Shot Harry (2022)
By Gary Phillips
Harry Ingram, a black crime-scene photographer in Los Angeles, is the hero of this crackerjack thriller set during the era of the civil-rights movement. Martin Luther King Jr. is coming to town for an event that would be dubbed the Los Angeles Freedom Rally, and Harry looks forward to plenty of photo ops. But when Harry’s white Army buddy is murdered, Harry feels honor-bound to crack the case.
The Plot (2021)
By Jean Hanff Korelitz
The cash-strapped author Jacob Finch Bonner takes a job teaching writing at a low-profile college, where a student claims to have concocted a surefire fiction plot. The student dies before writing the story—Jacob pens and sells it as his own. The result is a success, but someone turns Jacob’s life into a nightmare. Also memorable is Ms. Korelitz’s 2024 follow-up, “The Sequel.”
Razorblade Tears (2021)
By S.A. Cosby
Two Virginia men—one black, one white, both ex-cons—meet following the murders of their two sons. One father wants retribution; the other hesitates: “Folks . . . talk about revenge like it’s a righteous thing but it’s just hate in a nicer suit.” Desecration of the victims’ graves, though, jolts the pair into fateful action. “Razorblade Tears” presents a gripping dual portrait of grief driven to extreme ends.
Small Mercies (2023)
By Dennis Lehane
Boston-bred Dennis Lehane has been publishing atmospheric, psychologically complex crime novels since 1994. His finest work may be this gritty account of a tough Southie mother chasing after her missing teenage daughter during the summer of 1974, as Boston experiences a period of social turmoil around the desegregation of its public schools. A cop trying to help undergoes his own epiphany.
A Talent for Murder (2024)
By Peter Swanson
Peter Swanson has written several excellent thrillers since debuting with 2014’s “The Girl With a Clock for a Heart.” This one opens with a New Hampshire librarian growing suspicious about her traveling-salesman husband. (“You think I’m some kind of serial killer, Martha?” he jokes.) She and her grad-school friend Lily, a sort of freelance avenging angel, connect with a private-detective colleague. Together they facilitate the swift workings of fate.
The Thursday Murder Club (2020)
By Richard Osman
The English television producer Richard Osman became a mystery writer with the creation of this quartet of amateur sleuths in a British retirement village. Mr. Osman pleased readers on both sides of the Atlantic with his winning mixture of suspense and sentiment: Three sequels (a fourth is due in September) have proved similarly irresistible.
The Turnout (2021)
By Megan Abbott
Megan Abbott excels at depicting fierce rivalries and obsessive pursuits. “The Turnout” is set in a ballet school for tots and teens, run by two sisters and one husband. The owners’ lives are rattled by a plan for grandiose renovations, while competitive fever spreads among the students and parents. Old resentments are resurrected, with chilling results.
The Twenty-Year Death (2012)
By Ariel S. Winter
This intricately structured work presents three linked novellas, each told in the style of a different noir master. Taken together, the tales chart the downhill trajectory of an American writer over two decades, from France to the U.S. A police inspector, a private eye, a movie star and a murderer are linked to the ultimate narrator in ways only revealed at the very end.
What the Dead Know (2007)
By Laura Lippman
The author of the Tess Monaghan series of private-eye stories, Laura Lippman has also written terrifically noirish stand-alone works. In this one, the 30-year-old unsolved disappearance of two young sisters makes the news again after a woman comes forth to claim she is one of those long-lost girls. But where is her sibling?
Your House Will Pay (2019)
By Steph Cha
The fateful connections between two families—one Korean-American, one African-American—are unraveled in this ambitious and richly rendered saga. Steph Cha’s novel is propelled by the determination of a 27-year-old daughter of immigrant parents to better understand her family’s links to a black man in his 40s whose sister was killed during Los Angeles’s civil unrest of the early 1990s.
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Appeared in the July 19, 2025, print edition as '25 Years of Fictional Mayhem'.
