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Top 50 Best Crime, Thriller and Mystery Books

Looking for your next suspense book? We've compiled a list of the 50 best crime, thriller and mystery books. There are some truly great books on this list, from enthralling mystery novels to captivating crime books and the most suspenseful thrillers.

The category "suspense books" is sometimes used to describe books from the three genres. Here we rank books from all three genres in one combined list. Although each genre has it's own intricacies, they all have one thing in common. The books on this list excel at building suspense and are guaranteed to keep you up at night.

The list was created by parsing comments on the r/books subreddit, and takes into account both number of mentions and the comment scores. Since the list was created by parsing user comments, it represents the most popular crime, mystery and thriller books.

This list uses data from 2018 and 2019, so the list represents the most popular crime, mystery and thriller books for those years. As we get more data the list may change and will hopefully become a list of the best mystery books of all time.

    1. The Outsider
    Stephen King
    An unspeakable crime. A confounding investigation. At a time when the King brand has never been stronger, he has delivered one of his most unsettling and compulsively readable stories.An e

    2. I'll Be Gone in the Dark
    Michelle McNamara
    A masterful true crime account of the Golden State Killer—the elusive serial rapist turned murderer who terrorized California for over a decade—from Michelle McNamara, the gifted journalist who died t

    3. Sharp Objects
    Gillian Flynn
    FROM THE #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF GONE GIRLFresh from a brief stay at a psych hospital, reporter Camille Preaker faces a troubling assignment: she must

    4. The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle
    Stuart Turton
    At a gala party thrown by her parents, Evelyn Hardcastle will be killed. Again. She's been murdered hundreds of times, and each day, Aiden Bishop is too late to save her. Doomed to repeat the same day

    5. Dark Matter
    Blake Crouch
    From the author of the bestselling WAYWARD PINES trilogy, a brilliantly mind-bending science-fiction thriller in which an ordinary man is kidnapped, knocked unconscious—and awakens in a world inexp

    6. The Secret History
    Donna Tartt
    Storytelling in the grand manner, The Secret History is a debut remarkable for its hypnotic erudition and acute psychological suspense, and for the richness of its emotions, ideas, and language. These

    7. Bird Box
    Josh Malerman
    Something is out there, something terrifying that must not be seen. One glimpse of it, and a person is driven to deadly violence. No one knows what it is or where it came from.Five years a

    8. The Woman in the Window
    A. J. Finn
    "The Woman in the Window is the most riveting thriller I’ve read since Gone Girl. A. J. Finn is a bold new talent with the touch of a master."— New York Times Bestselling Au

    9. Rebecca
    Daphne du Maurier
    Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again . . .The novel begins in Monte Carlo, where our heroine is swept off her feet by the dashing widower Maxim de Winter and his sudden proposal o

    10. Gone Girl
    Gillian Flynn
    On a warm summer morning in North Carthage, Missouri, it is Nick and Amy Dunne’s fifth wedding anniversary. Presents are being wrapped and reservations are being made when Nick’s clever and beautiful

    11. And Then There Were None
    Agatha Christie
    Agatha Christie’s world-famous mystery thriller, reissued with a striking cover designed to appeal to the latest generation of Agatha Christie fans and book lovers.Ten strangers, apparently with

    12. Bad Blood
    John Carreyrou
    The full inside story of the breathtaking rise and shocking collapse of a multibillion-dollar startup, by the prize-winning journalist who first broke the story and pursued it to the end in the face o

    13. Jurassic Park
    Michael Crichton
    From the author of Timeline, Sphere, and Congo, this is the classic thriller of science run amok that took the world by storm.An astonishing technique for recovering a

    14. In Cold Blood
    Truman Capote
    On November 15, 1959, in the small town of Holcomb, Kansas, four members of the Clutter family were savagely murdered by blasts from a shotgun held a few inches from their faces. There was no apparent

    15. Killers of the Flower Moon
    David Grann
    In the 1920s, the richest people per capita in the world were members of the Osage Indian Nation in Oklahoma. After oil was discovered beneath their land, the Osage rode in chauffeured automobiles, bu

    16. Dark Places
    Gillian Flynn
    Libby Day was just seven years old when her evidence put her fifteen-year-old brother behind bars.Since then, she had been drifting. But when she is contacted by a group who are con

    17. You
    Caroline Kepnes
    When a beautiful, aspiring writer strides into the East Village bookstore where Joe Goldberg works, he does what anyone would do: he Googles the name on her credit card.There is only one G

    18. Meddling Kids
    Edgar Cantero
    1990. The teen detectives once known as the Blyton Summer Detective Club (of Blyton Hills, a small mining town in the Zoinx River Valley in Oregon) are all grown up and haven't seen each other

    19. Columbine
    Dave Cullen
    "The tragedies keep coming. As we reel from the latest horror . . . " So begins a new epilogue, illustrating how Columbine became the template for nearly two decades of "spectacle murders." It is a fa

    20. Murder on the Orient Express (Poirot)
    Agatha Christie
    "The murderer is with us - on the train now..."Just after midnight, the famous Orient Express is stopped in its tracks by a snowdrift. By morning, the millionaire Samuel Ratchett li

    21. Everything I Never Told You
    Celeste Ng
    Lydia is dead. But they don’t know this yet . . .So begins the story of this exquisite debut novel, about a Chinese American family living in 1970s small-town Ohio. Lydia is the fav

    22. Alias Grace
    Margaret Atwood
    In Alias Grace, bestselling author Margaret Atwood has written her most captivating, disturbing, and ultimately satisfying work since The Handmaid's Tale. She takes us back in time and i

    23. No Country for Old Men
    Cormac McCarthy
    One day, a good old boy named Llewellyn Moss finds a pickup truck surrounded by a bodyguard of dead men. A load of heroin and two million dollars in cash are still in the back. When Moss takes the mon

    24. Noir
    Christopher Moore
    San Francisco. Summer, 1947. A dame walks into a saloon . . .It’s not every afternoon that an enigmatic, comely blonde named Stilton (like the cheese) walks into the scruffy gin j

    25. The Witch Elm
    Tana French
    Toby is a happy-go-lucky charmer who's dodged a scrape at work and is celebrating with friends when the night takes a turn that will change his life: he surprises two burglars who beat him and leave h

    26. Red Dragon
    Thomas Harris
    A second family has been massacred by the terrifying serial killer the press has christened The Tooth Fairy. Special Agent Jack Crawford turns to the one man who can help restart a failed investigatio

    27. The Troop
    Nick Cutter
    Once every year, Scoutmaster Tim Riggs leads a troop of boys into the Canadian wilderness for a weekend camping trip—a tradition as comforting and reliable as a good ghost story around a roaring bonfi

    28. Recursion
    Blake Crouch
    Memory makes reality. That’s what NYC cop Barry Sutton is learning, as he investigates the devastating phenomenon the media has dubbed False Memory Syndrome—a mysterious affliction

    29. The Name of the Rose
    Umberto Eco
    Umberto Eco’s first novel, an international sensation and winner of the Premio Strega and the Prix Médicis Étranger awardsThe year is 1327. Franciscans in a wealthy Italian abbey ar

    30. A Head Full of Ghosts
    Paul Tremblay
    The lives of the Barretts, a normal suburban New England family, are torn apart when fourteen-year-old Marjorie begins to display signs of acute schizophrenia.To her parents' despair, the

    31. The Devil In The White City
    Erik Larson
    The Chicago World's Fair of 1893 and its amazing 'White City' was one of the wonders of the world. This is the incredible story of its realization, and of the two men whose fates it linked: one was an

    32. The Andromeda Strain
    Michael Crichton
    The United States government is given a warning by the pre-eminent biophysicists in the country: current sterilization procedures applied to returning space probes may be inadequate to guarantee uncon

    33. Misery
    Stephen King
    Bestselling novelist Paul Sheldon thinks he’s finally free of Misery Chastain. In a controversial career move, he’s just killed off the popular protagonist of his beloved romance series in favor of ex

    34. Final Girls
    Riley Sager
    Ten years ago, college student Quincy Carpenter went on vacation with five friends and came back alone, the only survivor of a horror movie-scale massacre. In an instant, she became a member of a c

    35. Big Little Lies
    Liane Moriarty
    From the author of Truly Madly Guilty and <a href="https://www.good

    36. The Shadow of the Wind
    Carlos Ruiz Zafon
    Barcelona, 1945: A city slowly heals in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, and Daniel, an antiquarian book dealer’s son who mourns the loss of his mother, finds solace in a mysterious book entitl

    37. Lethal White
    Robert Galbraith
    Lethal White is the fourth book in the Cormoran Strike series from the international bestselling author Robert Galbraith.“I seen a kid killed…He strangled it, up by the horse.”<br /

    38. The Godfather
    Mario Puzo
    Tyrant, blackmailer, racketeer, murderer - his influence reaches every level of American society. Meet Don Corleone, a friendly man, a just man, a reasonable man. The deadli

    39. American Psycho
    Bret Easton Ellis
    Now a major motion picture from Lion's Gate Films starring Christian Bale (Metroland), Chloe Sevigny (The Last Days of Disco), Jared Leto (My So Called Life), and Reese Witherspoo

    40. The Cabin at the End of the World
    Paul Tremblay
    The Bram Stoker Award-winning author of A Head Full of Ghosts adds an inventive twist to the home invasion horror story in a heart-palpitating novel of psychological suspense that recalls Stephen King

    41. Where the Crawdads Sing
    Delia Owens
    For years, rumors of the “Marsh Girl” have haunted Barkley Cove, a quiet town on the North Carolina coast. So in late 1969, when handsome Chase Andrews is found dead, the locals immediately suspect Ky

    42. Sphere
    Michael Crichton
    A group of American scientists are rushed to a huge vessel that has been discovered resting on the ocean floor in the middle of the South Pacific. What they find defies their imaginations and mocks th

    43. Angels and Demons
    Dan Brown
    World-renowned Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon is summoned to a Swiss research facility to analyze a cryptic symbol seared into the chest of a murdered physicist. What he discovers is unimaginable:

    44. Say Nothing
    Patrick Radden Keefe
    From award-winning New Yorker staff writer Patrick Radden Keefe, a stunning, intricate narrative about a notorious killing in Northern Ireland and its devastating repercuss

    45. Storm Front
    Jim Butcher
    Harry Dresden--Wizard Lost items found. Paranormal investigations. Consulting. Advice. Reasonable rates. No Love Potions, Endless Purses, Parties, or Other Entertainment. Harry Dr

    46. The City & The City
    China Miéville
    When a murdered woman is found in the city of Beszel, somewhere at the edge of Europe, it looks to be a routine case for Inspector Tyador Borlú of the Extreme Crime Squad. But as he investigates, the

    47. In The Woods
    Tana French
    As dusk approaches a small Dublin suburb in the summer of 1984, mothers begin to call their children home. But on this warm evening, three children do not return from the dark and silent woods. When t

    48. Mindhunter
    John E. Douglas, Mark Olshaker
    Discover the classic, behind-the-scenes chronicle of John E. Douglas’ twenty-five-year career in the FBI Investigative Support Unit, where he used psychological profiling to delve into the minds of th

    49. Sadie
    Courtney Summers
    A missing girl on a journey of revenge. A Serial―like podcast following the clues she's left behind. And an ending you won't be able to stop talking about.Sadie hasn't had an easy l

    50. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time
    Mark Haddon
    'Lots of things are mysteries. But that doesn't mean there isn't an answer to them'This is Christopher's murder mystery story. There are also no lies in this story because Christopher can'