The 6 Best Crime Books Released Since 1990, Ranked

Some crime novels leave you wanting to solve the case. But the ones you fall in love with beyond the average ones? They leave you wanting to call somebody at midnight and say, “You need to read this because I cannot be the only person carrying it around in my head.” That is why I would recommend these 6 almost aggressively. Read them when you actually have time to lose. The best crime fiction makes stopping feel irresponsible, as if the next chapter contains something you personally need to know. And each of these gets there differently. Let’s figure out how with a bit of tease. 6 'The Power of the Dog' (2005) Image via Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group If you like crime novels where the enemy keeps getting bigger every time you understand it better, this one is dangerously easy to disappear into. DEA agent Art Keller becomes obsessed with taking down Adán Barrera, a powerful Mexican drug trafficker whose rise pulls Keller into decades of cartel violence, political corruption, informants, priests, assassins, and an increasingly personal war. The Power of the Dog stretches across years and borders. Probably because Don Winslow is interested in the entire machine around the drug trade, and not just the men pulling triggers. What hooked me is how quickly Keller’s pursuit stops feeling righteous in any clean sense. He wants Barrera badly enough that the chase starts consuming the parts of him supposedly worth protecting. Winslow keeps widening the circle until politicians, law enforcement, clergy, families, and killers are all touching the same system from different directions. It is violent, yes, but the uglier realization is how many respectable institutions depend on the violence continuing. 5 'Mystic River' (2001) Image via William Morrow This is one of those books where you want to reach inside the story and slow everybody down by five minutes. You cannot. That helplessness is exactly why the ending hits so hard. Jimmy Marcus, Sean Devine, and Dave Boyle grow up together in a working-class Boston neighborhood until Dave is abducted as a boy and returns days later permanently changed. Decades afterward, Jimmy’s daughter Katie is murdered, Sean becomes one of the detectives investigating the case, and Dave comes home on the same night with blood on his clothes. Mystic River takes those facts and forces three damaged childhoods back into the same room. Dennis Lehane does something cruel here. He makes you understand exactly why everybody starts believing what they believe. Jimmy’s grief demands somewhere to go. Sean has evidence that keeps shifting beneath him. Dave has spent his entire adult life carrying something people around him can sense without fully understanding. The tragedy comes from watching suspicion become certainty faster than truth can catch up. 4 'In the Woods' (2007) Image via Penguin Books Detective Rob Ryan is assigned to investigate the murder of twelve-year-old Katy Devlin, whose body is found near an archaeological site outside Dublin. The case is already horrifying, but Rob has a secret connection to the area. As a child, he disappeared into those same woods with two friends and was found hours later alone, covered in blood, with no memory of what happened. His friends were never found. In the Woods puts the new murder directly on top of the mystery that has defined his life. I love this book partly because it has the nerve to understand that detectives are capable of ruining investigations for deeply human reasons. Rob and Cassie Maddox have the kind of partnership you start trusting almost immediately, which makes every crack between them hurt more than it should. And Rob’s need to understand the woods keeps colliding with the case he is actually supposed to solve. Tana French is brutally good at letting obsession masquerade as intuition. Read this one if you can tolerate a crime novel refusing to soothe you afterward. I mean that as a serious recommendation. 3 'L.A. Confidential' (1990) Image via Grand Central Publishing Three Los Angeles cops become tangled in overlapping investigations involving a coffee-shop massacre, celebrity scandal, prostitution, organized crime, police corruption, and the carefully manufactured image of 1950s Los Angeles. L.A. Confidential follows Ed Exley, Bud White, and Jack Vincennes, three men who want completely different things from the badge and keep crashing into the same rotten system from opposite directions. James Ellroy makes Los Angeles feel like a city where everybody has a public version and a private price. Exley wants status and legitimacy. Bud is terrifyingly violent around men who hurt women. Jack has grown comfortable selling police access to tabloid culture. None of them fits comfortably inside “good cop” or “bad cop,” and that is where the book gets addictive. The deeper they dig, the less useful those labels become. It is dense, nasty, and packed with people lying for reasons that make horrifying sense. Give it fifty pages to teach you its rhythm and there is a good chance it owns your weekend. 2 'The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo' (2005) Image via Norstedts Förlag The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo starts like an old missing-person mystery and gradually reveals something much uglier underneath. Disgraced journalist Mikael Blomkvist is hired by wealthy industrialist Henrik Vanger to investigate the decades-old disappearance of his teenage niece Harriet from the family’s private island. Blomkvist eventually teams with Lisbeth Salander, a brilliant hacker carrying a long history of institutional abuse, and together they begin uncovering secrets the Vanger family has spent years keeping buried. Lisbeth is the reason I keep wanting people to read it rather than merely know the story from screen adaptations. She notices what other people miss, distrusts almost everybody for excellent reasons, and approaches problems from angles Blomkvist would never reach alone. The investigation becomes genuinely addictive once photographs, dates, biblical references, and old family records start connecting. Yet the book’s anger is just as important as its mystery. Power keeps protecting terrible men until somebody stubborn enough decides to stop cooperating with that protection. Once Lisbeth fully enters the case, putting the book down becomes incredibly annoying. 1 'Gone Girl' (2012) Image via Phoenix Nick Dunne comes home on his fifth wedding anniversary to find his wife Amy missing, signs of a struggle inside the house, and a police investigation that increasingly turns toward him. Gone Girl follows both the public search for Amy and the private history of their marriage, gradually exposing how differently Nick and Amy understand the relationship they have been presenting to everyone else. I envy anybody who somehow still gets to read this cold. Gillian Flynn spends so much of the book letting you form confident little judgments about Nick, Amy, marriage, guilt, victimhood, and performance, then starts showing you how enthusiastically you helped build the trap yourself. Amy’s anniversary clues, Nick’s lies, the Amazing Amy books written by her parents, the media circus outside their house, every detail keeps acquiring a second meaning. And that is why the book has never left the culture. The crime is fantastic. The marriage is scarier. You finish it wanting to discuss what happened, then realize what you really want to discuss is who these two people became while trying to be loved by each other. Collider Exclusive · Villain Personality Quiz Which Criminal Mastermind Would Be Your Nemesis? Lecter · Joker · Moriarty · Chigurh Four of the finest criminal minds ever put on screen. One of them would look at you and see something worth their time. Eight questions decide which one comes for you, why they picked you, and what they would want when they arrived. 🍷Lecter 🃏Joker ♟️Moriarty 🪙Chigurh MEET YOUR NEMESIS → 01 What would a criminal mastermind notice about you first? Great villains choose their opponents carefully. Something about you got their attention. AMy manners, and everything I am careful not to say. BThat I still believe people are basically decent. CThat I am clever, and quietly enjoy proving it. DThat I handle things myself, and always have. NEXT QUESTION → 02 How do they make first contact? The introduction tells you everything about what is coming next. AA polite letter. Beautiful handwriting. Quietly wrong. BSomething on fire, with a message left beside it. CA puzzle, left where only I would look. DNo contact. Just the aftermath, and a coin. NEXT QUESTION → 03 What do you actually believe about right and wrong? Every nemesis is really an argument about the thing you believe most. AThere are lines. Mine are private and absolute. BRules are the only thing keeping us from being animals. CMorality is a system, and systems can be solved. DThings happen. Most of it was never up to me. NEXT QUESTION → 04 What finally gets under your skin? Everybody has a pressure point. Finding yours is the whole plan. ABeing seen clearly by somebody I cannot read. BWatching good people do something ugly. CLosing to someone who was simply better prepared. DHaving no move left that changes anything. NEXT QUESTION → 05 They have made their move. How do you fight back? This is the part of the film where the audience finds out who you are. ACarefully, and never where they expect to be touched. BLoudly. I would rather lose than play their game. CWith a better plan. I can out-think this. DDirectly, once, with whatever is closest to hand. NEXT QUESTION → 06 What would they use against you? A good villain never brings a weapon you have not already handed them. AMy privacy. I have kept far too much to myself. BMy conscience. I will not cross the line they want. CMy ego. I cannot resist a worthy opponent. DMy certainty that I can handle it alone. NEXT QUESTION → 07 What do they actually want from you? The money is never the point. Something else always is. ATo understand me better than anyone ever has. BTo prove I am no better than they are. CTo finally be beaten by someone worth the trouble. DNothing at all. I stepped into the wrong path. NEXT QUESTION → 08 How does it end between the two of you? Eight questions in, this is the one that decides who comes for you. AA conversation I will be replaying for years. BA choice forced on me that has no clean answer. COne final move, and the better mind wins. DA coin in the air, and nothing I can say. REVEAL MY NEMESIS → The Case File Is Complete Your Nemesis Is…Four criminal masterminds. One of them was always going to be yours. Here is who comes for you, why they picked you out of everyone available, and what they want from the encounter. Hannibal LecterYour nemesis does not want to beat you. He wants to know you completely, and he is patient enough to wait for it. The frightening part is how good the conversation is. Lecter is the most dangerous kind of opponent: the one who finds you interesting. He never raises his voice, because he has never needed to. You keep a great deal to yourself and you are careful about what you show. That reserve is exactly the door he would knock on. The films understood something other thrillers missed. The horror is not the violence. It is being perfectly understood by the wrong person. He would be unfailingly polite about all of it. That is the worst part. The JokerYour nemesis is not after money, territory or revenge. He is after a demonstration, and you are the person he has chosen to prove his point on. The Joker only picks opponents who believe in something. Your decency is not a defence against him. It is the entire reason he showed up. He has no plan you can predict and nothing you can take away, which removes every tool you would normally reach for. His whole argument is that you are one bad day away from being him, and you would spend the rest of your life proving him wrong. He would call it a magic trick. You would call it the worst night of your life. MoriartyYour nemesis respects you, which sounds flattering until you work out what it means. He chose you because nobody else was worth his time. Moriarty is the original criminal mastermind, the template every later one borrows from: a mind the equal of the hero's, pointed the wrong way. You enjoy being the cleverest person in the room. He is counting on exactly that, and he has already built the room. This is the rare nemesis who would be genuinely disappointed if you lost badly. He needs the game to be worth playing. It ends the way these things always end. Two people, one problem, and only one way down. Anton ChigurhYour nemesis has no personal interest in you whatsoever, and that is precisely what makes him unsurvivable. You are not a rival. You are a stop on the way. Chigurh does not negotiate, gloat or explain. He arrives, he asks one question, and the answer was decided long before you opened your mouth. You trust yourself to handle things. He is the one problem in the world that has no interest in how capable you are. No Country for Old Men rewrote the screen villain by removing the thing audiences quietly rely on: the sense that talking might work. Call it. He will wait. ↻ RETAKE THE QUIZ