The Best Mystery Page-Turners of the Last Decade

Two mysteries for one price. Susan Ryeland, an editor at Cloverleaf Books, settles down with Alan Conway's latest Atticus Pünd whodunit and finds the last chapter missing, so the golden-age pastiche inside has no solution and the modern frame has to supply one. Orion published it on 6 October 2016; BritBox filmed it in 2022 with Lesley Manville. The pastiche is not a joke — it is a real puzzle, fairly clued.

Getaway driving as inheritance. Beauregard Montage runs a failing auto shop in rural Virginia and still keeps his father's Duster, which is the whole problem, and one last job is the only arithmetic that works. Flatiron published it on 14 July 2020; it took the 2020 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for mystery and thriller and the 2021 Anthony Award for best novel. Every set piece is mechanical, legible, and paid for later.

Winner of the 2018 Edgar Award for best novel, and of the Anthony that same year. Darren Mathews is a black Texas Ranger working US Highway 59, and the order in which two bodies surface in the town of Lark — a black lawyer from Chicago first, a local white woman second — is the case. Mulholland published it in 2017. Procedural bones; the real question is who gets believed.

Drought does the structural work. Kiewarra has had no real rain in two years when federal agent Aaron Falk comes home for a funeral, into a town that already decided what he did as a boy. Winner of the CWA Gold Dagger in 2017, entered by Little, Brown. Two crimes twenty years apart, cut together in italics, and the older solution quietly reframes the newer one.

Duchess Day Radley is thirteen, calls herself an outlaw, and is raising her brother Robin in Cape Haven while chief of police Walk covers for everybody he loves, including the man he sent to prison. Won the 2021 CWA Gold Dagger, entered by Zaffre. Small-town California crime that becomes a road novel; the closing chapters recast a thirty-year-old hit-and-run without cheating.

Korede is a Lagos nurse who is very good at cleaning; Ayoola is her younger sister, and three boyfriends have now died on her, each time in self-defence. Doubleday published it in the United States on 20 November 2018; it won the 2019 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for mystery and thriller and was longlisted for that year's Booker. Comedy this dry should not be able to carry dread. It does.

Nine-year-old Jai has watched too much reality television and decides he can find the classmates vanishing from his basti; Pari does the actual thinking, Faiz worries about djinns. Winner of the 2021 Edgar Award for best novel and longlisted for the 2020 Women's Prize for Fiction. Anappara reported on social issues as a journalist in Gujarat, Delhi and Mumbai, and the ending refuses the consolation a detective story owes you.

Eight days, eight borrowed bodies, one murder. Aiden Bishop wakes each morning inside a different guest at Blackheath and the day resets until he can name the killer, which means the same twelve hours keep being solved from new angles. Bloomsbury published it in 2018 and it won that year's Costa Book Award for best first novel. Preposterous on paper; the rules are policed so strictly you end up taking notes.

Honolulu, November 1941. Detective Joe McGrady catches a double homicide days before Pearl Harbor, follows it west, and spends most of the war stranded in Japanese-held Hong Kong with the case still open. Hard Case Crime published it on 26 October 2021 and it won the 2022 Edgar Award for best novel. Part procedural, part prisoner's diary, and the solution waits four years without losing its grip.

Reporter Rika Machida writes to a convicted killer asking for an interview and gets recipes back: Manako Kajii, held over the deaths of three older men, will discuss nothing but food. Shinchōsha published the Japanese original in 2017; Polly Barton's English translation appeared in 2024 and was named Waterstones Book of the Year. Drawn from the Kanae Kijima case, and the interrogation runs on appetite rather than evidence.

Peter Guillam, retired to a farm in Brittany, is summoned to London to answer for Operation Windfall, a 1960s run reopened by a lawsuit from the next generation. Viking published it on 5 September 2017. It reads as a coda to The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and rewards reading that book first. Most of it is old paperwork read aloud, which sounds inert and is not: the file is the weapon.

Four residents of Cooper's Chase, a retirement village in Kent, meet weekly to pick over cold cases until a live one turns up on the grounds. Viking published it on 3 September 2020; it sold 45,000 copies in three days and became the first debut novel to be a UK Christmas number one, on 134,514 copies in the week ending 19 December 2020. Elizabeth drives it, Joyce narrates it, and the sentiment is earned.

Cover strapline, Orion, 25 January 2018: the serial killer is not on trial, he is on the jury. Film star Robert Solomon stands accused of a double murder, con-artist-turned-lawyer Eddie Flynn defends him, and the man who did it engineers his way into the jury box. Fourth of the Eddie Flynn novels and the one built to be read cold. Ridiculous premise, ruthlessly built — the two timelines interlock, and the verdict lands where the machinery says it must.

Alicia Berenson shoots her husband Gabriel five times in the face and then never speaks again; the nude self-portrait she paints afterwards is called Alcestis, after the Euripides play about a wife who dies in her husband's place. Celadon published it on 5 February 2019 and it went straight to number one on the New York Times list. Thin characters, immaculate mechanism, and the last twenty pages explain the sales.

Louise sleeps with a stranger in a bar and finds out on Monday that he is David, her new boss; then she befriends his wife, Adele, and is told two incompatible versions of one marriage. HarperCollins published it on 23 January 2017 and Netflix adapted it in 2021. Readers split hard over the final thirty pages, and the split is fair — either that swerve is the boldest in modern domestic suspense or it breaks the contract.