Top Ten Detective Novels
Death on the Nile by Agatha Christie. Clearly the best detective novel ever written, the plot revolves in Egypt and mainly on the Nile River and a torrid love triangle of two women in love with the same man.
And Then There was none by Agatha Christie. This is one of her best works. A chilling tale about how a group of people who had committed murder previously are tricked into coming to an island, where they are all murdered one by one, in accordance with a nursery rhyme.
The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler. The novel is a brilliant detective fiction which uses this genre to advocate the author’s socialistic criticism. It is also hinted to be autobiographical in nature.
Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle. This is one of the best in the author’s series of the Sherlock Holmes detective stories. Here Holmes is called for to look into the mysterious suicide of Mr. Baskerville.
Devil in a Blue Dress by Walter Mosley. The story features an African American detective in Southern California, in the post World War II period. The novel addresses complications of race and gender as well.
The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith. The novel is a chilling psychological and detective chase about an unemployed Mr. Ripley who goes on a murdering spree to assume identities and lead a lavish lifestyle.
The Day of The Jackal by Frederick Forsyth. The tale chases a professional Hit-Man who is appointed by a French Terrorist group to assassinate the French President.
The League of Frightened Men by Rex Stout. The novel is based on a profound psychological idea and works with the concept of a popular novel within a novel.
The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey. The novel follows the pursuit of an injured detective to prove the King Richard III innocent of all the crimes he is associated with.
The Black Echo by Michael Connelly. The novel is a first rate detective novel with spectacular bank robberies and mysterious tunnels and FBI attacks and foils. The central character is the Los Angeles detective Bosch.