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Best Crime & mystery series

The 48 best Crime & mystery series, scored across every volume.

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By year of first publication, 1922–2022. The busiest stretch is 2010–2019, with 12. Select a bar to narrow the list.

Why The Godfather is #1

The Godfather (Mario Puzo) scores 8.5/10 from 838 ratings — 0.2 points ahead of A Good Girl's Guide to Murder in second place.

The score is a weighted average across 3 independent rating sources. A title with few ratings is pulled toward the category average, so a handful of enthusiastic reviews cannot outrank a book that thousands of readers have judged. Method →

A good mystery plays fair

A mystery is a deal: you get the detective’s clues and race to the answer. Good ones keep it.

The clues were in plain sightAfter the reveal you see it was all on the page, as in “The Murder of Roger Ackroyd”.
The culprit grows from characterThe answer comes from who these people are, not a twin sprung in the last chapter.
Not always about whoSometimes you know the killer early and the puzzle is why, as in “Crime and Punishment”.

Frequently asked questions

Which title here has the most ratings?

Robert Langdon series (Dan Brown) — 11.9K ratings and 7.3/10, which puts it at #47 on this list.