The 100 best mystery and crime novels by women

No. 11 on this list. From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler · E.L. Konigsburg · 1967

A fixture in American elementary and middle school curricula since its 1967 publication, taught for over five decades in classrooms across the country. The book appears on numerous recommended reading lists and has sold millions of copies, though it sits within children's literature rather than the adult literary canon taught at university level. Its institutional presence in K-8 education is substantial and sustained.

No. 12 on this list. The Three Evangelists · Fred Vargas · 1995

France's most acclaimed crime novel of the 1990s. CWA International Dagger winner.

No. 13 on this list. Troubling Love · Elena Ferrante · 1992

Troubling Love is Ferrante's debut novel and appears on graduate and undergraduate syllabi in Italian literature, women's writing, and contemporary European fiction courses, though it has not achieved the curriculum fixture status of the Neapolitan Quartet. No syllabus data is available in the database, but the novel's critical reputation positions it well above genre fiction. It is essential reading for students of Ferrante but has not yet entered the broadest canonical consensus.

No. 14 on this list. Strangers on a Train · Patricia Highsmith · 1950

No Open Syllabus or Wikipedia data is available in the database, but Highsmith's debut novel is recognized as a foundational text of American psychological crime fiction. It appears occasionally in university courses on crime writing and 20th-century American literature, though it lacks the broad curricular presence of canonical literary novels. Its Hitchcock adaptation (1951) has kept it in cultural circulation for over seven decades.

No. 15 on this list. Death at La Fenice · Donna Leon · 1992

Launched one of the longest-running and most beloved mystery series. The definitive Venice detective.

No. 16 on this list. Gaudy Night · Dorothy L. Sayers · 1935

Harriet Vane returns to Shrewsbury College, Oxford, for a gaudy — the alumni reunion — and finds herself drawn back into a place she has both loved and fled. She is a detective novelist, a woman with a murder trial in her past, and someone who has spent years refusing to marry Lord Peter Wimsey. Oxford offers what she cannot find elsewhere: the life of the mind, clean and governed by evidence. But someone at Shrewsbury is sending poison-pen letters, defacing manuscripts, and leaving threatening notes in the quad at night. The attacks are petty, then vicious. They target the scholars themselves — the women who gave their lives to this place. Sayers wrote the most intellectually serious detective novel of the golden age. The mystery is real, but the book is actually about what it costs to choose work over love, or love over work, and whether the two can coexist. Harriet debates this question with Wimsey across formal dinners and long walks along the Cherwell while the college unravels around them. The Oxford setting is rendered with the precision of someone who knew it from inside: the stone corridors, the subfusc gowns, the rituals of a world built for men that women had only recently been allowed to enter. By the end, the culprit's motive turns out to be exactly what the book has been arguing about all along.

No. 17 on this list. My Cousin Rachel · Daphne du Maurier · 1951

Recognized as a major du Maurier work and a landmark of mid-century Gothic romance, taught periodically in British literature surveys and gaining renewed academic attention in the 2000s as a feminist Gothic text, though it does not occupy the uppermost tier of the Western literary canon.

No. 18 on this list. The Italian · Ann Radcliffe · 1796

The Italian is a fixture of Gothic and Romantic-era survey courses, though it's taught less universally than Radcliffe's own The Mysteries of Udolpho or than Frankenstein and Dracula within the wider Gothic canon. No syllabus or Wikipedia-language data was available for this title in our database, but it holds a stable place in history-of-the-novel curricula.

No. 19 on this list. The Nine Tailors · Dorothy L. Sayers · 1934

On New Year's Eve, Lord Peter Wimsey's car breaks down in the Fenland village of Fenchurch St. Paul, and he passes the night by standing in for an ailing ringer in a nine-hour change-ringing peal. Months later, a mutilated corpse turns up in the churchyard — no face, no hands, no identity. Wimsey returns to find out who the man was and how he died, and the investigation reaches back into a wartime jewel theft, a decade of buried secrets, and the obsessive, rain-soaked life of a fen community organized around its bells. Dorothy L. Sayers gives the bells names — Tailor Paul, John, Jericho — and the ringing sequences real structural weight; each section of the novel is titled after a bell-ringing method, and the rhythms of the peal pattern the prose throughout. The murder method, when it finally emerges, is one of the most audacious in detective fiction: not a weapon anyone could have anticipated, entirely consistent with every fact laid out from the first page. Wimsey himself is at his least flippant here, something about the flat landscape and the ancient church pressing the comedy out of him. Sayers brings the same scholarly seriousness she brought to her Dante translations — this is a detective novel that knows exactly what it is doing, and does it with complete conviction.

No. 20 on this list. Elena Knows · Claudia Piñeiro · 2022

Taught in schools: Leaving Certificate English – NCCA / State Examinations Commission (Ireland)

Taking place in a single, this is the story of Elena's trek across Buenos Aires to learn the truth about her daughter's death. In the course of the day, she is forced to redefine everything she thought she knew about her daughter, herself, and a fleeting encounter, twenty years before.

No. 21 on this list. Gone Girl · Gillian Flynn · 2012

Already a cultural touchstone — 'Gone Girl' is shorthand for domestic thriller with an unreliable narrator.

No. 22 on this list. An Unsuitable Job for a Woman · P. D. James · 1972

An Unsuitable Job for a Woman holds a recognized place in crime fiction history as a pioneering feminist detective novel, appearing on retrospective lists of essential genre reading. It lacks the broad university syllabus presence of mainstream literary canon fixtures but is regularly cited in crime fiction studies and women's fiction surveys. No syllabus or Wikipedia data was returned by automated signals, though the novel's reputation in genre scholarship is well-established.

No. 23 on this list. Roseanna · Maj Sjöwall · 1965

Roseanna is canonical within crime fiction and Scandinavian literature — widely cited as the genre-founding text of Nordic noir — but does not appear in general university literature curricula. No syllabus data was found in the database, reflecting its primary home in genre studies and Scandinavian literature courses rather than broad literary canons.

No. 24 on this list. Manhattan Beach · Jennifer Egan · 2017

Anna Kerrigan is a diver at the Brooklyn Navy Yard during World War II, one of the first women to do the work. Her father disappeared years ago; a gangster holds the answer. Egan's novel moves between the waterfront of the 1930s and the war years, its prose dense with historical texture—the mechanics of diving, the politics of unions, the secrets men carry. Anna is practical and tough, her journey into the underwater world both literal and metaphorical. The novel asks what women did when men went to war, and what they lost when the men came back.

No. 25 on this list. We Need to Talk About Kevin · Lionel Shriver · 2005

Appears on 65 university syllabi (45th percentile per Open Syllabus), putting it in the range of contemporary literary fiction taught in modern lit and women's studies courses rather than the broader canon. Wikipedia coverage in 12 languages suggests a solid international profile without reaching the global reach of truly canonical works. A serious literary novel but not yet a fixture of required reading lists.

No. 26 on this list. The Fortune Men · Nadifa Mohamed · 2021

Mahmood Mattan is a Somali sailor living in Cardiff's Tiger Bay in 1952 when a shopkeeper is murdered. He is arrested, tried, and hanged—the last man executed in Wales. Mohamed's novel tells his story through multiple voices: Mahmood himself, his Welsh wife Laura, the witnesses who lie, the lawyers who fail him. The prose shifts between registers, Mahmood's voice musical and defiant, the courtroom scenes clinical in their injustice. The novel won the Booker Prize for its excavation of a forgotten case, racism made visible through one man's destruction.

No. 27 on this list. The Daughter of Time · Josephine Tey · 1951

Voted the greatest mystery novel of all time by the Crime Writers' Association in 1990, and it consistently appears on best-of lists for the genre. It surfaces in university courses on detective fiction and historiography but lacks the broad syllabi presence of mainstream literary canon fixtures.

No. 28 on this list. The Glorious Heresies · Lisa McInerney · 2016

One messy murder affects the lives of five misfits who exist on the fringes of Ireland's post-crash society. Ryan is a fifteen-year-old drug dealer desperate not to turn out like his alcoholic father Tony, whose obsession with his unhinged next-door neighbour threatens to ruin him and his family. Georgie is a prostitute whose willingness to feign a religious conversion has dangerous repercussions, while Maureen, the accidental murderer, has returned to Cork after forty years in exile to discover that Jimmy, the son she was forced to give up years before, has grown into the most fearsome gangster in the city. In seeking atonement for the murder and a multitude of other perceived sins, Maureen threatens to destroy everything her son has worked so hard for, while her actions risk bringing the intertwined lives of the Irish underworld into the spotlight . . .

No. 29 on this list. The Mars Room · Rachel Kushner · 2018

It's 2003 and Romy Hall is at the start of two consecutive life sentences at Stanville Women's Correctional Facility, deep in California's Central Valley. Outside is the world from which she has been severed, the San Francisco of her youth and her young son, Jackson. Inside is a new reality, thousands of women hustling for the bare essentials needed to survive. The bluffing and pageantry and casual acts of violence by guards and prisoners alike. The deadpan absurdities of institutional living, which Kushner evokes with great humor and precision.

No. 30 on this list. The Poisonwood Bible · Barbara Kingsolver · 1999

Appears on 365 university syllabi (64th percentile in the Open Syllabus Project), placing it in regular rotation for postcolonial literature and American fiction courses. Its Wikipedia article covers 3 languages and includes dedicated reception and adaptations sections, indicating sustained cultural presence. Well-taught but not in the tier of perennial curriculum fixtures like Beloved or Their Eyes Were Watching God.