The Best Traditional Mysteries of 2024

If you know anything about me, you know that there are few things I like more than a whodunnit, a nice, “someone in this room is a murderer” or “I suppose you’re all wondering why I called you all here tonight” whodunnit. I love all that.

I also love that, at CrimeReads, I’m the point person for the books and movies and TV shows that conform to that genre. Duly, I’m honored every year to put together this list.

But first, some exposition. What is a “traditional mystery”? It’s is a story in which there is a murder (or a robbery), and an investigator (either a police inspector or a plucky amateur or busybody) follows a series of clues to find the killer (or the thief). If there is in fact a corpse, the story is not about the trauma of death or the proximity to death—the dead body is a riddle, and nothing more.

This year’s new books in this category are delightful and clever mysteries, featuring a cavalcade of gutsy amateur sleuths and dogged detectives, twisty plots and logistical puzzles. All are stylish, playful inheritors to this tradition, delicately toying with the history of the category’s expectations and innovations.

Let’s get to it!

Benjamin Stevenson, Everyone on this Train is a Suspect
(Mariner)

If you haven’t read Benjamin Stevenson’s previous novel, the charming and self-aware Everyone in my Family has Killed Someone, you’re missing out. It’s a funny, chatty, thoroughly twisty ride that you won’t forget. And now there’s a sequel! Our mystery expert protagonist Ern Cunningham is back. And this time, he’s on a train full of book industry types who all turn into amateur sleuths when someone among them is murdered. I’m losing my mind, people.

Janice Hallett, The Mysterious Case of the Alperton Angels
(Atria)

Having swallowed The Appeal, the Twyford Code, and The Christmas Appeal in basically one gulp, I eagerly awaited The Mysterious Case of the Alperton Angels, in which whodunnit puzzlemaster Janice Hallett goes true crime. Get this: in the novel, two authors looking to write a book about the famous Alperton Angels cult (which insisted to a young mother that her baby was the AntiChrist, committing a mass suicide when the woman and her child fled and disappeared), team up to find out what really happened. But, as is often the case with true crime, they find that the truth is way stranger than fiction.

Richard Osman, We Solve Murders
(Pamela Dorman)

Am I said that Richard Osman did not publish a fifth Thursday Murder Club this fall? Yes. Am so incredibly over the moon that he’s bringing us another indelible, incomparable sleuthing team? Yes. And they are former-investigator-cum-retiree Steve Wheeler and his private-security-working daughter-in-law Amy.

Kate Atkinson, Death at the Sign of the Rook
(Doubleday)

Yorkshire’s best ex-detective is finally back in this hotly-anticipated continuation of Kate Atkinson’s Jackson Brodie series. This time, he’s bored, with nothing but an art theft to work on… but it leads him down a dark and twisty path to Burton Makepeace, a dilapidated former estate that now hosts murder mystery weekends. Delightful!

Alan Bradley, What Time the Sexton’s Spade Doth Rust
(Bantam)

Flavia de Luce is back and I’m losing my mind with giddiness and delight!!! My favorite mystery character of all time, the precocious 12-year-old chemistry genius Flavia, sets her mind on a new murder mystery in the beautiful English countryside. What could be better than that?

Tom Mead, Cabaret Macabre
(Mysterious Press)

If you’re not reading Tom Mead, what are you doing with your life? His delightful puzzle-mysteries and riddling locked-room plots are some of the best today. This delightful novel brings back his ingenious sleuth, the retired stage magician Joseph Spector. Someone is trying to kill Victor Silvius, a man from a wealthy family—now inmate at a private santorum in the English countryside. But that’s not all. While Spector is looking into Silvius’s case, he finds two mysterious cases: a body is found in the middle of a frozen lake, and a rifle has been fired from behind a closed window, killing the man on the other side without breaking the glass.

Gigi Pandian, A Midnight Puzzle
(Minotaur)

Another fabulous locked room mystery from Gigi Pandian, who’s ably channeled the diabolical puzzles of John Dickson Carr mysteries into her own quirky style. In A Midnight Puzzle, Tempest Raj, the magician-turned-secret-staircase-builder, returns, this time facing a dramatic crisis that could destroy her family’s entire business. The key to solving the mystery lies in the clever use of booby traps by Tempest’s tormentor, and Tempest must race against time to keep more from falling prey to these ingeniously engineered killers. –Molly Odintz, CrimeReads Senior Editor

Anthony Horowitz, Close to Death
(Harper)

THE BOYS ARE BACK! I love Hawthorne and Horowitz.  If you don’t know the series, you should. The gambit is charming: the celebrated crime writer Anthony Horowitz is the first-person narrator/Watson-style sidekick to a fictional detective character named Daniel Hawthorne. They’ve had some rocky patches (looking at you, book 4), but they’re back together, and this time, solving a murder in the idyllic countryside.

Nova Jacobs, The Stars Turned Inside Out
(Atria)

Nova Jacob’s scintillating novel is a locked-room mystery where the locked room is a subatomic particle collider. Need I say more?

Mia P. Manansala, Guilt and Ginataan
(Penguin)