These are some of the best crime novels that have been published in 2026 so far

When Ellie moves into 1 Delaney Row, all she has to her name is the house, a small suitcase, and the terrible secrets she's desperate to keep. But what she doesn't know is that her new home is already hiding someone else's secrets - and the people determined to keep them are watching her. When a grim discovery prompts Ellie to find out more about the house's past, she unwittingly puts herself on a deadly collision course not just with her new home's history, but with her own as well.

The warring Brown sisters. Lucy. Susannah. Tara. Each is haunted - by disgrace (Lucy), vanity (Susannah) and envy (Tara). Most of all they are haunted by secrets. Just before a dinner at their mother's idyllic holiday cottage, Susannah disappears. That same night a young woman is killed violently on a nearby beach. Amid the confusion the next morning, Lucy discovers a link between Susannah and the murder victim. Lucy must summon all she knows from her short-lived policing career to figure out the connection and find her sister. But tracking down Susannah means Lucy confronting her own shame. It also means resurrecting ghosts that Susannah, Tara - and their mother - desperately want to keep buried. Even if Lucy finds Susannah, will the truth destroy them all?

The thing is, we always believe the best of our own kids. What mother thinks her own daughter will do something terrible? But every bad deed is carried out by a person who was once someone's child. Everyone has secrets. Even your daughter... The morning after a glamorous, luxury wedding, you and your best friend go to wake your twenty-four-year-old daughters. You open the door to their shared room in the pool-house and find a lamp smashed on the floor, a blood stain on the carpet, a ringing phone - and both girls are nowhere to be seen. The police come, and you discover something shocking. Something inexplicable. Is one of your daughters trying to kill the other? And that's when you and your best friend begin to unravel what's really going on between the girls. You need to work together to find your daughters, testing your friendship to its limits. And you can't help but wonder: which girl is the killer and which is the victim?

Thea wakes from a coma, having forgotten much of the recent past. As well as learning to walk again, she studies the list of 'facts' she keeps on her phone, hoping something will unlock her memory. Her top three facts are: I was in Italy, I was with the people I love the most, I fell down a ravine, and I'm lucky to be alive. But as Thea gets hazy glimpses of the lead-up to her fall, the facts stop adding up. Trapped at home in the middle of the Irish countryside, dependent on those who were on holiday with her - her fiance, her brother, her sister-in-law, and her best friend - terrifying questions surface: Was I pushed? Why are they lying? Who can I trust? As memories come tumbling back, Thea realises she is in a race against time to figure things out - and that her life hangs in the balance.

Someone is dead. Someone is a killer. Someone is lying. A woman is found in bloodstained clothes on the lonely coast of County Mayo. At first, she won't speak. Then a name comes: Ruth. And a story about her missing friend: Maura. Ruth says she and Maura were staying in a clifftop house together. But there's no trace of her there. Nothing but a pool of blood. Ruth says the pair fought in the days before Maura disappeared. But the locals say they only ever saw one woman. Ruth swears she's telling the truth, but do the answers really lie in everything she didn't say?