If you’re a crime fiction fan, you’ve probably noticed that the same handful of books get recommended everywhere. Don’t get me wrong, many of them deserve the hype. But once you’ve worked your way through the obvious classics and viral bestsellers, finding something genuinely surprising can feel like searching for a clue in a locked-room mystery. If you’re also in search of something lesser-known but mind-bending, you can finally stop. I have a list of some of the best underrated crime thriller books that you will not be able to put down at all.

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1. Eight Detectives by Alex Pavesi

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If you’ve ever found yourself trying to outsmart a murder mystery, Eight Detectives is very much your sort of book. The premise is brilliantly clever: a reclusive mathematician once wrote a collection of crime stories designed to explore every possible type of mystery. Years later, an editor arrives to republish them and begins to notice that something doesn’t quite add up. What follows is a wonderfully twisty puzzle that works on two levels at once. You’re reading a series of classic whodunnits, but you’re also trying to solve a much larger mystery hidden between the lines.

2. The Appeal by Janice Hallett

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Most murder mysteries begin with a body. The Appeal starts with a pile of emails, text messages, and online chats. Set within a seemingly ordinary village amateur dramatics group, the story unfolds entirely through correspondence as a charity fundraiser, personal rivalries, and small-town gossip slowly spiral into something far darker. The genius of the novel is that there isn’t a detective guiding you through the case. Instead, you’re left to piece together the evidence yourself, spotting lies, misunderstandings, and hidden motives along the way.

3. A Will to Kill by RV Raman

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Think Agatha Christie, but set in the mist-soaked Nilgiri hills of southern India, and you’ll start to get the picture. Ageing millionaire Bhaskar Fernandez has finally reclaimed his ancestral property after a vicious legal battle, and now he wants to gather all his shrewd and scheming relatives under one roof. He knows that half of them would prefer him dead. So, he writes two simultaneous wills: one to activate if he dies naturally, another if he’s murdered. Whichever version of his death occurs determines who inherits. Then he invites a seasoned investigator, Harith Athreya, to watch it all unfold. This is one of the best crime thriller books in India.

4. The Compass Box Killer by Piyush Jha

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One muggy afternoon in Mumbai, a senior police officer is found dead at his own desk. At first glance, it looks like food poisoning. But when Inspector Virkar from the Crime Branch shows up at the scene, he finds something that changes everything: a cryptic note tucked inside a student’s compass box. Then the killings start, one after another, each one announced in advance and each leaving behind another compass box with another clue. It has very similar vibes to the infamous Chandrakant Jha case of Delhi.

5. The Untamed Shore by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

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This story is set in a small coastal town in Baja California in 1979. Viridiana spends her summers working a dead-end job, watching the tourist season arrive and depart, dreaming of a life that feels perpetually just out of reach. Then three glamorous, careless Americans arrive, and Viridiana finds herself drawn into their orbit in ways she doesn’t fully understand. Then things go wrong, and someone ends up dead. But how and why isn’t so easy to figure out.

6. The Last Good Kiss by James Crumley

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Among crime writers, this book is something close to a sacred text. CW Sughrue is a private investigator hired to find a missing writer, and his search takes him across a rain-soaked, booze-soaked American West with some dark and twisted people. Every lead takes him somewhere darker than the last. The missing writer isn’t just lost because some people would prefer he stay that way. And the deeper Sughrue digs, the more the case stops being about finding one man and starts being about everything that’s been buried alongside him.

7. Night Film by Marisha Pessl

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There are books that you read, and then there are books that you fall into. Night Film is the second kind. When the daughter of a famously reclusive cult horror director is found dead, it is officially ruled a suicide. But a disgraced journalist decides he can’t leave it alone. His investigation takes him deeper and deeper into the world her father created: a world of secret screenings, obsessive fans, and films so disturbing they were never released to the public. And the deeper he digs, the less solid reality starts to feel. Marisha Pessl fills the novel with fake documents, fabricated photographs, and embedded materials that make it all the more immersive. If you enjoy conspiratorial mysteries with a gothic edge and don’t mind having your grip on things slightly loosened, this is the one.

8. Love, Swipe, Blackmail by Nitish Bhushan

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Ravi has a loving girlfriend, a solid career, and good friends. Then, out of restlessness, he downloads a dating app and connects with a mysterious woman named Mahek. She knows about his girlfriend. And now she wants something in return for her silence. What follows is a thriller that lives entirely in the world of phones, apps, DMs, and digital footprints, the world most of us actually live in. As the pressure builds, he turns to his friends, and what the three of them do to fight back is where the book really gets interesting.

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