5 Crime Novel Series With No Bad Books

Published Sep 27, 2026, 9:21 AM EDT

Ambrose Tardive is an editor on ScreenRant's Comics team. Over the past two years, he has developed into the internet's foremost authority on The Far Side. Outside of his work for ScreenRant, Ambrose works as an Adjunct English Instructor.

Few genres have as successful of a hit rate when it comes to serialization as crime fiction. With mysteries and thrillers, each new book in a series is an opportunity for a new case, offering fresh leads on drama, tension, and all sorts of intrigue. The crime novel series below are all flawless sagas that will leave readers wanting more, even after tearing through a dozen books or more in some cases.

What do these series have in common? First of all, they each represent a large chunk of the output of some of the biggest names in crime literature over the past 35-40 years. Each author discussed here is a certified master of mystery storytelling. There's no need to haul their reputations before a grand jury or grill them under the hot lights of an interrogation room. Their records are impeccable and speak for themselves.

What really connects all these series, though, is that each features an all-time classic detective at its heart. When it comes down to it, crime fiction is defined by two things: the cases, and the detectives that solve them. The books below deliver on both fronts, and then some.

Whether they are city homicide police, private sleuths, corporate detectives, or unlicensed investigators, the protagonists of the novels listed here are attention-catching characters readers will want to spend endless time exploring mysteries with.

5 Neal Carey Series

Written By Don Winslow; 5 Books

1991's A Cool Breeze on the Underground was Don Winslow's authorial debut, and the first of his five Neal Carey novels. His protagonist, Carey, starts out as a streetwise kid, is taken under the wing of an acerbic private detective, and has his education funded by the "Friends of the Family," the in-house clandestine service of a powerful regional bank.

A Cool Breeze gained Winslow attention as a new voice in crime fiction at the time. Today, Winslow is perhaps better known for his "Cartel Trilogy," chronicling the War on Drugs at its most vicious and gutwrenching, or his "Danny Ryan Trilogy," which remixes ancient myths into a modern gang war epic. However, he cut his teeth on his Carey mysteries, and they hold up exquisitely today as '90s neo-pulp.

The great thing about Winslow's Neal Carey series is how its protagonist evolves over time. In A Cool Breeze, he's already got one foot in and one foot out of the PI game, and his struggle between the better angels of his nature and his knack for gumshoe detective work forms a compelling character throughline that carries the reader right up to the "one last job" plot of 1996's While Drowning in the Desert.

4 Ivan Monk Mysteries

Written By Gary Phillips; 5 Books

Gary Phillips' Ivan Monk mystery series is peak contemporary L.A. noir. It is a perfect alternative to James Ellroy's "L.A. Quartet," for anyone who finds those books too hard to get through. Phillips' Monk novels lack Ellroy's literary pretensions, and instead serve up a perfect take on the crime novel form.

Ivan Monk is a generational "one detective against the world" protagonist. Through the cases Monk takes, Phillips gives his readers a reality check regarding the complex racial and class politics of Los Angeles, and by extension, America. This is compelling in its own right, but add onto that the fact that Monk is a charming, funny lead character, and the result is a series readers will tear through one book after another.

Monk debuted in 1994's Violent Spring, and appeared in three more novels published between then and 2000. Monkology, a short story collection starring the character, proved to be the capper for Ivan Monk's capers, though over two decades later fans are still holding out hope for a return before Gary Phillips calls it quits.

3 Lupe Solano Series

Written By Carolina Garcia-Aguilera; 7 Books

It is a story right out of the pages of a crime novel: an academic gest a job as a private detective in order to write better mysteries. (In fact, this was the exact premise of HBO's underrated comedy Bored to Death.) Author Carolina Garcia-Aguilera actually lived it, moonlighting as a PI for a full decade before the publication of her first Lupe Solano novel, Bloody Waters in 1996.

Guadalupe 'Lupe' Solano, the Cuban-American private investigator based out of Miami, went on to take the spotlight in six additional novels, the most recent published in 2010. Garcia-Aguilera's mastery of the crime genre is evident from the way she flips the script on the conventions of the usual male detective protagonist.

Solano is as sharp-dressed as she is sharp as a tack, and the knowledge that she has to prove herself twice as much as her male colleagues leads her to be not just one, but two or three steps ahead at all times. Carolina Garcia-Aguilera is an underrated voice in the annals of detective novels, and Lupe Solano is an extremely reliable character, the kind readers will return to for multiple sittings with the same books.

2 Tess Monaghan Mysteries

Written By Laura Lippman; 12 Books

Laura Lippman is a luminary of contemporary crime fiction. Her prolific output amounts to dozens of novels, mostly mysteries, including twelve Tess Monaghan books. Starting with Baltimore Blues in 1997 and culminating in 2015's Hush, Hush. Unlike Lupe Solano, Monaghan is more like a classic noir detective: professionally impeccable, but personally messy.

The end result is the same. A lead character that readers will immediately grow to love, and who they will soon trust implicitly to solve any crime, or get out of any predicament that she finds herself in. Like Lippman, Monaghan has a background as a beat reporter for a city newspaper, parlaying those skills into a successful career as an investigator. Throughout the series, she proves to be an expert at gaining access, noticing the overlooked details, and making connections other detectives don't.

Laura Lippman is a can't-miss crime writer, the kind that defines the form. What is remarkable is that out of a dozen Tess Monaghan books, readers will be hard-pressed to say a bad thing about any in the bunch. And as a born-and-bred citizen of Baltimore, Lippman should also get credit for creating one of the city's most underrated literary legends.

1 Easy Rawlins Mysteries

Written By Walter Mosley; 17 Books

Walter Mosley is another absolute icon in the crime fiction scene. His seventeen Easy Rawlins books are all essential reading for detective novel die-hards. The first installment, 1990's Devil in a Blue Dress, is regarded as one of the best mystery thrillers ever written. But Mosley fans will tell you the subsequent volumes get even better, as protagonist Easy Rawlins becomes more and more of a full-fledged, three-dimensional figure.

Ezekial "Easy" Rawlins is a self-taught private eye. Devil in a Blue Dress introduces Rawlins as a down-on-his-luck World War II veteran in 1948, and the books follow his adventures up through the early 1970s, up through the latest entry, 2025's Grey Dawn. (At one point, in 2007's Blonde Faith, it seemed like Mosley had killed off his beloved detective, but wound up returning for six more novels.)

Rawlins would be up there in any ranking of the greatest detective novel detectives of all time. Top 10, easily. Top 5, probably. He's an effortlessly engaging character whose cases never fail to deliver. In a reading funk? Not sure what to turn to next? There's always an Easy Rawlins book to pick up for a quick it of flawless crime fiction.