Top-rated Police Procedurals, According to Goodreads
It’s a dilemma that every book lover goes through: What am I going to read next? And mystery lovers are no exception. It can be a mystery wrapped in a riddle wrapped in an enigma.
When you’re looking for recommendations on your next mystery/thriller read, there are a lot of places you can turn to for advice. You could ask your friends what they’ve been reading. You could look at the website for your local library or bookstore, or see what books have been getting a lot of traction through Amazon or Barnes and Noble. (Certainly, you can check with Novel Suspects as well!)
A lot of readers turn to Goodreads for suggestions on their next read.
Goodreads can show you what books your friends and contacts have recently read and reviewed. Users can compile themed lists of their favorite books and post them for others to see.
As with any review site, Goodreads has its fans and its detractors. Some people love the book’s rating/review system and have found some great new reads there. Conversely, many readers have criticized Goodreads over reports of review-bombing and spamming, which can cause a book’s average rating to artificially skyrocket or plummet.
Many of the top-ranked police procedural titles, either with high star ratings or with thousands of user reviews, on Goodreads are from the big-name authors with long-running series or dozens of free-standing books to their credits: names like J.D. Robb, Michael Connelly, Robert Dugoni, Jeffery Deaver, James Patterson, Tana French, and Louise Penny.
J.D. Robb’s In Death books, which follow investigator Eve Dallas in the near future of 2060s America, rank high among Goodreads readers in terms of star ratings. Desperation in Death, for example, has an average star rating of 4.59.
Robert Dugoni’s books featuring Detective Tracy Crosswhite of the Seattle Police Department also have high average ratings, as do Angela Parsons’s Kim Stone books.
A Goodreads book may have a perfect five rating, but a lot of those books turn out to have only a few reviews posted.Superstar thriller author Michael Connelly shows up frequently on the ratings scoreboard. You’ll also find books like Jeffery Deaver’s The Bone Collector and James Patterson’s Kiss the Girls making the high score list.
Connelly’s The Black Echo has one of the highest numbers of ratings among police procedurals on Goodreads, followed by The Concrete Blonde and Echo Park.
Louise Penny’s STILL LIFE, the novel that introduced readers to Inspector Armand Gamache, has more than 200,000 ratings on Goodreads, though an average star rating of just under four stars. Check out some of these police reads that have been getting lots of hits.
This 1992 novel introduced readers to Vietnam veteran-turned L.A. homicide detective Harry Bosch. A man has been found dead in a drainpipe. But Bosch knows who the man is. It’s Billy Meadows, one of his friends from the war, and Billy’s death may be connected to a larger series of crimes. Bosch finds himself investigating alongside an FBI agent, and in doing so, coming to terms with his memories of the war.
Alex Cross, a homicide investigator and forensic psychologist with the Metropolitan Police Department in Washington, D.C., made his debut in this 1993 novel. Two young children, both under Secret Service protection, are kidnapped from a prestigious private school by one of the school’s teachers. Cross is pulled off the triple murder he is investigating to look into the kidnapping. Working alongside the FBI and the Secret Service, Cross discovers that he is dealing with a very clever and extremely dangerous criminal, and that others may be involved as well.
Inspector Armand Gamache of the Surete du Quebec is called to the rural town of Three Pines, a stone’s throw from the Canada-United States border, on Thanksgiving morning. Jane Neal, a local woman and an aspiring artist, has been found shot to death with a hunting bow, and many of the villagers are inclined to think it was a hunting accident. But Gamache suspects otherwise. He and his team must interview the inhabitants of Three Pines, and they discover that a tiny village contains a lot of secrets.
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Erin Roll is a freelance writer, editor, and proofreader. Her favorite genres to read are mystery, science fiction, and fantasy, and her TBR pile is likely to be visible on Google Maps. Before becoming an editor, Erin worked as a journalist and photographer, and she has won far too many awards from the New Jersey Press Association. Erin lives at the top floor of a haunted house in Montclair, NJ. She enjoys reading (of course), writing, hiking, kayaking, music, and video games.