# The 17 Best Agatha Christie Novels

> Trains, islands, Nile steamers and one very ordinary English village. Sixty-six novels come down to a shortlist people still fight over.

*By YPB Team · Published August 14, 2026 · https://youpick.best/ranking/the-17-best-agatha-christie-novels*

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1. **And Then There Were None**
   Ten strangers on an island, killed one by one to the beat of a nursery rhyme. Her best-selling book.
2. **The Murder of Roger Ackroyd**
   The 1926 Poirot novel whose narrator changed what a detective story could do.
3. **Murder on the Orient Express**
   A stranded train, thirteen passengers and a solution nobody expects.
4. **Death on the Nile**
   The 1937 Poirot novel set on a Nile steamer full of grudges.
5. **The ABC Murders**
   A serial killer working alphabetically, and a railway guide left by each body.
6. **Crooked House**
   A 1949 standalone Christie named as one of her own favourites.
7. **Endless Night**
   The late, bleak 1967 novel written in the first person by a young man.
8. **Five Little Pigs**
   The 1942 Poirot novel that reconstructs a murder sixteen years afterwards.
9. **A Murder Is Announced**
   The 1950 Marple novel that opens with a murder advertised in the local paper.
10. **The Murder at the Vicarage**
   Miss Marple's first novel, published in 1930.
11. **Peril at End House**
   The 1932 Poirot novel set at a crumbling Cornish house.
12. **Cards on the Table**
   The 1936 novel with four suspects, four sleuths and a bridge game.
13. **Curtain**
   Poirot's last case, written in the 1940s and locked away until 1975.
14. **The Body in the Library**
   The 1942 Marple novel that takes the oldest cliche in the genre at its word.
15. **The Pale Horse**
   The 1961 novel whose poisoning method reportedly helped save a real life.
16. **Towards Zero**
   The 1944 Superintendent Battle novel built backwards from the murder.
17. **4.50 from Paddington**
   The 1957 Marple novel that starts with a murder seen from a passing train.

Tags: books, crime, mystery, agatha christie