The Best Crime Series Set Outside the UK and US
April 29, 2026
The English-speaking world does not have a monopoly on crime fiction. Some of the genre’s most interesting and distinctive series come from Sweden, Norway, Iceland, Italy, France, and Japan — places where the crime novel carries different cultural weight, operates within different police systems, and reflects societies that British and American crime fiction simply cannot access.
Here is a guide to the best of them, by region.
Nordic Noir
The term “Nordic noir” was coined partly by marketing, but it describes something real: Scandinavian crime fiction’s tendency toward social criticism, psychological depth, and a particular relationship with landscape — the darkness, the cold, the long winters — as a moral environment.
Kurt Wallander by Henning Mankell
Sweden | 10 novels | 1991–2009
Henning Mankell invented the template. Kurt Wallander is a detective in the small city of Ystad in southern Sweden — middle-aged, divorced, diabetic, frequently despairing about the Sweden he sees changing around him. The Wallander novels are as much about Swedish society — immigration, welfare state anxiety, political violence — as they are about murder.
Start with Faceless Killers (1991), which opens with a brutal farm murder and an inflammatory rumour that becomes a crime in itself.
Harry Hole by Jo Nesbø
Norway | 13 novels | 1997–present
Jo Nesbø writes the most propulsive crime fiction in the Nordic tradition. Harry Hole is an Oslo detective — brilliant, alcoholic, self-destructive, magnificent in a crisis. The series escalates in ambition across its run, with The Snowman and The Leopard representing peaks of sustained thriller plotting.
The series begins with The Bat (set in Australia) and Cockroaches (Thailand) before settling into Oslo. Many readers start at The Redbreast (Book 3) — the first Oslo-set novel — and go back to the early books later.
Millennium Series by Stieg Larsson
Sweden | 3 original novels | 2005–2007
Stieg Larsson died before The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was published. The three novels he completed — Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest — are the most globally successful Scandinavian crime fiction ever written. Lisbeth Salander is one of the defining protagonists of 21st-century popular fiction.
The series has since been continued by David Lagercrantz (three further novels) and Karin Smirnoff (one novel to date). The Larsson trilogy stands entirely on its own.
Inspector Erlendur by Arnaldur Indriðason
Iceland | 14 novels | 1997–present
Iceland’s foremost crime writer. Arnaldur Indriðason’s Inspector Erlendur is a melancholy, solitary detective obsessed with cold cases and the lost — people who disappeared, often decades ago, whose fates he feels compelled to understand. The Icelandic landscape is integral: the lava fields, the long dark, the insular society.
The English translations begin with Jar City (known in Iceland as Mýrin), which is a strong starting point.
Inspector Van Veeteren by Håkan Nesser
Sweden | 11 novels | 1993–2003
Less well-known outside Scandinavia than Mankell or Nesbø, Håkan Nesser is worth seeking out for readers who want something quieter. Van Veeteren is a detective in a fictional European country — neither Sweden nor anywhere else — which gives the series an unusual quality of fable. Precise, elegant, and bleaker than it initially appears.
Mediterranean Crime
If Nordic noir is defined by cold and social anxiety, Mediterranean crime fiction tends toward warmth, food, bureaucratic absurdity, and a more philosophical relationship with justice — which is not always the same thing as the law.
Inspector Montalbano by Andrea Camilleri
Sicily | 30 novels | 1994–2021
Andrea Camilleri wrote thirty Montalbano novels before his death in 2019, and they are among the most pleasurable crime series ever written. Inspector Salvo Montalbano is a detective in the fictional Sicilian town of Vigàta — stubborn, food-obsessed, politically awkward, deeply ethical — and his cases are vehicles for Camilleri’s observations about Sicilian society, Italian politics, and the comedy of institutional life.
The novels are short, funny, and beautifully translated by Stephen Sartarelli. Start with The Shape of Water and read as many as you want — the series doesn’t demand strict order, though characters accumulate.
Guido Brunetti by Donna Leon
Venice | 33 novels | 1992–present
Donna Leon is an American who has lived in Venice for decades, and her Commissario Guido Brunetti novels are the most sustained portrait of that city in crime fiction. Brunetti is a civilised, intelligent detective whose cases consistently implicate the corruption and institutional dysfunction that Leon sees as Venice’s other face beneath the beauty.
The series is notable for its food, its domesticity (Brunetti’s wife Paola and their family dinners are as important as any case), and its refusal to pretend that justice is reliably available. Start with Death at La Fenice.
Aurelio Zen by Michael Dibdin
Italy | 11 novels | 1988–2007
Michael Dibdin’s Aurelio Zen is an Italian detective who moves between different Italian cities — Rome, Venice, Sardinia, Naples — as his career takes him to different assignments. Each novel is set in a specific place and absorbs that place’s character; Dibdin’s Italy is politically complex, historically layered, and frequently sinister beneath its surface.
Ratking (1988) won the Crime Writers’ Association Gold Dagger and is still one of the finest Italian crime novels written by anyone, native or foreign.
Australia
Murray Whelan by Shane Maloney
Melbourne | 6 novels | 1994–2005 | Complete
Shane Maloney’s Murray Whelan series is one of the great unsung runs in crime fiction — six novels set in Melbourne’s Labor Party political world, following a party fixer who keeps tripping over bodies in ways that are inconvenient for everyone, including himself.
Whelan is not a detective. He is a political minder — a factional operator in Melbourne’s union and Labor machine — and his investigations are driven less by principle than by the need to keep his party, his boss, and occasionally himself out of the newspapers. Maloney uses the crime plot as a vehicle for sharp political satire: the novels are funny, specific about how Australian Labor politics actually worked in the 1990s, and affectionate about Melbourne in the way that the best crime fiction is affectionate about its cities.
Start with Stiff (1994), which begins with a body in a meatworkers’ union and escalates from there.
France
Commissaire Adamsberg by Fred Vargas
France | 9 novels | 1991–present
Fred Vargas is a French medievalist and archaeologist who writes crime fiction as a sideline — and has won the Crime Writers’ Association Gold Dagger four times. Commissaire Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg is one of fiction’s most eccentric detectives: intuitive to the point of mysticism, permanently distracted, incapable of following institutional procedure, and almost always right.
The novels are comic and strange and utterly unlike anything else in crime fiction. Start with The Chalk Circle Man, which introduces Adamsberg and his bizarre method.
Japan
Detective Galileo by Keigo Higashino
Japan | 5 novels | 1998–present (translated)
Keigo Higashino is Japan’s bestselling crime writer, and The Devotion of Suspect X — the third Detective Galileo novel and the first translated into English — is one of the most formally elegant crime novels of the last twenty years. It opens by showing you the murder and the murderer, then watches as a physics genius tries to construct an alibi that cannot be broken.
The series follows Detective Kusanagi and his consultant, the physicist Manabu Yukawa (known as “Galileo”), whose scientific method applied to criminal problems produces solutions that feel genuinely surprising.
Where to Start
If you’ve never read international crime fiction: start with Camilleri. The Montalbano novels are the most immediately accessible — short, warm, funny — and thirty novels deep if you want them.
If you want something with serious literary weight: Mankell’s Wallander or Indriðason’s Erlendur. Both reward patience.
If you want propulsive thriller plotting: Nesbø’s Harry Hole. The Snowman is the series at its most commercially satisfying, but start at the beginning.
If you want something unlike anything else: Fred Vargas. There is no other crime writer quite like her.
If you want puzzle-box precision: Keigo Higashino. The Devotion of Suspect X is a standalone point of entry that will tell you immediately whether his work is for you.