11 Bingeworthy Mystery TV Shows and the Books That Inspired Them

Hulu’s Saint X is an intriguing new psychological drama that delves into deeper issues of race, privilege, and the role that family plays in response to an unspeakable tragedy. The miniseries is based on the New York Times Notable Book Saint X, written by Alexis Schaitkin, who also wrote the acclaimed speculative fiction book, Elsewhere. In Saint X, a young woman named Alison dies mysteriously while vacationing with her family on a Caribbean island. Two local men are arrested under suspicion of murder, but with scant evidence, they’re released, and the case goes cold. Years later, Alison’s younger sister (played in the series by Alycia Debnam-Carey) crosses paths with one of the suspects, reigniting an obsessive search for answers about what really happened that night. 

Jean Hanff Korelitz is the bestselling author of the acclaimed family saga, The Latecomer, and the gripping literary thriller, The Plot — both of which are in the process of being adapted for television. In the meantime, we highly recommend checking out The Undoing, an Emmy Award-winning HBO mystery drama based on Korelitz’s bestselling psychological thriller, You Should Have Known. The miniseries stars Nicole Kidman as Grace, a successful Manhattan psychologist who gets wrapped up in a baffling mystery after an acquaintance is murdered and Grace’s husband (played by Hugh Grant) becomes the prime suspect.

Most viewers know that Netflix’s smash hit mystery show You is based on Caroline Kepnes’s book of the same name. However, not everyone may be aware that Kepnes’s twisted thriller is the first in a multi-book series, and that the show’s creative team picks and chooses which elements to follow. For example, Kepnes’s fourth novel finds Joe Goldberg, the obsessive stalker and killer at the heart of her narrative, teaching at Harvard; the fourth season of the show, by contrast, moves Joe to London for an entirely different deadly adventure. The first season of You mirrors Kepnes’s blockbuster debut and is worth seeing. Starring Penn Badgley as the charismatic antihero, it traces Joe’s escalating obsession with an aspiring writer in New York City named Guinevere Beck (played by Elizabeth Lail).

Mindhunter is another thrilling Netflix series that draws its inspiration from literature. The show is based on John Douglas’s 1995 true crime account, Mindhunter: Inside the FBI's Elite Serial Crime Unit, which details Douglas’s twenty-five-year career as an FBI agent and criminal profiler. Netflix’s adaptation follows FBI agents Holden Ford (played by Jonathan Groff) and Bill Tench (played by Holt McCallany), along with psychologist Wendy Carr (played by Anna Torv), as they attempt to get inside the minds of serial killers. Both seasons of the two-season series are set in the past — the first covering 1977 to 1980 and the second tackling 1980 and 1981, where the investigators delve into the murder of 28 people in Atlanta.

Edgar Award-winning author Harlan Coben is one of the best thriller writers working today, so it comes as no surprise that a number of his compelling narratives have made their way to TV. In fact, in 2018, Coben signed a multimillion-dollar contract with Netflix to adapt 14 of his novels into movies or shows! Among the handful that already hit Netflix, we’re spotlighting The Stranger. Originally published in 2015, Coben’s psychological thriller focuses on a mysterious figure known only as the Stranger, who appears out of nowhere and reveals devastating secrets to unsuspecting citizens. The eight-part TV adaptation of The Stranger hit Netflix in 2020. It stars Richard Armitage as Adam Price and Hannah John-Kamen as the foreboding Stranger. When the Stranger tells Adam a secret about his wife, Adam tumbles into a swirling conspiracy with deadly consequences.

All three of Gillian Flynn’s acclaimed mystery novels have been adapted for the screen, with Gone Girl and Dark Places made into feature films. Sharp Objects was turned into an HBO miniseries in 2018 — and it’s fantastic. The acclaimed Southern mystery centers on Camille Preaker (played in the series by Amy Adams), a troubled crime reporter who returns to her hometown in Missouri to investigate the murders of two young girls. As Preaker searches for answers about the killings, she must also reconnect with a half-sister she barely knows and mend her relationship with her disparaging socialite mother (played with icy grace by Patricia Clarkson).

Petra Hammesfahr’s 1999 book The Sinner is an engaging, but very dark thriller — so dark, in fact, that showrunner David Simonds felt compelled to dial things back when he adapted it for television. “There were aspects to the book that felt kind of relentlessly dark and depressing. When I imagined them actually putting that on screen, I thought, ‘Wow, this is a lot for an audience to handle’,” he told IndieWire. And yet, season one of the mystery show, which is based on the book, is still plenty twisted. The narrative centers on Cora (played in the series by Jessica Biel), who brutally murders a man in public. While Cora’s guilt is obvious, her motive is mystifying, sending Detective Harry Ambrose (played by Bill Pullman) deep into the recesses of Cora’s past. The anthology procedural aired three additional seasons, but only the first season is based on Hammesfahr’s novel.

Horror maestro Stephen King is no stranger to seeing his novels adapted for the big screen, from IT to Carrie to The Shining. In 2020, HBO released The Outsider, a ten-part supernatural thriller miniseries based on King’s novel of the same name — and it ranks among the best King adaptations out there. At the core of the narrative is a brutal and baffling crime: A local boy has been murdered, and all clues point to a beloved teacher and Little League coach named Terry Maitland as the culprit. Armed with eyewitness testimony and DNA evidence, Detective Ralph Anderson (played in the series by Ben Mendelsohn) moves in to arrest the suspect. But Maitland (played by Jason Bateman) has an ironclad alibi that puts him out of town when the murder occurred. How could someone be in two places at once? And what kind of monster would carry out such a horrendous killing?

Behind Her Eyes is another Netflix mystery show worth checking out, despite it being a little more under the radar than some of the other entries on our list. The six-episode miniseries hit the streaming platform in 2021 and is based on Sarah Pinborough’s bestselling 2017 psychological thriller of the same name. While there are a few differences, the series did a solid job of sticking to its source material. The narrative focuses on single mom Louise Barnsley (played in the series by Simona Brown), who gets wrapped up in a dark and twisted situation when she begins an affair with her married boss (played by Tom Bateman), while at the same time befriending her boss’s wife (played by Eve Hewson).

Babylon Berlin is the first book in Volker Kutscher’s acclaimed Gereon Rath historical mystery series, and it’s easy to see why TV execs adapted it for the small screen. The neo-noir show — which airs on Sky 1 in Germany but is streamed stateside by Netflix — is set in Weimar Berlin, circa 1929. The first season follows Gereon Rath (played by Volker Bruch), an inspector and WWI veteran investigating an extortion ring while managing his morphine addiction. A number of characters from Kutcher’s mystery books pop up in the TV adaptation, most notably a police clerk named Charlotte Ritter (played by Liv Lisa Fries) who moonlights as a sex worker. But showrunners have also created their own characters and storylines over the course of the show’s four seasons.

We conclude our list of mystery TV shows based on books with Big Little Lies, Liane Moriarty’s blockbuster domestic suspense novel that inspired a blockbuster murder mystery series starring Reese Witherspoon, Nicole Kidman, Shailene Woodley, Laura Dern, and Zoë Kravitz. The narrative takes place in an affluent seaside enclave, where a shocking death pits neighbor against neighbor and flips the well-to-do community on its head. While Moriarty’s novel is set in a fictional suburb outside of Sydney, Australia, the HBO miniseries takes place in Monterrey, California. Both explore the secrets, lies, and trauma that hide behind picture-perfect facades and are well worth checking out.