6 Chilling Crime Fiction Novels Featuring Child Narrators

In the 2021 Edgar Award Winner for Best Novel, nine-year-old Jai spends his days adventuring in the slum he calls home when suddenly local children begin to go missing.

Fascinated with the detective shows his parents watch on the television, Jai is certain he’s the man to solve the case, and with the help of his school friends, Pari and Faiz, he begins his investigation.  

What ensues is a story that runs like an engine, buzzing and bright with evocative details that could only be observed through the eyes of a child.

What’s most impactful, though, is the deeper truth: Deepa Anappara was inspired to write this novel while working as a journalist abroad and learning that over 180 children go missing every day in the slums of India, most of whom fall victim to human trafficking. 

The real horrors of what happens to the missing children in this story are only made darker when held against Jai’s innocence and zest for life. His entire investigation and the antics of him and his friends woven throughout are a representation of all that’s been lost.

With her mother in a halfway house, her father dead from cancer, and her older brother and guardian preoccupied with himself, seventeen-year-old Kiara will do anything to prevent losing the apartment that houses her and her young neighbor.

But when she falls into sex work on the streets of Oakland, things take a turn Kiara never could have imagined: a ring of monstrous men within the Oakland Police Department extort her into having sex with them.

And life only gets more complicated when an investigation into their abuse reveals her name to the world.  

The worst crime in Nightcrawling is the systemic way that Kiara’s childhood is stolen from her. Despite this, the story is so strong because of Kiara's determination to preserve the innocence of Trevor—her nine-year-old neighbor who has been abandoned by his mother and the foil to her character.

Leila Mottley was seventeen herself when she wrote Nightcrawling, and the novel is based on a true story where the Oakland PD did, in fact, extort a teenage sex worker and traffic her to other members of the force.

The experience of reading something like this and knowing that it’s both rooted in truth and written by a kid is viscerally unsettling.  

Young God follows thirteen-year-old Nikki as she searches for her kingpin father and a place to call home in the backwoods of North Carolina after her mother’s sudden death—imagine Winter’s Bone by Daniel Woodrell (another fantastic crime novel narrated by a young girl) on coke and heroin instead of amphetamines.

This novel is brutal, and the dynamic between Nikki and her father is the force guiding everything forward, a strange and borderline incestuous relationship between an adultified child born of a man who himself is very young. 

Young God feels like a commentary on the way society treats girls as if they age in dog years compared to boys and men, which results in a Bonnie and Clyde vibe between Nikki and her father, Coy, that’s all the more upsetting considering how violent this book gets.

Compared to the two novels listed above, the absolute lack of childhood in this story makes this book feel pitch black.  

Frank Cauldhame is a sixteen-year-old murderer living with his father in isolation on an island in Scotland.

It’s been years since he was killed, the murders of his brother and two cousins are long in the past, and he’s determined to prove to himself that his violence was only a phase.

However, his treatment of the animals on the island and the fact that his other brother, Eric, is institutionalized for setting dogs on fire seem to point to something deeper.  

It’s disorienting to encounter a child as violent as Frank, and even rarer to read their perspective on violence as they exact it. If you can get through the detailed depictions of animal abuse, you’ll come to learn that the way Frank treats death like science and experiment stems from the fact that someone is experimenting on him.

The Wasp Factory investigates hereditary violence, and it is deeply unsettling to learn all the ways that Frank was doomed from the start.  

Nine-year-old Robin Dufresne is hung from a tree on his family’s property, and over a decade later, Robin’s twelve-year-old little sister, Harriet, decides to crack the unsolved case.

Fascinated by the lore of the brother she never knew and left unsupervised due to her father’s absence and her mother’s depression, Harriet and her young friend Hely Hull vow to find Robin’s killer. 

A cat-and-mouse game ensues, swirling through a Southern underworld, and what follows is a journey that highlights the vast differences between how adults and children cope with tragedy. 

he defeat and dejection among the grown-ups in Harriet’s life serve as the ultimate foil to her character and make her question throughout the novel what it means to grow old.  

Harriet’s desperation to avoid growing jaded almost rivals that of uncovering the truth about her brother’s death, and in the end, she must reconcile with reality—we don’t always get what we want.  

A National Book Award Winner for Fiction in 2012, The Round House follows thirteen-year-old Joe in the wake and aftermath of his mother’s violent rape on their reservation in North Dakota.

When his mother slips into depression and becomes reluctant to relive the details of what happened to her, Joe and his friends, Cappy, Zack, and Angus, take the investigation into their own hands.

What they discover instead is the long legacy of violence against Indigenous women that has gone unpunished and how this informs Joe’s mother’s lack of interest in speaking up. 

What’s fascinating about this novel is how Joe must reconcile the existence of sexual violence and aggression, of which, until his mother’s rape, he was ignorant, just as he begins to come into his own sexuality. His desire blooms right on cue alongside his mother’s unraveling.

And ultimately, as he matures throughout the novel, Joe must decide whether he wants to perpetuate the patterns of misogyny in his lineage or if he wants to stop them.  

In The Round House, the levity of boyhood is pinned against the inherent violence of masculinity. Watching Joe caught in between makes for a uniquely powerful read.