Ten Great Crime Books set in VIENNA

9th December 2025

Ten great crime books set in Vienna.Vienna is an ideal setting for crime books, its historical depth providing distinct atmospheric backdrops for intrigue and danger.

The most iconic era is the post-World War II period, when the city was divided by the Allied powers, fostering black market corruption and espionage.

Other thrillers explore the elegant yet tense Fin-de-Siècle (turn of the 20th century).

The years leading up to the Anschluss (1938) also provide rich ground for historical espionage, focusing on resistance and the escalating threat of Nazi control. Vienna’s unique blend of cultural sophistication and political volatility makes it a perpetually chilling backdrop for crime fiction.

Here are ten of our favourite crime books set in the city.

A Death in Vienna by Daniel Silva

Gabriel Allon has avoided Vienna since he lost both his wife and child in a terrorist bombing. His Israeli mentor, however, requests that he returns in order to investigate a lethal explosion in Wartime Claims and Inquiry Office. His presence alerts certian police officials who have reasons to stand in the way of his investigation. When a concentration camp survivor is killed, a link seems to form between the Father of Austria’s next Chancellor, the Nazis and the Catholic Church. Yet Allon discovers a further connection, which brings him to face his own past. Another in the thrilling Gabriel Allon series, a compelling hero.

Vienna Secrets by Frank Tallis

In Freud’s dangerous, dazzling Vienna of 1903, an ingenious doctor and an intrepid detective again challenge psychotic criminals across a landscape teetering between the sophisticated and the savage, the thrilling future and the primitive past.

On opposite sides of the city, two men are found beheaded on church grounds. Detective Inspector Oskar Reinhardt is baffled. Could the killer be mentally ill, someone the victims came into contact with? Some are even blaming the murders on the devil. But when psychoanalyst Dr. Max Liebermann learns that both victims were vocal members of a shadowy anti-Semitic group, he turns his gaze to the city’s close-knit Hasidic community. The doctor is drawn into an urban underworld that hosts and hides virulent racists on one side and followers of kabbalah on the other. And as the evidence-and bodies-pile up, Liebermann must reconsider his own path, the one that led him away from the miraculous and toward a life of the mind.

The Silence by J Sydney Jones

Karl Werthen is the protagonist, aided by his wife Berthe.
Werthen is at first hired to find a wealthy family’s oldest son. As he goes to their mansion we learn one of the many things about 1900 Vienna that make this book so charming and interesting to read. The wife has a migraine, so city workers have been dispatched to spread straw on the street to muffle the sound of horses’ hooves. There are descriptions of homes, the architecture of city buildings, the sounds and smells of the city, and the Vienna Woods. We also learn of the anti-Semitism rampant in the city so long before WW II, and the great gulf between the rich and the poor.

36 Yalta Boulevard by Olen Steinhauer

State Security Officer Brano Sev’s job is to do what his superiors ask, no matter what. Even if that means leaving his post to work the assembly line in a factory, fitting electrical wires into gauges. So when he gets a directive from his old bosses—the intimidating men above him at the Ministry of State Security, collectively known for the address of their headquarters on Yalta Boulevard, a windowless building consisting of blind offices and dark cells—he follows orders.
This time he is to resume his job in State Security and travel to the village of his birth in order to interrogate a potential defector. But when a villager turns up dead shortly after he arrives, Brano is framed for the murder. Again trusting his superiors, he assumes this is part of their plan and allows it to run its course, a decision that leads him into exile in Vienna, where he finally begins to ask questions.

The Fig Eater by Jody Shields

He watches her eating one fig, then two more, grinding the seeds between her teeth, the sound echoing in her head, perhaps the last sound Dora heard before there was the thunder of blood in her ears…

Vienna, 1910. On a warm August night, the body of a young girl is discovered in the city’s celebrated Volksgarten. She has been strangled. Using the latest forensic methods and psychological thinking, the Chief Inspector of Police begins his painstaking search for the killer. He is not alone, however. His wife Erszébet – an exotic, passionate woman steeped in the folk tales and Gypsy lore of her native Hungary – becomes obsessed with the dead girl. In secret, and enlisting the help of a young English governess, she conducts her own investigation of the murder, guided by intuition, instinct and superstition…
With its beautifully-evoked setting of Vienna just prior to the Great War, a city embracing the modern and yet in thrall to superstition and prejudice, and riven by corruption, perverse sexual practices and disease, The Fig Eater is a rich and seductive period page-turner of a novel.

Diplomatic Immunity by Jaya Gulhaugen

Peggy Gilman’s husband, Jim, has been posted to Vienna, Austria, at the height of the Cold War. An operative with the CIA, Jim has diplomatic cover at the American Embassy. World War II has been over for eleven years, and the Allied Occupation Forces have finally withdrawn. In April of 1955 Austria was granted sovereignty in exchange for perpetual neutrality, ironically turning Vienna into a hotbed of espionage and intrigue.

The Gilman family’s arrival in October of 1956 coincides with the Hungarian Revolution and the enormous influx of refugees across the border. Peggy, who has been looking forward to a glamorous life filled with servants, Viennese coffee, and Strauss waltzes, finds herself setting up a soup kitchen, a nursery, and a sewing cooperative for the refugees. She even makes her attic rooms available to refugees awaiting visas to the United States.

As Christmas approaches, Peggy invites a lively mix of expats and locals to an American holiday party at her villa across from Türkenschanz Park. The cook, Frau Mitzi, concocts a scrumptious feast, complete with turkey and canned sweet potatoes from the Commissary. After the Christmas party comes to a shocking end, Peggy embarks on an unofficial murder investigation. She discovers that all of the suspects have hidden depths and will go to great lengths to disguise the past. Rather like Vienna itself.

A Place to Die by Dorothy James

In A Place to Die, author Dorothy James takes us to a retirement home in the Vienna Woods. Here she introduces us to an eclectic cast of characters who charm or annoy. When Eleanor and Franz Fabian arrive from their home in New York to settle his mother in her new rooms, they find themselves in the midst of a murder and a mystery — one that dates back to the history of some of the residents — after the wealthy and well-liked Herr Graf is found dead.

Eleanor is a mystery aficionado and is interested in the process of crime investigation, getting involved when she should not be. Her husband, however, has no time and finds it all very boring. When Inspector Georg Buchner gets the case he finds more mysteries behind each clue he uncovers. The residents are not above suspicion, yet neither are the help, including the physicians and nurses

The Second Rider by Alex Beer

Most of the remaining population of Vienna―a city scarred by World War I in which the grandeur of the Habsburg Empire is a fading memory―is surviving by its wits, living hand to mouth in a city rife with crime, prostitution, and grotesquely wounded beggars. There are shakedowns on every street corner, the black market is the only market, and shortages of vital goods create countless opportunities for unscrupulous operators.

Into this cauldron of vice comes Inspector August Emmerich, a veteran himself, whose ambitions lead him to break the rules when necessary and whose abiding wish is to join the Viennese major crimes unit. When a corpse is found in the woods outside the city and immediately labeled a suicide, Emmerich, convinced it was nothing of the sort, sees a chance to prove his mettle. His investigations will reveal an insidious and homicidal urge lurking in the city.

The Second Rider is the first volume in a gripping and bestselling series featuring police agent August Emmerich.

The Third Man by Graham Greene

The Third Man, Graham Greene’s most iconic tale, takes place in post-war Vienna, a ‘smashed dreary city’ occupied by the four Allied powers. Rollo Martins, a second-rate novelist, arrives penniless to visit his friend and hero, Harry Lime. But Harry has died in suspicious circumstances, and the police are closing in on his associates…

The Fallen Idol is the chilling story of a small boy caught up in the games that adults play. Left in the care of the butler and his wife whilst his parents go on a fortnight’s holiday, Philip realises too late the danger of lies and deceit. But the truth is even deadlier.

The Shadow by Melanie Raabe

“On February 11 you will kill a man called Arthur Grimm. Of your own free will. And for a good reason.”

Norah has just moved from Berlin to Vienna in order to leave her old life behind her for good when a homeless woman spits these words at her. Norah is unnerved — many years earlier, something terrible happened to her on February 11. She shrugs this off as a mere coincidence, however, until shortly afterwards she meets a man called Arthur Grimm.

Soon Norah begins to have a dreadful suspicion — does she have a good reason to take revenge on Grimm? What really happened in the worst night of her life all those years ago? And can Norah make sure that justice is done without herself committing murder?

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