My favourite is And Then There Were None, by Agatha Christie. She had me constantly guessing then changing my mind about who the murderer actually was. :)

As far as the classics go, I really enjoyed recently reading Agatha Christie's "Murder on the Orient Express." It's a really well-structured story and the characters are very interesting as well. I actually already knew something about the basics of the ending of the story going in, but even with that, I still quite liked the story. For more recent stuff, I am a big fan of Lilian Jackson Braun's "Cat Who..." series, though the more recent ones of those unfortunately aren't very good. And Donna Andrews is really talented. She goes for a sort of screwball comedy / mystery type, with "Crouching Buzzard, Leaping Loon" probably being the best of her works.

My current favorite is Kate Atkinson's "Case Histories." It's the first in a set of three very well written mysteries which go beyond the typical works in this genre. Ms Atkinson is popular in Britain for her extremely well developed characters and complex plots which feature not only suspense, but lots of humor, human drama and romantic sub plots. Detective Jackson Brodie is the recurring protagonist of the series, and he's painfully authentic, a flawed and vulnerable man attempting to make sense of a cruel world and protect others. In "Case Histories", the author explores three seemingly unrelated plots in detail before skillfully wrapping them together in an intertwined mystery. Each story line is entertaining in itself and able to hold the reader's attention and initially, the reader might mistake the book for a short story collection before realizing the how it all comes together. I think that takes masterful plotting ability. We follow Jackson into the next novel, "One Good Turn" and come to adore him. The last of the series, "When Will There Be Good News" seemed to be not quite as superb as the first two, but was still an "A-" in my opinion. All in all, I'd love to have the ability shown by Ms Atkinson and I'm so glad to have discovered this writer.