Based on a large body of police novels, the study proposes to identify the linguistic properties and textual functions of crime scene expression; the method used combines corpus language tools with stylistic work. The aim is to show how the structures in which this crime scene appears determine stylistic traits specific to the thriller and what roles then play the expression in the narrative economy of this subkind of the police novel. The specificity of the expression scene of crime has been established using lexico-syntactic methods: the technique of extracting recurrent lexico-syntactic trees, based on thresholds for measuring association and minimum frequency, makes it possible first of all to identify those which appear to be specific to a textual subgenus. A more stylistic approach then makes it possible to recontextualise, in diachronic terms, the appearance of this expression in the corpus (at the end of the 20th century). It can be seen that the motives of co-occurrant words organised around crime scene – in the form of various language structures (collocation, colligations, nominal sentences) – are the expression of location and expertise (in particular by transposing English). Finally, the expression of a crime scene makes it possible, in the novel, to move from the narrative (discovery of the crime) to the description (of the investigation); above all, it makes it possible to reactivate the memory of the discovery of cadavers and then operates, partly by connotations, as a horror reservoir, a punctuation that contributes to the macabre atmosphere of the thriller.