Detectives and spies, locked-room puzzles and cold cases, courtroom arguments and the domestic thriller where the danger is someone at the table. 599 books so far, across 140 series, plus 305 titles with no series listed.
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Rating coming soonSherlock Holmes, a consulting detective, works a murder investigation with Dr John Watson, the friend and chronicler who writes his cases down. This is the book that introduced both of them, and its title comes from the phrase Holmes uses to describe the kind of work he is doing: a study in scarlet.
Rating coming soonTen people are brought to an island off the coast of Devon, and each has a death in their past that was never answered for. Then they begin to be killed one at a time, in the order set out by a counting rhyme that hangs in every bedroom. Nobody can leave the island, and nobody can work out who among them is doing the killing.
Rating coming soonNick and Amy Dunne have been married five years, and Amy disappears from their rented house in a small Missouri town on the morning of their anniversary. Nick tells the police what he knows, and then behaves in ways a worried husband is not supposed to behave: he is evasive, he is angry, and he is not sorry enough on camera. The book keeps the question of his guilt open throughout.
Rating coming soonThe job Patrick Kenzie is given is a missing four-year-old, taken from her mother's apartment on a night when the woman had been out drinking. The search runs through the parts of Boston that nobody reports on, among dealers, kidnappers and people who buy children, and every answer leads to somebody with a reason to keep the girl missing.
Rating coming soonIn 1984 three children go into woods near a Dublin suburb and only one comes out, holding on to a tree, wearing shoes full of blood and with no memory of the hours before. Twenty years later that boy is Rob Ryan, now working as a murder detective in Dublin, and nobody he works with knows about it. Then the body of a child, a twelve-year-old girl, is discovered in the same woods.
Rating coming soonSusan Ryeland edits crime novels, and her best-selling author has just delivered a new Atticus Pund mystery about a murder in an English village. The further she reads the more certain she becomes that there is a second story underneath the one she was given. Then the author is found dead, and everything Susan noticed in the manuscript has a use.
Rating coming soonSnow brings the train to a halt between Syria and Paris, and by morning a rich American passenger is found dead in his own compartment, stabbed, with the door locked from the inside. Nobody has left the train, so whoever killed him is still aboard. The last free berth went to Hercule Poirot, and the job of working out which passenger did it falls to him.
Rating coming soonThree boys were friends in the same Boston neighbourhood until a car stopped and one of them got in. A quarter of a century on, Sean works homicides, Jimmy runs a corner store and has done time, and Dave is trying to hold a marriage together against the things he cannot put down. When Jimmy's daughter is found dead, Sean catches the case.
Rating coming soonFour women work the night shift at a bento factory, all of them dealing with lives that have gone badly wrong outside it. Masako, the one the others look to, has nothing left in common with the husband she lives with. The novel won Japan's leading crime prize and was the first of the author's books to be published in English.
Rating coming soonRusty Sabich is the chief deputy prosecutor in a Midwestern city, and three weeks before his boss faces re-election a colleague from his own office is found murdered. He is given the investigation. Then his boss loses the election, and Rusty finds himself charged with the murder he was appointed to solve.
Rating coming soonA young woman marries a widower after a courtship of a few weeks and goes to live at his house on the Cornish coast, where nothing has been changed since his first wife died. The housekeeper keeps the dead woman's rooms exactly as she left them and makes sure the new wife knows she is not her equal. The story is told by the second wife looking back at what happened there.
Rating coming soonJack is five and the room he shares with his mother is the only place he has ever been. It has a bed, a wardrobe, a rug, a skylight and a television, and it has a routine that keeps him occupied and safe. He does not yet know that he and his mother are being kept, and the novel is what happens as he begins to find out.
Rating coming soonA small town in drought-stricken New South Wales is still living with the morning a priest killed five of his parishioners and was then shot himself. A journalist arrives to write about how the community is coping and finds that the accepted account does not fit the facts he can check. Every person he talks to has a reason to prefer the version they have agreed on.
Rating coming soonCamille Preaker has just come out of a psychiatric hospital and gone back to her job at a small paper, where her first assignment sends her to the town she grew up in. Two girls have been murdered there, and the case puts her back in the house ruled by her mother and next to a thirteen-year-old half-sister she barely knows. Camille has spent her adult life not thinking about her childhood.
Rating coming soonAn elderly woman is found dead in the woods near a village close to the American border during hunting season, and the village agrees that an arrow went astray. Armand Gamache, a chief inspector with the Surete du Quebec, is sent out from Montreal, decides the accident does not add up, and begins interviewing people who have known each other their whole lives. It is the first case in the series that bears his name.
Rating coming soonGuy Haines meets Charles Bruno on a train and tells him more about his life than he meant to: the wife he is divorcing and the plans he has for afterwards. Bruno has an idea. If he disposes of Guy's wife and Guy disposes of Bruno's father, neither man can be tied to the other's killing. Guy refuses, which turns out not to be the same as it being over.
Rating coming soonIt is 1896, and a New York Times reporter is called out at night to look at a body with his old friend Laszlo Kreizler, a doctor who studies the minds of criminals and is known as an alienist. The dead boy was a child prostitute, and the way he was killed suggests a mind rather than a quarrel. Theodore Roosevelt, new in the job of police commissioner, asks the pair to work it.
Rating coming soonA village theatre company is rehearsing when the director's granddaughter is diagnosed with a rare cancer, and the cast starts raising money for an experimental treatment that costs more than any of them has. Not everyone believes the treatment works or that the people collecting for it are honest. By the dress rehearsal the argument has turned into something worse, and the next morning a body is found. The case is pieced together from the messages and notes the people involved left behind.
Rating coming soonPhilip Marlowe is a private investigator in Los Angeles, and his first case comes from a dying general who is being blackmailed. Marlowe is meant to deal with the blackmailer quietly, and instead finds himself among the general's daughters, a missing person and a growing number of bodies. Everybody in the book lies to somebody, and the secrets come out in the wrong order.
Rating coming soonA man is found on a shoreline with a head wound and no memory of his life. The doctor who treats him finds a numbered bank account under his skin, and following that number to Switzerland starts the process of finding out who he is. The name he turns out to be carrying is Jason Bourne's, and the man who used it was a deep-cover agent.
Rating coming soonJoe Cashin was a homicide detective in the city until a case nearly killed him, and he has been posted back to the South Australian coastal town where he grew up to recover and to be out of the way. When a wealthy local is beaten and left to die in his own house, the case lands on him. The evidence points at three boys from the Aboriginal community nearby, which suits almost everyone.
Rating coming soonA lonely young man has watched a female art student across London for a long time, and when money comes his way he buys a house in the country with a converted cellar. Then he takes her, keeps her there and tells himself that patience will do the work. The novel gives the captive half the book to answer him, and her account does not agree with his.
Rating coming soonTessa Quayle is murdered beside a lake in northern Kenya, and the doctor who was travelling with her, the man the newspapers call her lover, has disappeared. Her husband Justin is a diplomat posted in Nairobi, much older than Tessa and not by any account a man who chases things. He resigns and goes looking for who killed her and why.
Rating coming soonCormoran Strike lost a leg in Afghanistan and now works as a private investigator, which is going badly: one client, unpaid bills and a bed in his own office. Then the brother of a dead supermodel arrives with a case. Lula Landry fell to her death months ago and the police called it suicide, and her brother wants to know whether that is true.
Rating coming soonIn 1963 a secret French organisation hires an Englishman to shoot President de Gaulle. The man is unknown to every intelligence service in Europe and good enough at the work that the police hunting him have almost nothing to go on. The book follows both sides in step, from the planning and the false identities to the morning itself.
Rating coming soonSeven students from a university mystery club take a boat to a deserted island and stay in the strange decagonal house that stands on it. The island was where a mass murder took place months earlier, and nobody has ever explained it. Then the students start dying one by one, and whoever is doing it is on the island with them.
Rating coming soonAaron Falk left the farming town he grew up in twenty years ago, after he and his father were driven out of it. He does not go back for the funeral of his childhood friend Luke, whose family was murdered with him, until a note arrives saying that Luke lied and Falk lied and that he should be there. So he goes, into the worst drought the district has seen.
Rating coming soonMitch is the best student in his year, and instead of the big-city offers he takes a job with a small, extremely rich tax firm in Memphis that pays far more than it should and treats its new man like family. The partners are proud that nobody has ever resigned. Then the FBI makes contact, and Mitch understands that staying and leaving both have a price.
Rating coming soonRachel takes the same train twice a day and has learned the houses it passes, including the one where a couple she has never met eat breakfast on their deck. She has names for them and a whole idea of their lives, which are better than hers since her marriage ended. One morning she sees something she cannot explain away, and taking it to the police puts her inside the case.
Rating coming soonSir Charles Baskerville is found dead on his land in Devon, and the family story says that a great hound has been killing Baskervilles for generations. Sherlock Holmes takes the case and sends Dr Watson down to Dartmoor while he works on it from London. The question is whether the death came from the legendary dog or from somebody who needed the legend believed.
Rating coming soonThe narrator takes a live-in job cleaning for the Winchesters and is glad of it: a room on the top floor, a child to collect from school, meals to cook and a family that seems to need her. Nina, the wife, makes work for her and tells lies about her own daughter. The narrator makes one mistake with Nina's things, and then works out what the lock on her bedroom door does.
Rating coming soonThe Red October is the newest missile submarine the Soviet Union has, and its captain has decided to take it west rather than back to port. The Americans want the boat and the technology in it; the Russians want the captain dead and the submarine at the bottom of the Atlantic. Between them is an analyst, Jack Ryan, who thinks he knows what the captain is really trying to do.
Rating coming soonMickey Haller defends people who are usually guilty, and he does the work from the back seat of his car, moving between Los Angeles courthouses with a phone in each hand. His job is bargaining rather than truth-seeking and he is good at it. Then a wealthy young man accused of attacking a woman he met in a bar asks for Haller by name.
Rating coming soonMarlowe meets Terry Lennox outside a club, drives him home, and becomes the one man in Los Angeles who will take his side. Lennox's wife is rich, difficult and about to be dead, and when her body is found her husband disappears, leaving Marlowe to deal with a police department that thinks he helped and a gangster after the same answers. It is the sixth of the Marlowe novels.
Rating coming soonA woman comes into Sam Spade's office with a story about a missing sister and a man named Floyd Thursby, and Spade's partner takes the job of following him. By the end of the night Archer is dead, Thursby is dead, and the client has given a false name. Spade then has to work out who killed his partner while several people hunt the same jewel-encrusted bird.
Rating coming soonA large yellow diamond cut from a Hindu idol comes to England and is given to Rachel Verinder as a present on her eighteenth birthday. Within hours it is gone from her room, and nobody in the house can account for what they were doing at the time. The story is told through the statements and letters of the people involved, including the detective brought in to get it back.
Rating coming soonCaptain Hastings is invalided home from the war and invited to stay at Styles, the Essex house where a friend's family is at quiet war over the widowed aunt's recent marriage to a man twenty years younger than she is. Then the aunt dies in the night and the cause turns out to be poison. Hastings, who knows a Belgian refugee detective from before, brings him in. It is the first case for Hercule Poirot.
Rating coming soonFrank Chambers drifts into a roadside tavern in California, takes a job from the man who owns it and falls for the owner's young wife, Cora. The two of them want the same thing and are willing to do the same thing to get it, and the plan they settle on is simpler than living with the alternative. The story is told by Frank.
Rating coming soonRichard Papen arrives at a small, expensive college in Vermont and talks his way into the Classics class: six students taught by one professor and almost nobody else. It is a closed world of Greek texts, and belonging to it costs a great deal. Richard tells the story years later and starts with the death, so the book is less about what happened than about how the group talked itself into it.
Rating coming soonAt a party at Blackheath, the young woman of the house is shot dead as the fireworks go off. The day then repeats, and will keep repeating until Aiden Bishop, one of the guests, names her killer. Each time the morning comes round again he wakes inside a different person at the party, so every clue has to be gathered from inside somebody else's life.
Rating coming soonAlicia Berenson is a painter whose apparently happy marriage ends one evening when her husband comes home late from a shoot and she shoots him in the face, five times, and then stops speaking. She never explains and never defends herself, and the silence turns her into a public mystery and her paintings into expensive ones. Years later a psychotherapist takes a job at the secure unit where she is kept so that he can try to get her talking.
Rating coming soonThe first snow of winter falls on Oslo, and a small boy discovers that his mother is not in the house. In the garden stands a snowman that somebody built overnight, wearing her scarf. Inspector Harry Hole, who was sent a letter months before that he could make nothing of, begins treating the disappearance as the work of a man who has done this before.
Rating coming soonAlec Leamas runs British intelligence operations in Berlin, and when his network is destroyed he is brought home and offered a job that suits a man with nothing left: to present himself in East Germany as an officer who has turned against his own side. The false defection is designed to damage one particular East German, and it depends on people on both sides believing a story that is only partly true.
Rating coming soonA wealthy businessman hires Tom Ripley to go to Italy and talk his son Dickie into coming home. Ripley finds the young man living comfortably on his father's money, makes himself useful, and then decides he would rather have the life than the fee. The plan he builds is to become Dickie, and it involves the name, the money and what happens to the man himself.
Rating coming soonNick Charles gave up detective work when he married Nora's money, and the couple are in New York for the holiday season when a murder lands in his lap. He would rather drink and trade jokes; Nora rather enjoys watching him work. The book is a murder investigation conducted in bars, hotels and parties by a man who refuses to look like he is taking it seriously.
Rating coming soonFour residents of a retirement village meet every Thursday to work through old unsolved murders, until the death of a local developer, found with a photograph beside the body, turns their hobby into a live case. The club decides to look into it themselves, on the grounds that they have nothing but time and the police are slow. Then somebody else dies.
Rating coming soonRowan Caine answers an advertisement for a live-in nanny and gets the job, at a salary far above what the work should pay. The house is a modernised Victorian in the Scottish Highlands with cameras, an app for everything and a family that seems pleased with her. By the end of the summer a child is dead and Rowan is in prison waiting to be tried for murder.
Rating coming soonWalter Hartright is walking into London at night when a woman dressed all in white stops him to ask the way and tells him about a wrong that has been done to her. The next day he travels to a country house to teach drawing to Laura Fairlie, who looks exactly like the stranger. Laura's engagement to a baronet she dislikes pulls her into a scheme that Hartright has to unravel.
Mystery and thriller covers a wide set of shelves in one place here: golden-age puzzle plots and hard-boiled noir, police procedurals and amateur sleuths, historical mystery, crime fiction from many countries, and the contemporary psychological and domestic suspense novels where the question is who in the room is lying.
Espionage and legal thrillers sit here too, because the engine is the same one: something hidden, someone working out what it is, and a clock. A book qualifies when the plot turns on an investigation, a deception or a pursuit rather than on a speculative idea, which is why books with a science-fiction or fantasy premise live on those shelves instead.
Tags are cross-cutting markers, not genres. They have their own landing pages.
The love story is the plot: fantasy courts, dragon academies and modern cities all count.
676 booksPrimary genreEpic quests, grimdark cities, retold myths and a few very stubborn rabbits.
685 booksPrimary genreGeneration ships, dying empires, robots with opinions and one very unlucky astronaut.
536 booksPrimary genreHaunted houses, old vampires, cosmic dread and the odd very bad week.
381 booksPrimary genreCathedrals, courts, trenches and revolutions, all of it set in a past that is doing the work.
580 booksPrimary genreNovels where the prose carries the book: families, cities, memory and the modern self.
575 booksPrimary genreShipwrecks, expeditions, chases, frontiers and people who should have turned back.
324 books