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. This is page 11 of the shelf.
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Rating coming soonTimothy Carrier is a stonemason having a beer after work when a nervous stranger sits down beside him, mistakes him for somebody else and hands him an envelope of cash with an instruction about a woman who is to be killed. Before Tim can explain the mistake, the man is gone, and shortly afterwards a second stranger arrives who takes Tim for the client who hired him.
Rating coming soonTracy Whitney is a successful bank manager in Philadelphia, engaged to a wealthy young man, when her mother kills herself after being cheated out of everything by a confidence trick run by organised crime. Tracy takes a gun to the man responsible in the hope of making him admit what he did, and within days her whole life has been dismantled.
Rating coming soonIn Chicago, Jack Reacher stops to help a young woman with an injured leg carry her dry cleaning, and three men with guns take them both. They are driven out of the city and across the country, and on the way Reacher works out that the woman is an FBI agent. Nobody has told him who her family is, and her colleagues have no idea he is there.
Rating coming soonA widow is suing a tobacco company over the death of her husband from lung cancer, and the trial is being heard in a Mississippi town chosen because its juries are thought to be sympathetic. Before the jury has even been sworn in, both sides are spending enormous sums trying to control who ends up on it, and one of the jurors is not who he says he is.
Rating coming soonA senator is found murdered in bed in his Georgetown apartment, and the only clue the police recover is a rhyme signed Jack and Jill, promising that this death is the first of many. Meanwhile Detective Alex Cross of the Washington police is called to a murder scene a few blocks from his own house, where a young girl has been beaten to death.
Rating coming soonWinifred Allen is in need of a holiday. Her job has drained her, her brother has died and a long marriage has ended, so when her three closest friends propose their annual trip, she agrees to a hiking and white-water rafting expedition in the Maine wilderness, despite misgivings she does not voice. It is the most demanding trip the four of them have ever attempted together.
Rating coming soonIn a park in London a policeman falls into conversation with a man who says he is an anarchist, and talks his way into the strange council that runs the movement's affairs in Europe. He is given the name of a day of the week and the position that goes with it, and he has not met the man at the head of them all.
Rating coming soonSix years after he gave up investigating for the sake of his wife and daughter, Sid Halley is asked by the chairman of the racing authority to look into a run of suspicious races. He turns the request down, and the next day the man who made it is dead, and someone else wants a report written to order.
Rating coming soonSookie Stackhouse has been betrayed by the vampire she had been with for years, and she is trying to work out what to do about the new man in her life when she is drawn into a summit of the vampire states, held in a hotel with a great deal of politics going on behind the doors.
Rating coming soonTwenty-five million dollars in cartel gold is hidden under a house on the Miami Beach waterfront, and two sets of people are looking for it. The house is looked after by Cari Mora, a young Colombian refugee, and the man leading one of the searches has plans for her as well as for the gold. Neither of them knows what she will decide to do about it.
Rating coming soonA newly appointed professor of Semitic languages is summoned to the Israeli embassy and shown a parchment that appears to describe the hiding of the Menorah, the temple candelabrum taken out of Jerusalem before the Romans destroyed it. The Jordanians have a better copy of the same document, and both of them point to a third.
Rating coming soonA brilliant Egyptologist translating a set of hieroglyphics comes across a message that describes the tomb of an unnamed pharaoh, one that has never been found. He cannot mount an expedition himself without alerting the Egyptian authorities, so he tells a freelance writer, and between them they assemble a crew. The odds are not in their favour.
Rating coming soonMelis Nemid runs a dive resort in the Caribbean and knows how dangerous the water can be, but she has never wanted anything to do with the treasure that is supposed to lie under it. Two men she has been close to have already been lost to the hunt, and now somebody is trying to pull her into it.
Rating coming soonPenn Cage was a prosecuting attorney who sent killers to death row, and now he is the mayor of the town he grew up in, where the arrival of casino gambling has changed everything. Beside the old slave market float five steamboats, and one of them is drawing gamblers away from Las Vegas.
Rating coming soonWhen a sailing ship breaks up on the rocks off Cape Flattery, the authorities say there were no survivors, and the fourteen-year-old son of the lighthouse keeper refuses to believe them. Footprints on an empty beach and a wild figure glimpsed in the sea caves convince him that somebody is hiding out there. He is not supposed to go near the caves, and he goes anyway.
Rating coming soonBuried under the water, somewhere inside the Bermuda Triangle, there is a treasure worth killing for. Samantha Carlyle runs a dive resort on a small island and wants nothing to do with it, but unexplained events keep happening, her former lover arrives without warning, and somebody tries to take her. Two men she was close to are already gone.
Rating coming soonMicah Wilkins promises at the beginning of the book to tell the whole truth about what happened to her boyfriend, whose body has been found after he went missing. She is seventeen, she lives in New York with her parents, and she is, by her own account, a compulsive liar. Some of what she says is true, and working out which parts is the reader's problem.
Rating coming soonA young woman who has been dancing in nightclubs since she was sixteen to keep herself and her brother afloat learns that he has been found guilty of murdering a singer and is going to be executed. She sets out to prove that he did not do it, and she has very little time. There is nobody else to do it for him.
Rating coming soonAn escaped convict on the run after a stretch of work on a Louisiana drilling rig hires a call girl for a night, and then finds that he cannot shake her off. The two of them travel west together, and the plan he has been carrying since prison is a robbery.
Rating coming soonIn Rome in the year 70, an informer called Marcus Didius Falco meets a frightened young woman in the Forum and makes the rash decision to help her. She is carrying a burden that turns out to be connected to a pile of silver ingots stolen from Britain, and to the people who want them back.
Rating coming soonIn 1634 the investigator Samuel Pipps is put aboard a ship at Batavia to be taken back to Amsterdam, where he is to be tried and probably executed for a crime he may or may not have committed. His bodyguard Arent Hayes goes with him, determined to clear him, and the voyage begins badly. What follows happens almost entirely aboard that one ship.
Rating coming soonClaire is a medium of doubtful authenticity and her best friend Sophie has been dead since they were seventeen. The two of them take what looks like an easy job performing a seance at a crumbling manor house for the family matriarch's eightieth birthday, and a murder follows. Almost everybody in the house has something to hide.
Rating coming soonEmily agrees, at her friend's insistence, to go to a party at the country house of a man she dislikes and finds odious. Her host has also invited an Austrian countess who was once romantically linked with Emily's fiance, and by the end of the evening the host is dead and a friend's husband is under arrest.
Rating coming soonThe Amazing Arden is the best known female illusionist of her day, famous for the trick in which she appears to saw a man in half. One night in Iowa she uses a fire axe instead of a saw, her husband is found dead under the stage, and the policeman who catches up with her hears a story he cannot quite believe.
Rating coming soonA man who is recovering from an emotional collapse caused by a sleeping pill travels to Israel to interview a writer, and learns while he is there that somebody with his own face and his own name has been passing himself off as him. What follows is partly an intelligence operation and partly a story about identity.
Rating coming soonA professional thief in Toronto is asked by a woman he has befriended to steal objects from her brothers and sisters, because she believes that each of them holds one clue to where a large inheritance has been hidden. He takes the job, and then he has to solve the puzzle. What he is looking for may not exist at all.
Rating coming soonIn a mining town in southern Illinois, a man is tried and convicted of shooting his neighbour during a weekend gathering of the two families, and sentenced to be executed. Days before the sentence is to be carried out he is rescued by masked men and disappears, and what follows is the story of what became of him and of his family.
Rating coming soonMaud finds a note in her own handwriting that reads Elizabeth is missing, and she cannot remember writing it. She is becoming forgetful, but she is certain that something has happened to her friend Elizabeth, and she sets out to find out what, while the people around her are not sure she can. Her memory is not helping.
Rating coming soonMarion Lafournier is a gay Ojibwe man living on a reservation in northern Minnesota, in a town he cannot seem to leave. One night he brings to life a dog from underneath the elementary school playground, and the animal leads him to the grave of a murdered Ojibwe basketball player. The town knows more about the dead boy than it says.
Rating coming soonA social worker in Montana tries to help an eleven-year-old boy who is living wild in the woods and barely surviving, and in doing so he meets the boy's father, a paranoid survivalist who is waiting for a final conflict. Meanwhile the social worker's own family is coming apart. Nobody in the story is easy to help.
Rating coming soonJason Lynx is an antiques dealer with a habit of solving puzzles, and one morning on a walk with his dog he finds something that puts him in the middle of a murder. As he looks into it, an unsolved case from the police records turns out to be connected.
Rating coming soonStarr Carter is sixteen, black, and lives in a poor neighbourhood while attending an elite private school in a white and wealthy part of the city. On her way home from a party she is in the car when a white police officer shoots and kills her childhood friend Khalil. The grand jury's decision afterwards leads to a riot.
Rating coming soonOedipa Maas is named as the executor of the estate of a former lover, a wealthy California man, and what she finds while sorting out his affairs is a possible centuries-old feud between two mail companies, and a conspiracy she cannot prove. She cannot tell whether any of it is real, and neither can the reader.
Rating coming soonInspector Alan Grant of Scotland Yard is in hospital with a broken leg, and an actress friend brings him pictures of historical figures to occupy him. One of them is a portrait of Richard III, and Grant cannot square the face with the monstrous uncle of the history books. The case he takes up is five hundred years old, and he has nothing to do but think about it.
Rating coming soonGeorge Smiley is called out of retirement when one of his old agents, a former Soviet general, is found dead. What the general had discovered before he died leads back to Karla, the Soviet spymaster who has been Smiley's opposite number for years. The book is the last of the three about that confrontation, and it settles the question between them.
Rating coming soonA vacuum cleaner salesman in Havana has a daughter of an expensive age, so when a mysterious Englishman offers him money to run a network of agents he accepts. The reports he files are invented, the trouble is that they keep coming true, and his inventions are taken a great deal more seriously than he is himself.
Rating coming soonThomas Lang is offered money to kill an American industrialist, and instead of taking the job he warns the man he was supposed to shoot. It is a good deed that is not left unpunished, and within hours he is caught up in something much larger. Lang is not a careful man, and the book does not pretend that he is.
Rating coming soonBrigadier-General Richard Hannay is recalled from the Western Front to hunt a German agent who is at large in Britain, and the work has to be done under cover. He goes about the country disguised as a pacifist, and the trail is not the one he expected to find. The war is still going on all around him.
Rating coming soonRichard Hannay is asked to look into rumours of an uprising in the Muslim world, and the enquiry takes him across wartime Europe towards Constantinople. What he finds there is a German plan to use religion as a weapon in the war. It is one of two Hannay novels set during the First World War.
Rating coming soonA reader writes to the advice column of a small Christian magazine to say that her husband, a junior master at a public school, is plotting to kill her. The editor of the magazine takes it seriously, and asks a former colleague from the war to look into it. The town of Carne is not a place that welcomes questions.
Rating coming soonA British military intelligence department that has been living on its wartime reputation tries to prove that a defector's account of a Soviet missile build-up in East Germany is true. The attempts it makes are not competent ones, and the people who pay for them are its own agents. What the Department wants is a success to justify its existence.
Rating coming soonTommy and Tuppence Beresford are brought back into intelligence work during the Second World War and sent to a seaside hotel, where they are to find a pair of enemy agents living under other names among the guests. The guests are a mixed company, and two of them are not what they seem to be.
Rating coming soonA North Vietnamese agent is embedded in the South Vietnamese army and goes into exile with the community he has been sent to watch. The novel is his own account, told years later, of what he did and of the two halves of himself that he could not bring together. He is both a mole and an immigrant.
Rating coming soonMagnus Pym, a diplomat of high standing, disappears after attending his father's funeral, and the intelligence service he worked for begins to look for him. What it finds is that his whole life has been made of secrets, including the largest one of all. The search for him turns up the larger secret of his career.
Rating coming soonA decade after a sexual assault at an elite private school, and after the tape of it went missing and a classmate was murdered, one of the young men involved is released from prison and the case comes back to life. Kinsey Millhone is drawn into it. The question is what became of the tape, and who has it now.
Rating coming soonIt begins with the murder of an American woman in the back streets of Tokyo and it ends in war. A group of Japanese industrialists takes control of their country's government and turns it against the United States, and Jack Ryan is in the middle of it. The two countries are at peace when the book opens, and that is the arrangement that breaks.
Rating coming soonJack Ryan is in London when a splinter group of the Irish republican movement tries to kidnap the Prince and Princess of Wales, and he intervenes. Foiling the attempt makes him a target, and his family with him. The group behind it is a splinter of the Provisional Irish Republican Army, and he is not the kind of man to stand by.
Rating coming soonAfter a terrorist attack kills almost everybody in the American government, the man who had recently been confirmed as Vice President is sworn in as President. Jack Ryan has to rebuild the government and deal with the crises coming at him at the same time. He is left to represent the United States more or less on his own.
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