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 2 of the shelf.
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Rating coming soonGeorge Smiley is brought out of retirement and given one job: there is a Soviet agent near the top of British intelligence, and he has to find out which of his senior colleagues it is. He is given almost nothing else, and the people he is asked to investigate understand the operation better than he does. The work is done through old files and long conversations rather than a chase.
Rating coming soonScout Finch is six and growing up in a small Alabama town in the thirties, where the summers are long and every neighbour is known to her. Her father Atticus is a lawyer, and when he agrees to defend a Black man accused of attacking a white woman, the town turns on the family. Scout watches the trial from the gallery and reports what she sees, understanding only part of it.
Rating coming soonRachel Sexton works as an intelligence analyst for the White House, and her father is running for president on a platform that has been attacking NASA for years. When the space agency announces that it has found a meteorite in the Arctic containing fossil evidence of extraterrestrial life, the administration sends Rachel to verify the find before the election. She joins a team of civilian scientists on the ice, and what they are shown is convincing enough to end the argument about whether life exists elsewhere. Rachel begins to notice details that the briefings did not cover.
Rating coming soonA curator at the Louvre is found dead inside the museum with his body arranged as a message, and the police call in Robert Langdon, a Harvard professor who works on symbols and who happened to be in Paris for a lecture. He is joined by Sophie Neveu, a cryptologist with the police who recognises the message as being intended for her. The trail runs from the museum into a set of codes left by a painter, and into a dispute between two organisations that have been keeping a secret for centuries. Langdon is wanted for the murder.
Rating coming soonHercule Poirot has retired to the village of King's Abbot and is spending his days growing marrows while the narrator, the local doctor, watches him with amusement. Then a wealthy neighbour is found stabbed in his study, a man who had been about to be married and who had been receiving letters that frightened him. The doctor is drawn into the investigation as both a witness and, for the reader, the person through whom everything is seen. The novel's solution is one of the most discussed in detective fiction.
Rating coming soonQuentin Jacobsen has lived across the street from Margo Roth Spiegelman for most of his life and has spent most of it watching her from a distance. One night, a month before graduation, she climbs through his window and takes him on a campaign of revenge against the people who have wronged her. The next morning she is gone, and the clues she has left behind are addressed to him. Quentin and his friends spend the rest of the novel working out where she went and what they were supposed to understand from it.
Rating coming soonThe first collection of Sherlock Holmes short stories brings together twelve cases, starting with a scandal involving a king and a photograph and running through a red-headed man's strange employment, a bet about a goose, a locked room in an old house, and a case that introduces Irene Adler. Dr Watson narrates all of them and moves into Baker Street in the second story, which sets the arrangement the rest of the series depends on. The collection established the form the detective story would take for the next century.
Rating coming soonA young woman asks Sherlock Holmes for help because she has been receiving a pearl every year from an unknown source, and this year the sender has written to say he will visit her. The man who arrives is missing a leg and brings news of a fortune in treasure, a dead man in an empty house and a set of footprints that include a bare foot and a wooden leg. Holmes and Watson investigate the locked room, the Indian servants who are involved and the years-old betrayal that connects all of them.
Rating coming soonBarton George Dawes works at a laundry, lives in a house he bought with his wife and son, and is about to lose all of it to a road extension. The city has decided to run a new highway through the neighbourhood, the compulsory purchase paperwork has been served, and the deadline for moving is fixed. Dawes does not move. He has already lost his son to a brain tumour and his marriage to the aftermath, and the machinery closing in on his house gives him something to fight, which he does with increasing violence.
Rating coming soonBritish agent James Bond is sent to a casino in northern France with one job: to ruin a Soviet paymaster called Le Chiffre at the baccarat table. The man has lost money that belongs to his employers, and the service has decided that taking the rest of it is cheaper than killing him. Bond arrives with a colleague from the CIA and a French contact, plays the game over several nights, and finds that winning makes him a target rather than a winner. The first Bond novel is short, cold and much darker than the films.
Rating coming soonLydia Lee is dead, and the novel's first line says so before anybody else in the family knows. She was the middle child of a Chinese-American family in a small Ohio town in the 1970s, and she was the one her parents had decided would have the life they did not get. Her father teaches at the college because the college would not hire him for anything else. Her mother gave up medical school in a way that everybody has agreed not to discuss. The investigation into what happened to Lydia is also an examination of what the family asked of her.
Rating coming soonThe Lisbon family lives in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, where the father teaches mathematics at a private school and the mother keeps the house. They have five daughters, the eldest seventeen and the youngest thirteen. Over the course of a year all five die, and the novel is written from the point of view of the boys who grew up across the street, who spend the rest of their adult lives collecting the evidence and trying to work out what was happening inside the house. The neighbourhood watches, and does very little.
Rating coming soonWill Graham was an FBI profiler until one of the cases went badly and put him in hospital, and he has been living quietly since. The Bureau asks him to come back for a killer who has murdered two families, and Graham's method is the thing that makes him valuable and also the thing that broke him: he works out where a murderer lives by thinking the way the murderer thinks. To catch this one he needs help from a man he already caught, a psychiatrist and a cannibal who knows exactly what Graham is doing and enjoys it.
Rating coming soonPirriwee Public is a beachside primary school where the parents organise fundraisers and learn each other's business. On the night of the school trivia quiz, somebody dies. The novel is told partly from that night and mostly from the months leading up to it, through the eyes of three mothers: one who has just moved to the area with her son, one who has never quite fitted in, and one whose marriage looks perfect from outside. None of them are telling the whole truth, and the police interviews between chapters make that plain.
Rating coming soonHolmes is dead at the start of the collection and back by the end of the first story, and the thirteen cases that follow take him from a reopened tomb to a school, a university, an actress's house and a train. Watson is married and practising medicine, and the cases are fitted around his diary rather than the other way round. The volume includes the investigation of the empty house where Holmes returns and the mystery of a young woman who cannot stop laughing, and it is the collection that re-established the character after the author had killed him off.
Rating coming soonFive girls are close until the summer when their leader, Alison, disappears, and then the group comes apart. Three years later, Spencer, Hanna, Aria and Emily each receive a message signed with Alison's nickname, and each of them is keeping something that the messages refer to. The stranger communicating with them knows about the family secrets, the stolen boyfriends and the night nobody discusses, and will trade silence for obedience. The first book in the series establishes the four girls and the question of who is sending the messages.
Rating coming soonSixteen people are summoned to the reading of the will of Samuel W. Westing, a paper manufacturer who has died and left a fortune with strings attached. The heirs are paired off, each pair is given ten thousand dollars and a set of clues that no other pair has, and the first pair to solve the puzzle inherits everything. One of the heirs is also the person responsible for Westing's death, and the will says so. The contestants move into a building where they can watch each other, and the game begins.
Rating coming soonHenry, Jessie, Violet and Benny are orphans, and they are determined not to be separated. Rather than be sent to a grandfather they have been told is cruel, they run away and make a home in an abandoned railway boxcar in the woods, where the eldest two find work, the youngest two keep the place running and all four learn to live on very little. A doctor in the nearby town notices them, and the question of what to do about the grandfather resolves in a way none of them expected. The first book established a series that ran for generations.
Rating coming soonThe novel is set in an alternative present in which a temporary settlement for Jewish refugees was established in Sitka, Alaska, in 1941 and the State of Israel did not survive its first years. The settlement is about to be dissolved, which means the people living there are waiting to find out where they will be sent. A homicide detective works a murder in a run-down hotel while his own future is being decided by a committee in Washington. The case looks like a small death and turns out to be connected to the community's politics.
Rating coming soonStephanie Plum has lost her job as a lingerie buyer in Trenton, New Jersey, sold most of her furniture and is two months behind on the rent. Her cousin gives her work as a bail bondsman's file clerk, and the reward for bringing in a fugitive turns out to be the only money she can see. The fugitive is a local cop accused of murder, a man she went to school with and has a history with, and he does not want to be found. Stephanie has no experience, no weapon and no idea what she is doing.
Rating coming soonA young lawyer in a small southern town takes on a murder case in which his client has already admitted what he did. The defendant is a father who shot the men accused of attacking his daughter, the trial has the whole county watching it, and the defence is not about whether the act happened but about whether the law will accept the reason. The prosecution has the evidence, the local mood is dangerous and the lawyer's own family is not safe. The novel established the courtroom thriller as a genre readers would buy in enormous numbers.
Rating coming soonThe Monroe family brings home a rabbit found in a cinema during a Dracula film, and the household's animals notice two things about him: he has fangs, and vegetables in the kitchen have started turning white and losing their juice. Harold the dog narrates and is prepared to believe the best of everybody. Chester the cat has read too many books and is not prepared to believe anything at all. Together they investigate the newcomer, and the case against him depends on evidence that keeps pointing in two directions at once.
Rating coming soonA woman travelling home for Christmas looks out of the window as her train draws level with another one on a parallel track, and sees a man strangling a woman in the carriage opposite. By the time the trains separate and she reaches a station, the other train has vanished and nobody believes her. Miss Marple is her friend, and believes her. The investigation has no body, no name and no crime scene, and it has to be found in a countryside where the only evidence is a set of schedules.
Rating coming soonSt Mary Mead has been through a great deal of change, and the newest thing about it is the film star who has bought a local house and invited the village to a garden party for a charity. Miss Marple is old, unwell and dependent on a new housekeeper, and she watches the arrangements with the interest of somebody who has known every family in the parish for sixty years. A guest dies at the party, apparently poisoned, and the question the police cannot answer is who was the intended victim. The title comes from a mirror and a fragment of poetry, and the answer depends on a woman's face.
Rating coming soonAriadne Oliver, the detective novelist who appears in several Poirot books, is staying with friends and is invited to a children's Hallowe'en party at a house in the village. One of the guests is a thirteen-year-old girl who is known for telling dramatic stories, and during the evening she announces to the room that she once witnessed a murder. Nobody takes it seriously. Later that night she is found drowned in the tub used for the apple-bobbing, and Mrs Oliver asks Poirot to come down because she is certain the two things are connected.
Rating coming soonRobert Langdon, a Harvard professor of symbology, is called to a research institute in Switzerland overnight after a physicist is found murdered with a symbol burned into his chest. The symbol belongs to the Illuminati, a society long thought extinct, and a canister of antimatter has gone missing from the dead man's laboratory. Langdon and the scientist's daughter, Vittoria Vetra, follow the trail to Rome and to the Vatican, where the cardinals are gathering to elect a pope and the Swiss Guard has only hours to find the canister. The novel runs on a single day.
Rating coming soonIn the small Mississippi town of Innocence, days are long, nights are fragrant and secrets do not stay kept. When a killer begins taking the lives of the town's most attractive women, neighbours have to ask whether the culprit is a stranger hiding in the bayou or someone living next door. Into that summer comes Caroline Waverly, a concert violinist who wants only a quiet stay in her late grandmother's house.
Rating coming soonMeeting Torr Latime is the last thing Abby Lyndon expected from a Japanese flower-arranging class, and he is dynamic, good-looking and better at arrangements than she is. He is also the distraction she needs, because someone is stalking her. Once Torr understands her situation he offers to protect her, taking her to his secluded cabin, where the atmosphere is intimate and safe and, it turns out, conducive to seduction.
Rating coming soonOrphaned at five and taken in by wealthy cousins, Ellen Kellaway has been raised as a companion to their daughter and never once allowed to forget that every advantage she has was owed to somebody's charity. Her life of deference changes completely when the son of a powerful London family asks to marry her, opening a world of wealth and position.
Rating coming soonJack Reacher is a drifter who has just got off a bus in Margrave, Georgia, and within an hour he is under arrest for murder. It is a poor welcome from the town, and all Reacher knows is that he did not kill anybody, at least not here and not recently. He does not stand a chance of convincing anyone of that in Margrave, which is exactly the position the novel leaves him in.
Rating coming soonJohn Clark, the ex-Navy SEAL known to readers of Tom Clancy's novels as the dark side of Jack Ryan, is a man who handles the secret operational work Ryan cannot be associated with. He has hunted warlords in Japan, drug lords in Colombia and nuclear terrorists in the United States, and he has ghosts of his own to settle.
Rating coming soonAlex Rider is fourteen, and he is told that his uncle died in a car accident. He knows it is a lie, because of the bullet holes in his uncle's windscreen. Nothing prepares him for the next discovery, that the uncle he thought he knew was working for MI6, and that he is being recruited to find the killers and finish the mission. He is then caught in a game of cat and mouse.
Rating coming soonInvestigations into the accidental deaths of two of the world's most powerful men reveal a single link: both had sons attending Point Blanc Academy, an exclusive school for rebellious rich children run by a sinister man named Dr Grief and sited high on an isolated peak in the French Alps. Alex Rider is sent in as a pupil, with a false identity and a set of disguised gadgets, to establish what is really happening there.
Rating coming soonIn the pre-dawn hours, in a distressed Midwestern city, hundreds of unemployed people are queuing for a place at a job fair when a lone driver ploughs a stolen Mercedes through the crowd, reverses and charges again. Eight are killed and fifteen wounded, and the killer gets away. Months later a retired detective named Bill Hodges is still haunted by the unsolved case, until a letter arrives from someone who claims to be the driver and threatens worse.
Rating coming soonRetired detective Bill Hodges and his partner Holly Gibney run a private investigation agency, and Hodges has just been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and given months to live. He is drawn instead into a spree of suicides, all of them connected to the same source. Brady Hartsfield, the Mercedes killer, has found a new way to reach his victims and drive them to kill themselves.
Rating coming soonThe novel takes place seven years after the events of The Silence of the Lambs and follows the intended revenge of one of Hannibal Lecter's victims. It is the third book in the series featuring Lecter and the second to feature the FBI agent Clarice Starling, and it centres on a pursuit rather than on a single investigation. It follows The Silence of the Lambs as a direct sequel.
Rating coming soonMark and Cara Burroughs' parents do not come home, do not call and leave no note. At first the children are not badly alarmed, because their parents have stayed out late before. Then other things begin going wrong: Mark's girlfriend breaks up with him and disappears, the police show no interest in finding the adults, and the cousin boarding with them seems to be watching.
Rating coming soonJanie and her friends make bets about which of them will be the first to date Ross, the mysterious new boy in town. He is good looking, he is interesting, and nobody knows anything about where he came from. Then the murders begin, and the competition between the girls stops being a game and starts being a question about who is safe to be near.
Rating coming soonHome on leave after destroying a Colombian drug cartel, the Navy SEAL Clint McIntire finds himself in serious trouble with Morganna Chavez, the younger sister of his best friend. She has been working secretly with the Drug Enforcement Administration to uncover a lucrative and deadly conspiracy involving a date-rape drug, and the operation has put her in danger that he is not prepared for.
Rating coming soonRoman DeWinter arrives at a seaside inn with nothing but the clothes he is wearing and a loaded revolver. His orders are to expose a criminal organisation based at the holiday retreat, and the evidence points to the innkeeper, Charity Ford. It should be a routine assignment, and then he learns what it is to be welcomed into a home, and starts to care for his own suspect.
Rating coming soonLibby Day was seven years old when she witnessed the murder of her mother and two sisters on the family farm in Kansas, and her older brother was convicted of the crime and sentenced to life. Twenty-four years later a group convinced of his innocence approaches her, and she begins to ask the questions she had never dared to ask, including whether the voice she heard that night was really his.
Rating coming soonMiss Marple comes up to London from the country for a holiday and finds what she was looking for at Bertram's Hotel: traditional decoration, impeccable service and an unmistakable atmosphere of danger behind the highly polished surface. When an eccentric guest makes his way to the airport on the wrong day, a violent chain of events is set in motion that even she could not have foreseen.
Rating coming soonA man sprays bullets into a crowd of children leaving a San Francisco church, and only one person dies, which raises the question of whether the killing was intended. Then an elderly woman is found hanged. Homicide inspector Lindsay Boxer senses a connection, and with the medical examiner, an assistant district attorney and a reporter she finds a link that sends a chill through the country.
Rating coming soonSir Charles Cartwright should have known better than to allow thirteen guests to sit down to dinner, because by the end of the evening one of them is dead, choked by a cocktail that contained no trace of poison. Hercule Poirot calls the death predictable, and then finds that he can discover no motive for a murder at all.
Rating coming soonThree generations of the Leonides family live together in a large, somewhat crooked-looking house, and then the wealthy patriarch Aristide is murdered. Suspicion falls on the whole household, including his two sons, his widow fifty years his junior and even his three grandchildren. Charles Hayward, engaged to the dead man's granddaughter, tries to help the police find the killer.
Rating coming soonIn 1915, Sherlock Holmes is retired and quietly occupied with the study of honeybees in Sussex when a young woman stumbles onto him on the Downs. Fifteen years old, awkward and recently orphaned, Mary Russell has an intellect that impresses even him, and under his reluctant teaching she proves a capable partner. They are soon called to Wales to help find a kidnapped American senator's daughter.
Rating coming soonWhen his sexton finds a corpse in the wrong grave, the rector of Fenchurch St Paul asks Lord Peter Wimsey to find out who the dead man was and how he came to be there. The lore of bell-ringing and a village in the remote fens of East Anglia form the background to a story of an old unsolved crime and its violent unravelling twenty years later.
Rating coming soonFriday Barnes is a genius girl detective who solves crimes at her exclusive boarding school, and this is the second case she takes on there. The mystery continues from the first book, with the same school setting and the same cast of students and staff around her investigations. The school has money, secrets and a long list of grudges, which is what keeps supplying her with cases.
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