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 3 of the shelf.
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Rating coming soonVirgil Flowers, an investigator with the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, is summoned by Lucas Davenport to look into a pair of murders in which the victims were found with lemons in their mouths. He has to work out what connects them, because without that connection more killings will follow and there will be no way to anticipate them.
Rating coming soonAn archaeologist working on a dig in 1920s Palestine discovers a letter that purports to come from a woman who was an apostle of Christ, which would make it a sensational document. When she returns to England and is murdered, the detective Mary Russell sets out to establish why anybody would kill for it, and what the discovery would mean to the institutions with an interest in it.
Rating coming soonA thriller set in Washington DC after the events of The Da Vinci Code, built on Freemasonry for both its recurring theme and its major characters. It centres on the Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon and a kidnapping that proceeds through the symbols and secret societies of the American capital, with a deadline attached to the search.
Rating coming soonThe novelist Paul Sheldon intends to move from writing historical romances about a heroine called Misery Chastain to publishing literary fiction. After a car accident he is rescued by Annie Wilkes, who describes herself as his number one fan and is a former nurse. When she discovers that he has killed Misery off in his latest book, she becomes furious and keeps him prisoner in her isolated farmhouse until he writes a book that brings her back.
Rating coming soonIt is the very first adventure of the Secret Seven, and the club of child detectives is already on the trail of some peculiar clues. It is snowing, the seven are in disguise, and the lead takes them to a spooky old house and a mystery that has to be solved before the weather or the adults put a stop to it.
Rating coming soonEx-military policeman Jack Reacher is lying low in Key West, digging swimming pools by hand, and he is not pleased when a private detective starts asking questions about him. When the detective, Costello, turns up dead with his fingertips sliced off, Reacher decides it is time to move on, and the case he had been avoiding follows him.
Rating coming soonTwo women who knew Jack Reacher are dead. Sergeant Amy Callan and Lieutenant Caroline Cook were both high-flying soldiers who had been forced to resign from the service, and both were found in their own homes, naked, in a bath full of paint. Both deaths look like the work of an army man, a loner with a score to settle, and Reacher fits the description.
Rating coming soonA dying criminal confesses that his loot has been stored in the tower. Both towers of the looted mansion are searched without success, and it is left to the Hardy boys to make the discovery that clears up the mystery and clears the name of a friend's father. The official search has already failed twice, which is what gives the brothers their opening.
Rating coming soonJack Reacher is an elite ex-military policeman who left the service years ago and has moved from place to place without family, possessions or commitments. Trouble finds him wherever he goes, and unfinished business has now found him: ten years ago a key investigation went wrong and someone got away with murder, and a chance encounter brings it all back.
Rating coming soonThe ability to manipulate time has come in useful for Caleb Edge in his career as a T-FLAC operative, and his current assignment is to get close to Heather Shaw in order to find her banker father and forty-eight billion dollars of missing terrorist funds. The difficulty is that Heather has been in hiding for a year and does not know where he is.
Rating coming soonMary Russell and Sherlock Holmes are pursued by murderous strangers through the bazaars of Jerusalem in 1918. In Palestine they meet Mahmoud and Ali Hazr, two apparently Bedouin guides, and set out to counter a plot against the British administration under General Edmund Allenby, with Russell dressed as a young Bedouin man and learning Arabic as she goes.
Rating coming soonIn Providence, Rhode Island in 1848, Edgar Allan Poe reluctantly investigates the problems of an eleven-year-old boy named Edmund, whose family has mysteriously disappeared. The boy's story suggests a new Poe tale with a ghastly final twist, and the investigation places a real disappearance beside the kind of fiction its investigator writes. Edmund has almost no authority of his own, which is why he needs the writer.
Rating coming soonMary Russell continues as a student of Sherlock Holmes and an increasingly skilled investigator in her own right. Looking for rest in London after a stupefying visit from relatives, she meets a friend from Oxford who introduces her to a charismatic woman named Margery Childe, who leads the New Temple of God. Then a series of murders claims members of the movement.
Rating coming soonReturning home to Sussex one afternoon, Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes find a stone in their garden that once belonged to the Imperial gardens in Kyoto. It brings back the spring of 1924, when on their way back from India they agreed to do a small but dangerous job for the emperor of Japan, and when Russell met a young Japanese woman who guided them into a secret meeting with the Prince Regent.
Rating coming soonThe shadows of war are drawing over the city of Fez, and Holmes badly wants the wisdom and courage of his wife, whom he has learned, to his horror, has gone missing. As Holmes searches for her, and Russell, suffering a temporary loss of memory, searches for herself, each of them tries to solve parallel puzzles before it is too late for them, for Africa and for the peace of Europe.
Rating coming soonMary Russell and her husband Sherlock Holmes travel to San Francisco to unlock a buried memory of a crime that has the power to kill again, lost somewhere in Russell's past. They go to close up the house and businesses she inherited after her family's death, and a puzzling codicil to the family will sets off an investigation.
Rating coming soonAfter exposing a suitor's dishonourable intentions toward the daughter of a client, Harry Cartwright is hired by a wealthy marquis to solve a murder that takes place at a house party. The case is complicated by the host's wish to keep the matter discreet, which limits what can be asked and of whom.
Rating coming soonHours after returning from solving the riddle of The Moor, Holmes and Russell are visited by a bloodied stranger who pleads for their help. Recovered, he tells them the story of Marsh Hughenfort, younger brother of the Duke of Beauville, who returned to England on his brother's death and wants the truth about the death of the hall's expected heir, Gabriel Hughenfort, which scandalised the family during the First World War.
Rating coming soonTravelling incognito, Mary Russell and her husband Sherlock Holmes head for India to search for a missing spy, the man whose story is said to have inspired a famous imperial adventure novel. They find themselves caught in an intrigue that involves more than one government's interests in the region, and the search has to be conducted behind cover.
Rating coming soonCasey Singleton is a quality assurance vice president at the fictional aerospace manufacturer Norton Aircraft, and she is assigned to investigate an in-flight accident aboard one of the company's airliners that left three passengers dead and fifty-six injured. The inquiry has to establish what happened to the aircraft while the company's commercial interests are at stake.
Rating coming soonThe second novel featuring the private detective Dirk Gently is a humorous fantasy detective story. Its plot involves a Norse deity in difficulties, an advertising agency, a contract that cannot be broken and a client who is found dead in a locked room, and the investigation proceeds by the detective's own methods rather than by deduction in the ordinary sense.
Rating coming soonIt began as a problem in one of Holmes's beehives, led to a murderous cult, and appeared to end with an escape from a sacrificial altar. Instead, Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes have stirred the anger and the resources of the people they thwarted, and now they are separated and on the run, wanted by the police and pursued across the Continent.
Rating coming soonMary Russell and her husband Sherlock Holmes investigate a death on Dartmoor, together with sightings of a phantom coach on the moor. The case places the two of them in a landscape whose legends are as much a part of the evidence as the physical traces, and the investigation has to separate the two.
Rating coming soonWhen Casey first arrived in the off-the-grid town, an isolated community built as a haven for people running from their pasts, she had no idea what to expect: no mobile phones, no internet, no post and no way in or out without the town council's approval. She did not expect to be the homicide detective on two cases, or for the council to drop a dangerous criminal into their midst without a plan to hold him.
Rating coming soonA murder mystery set in New York City and on Long Island, and the first of the Alice Nestleton series. When one of the clients of the middle-aged actress turned cat-sitter is murdered, she is drawn into the world of horse racing, and cats and horses take centre stage in the investigation. The book is a short cosy mystery written for the paperback market.
Rating coming soonA Regency mystery in which a young woman becomes involved in an investigation, in the setting of a country England where the conventions of the period limit what a woman can ask and where she can go. It sits between the historical romance, the woman-detective story and the Regency novel rather than being a straightforward crime novel.
Rating coming soonWyatt has never thought much about his father, a hardened criminal serving a life sentence, until his school baseball programme is cut and the coach shows him a photograph of his father at sixteen looking very much like Wyatt himself. Then he meets a girl whose own father is in the same prison, and arranges a meeting.
Rating coming soonLeonidas Witherall, the man who looks like Shakespeare and writes the adventures of Lieutenant Hazeltine, is finishing the latest instalment when his housekeeper interrupts with her opinion. Then two men deliver an unwanted deep freeze, followed by a woman in an evening gown who mistakes him for somebody else, and the deep freeze turns out to contain something it should not.
Rating coming soonHercule Poirot is travelling to the Riviera on the Blue Train when he meets Ruth Kettering, an American heiress on her way to see a former lover. By morning she has been murdered in her compartment and her jewels are gone, and the only lead is a strange man who was seen loitering near the carriage.
Rating coming soonLeonidas Witherall is knocked unconscious in the lost-and-found department of a department store while retrieving his umbrella, and comes round in a wagon loaded with French bread. Called out later to help during a blackout, he returns home to find the store's owner dead in his study with a samurai sword in his chest, and the police treat him as the obvious suspect.
Rating coming soonMiles Kendig has been one of the CIA's most effective deep-cover officers, until an injury ends his usefulness in the field and the Agency offers him a desk. He retires instead, finds civilian life unbearable, and begins writing a memoir full of what he knows, posting a chapter a week to his old employer and daring them to stop him.
Rating coming soonOn a June evening in 1925, at their home on the Sussex Downs, Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes take a telephone call about an old friend's aunt, who has not returned from a supervised outing from Bedlam. Russell has had a difficult few weeks, and the search for the missing woman takes her from the asylum to Venice.
Rating coming soonIn London in 1958, a filing assistant at a secret detective agency receives an unsigned letter naming a place and a time. She goes to look and finds nothing, and at midnight she is murdered by someone she cannot see, which means the killer works inside the agency. Marion Lane is a first-year trainee, and she is drawn into the search.
Rating coming soonHercule Poirot is holidaying in Egypt when a wealthy young heiress, Linnet Ridgeway Doyle, is shot aboard the Nile steamer Karnak during a cruise south towards Abu Simbel. Almost everyone on the boat has a reason to dislike her, including the friend whose fiance she married, and Poirot has to work out how and when the killing happened.
Rating coming soonAlex Rider is in hospital recovering from a bullet wound when four men break in to kidnap the son of a Russian billionaire. He stops them, and the boy's father, Nikolei Drevin, rewards him with two weeks at his side. Drevin is building a hotel in space called Ark Angel, and a group calling itself Force Three is determined to see the project destroyed.
Rating coming soonClayton Blaisdell Jr, known as Blaze, is a small-time con artist with a damaged head and a dead partner he still talks to. George Rackley planned their crimes while he was alive, and Blaze means to carry out the scheme the two of them worked up together: taking the baby son of a wealthy family and holding him until a ransom is paid.
Rating coming soonJack Reacher is hitching through the heat of West Texas when a young woman named Carmen Greer offers him a lift. She wants something in return: her husband is about to leave prison, he has beaten her before, the local police cannot be trusted, and the ranch he is coming home to belongs to his family, which owns everything around it.
Rating coming soonJack Reacher watches a man walk out of a New York building, cross the street to a parked Mercedes and drive it away. The car was carrying one million dollars in ransom money, and the man who paid it, Edward Lane, will find more where that came from to get his family back. Lane runs a soldiers-for-hire operation, and he means to have his wife and child returned whatever it costs him.
Rating coming soonA Korean-American family in Virginia is thrown into confusion when the father and his younger son do not come back from a walk in a nearby park. The father's daughter Mia, who is twenty and has an explanation for everything, is not worried at first, and then her brother arrives home alone and covered in blood.
Rating coming soonGary Soneji, the killer Alex Cross put away, is out of prison, dying and determined to take his revenge before he goes. At the same time a second man is at work: Thomas Augustine Pierce has been hunting a killer he calls Mr Smith since his fiancee was murdered, and when Cross is attacked in his own home the two hunts begin to meet.
Rating coming soonSeven friends did something terrible one night in the California desert, and somebody knows what it was. A chain letter signed by a figure calling themselves Your Caretaker reaches Alison first and then each of the others in turn, and what it asks for is not a favour: do as you are told, or pay for what you did.
Rating coming soonColby Lane has left his years as a mercenary behind and taken a job running security for an oil company, and then a drug trafficker brings him back into the world he left. His ex-wife is part of the case, which he was not expecting, and so is the six-year-old daughter she has.
Rating coming soonStephanie's uncle Gordon wrote horror fiction, and when he dies and leaves her his estate she discovers that what he wrote was not invented. Pursued by people who want a key he left behind, she is helped by Skulduggery Pleasant, who is a detective, a magician and, technically, dead. The book is the first of the series and brings the two of them together.
Rating coming soonTexas Ranger Marc Brannon is back on duty and the case he is given puts him opposite Josette Langley, the junior investigator he once loved. Their relationship ended years earlier when she accused him of something that broke them apart, and now the person threatening her is a political figure with a great deal to hide.
Rating coming soonMaureen Harris works as a secretary and has been given a job that requires her to get close to a new mechanic at the company, because somebody has been tampering with its aircraft designs. She is very shy, and the man she is investigating turns out to be more than she bargained for.
Rating coming soonWinslow Covington has just become chief of police in the small Montana town of Quincy and is trying to prove she was not given the job because her grandfather is the mayor. On her first night there she slept with Griffin Eden, of the town's founding family, and then a woman is found dead on Eden land.
Rating coming soonGaron Grier is an FBI agent from San Antonio who has bought a ranch in Jacobsville hoping to repair his relationship with his family. Grace Carver has lived in the town all her life and never married. The case that brings them together is the hunt for an escaped child predator.
Rating coming soonOn the day her husband is buried, a woman receives a letter from a state penitentiary containing one sentence, signed by a man she has never met. She writes back to ask what he is waiting for, and the answer is her. The letters continue for months and then they stop.
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