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 4 of the shelf.
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Rating coming soonDante Maroni is the heir to a criminal outfit and has been trained for the position since he was a child. While working undercover inside the syndicate responsible for a series of missing children, he finds something that changes what he thought he knew, and the game he sets in motion pulls in Amara.
Rating coming soonTristan Caine has spent his adult life keeping a promise, and he broke it on a rainy night for Morana Vitalio, whose safety he considers his own business. She is in enemy territory with both her freedom and her survival at stake, and the two of them join forces to find out what happened to a group of missing girls.
Rating coming soonElijah Baley is a New York police detective in a future city buried under steel and roofed against the outside, where most people live in enormous communal blocks and housing is rationed down to the last square metre. A Spacer has been murdered, and the Spacers will only accept the arrest if the investigation is carried out alongside a robot partner.
Rating coming soonSolaria is a Spacer world where nobody touches anybody and conversation happens through holograms, with robots doing all the work and the settlers living alone on enormous estates. It is also the setting for the first murder in two hundred years, and the Solarians want the case cleared up without the disturbance of an Earthman living among them.
Rating coming soonAriadne Oliver is staging a murder hunt for a village fete at Nasse House in Devon when she becomes convinced that parts of her plan have been changed behind her back. She asks Hercule Poirot to come down, and by the end of the fete there is a real body to account for.
Rating coming soonIn 1943 a British aircraft comes down in occupied France, and the woman who survives is taken prisoner by the Germans. The account of how she came to be there, and of the pilot who was flying her, is written by a captive who tells the story she has to tell in order to stay alive.
Rating coming soonIn Maine in 1789 the Kennebec River freezes over, and the body of a man is found locked in the ice. Martha Ballard is called out to examine him because she is the midwife and healer for the district, and the death turns out to be connected to a case she is already entangled in.
Rating coming soonA Secret Service agent wants Jack Reacher to look at her arrangements for protecting the Vice President-elect and find the holes in them, which is the assignment she has to make because she cannot ask anyone inside the service without exposing the plan. Someone has already been working on the attack for a long time, and their preparations are further along than she knows.
Rating coming soonTom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn are on their way downriver when a strange man asks them to carry a message to a relative in Arkansas. By the time they arrive there has been a murder, a stolen diamond and a confession nobody believes, and Tom decides to solve the case the way the detective stories he has read say it should be done.
Rating coming soonAdam Farmer is riding a bicycle from his home in Massachusetts to visit his father in Vermont, and he is carrying a package he does not explain. Between the stages of the journey the book gives transcripts of tapes made by a subject talking to a doctor, and the two accounts have to be fitted together before either makes sense.
Rating coming soonCarruthers is a junior diplomat in London with a dull summer ahead of him when a friend invites him to spend a holiday sailing in the Baltic. The invitation is really a request for help: Davies has found something in the German sands that suggests a plan for an invasion of England, and he needs someone who can read a chart and understand the politics.
Rating coming soonIntruders break into a house on a quiet street in suburban Minneapolis in the middle of the night and murder Luke Ellis's parents, and the whole operation takes less than two minutes. Luke wakes up in a room that looks like his own except that it has no window, in a building full of other children who were taken the same way and who have telepathy or telekinesis.
Rating coming soonSix shots are fired in a city in the middle of the country and five people are killed, and within hours the police have a suspect who fits every detail of the case and a confession that appears to close it. The arrested man says they have the wrong person, and then he asks for Jack Reacher by name, which is how a retired military investigator ends up taking the case apart.
Rating coming soonMary Russell and Sherlock Holmes come home to Sussex in 1924 after seven months travelling in India and Japan, and within days Holmes's estranged son arrives asking for help. A woman and a child have disappeared, the search leads into a religious community in the English countryside and then to Scotland, and the whole case is bound up with the personal failure Holmes has never been able to settle.
Rating coming soonOn a cold winter day in Boston a young man named Martin Jones ducks into a secondhand bookshop to get warm, because the sign in the window says it is warm inside and because the police are looking for him. Inside he meets the man who was once his teacher, Leonidas Witherall, who has lost his money in the crash and is now the shop's janitor.
Rating coming soonLeonidas Witherall has inherited money from an uncle and had a house built while he was travelling the world, and he is on the train to Dalton in Massachusetts to see it for the first time. On the way he meets a nervous woman and a young woman carrying a brown paper package, and the house he arrives at contains a pickaxe and a corpse in the garage.
Rating coming soonSomeone tries to run Leonidas Witherall over on a snowy day in Dalton, and he is saved by a brassy young woman named Margie and her boyfriend Cuff. Then he escapes them, is struck by a second car, and wakes up in the home of a former pupil who is sitting in the same room with a knife in him.
Rating coming soonLeonidas Witherall is writing the latest adventure of his fictional detective when he notices that a parcel of bank papers has gone missing, and he sets off for a dinner at the home of the banker Fenwick Balderston, where he serves as a director. He arrives to find his host dead on the floor, beaten with a bronze bust of Shakespeare.
Rating coming soonDanny has a problem at school and wants to borrow the equipment his friends' professor is working with in order to solve it. Professor Bullfinch and Doctor Grimes are developing new scientific methods of fighting crime, and Danny ends up using their bloodhound robot and their instruments to investigate the disappearance of the manager of the local department store.
Rating coming soonA London taxi driver who knows every street in the city is ordered at gunpoint to drive a man away from a crime committed in front of an art gallery and casino. The passenger escapes to Nairobi, and the case comes to Detective Superintendent Richard Jury through a photograph in the Saturday paper, because he recognises one of the victims.
Rating coming soonMark Treasure goes with his actress wife to a West Country town while she is filming, and is asked by the local bishop to look into the finances of a convent with three nuns left and assets of eleven million pounds. One of the people already handling the convent's money has died in suspicious circumstances, and a second is strangled after a dinner party.
Rating coming soonA wedding is being arranged in a hurry at a manor house in rural Herefordshire, and the bride is marrying before her twenty-first birthday even though doing so will cost her a large inheritance. The guests include the banker Mark Treasure and his wife, and the bride's father, who has been estranged from his daughter for years, arrives uninvited on the eve of the ceremony.
Rating coming soonFour men are playing golf at Paston Oatvile when one of them slices his drive from the third tee, and while they are looking for the ball they find a dead body in the ground below the railway viaduct. The dead man's hat is lying fifteen yards away from where he fell, which is enough for the four of them to conclude that there has been dirty work.
Rating coming soonMary Russell and Sherlock Holmes have built a working partnership over a decade, and each of them has secrets that the other has learned to leave alone. This time the secrets belong to the household around them: the housekeeper who has kept Holmes's house since long before Russell arrived, and who has a history of her own that nobody in the house has ever thought to ask about.
Rating coming soonLilly Burkstrom's ex-husband told her that if he died it would not be an accident, and she did not believe him until he was killed in what was reported as a robbery at a convenience store. The police are not interested in her suspicions, and then someone breaks into her house and into the dead man's apartment as well.
Rating coming soonA tour bus comes off the road in a snowstorm in South Dakota and leaves Jack Reacher stranded in a small town with a prison, a police force stretched thin and a witness who is waiting to give evidence. Sixty-one hours is the time he has, and the countdown runs the length of the book.
Rating coming soonAlex Rider is fourteen and has just come back from space, and when he crash lands off the coast of Australia the Australian Secret Service recruits him to infiltrate one of the criminal gangs operating across South East Asia. The gangs are known as snakeheads, and they smuggle drugs, weapons and people through the region for a living.
Rating coming soonJulian, Dick and Anne arrive at Kirrin Cottage to spend the holidays with their cousin George, and their plans for the island are ruined when Aunt Fanny falls ill and has to go away to hospital. The temporary cook who comes to look after them is unfriendly to the children and actively unkind to George's dog.
Rating coming soonLondon is in the middle of an outbreak of supernatural Visitors that Scotland Yard cannot handle and that has brought people onto the streets in protest. Lockwood and Co. keep doing the work the larger agencies will not take on, and the arrangement between the three young agents who run it is about to change.
Rating coming soonCHERUB needs to reach an illegal weapons dealer, and the only route open to them is through his son, who is serving a sentence in a maximum security prison in the United States. The plan requires an agent to get inside the prison and make contact, which is more complicated than anyone in the organisation wants to admit.
Rating coming soonD. J. Holden is a private investigator who has lived by one rule since her boss and foster father taught it to her, which is never to go undercover. When she discovers that his agency is in trouble she breaks the rule and takes a job investigating Maxwell Lotorto, the heir to a grocery fortune and the despair of his formidable grandmother.
Rating coming soonElinor Carlisle and Roddy Welman are engaged and expecting to inherit from a wealthy aunt when an anonymous letter warns that someone is courting the old woman's favour. Elinor's suspicion falls on Mary Gerrard, the lodgekeeper's daughter, and before the summer is out Elinor is in the dock on a charge of murder. Hercule Poirot is asked to find out what happened at Hunterbury.
Rating coming soonBurt Stallings wants Mike Shayne to find his daughter, who walked out of the family home in the middle of the night, and he makes it sound less like a request than an order. Shayne has a problem before he starts: he has already found the heiress, and somebody had strangled her before he got to her.
Rating coming soonSomething in the Big Woods is frightening the animals of the Bean farm, and the First Animal Bank has been robbed. The neighbours blame a legendary phantom they call the Ignormus, and Freddy the pig, who has solved this kind of problem before, sets out to find out who or what is really behind it.
Rating coming soonJohnny O'Brien, better known as White Folks, learned to use his light skin to work the Chicago con game, and he is finished with small money. With his mentor Blue dead and the city used up, he takes his polished act north, where a crew of grifters is assembling around a long con and the stakes are counted in thousands.
Rating coming soonWhite Folks is the son of a Black woman working the streets and a white man, and his complexion is light enough to pass. Blue Howard, an older hustler, raises him and teaches him the con, and together the two of them work the gap between Black and white Philadelphia for everything the marks are willing to hand over.
Rating coming soonToby Jugg is a decorated fighter pilot who was shot in the back during a raid on Cologne and is now paralysed below the waist. Sent to convalesce in a house in Wales, he finds himself tormented at night by a shadowy many-legged presence, and the man in charge of the house turns out to belong to a Satanist brotherhood.
Rating coming soonIn 1843 two servants of a household in Canada West were convicted of murdering their employer and his housekeeper. James McDermott was hanged, and Grace Marks was imprisoned for life, her case argued over by everyone who read about it. Years later a young American doctor begins visiting her in the penitentiary, hoping to establish what a woman like her could possibly have done.
Rating coming soonCharles Dickens is at the height of his fame in 1865 when a train he is travelling in runs off the rails at Staplehurst, and the disaster lays the ground for the last five years of his life. The man telling the story is his friend and fellow novelist Wilkie Collins, whose account of Dickens cannot be trusted.
Rating coming soonThe narrator of this story makes her living by reading auras at a shop called Spiritual Palms, a fraud she has refined over the years to something close to a small science. Then Susan Burke comes in, a rich and unhappy woman with a stepson and a house that frightens her, and the woman who does not believe in ghosts is invited to spend time in one.
Rating coming soonCharles Dexter Ward is a young man from a prominent Rhode Island family who has become obsessed with an ancestor called Joseph Curwen, a merchant of unpleasant reputation and, it is said, a wizard who knew things a man should not. Ward vanishes from the asylum where he had been held, and his family doctor sets out to establish what has been done to him.
Rating coming soonStevie Bell went to Ellingham Academy because of its most famous crime: the 1916 kidnapping and triple murder known as the Truly Devious case. Then a present-day classmate was murdered, and although Stevie identified the killer her parents took her home, which leaves her with a cold case and no way back into the school that holds it.
Rating coming soonA man is pushed out of a helicopter over the empty California desert, and in Chicago a woman discovers that the members of an old army investigation unit are being killed one at a time. Somewhere in Portland, Jack Reacher is drifting through his life until a message reaches him that uses a code only his former colleagues would know.
Rating coming soonAn advertisement appears in the newspaper asking whether the reader is a gifted child looking for special opportunities, and dozens of children answer it. Only four pass the strange tests that follow, and the four of them are then sent into a school run by a man named Curtain to find out who is sending secret messages into people's minds.
Rating coming soonIn the summer of 1973 a university student called Devin Jones takes a job at a small amusement park in North Carolina, where the work involves maintenance, a mascot costume and keeping the children entertained. The park also has a history: a crime was committed there, and the young man who learns about it finds the story harder to leave than the job.
Rating coming soonVictorian London has a murderer the newspapers have christened Jack the Ripper, and the police have nothing to show for their investigation. A well-off young woman, more interested in dead bodies and forensic work than in the marriage her family has in mind for her, decides that she is going to work out who he is, using the parts of London society that the police cannot enter.
Rating coming soonJamie Conklin is the son of a single mother in New York, and he has a talent his mother has told him to keep quiet about: he can see and speak to the dead. The dead have to answer his questions honestly, which makes him useful to people who want the truth, and the arrangement is not safe for anyone involved.
Rating coming soonLucy Carlyle has left Lockwood & Co., and Anthony Lockwood has to ask her to come back when a crime forces his hand. The two of them, and the agency's small team, follow the case into the upper reaches of London society, where the people who employ them have reasons of their own for wanting the truth kept quiet.
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