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 7 of the shelf.
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Rating coming soonThree people are circling the same secret in contemporary America. Hollis Henry, a former musician now writing for a magazine that does not exist yet, is researching a story about locative art. Tito moves information for a family with unusual employers, and Milgrim is a translator held in place by a man who claims to have rescued him.
Rating coming soonHenry Perowne is a successful London neurosurgeon, happily married and content with his life, and the novel follows him through a single Saturday in February 2003. A demonstration against the coming war in Iraq is filling the streets. On his way across the city he has an encounter with a violent and troubled man.
Rating coming soonHollis Henry has lost most of her money in the crash and cannot afford to refuse the advertising executive Hubertus Bigend when he offers her work. She is sent to find the designer behind a secretive clothing label, while Milgrim, who also works for Bigend, investigates military garment design. Their assignments soon collide with a rival contractor and a missing researcher.
Rating coming soonVictoria McQueen is eight years old when she discovers that riding her bicycle through a particular covered bridge can carry her to anything she has lost. Each trip across the bridge costs her more than the last, in body and in mind. The talent also brings her to the attention of a man who collects children, and the novel follows her from childhood into adulthood.
Rating coming soonYakov Liebermann runs a centre in Vienna documenting Nazi crimes, and his funding is failing as the world loses interest in the work. Then a stranger telephones from Brazil with a recording of a meeting held by Josef Mengele, who is organising a strange operation: ninety-four harmless civil servants in different countries are to be killed on particular dates spread across several years.
Rating coming soonLinus Weems wakes in a concrete building with no windows and no doors, where an elevator is the only way in or out. Five other people arrive from different backgrounds, all of them kidnapped, and none of them knows who has taken them or what he wants. Linus keeps a diary of it.
Rating coming soonIt is 1996 and Jack Reacher is still an army major. He is given a medal in the morning and sent back to school in the afternoon, to a course shared with an FBI agent and a CIA analyst, each of whom is wondering what he is doing there. It is not a school at all.
Rating coming soonOdd Thomas can see the dead, and during a chance encounter with a truck driver he receives a vision of three children being burned alive by a man in a red suit and a black mask. He understands that the driver had the same vision because he is the man in the mask, and Odd has to stop him.
Rating coming soonIt is 1914 and Britain needs Russian support in the naval arms race against Germany, so the Tsar's nephew is sent to London for secret talks. One of the men at the table is married to a Russian aristocrat whose nephew the prince is. An anarchist named Feliks arrives intending to kill him.
Rating coming soonKeith Russo, a young lawyer in a small Florida town, is shot dead at his desk one night, and the police settle on Quincy Miller, a young Black man who had once been his client. Quincy is convicted and spends twenty-two years insisting he is innocent before writing to a small innocence project run by a lawyer who is also a minister.
Rating coming soonA minimalist London house comes with a long list of rules imposed by the architect who designed it, and a woman recovering from a traumatic break-in is glad to move in. Three years earlier another woman lived in the same house and died there. Both of them answered the same strange question about what they owned.
Rating coming soonA man wakes in the lavatory of a railway station in 1958 with no memory of who he is, and his clothes and surroundings suggest to him that he is an alcoholic derelict. He is in fact a rocket scientist, and the launch he helped to design is due in a matter of days. Working out his own identity means working out who took it from him.
Rating coming soonSamantha Kofer is an associate at a New York law firm when the financial crisis hits and she is put on furlough instead of being laid off. She spends the year volunteering at a legal aid clinic in Virginia's coal country, where the clients have real problems and the law behaves differently.
Rating coming soonA test rabbit infected with a dangerous strain of Ebola is stolen from a Scottish research laboratory on Christmas Eve, and then the virus itself goes missing as well. The company's head of security has to recover it through a blizzard with almost no help from the police, while the director's family gathers for Christmas nearby.
Rating coming soonJackie Burke is a flight attendant who couriers money for a gunrunner named Ordell Robbie. When federal agents catch her and threaten her with prison and the loss of her job, they want her to act as bait in their case against him. Ordell wants her to stall them long enough to collect the rest of his money.
Rating coming soonMr and Mrs Darcy have been married six years and are preparing for their annual ball at Pemberley. Jane and Bingley have arrived, the staff have everything in hand, and then the night before the ball Lydia turns up in hysterics, shouting that her husband has been murdered. A body is found in the woods.
Rating coming soonA stranger approaches people in bars and car parks with information that ruins their lives: a fact about a spouse, offered quietly and without explanation, after which he walks away. Adam Price has a comfortable marriage, two sons and a good job, until he meets the stranger and is told something about his wife.
Rating coming soonAt their favourite restaurant, four professional women start discussing what would make the perfect man. The conversation turns into a joke list that is funny, detailed and deliberately racy, and it spreads through their company and out into the wider world until the four of them are briefly famous for it. Then somebody begins to take the list seriously.
Rating coming soonA Chinese smuggler has built a fortune out of human lives, moving immigrants into countries around the world. Dirk Pitt follows his activities from Washington State to Louisiana, where the man is building an enormous shipping port in the middle of nowhere, and the reason for the location turns out to matter more than the port.
Rating coming soonNed Kelly works as a lifeguard at a Florida resort and has fallen for a guest who is far out of his league. When his cousin offers him a share of a break-in worth five million dollars, he takes it. On the night of the robbery everything goes wrong, and Ned runs, because speed and secrecy are the only things that will keep him alive.
Rating coming soonAlex Cross is a detective and a psychologist in Washington, called to a murder in the projects and then seconded to a kidnapping case involving two children of famous families. The kidnapper is a teacher at their school, a man who has been planning this for years. Cross works alongside the Secret Service, the FBI and a supervisor named Jezzie Flanagan.
Rating coming soonA young woman is about to be married when a blackmailer obtains letters that would ruin her, and Holmes is engaged to get them back. Charles Augustus Milverton has made a profession out of other people's secrets and does not care what publishing them costs. When his price cannot be met, Holmes considers taking the letters rather than buying them.
Rating coming soonEight months after his wife was murdered, James Bond is drinking, gambling and making mistakes, and the Service sends him to Japan on a semi-diplomatic mission rather than dismiss him. The head of Japanese intelligence offers him a private bargain: kill a man who has built himself a garden of death. Bond recognises the target's other name.
Rating coming soonA skiing holiday in Utah ends with thirty Secret Service agents dead and the President of the United States kidnapped. Scot Harvath, a former Navy SEAL who is the only survivor of the detail, refuses to accept the official explanation of a landslide. He starts his own investigation, and it takes him to Switzerland.
Rating coming soonMitch Rapp has spent fifteen years hunting terrorists for the CIA, and the people he has killed have families with money. A Saudi businessman whose son died in one of Rapp's operations buys the services of a professional assassin, and the intention is not a quick death but an example. Rapp's private life is the part of him that is unprotected.
Rating coming soonMitch Rapp's cover has been blown, and the man who killed terrorists quietly for years is now a public figure and a target. He is moved onto the CIA director's staff as an adviser, and then a rescue operation in the Philippines goes wrong because somebody in Washington passed on its details. Rapp is asked to deal with both the leak and the hostages.
Rating coming soonJohn Corey is a New York homicide detective recovering from gunshot wounds at his uncle's house on the North Fork of Long Island. The local police chief asks him to look at the murder of two biologists who worked on Plum Island, a research site suspected of germ warfare work. Corey knew both of the victims.
Rating coming soonMegan is a suburban mother with a husband, three children and a past she has told nobody about. Ray was a documentary photographer and now works as a paparazzo. Broome is a detective who has never closed the case of a man who vanished seventeen years ago. When another man disappears on the same date, the three of them are drawn back to it.
Rating coming soonCatherine Douglas wakes in a convent on a Greek island knowing only her own name, and is told that everyone believes she died at the hands of her husband and his mistress. Her benefactor is a shipping magnate who arranges for her to recover, to work and to remember. What she remembers is inconvenient for more than one person.
Rating coming soonA reporter and four urban explorers break into the Paragon Hotel, an abandoned seaside building where nothing has been touched since its owner killed himself. They are looking for a vault they believe is somewhere inside. They find that the building is not empty, that somebody has been living in it, and that they are not the only people who came for the money.
Rating coming soonMolly Lasch pleaded guilty to manslaughter rather than stand trial for murdering her husband, a respected doctor, and served her sentence. Now on parole, she tells anyone who will listen that she cannot remember the night and believes she is innocent. An old college friend, a reporter, agrees to look at the case.
Rating coming soonSara Linton, a paediatrician and medical examiner, is being sued by the parents of a patient who died, and the town she has served for sixteen years is lining up against her. Her husband, the police chief Jeffrey Tolliver, gets word that his detective has been arrested in connection with a murder, and the two of them drive south into country where they are not welcome.
Rating coming soonA couple on a Long Island beach are filming each other when an explosion lights up the sky and something appears to rise from the sea towards a plane. Five years later the crash of TWA Flight 800 has been attributed to a mechanical fault. Detective John Corey and his wife, who worked on the original inquiry, go looking for the video.
Rating coming soonA killer in Minneapolis parks burns the bodies of women he has already killed, and the press has named him the Cremator. When one of the victims is the daughter of a wealthy family and a homeless teenager claims to have seen the fire, the case is handed to the Bureau. A former FBI agent working with witnesses and a profiler are put together on it.
Rating coming soonA pawnbroker with very red hair is recruited into a society that pays its members to sit in an office copying out the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and when the league is suddenly dissolved he asks Sherlock Holmes about it. Holmes listens, takes three pipefuls of tobacco and goes to look at the street outside the shop. The answer is not about red hair at all.
Rating coming soonA private jet goes down in the water sixteen minutes after taking off from Martha's Vineyard, killing everybody on board except a middle-aged painter and a four-year-old boy. The painter swims for hours with the child on his back, and then finds himself at the centre of a media storm and an investigation into why the aircraft crashed.
Rating coming soonSix years ago Jake Sanders watched Natalie, the woman he loved, marry another man, and he promised to leave her alone. When he sees that her husband has died he goes to the funeral. The widow is not Natalie, and she has been married to the dead man for far longer than six years.
Rating coming soonKara and Steve Marshall are selling their house on Long Island so that they can move into Manhattan, and their teenage daughter Lindsay does not want to go. She tells her mother that somebody came into her room during an open house. When her parents are in the city looking at apartments, Lindsay disappears from her bed.
Rating coming soonA young woman asks Holmes for help a few weeks before her wedding, because her sister died in a locked bedroom on the night before her own marriage, and she has begun to hear the same low whistle in the night. Their stepfather, a doctor who once practised in India, keeps a collection of animals and has a violent temper. Holmes and Watson go down to the house.
Rating coming soonGrace McCabe is a mystery novelist who goes to Washington to spend time with her sister Kathleen, and finds her working a telephone sex line in the evenings to pay for a custody lawyer. When Kathleen is killed in her apartment, the police settle on a suspect whom Grace does not believe. She starts asking questions of her own.
Rating coming soonArmed intruders dressed as monks kill the congregation of a cathedral in Cologne and leave with the bones of the Magi, which have been kept there for centuries. A group of soldiers and scientists from an American special unit is sent after them. What the thieves want with the relics turns out to be stranger than a theft.
Rating coming soonRegan Madison is a hotel heiress who helps run a charitable foundation, and an anonymous email arrives with a photograph of a crime scene attached. The detective assigned to look after her, Alec Buchanan, would rather be getting on with his career and is not pleased about the assignment. The list the photograph belongs to keeps growing.
Rating coming soonKate Donovan is a television producer whose career has stalled, and she is given an interview with the only survivor of a massacre that has shocked the world. The interview is the chance of a lifetime and it puts her in the middle of an investigation that the authorities would rather she did not pursue. She is also brought face to face with a man from her past.
Rating coming soonBritt Shelley wakes up in a hotel bed next to a detective called Jay Burgess with no memory of the night, and then discovers that he is dead beside her. Five years earlier Jay was one of four officials celebrated for leading people out of a fire that destroyed the Charleston police headquarters. The firefighter who investigated that blaze has never accepted the story.
Rating coming soonJordan Buchanan goes to a wedding that joins two family dynasties, and a dishevelled professor turns up to warn that the MacKennas and the Buchanans have been feuding since Scotland and that a treasure was stolen. The wedding party treats him as a nuisance until somebody takes him seriously enough to hurt him. Jordan starts looking into the story.
Rating coming soonNicolas Creel runs the largest defence contractor in the world, and he decides that his business would do better with a war. He hires a man whose profession is the management of public perception and gives him an unlimited budget. Against them are a woman journalist who has just been handed the interview of her career and a man with no first name.
Rating coming soonIrene Stenson left the small northern California town of Dunsley seventeen years ago, on the night she found her parents dead in the kitchen and the deaths were ruled a murder and a suicide. A cryptic message from the friend she left behind brings her back, and the friend is dead before Irene can see her. The town has not changed its mind about anything.
Rating coming soonBailey Wingate's husband dies and leaves her in control of the family fortune, to the fury of his adult children. A year later she is flying from Seattle to Denver in a small plane when the engine fails, and her pilot brings it down in the Idaho wilderness. Getting out alive is the first problem, and the reason for the crash is the second.
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