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 10 of the shelf.
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Rating coming soonA wealthy American financier disappears while hunting treasure in an antique airship, and the blimp drifts out of Cuban waters towards Florida carrying the bodies of Soviet cosmonauts. Dirk Pitt uncovers a covert group of American industrialists who have put a colony on the moon and will defend it at any cost.
Rating coming soonJace Wilson, a teenager from Indiana, witnesses a murder, and his parents cannot put him into witness protection because the killers have contacts inside law enforcement. They hand him to a couple who run a wilderness survival programme for troubled children in Montana, and the two murderers follow him there. The boy is given a new name for the summer, and the men who want him dead work it out.
Rating coming soonOliver Stone is an ex-Green Beret and a former CIA-trained assassin who leads the Camel Club, a small group of civilian misfits in Washington. In the third book about the club, the group is drawn into a case that touches intelligence work, casinos and a murder the authorities have their own reasons for leaving unsolved.
Rating coming soonTwenty-five years ago Maggie Holt and her parents moved into Baneberry Hall, a Victorian estate in the Vermont woods, and fled it three weeks later in the middle of the night. Her father wrote a memoir about the haunting that made the family famous, and Maggie, who was too young to remember, has never believed it.
Rating coming soonAnne and Marco Conti appear to have everything: a loving marriage, a good home and a baby daughter called Cora. One night, while they are at a dinner party at the neighbours' house, a crime is committed, and suspicion falls immediately on the parents, although the truth is more tangled than that.
Rating coming soonBank robbers in Washington are laying out precise demands when they enter a building and then killing the employees and their families when the instructions are not followed exactly. Detective Alex Cross takes the case and becomes convinced that a single criminal who calls himself the Mastermind is behind all of it.
Rating coming soonDetective Inspector Daniel Clement has left the homicide squad in Perth and come back to Broome, the town where he grew up, so that he can be near his daughter after separating from his wife. His work is petty theft and drunken violence until a body is found at Jasper's Creek with an axe wound to the head.
Rating coming soonIn the twenty-fourth century telepathy is an established profession and the police number Espers among their officers, which is supposed to make murder impossible. Ben Reich runs a business empire that reaches across the solar system and has decided that a rival must die. Everything then depends on whether a determined man can plan a killing that no mind in the room will read.
Rating coming soonJack and Grace have the marriage everyone admires: he is wealthy and handsome, she is charming and elegant, and they are never apart. Grace never answers the telephone, she does not meet friends for coffee, she does not work, and there are bars on one of the bedroom windows. Their neighbours like them, and nobody has asked what happens once the dinner party ends.
Rating coming soonLydia Smith is a licensed para-archaeologist in the Dead City of Old Cadence, working part-time in a cheap museum of ancient horrors after an incident in an alien tomb left her career in trouble. Then she finds a body in one of the sarcophagus exhibits, and her new client turns out to be one of the most dangerous men in the city.
Rating coming soonThe teenage son of the professional golfer Linda Coldren and her husband Jack is kidnapped in the middle of the U.S. Open, while Jack is unexpectedly leading the tournament. Sports agent Myron Bolitar is asked to get the boy back, and his search takes him through the houses of the Philadelphia suburbs and back to an Open that Jack Coldren should have won twenty-three years earlier.
Rating coming soonNew York in 2001, in the months before the attack on the World Trade Center. Maxine Tarnow, a former fraud examiner, is asked to look into the finances of a computer security company run by a billionaire, and finds figures that do not add up, payments going to a website that no longer exists, and men following her who do not want to be noticed.
Rating coming soonA doctor tells Lord Peter Wimsey about an elderly patient of his, a woman dying of cancer who died suddenly and without any immediate cause, and who had refused to make a will because she believed her great-niece would inherit everything anyway. There is no evidence that a crime took place, but Wimsey cannot leave the story alone.
Rating coming soonAt a shooting lodge in Yorkshire, the fiance of Lord Peter Wimsey's sister is found shot dead outside the conservatory at three in the morning, and the family's elder brother, the Duke of Denver, is found kneeling beside the body. The bullet came from the Duke's revolver and he had quarrelled with the dead man that evening, and he refuses to explain himself.
Rating coming soonLord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane marry and go straight from the wedding reception to Talboys, a farmhouse in Hertfordshire that he has bought her as a present. The plan is to spend the honeymoon away from his habit of solving crimes and hers of writing about them, and the plan survives until the former owner of the house is found dead at the bottom of the cellar steps.
Rating coming soonMarion Sharpe and her mother live quietly at The Franchise, a shabby country house, until a young woman named Betty Kane accuses them of having kidnapped her and held her in an attic room. The story sounds absurd to the local solicitor who takes the case, and then the girl describes the house, the room, the kitchen and the old trunks in a way that cannot easily be dismissed.
Rating coming soonThe snow is thick, the telephone line is down and nobody is leaving Warbeck Hall, where a party has gathered for Christmas: a socialist cabinet minister, a historian from central Europe, a butler and his daughter, and an elderly viscount who is gravely ill. As the bells ring in Christmas Day, one of them is murdered inside the house, and the household is cut off from every kind of help.
Rating coming soonClara Morrow's first solo exhibition has opened in Montreal, and the party afterwards is held at her home in the village of Three Pines. The next morning a woman in evening dress is found dead in the garden, and nobody can say whether she was at either celebration. Chief Inspector Armand Gamache and his team take the case.
Rating coming soonErica Falck returns to her home town of Fjällbacka after her parents die, and finds her childhood friend Alex dead in a bath with her wrists cut, in a house where the heating had failed. The police treat it as a suicide. Erica, who wants to write about Alex, is not so sure, and neither is the detective investigating it.
Rating coming soonHarry Arno is a Miami bookmaker who has been skimming from his boss for years and wants to retire to Italy with his girlfriend. The Justice Department decides to leak word of the skimming in the hope that Harry will ask for witness protection, and Harry, who knows what is coming, leaves the country instead. A U.S. Marshal in a cowboy hat is sent after him.
Rating coming soonPeter Grant is a police constable and an apprentice magician, working out of a unit in London that deals with the cases nobody else can put a name to. A road accident in Crawley turns up human blood in the car, and enquiries from that lead to a shallow grave, another body and a suspect with an education in magic that he was never supposed to have.
Rating coming soonIn 2018, Sergeant Sue Smith of the Edinburgh police is called out to a robbery at a company that has just been floated on the London stock exchange. The crime took place inside a multiplayer online world, the value stolen was in virtual property, and the suspects appear to include the avatars of the players who were in the room at the time.
Rating coming soonGriffin Bing finds a vintage 1920 Babe Ruth baseball card in an abandoned house and takes it to a dealer, who buys it from him for a hundred and twenty dollars and sells it on for a great deal more. Griffin's response is not to complain to anyone but to assemble a team and get the card back out of the dealer's shop.
Rating coming soonLarry, Daisy, Fatty, Pip, Bets and the dog Buster are at a gymkhana when a house nearby is robbed, and the burglar leaves no sign of how he got in or out. What he does leave is a set of enormous footprints, a glove print, a curious criss-cross mark on the ground and two torn scraps of paper, and the Five Find-Outers have holidays and a mystery at the same time.
Rating coming soonJack Reacher is passing through a small town in Wisconsin when he sees a class ring in a pawn shop window: West Point, 2005, small enough to have belonged to a woman, with initials engraved inside. He decides to find out who she is, why she gave up something that took four years to earn, and to give it back to her.
Rating coming soonVirgil Flowers of the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension is taking part in a fishing tournament in the north of the state when he gets a call from Lucas Davenport, who wants him to look into a murder at a nearby resort. A woman has been shot while she was out in a kayak on the lake, and the guests at the resort are all women who came there to be left alone.
Rating coming soonAngela Wong disappeared when she was sixteen, and nobody suspected that her best friend Georgina Shaw knew anything about it. Fourteen years later Angela's remains are found in woods near Georgina's childhood home, and the detective on the case, an old friend of both women, learns who killed her and what Georgina's part in it was.
Rating coming soonChief Inspector Armand Gamache of the Surete du Quebec and his wife return each July to a remote and luxurious manor house in the wilderness to spend their wedding anniversary, and this year they are there at the same time as the Finney family. Before the visit is over, one of the Finneys is dead and Gamache is working through a holiday.
Rating coming soonNobody is admitted to the monastery of Saint-Gilbert-Entre-les-Loups, hidden in the Quebec wilderness, where two dozen cloistered monks grow vegetables, keep chickens and make chocolate. They have taken a vow of silence, and they have become famous anyway for the chant they sing, until their choir director is murdered and the door is opened to the police.
Rating coming soonTom Dunleavy is a lawyer in Montauk whose practice is so small that real estate closings barely cover his expenses. Then he is hired to defend a local man accused of a triple murder that has outraged the wealthy summer community, and he finds himself with the case of his life and a client who is either the perfect fall guy or the man who did it.
Rating coming soonA prominent businessman is found in his Park Avenue apartment, tied to the bed and strangled with cords of black velvet, and the manner of his death makes the case a talking point for the whole city. Lieutenant Eve Dallas is less interested in the scandal than in the fact that the physical evidence does not fit the story anybody is telling her.
Rating coming soonWalter Pettibone arrives home to a surprise party and a house full of friends, and a woman with red hair and green eyes hands him a glass of champagne. One sip and he is dead. Nobody at the party knows who she is, but Lieutenant Eve Dallas does: Julie Dockport, whose imprisonment was Dallas's doing nearly ten years earlier.
Rating coming soonDr Temperance Brennan is called to the Charlotte cold case unit by a homicide detective who works a long way from his own jurisdiction, and the reason is that two child murders thousands of miles apart appear to have been committed by the same person. The suspect is a woman Brennan tried and failed to catch years earlier in Canada.
Rating coming soonIn 1869 three people are killed in a remote community in the Scottish Highlands, and a young man called Roderick Macrae is arrested for the murders. The memoir he writes in prison makes it clear that he did it, and the courts then have to decide why: what kind of man kills his neighbours, and whether the law should hold him responsible.
Rating coming soonLeda Foley runs a small travel agency in Seattle and has an inconsistent gift for knowing things she should not. When she rebooks a police detective's flight on impulse, she changes both their lives. He watches his original plane blow up from the airport terminal, and he starts to wonder whether her abilities could help him with a case he cannot close.
Rating coming soonAnthony Cade is a cheerful drifter who takes a messenger job from a friend in Africa, and it looks like easy money: deliver the memoirs of a dead European count to a publisher in London. The manuscript turns out to be worth killing for, because it contains letters that bear on the restoration of a monarchy, and other people want it very badly.
Rating coming soonAnne Beddingfeld has just been left on her own and is looking for some adventure when a man falls onto the live rail at a London tube station and dies. A doctor who examines the body drops a piece of paper as he leaves, and Anne picks it up. The next day a woman is found strangled, and a fortune in diamonds has gone missing.
Rating coming soonAn architect called Thipps comes home to his flat and finds a dead body in his bath, wearing nothing except a pair of pince-nez. The same night, a financier named Sir Reuben Levy disappears from his bedroom without explanation. Lord Peter Wimsey, who has taken up criminal investigation as a hobby, decides to look into the first of these privately.
Rating coming soonTwo United States Marshals travel to an island in Boston Harbor where a hospital for the criminally insane occupies an old fortress, because a patient has disappeared from inside it. The patient is a woman who drowned her children, the island is cut off by weather, and the longer the two men stay the less the staff's account of anything holds together.
Rating coming soonChyna Shepherd is twenty-six and spending a weekend with the family of her best friend in the Napa Valley when a man lets himself into the house at midnight. He kills everyone in it, and Chyna, who has spent her life learning to survive people, escapes, and then learns the identity of the next person he means to kill.
Rating coming soonMitchell Rafferty is a landscape gardener planting beds for a client when a stranger telephones to say that his wife has been taken and that he can have her back for two million dollars. Mitch has no idea how to raise that kind of money, and the caller does not care, because he is confident that a man who loves his wife enough will find a way.
Rating coming soonEleven-year-old Mark Sway and his younger brother are smoking a forbidden cigarette in a vacant lot near Memphis when a car pulls up and a lawyer parks beside them. What happens in the next hour leaves Mark knowing where a murdered senator's body is, and makes him the person both the federal prosecutors and the Mafia most want to find.
Rating coming soonMichael Brock is a young antitrust lawyer at a large Washington firm, billing his hours and one step away from partnership, and he has lost sight of why he does any of it. Then a homeless man takes hostages in the firm's offices, and when the siege ends Brock begins to ask what the man was actually angry about.
Rating coming soonKorede is a nurse in Lagos, sensible and used to cleaning up after her younger sister Ayoola, who is the favourite child, the beautiful one, and in the habit of killing her boyfriends. Three of them have died now, and it is Korede who arrives with the bleach and the large car boot while Ayoola goes about her ordinary business.
Rating coming soonJack Ryan, now deputy director of central intelligence, is working on a plan that might finally settle the long conflict in the Middle East. A group of terrorists has one card left to play, and what they do with it is designed to make two superpowers believe the worst of each other at the worst possible moment, with a president who cannot cope with the crisis.
Rating coming soonJohn Kelly is a former Navy SEAL living quietly near Chesapeake Bay, still grieving his wife half a year after her death, when he becomes involved with a woman whose past catches up with her. The men who take her away are drug dealers, and Kelly, who has every skill the Navy taught him and no reason left to hold back, decides to go after them.
Rating coming soonDolores Claiborne is a widow of sixty-five living on a small island in Maine, and the police suspect her of killing the wealthy elderly woman she worked for. Her answer is to sit down with the constable and a stenographer and tell the whole story, starting with her marriage, her husband's death thirty years earlier and the years she spent looking after Vera Donovan.
Rating coming soonMorris Bellamy is a devoted reader of the novelist John Rothstein, who created a famous character and then stopped publishing, and Morris is angry about what happened to the character and about the silence. He and two accomplices break into the writer's house, and what they take includes a set of notebooks that have never been seen and are worth far more than the cash.
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