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 11 of the shelf.
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It 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.
Anne 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.
In 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.
In a park in London a policeman falls into conversation with a man who says he is an anarchist, and talks his way into the strange council that runs the movement's affairs in Europe. He is given the name of a day of the week and the position that goes with it, and he has not met the man at the head of them all.
Jack 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.
St 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.
A large yellow diamond cut from a Hindu idol comes to England and is given to Rachel Verinder as a present on her eighteenth birthday. Within hours it is gone from her room, and nobody in the house can account for what they were doing at the time. The story is told through the statements and letters of the people involved, including the detective brought in to get it back.
Mary 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.
The magistrate of a village is shot in his study at the vicarage, and everybody who was in the house at the time seems to have a reason for wanting him dead. Nobody heard the shot, and the person who confesses to the killing is not the only one who could have done it.
Mary 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.
Hercule 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.
Poirot receives a letter from a South American millionaire living in northern France, asking him to come at once because his life is in danger. By the time Poirot and Hastings arrive at Merlinville-sur-Mer, Paul Renauld has been stabbed and his body left in a newly dug grave on the golf course beside his house. The local police already have a suspect.
Chief 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.
Captain Hastings is invalided home from the war and invited to stay at Styles, the Essex house where a friend's family is at quiet war over the widowed aunt's recent marriage to a man twenty years younger than she is. Then the aunt dies in the night and the cause turns out to be poison. Hastings, who knows a Belgian refugee detective from before, brings him in. It is the first case for Hercule Poirot.
An 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.
Hercule 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.
A thatched cottage in Mr Hick's garden burns down, and the children who meet at the scene decide to work out who set the fire. They are Larry and Daisy Daykin, Pip and Bets Hilton, and a newcomer named Frederick Algernon Trotteville, soon nicknamed Fatty from his initials, and they call themselves the Five Find-Outers and Dog. Their suspects include an old tramp, a dismissed servant, a hostile colleague and the cook.
Larry, 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.
Solaria 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.
An ancient Phoenician statue called the Navigator was stolen from the museum in Baghdad years ago, and there are men who will do anything to get hold of it. Their first victim is a corrupt antiquities dealer, and their second very nearly becomes a United Nations investigator, who is saved from drowning by Kurt Austin and Joe Zavala. Austin wants to know what makes the statue so valuable.
Twenty years after a series of killings stopped in Washington, D.C., a body is found in a community garden in a way that suggests the murderer has come back. A homicide detective and two former police officers, one of them retired from the original case, find themselves working the same streets and the same failure all over again.
When the entire Christopher Columbus exhibit disappears from the local museum, a fourth-grade sleuth-in-training named Alec Flint takes the case. He is joined by Gina, a new classmate who wants help with a disappearance of her own, since one of the teachers at their school has gone missing and nobody else seems to be looking for her.
When 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.
Mma Precious Ramotswe sells the family property after her father's death, leaves the town where she grew up and opens a detective agency in Gaborone, the capital of Botswana. It is the first agency of its kind in the country, its office is in a small storefront, and its cases are the problems that people bring to a woman they have decided to trust.
In November 1963 a German freelance crime reporter follows an ambulance to the flat of a Holocaust survivor who has killed himself, and is given the dead man's diary. What the diary describes is a former SS commander, and the search for him has to be made inside a secret organisation. That organisation exists to protect men like the one he is hunting.
Patrick Lanigan, a junior partner in a law firm in Biloxi, Mississippi, learns that his firm's client and its senior partners are defrauding the government over navy shipbuilding contracts. He fakes his own death, takes ninety million dollars of the firm's hidden money and disappears to South America, and four years later he is found.
Two Supreme Court justices are murdered in a single week, one a liberal killed at home and one a Republican appointee shot inside a Washington cinema, and nobody can explain why anyone would want both of them dead. A Tulane law student writes a brief setting out her own theory of the case, and the people who read it begin to die.
Lucinda Bromley is a botanist whose talent is an unusual one: she can detect almost any poison, which is useful to the investigators who consult her and ruinous to her reputation. When a lord is murdered with a poison made from a rare fern stolen from her own conservatory, she needs help to keep her name out of it.
Flynne Fisher lives in a small town in a near-future America where steady work is scarce and the drug trade is the largest employer. Her brother Burton, a veteran with an implant and a limp, is offered security work that he thinks takes place inside a simulation, and when he cannot take the shift Flynne sits in for him. What she sees through the headset is a murder in a city that is not hers.
Jack McEvoy is a crime reporter in Denver whose twin brother, a homicide detective, has died in what the authorities call a suicide. Unable to believe it, Jack re-examines the case his brother was working on and concludes that the death was staged, and his search leads him towards a killer who preys on detectives.
Frank Chambers drifts into a roadside tavern in California, takes a job from the man who owns it and falls for the owner's young wife, Cora. The two of them want the same thing and are willing to do the same thing to get it, and the plan they settle on is simpler than living with the alternative. The story is told by Frank.
Tristan 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.
Mark Ablett is holding a house party at his English country house when his long-lost brother Robert, the black sheep of the family, arrives from Australia. Shortly afterwards Robert is found dead, shot through the head, and Mark has disappeared. Tony Gillingham, a stranger who has come to call on his friend Bill Beverley, decides to investigate.
A 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.
Holmes 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.
Carruthers 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.
Winifred Allen is in need of a holiday. Her job has drained her, her brother has died and a long marriage has ended, so when her three closest friends propose their annual trip, she agrees to a hiking and white-water rafting expedition in the Maine wilderness, despite misgivings she does not voice. It is the most demanding trip the four of them have ever attempted together.
Four months after the Garden was broken up, the FBI agents who freed the women held there are still dealing with the aftermath. The thaw is coming, and it brings a guarantee: somewhere in the country a young woman will be found dead in a church, her throat cut and her body surrounded by flowers. The sister of one of the killer's earlier victims has been moving from town to town with her mother ever since.
Eddie Gato Wolfe is a young and impatient member of a Texas family that has run guns for generations. Unfulfilled by his minor place in the business, he crosses into Mexico to work in security for a drug cartel run by the ruthless La Navaja, and falls for a woman called Miranda. By the time he learns who she belongs to, it is too late.
A widow is suing a tobacco company over the death of her husband from lung cancer, and the trial is being heard in a Mississippi town chosen because its juries are thought to be sympathetic. Before the jury has even been sworn in, both sides are spending enormous sums trying to control who ends up on it, and one of the jurors is not who he says he is.
Tommy Beresford and Prudence Cowley, known to everyone as Tuppence, are old friends, demobilised after the war and short of money. They decide to advertise themselves as Young Adventurers, willing to do anything and go anywhere, and their first client makes Tuppence an offer that is far more generous than the work. The name they overheard in passing, Jane Finn, turns out to matter.
Adolf Verloc runs a shop in Soho that sells photographs and other things the neighbours do not mention, and he is paid by an unnamed foreign embassy for information. His employers want a bombing in London that will be blamed on the anarchists, and they want it soon. Verloc is not a man who has ever been asked to do anything difficult.
Richard Papen arrives at a small, expensive college in Vermont and talks his way into the Classics class: six students taught by one professor and almost nobody else. It is a closed world of Greek texts, and belonging to it costs a great deal. Richard tells the story years later and starts with the death, so the book is less about what happened than about how the group talked itself into it.
Anthony 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.
It 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.
At a party at Blackheath, the young woman of the house is shot dead as the fireworks go off. The day then repeats, and will keep repeating until Aiden Bishop, one of the guests, names her killer. Each time the morning comes round again he wakes inside a different person at the party, so every clue has to be gathered from inside somebody else's life.
A 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.
Clarice Starling is still an FBI trainee when the head of the bureau's profiling unit sends her to a hospital for the criminally insane with a questionnaire. Her assignment is to interview Dr Hannibal Lecter, a psychiatrist who ate several of his patients. The bureau wants his help with a killer called Buffalo Bill, and Lecter is willing to talk, but only in exchange for something.
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