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 12 of the shelf.
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Rating coming soonAdam Scott listens to the reading of his father's will knowing there can be nothing in it worth having, because the Colonel had nothing to leave except a letter he had never opened. Against his mother's wishes, Adam opens it, and it takes him to a safe deposit box in Switzerland. What he finds there is worth killing for.
Rating coming soonIn 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.
Rating coming soonA captain in the United States Army, a graduate of West Point and the daughter of a famous general, is found dead on the firing range at the base where she grew up. The investigation has to be handled carefully, and the man given it is a specialist in difficult cases.
Rating coming soonJames Adams is fourteen and works for a secret organisation that uses children as agents, because nobody suspects a child of being a spy. His next assignment is to get inside an animal liberation group that has moved from protest to terrorism. The organisation he works for exists because adults are watched and children are not.
Rating coming soonClyde Griffiths is brought up by poor and devoutly religious parents, and he spends his youth taking whatever work will help to support them. What he wants is a life like the one he can see other people having, and the way he goes after it is what destroys him. The novel is based on a real murder and on the trial that followed it.
Rating coming soonSophronia would rather take clocks apart and climb trees than learn how to behave in company, and her mother is desperate for her to become a proper lady. So she is sent to a finishing academy for young ladies of quality, which turns out to be something else. The lessons are not the ones her mother had in mind.
Rating coming soonThe 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.
Rating coming soonThe Night Watch has two problems: murders that appear to have been committed by a golem, and the poisoning of the Patrician, which nobody can work out how anyone managed. Several of the city's golems have gone missing as well, and none of it fits together at all. Every answer the Watch finds leads to another question.
Rating coming soonAgnes Nitt leaves Lancre to look for a career at the Opera House in Ankh-Morpork, and the witches follow when Granny Weatherwax realises that Nanny Ogg has not been paid for her very popular cookbook. What they walk into is a story rather like The Phantom of the Opera, and the witches are not sentimental about opera.
Rating coming soonCharlie Decker is a high school senior in a small Maine town who has been suspended once already and is called in to account for it. The meeting ends with him expelled and with a decision he makes in the corridor afterwards. By mid-morning he is back in his classroom with a pistol and a room full of students who cannot leave, while the police and the press gather outside.
Rating coming soonA killing staged as a message tells David Webb, who has spent years living as Jason Bourne, that his oldest enemy has come back. Carlos the Jackal is old, his reputation is fading, and before he dies he intends to do two things: kill Bourne and destroy the facility where he was trained. Bourne sends his family into hiding and starts hunting first.
Rating coming soonI. M. Fletcher is a journalist with two ex-wives and an alimony problem, working undercover on a beach for a story about where a drug dealer's supply comes from. While he is there a wealthy businessman mistakes him for a vagrant and asks him to murder him for money. Fletch starts looking into whether any of it is true.
Rating coming soonGreat Kesh has gone to war against the western lands of the Kingdom of the Isles, palace coups have been attempted in Roldem and Rillanon, and the intelligence network that used to hold the west together has been taken apart piece by piece. Pug and the Conclave of Shadows suspect that somebody else is standing behind all of it.
Rating coming soonA husband and wife whose marriage is in trouble are stranded on a road in the middle of nowhere in Alabama, and they take shelter in what looks like a fine Victorian house. Inside, they find that it is occupied, and that whoever is there means the two of them to face something about themselves before either of them leaves.
Rating coming soonCason Statler comes back to his home town of Camp Rapture, Texas, after being run out of Houston by a scandalous affair, and takes a reporting job at the local paper because there is nothing else to do. In the office he finds his predecessor's notes on an old murder case and decides that working it will keep him out of trouble.
Rating coming soonLaura Evans has settled into running the cafe in the General Store of the Vermont town of Silver Springs, a long way from the high-pressure restaurant career she left in Boston. When an apple farmer called Vernon Reed is found murdered in his garage with a cider-making hammer, the weapon turns up carrying the fingerprints of a young man she has befriended.
Rating coming soonFelix Brewer meets Bernadette Gottschalk at a Valentine's dance in 1959 and charms her with promises he partly keeps, and the money from his businesses, which are not all legal, keeps her and their three daughters in luxury. On the Fourth of July in 1976, newly convicted and facing prison, he disappears. Ten years later to the day, his mistress disappears too.
Rating coming soonEddie 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.
Rating coming soonTwelve years ago Chester Morton walked out of his home town in upstate New York and was never heard from again. His mother has kept the search alive ever since, paying for a billboard overlooking the local college and hounding every agency that will listen, at real cost to her family. Now Chester's body has been found, hanging from that billboard.
Rating coming soonAn 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.
Rating coming soonThe second Mrs Botesdale is found dead at the foot of the basement stairs by the maid who has served the family for years, on the day she returns from visiting her master, a certified lunatic confined in a mental home. The death appears to have been an accident, but she was alone when she fell, so an inquest is inevitable and Inspector Arnold is brought in.
Rating coming soonCammie Morgan attends the Gallagher Academy for Exceptional Young Women, which calls itself a school for geniuses and is in fact a school for spies: the physical education is advanced martial arts, the science lessons cover chemical warfare and the computer classes involve breaking CIA codes. Cammie speaks fourteen languages and can kill a man seven different ways. Then she meets an ordinary boy.
Rating coming soonHunting Adeline is the second half of a two-book story told from two points of view. One of them belongs to a young woman who has been taken and is being held by people she describes as monsters in the shape of men, and who is surviving it and trying to get back to the man who hunts for her. The other voice belongs to that man, who is looking for her.
Rating coming soonDetective Sam Vernelli never solved the murder of his fiancee more than a decade ago, and it is the case that has stayed with him ever since. Now her determined younger sister, Claire Fontaine, is being threatened in ways that are frightening and familiar, and Sam is not prepared to let her face whoever it is on her own.
Rating coming soonA newcomer to Sycamore, Arizona, is out hiking on a scorching afternoon when she comes across what appear to be human remains set into the wall of a dry desert ravine. The long-time residents of the town believe the bones belong to Jess Winters, a teenage girl who vanished eighteen years earlier, and whose disappearance has haunted the place ever since.
Rating coming soonYuri Danko, an officer in the medical division of Russia's security service, is shot dead before he can say more than that what is being planned is insane. Covert-One operative Jon Smith and the CIA agent Randi Russell have his classified papers, and what they find in them is a conspiracy to release a plague. A Serbian terrorist has already been sent out of Russia with vials of bacteria.
Rating coming soonDirk Pitt is investigating a toxic outbreak in the Caribbean Sea that may eventually reach the United States, and in the course of it he becomes involved in something more dangerous still: a struggle for control of Cuba after Castro. His children are in the region too, following an Aztec stone that may show where a vast treasure is hidden.
Rating coming soonIn a suburb of Stockholm a family has been murdered, and the only person who can describe what happened is the boy who survived it, who is in a state of shock and cannot speak. The detective leading the investigation asks a doctor who practises hypnotism to draw the details out of the boy, although the doctor swore he would never do that work again.
Rating coming soonAt a quarter past two in the morning the telephone rings beside Myron Bolitar's bed, and the frightened teenager at the other end is Aimee Biel, calling the one adult who promised to help her if she ever got into trouble. He gets up and drives into Manhattan to collect her from a cold street corner, and on the way home she asks him for one more thing.
Rating coming soonThe attorney Barbara Holloway has no strong evidence to work with, only her legal instincts, and if those instincts cannot lead her to the truth then her client will die. Meanwhile, in Eugene, Oregon, a state senator is doing everything he can to keep buried a story that goes back twenty-two years to the death of a young woman at the university.
Rating coming soonDanny Torrance was the boy in the Overlook Hotel, and he has spent the years since living with what happened there. As an adult he takes up his father's drinking and his father's temper, and drifts across the country until he reaches a small town in New Hampshire and decides to stop. There he works at a hospice, where the residents give him a new name.
Rating coming soonPoirot is flying back to England on the midday service from Paris to Croydon and sleeps through most of it, and the eleven other passengers in the rear compartment include a mystery writer, two French archaeologists, a dentist, a doctor, a moneylender, a businessman and three women. Close to landing a wasp is seen in the cabin, and then the moneylender is found dead.
Rating coming soonRichard Abernethie dies at home and his family gathers at Enderby Hall for the reading of the will, where his sister Cora says out loud that he was murdered. The next day Cora is found dead as well, and Poirot is asked to work out whether she was right and, if she was, which of the family she was talking about.
Rating coming soonAudrina Adare believes she is seven years old when the novel begins, and her memory is not to be trusted. She lives at Whitefern, a Victorian-era mansion near the river, with her father, her mother, her aunt and her cousin, and her father is convinced that she walks in her own time. Before she was born, her elder sister, who had the same name, was murdered in the woods.
Rating coming soonA body is found on the hearth rug in the library at Gossington Hall, the home of Colonel Arthur and Dolly Bantry. The woman is heavily made up, with platinum-blonde hair and a silver-spangled dress, and nobody in the house has any idea at all who she is. The colonel calls the police, and Dolly calls her friend Miss Marple.
Rating coming soonCaroline Crale died in prison sixteen years ago after being convicted of poisoning her husband, the painter Amyas Crale. In her last letter from prison she said she was innocent. Her daughter Carla Lemarchant brings that letter to Poirot and asks him to look into the case, because the people who were at the house that day are still alive.
Rating coming soonOdd Thomas is twenty years old and works as a short-order cook in a small desert town, and he can see the dead. They come to him when they want something, and they cannot speak, so what he has to do is work out what it is they are after. The novel opens with the ghost of a young girl leading him to the man who killed her.
Rating coming soonPoirot is taking a quiet holiday at a secluded hotel in Devon, where he notices a former actress called Arlena Marshall flirting with a married man. She is attractive and she is not well liked by the other guests. One morning she goes out to a cove for a private meeting, and later she is found there, strangled.
Rating coming soonMiss Marple's nephew has paid for her to recuperate at a resort on a Caribbean island after an illness. There she listens, without much interest, to an elderly major's long stories, until he begins describing a man who murdered a series of wives and got away with it. He takes out a photograph to show her, looks over her shoulder, and changes the subject.
Rating coming soonA murder is announced in advance in the personal column of a local newspaper, with a time and an address, and the people named in the advertisement treat it as a joke until the evening in question arrives and something happens that is no joke at all. Miss Marple, staying nearby for treatment, works the case with the county police.
Rating coming soonSam Wood is a police officer in the town of Wells, South Carolina, and one night he finds a body lying in the middle of the highway: the conductor who was organising the town's music festival. Sent to the railway station, he arrests a black man waiting for a train, and the man turns out to be Virgil Tibbs, a homicide investigator from another city.
Rating coming soonAstrid Magnussen is twelve and lives in Los Angeles with her mother, Ingrid, a poet who is brilliant and self-centred. When Ingrid's boyfriend ends the relationship, she poisons him with oleander sap and is sent to prison for life, and Astrid is moved from one foster home to another for the rest of her childhood. The novel follows what the years do to her.
Rating coming soonMark 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.
Rating coming soonRabbi David Small leads a Conservative Jewish congregation in the Massachusetts town of Barnard's Crossing, and he is not a conventional rabbi: his training in the Talmud gives him a habit of seeing the third side of any problem. When the body of a young woman is found on the temple grounds, the congregation and the investigation become tangled together.
Rating coming soonFour women in San Francisco put their skills together to work the city's hardest murder cases: Lindsay Boxer, a homicide inspector with the police department; Claire Washburn, a medical examiner; Jill Bernhardt, an assistant district attorney; and Cindy Thomas, a reporter newly assigned to the crime desk of the Chronicle. Their first case involves a bride and groom killed on their wedding night.
Rating coming soonThe protagonist of this novel is a professional hitman who learned his trade from his foster father, Eddie the Butcher, and who followed both of the older man's trades until Eddie died. After killing a union official and a United States senator, he goes to Las Vegas to collect his fee, and finds that a murder contract has been taken out on him instead.
Rating coming soonFred Fitch is a credulous man: wherever there is a scam, he finds it or it finds him, from his rooming house to the people collecting in the street outside. He has a standing file with the Bunco Squad. Then a lawyer tells him an uncle he has never heard of has left him three hundred thousand dollars, and with it come a devoted friend of the deceased and a crowd of claimants.
Rating coming soonJohn Berendt's Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, subtitled A Savannah Story, was published in 1994. The book follows the shooting of a young man at the home of the antiques dealer Jim Williams, the trials that came afterwards, and the wide cast of Savannah characters who surrounded both men.
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