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 13 of the shelf.
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Rating coming soonIan Fleming's For Your Eyes Only, published in 1960, is a book of five short stories and the eighth to feature the British Secret Service agent James Bond. It was a change of approach, because until then Fleming had written Bond at full novel length, and three of the stories began as ideas for a television series that was never made.
Rating coming soonPoirot's Early Cases gathers short detective stories by Agatha Christie that follow Hercule Poirot through the years before he was known beyond the cases he was working on. The stories had all appeared in magazines between 1923 and 1935, and the collection itself was first published in Britain in September 1974, with an American edition following later the same year under a slightly different title.
Rating coming soonIn Cold Blood is Truman Capote's account of a quadruple murder in Kansas. He read about the deaths of the Clutter family in the farming town of Holcomb before the men responsible had been caught, travelled there to report on the case with his friend Harper Lee, and spent six years turning their interviews and notes into a book.
Rating coming soonThe Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes gathers the last twelve of the fifty-six Sherlock Holmes stories that Arthur Conan Doyle wrote, which had all run in the Strand Magazine across the years from October 1921 to April 1927. The collection itself was issued in book form in June 1927 in Britain and the United States, in editions that differ over how the title should be punctuated, and it closes the Holmes canon.
Rating coming soonThe Devil in the White City sets two stories side by side in Chicago at the time of the 1893 world's fair: that of Daniel Burnham, the architect who had to get the fair built, and that of H. H. Holmes, whose crimes have led him to be described as the first American serial killer.
Rating coming soonI'll Be Gone in the Dark is Michelle McNamara's true crime book about the long investigation of the man she named the Golden State Killer, and about her own years of work on the case. It was published in 2018, two years after her death, and its title comes from a threat spoken to one of his victims.
Rating coming soonMargery Allingham's Dancers in Mourning, a crime novel first published in 1937, is the eighth to feature her detective Albert Campion. Campion is asked to find out who is playing practical jokes on a musical-comedy star, and what looks like a nuisance turns into something considerably darker; the book has also been published in America under the title Who Killed Chloe?.
Rating coming soonDeathwatch is a novel by the American writer Robb White, published in 1972 and awarded the Edgar for best juvenile mystery the following year. A wealthy hunter hires a college student as a guide in the Mojave Desert, and after a shooting the two of them become a hunter and a hunted man.
Rating coming soonAgatha Christie's The Clocks came out in Britain in November 1963 and in the United States the following year. It features Hercule Poirot, and it is unusual among the Poirot books in that its detective never leaves his chair to visit a crime scene or question a witness; the puzzle turns on the times shown by a set of clocks found in the room with the body.
Rating coming soonAgatha Christie's Third Girl, first published in November 1966, brings back Hercule Poirot and the novelist Ariadne Oliver. It begins with a young woman who comes to Poirot to ask for help and then runs away because she thinks he is too old to be worth troubling, and it is among the later novels in which the detective works his way towards a crime rather than away from one.
Rating coming soonCards on the Table is a mystery novel by Agatha Christie, published in Britain in November 1936 and in the United States the following year. Four detectives and four suspects play bridge with a host who is then found murdered, and the solution depends on what the behaviour of the players reveals about them.
Rating coming soonLord Edgware Dies is a mystery novel by Agatha Christie, first published in Britain in September 1933 and in the United States later the same year as Thirteen at Dinner. Hercule Poirot, Hastings and Chief Inspector Japp are all in it, and it turns on a request for help that comes a day too late.
Rating coming soonMurder in Mesopotamia is a mystery novel by Agatha Christie, first published in Britain in July 1936 and in the United States later the same year. It sets Hercule Poirot down among the archaeologists at an excavation in Iraq, a world Christie knew at first hand. Much of it is told by a nurse hired to look after the archaeologist's wife, which gives the reader an outsider's view of the whole expedition.
Rating coming soonDumb Witness is a mystery novel by Agatha Christie, first published in Britain in July 1937 and in the United States later that year under the title Poirot Loses a Client. It features Hercule Poirot and is narrated by his friend Captain Hastings, and it is the last of the books in which Hastings appears until the final Poirot novel.
Rating coming soonPeril at End House is a mystery novel by Agatha Christie, published in the United States in February 1932 and in Britain the following month. It is the sixth novel to feature Hercule Poirot, and it begins with him on holiday in Cornwall, being told by a young woman that somebody is trying to kill her.
Rating coming soonOne, Two, Buckle My Shoe is a mystery novel by Agatha Christie, first published in Britain in November 1940 and in the United States in February 1941 under the title The Patriotic Murders. Poirot investigates the death of his own dentist, and it is the last of the novels to feature Chief Inspector Japp.
Rating coming soonPeter Grant, London's resident police wizard, is pulled into a case that begins with a dead teenager in a luxury flat and stops being ordinary almost immediately. The girl was the daughter of Lady Tyburn, a river goddess who has never had much time for Peter and now wants a favour from him, and the pathologist finds magic in the death as well as drugs. As Peter and Sahra Guleed work their way through the very rich, traces keep surfacing of a manuscript that has been missing since the eighteenth century.
Rating coming soonHarry Dresden, Chicago's professional wizard, takes on two problems at once in the fifth Dresden Files novel. A priest asks him to recover the Shroud of Turin, stolen and on its way to a private sale, and a noble of the Red Court vampires challenges him to a duel that would settle a war by single combat. Neither job stays separate for long, and the people who took the Shroud turn out to belong to an older and considerably worse kind of trouble.
Rating coming soonShannon McFarland is a fashion model whose life ends the day someone shoots her in the face while she is driving, and the novel she narrates is scrambled out of order on purpose. Her career, her boyfriend and her best friend are all gone, and she hides what is left of her jaw behind a veil until she meets Brandy Alexander in speech therapy, a woman one operation away from completing her transition. Brandy teaches Shannon how to invent a new life, and the two of them set out to settle accounts.
Rating coming soonIn a small Mississippi town, a nine-year-old boy called Robin Dufresnes was found hanging from a tree on his family's property, and nobody was ever charged. Twelve years later his younger sister Harriet is twelve herself, brilliant and difficult, and the rest of the household has never recovered: her mother spends her days in a chair and her father is long gone. Harriet decides to find out who killed her brother, and recruits her friend Hely and a great deal of nerve.
Rating coming soonJack Reacher steps off a train in a small town in the middle of the wheat fields for one reason: he wants to know why it is called Mother's Rest. Nobody will tell him, and the locals watch him while he asks. Then a woman named Michelle Chang mistakes him for a colleague of hers who has disappeared while working a case she knows almost nothing about, and Reacher decides to stay and help. Curiosity turns into a rare thing in his life, which is a job.
Rating coming soonProfessor Ravi Mohan Saini is a historian whose childhood friend, an archaeologist who had just deciphered the script on the Indus Valley seals, is found dead, and the police settle on Saini as the murderer. Clearing his name means following his friend's work: four pieces of an ancient seal held by different families, a treasure connected with Krishna, and a killer who believes he is the final avatar of Vishnu and is working through a list of descendants. Saini has to stay ahead of both of them.
Rating coming soonHarry Dresden is living on an island in Lake Michigan with a spirit growing inside his head and a headache that keeps getting worse, which is when Queen Mab informs him that he has a job to do. The job is to help Nicodemus Archleone, one of the people Harry would least like to help, break into a vault belonging to Hades. Harry agrees because of what Mab offers in return, and then spends the rest of the book waiting for the betrayal he knows is coming.
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