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 5 of the shelf.
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Rating coming soonLockwood & Co. is the smallest agency in the ghost-haunting trade, and the larger firm run by Quill Kipps keeps taking its cases. When a job to seal a coffin goes wrong and something powerful is released, the small agency is left with the task of recovering it before it does damage across London, with its reputation and its rivals both working against it.
Rating coming soonA KGB communications officer learns that the chairman of the Committee for State Security has decided to have the Pope killed, and the knowledge makes him a target himself. The CIA analyst Jack Ryan is drawn into the defection that follows, and to the officer's family, in a book set early in his career and built around the assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II in 1981.
Rating coming soonTwo 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.
Rating coming soonKinsey Millhone is a former police officer who has set up a small detective agency in a quiet corner of Santa Teresa, California, and her life is deliberately thin: two divorces, few possessions, no address she intends to keep. Her clients tend to be people with nowhere else to take their problems, and her habit of taking their side is what keeps the agency going.
Rating coming soonRichmond, Virginia, has a killer working through the city, and the chief medical examiner is called out to the latest strangling. The scene has been cleaned of evidence with a substance that only shows up under laser light, and Dr Kay Scarpetta has to work out what that says about the person doing it before the body count grows again and the case is taken out of her hands.
Rating coming soonMma 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.
Rating coming soonAlex Cross is at a family birthday party when the call comes: his niece Caroline, the only daughter of his late brother, has been found dead in Virginia. He and his girlfriend drive to Richmond, and what the police have found in the boot of a car leads the investigation into organised crime and back into a part of his own family's life he knew nothing about.
Rating coming soonIn 1947 the body of a young woman called Elizabeth Short is found in an empty lot in Los Angeles, badly mutilated, and the case becomes the most notorious unsolved murder in the city's history. Two policemen are assigned to it, and the investigation they conduct carries them into the corruption of the department that employs them and out the other side.
Rating coming soonDriving home on New Year's Eve, the cocktail waitress Sookie Stackhouse finds a man running along the road with no clothes on and no idea who he is. She knows him, because the vampire Eric has been one of the most dangerous people in her life for years, and the person beside her in the car is frightened, polite and entirely unlike himself.
Rating coming soonHercule Poirot is old and in a wheelchair, and he has taken a room at Styles, the country house where he investigated his first case in England. He sends for Captain Hastings and tells him that a murder is going to be committed there, that he knows this and cannot prevent it, and that no court would accept what he knows.
Rating coming soonSookie Stackhouse notices her brother Jason's eyes beginning to change, which means he is about to become a were-panther for the first time. Then a sniper begins shooting at the local shape-changers, taking one victim at a time, and Jason's new companions start to wonder whether the newest member of their pack is the one holding the rifle.
Rating coming soonA middle-aged spinster decides to give up her house in the city for a summer and takes a furnished place in the country with her niece and nephew. The house comes with a reputation, and the strange events that begin there turn into a series of crimes that she has to make sense of with the police a step behind her.
Rating coming soonDown an alley beside a pub, through a small iron door in a brick wall, there is a house that is not always there. Those who find it see what they most want to see, including people and places that cannot be real, and the brother and sister who live in it have been waiting a long time for guests.
Rating coming soonClay Carter works for the public defender's office in Washington, which is not where ambitious lawyers stay. He takes on the case of Tequila Watson, a young man accused of a random street killing, hears an account of not being in control of his own body, and follows that unlikely claim out of the office job and into an industry built on other people's injuries.
Rating coming soonJoel Backman was one of the most powerful lobbyists in Washington until a deal involving a hacked spy satellite collapsed and sent him to prison. Six years later a disgraced president grants him a full pardon, and he is taken out of his cell in the middle of the night, given a new name, put on a military aircraft and flown to Italy to be tucked away in a small city.
Rating coming soonLondon, 1890, and a fine art dealer named Edmund Carstairs comes to Baker Street to ask for help. A man in a flat cap has followed him all the way from America and means him harm, and in the days that follow his house is robbed and his family is threatened, so that a case beginning as a matter of intimidation leads somewhere the doctor is careful about setting down.
Rating coming soonA year after Rosemary Barton collapsed and died at dinner after drinking champagne laced with cyanide, the same six guests sit down at the same table, which has been laid for seven. A sprig of rosemary marks the empty place, and every person sitting there has a good reason to be afraid of what that first dinner set in motion.
Rating coming soonTwenty 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.
Rating coming soonThere is a thief at Kirrin Cottage, and the Famous Five are sure they know who it is and quite unable to prove it. What they need is evidence, and what they find is an old map and a hiding place nobody has thought to look in, which is enough to take the investigation all the way to the person actually responsible.
Rating coming soonJack Reacher is hitching rides across the country when he accepts a lift from a man, a woman and a boy he does not know, in a car whose story does not add up. By the time the car reaches Virginia he is caught up in a conspiracy he never agreed to join, and the people running it have worked out that he is the biggest problem they have.
Rating coming soonEnola Holmes is the much younger sister of the detective Sherlock Holmes, and she has been brought up quietly in the country by a mother who does not care what the neighbours think. On her fourteenth birthday her mother disappears, leaving a small amount of money and no explanation, and Enola's older brothers arrive to arrange her future.
Rating coming soonIn December 1985, nineteen-year-old Frank Mackey planned to escape his family's cramped flat on Faithful Place and start again in London with his girlfriend Rosie Daly, and the two of them were to meet at midnight at the top of the cul-de-sac. Rosie never appeared. Frank took it that she had dumped him, and he left Ireland without going home again. Twenty-two years later, Rosie's suitcase turns up behind a fireplace in a derelict house on Faithful Place.
Rating coming soonSMERSH, the Soviet counter-intelligence agency, intends to kill James Bond in a way that will disgrace both him and the British Secret Service, and the lure it has chosen is Tatiana Romanova, a cipher clerk, along with the Spektor, a Soviet decoding machine she offers to bring with her. Much of the book takes place in Istanbul and on the Orient Express, and Bond spends his section of it on a journey he has been allowed to believe is his own operation.
Rating coming soonCordelia Gray, twenty-two years old, arrives at the London office of the Pryde Detective Agency to find that her partner Bernie Pryde has killed himself, leaving her the agency, its unlicensed handgun and a failing business. Her first client, the assistant to a prominent scientist named Sir Ronald Callender, hires her to discover why his son Mark hanged himself after leaving Cambridge to work as a gardener. Cordelia goes to Cambridge expecting to explain a suicide, and begins to suspect that Mark was murdered.
Rating coming soonEleven-year-old Emily Steiner left a North Carolina church meeting one October afternoon and walked along a lakeside path towards her house two miles away. She was taken from her bedroom and her body was found by the lake days later. The case looks like the work of a serial killer who has evaded the FBI for years, and Dr. Kay Scarpetta, a forensic pathologist and chief medical examiner, is called in to help, with the help of a clandestine research facility in Tennessee where human remains are studied as they decay.
Rating coming soonWhen a woman's severed leg is delivered to Robin Ellacott at the office of the private detective Cormoran Strike, the package carries a message quoting a song that Strike last heard as a favourite of his dead mother. It points him back at the men he has reason to suspect from his own past, and while he works through the list the sender keeps watching Robin and building a plan around her. Robin, who has spent a year at the agency, is now an investigator as well as a secretary.
Rating coming soonJack Reacher travels from South Dakota to the headquarters of his old unit, the 110th MP, to finally meet its commander, Major Susan Turner, whose voice he has been talking to for months. When he arrives he is told that Turner has been relieved of command, and that two cases have been opened against him: a suspected homicide from sixteen years earlier, and a lawsuit from a woman who says that she and Reacher had an affair that produced her teenage son. Two men in a motel car park give him until the next morning to leave town.
Rating coming soonPaul is a lonely student at the University of Toronto who gives some tablets to band members he was hoping to befriend, one of whom dies shortly afterwards, and who then flees to the apartment of his half-sister Vincent. Five years later the two of them are working at a hotel at the northernmost tip of Vancouver Island, where a line of graffiti written on the lobby window with an acid marker is discovered. Vincent meets the investor who owns the hotel, and the book follows what that meeting costs everyone connected to him.
Rating coming soonStephanie Plum is still new to bounty hunting, so her boss and cousin Vinnie hands her what should be a simple job: bring in Kenny Mancuso, a local man accused of shooting his best friend in the knee and then skipping bail. Kenny is the black sheep cousin of the vice cop Joe Morelli, which puts Morelli on the same trail. A second case competes for Stephanie's time, involving twenty-four coffins that have gone missing from a funeral home, and the friend Kenny shot is shot again.
Rating coming soonMickey Haller is a Los Angeles defence attorney who has spent a year recovering from his wounds and from the painkillers he took while they healed, and he is ready to return to court. When the defence lawyer Jerry Vincent is murdered, Haller inherits his caseload, including the trial of the studio executive Walter Elliott, who is accused of killing his wife and her lover. The trial is due to begin in nine days, and the detective working Vincent's murder believes the killer may come after Haller next.
Rating coming soonSookie Stackhouse is a cocktail waitress in Bon Temps, Louisiana, who can hear other people's thoughts, and she has had a run of bad luck. A colleague of hers is murdered and nobody seems to take it seriously, and then she is attacked by a creature that leaves her poisoned. The local vampires save her life by drawing the poison out, and when one of them asks her to do something in return, she agrees. The favour takes her to Dallas to use her telepathy to find a vampire who has gone missing.
Rating coming soonTom Sanders is the head of advanced products manufacturing at DigiCom, a computer hardware company, and he expects to be promoted to run the advanced products division once DigiCom has completed its merger with a publishing house. The job goes instead to Meredith Johnson, an ex-girlfriend who has just moved to Seattle from the company's headquarters in California. That evening Meredith calls Tom into her office, ostensibly to talk about a CD-ROM drive, and what happens there changes the whole shape of the story.
Rating coming soonMoses Bedemier runs a sweet shop and ice-cream parlour in the Burg, and everyone in Trenton knows him as Uncle Mo. He is ticketed by a newly qualified policeman for carrying a concealed weapon and then fails to appear for his court date, so the bounty hunter Stephanie Plum is sent to bring him in. Nobody in the neighbourhood is willing to help her, because nobody believes that Uncle Mo could have done anything wrong.
Rating coming soonA Johannes Vermeer painting, A Lady Writing, is stolen while it is on its way to the Art Institute of Chicago, and two eleven-year-olds in the Hyde Park neighbourhood of the city, Calder Pillay and Petra Andalee, set out to find it. The thief places advertisements in the newspaper explaining that the painting will be returned if the public can work out which of the pictures attributed to Vermeer were really painted by him. The whole neighbourhood begins looking at paintings much more closely.
Rating coming soonLemony Snicket is thirteen years old and about to begin his apprenticeship with S. Theodora Markson, the worst-ranked agent in the secretive organisation known as the V.F.D., in a town called Stain'd-by-the-Sea. Snicket has to escape the people currently pretending to be his parents, who have laced his tea with laudanum, and leave with Markson in a green roadster. Their first case in the mostly abandoned town concerns the theft of a statue.
Rating coming soonJames Bond is put on the trail of Auric Goldfinger, a man whose business is gold and whose methods are as violent as they are clever, and MI6 also suspects him of being connected to SMERSH, the Soviet counter-intelligence organisation. What begins as an investigation into a smuggling operation becomes something considerably larger when Bond works out what Goldfinger plans to do to the gold reserves of the United States.
Rating coming soonHugo Drax came out of nowhere to build England the deadliest weapon any human brain has devised, and the country is grateful to him. Bond first meets him over a game of bridge at his club, where Drax is suspected of cheating, and in the later part of the novel he is seconded to the industrialist's staff as the Moonraker, a prototype missile meant to defend Britain, is finished. Drax's past is not what it appears, and neither is the missile.
Rating coming soonBond is sent to investigate a diamond-smuggling operation that runs from the mines of Sierra Leone through London to Las Vegas, and the route is guarded by people who are prepared to kill over it. He meets Tiffany Case, one of the members of the gang, and uses her to get inside the operation. Once he is in America the hunter becomes the hunted, and the help he needs comes from the last person he expected.
Rating coming soonSean King and Michelle Maxwell are former Secret Service agents working as private investigators, and their lives have come apart. Maxwell is lying unconscious in a hospital bed after a night of suicidal violence, and King, short of money, is forced to take an assignment from an old girlfriend: a scientist has been murdered just inside the razor wire of a CIA training camp near Williamsburg, Virginia, and nobody wants the case solved quickly.
Rating coming soonEight years ago David Beck was knocked unconscious and left for dead, and his wife Elizabeth was kidnapped and murdered. He has relived that day every day since, working as a paediatrician in inner-city clinics. Then he receives an anonymous email telling him to log on to a website at a particular time, using a code only he and Elizabeth knew, and the screen shows him an image of his wife. While he tries to establish whether she is alive, the FBI is trying to pin her murder on him.
Rating coming soonA woman plans her own funeral in the morning and is found murdered six hours later. The ex-Detective Inspector Daniel Hawthorne, who needs money after being dismissed from the Metropolitan Police, approaches the crime writer Anthony Horowitz with a proposal: Hawthorne will investigate, Horowitz will write a book about the case, and the two of them will split the proceeds. The only catch is that they also have to solve the crime.
Rating coming soonBeverly Danziger wants Kinsey Millhone to find her sister Elaine Boldt, and presents the job as a formality about a signature on some papers. Millhone takes it because work is slow and private investigators have bills to pay, and it looks routine until she learns that the wealthy widow was last seen leaving California for Florida and never arrived there. Then she is told to drop the case, and she finds out that days before Elaine went missing, her next-door neighbour and bridge partner was murdered.
Rating coming soonAlvin Limardo hires Kinsey Millhone for a job that looks straightforward, and then his cheque bounces. His real name turns out to be John Dagett, and he is an ex-convict, a liar, a chronic drunk, and dead, drowned in what the police have called an accident. Millhone is not convinced, and the more she looks into the man who hired her, the longer the list of people who had reason to dislike him becomes.
Rating coming soonDetective Lindsay Boxer is called away from her wedding celebrations to a crime: a teenage girl has been left badly injured and her newborn baby is missing. There is no trace of whoever did it, and the victim appears to be keeping secrets of her own. At the same time the assistant district attorney Yuki Castellano is prosecuting the biggest case of her career, against a woman accused of murdering her husband in front of their two young children.
Rating coming soonIdentical twins Melina and Gillian Lloyd have not switched places since they were children, and Gillian refuses when Melina suggests that she take her place as a media escort to a NASA astronaut. The following morning Melina is told that her sister has been brutally murdered, and that the astronaut, though innocent, is the prime suspect. He and Melina set out to find the killer, whose plans require Gillian's replacement.
Rating coming soonA 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.
Rating coming soonNick Belane is a private detective in Los Angeles, and the cases that come to him include the search for a writer who is supposed to be dead and a woman convinced that she is being followed by somebody who claims to come from another planet. Belane works his way through the bars and the racetrack and the people who owe him money, in a story that sends up the private-eye genre it is written in. It was Bukowski's last completed novel.
Rating coming soonBond is sent after Mr Big, a criminal with links to the American underworld, to the world of voodoo and to SMERSH, the Soviet secret service, and his route into the case is Mr Big's smuggling of seventeenth-century gold coins out of the Caribbean. He meets Solitaire, a fortune teller who is both the prisoner and the instrument of the man he is hunting. The pursuit takes Bond through the jazz clubs of Harlem, into the Everglades and on to Jamaica.
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