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 8 of the shelf.
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Rating coming soonKay Scarpetta is at a death scene in Cambridge, Massachusetts when her phone sounds an emergency alert and a video arrives that appears to be from her niece Lucy. The film is surveillance footage of Lucy taken almost twenty years earlier, and more of it follows. Scarpetta cannot tell her husband, her investigator or even Lucy what she has been sent.
Rating coming soonWill Trent arrives at an abandoned Atlanta warehouse where a former police officer has been shot, and the blood trail shows that a second victim, a woman, was carried out and has disappeared. The building belongs to the city's most famous athlete, a man married to Will's ex-wife and under investigation for rape. Then Sara Linton finds something at the scene.
Rating coming soonYears after an unknown gunman killed his wife in front of him, Alex Cross has left the police and the FBI and is practising as a psychologist again. Then his former partner calls in a favour: a serial rapist is working in Georgetown, and the method matches a case the two of them worked together years earlier. Cross says yes.
Rating coming soonParis Gibson hosts a late-night radio show in Austin, where listeners call in with their problems and she offers advice. One caller, who signs himself Valentino, tells her that her advice to the woman he loves has driven her away, that he has taken the woman prisoner, and that he will kill her in seventy-two hours and then come for Paris. The police take it seriously.
Rating coming soonGideon is a contract killer who works in a world of money, hotels and women, and he has always been the one in control of the game. He wakes one morning in London with no memory of the night and no idea whom he can trust. Somebody from his past has decided that he is the problem.
Rating coming soonTrevor Mann is a lawyer who has finally found a life he likes, with a journalist girlfriend called Claire Parker who is always chasing the next story. Then one of her investigations leads to violence, and Trevor finds himself following her notes. What she was working on is a secret that governments and terrorist groups would both like to have.
Rating coming soonSix-year-old Sam Kettering is kidnapped from his home and manages to escape on his own, and everybody assumes that the worst is over. A sheriff in eastern Tennessee calls his father, a former FBI agent, and he and Savich fly out to find out why anybody would have brought the boy to a town like Jessborough. Then the kidnappers try again.
Rating coming soonClarice 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.
Rating coming soonRobert Langdon, a Harvard professor of symbology, travels to Bilbao for an evening hosted by his former student Edmond Kirsch, a technology billionaire who has promised to announce a discovery that will overturn the way people understand human existence. Kirsch is a famous atheist with enemies among the religious leaders he has told in advance. The presentation does not go as planned.
Rating coming soonFive years ago in the town of Little Kilton, a popular schoolgirl called Andie Bell was murdered and her boyfriend Sal Singh was blamed for it and then found dead. Pippa Fitz-Amobi, who knew Sal as a child, has never believed it. For her final school project she decides to reopen the case and prove that the killer is still out there.
Rating coming soonFive students walk into detention at Bayview High, and each of them insists the phone found in their bag was planted there. One of the five is Simon, who runs an app that publishes other students' secrets. Before the hour is up Simon is dead, and the four who are left are the only suspects.
Rating coming soonAvery Grambs is seventeen, sleeping in her car and hoping for a scholarship, when she learns that Tobias Hawthorne, a billionaire she has never met or heard of, has left her almost everything he owned. The will gives her one condition: she has to move into Hawthorne House. The family he has disinherited lives there too, and they want to know why.
Rating coming soonDream Park is an amusement park where visitors act out adventures that the park's technology makes solid, and in March 2051 a game is running that has drawn a large audience. Somewhere in the middle of the illusion a man is murdered, with a weapon that should not exist inside the game. Alex Griffin, the park's head of security, has to work out which of the players did it.
Rating coming soonA young woman called Ashley Cordova is found dead in New York, and the police treat it as a suicide. Scott McGrath, an investigative journalist, has reasons of his own for looking into it: Ashley's father is Stanislas Cordova, the director of a set of notorious films who has not been seen in public for more than thirty years. The last time McGrath went after the father he lost everything.
Rating coming soonSookie Stackhouse's boyfriend has been distant, and then he disappears while working on a task for the queen of the Louisiana vampires. His friends tell her he had been in Mississippi, summoned by the vampire who made him. Sookie drives to Jackson to find him, with a werewolf for a bodyguard and instructions she does not entirely trust.
Rating coming soonA year after her son Danny is said to have died on a camping trip, the stage producer Tina Evans is preparing a new show in Las Vegas and trying to decide whether she is allowed to be happy again. Then words appear on the chalkboard in Danny's old room telling her that he is not dead. She never saw his body.
Rating coming soonHarry Benson has had psychomotor epilepsy since a car crash two years ago, and during his seizures he has beaten three people and remembered none of it. As an alternative to prison he is admitted to a university hospital for an experimental operation: electrodes are implanted in his brain to interrupt the seizures before they begin. The day after the surgery he works out how the machine can be made to please him.
Rating coming soonAdolf 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.
Rating coming soonA man collapses in Poirot's rooms and, before he dies, manages to describe an organisation: four criminals, each of them outstanding in his or her own line, operating internationally. Number One is a Chinese criminal mastermind, Number Two an American millionaire, Number Three a Frenchwoman scientist and Number Four the killer who removes anyone who interferes. Poirot takes the threat personally.
Rating coming soonTommy 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.
Rating coming soonPoirot 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.
Rating coming soonOliver Marks has spent ten years in prison for a killing he may not have committed. The night before his release, the detective who arrested him asks to hear the whole story and promises to take no action on it. Oliver begins with the previous decade, at a conservatory where he and six classmates were the last acting students left in their year.
Rating coming soonEva Khatchadourian never wanted to be a mother, and the son she had turns out not to want anything from her either. Two days before his sixteenth birthday, Kevin kills seven of his fellow students, a cafeteria worker and a teacher who had tried to be friendly to him. Two years later, Eva begins writing letters to her husband about what happened.
Rating coming soonEllie Mack was fifteen, the youngest of three, and she left the house one afternoon and did not come back. Ten years later her remains are found and buried, and her mother Laurel has begun to put her life back together. Then she meets a man and is introduced to his young daughter, and the child looks and behaves exactly like the girl who disappeared.
Rating coming soonA man's body is found on a small island off the coast of Maine, with no wallet, no name and no explanation for how he got there. The case goes nowhere: the police are left with dead ends, and more than a year passes before anybody identifies him. Everything else about the death stays open, and the two people who run the island's newspaper never stop thinking about it.
Rating coming soonIn the desert back country near the Mexican border, a hunter called Llewelyn Moss comes across the aftermath of a drug deal that has gone wrong: trucks, bodies, and a case of money that nobody is left alive to claim. He takes it. What follows him is a killer who answers to nobody, and behind them both a county sheriff who is trying to understand what has happened to the place he has spent his life policing.
Rating coming soonMaura Isles comes back from a conference in Paris to find her luggage missing and her street taped off as a crime scene. In her own driveway is a car, and in the car is a woman who looks exactly like her and shares her birthday. Maura takes a tissue sample from the dead woman and one from herself, and asks a detective she knows to run the comparison.
Rating coming soonMartie Rhodes drives her friend Susan to appointments with a psychologist, because Susan's agoraphobia makes it impossible for her to go alone. Martie's husband Dusty is trying to keep his brother Skeet, just out of rehabilitation, out of trouble. Then Martie develops a terror of her own reflection, and the fear starts to spread to the rest of her life.
Rating coming soonJames Bond has been hunting Ernst Stavro Blofeld since the business in the Bahamas, and the trail has gone cold. Then he meets Teresa di Vicenzo, the daughter of a Corsican crime boss, whose own difficulties give him a way in. Bond is closer to a settled life than he has been in any of the earlier books, and he is about to be sent to Switzerland.
Rating coming soonSix high school seniors take a borrowed motorhome to South Carolina for spring break, and one of them is Red Kenny, who has had a bad year and would like one ordinary week. Somewhere in a desolate stretch of the state the vehicle stops, the mobile signal is gone, and it becomes clear that this was arranged. There is a shooter outside, and the group has to work out what is wanted.
Rating coming soonJules Keegan, a magazine publisher in London, is marrying Will Slater, a television presenter, on an island off the coast of Ireland. The guests have been carried over by boat and the weather is turning. Somebody on the island has been waiting for a chance like this for a long time, and by the end of the weekend one of the wedding party is dead.
Rating coming soonKeshav Rajpurohit graduated from the Indian Institutes of Technology and now teaches at a coaching centre for the entrance examinations, which he dislikes. He turns up on his ex-girlfriend's birthday to wish her well and finds her dead in her room. He has an obvious motive and no alibi, so the investigation he begins is partly an attempt to keep himself out of it.
Rating coming soonAdam and Amelia Wright have been married for ten years and the marriage has not been going well for most of them. Amelia wins a weekend away in Scotland and decides it is a chance to repair something. Adam is a screenwriter who cannot recognise faces, including his wife's, and the chapel they are staying in is not the comfortable retreat the prize described.
Rating coming soonFour 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.
Rating coming soonHannah Shapiro is an American student whose life was saved eight years ago in Los Angeles by the head of a detective agency called Private. She has left her country but her past has followed her to London, and the agency's London office takes her case. At the same time, young women are being taken off the streets of central London and found days later, mutilated in ways the police cannot explain.
Rating coming soonAn employer who does not ask too many questions about the past is hard to find, and the Garricks give the narrator a job cleaning their penthouse and cooking in their kitchen. She has a secret of her own to keep, and the arrangement is nearly perfect. Then she notices that she has never met the wife, that there are stains on the nightgowns in the laundry, and that she can hear somebody crying.
Rating coming soonThe narrator has moved into a house of her own with her husband and children, on a quiet street where the neighbours introduce themselves over the fence. She used to clean other people's houses and now she has one of her own, and she intends to keep the life that came with it. The first dinner with the people next door is where the trouble starts.
Rating coming soonThe year after Simon Kelleher's death, Bayview High has dozens of imitations of the gossip app that made him notorious, and none of them matter until an anonymous texter starts a game instead of an app: truth or dare, sent by message, with twenty-four hours to answer. Three students, Maeve Rojas, Knox Myers and Phoebe Lawton, are the ones it chooses.
Rating coming soonNewlyweds Tricia and Ethan are looking for their dream house when they visit a remote manor that once belonged to Dr Adrienne Hale, a psychiatrist who vanished without trace four years earlier. A violent winter storm traps them there with no way out, and while Tricia is looking for something to read she finds a secret room full of transcripts of every interview Dr Hale ever conducted.
Rating coming soonNear an isolated mansion lies a garden of flowers and shady trees, and among its ornaments are young women who have been kidnapped and intricately tattooed to resemble the butterflies they are named for. The man who keeps them calls himself the Gardener, and when the garden is discovered a single survivor is brought in for questioning by two FBI agents.
Rating coming soonPip Fitz-Amobi is not a detective any more. With Ravi Singh she made a true-crime podcast about the murder case they solved together, and it went viral, but she insists her investigating days are behind her. Then someone she knows goes missing on the night the town holds a memorial, the police do nothing, and Pip starts looking into it herself.
Rating coming soonTwo years after millions of people vanished in an instant, a new world order has risen from the rubble and the strangely persuasive leader Nicolae Carpathia has consolidated his power over the Global Community. Heads of state, financiers, religious leaders and the media have been reduced to instruments of his regime, and only a small group knows what he really is.
Rating coming soonMarried FBI agents Savich and Sherlock are summoned back to Washington from a weekend away when a prominent judge is murdered in the Supreme Court's third-floor library, the night before the court is to hear arguments in a controversial death-penalty case. More killings follow, each one targeting another brilliant and successful figure in the capital.
Rating coming soonOn her thirty-fourth birthday, Daisy Minor decides to remake her entire life: she is tired of her boring clothes, her ordinary looks and nearly a decade without a date. The small-town librarian turns herself into a party girl who dances and flirts at clubs, and then she witnesses a murder and becomes the target of a killer.
Rating coming soonNina Bloom is a successful lawyer and a loving mother who would do anything to protect the life she has built in New York, including lying about her past to everyone, her daughter included. When an innocent man is framed for murder she cannot let him pay for somebody else's crime, which means going back to the identity she abandoned nineteen years earlier.
Rating coming soonSixty years ago an eccentric Hungarian genius worked out how to trigger a shift of the polar ice caps artificially, with eruptions, earthquakes and climate changes to follow, and then his work disappeared. Now the leader of an anti-globalisation group intends to use it on the industrialised nations, and the process cannot be reversed once it has begun.
Rating coming soonAn officer is shot at point-blank range inside the Grant County police station and police chief Jeffrey Tolliver is wounded, which sets off a hostage situation with the medical examiner Sara Linton at the centre of it. Outside, a newly reinstated officer and Jeffrey's second in command must work out who the shooter is before Jeffrey dies.
Rating coming soonOn the eve of her graduation from an exclusive private school, the shy Semantha Heavenstone is caught up in scandal and betrayal, and she returns to the family's grand Kentucky mansion where memories of her mother and her older sister Cassie are still sharp. Wherever she goes, Semantha is haunted by her sister's voice.
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