3473 books across eight primary genres: romance, fantasy, science fiction, horror, mystery and thrillers, historical fiction, literary fiction and adventure. Romantasy and contemporary romance are tags on top of those shelves rather than genres of their own. Every page gives you the author, the publication year, the series it belongs to and a short synopsis that stops before the plot turns.
Search by title or author, narrow the list by primary genre or by tag, or sort it. Every title here is a different book: no duplicate editions and no omnibus volumes. A book that genuinely belongs to two genres appears once and is listed on both.
This is page 27 of the list. The search box and the filter chips read the whole catalogue, not just this page, and the page links below walk the shelf in order.
Showing 48 of 3473 books
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Results below cover the whole catalogue, not just this page. Use the page links to browse everything in order.
Rating coming soonA London taxi driver who knows every street in the city is ordered at gunpoint to drive a man away from a crime committed in front of an art gallery and casino. The passenger escapes to Nairobi, and the case comes to Detective Superintendent Richard Jury through a photograph in the Saturday paper, because he recognises one of the victims.
Rating coming soonMark Treasure goes with his actress wife to a West Country town while she is filming, and is asked by the local bishop to look into the finances of a convent with three nuns left and assets of eleven million pounds. One of the people already handling the convent's money has died in suspicious circumstances, and a second is strangled after a dinner party.
Rating coming soonA wedding is being arranged in a hurry at a manor house in rural Herefordshire, and the bride is marrying before her twenty-first birthday even though doing so will cost her a large inheritance. The guests include the banker Mark Treasure and his wife, and the bride's father, who has been estranged from his daughter for years, arrives uninvited on the eve of the ceremony.
Rating coming soonFour men are playing golf at Paston Oatvile when one of them slices his drive from the third tee, and while they are looking for the ball they find a dead body in the ground below the railway viaduct. The dead man's hat is lying fifteen yards away from where he fell, which is enough for the four of them to conclude that there has been dirty work.
Rating coming soonMary 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.
Rating coming soonNikolai Lantsov is the young king of Ravka, and the country he inherited is bankrupt, its borders are under pressure and its army has been reduced. He also carries something inside him that arrived during the civil war and that he has told nobody about, and it is getting harder to keep it where it is.
Rating coming soonPercy Jackson saved the world more than once, and now he wants to finish his senior year of school and get into university like anybody else his age. The gods have other plans, and the letter of recommendation he needs from Mount Olympus can only be earned by completing three more quests for them, starting with one that somebody else has already made a mess of.
Rating coming soonZafira is the Hunter, who dresses as a man to go into a cursed forest and bring back food for her people, and whose identity would be worth her life if it were known. Nasir is the Prince of Death, who kills for his father the sultan, and the sultan has now sent him to find the Hunter and finish her.
Rating coming soonLaia is a Scholar living under the rule of the Martial Empire, and when her brother is arrested for treason she goes undercover as a slave at the empire's military academy in exchange for the rebels' help in saving him. Elias is a soldier at the same academy who wants out of the life he was raised for.
Rating coming soonIrene is a princess in a mountain kingdom, and she is a small girl in a large palace with more stairs and corridors than anyone has told her about. In one of the upper rooms she meets her great-grandmother, who is very old and very hard to find twice, and below the palace there are goblins who have plans for the kingdom.
Rating coming soonFive brothers and sisters are digging in a gravel pit near the house they have moved to when they uncover something that has been asleep for a very long time. It is a sand-fairy who grants wishes and whose temper is not improved by being woken up, and the children get one wish each day, which lasts only until sunset and cannot be taken back.
Rating coming soonClary Fray would like her life to go back to normal, which is difficult now that she can see werewolves, vampires and faeries and knows she is one of the Shadowhunters who police them. Her mother is in a magically induced coma, and the man who put her there is still collecting the objects he needs.
Rating coming soonOn a mountainside at the edge of the empire live warriors who are said to be the most powerful in the world, able to raise the sea and make blades out of ice. For centuries the families of the Kusanagi Peninsula have held the empire's enemies at the coast, and the world they were trained for is no longer the one they are living in.
Rating coming soonSonia and Sunny see each other for the first time on an overnight train in India, and both of them are embarrassed, because their grandparents once tried to arrange a marriage between them and the attempt drove them apart before they ever met. Sonia has come home from studying in Vermont; Sunny is a journalist who has been living in New York.
Rating coming soonIn a West African city recovering from a long civil war, a dying man named Elias Cole spends his last weeks talking about a woman he was obsessed with and her husband, whose life he ruined. A psychologist newly arrived from England listens, and a local surgeon who lived through the war has his own account of what happened.
Rating coming soonMadeleine McCarthy is eight years old when her father's posting takes the family to a quiet air force station near the Canadian border in the early 1960s. The base is friendly and orderly, the Cold War is being watched from the other side of the fence, and then a child goes missing from the neighbourhood and the local investigation reaches into her own household.
Rating coming soonAt a dinner in 2014 a well-known poet reads a new poem dedicated to his wife, and the guests drink and listen and mostly do not pay attention. A century later, in a partially submerged Britain, a scholar is chasing the text of that poem, which nobody has ever been able to find.
Rating coming soonEbun gives birth to her daughter Eniiyi on the same day the family buries her cousin Monife, and the baby's resemblance to the dead woman is impossible to miss. The family takes that resemblance as proof that the child is Monife returned, and the curse that has kept three generations of women in one house begins to close over the new one.
Rating coming soonSong Yan gave up the career of a concert pianist years ago, and she now fills her Beijing flat with the hesitant playing of her young students. Her husband will not discuss having a child, his mother arrives from the south to campaign for a grandchild, and parcels of mushrooms from her province keep turning up at the door without a note.
Rating coming soonHaiwen is buying bananas in a supermarket in Los Angeles when he looks up and sees Suchi, the girl he knew in Shanghai, for the first time in sixty years. To him it feels like a second chance; to her it is an interruption of a life she has survived by refusing to look back.
Rating coming soonLittle Nettlebed is a village where the uncanny is part of ordinary life: strange creatures wash up on the riverbed and ravens settle on the roofs of people who are about to die. Then the villagers begin to hear barking at night, and one of them claims that he has watched the Mansfield sisters change shape in front of him in the lane outside his own house.
Rating coming soonIn the late summer, a financier named Harry Wainwright arrives at a fishing camp in a remote part of Maine, near the end of his life. He has come for one more day on the water in a place that has comforted him for thirty years, and he brings with him a bequest that will change the lives of everyone who works there.
Rating coming soonRukshana is a young journalist in Kabul, looking after her widowed mother and her younger brother Jahan. She is summoned to the ministry that enforces the Taliban's rules and told that the regime has found a new way of earning the diplomatic respect it has been denied: cricket, with a tournament whose winner will train abroad and then represent Afghanistan.
Rating coming soonGail Baines has lost her job, or left it, depending on who is telling the truth, and her daughter is getting married tomorrow. She has not been invited to the spa day the groom's mother has arranged, her ex-husband Max has arrived on her doorstep with a cat and nowhere to stay, and then her daughter tells her parents something that puts the wedding in question.
Rating coming soonHank Mallone needs a bank loan for his business, and he has decided that the reason he keeps being turned down is his reputation as a rogue. His solution is to hire a wife to improve it, and the woman who answers his advertisement turns out to be nothing like the quiet, respectable figure he had in mind.
Rating coming soonLaura Hewitt travels out to India with the man she intends to marry and is drawn instead to his brother, Oliver Erskine, who is the hereditary ruler of a private kingdom and the commander of his own army. He answers both to the British Crown and to India, and the country around them is about to rise against the Company's rule.
Rating coming soonParis in 1871 is a city under siege and then a city in revolt, and Babette is an artist's model in the middle of it. Around her the people she knows have to decide what they believe and whom they will stand with at the barricades, and an affair none of them can control threatens everything that one of them values.
Rating coming soonTina and her sister Moira have been indulged by their stepfather for years, and neither of them has ever had to earn a living. When the two of them decide on a holiday in Menorca they assume he will pay for it as usual, and his son Charles takes a very different view of the arrangement.
Rating coming soonIn 1886 Agnes Foster is told to leave the orphanage in New York where she grew up and make her own way in the world. She takes a teaching post in Persimmon Hollow, a town in frontier Florida that she has never seen and knows only from a newspaper advertisement, and arrives with her Catholic faith and not much else.
Rating coming soonKarlee Merrick is trying to put her life back together after her husband's death, with two children to raise and a determination to manage without anyone else's help. Two men are willing to provide it: Randy, the high school sweetheart she never quite forgot, and David, whose faith is the centre of everything he does.
Rating coming soonMercy Hollings has never been sure she is entirely human, and the medical tests she has had over the years have shown nothing unusual. What she does have is the ability to make people do as she tells them, which is useful until she loses her temper, and then it is very dangerous for everyone nearby.
Rating coming soonHelen Decatur has spent her working life reaching goals, and she has met every one of them: college, law school, her own practice, financial security and a reputation as one of the most respected divorce lawyers in South Carolina. The one thing she has decided she wants now is the thing she has left latest, and it is harder than the rest.
Rating coming soonLilly Burkstrom's ex-husband told her that if he died it would not be an accident, and she did not believe him until he was killed in what was reported as a robbery at a convenience store. The police are not interested in her suspicions, and then someone breaks into her house and into the dead man's apartment as well.
Rating coming soonHolly has just finished nursing school and cannot afford to be distracted by anything, because she believes that a mistake on her part could cost a patient's life. When she meets Matthew Cook, a baker she knew in high school but never noticed at the time, she has to decide whether she can risk letting anyone get close to her again.
Rating coming soonFlooding has almost destroyed the town of Wildwood in North Dakota, and the youth minister Ric Jensen is determined to bring it back to life. He turns the spare rooms of his church into a daycare to help parents get back on their feet, and then meets Lily Chamberlain and her young son Todd at a church retreat.
Rating coming soonA tour bus comes off the road in a snowstorm in South Dakota and leaves Jack Reacher stranded in a small town with a prison, a police force stretched thin and a witness who is waiting to give evidence. Sixty-one hours is the time he has, and the countdown runs the length of the book.
Rating coming soonAlex Rider is fourteen and has just come back from space, and when he crash lands off the coast of Australia the Australian Secret Service recruits him to infiltrate one of the criminal gangs operating across South East Asia. The gangs are known as snakeheads, and they smuggle drugs, weapons and people through the region for a living.
Rating coming soonJulian, Dick and Anne arrive at Kirrin Cottage to spend the holidays with their cousin George, and their plans for the island are ruined when Aunt Fanny falls ill and has to go away to hospital. The temporary cook who comes to look after them is unfriendly to the children and actively unkind to George's dog.
Rating coming soonLondon is in the middle of an outbreak of supernatural Visitors that Scotland Yard cannot handle and that has brought people onto the streets in protest. Lockwood and Co. keep doing the work the larger agencies will not take on, and the arrangement between the three young agents who run it is about to change.
Rating coming soonSundew has wanted to destroy the HiveWings since she was old enough to understand what they did to her tribe, and it is the whole purpose of her life. The LeafWings survive only in the Poison Jungle, a place dangerous enough to have kept them safe, and Sundew has to decide what the war costs the people she is fighting for.
Rating coming soonThe four nations have settled on Yun as the next Avatar after years of searching, and then a demonstration of bending by Kyoshi, who is Yun's friend and servant, throws the whole identification into doubt. With the identity of the true Avatar at stake, Kyoshi and her friend Rangi flee the mansion where they have been living and go on the run together.
Rating coming soonCHERUB needs to reach an illegal weapons dealer, and the only route open to them is through his son, who is serving a sentence in a maximum security prison in the United States. The plan requires an agent to get inside the prison and make contact, which is more complicated than anyone in the organisation wants to admit.
Rating coming soonA young villager in a world built out of blocks has been keeping a diary of his attempts to become a warrior instead of the farmer everyone expects him to be. The sixth book of the journal takes him further into the working life of the village, where the skills he has been practising are needed for something larger than his own training.
Rating coming soonSophie Foster wants answers about who she is and what was done to her, and she has learned that the truth about her own past is the most dangerous thing she could go looking for. She is not the only one with gaps in her history, and the people around her have family secrets of their own.
Rating coming soonClaire Fraser has lived in the North Carolina backcountry with her husband Jamie for years, keeping the secret of where she came from. The colonies are moving towards a war that she knows the outcome of, and the family she has built in the eighteenth century is caught between the side it belongs to and what is coming.
Rating coming soonIt is late summer in 1793 and Philadelphia is filling with mosquitoes and rumours of fever. The deaths begin near the docks, and then the serving girl at the coffeehouse where fourteen-year-old Mattie Cook works becomes one of them, and the wealthier families begin leaving the city while the people who cannot afford to go stay behind.
Rating coming soonHenry Montague was raised to be a gentleman and has spent his life avoiding it, with the gambling halls and the late nights and the company of whoever he pleased. His father's last attempt at reform is a grand tour of Europe with his best friend and his sister, and the tour goes wrong almost immediately when somebody else's property ends up in his hands.
Rating coming soonErienne Fleming's father, the mayor of a small town in the north of England, owes money to everyone he has ever met, and her brother has been maimed in a duel fought over the family's honour. The plan to repair both is to marry Erienne to a wealthy suitor, whether she agrees to the match or not.
The library is split into eight primary genres so you can find the kind of book you actually want: romance, where the relationship carries the story; fantasy, from epic quests to cosy shops; science fiction, from the classics to this year's awards; horror, from gothic novels to haunted houses; mystery and thrillers, from detectives and spies to domestic suspense; historical fiction, for stories built inside a past period; literary fiction, for books whose interest is in the writing and the people rather than in a plot engine; and adventure, for journeys, survival and treasure hunts. Each shelf page says what belongs on it.
Tags are a second, separate layer. Romantasy marks the books where romance and a fantasy world carry the story together, and contemporary romance marks the love stories set in the modern real world. Neither is a genre: a tagged book still lives on one or two of the eight shelves, and the tag is a way to narrow a shelf rather than a shelf of its own. Tags have landing pages too.
The title, the author and the publication year are checked against the publisher or a library record before a page goes up, and the cover is the one that record carries. Where no source states the first-publication date, the page says the year is the earliest edition we could confirm instead of claiming a date.
The synopsis on each page is written for this library. It tells you who the characters are and what they are up against, then stops. It is not a review, there are no scores anywhere on these shelves, and nothing here claims that we have read a book we have not written about yet.
Baby Bat keeps the V4mp book library.
Goodreads and social links will be added soon.
Eight primary genres, each with its own filters. Titles that genuinely belong to two genres are listed on both and keep one page.
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 genreDetectives, spies, locked rooms and the people who lie to the police.
599 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 booksOne page per book, shared between genres: 858 titles sit on more than one genre right now. Romance 676, Fantasy 685, Sci-Fi 536, Horror 381, Mystery & Thriller 599, Historical Fiction 580, Literary Fiction 575, Adventure 324.
Tags cut across the genres. 225 of the 3473 books carry one.
Romance at the centre of the story, with a fantasy world carrying it.
70 booksTagModern love stories: offices, small towns, sports teams, group chats and people who talk too much.
155 booksRomantasy 70 and Contemporary Romance 155. A tag landing works like a shelf: search, subgenre chips, primary-genre chips and sorting.
