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 30 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 man is pushed out of a helicopter over the empty California desert, and in Chicago a woman discovers that the members of an old army investigation unit are being killed one at a time. Somewhere in Portland, Jack Reacher is drifting through his life until a message reaches him that uses a code only his former colleagues would know.
Rating coming soonAn advertisement appears in the newspaper asking whether the reader is a gifted child looking for special opportunities, and dozens of children answer it. Only four pass the strange tests that follow, and the four of them are then sent into a school run by a man named Curtain to find out who is sending secret messages into people's minds.
Rating coming soonHarry Dresden is Chicago's only professional wizard, and the work is mostly ghosts, vampires and werewolves, in no particular order. This time he is hunting a bewildered and dangerous spirit through a hospital with a Knight of the Cross beside him, and the invitation he has just been handed is to a party held by the vampire court, which is not the kind of invitation a sensible man accepts.
Rating coming soonA world economic crisis leaves a small, mismatched group of people shipwrecked on a fictional island in the Galapagos, and then a disease makes every other human on the planet infertile. The survivors are the only fertile people left, and the novel follows their descendants across the next million years from the point of view of a ghost watching it all.
Rating coming soonTiffany Aching is fifteen and the only witch on the Chalk, where the work is unglamorous and consists mostly of looking after people who need it. Then the old Baron, whom she had been nursing, dies of poor health, and the neighbourhood decides that the young witch must have had something to do with it. Suspicion of that kind is hard to argue with.
Rating coming soonIn the summer of 1973 a university student called Devin Jones takes a job at a small amusement park in North Carolina, where the work involves maintenance, a mascot costume and keeping the children entertained. The park also has a history: a crime was committed there, and the young man who learns about it finds the story harder to leave than the job.
Rating coming soonYadriel is queer, trans and Latino, and in his family the boys become brujos who summon and release the spirits of the dead while the girls become brujas who heal. His relatives have not accepted him as a man and expect the healing powers they think he should have, so he sets out to prove otherwise by summoning a ghost on his own.
Rating coming soonVictorian London has a murderer the newspapers have christened Jack the Ripper, and the police have nothing to show for their investigation. A well-off young woman, more interested in dead bodies and forensic work than in the marriage her family has in mind for her, decides that she is going to work out who he is, using the parts of London society that the police cannot enter.
Rating coming soonRandolph Carter dreams three times of a marvellous city at the edge of the sunset, and then cannot find it again. He sets out through the dreamlands to reach it, and the route runs through places that the gods of that world keep guarded, past creatures that have no interest in whether he arrives, and through cities of the dead that answer questions only in their own way.
Rating coming soonDouglas Sherbrooke, Earl of Northcliffe, needs an heir, and an heir means a wife, so he sets about acquiring one. Alexandra Chambers, the youngest daughter of the Duke of Beresford, has loved him since she was fifteen, but the sister everyone considers incomparable is the one he had in mind, and the two families have their own ideas about how it should end.
Rating coming soonJamie Conklin is the son of a single mother in New York, and he has a talent his mother has told him to keep quiet about: he can see and speak to the dead. The dead have to answer his questions honestly, which makes him useful to people who want the truth, and the arrangement is not safe for anyone involved.
Rating coming soonLucy Carlyle has left Lockwood & Co., and Anthony Lockwood has to ask her to come back when a crime forces his hand. The two of them, and the agency's small team, follow the case into the upper reaches of London society, where the people who employ them have reasons of their own for wanting the truth kept quiet.
Rating coming soonJules and her family have moved into an abandoned house while her father restores it, and she is lonely enough to start thinking about the girl who lived there a century earlier. The two of them begin to communicate, and the story the girl tells about her own life comes out slowly.
Rating coming soonArthur Kipps is a solicitor sent to settle the affairs of a woman who lived alone in a house on the edge of the marshes, and the work is not as straightforward as his firm assumed. Years later, asked for a ghost story at Christmas by his stepchildren, he writes out what happened to him when he was young rather than inventing anything, and the account is the book.
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 soonBetsy Bobbin and Hank the mule are shipwrecked on the coast of Oz and fall in with an army on the march. Ann Soforth, the Queen of Oogaboo, has decided to conquer the Nome King, and she has the clockwork man Tik-Tok to help her do it. He can think, speak and act, but only while his springs are wound.
Rating coming soonIt is twenty-four hours since Max Ride and the other bird-kids escaped the New York Institute, and they are still running. There are six of them, 98 per cent human and 2 per cent bird, and they came away with information that might tell them where their parents are, if they can work out what the garbled words and numbers mean.
Rating coming soonIn July 1916, Chet Roscow is fascinated by the newspaper reports of a great white shark attacking people along the New Jersey shore, not far from the town where he is living. He reads the accounts the way a boy reads a ghost story, until the day he goes swimming in Matawan Creek himself.
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 soonFor centuries dragons have told stories about another continent across the ocean, a land populated by tribes very different from the ones they know. There has never been any proof and most dragons have dismissed the stories as fairy tales, which leaves one young dragon with a grand story, a nobody's name and a decision to make.
Rating coming soonFor years Grace has watched the wolves that live in the woods behind the house, and she has been drawn to one of them in particular: a yellow-eyed wolf who watches her back with an attention of his own. Then a local boy is killed by wolves and the town's hunters go into the woods after the pack.
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 soonTom Barton and his uncle Jack are smugglers, and they are good at it: quick wits, a fast vessel and secret cargo holds have kept them ahead of the authorities for years. What they are carrying through Europe in the 1500s is more dangerous than the goods they usually run, and the people who want it stopped have the power of the law behind them.
Rating coming soonLara had been told that her husband was lost at sea, and the marriage he left behind was cold, formal and unloving, so she had made her peace with being a widow. Then a man walks into her life claiming to be Hunter, Earl of Hawksworth, and proving what he says with private details that only a husband could possibly have known.
Rating coming soonHenry Smart is born in the Dublin slums in 1901, the son of a one-legged whorehouse bouncer, and he has to grow up fast because the city gives him no other option. He is in the General Post Office during the Easter Rising as a boy soldier, and he carries what he learns there into the guerrilla war that follows.
Rating coming soonLucas loves football more than anything except Benny, his father's friend, who is a firefighter and a former football player. When his parents decide the sport is too dangerous and tell him to stop, Lucas goes to the one person who will understand, and he happens to be in New York on a Tuesday morning in September 2001.
Rating coming soonArtemis Fowl has taken fairy technology and built a computer far beyond anything the human world can produce. Then he shows it off to an American businessman, who simply takes it from him, and the only way to get it back is to work alongside the fairies he has spent years outwitting and robbing blind.
Rating coming soonJuliette Ferrars thought the fighting was over. She has taken control of Sector 45, been named the new Supreme Commander of North America, and has Warner at her side, which is more than she had ever expected to have. Then a death in her circle forces her to deal with what she has become as well as what surrounds her.
Rating coming soonMichael Vey has a secret he cannot show to anyone: he can send a current of electricity through his hands. When an organisation with its own interest in people like him starts watching him closely, Michael and his friends have to work out what it wants from them, and then it takes his mother.
Rating coming soonJohn Carter is on Mars with the woman he loves imprisoned in a place he cannot reach, held there by a religion's rules rather than by walls. He has a year to find a way in, and the planet's politics, its warring nations and its strange temples all stand between him and her.
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.
