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 56 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 soonStile lives in two worlds at once. On Proton he is a serf who has to compete in the Great Games to prove he deserves to exist, and on Phaze, where only magic works, he is the Blue Adept learning sorcery. In both worlds somebody is trying to kill him, and he also has to win Lady Blue and find the ultimate weapon.
Rating coming soonStosh is surprised when Bobby Fuller, the boy who has always been his enemy, asks him for a favour: to take him back in time to meet Jim Thorpe, the Olympic champion who lost his medals after a scandal and never recovered his fame. The two of them travel into the past on a quest to save Thorpe's reputation.
Rating coming soonNora Davis was eleven and doing her homework in her bedroom when the police arrived at the family home: her father had been killing women in the basement. Decades later he is in prison, and Nora is a successful surgeon with a quiet life and a secret she intends to keep, until one of her young patients is murdered in the same distinctive way.
Rating coming soonPip Fitz-Amobi is about to leave for college, and the investigations she carried out in her home town have left her with death threats and a true-crime podcast that made her famous. An anonymous questioner keeps asking her something she cannot answer, and the pursuit that follows is the last one she has to survive.
Rating coming soonFang Kattalakis is a wolf, and the brother of two of the most powerful members of the Omegrion, the council that enforces the laws of the Were-Hunters. When war breaks out among the lycanthropes he has to choose a side, and when Aimee, the woman he loves, is accused of betraying her people, saving her means breaking the law of his own.
Rating coming soonMercy Thompson, a mechanic and shapeshifter, tries to return a powerful Fae book she borrowed in desperation and finds the bookshop locked and closed. The book contains knowledge the Fae will do a great deal to keep hidden, and at the same time her friend Samuel is struggling with his wolf side, leaving Mercy to cover for him.
Rating coming soonClaire Laurent has built French Silk, a successful lingerie company, out of nothing in New Orleans. When a television evangelist denounces her sleepwear as sinful and is then murdered, Claire becomes the prime suspect, and every answer she gives about the night of the killing makes the district attorney more certain of her guilt.
Rating coming soonMichael Rogers is a young rolling stone who has never settled to anything, and when he sees the Gipsy's Acre estate he decides that he wants to live there in a house built by the architect Rudolf Santonix. He is poor, the land carries a bad reputation, and the novel is told in his own voice as he explains how he came to be there.
Rating coming soonOn a snowy winter evening in Dartmoor, Mrs Willett and her daughter hold a table-turning session for their guests, and the spirit that answers tells them Captain Trevelyan is dead. Major Burnaby walks through the snow to check on his friend, and Emily Trefusis, who is engaged to the captain's nephew, joins the police in working out what has happened.
Rating coming soonSlough House is the office where MI5 keeps the officers who have disgraced themselves: a lost file, a blown surveillance, a reputation for drink. River Cartwright, bitterest of them all, spends his days transcribing phone conversations until a British-Pakistani student is kidnapped and held hostage, and the slow horses find a way into a real case.
Rating coming soonCayce Pollard is a marketing consultant who has a psychological sensitivity to corporate symbols, and her work takes her to London, Tokyo and Moscow to judge proposed logos. She is also addicted to fragments of film footage being posted anonymously on the internet, and she is hired to find whoever is making them.
Rating coming soonInspector Tyador Borlú of the Extreme Crime Squad in Besźel investigates the murder of a foreign student found dead in the street with her face disfigured. His inquiries lead him towards Ul Qoma, the city that shares his city's ground, and towards the quarrel between two places whose citizens are forbidden to acknowledge each other.
Rating coming soonLeonora Shaw is a crime writer with a settled and solitary life in London who has not seen her old friend Clare for ten years. She accepts an invitation to Clare's hen party at a glass house in the English countryside, and wakes in hospital afterwards with a head injury and no memory of what happened.
Rating coming soonTen years ago Quincy Carpenter went on holiday with five friends and was the only one to come out of Pinewood Cottage alive. The press grouped her with two other survivors of massacres, Lisa and Sam, and called them the final girls. Now Lisa is dead and Sam has arrived at Quincy's home, determined to make her remember that night.
Rating coming soonBurton Corliss is a young man from a working-class town who came out of the war with a hunger for wealth and a willingness to do anything to get it. At college he meets Dorothy Kingship, the daughter of a copper tycoon, and sets out to marry into the family, until she becomes pregnant and his plans are threatened.
Rating coming soonLou Ford is the deputy sheriff of a small Texas town, and the worst thing most people say about him is that he is a little slow and a little boring. He also carries a sickness that nearly had him locked up when he was younger, and it is about to surface again.
Rating coming soonNew York in 1999 holds thirty-five million people, who run their televisions off pedal power, riot for water and live in rooms shared with strangers. Detective Andy Rusch is under pressure to solve the murder of a gangster during a heat wave, and he is also drawn to the dead man's girlfriend, which makes an already crowded life more difficult to manage.
Rating coming soonMolly Gray is twenty-five, works as a maid at the Regency Grand Hotel and takes real joy in returning a messy room to a state of perfection. She does not read social cues well, and since her grandmother died she has had to interpret the world on her own, which leaves her easy for other people to deceive.
Rating coming soonJack McEvoy is a crime reporter in Denver whose twin brother, a homicide detective, has died in what the authorities call a suicide. Unable to believe it, Jack re-examines the case his brother was working on and concludes that the death was staged, and his search leads him towards a killer who preys on detectives.
Rating coming soonA killer is stalking the streets of Boston, entering the apartments of women who live alone and torturing them before he kills, with a level of surgical skill that suggests a doctor. Detective Jane Rizzoli and her colleague Thomas Moore work the case, and their enquiries lead them to a surgeon who survived an attack of the same kind.
Rating coming soonA young college professor is found mutilated in a diner in a small Georgia town, and the autopsy by the paediatrician and part-time coroner Sara Linton shows how much the killer did before she died. Sara works the case with the police chief Jeffrey Tolliver, who is her ex-husband, and the detective Lena Adams, the dead woman's twin sister.
Rating coming soonMariana Andros, a group therapist, is certain that Edward Fosca, a charismatic professor of Greek tragedy at Cambridge, is a murderer. Fosca is protected by his reputation and adored by the students, especially the members of a secret society of young women known as the Maidens, and Mariana becomes fixated on them when one of them is found dead.
Rating coming soonThe Godfather follows the Corleone family, a Mafia family in New York City and Long Island, from 1945 to 1955 under its head, Vito Corleone. It also carries the story of Vito's own childhood and rise, from his early years to adulthood, and it introduced English-speaking readers to the vocabulary of the American Mafia.
Rating coming soonIn 1996 Dirk Pitt is searching for a treasure on the Nile when he prevents an attempt on the life of a United Nations scientist investigating a disease that is driving thousands of North Africans into madness and death. The suspected cause is a vast pollution that threatens to extinguish life in the world's seas.
Rating coming soonMatthew Sobol, a brilliant programmer and the chief technology officer of a games company, dies of brain cancer, and the publication of his obituary activates a daemon: a distributed program that begins to change the real world. Its first task is to kill two programmers who worked for his company and unknowingly helped to create it.
Rating coming soonSVR director Sergey Golovko survives an attempt on his life in Moscow, when a car identical to his own is destroyed with a rocket-propelled grenade. The investigation points towards Chinese intelligence, and President Jack Ryan finds himself dealing with a war between Russia and China as well as the politics of his own government.
Rating coming soonNancy Harmon fled her first marriage, the deaths of her two small children and the charges that followed, changed her name and moved across the country. She is married again with two more children and a happy life, until one morning she goes to find them and sees only a tattered red mitten.
Rating coming soonFrank Pollard wakes each night with no memory of where he has been or what he has done, and finds himself injured or carrying objects he does not recognise. Two private investigators, Bobby and Julie Dakota, are hired to find out what is happening to him, and their work leads into a web of experiments and family secrets.
Rating coming soonIn 1997 a woman is found murdered near an army base in Carter Crossing, Mississippi, and the evidence points to a soldier. Military police officer Jack Reacher is sent undercover to find out what happened and then to disappear, and his instructions are to keep the army out of a scandal rather than to solve the crime.
Rating coming soonLakshmi is thirteen and lives with her family in a hut in the mountains of Nepal. When the monsoon washes away what is left of their crops, her stepfather says she must leave home to earn, and a charming stranger arranges work for her that turns out to be a brothel in India.
Rating coming soonPatrick Lanigan, a junior partner in a law firm in Biloxi, Mississippi, learns that his firm's client and its senior partners are defrauding the government over navy shipbuilding contracts. He fakes his own death, takes ninety million dollars of the firm's hidden money and disappears to South America, and four years later he is found.
Rating coming soonInspector Sartaj Singh, one of the few Sikh officers in the Mumbai police, is invited to pursue the city's most legendary crime boss, Ganesh Gaitonde. Gaitonde describes a long criminal career and drops hints about his collaborators before killing himself, and the novel runs on two tracks: his past and the hunt for what his last words meant.
Rating coming soonCilla McGowan was a child star and now restores old houses, and she comes to the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia to save the farmhouse her grandmother, a legendary actress, left behind. The house brings back dreams of the grandmother, who died of a suspected overdose more than thirty years earlier.
Rating coming soonJack Reacher walks into Hope, a small town in Colorado, and discovers that twelve miles of empty road separate it from a second town called Despair. He asks for a cup of coffee and gets a reception he did not expect, from a place that not only wants him gone but would rather he did not leave alive.
Rating coming soonVirginia's chief medical examiner, Kay Scarpetta, prepares for the autopsy of the convicted murderer Ronnie Joe Waddell before he has been executed, and watches the clock until he is pronounced dead in the electric chair. His death is not the end of her involvement with him, and the body in her morgue is only the first complication.
Rating coming soonA wealthy American financier disappears while hunting treasure in an antique airship, and the blimp drifts out of Cuban waters towards Florida carrying the bodies of Soviet cosmonauts. Dirk Pitt uncovers a covert group of American industrialists who have put a colony on the moon and will defend it at any cost.
Rating coming soonJace Wilson, a teenager from Indiana, witnesses a murder, and his parents cannot put him into witness protection because the killers have contacts inside law enforcement. They hand him to a couple who run a wilderness survival programme for troubled children in Montana, and the two murderers follow him there. The boy is given a new name for the summer, and the men who want him dead work it out.
Rating coming soonKarou has learned that she is Madrigal, a chimaera killed for loving the seraph Akiva and resurrected in human form, and she has left Earth for the land of Eretz. There she takes up the work of her murdered adoptive father, using the art of resurrection to rebuild the chimaera army, while blaming Akiva for everything that has happened.
Rating coming soonCasiopea Tun is eighteen, lives as an unwanted poor relation in her wealthy grandfather's house in the Yucatán and dreams of escape. In a forbidden chest in his bedroom she finds the bones of the Mayan death god Hun-Kamé, and when a shard of bone pierces her thumb he returns to a semblance of life and binds himself to her.
Rating coming soonIn the winter of 1953, twenty-year-old Boy Novak runs away from her father in New York and arrives by chance in a small town in Massachusetts, looking for beauty and the opposite of the life she has left behind. She marries a local widower with a daughter called Snow and becomes a stepmother in a family with a secret.
Rating coming soonOjo the Unlucky lives in poverty in the woods of the Munchkin Country with his laconic uncle, Unc Nunkie, and their neighbour is the magician Dr Pipt, who is about to finish six years of work on the Powder of Life. The powder animates the Patchwork Girl, and an accident leaves Ojo needing to find the ingredients for a cure.
Rating coming soonThe Oppenheimer Alternative follows J. Robert Oppenheimer through the Manhattan Project and the security hearings of the mid-1950s, and then adds a fictional discovery that the core of the Sun is unstable and will shed its outer layer in the late 2020s. The novel asks what the scientists who built the bomb would do with such knowledge.
Rating coming soonAfter her father dies unexpectedly, eighteen-year-old Layken has to hold her family together for her mother and younger brother, and she looks capable on the outside while losing hope on the inside. The family moves across the country, she meets a twenty-one-year-old neighbour with a passion for poetry slams, and what begins between them is complicated by a discovery.
Rating coming soonRoxanne and Pepper are a teenage couple with problems, and they leave their small town for a weekend to try to solve them. They do not succeed, and when they come home they find the town empty; the other towns are empty too, and so is the world, until they find three other teenagers who are still alive.
Rating coming soonOliver Stone is an ex-Green Beret and a former CIA-trained assassin who leads the Camel Club, a small group of civilian misfits in Washington. In the third book about the club, the group is drawn into a case that touches intelligence work, casinos and a murder the authorities have their own reasons for leaving unsolved.
Rating coming soonMemphis, 1939: twelve-year-old Rill Foss and her four younger brothers and sisters live aboard their family's shantyboat on the Mississippi until their mother is taken to hospital one stormy night and strangers arrive. The children are taken to a Tennessee orphanage, and the novel also follows a present-day family changed by the same injustice.
Rating coming soonValerius was born the son of a Roman senator and has been bound to a goddess so that he can protect humanity from the vampires that haunt it; now he finds himself involved with one of the people he was bound to fight. Tabitha Devereaux is human, and has trained herself to fight vampires as capably as any immortal.
Rating coming soonTwenty-five years ago Maggie Holt and her parents moved into Baneberry Hall, a Victorian estate in the Vermont woods, and fled it three weeks later in the middle of the night. Her father wrote a memoir about the haunting that made the family famous, and Maggie, who was too young to remember, has never believed it.
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.
