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 68 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
No books match those filters. Try a shorter name, or pick another subgenre.
Results below cover the whole catalogue, not just this page. Use the page links to browse everything in order.
Rating coming soonVine is Cherokee, born and raised in the early 1900s, and she gives up her family and their homeland to settle with a young white man and his people in the mountains. Her mother had predicted that the move would not go smoothly. It goes worse than that: the townspeople treat Vine as an outsider, and her husband's brother becomes strangely fixated on her.
Rating coming soonHunting Adeline is the second half of a two-book story told from two points of view. One of them belongs to a young woman who has been taken and is being held by people she describes as monsters in the shape of men, and who is surviving it and trying to get back to the man who hunts for her. The other voice belongs to that man, who is looking for her.
Rating coming soonRose Woodbine is the daughter of a wealthy Virginia planter, and she is taken to the court of Charles II, where she is married against her wishes to Lord Pierce Deforte. What she does not know is what he has become in the years since: banished from England, he lives as a pirate, hunting down the people who betrayed him, and she is among the names on his list.
Rating coming soonEnola Holmes has few people in her life beyond the occasional run-in with her brother Sherlock, and the closest thing she has to family is her landlady, Mrs Tupper, who is nearly deaf and cannot cook but is thoroughly endearing. So when Enola comes home to find that Mrs Tupper has been kidnapped, the search becomes personal almost at once.
Rating coming soonHal and the Herons have returned home to Skandia after defeating the pirate captain Zavac and recovering the Andomal, and with their honour restored they take on a new mission: tracking down an old rival, Tursgud, who has grown from a bully into a pirate and a slave trader. When Tursgud seizes villagers from Araluen to sell, the crew sails after him.
Rating coming soonAuburn Reed is twenty-one and has already lost everything important to her, and she has decided that there is no room in her life for mistakes. Then she walks into an art studio in Dallas looking for work, meets Owen Gentry, the artist who works there, and for once lets her heart make the decision. What she does not know is that he is keeping something from her.
Rating coming soonBiron Farrell is a student at the University of Earth when a radiation bomb is planted in his dormitory room, which turns him from an innocent young man into a marked one, running from an assassin he cannot identify. He then learns that his father, the Rancher of Widemos, has been murdered light-years away. Finding out why draws him into a rebellion.
Rating coming soonCassie Witting thinks there could be nothing better than a prairie wedding, and one is coming: two lovebirds brought together, aunts arriving from as far away as Maine, a long white dress with a veil, zinnias and satin ribbons, dancing under a clear blue sky. As the family gathers, Cassie finds that life brings the turning of seasons, joy and sorrow, and a dance only her grandfather does.
Rating coming soonDr Emory Charbonneau is a paediatrician and a marathon runner, and she disappears on a mountain road in North Carolina. By the time her husband reports her missing, still annoyed by the argument the two of them have just had, fog and ice have closed the search down. Emory, meanwhile, is the captive of a man who will not tell her his name.
Rating coming soonGrave forces are converging to seize control of the Book of Thoth, an artifact whose pages hold the key to creating or unmaking the threads of existence itself. Max McDaniels and David Menlo are sent to protect it from the demon Astaroth, who has been imprisoned for centuries and is now free. Beyond the gates of their school, the world has already turned hostile.
Rating coming soonFive years after the hydrogues attacked the human-colonised worlds of the Spiral Arm, they still control the fuel that drives starships, and the embargo is strangling human civilisation. On Earth the attacks have started again, and the Terran leaders decide to send a cybernetic army against them, not realising that those machines have already destroyed the people who built them.
Rating coming soonNastasya has started her life over more times than she can count, and nothing ever really ends when you are immortal. Tired of the party-girl existence she has been living, she goes to River's Edge, a refuge for immortals who have lost their way, where the clothes are plain, the drink is tea, and a man she finds uncomfortably familiar is waiting.
Rating coming soonDetective Sam Vernelli never solved the murder of his fiancee more than a decade ago, and it is the case that has stayed with him ever since. Now her determined younger sister, Claire Fontaine, is being threatened in ways that are frightening and familiar, and Sam is not prepared to let her face whoever it is on her own.
Rating coming soonHal and the Herons are a group of outsiders, and they have just beaten the strongest and most skilled young warriors in Skandia to win the Brotherband competition. Their celebration ends abruptly when the Andomal, the object the Skandians hold most sacred, is stolen, and the Herons are blamed for it. To redeem themselves they have to find the thief and bring it back.
Rating coming soonIt is the year 2380, and the Intersolar Commonwealth is a sphere of stars four hundred light-years across with more than six hundred worlds in it, all joined by a web of wormhole transport tunnels. At the far edge of it, an astronomer watches a star more than a thousand light-years away simply disappear. It does not explode and it does not collapse. It vanishes.
Rating coming soonMarisa was an orphan, and the wealthy Santangeli family raised her on one condition: that she marry their son. Lorenzo Santangeli is a billionaire and a well-known playboy, and he expects his innocent wife to be his on their wedding night. Marisa, who is twenty, runs instead, because she cannot face sharing a bed with a man who married her only to produce an heir.
Rating coming soonA newcomer to Sycamore, Arizona, is out hiking on a scorching afternoon when she comes across what appear to be human remains set into the wall of a dry desert ravine. The long-time residents of the town believe the bones belong to Jess Winters, a teenage girl who vanished eighteen years earlier, and whose disappearance has haunted the place ever since.
Rating coming soonMacKayla Lane has been hunting her sister Alina's killer, and when she receives a torn page from Alina's journal and reads the desperate words on it, she knows the killer is close. What she is really after is the Sinsar Dubh, an ancient book of dark magic that corrupts anyone who touches it, and Dublin has become a dangerous place to be looking for it.
Rating coming soonDamaris is almost fifteen on the night she decides she can no longer live with what her father does when he comes home drunk and mean, and she begins planning how to get away from him. When the chance finally comes she carries two things with her, her grandmother's golden brooch and her grandfather's watch, both of which were hidden from her father for years, along with her name and the question of what it might mean for her.
Rating coming soonThe Chemin, also known as the Camino de Santiago, is a pilgrimage route centuries old that ends at Santiago de Compostela in north-west Spain, and thousands of walkers follow it every year, some devout and many of them not. Zoe, an artist from California whose husband has just died, decides on impulse to walk it. Martin, an engineer from England, is testing a cart of his own design.
Rating coming soonYuri Danko, an officer in the medical division of Russia's security service, is shot dead before he can say more than that what is being planned is insane. Covert-One operative Jon Smith and the CIA agent Randi Russell have his classified papers, and what they find in them is a conspiracy to release a plague. A Serbian terrorist has already been sent out of Russia with vials of bacteria.
Rating coming soonGwen Frazier is a psychic counsellor, and the death of her friend and mentor, Evelyn Ballinger, brings her back to the small town of Wilby, Oregon, and to memories she would rather not revisit. Two years earlier a killer stalked the members of one of Ballinger's research studies, and Gwen survived it when two others did not. She is certain the two deaths are connected.
Rating coming soonEverworld is a place that should not exist and does, and the creatures living in it should not exist either; it is a land where dreams and nightmares are real and frequently lethal. April, David, Christopher and Jalil have come to the end of the line, because Senna, the only passage they had back to the real world, is gone and is not coming back.
Rating coming soonDirk Pitt is investigating a toxic outbreak in the Caribbean Sea that may eventually reach the United States, and in the course of it he becomes involved in something more dangerous still: a struggle for control of Cuba after Castro. His children are in the region too, following an Aztec stone that may show where a vast treasure is hidden.
Rating coming soonIn a suburb of Stockholm a family has been murdered, and the only person who can describe what happened is the boy who survived it, who is in a state of shock and cannot speak. The detective leading the investigation asks a doctor who practises hypnotism to draw the details out of the boy, although the doctor swore he would never do that work again.
Rating coming soonIt is a world shrouded in mystery: a planet pocked by meteors, baked by ultraviolet light and covered in deserts the colour of dried blood. To that world travel the twenty-five astronauts of an international mission, who have to come together once the landers are down, the base dome is inflated and the robotic explorers are sent out.
Rating coming soonIn the space of a moment everyone over the age of fourteen disappears from a small town: no adults, no teachers, no police and no parents. The telephones, the internet and the television go with them, which means there is no way to call for help. What is left is young people who are hungry, frightened, and beginning to change.
Rating coming soonAt a quarter past two in the morning the telephone rings beside Myron Bolitar's bed, and the frightened teenager at the other end is Aimee Biel, calling the one adult who promised to help her if she ever got into trouble. He gets up and drives into Manhattan to collect her from a cold street corner, and on the way home she asks him for one more thing.
Rating coming soonAn ancient artifact with catastrophic radioactive power is unearthed in the remote wastes of Greenland, and the find puts the rest of the world at risk. Two militant factions are prepared to slaughter for it, and Juan Cabrillo and his network of spies, known as the Corporation, have to keep them from getting it and stop the outbreak of a world war.
Rating coming soonThe dragons kept in the dragon sanctuaries no longer regard them as safe places to live, and they have started to see them as prisons instead and want their freedom back. In the hidden sanctuary of Wyrmroost, Celebrant the Just, King of the Dragons, is plotting his revenge: he means to overthrow the people who confined his kind and to bring back the Age of Dragons, when he and his kind ruled the world without any borders at all.
Rating coming soonThe attorney Barbara Holloway has no strong evidence to work with, only her legal instincts, and if those instincts cannot lead her to the truth then her client will die. Meanwhile, in Eugene, Oregon, a state senator is doing everything he can to keep buried a story that goes back twenty-two years to the death of a young woman at the university.
Rating coming soonThe Luthers are sharecroppers living in the mountains of North Carolina, and the father, Roy, is a sick man with four children who are all too young to look after themselves. He asks his second-eldest daughter, Mary Call, to take over his place when he dies, and to tell nobody when it happens, because if the authorities find out the children will be taken from each other.
Rating coming soonDanny Torrance was the boy in the Overlook Hotel, and he has spent the years since living with what happened there. As an adult he takes up his father's drinking and his father's temper, and drifts across the country until he reaches a small town in New Hampshire and decides to stop. There he works at a hospice, where the residents give him a new name.
Rating coming soonPoirot is flying back to England on the midday service from Paris to Croydon and sleeps through most of it, and the eleven other passengers in the rear compartment include a mystery writer, two French archaeologists, a dentist, a doctor, a moneylender, a businessman and three women. Close to landing a wasp is seen in the cabin, and then the moneylender is found dead.
Rating coming soonRichard Abernethie dies at home and his family gathers at Enderby Hall for the reading of the will, where his sister Cora says out loud that he was murdered. The next day Cora is found dead as well, and Poirot is asked to work out whether she was right and, if she was, which of the family she was talking about.
Rating coming soonAudrina Adare believes she is seven years old when the novel begins, and her memory is not to be trusted. She lives at Whitefern, a Victorian-era mansion near the river, with her father, her mother, her aunt and her cousin, and her father is convinced that she walks in her own time. Before she was born, her elder sister, who had the same name, was murdered in the woods.
Rating coming soonA body is found on the hearth rug in the library at Gossington Hall, the home of Colonel Arthur and Dolly Bantry. The woman is heavily made up, with platinum-blonde hair and a silver-spangled dress, and nobody in the house has any idea at all who she is. The colonel calls the police, and Dolly calls her friend Miss Marple.
Rating coming soonCaroline Crale died in prison sixteen years ago after being convicted of poisoning her husband, the painter Amyas Crale. In her last letter from prison she said she was innocent. Her daughter Carla Lemarchant brings that letter to Poirot and asks him to look into the case, because the people who were at the house that day are still alive.
Rating coming soonOdd Thomas is twenty years old and works as a short-order cook in a small desert town, and he can see the dead. They come to him when they want something, and they cannot speak, so what he has to do is work out what it is they are after. The novel opens with the ghost of a young girl leading him to the man who killed her.
Rating coming soonPoirot is taking a quiet holiday at a secluded hotel in Devon, where he notices a former actress called Arlena Marshall flirting with a married man. She is attractive and she is not well liked by the other guests. One morning she goes out to a cove for a private meeting, and later she is found there, strangled.
Rating coming soonMiss Marple's nephew has paid for her to recuperate at a resort on a Caribbean island after an illness. There she listens, without much interest, to an elderly major's long stories, until he begins describing a man who murdered a series of wives and got away with it. He takes out a photograph to show her, looks over her shoulder, and changes the subject.
Rating coming soonA murder is announced in advance in the personal column of a local newspaper, with a time and an address, and the people named in the advertisement treat it as a joke until the evening in question arrives and something happens that is no joke at all. Miss Marple, staying nearby for treatment, works the case with the county police.
Rating coming soonSam Wood is a police officer in the town of Wells, South Carolina, and one night he finds a body lying in the middle of the highway: the conductor who was organising the town's music festival. Sent to the railway station, he arrests a black man waiting for a train, and the man turns out to be Virgil Tibbs, a homicide investigator from another city.
Rating coming soonAstrid Magnussen is twelve and lives in Los Angeles with her mother, Ingrid, a poet who is brilliant and self-centred. When Ingrid's boyfriend ends the relationship, she poisons him with oleander sap and is sent to prison for life, and Astrid is moved from one foster home to another for the rest of her childhood. The novel follows what the years do to her.
Rating coming soonMark Ablett is holding a house party at his English country house when his long-lost brother Robert, the black sheep of the family, arrives from Australia. Shortly afterwards Robert is found dead, shot through the head, and Mark has disappeared. Tony Gillingham, a stranger who has come to call on his friend Bill Beverley, decides to investigate.
Rating coming soonRabbi David Small leads a Conservative Jewish congregation in the Massachusetts town of Barnard's Crossing, and he is not a conventional rabbi: his training in the Talmud gives him a habit of seeing the third side of any problem. When the body of a young woman is found on the temple grounds, the congregation and the investigation become tangled together.
Rating coming soonFour women in San Francisco put their skills together to work the city's hardest murder cases: Lindsay Boxer, a homicide inspector with the police department; Claire Washburn, a medical examiner; Jill Bernhardt, an assistant district attorney; and Cindy Thomas, a reporter newly assigned to the crime desk of the Chronicle. Their first case involves a bride and groom killed on their wedding night.
Rating coming soonThe protagonist of this novel is a professional hitman who learned his trade from his foster father, Eddie the Butcher, and who followed both of the older man's trades until Eddie died. After killing a union official and a United States senator, he goes to Las Vegas to collect his fee, and finds that a murder contract has been taken out on him instead.
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.
