I’ve been on a binge this year of reading some fairly good and some terribly bad thrillers and mystery books. I just finished reading “And Then There Were None” by Agatha Christie, which I greatly enjoyed, particularly after reading the Silent Patient, which I thought was awful.
Any favorites of the genre you’d recommend? Any terrible ones you’d steer away from?
For me, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd is the best Agatha Christie. Go in blind. For non-Poirot books, Crooked House and Murder at the Vicarage are also top shelf.
If you like Christie, I would also recommend Louise Penny. She’s very stylistically and thematically similar. Still Life is a great mystery and also a nice window into a cute pastoral Canadian town.
For something off the wall, Leech by Hiron Ennis. A detective is dispatched to a snowbound manor house to investigate the death of his predecessor. However, the detective is a sentient parasitic leech hivemind and the killer he pursues is an alien fungus body snatcher.
Oooh these all sound great! Haven’t read a ton of Christie so am looking forward to checking these out
@Hstansss For light mystery, The Thursday Murder Club books are a good read. A group of retirees in a senior living center have a hobby of trying to solve cold cases. The characters are funny and quirky.
Exactly what I was going to recommend. There are three so far, the first (The Thursday Murder Club) is the best but the other two (The Man Who Died Twice and The Bullet That Missed) are also both a lot of fun. They’re light easy reads, but with enough seriousness and depth to keep you interested, and the character are just wonderful! They’re by Richard Osman, famous for being on the telly and very tall prior to this!
One series I got into for a while was skull duggery pleasant. Very dick Tracey vibes from the main detective, but the catch is he is an animated skeleton who investigates mysteries in the world of magic and has a teenage girl that tags along as his apprentice. All in all a fun read that stays in the detective noir vein but also takes a couple steps into the fantasy realm.
I actually wrote a super long post on some of my favorite mystery series of a couple different flavors for another post when I was bored at work the other day.
Dark, more substantial, more explicit
- Karen Rose’s Romantic Suspense. The world is full of monsters, and Karen Rose will introduce you to them all. These aren’t fantasy monsters, but the human kind. They do fucked up shit and you see a lot of it. WARNING: I think it’s all off screen, but this includes children as victims of sexual crime. However, to me she’s the gold standard for fiction authors. Her characters are broken, and there’s a dichotomy between how they see themselves when they’re the character leading a scene and when they’re a side character that’s really well done. She gets you inside the heads of both the main pair of characters as they heal and fall for each other and the villains, and does an exceptional job at being aware of who knows what and when in their interior monologues. I love the way the books are paced, and the mysteries are complex and layered. I don’t really read romance so can’t comment on that part, but I really like how the developing partnership builds out the characters. In sharing their deepest darkest secrets with their co-lead in a given book, the characters get really fleshed out. This is hands down my favorite series and I go through it start to finish on audiobook 3-4 times a year since discovering it. You don’t need to read the entire series from the start, but they’re broken down into sub-series by city, and those sub-series have strong arcs through them. So far example, you would want to start the 3 part Sacramento series with Say You’re Sorry and go in order. This is probably not “first read” material, but I can’t give a list of my favorite fiction and not pitch what I think is the best I’ve read. There’s really nothing else like it. If Game of Thrones isn’t too much, this is probably OK.
Victorian Era
- Lady Sherlock by Sherry Thomas. This is a wildly popular setting because of Sherlock Holmes, and I don’t think most manage it very well, but when you do nail the setting, it really creates a deep feeling world. Holmes adaptations themselves are also relatively popular, but this is the most interesting one to me. Charlotte Holmes is thrown out of her house for refusing to fit in to the era’s norms, and invents the Sherlock character we all know and love to survive and use her brain. Of all the adaptations, this is the one that feels like the same character deep down to me. It also highlights the issues with the era instead of romanticizing them like most, without being overbearing. You don’t have to read in order, but book one sets up the premise.
- Glass and Steele by CJ Archer. This one is an awesome mesh of different settings and genres blended really well together. It’s Wild West outlaws coming to Victorian era England for a fantasy epic styled coming into the light of magic, where magicians who have hidden themselves for fear of prosecution from the craft guilds come into the light. The mysteries don’t ignore the magic elements, but don’t use them as a crutch and stay broadly true to the era, and the take on magic is unique and interesting. You really want to read this from book 1.
-second post because I wrote way too much
Light, shorter, on the wacky side:
- Stephanie Plum series by Janet Evanovich. Stephanie Plum is a little crazy, but the world she’s in is crazier, and she takes it all in stride. She’s a bounty hunter working for her cousin’s bail bond agency chasing fugitives, and while there’s mild profanity and some messed up situations, the tone is incredibly light and funny. This is one of my favorites that I reread frequently, and I really enjoy Lorelei King’s reading of the audiobooks. There’s some minor carry over, but you don’t need to start at the beginning.
- Miss Fortune series by Jana DeLeon. Fortune Redding is a CIA agent hiding in a tiny town of Louisiana because she pissed off an arms dealer by breaking her cover to protect a kid. I looked a long time for other books comparable in tone to Stephanie Plum, and this is my best example. More stupid nonsense and enjoyable characters. Starting at the beginning isn’t strictly necessary, but there’s more underlying plot arc through the series.
- Haunting Danielle series by Bobbi Holmes. You’d probably be surprised by how many lengthy series there are centered around a haunted B&B owner solving murders. This is my favorite though. It’s similar in the light, nonsensical tone, but with an OK (if not super deep) mystical element. You won’t be lost starting wherever, but you’ll miss out on character development if you start partway in.
- Jack Reacher series by Lee Child. The Amazon series takes it dark and hardcore, and that stuff all happens in the books, but they don’t really feel dark reading them. Much more action oriented, but Reacher sees something wrong, gets hooked in one way or another, and comes in like a nuke ripping the bad guys to shreds. These theoretically have carry over, but you can very easily read them in any order.
Yeah, it’s a lot, but I could do more. I read way too many audiobooks.
Seconding the Jack Reacher novels. There’s a lot of them, and of course some are not as good as others, but they’re all very readable.
I started a bit seeing my hometown mentioned as the setting for a series of books. I will have to check that out now!
Since it’s the only one I mentioned I’m guessing Sacramento? Great series, great arc, but I’ll mention again that you need to know going in that the villains are dark. In this one specifically, there are characters who have been the victims of sexual crimes at young ages and obviously the bad guys who have a pattern of doing it.
I love all the books, but every arc gets a little more polished and this is the most recent one, so I really love it. It’s just one I can’t tell people to go into entirely blind.
Short thriller/comedy/sci-fi that I really liked was The Murderbot Diaries series by Martha Wells
I only read the first in the series (though I’ve heard the whole series is great), but I was really surprised by how much I liked All Systems Red. Really entertaining quick read.
The audiobooks are a great quick listen (I think about 4 hours long or so on average)
I got those via my library and Libby.
The protagonist has such a unique narrative perspective
Henning Mankell’s Wallander books are great, if you’re into the slightly depressing Nordic vibe.
I’m not sure they really fit into the category of murder mystery that you’re looking for, but I recently read both The Seven Deaths if Evelyn Harcastle and The Devil and the Dark Water and absolutely loved both of them.
I was also disappointed in the Silent Patient!
I like the Jimmy Perez series by Ann Cleeves set in the Shetland Islands. The descriptions of the scenery alone are worthwhile.Highly recommend Raymond Chandler’s books. He’s one of the reasons I got so into reading.
Some other good books are by Rodica Ojog Brasoveanu and George Arion, but sadly I don’t think they’re translated to English.
The book that got me back into reading for pleasure after many years of not doing so was a comic called Whiteout by writer Greg Rucka and artist Steve Lieber. It’s a murder mystery set on an Antarctic research station.
I would also suggest pretty much anything written by Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips published by Image. Some of the best noir (in any format) you will ever read is by them. I particularly enjoyed
- The Fade Out - a Holywood scriptwriter in the 1950 wakes up in a bathtub after a party he can’t remember in a house he doesn’t know, and discovers the starlet of the film he’s currently working on dead on the sofa. It’s fair to say the ending is a little weak but getting there is quite a ride
- Fatale - a Cthulhu/noir about a femme fatale and her trials and tribulations over a century or so
- Incognito - a superhero/noir about a supper villain in witness protection who tries to g et back into the world of supers, this time as a hero. But of course no-one trusts him on either side
Everyone in my Family has Killed Someone was a very fun read for me! Family drama in an Australian ski resort told after the fact in 1st person.
Ooh haven’t heard of this one! Will check it out
I have really enjoyed Japanese honkaku mysteries. They’re based on the classic British mysteries of the 1930s. Not many are translated but I liked The Honjin Murders and The Tattoo Murder Case. Search honkaku and read them for the Japanese take on the country house murder.
