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Before the Fact

10 best books like Before the Fact (Francis Iles): A Touch of Death (Hard Case Crime #17), Vertigo, Mischief, The Lady Vanishes, Ride the Pink Horse, The Horizontal Man, The House of Dr. Edwardes, The Thinking Machine, The Lodger, Uncle Abner Master of Mysteries: A Collection of Classic Detective Stories

A Touch of Death (Hard Case Crime #17)
AuthorCharles Williams
ISBN0843955880
When washed up football player Lee Scarborough gets hired to steal $120,000 from a banker's widow, how can he pass it up? Little does Lee know that other people have their sights set on the money and the widow herself. And Madelon Butler, the widow, is the most deadly of them all...

A Touch of Death...
Vertigo
AuthorBoileau-Narcejac
ISBN0747531870
D'entre les Morts = Among the Dead = Vertigo = The Living and the Dead, Boileau-Narcejac (Pierre Boileau, Thomas Narcejac)
The Living and the Dead (also published as Vertigo) (French: D'entre les morts, "Among the Dead") is a 1954 crime novel by Pierre Boileau and Pierre Ayraud (Thomas Narcejac),...
Mischief
AuthorCharlotte Armstrong
ISBN0930330722
Tonight is the night, the big event. As Charlotte Armstrong’s Mischief begins, Peter O. Jones, small-town newspaper editor, and his wife Ruth have come to New York City so that Peter can accept an award. They are nervous but excited about the glamorous evening stretching out before them. There’s...
The Lady Vanishes
AuthorEthel Lina White
ISBN0743413008
THE WORLD-FAMOUS SUSPENSE NOVEL FROM WHICH ALFRED HITCHCOCK CREATED HIS MOVIE MASTERPIECE, REDISCOVERED BY EDGAR AWARD-WINNING MYSTERY EXPERT OTTO PENZLER!

Iris Carr is a beautiful, young socialite on her way back home to England after vacationing in Europe. Feeling terribly alone and...
Ride the Pink Horse
AuthorDorothy B. Hughes
Sailor, a hood from Chicago, steps off a bus in a small, desert town. He is looking for someone, his boss, 'Sen' - a crooked, 'weasel-faced' Senator, who has set up the murder of his wealthy wife and made it look like a bungled robbery. Sailor is the only person who can finger Sen for the crime, and he intends...
The Horizontal Man
AuthorHelen Eustis
ISBN0140007180
This was a weird book, just weird.

First off, it's about a popular, handsome, debonair, poetic, young male teacher of English literature at a posh or elite girls' college circa 1943 or so. He's found dead, bludgeoned by a fireplace poker. (Pokers can come in so handy.) This happens on the very...
The House of Dr. Edwardes
AuthorFrancis Beeding
ISBN0795307624
The single most striking quality of Francis Beeding's 'The House of Doctor Edwardes' is the sense of foreboding and uncertainty that pervades every scene, the hallmarks of many great mystery.

From the very first page of the prologue, Beeding makes the very air the characters live and breathe...
The Thinking Machine
AuthorJacques Futrelle
ISBN0812970144
This irascible genius, this diminutive egghead scientist, known to the world as “The Thinking Machine,” is no less than the newly rediscovered literary link between Sherlock Holmes and Nero Wolfe: Professor Augustus S. F. X. Van Dusen, who—with only the power of ratiocination—unravels...
The Lodger
AuthorMarie Belloc Lowndes
ISBN0897332997
”’Do you think to escape the consequences of your hideous treachery. I trusted you, Mrs. Bunting, and you betrayed me! But I am protected by a higher power, for I still have much to do.’ Then, his voice sinking to a whisper, he hissed out ‘Your end will be bitter as wormwood and sharp as a two-edged...
Uncle Abner Master of Mysteries: A Collection of Classic Detective Stories
AuthorMelville Davisson Post
ISBN1410106314
This work usually appears on lists of the ten most important books of detective stories published in the United States. The tales of Uncle Abner take place in what is now West Virginia, in the 1840's or 1850's. Melville Davisson Post (1869-1930) was a lawyer, political insider, and candidate for President...
Trent's Last Case
AuthorE.C. Bentley
ISBN0755103270
On Wall Street, the mere mention of the name Sigsbee Manderson is enough to send a stock soaring—or bring it tumbling back to earth. Feared but not loved, Manderson has no one to mourn him when the gardener at his British country estate finds him facedown in the dirt, a bullet buried in his brain. There...
Calamity Town / Dragon's teeth
AuthorEllery Queen
ISBN0060810688
Wrightsville, a typical American town, buried in the great American heartland, up to its neck in good old American corn. The well-respected Wrights: daddy Wright is the town banker, Momma Wright is the town social lioness, daughter Patricia the town beauty, Nora the town recluse, Lola the town scandal....
Trial and Error
AuthorAnthony Berkeley
ISBN0755102053
This crime classic written and set in the 1930's, preWW2 England has been recently reprinted. I've given it 5 stars and would recommend this book to any fans of mystery.

Poor Mr. Todhunter has been informed by his Dr. that he has a heart aneurysm that could go off at any time. He has instructed him...
Last Seen Wearing
AuthorHillary Waugh
ISBN0330389890




I'll give this 4 stars (though it's probably, in truth, a touch under...), and leave my (typically) overoptimistic first impressions (below) alone.

An early and 'classic' example of the police procedural, it is still rooted in pulp and early 50's noir, and is important...
To Catch A Thief
AuthorDavid Dodge
ISBN0856178039
David Dodge’s writing style often reminds me of Montgomery Clift’s acting style; five minutes into the film or the narrative, you forget either exist. Clift’s fine performances were often overlooked, because they weren’t showy. Clift no longer existed, only the character he was portraying....
Marnie
AuthorWinston Graham
ISBN0755109007
What's the childhood secret Marnie is running from? Told in the first person, Marnie is a self-portrait of a con artist who serially changes identity in order to build a better life for herself. The secret to her success is complete emotional detachment. So when her latest boss falls in love with her,...
The Trouble with Harry
AuthorJack Trevor Story
ISBN1594161429
"As engaging a tale as I have encountered in months of looking for something really amusing to read.”—Kelsey Guilfoil, Chicago Tribune

“A pleasantly muted mystery that is genuinely funny fantasy as well.”—New York Times

On the outskirts of a small English town, young...
Green for Danger
AuthorChristianna Brand
ISBN0786703865
Set in a military hospital during the blitz, this novel is one of Brand's most intricately plotted detection puzzles, executed with her characteristic cleverness and gusto. When a patient dies under the anesthetic and later the presiding nurse is murdered, Inspector Cockrill finds himself with...
Phantom Lady
AuthorCornell Woolrich
ISBN0743423739
Phantom lady, I was with you for six hours last night, but I can't remember what you look like, or what you wore -- except for that large orange hat. We sat shoulder to shoulder at a little bar in the east Fifties. We ate dinner together, saw a Broadway show together, shared a cab together.

The bartender,...
The Beast Must Die
AuthorNicholas Blake
ISBN0330373218
The book starts off with the diary of Frank, who addressing the reader tells us that he is going to kill the man who ran over his son. The diary stops at the point where Frank is supposed to kill the person responsible but he fails and the yet the other person turns up dead anyways and Nigel Strangeways is invited...
Tragedy at Law
AuthorCyril Hare
ISBN0330377388
A judge commits a crime of negligence after receiving a death threat...a crime that might completely derail his career, if the person writing the death threats doesn't get him first!

I liked this but called it pretty early, then spent the rest of the book paranoid that my solution was a red herring....
The Tremor of Forgery
AuthorPatricia Highsmith
ISBN0871132583
Under the hot desert sun nothing is quite as it seems. Howard Ingham, an American writer, is sent to Tunisia to gather material for a movie, a love story too sordid to be set in America. But his director fails to arrive as scheduled and the erratic mails bring news of infidelities and suicide.

Ingham,...
Devil Take the Blue-tail Fly
AuthorJohn Franklin Bardin
ISBN0140107347
John Franklin Bardin's most acclaimed work plays a virtuoso performance on music and madness in this unforgettable thriller.

In 1946 New York, Ellen, a world-renowned musician, is suffering from the effects of her latest mental breakdown. Amongst other challenges, a chance meeting with...
Nobody's Perfect
AuthorDonald E. Westlake
ISBN0445407158
The priceless painting is titled "Folly Leads to Man's Ruin," and its owner, the rich and careless Mr. Chauncey, wants it stolen for the insurance payout. That's why he hires Dortmunder, who has a foolproof plan. Just in case, Chauncey also recruits a hit man to make sure he gets the painting back.Too...
Rope: A Play
AuthorPatrick Hamilton
ISBN0094508607
For the mere sake of adventure, danger, and the -fun of the thing, - Wyndham Brandon persuades his weak minded friend, Charles Granillo, to assist him in the murder of a fellow undergraduate, a perfectly harmless man named Ronald Raglan. They place the body in a wooden chest, and to add spice to their handiwork,...
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