Best Literary Mysteries
Top 10 Best Literary Mysteries
: The Thirteenth Tale, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, Smilla's Sense of Snow, Case Histories, Possession, The Spy Who Came In from the Cold, Gorky Park, The Daughter of Time, The Maltese Falcon, The Brothers Karamazov
| Author | Diane Setterfield |
| ISBN | 0743298020 |
All children mythologize their birth...So begins the prologue of reclusive author Vida Winter's collection of stories, which are as famous for the mystery of the missing thirteenth tale as they are for the delight and enchantment of the twelve that do exist.
The enigmatic Winter has spent...
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil
| Author | John Berendt |
| ISBN | 0679751521 |
A sublime and seductive reading experience. Brilliantly conceived and masterfully written, this enormously engaging portrait of a most beguiling Southern city has become a modern classic.
Shots rang out in Savannah's grandest mansion in the misty, early morning hours of May 2, 1981. Was...
| Author | Peter Høeg |
| ISBN | 0385315147 |
She thinks more highly of snow and ice than she does of love. She lives in a world of numbers, science and memories--a dark, exotic stranger in a strange land. And now Smilla Jaspersen is convinced she has uncovered a shattering crime...
It happened in the Copenhagen snow. A six-year-old...
| Author | Kate Atkinson |
| ISBN | 0316010707 |
The first book in Kate Atkinson's Jackson Brodie Mysteries series, called "The best mystery of the decade" by Stephen King, finds private investigator Jackson Brodie following three seemingly unconnected family mysteries in Edinburgh
Case one: A little girl goes missing in the night. Case...
| Author | A.S. Byatt |
| ISBN | 0679735909 |
Possession is an exhilarating novel of wit and romance, at once an intellectual mystery and triumphant love story. It is the tale of a pair of young scholars researching the lives of two Victorian poets. As they uncover their letters, journals, and poems, and track their movements from London to Yorkshire—from...
The Spy Who Came In from the Cold
In this classic, John le Carre's third novel and the first to earn him international acclaim, he created a world unlike any previously experienced in suspense fiction. With unsurpassed knowledge culled from his years in British Intelligence, le Carre brings to light the shadowy dealings of international...
| Author | Martin Cruz Smith |
| ISBN | 0345298349 |
A triple murder in a Moscow amusement center: three corpses found frozen in the snow, faces and fingers missing. Chief homicide investigator Arkady Renko is brilliant, sensitive, honest, and cynical about everything except his profession. To identify the victims and uncover the truth, he must battle...
| Author | Josephine Tey |
| ISBN | 0684803860 |
In 1951, Josephine Tey wrote her 5th novel in the Inspector Grant series. In 1990, this mystery novel was named the greatest mystery novel of all time by the British Crime Writers' Association. After reading it, I can definitely see why.
For one thing, during the entire novel, Inspector Alan...
| Author | Dashiell Hammett |
| ISBN | 0752865331 |
Sam Spade is hired by the fragrant Miss Wonderley to track down her sister, who has eloped with a louse called Floyd Thursby. But Miss Wonderley is in fact the beautiful and treacherous Brigid O'Shaughnessy, and when Spade's partner Miles Archer is shot while on Thursby's trail, Spade finds himself...
| Author | Fyodor Dostoyevsky |
| ISBN | 0374528373 |
The Brothers Karamasov is a murder mystery, a courtroom drama, and an exploration of erotic rivalry in a series of triangular love affairs involving the “wicked and sentimental” Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov and his three sons―the impulsive and sensual Dmitri; the coldly rational Ivan; and...
| Author | Katherine Neville |
| ISBN | 0345366239 |
Computer expert Cat Velis is heading for a job to Algeria. Before she goes, a mysterious fortune teller warns her of danger, and an antique dealer asks her to search for pieces to a valuable chess set that has been missing for years...In the South of France in 1790 two convent girls hide valuable pieces...
| Author | Patricia Highsmith |
| ISBN | 0393332144 |
Since his debut in 1955, Tom Ripley has evolved into the ultimate bad boy sociopath, influencing countless novelists and filmmakers. In this first novel, we are introduced to suave, handsome Tom Ripley: a young striver, newly arrived in the heady world of Manhattan in the 1950s. A product of a broken...
An Unsuitable Job for a Woman
| Author | P.D. James |
| ISBN | 0743219554 |
This book, which was first published in 1972, reads like it was written in 1947, if not earlier. It's very much in the tradition of English mysteries that were set in country houses in the years between the two world wars, and there's nothing in the book to suggest the time period in which it is supposed to...
| Author | Kate Atkinson |
| ISBN | 0316012823 |
It is summer, it is the Edinburgh Festival. People queuing for a lunchtime show witness a road-rage incident - a near-homicidal attack which changes the lives of everyone involved. Jackson Brodie, ex-army, ex-police, ex-private detective, is also an innocent bystander - until he becomes a murder...
When Will There Be Good News?
| Author | Kate Atkinson |
| ISBN | 0316154857 |
Three lives come together in unexpected and thrilling ways in Kate Atkinson's When Will There Be Good News?
On a hot summer day, Joanna Mason's family slowly wanders home along a country lane. A moment later, Joanna's life is changed forever...
On a dark night thirty years later, ex-detective...
The Yiddish Policemen's Union
| Author | Michael Chabon |
| ISBN | 0007149824 |
For sixty years, Jewish refugees and their descendants have prospered in the Federal District of Sitka, a "temporary" safe haven created in the wake of revelations of the Holocaust and the shocking 1948 collapse of the fledgling state of Israel. Proud, grateful, and longing to be American, the Jews...
A magnificent blend of fact and fiction, a brilliantly realized paean to Dante's continued grip on our imagination, and a captivating thriller that will surprise readers from beginning to end.
Words can bleed.
In 1865 Boston, the literary geniuses of the Dante Club—poets and...
| Author | Val McDermid |
| ISBN | 0312979533 |
Winter 1963: two children have disappeared in Manchester; the murderous careers of Myra Hindley and Ian Brady have begun. On a freezing day in December, another child goes missing: 13-year-old Alison Carter vanishes from the isolated Derbyshire hamlet of Scardale. For the young George Bennett it...
Mistress of the Art of Death
| Author | Ariana Franklin |
| ISBN | 0399154140 |
A chilling, mesmerizing novel that combines the best of modern forensic thrillers with the detail and drama of historical fiction. In medieval Cambridge, England, four children have been murdered. The crimes are immediately blamed on the town's Jewish community, taken as evidence that Jews sacrifice...
| Author | C.J. Sansom |
| ISBN | 0330411969 |
”’This is not Thomas More’s Utopia, a nation of innocent savages waiting only for God’s word to complete their happiness. This is a violent realm, stewed in the corruption of a decadent church.’
‘I know.’
‘The papists will use every means to present us from building...
| Author | Ann Patchett |
| ISBN | 0062049801 |
As Dr. Marina Singh embarks upon an uncertain odyssey into the insect-infested Amazon, she will be forced to surrender herself to the lush but forbidding world that awaits within the jungle. Charged with finding her former mentor Dr. Annick Swenson, a researcher who has disappeared while working...
Special Topics in Calamity Physics
Special Topics in Calamity Physics is a darkly hilarious coming-of-age novel and a richly plotted suspense tale told through the distinctive voice of its heroine, Blue van Meer. After a childhood moving from one academic outpost to another with her father (a man prone to aphorisms and meteoric affairs),...
Margaret Atwood takes the art of storytelling to new heights in a dazzling novel that unfolds layer by astonishing layer and concludes in a brilliant and wonderfully satisfying twist. Told in a style that magnificently captures the colloquialisms and clichés of the 1930s and 1940s, The Blind Assassin...
| Author | Minette Walters |
| ISBN | 0333733673 |
I've read several of Walters's later novels and for the most part enjoyed them a great deal. Her writing has a tremendous fluency, while she has the ability to create very real characters; the net result is thrillers that have a fine pace and an admirable depth of reader involvement.
Had I not...
| Author | P.D. James |
| ISBN | 0345446666 |
The Barnes & Noble Review
A number of traditions come seamlessly together in P. D. James's Death in Holy Orders, another of her acclaimed mysteries featuring Scotland Yard's Commander Adam Dalgliesh. Included among those traditions are the Golden Age detective story, the police procedural,...
The Murders in the Rue Morgue
In these first five stories about Poe's detective Auguste Dupin, he establishes many of the traditions or motifs we know from classic detective fiction. The eccentric but brilliant detective who solves the mystery merely by analysing the facts from his armchair, the mystery of how a murder was committed...
A Red Herring Without Mustard
| Author | Alan Bradley |
| ISBN | 0385342322 |
Award-winning author Alan Bradley returns with another beguiling novel starring the insidiously clever and unflappable eleven-year-old sleuth Flavia de Luce. The precocious chemist with a passion for poisons uncovers a fresh slew of misdeeds in the hamlet of Bishop's Lacey--mysteries involving...
The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency
| Author | Alexander McCall Smith |
| ISBN | 1400034779 |
A lot of people are under the impression that Alexander Mccall Smith books are strictly for middle aged women. This is NOT the case at all. These books are for everyone. They are not even just for women. A lot of people are also under the impression that these books are mystery books. This is also a misconception....
