Angels & Demons
Dan Brown, 2000
A Harvard symbologist is pulled from his bed into one night of pursuit beneath Rome, where a corpse is branded with a sign only he can read.
Mystery, thriller & crime: books to read
These books trade in the tension between what a place shows and what it keeps hidden, whether that's Rome's churches, a snowbound Swedish island, or a wealthy Vermont college. You get the pull of a puzzle and the people caught inside it, as in «The Secret History», where belonging has a price, or The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, where a forty-year-old disappearance opens onto a family's closed doors.
A page that shows it
The moment a scholar realises the symbol in the photograph is addressed to him.
The image on the page was that of a human corpse. The body had been stripped naked, and its head had been twisted, facing completely backward. On the victim’s chest was a terrible burn. The man had been branded...imprinted with a single word. It was a word Langdon knew well. Very well. He stared at the ornate lettering in disbelief. -
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The Silent Patient
Alex Michaelides, 2019
A psychotherapist tries to make a silent murder suspect speak, and finds his own life caught in her refusal.
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The Secret History
Donna Tartt, 1992
A California scholarship boy is taken up by a circle of Greek students at an elite Vermont college — and by the thing they have done. A novel about beauty, envy and the cost of belonging.
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The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo
Stieg Larsson, 2005
A disgraced financial journalist and a furious young hacker are drawn into a forty-year-old disappearance on a snowbound Swedish island, where a rich family keeps its secrets.
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The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest
Stieg Larsson, 2007
A wounded woman, an ER doctor counting minutes, and a journalist in handcuffs—a thriller about the machinery that protects secret power.
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La sombra del viento
Carlos Ruiz Zafón, 2001
A boy is taken to a secret library in post-war Barcelona, where one book leads him into a city's buried past.
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The Client
John Grisham, 1993
A boy who knows where a body is buried becomes the most wanted witness in Memphis, and the only lawyer who will help him is one step from losing everything.
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Rogue Lawyer
John Grisham, 2015
A criminal defense lawyer takes the cases nobody else in the county will touch — and pays for it in threats, cheap motels and a bodyguard called Partner.
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Missing You
Harlan Coben, 2014
A New York detective opens a dating site and finds the face of the fiancé who vanished eighteen years ago—a cold case that may not be cold.
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The Racketeer
John Grisham, 2012
A disbarred lawyer in a minimum-security federal camp explains the rules of his new life—and what a man with nothing left can do with them.
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Smiley's People
John le Carré, 1979
A retired spymaster is pulled back into the trade he was told to leave, where old loyalties and old betrayals wear the same grey coat.
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Disclosure
Michael Crichton, 1994
A Seattle tech manager’s merger week turns personal when an accusation makes the office a maze of power, sex and plausible deniability.
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The Whistler
John Grisham, 2016
A tip about a corrupt Florida judge sends two judicial investigators into a case with higher powers behind it. Grisham's patient procedural suspense and a wry, road-trip partnership.
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Red Dragon
Thomas Harris, 1981
A retired FBI profiler is pulled back to hunt a killer who strikes by the moon, while the man who nearly killed him waits in a cell.
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Bleachers
John Grisham, 2003
A star quarterback returns to the town that worshipped him and the coach who made him, to reckon with old glory and old wounds.
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A Taste for Death
P. D. James, 1986
Two bodies found by a canal in Paddington, a ten-year-old thief with a taste for smoked salmon, and Dalgliesh picking through the parish's polite secrets.
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Hornet's Nest
Patricia Cornwell, 1996
Cornwell leaves the morgue for a whole Southern city: an angry deputy chief, a rookie reporter and the crimes swarming between them.
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The Honorary Consul
Graham Greene, 1973
A kidnapping gone wrong in a dusty Argentine river town, and the odd, decent, badly married men caught up in it.
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The Eighth Day
Thornton Wilder, 1967
A murder charge in a small Illinois town becomes Wilder's long argument with providence: how much of a life is chosen, how much is handed to us, and what the worst of it is for.
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Seven Days in May
Fletcher Knebel, 1962
A Cold War thriller about a popular general's plot against the White House, and the handful of insiders trying to stop him in seven days.
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Sharp Objects
Gillian Flynn, 2006
A damaged Chicago reporter goes home to cover a small town's violence and finds her own family waiting.
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Big Little Lies
Liane Moriarty, 2014
A satirical mystery about school-gate friendships, perfect marriages and the small lies that hold a community together.
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One of Us Is Lying
Karen M. McManus, 2017
A high-school gossip app turns a routine detention into a murder case, and four students with everything to hide become suspects.
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Then She Was Gone
Lisa Jewell, 2017
Ten years after a mother loses her daughter, a girl who looks just like her walks into her life.
A taste of the feed
What it costs to answer no questions when the charge is murder.
The following day, she lay in bed in a private room at the hospital. The police questioned her in the presence of her lawyer. Alicia remained silent throughout the interview. Her lips were pale, bloodless; they fluttered occasionally but formed no words, made no sounds. She answered no questions. She could not, would not, speak. Nor did she speak when charged with Gabriel’s murder. She remained silent when she was placed under arrest, refusing to deny her guilt or confess it.
The Silent Patient · Alex Michaelides
The idea that a life has one crack running down it, decided in advance.
DOES SUCH a thing as “the fatal flaw,” that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature? I used to think it didn’t. Now I think it does. And I think that mine is this: a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs.
The Secret History · Donna Tartt
What a wall of forty-three pressed flowers can tell you that the police never could.
After putting down the telephone the eighty-two-year-old birthday boy sat for a long time looking at the pretty but meaningless flower whose name he did not yet know. Then he looked up at the wall above his desk. There hung forty-three pressed flowers in their frames. Four rows of ten, and one at the bottom with four. In the top row one was missing from the ninth slot. Desert Snow would be number forty-four.
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo · Stieg Larsson
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