100 books like Death Comes as the End

From the very first page, I was intrigued by Shriver's exploration of maternal complexities. It shone a light on motherhood that I’d never seen before. I found the raw emotion and psychological depth unparalleled and loved how the narrative really delved into nature versus nurture and went so far as to question: are people born evil? 

Being a mother myself, I couldn’t imagine living through the horror of my child becoming withdrawn and that disengagement resulting in such devastation in a community. The dismissal of the mother’s concerns by the father was also an interesting social commentary.

Finally, Shriver’s writing is beyond beautiful yet so accessible for the readers.

A multiple POV thriller that kept me up all night. This book awed me with its multiple POVs combined with unreliability and timeline jumps.

As the book shifted from one POV to the other and from one timeline to another, I loved how the author weaved in the backstories of the characters by showing the impact it had on the present timeline.

The writing. The style, the words used, and the way the sentences spun the story is something I still think about, years after I first read this book. It drew me in, lulled me into a false sense of security, then sprung a small nugget of what really happened. A brilliant tactic.

This book is on my list of all-time favorites. I read it more than a decade ago, but I still can’t get the ending out of my head. The book is intriguing and fast-paced, and I found the characters so relatable–normal, middle-class people, much like my own family.

Maybe that is why the ending hit me so hard. I didn’t see it coming, but I should have. Maybe I didn’t want to believe it could happen or even consider the possibility. Who would? What a twist. All the evidence is there. The motive is there. It is the only ending that makes sense. It’s perfect. 

The strengths of Wentworth’s books lie in the portrayal of the era, and in the characters who are forced to find their way through unfamiliar and difficult circumstances. They are not all wealthy, they are not all high-born, and we watch them as they try to adapt to wartime conditions and deprivations. 

Wentworth’s mysteries are fascinating, clever, with the protagonist Miss Silver, a spinster who is a professional ‘private enquiry agent’. The Listening Eye, I feel, contains some of the most acute observations of human nature, and this makes the characters just seem so relatable. Wentworth books are ‘clean’ mysteries with a strong thread of romance, little gore, no bad language, or sexy shenanigans.

This is a great one to curl up on a cold night with. A group of carolers go out to sing at Christmas. One disappears. That’s it. The stage is set in such a simple way, it’s masterful. Bring on the ‘sleuth’, John Rutherford, who manages to be the Watson to the official police investigators, along with his wife Molly. The story is witty, intriguing, and beautifully put together. 

Witting really deserves to be better known as his writing is definitely on a par with the Golden Age detective writer greats. Now being republished by Galileo Publishing.

I highly recommend every mystery Sayers has written. She’s my kind of author — articulate, inspiring, a writer who writes about her surroundings with a realism that allows a reader to enter and learn more: In this book, death by the ringing of church bells in a small English village.

She’s complex but delivers layers of life and death with profound simplicity and understanding. The daughter of a minister, an advertising copywriter, a poet, she graduated from Oxford and used her life experiences to color every page she wrote.

I love her spunk and the exciting way she has written. But mostly, I love her monocled amateur sleuth, Lord Peter Whimsey who exploded on her typewriter in her first mystery.

I always like to get in at the beginning of an ongoing romance/relationship and this is the one where Alleyn meets Troy, the artist and his future wife. Actually, no I take that back, it’s a spoiler, don’t pay any attention. What if she’s the killer? Then where would the rest of these books be? 

You might think Marsh’s characters seem no different than Sayers’, Christie’s, etc well-to-do detectives and their privileged suspects, but there is a difference here. There is tension between Alleyn, his traditional outlook, his job, and Troy’s more liberal leanings. But like any great couple, together they make a great, if not very romantic, combination. 

Southern writer Joshilyn Jackson is one of my all-time favorites, with her unerring sense of place. In her last few books, she has turned to mystery plots. The results are mysteries of high literary quality. In The Almost Sisters, unflinching questions about race and privilege reside next to questions of guilt and innocence. I was close to the end before I picked up on a twist she’d embedded. 

Look, I know Hogarth is better known for her more recent novel Motherthing, but I will always have a soft spot for this book. Decades ago, there were some grisly cannibalistic murders at the Boy Meets Girl Inn, resulting in a reputed haunting. Noelle and Alf, high school friends with summer night shift gigs at the Inn, are organizing a soiree to celebrate the anniversary of the killings.

It's told mostly in Noelle’s journal entries that have been annotated and footnoted by detectives, experts, and a movie director, which made it irresistible to me since it’s done so well; the novel spotlights the ultimate unreliable narrator and includes some absolutely disgusting (in the best possible way) body horror scenes. I’ve read and re-read this book, and each time, I’m so creeped out.

Take this book with you on a summer vacation that involves a hotel stay, and read it… show more.

Based on the case of child killer Mary Bell this book is an unexpected page-turner and is written with so much heart. It’s dark, compulsive, and the prose sparkles.

This is another dual timeline book we follow Chrissie as a child living a hard life and eventually committing murder. We meet her again as an adult with a new identity and a daughter of her own. Nancy Tucker is a psychologist I believe and it certainly comes across.

The entire cast in this book is written with such tenderness and insight. A really difficult book dealing with a tough topic but also a story of redemption and understanding.