Here are 100 books that The Bangalore Detectives Club fans have personally recommended if you like
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I’ve always adored mysteries. My dad has the entire collection of Agatha Christie books, but even before I read those, I worked through his ancient original hardbacks of Enid Blyton's Famous Fivebooks and the less well-known Malcolm SavilleLone Pineseries. I love getting totally engrossed in a series, so I really get to BE the main character–I am one of four siblings, and when I wasn’t too busy reading, we were the Famous Five. I was George. I think I still am, to be perfectly honest–she was fiery, passionate, loved her dog, and wanted to serve justice and out the bad guys. What a role model!
Is this a cozy mystery? I’m saying yes, but honestly, it’s so good I’d squeeze it into any genre just so I can talk about it. It has a crime, a small community, a couple of bumbling policemen, a locked room, a bunch of people trying, amateurishly, to solve a crime, and a lot of ‘keep the reader guessing’ elements.
So far, so cozy. It also has a lot of anxious people and explores their unhappy and complicated lives in a hilarious, satirical tone. It is also just a little bit sad, as well as funny and happy, so, all right, it probably isn’t really a cozy mystery, but it’s been one of the best listens on my audiobook library so far this year–I’ve already listened to it twice in 2024, and it’s only July.
The funny, touching and unpredictable No. 1 New York Times bestseller, now a major Netflix TV series
'A brilliant and comforting read' MATT HAIG 'Funny, compassionate and wise. An absolute joy' A.J. PEARCE 'A surefooted insight into the absurdity, beauty and ache of life' GUARDIAN 'I laughed, I sobbed, I recommended it to literally everyone I know' BUZZFEED 'Captures the messy essence of being human' WASHINGTON POST
From the 18 million copy internationally bestselling author of A Man Called Ove _______
It's New Year's Eve and House Tricks estate agents are hosting an open viewing in an up-market apartment when…
I’ve always adored mysteries. My dad has the entire collection of Agatha Christie books, but even before I read those, I worked through his ancient original hardbacks of Enid Blyton's Famous Fivebooks and the less well-known Malcolm SavilleLone Pineseries. I love getting totally engrossed in a series, so I really get to BE the main character–I am one of four siblings, and when I wasn’t too busy reading, we were the Famous Five. I was George. I think I still am, to be perfectly honest–she was fiery, passionate, loved her dog, and wanted to serve justice and out the bad guys. What a role model!
This whole series always makes me smile–Mma Ramotswe remains one of the most hilarious main characters in any cozy mystery I’ve ever read. The crimes she comes up against are usually low-key, usually secondary to the backdrop of Botswana, and often solved by accident as much as design.
Precious Ramotswe’s commentary on Botswanan life is simply brilliant, but almost even more amusing is her sidekick, Grace Makutsi, who bumbles through her role as secretary-promoted-to-assistant-detective, and the interaction between the characters never fails to give me laugh-out-loud moments.
This whole series has to be the most feel-good series ever, and now I’m rediscovering it as an audio production of the radio series; it’s as heart-warming as a bright bunch of flowers on a dull day, a bowl of hot soup when you’re sick; a hot bubble bath when it’s snowing outside…I love it, love it, love it!
Precious Ramotswe, a cheerful woman of traditional build, is the founder of Botswana's first and only ladies' detective agency. Here is a gentle interpretation of the detective role: solving her cases through her innate wisdom and understanding of human nature, she 'helps people with problems in their lives'. With a tone that is as elegant as that which is unfailingly used by his protagonist, Alexander McCall Smith tenderly unfolds a picture of life in Gaborone with a mastery of comic understatement and an evident sympathy for his subjects and their milieu. In the background of all this is Botswana, a…
I’ve always adored mysteries. My dad has the entire collection of Agatha Christie books, but even before I read those, I worked through his ancient original hardbacks of Enid Blyton's Famous Fivebooks and the less well-known Malcolm SavilleLone Pineseries. I love getting totally engrossed in a series, so I really get to BE the main character–I am one of four siblings, and when I wasn’t too busy reading, we were the Famous Five. I was George. I think I still am, to be perfectly honest–she was fiery, passionate, loved her dog, and wanted to serve justice and out the bad guys. What a role model!
This book was such fun to read! It's really unusual in that it's told entirely by letters, emails, and text messages. It has no chapters and invites lots of flicking pages back and forth to go back and check things, so it's super interactive (I was glad I got the paperback!). I really liked that most of the characters are unlikeable, and none of them seem to like each other very much, either. I LOVE unlikeable characters.
On top of that, much of the information they give in the letters is unreliable at best or completely untrue at worst. This book is a murder mystery, but it takes ages to find out who's dead, and by the time I found out, I'd wanted most of the characters to have been killed off–they really are a nasty lot! This book was totally original and very clever, and I adored it from…
INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER Winner of the CWA New Blood Dagger Award
“[W]itty, original…a delight.” —The New York Times
Perfect for fans of Ruth Ware and Lisa Jewell, this international bestseller and “dazzlingly clever” (The Sunday Times, London) murder mystery follows a community rallying around a sick child—but when escalating lies lead to a dead body, everyone is a suspect.
The Fairway Players, a local theatre group, is in the midst of rehearsals when tragedy strikes the family of director Martin Hayward and his wife Helen, the play’s star. Their young granddaughter has been diagnosed with a rare form of cancer, and…
Truth told, folks still ask if Saul Crabtree sold his soul for the perfect voice. If he sold it to angels or devils. A Bristol newspaper once asked: “Are his love songs closer to heaven than dying?” Others wonder how he wrote a song so sad, everyone who heard it…
I’ve always adored mysteries. My dad has the entire collection of Agatha Christie books, but even before I read those, I worked through his ancient original hardbacks of Enid Blyton's Famous Fivebooks and the less well-known Malcolm SavilleLone Pineseries. I love getting totally engrossed in a series, so I really get to BE the main character–I am one of four siblings, and when I wasn’t too busy reading, we were the Famous Five. I was George. I think I still am, to be perfectly honest–she was fiery, passionate, loved her dog, and wanted to serve justice and out the bad guys. What a role model!
I love London. I love old mysteries. I love the Art Deco era. I love magic. As a child, my dad was part of the Magic Circle, and my brother and I learned some of the tricks–and when I say ‘my brother and I learned tricks,’ I mean I twirled endless chiffon scarfs from thin air and tried not to get cut in half, and he tried to cut me in half.
Tom Mead’s tale of conjuring, stage trickery, and locked room mystery somehow transports me back to my childhood, even though his 1930s setting is far further back than my 70s childhood! He gives us that Golden Age impossible puzzle–how is a man killed inside a locked room?–and I admit, my guess was quite wrong in this cleverly woven tale of intrigue and deceit, but the magic of smoke, mirrors, trickery, and Art Deco theatre more than made up…
A Publishers Weekly Top 10 Best Mysteries of 2022 Selection
In this "sharply-drawn period piece" (New York Times), a magician-turned-sleuth in pre-war London solves three impossible crimes
In 1930s London, celebrity psychiatrist Anselm Rees is discovered dead in his locked study, and there seems to be no way that a killer could have escaped unseen. There are no clues, no witnesses, and no evidence of the murder weapon. Stumped by the confounding scene, the Scotland Yard detective on the case calls on retired stage magician-turned-part-time sleuth Joseph Spector. For who better to make sense of the impossible than one who…
A banker by day and a cynical cartoonist-cum-blogger by night, I have traveled the world, have met many interesting people with compelling backgrounds, and have experienced many peculiar and beautiful things.
I love getting inspiration from my experiences and spinning stories out of that. As an author, I always look out for the unconventional ending fueled by my fervid imagination.
I prefer the medium of the short story as it keeps the author honest and sharp—no meandering into unrelated tangents.
Ruskin Bond is known more for his simple stories about everyday people in the Himalayan foothills (like a North Indian R.K. Narayan). He does throw in the odd story, which seems like a folktale with a surprising ending like A Face in the Night and The Eyes Have It. This livens up the collection more, as you don’t know when you will get one of the unexpected plot twists.
His books ooze with his love for his adopted country, and he writes with such tenderness about young characters that they are wholesome and fulfilling to read.
What I love most about him is that he is one of the most approachable and friendly authors. He spends hours sitting in his hometown’s main bookshop talking with readers and autographing their purchases.
Ever since I picked up an old copy of Richard Halliburton’s Book of Wonders as a child, I’ve known that exploring other cultures and countries is something I wanted to experience for the rest of my life. From then on, I’ve traveled, taken cross-cultural studies, and managed international teams as a tech marketer–and my passion for new people and places hasn’t ceased. I love reading (and writing) about the liminal spaces in history–the times and places that aren’t easy to define and don’t make it into standard history books. This list reflects my interests, and I hope it broadens the horizons of other readers.
This massive book has haunted me ever since I finished it a few months ago. It’s set during a period I knew nothing about (India, 1975, during Indira Gandhi’s “State of Emergency”).
It took me a while to become invested in the characters, and that is because Mistry takes his time (more than 600 pages) to really develop the four main characters, exploring their history, their motives, fears, and prejudices.
Parts of this book were so brutal that I had to set it aside for a few days until I felt I could continue. Parts of it were so sensitive and touching that I cried.
When I finished it, I had a book hangover, and I haven’t been able to get it out of my head since.
With a compassionate realism and narrative sweep that recall the work of Charles Dickens, this magnificent novel captures all the cruelty and corruption, dignity and heroism, of India. The time is 1975. The place is an unnamed city by the sea. The government has just declared a State of Emergency, in whose upheavals four strangers--a spirited widow, a young student uprooted from his idyllic hill station, and two tailors who have fled the caste violence of their native village--will be thrust together, forced to share one cramped apartment and an uncertain future.
As the characters move from distrust to friendship…
Human lie detector, Charmaine Digby, is psyched to put her ability to the test as the County Coroner's new investigative assistant. But she sure never expected she’d need it to solve a murder! Not until she got her first assignment. Interview the hunky doctor reporting the suspicious death of Trudy,…
James V. Irving was born and raised in Gloucester, Massachusetts. He is a graduate of the University of Virginia, majoring in English. He holds a law degree from the College of William and Mary. After completing his undergraduate studies at UVA, Mr. Irving spent two years employed as a private detective in Northern Virginia, where he pursued wayward spouses, located skips, investigated insurance claims, and handled criminal investigations. In his early years as a lawyer, he practiced criminal law, which, along with his investigative experience and trial work, informs this fictional account of Joth Proctor. Mr. Irving and his wife, Cindy, live in Vienna, Virginia.
I was looking for a writer to breathe new life into the sometimes-stuffy traditional English novel format, and Wilkie Collins is that man. In what is widely considered the first detective novel, Collins introduces many of the tropes of the classic whodunit, including the English country house setting, the gentleman detective, the skilled professional contrasted with the bungling local investigator, and a generational curse arising from the initial theft.
Underlying this gripping tale is the truth that the moonstone belongs not to one of the principal players who compete for it but to the religious site in India from which it was originally stolen. Justice has an immediate, local, eternal, and global context. The result is a book with memorable characters and enough twists and turns to keep you guessing until the end.
Who, in the name of wonder, had taken the Moonstone out of Miss Rachel's drawer?
A celebrated Indian yellow diamond is first stolen from India, then vanishes from a Yorkshire country house. Who took it? And where is it now? A dramatist as well as a novelist, Wilkie Collins gives to each of his narratorsa household servant, a detective, a lawyer, a cloth-eared Evangelical, a dying medical manvibrant identities as they separately tell the part of the story that concerns themselves.
One of the great triumphs of nineteenth-century sensation fiction, The Moonstone tells of a mystery that for page after…
In childhood, I memorized the Encyclopedia’s human anatomy pages, leading the family physician to explain, “Children like this become doctors or writers.” Good call, Doc! I wrote 14 of the 92 entries in my high school’s annual literary magazine (the most by one student). In college I earned a Bachelor’s, two Associates and Intercollegiate Press Association awards for Journalism and photography. I followed that with years of photography, photographic surveillance, 14 years of law firm litigation support, a temporary appointment as an SBA Paralegal Specialist, and 7 years of contract compliance at RadioShack headquarters. And, of course, my debut novel took 20 years of 8 drafts—I’m methodical that way.
An ill-timed robbery and a mysterious ghost train—both from 1914—and the present day CIA and MI6: All are perfectly normal, abnormal elements to this Clive Cussler novel.
I especially like this book for its ties to recent American history. It flirts with elements of espionage and the crackerjack job of merging a confounding prologue with a mystery that needs solving. There is a combination of Cussler's Dirk Pitt novels that have influenced my own story-telling, and this one is among them.
Cussler penned an entire series around his National Underwater and Marine Agency Projects Director, Dirk Pitt. Nearly every one of the novels begins with an event of the distant past that culminates in the present. This novel follows that pattern but involves political concerns regarding the North American Continent. While Cussler’s characters only occasionally rise to the challenge of emotionally involving me, his plots—the twists, turns, and historical antecedents—always…
The page-turning Dirk Pitt classic from multi-million-copy king of the adventure novel, Clive Cussler.
May 1914. Two diplomats hurry home by sea and rail, each carrying a document of world-changing importance. Then the liner Empress of India is sunk in a collision, and the Manhattan-Line express plunges from a bridge - both dragging their VIP passengers to watery oblivion. Tragic coincidence or conspiracy?
In the energy-starved, fear-torn 1980s, Dirk Pitt discovers that those long-lost papers could destroy whole nations, throwing him into his biggest challenge yet. Racing against hired…
I am the granddaughter of an American boy who grew up in India at the end of the British Raj. I have a personal interest in the time period because of this, but I wanted to see more books about the Raj that weren’t from the British perspective. I wrote my own novel from the unique angle of Americans in India. During my historical research, I specifically looked for books that represented Indian opinions and mindsets of that period. As the saying goes, history is written by the victors, but with this reading list, I want to help shed light on the other side of the story.
I thought this book was such a heartfelt and tragic story. It’s about a family struggling with their past as the city of Delhi gets taken over by the British as it becomes their new capital. The author paints these beautiful scenes of Delhi, like the traditional pigeon flying and the bustling Chandni Chowk market.
I could really feel his love for the city in those descriptions. To me, the story felt like a lament for the old Delhi that was lost to the British, and you can sense how hard it was for the author to accept that. In the introduction, he talks about how he left India and was never allowed to return, so this goodbye isn’t just part of the story; it’s personal.
Set in nineteenth-century India between two revolutionary moments of change, Twilight in Delhi brings history alive, depicting most movingly the loss of an entire culture and way of life. As Bonamy Dobree said, "It releases us into a different and quite complete world. Mr. Ahmed Ali makes us hear and smell Delhi...hear the flutter of pigeons' wings, the cries of itinerant vendors, the calls to prayer, the howls of mourners, the chants of qawwals, smell jasmine and sewage, frying ghee and burning wood." The detail, as E.M. Forster said, is "new and fascinating," poetic and brutal, delightful and callous. First…
Liveaboard sailor Cass Lynch thinks her big break has finally arrived when she blags her way into skippering a Viking longship for a Hollywood film. However, this means returning to the Shetland Islands, the place she fled as a teenager. When a corpse unexpectedly appears onboard the longship, she can…
I love historical fiction, and with dual timelines, I often find myself identifying with a contemporary character who is trying to solve some mystery from the past. I wrote an article titled Five Questions to Ask Before Writing a Dual Timeline Novel, in which I addressed structure, how to relate the timelines to each other, and how to keep the reader engaged when going back and forth between time periods. I also wrote a blog post about how fitting the pieces together for this kind of work can be a bit like solving a jigsaw puzzle. Each of the novels I’ve recommended is an example of a satisfying final picture.
The modern-day Jaya, grieving after a third miscarriage and trouble in her marriage, goes to India to learn more about her grandmother, Amisha, who lived under the British occupation in the 1930s. Amisha’s servant and confidant, Ravi, tells Jaya about Amisha’s life so that Jaya comes to understand its relevance to her.
I was especially touched to see how learning about her ancestors' lives helps to heal Jaya in the present.
An Amazon Charts, USA Today, and Washington Post bestseller.
From the bestselling author of Trail of Broken Wings comes an epic story of the unrelenting force of love, the power of healing, and the invincible desire to dream.
Nothing prepares Jaya, a New York journalist, for the heartbreak of her third miscarriage and the slow unraveling of her marriage in its wake. Desperate to assuage her deep anguish, she decides to go to India to uncover answers to her family's past.
Intoxicated by the sights, smells, and sounds she experiences, Jaya becomes an eager student of the culture. But it…