The most recommended murder books

As a cat lover, the cover of this book drew my attention, and I also loved the title which hinted at a secret. Both play big roles in the book that features a private library in a strange mansion where the main character, Laura Lee, accepts a summer job as a housekeeper. When the chauffeur is murdered and a valuable crown is missing, Laura Lee investigates the mystery with the help of Hank the cat who travels through the house via secret passageways and seems to know many of the mysteries of the house. As a fan of gothic mysteries, I found this book a great read and look forward to reading more in the series.

I stumbled across the Vinyl Detective novels this year and pretty much binge read them. Such a brilliant idea that there could be a whole range of crimes connected to different genres of music – all of it on collectible vinyl.

I’m totally in love with the characters in this book: the Vinyl Detective himself, his girlfriend Nevada, and the hilarious brood of friends and supporting characters. And best of all, while writing this review I checked a couple of details on Amazon and saw that there is a new Vinyl Detective novel out!

I have liked all the Gamache books, but this one blew me away.

Not just another clever puzzle-solving entertainment (which it is). It’s also a compelling meditation on the ethics of free speech in our world today as we struggle with a pandemic and elect autocrats into seats of power.

And this isn’t just any free speech, but speech coolly advocating for euthanizing the elderly and disabled, because caring for them is too expensive, and a waste—they’ll die anyway and leave society with much-reduced ability to care for those with a real chance to survive.

This speaker is a reputable academic, popular, and with hard data to support her position. Which is why someone wants to kill her. Which is why Gamache is brought in.

This infamous child killers work remains banned in my home country (UK) but is widely available online. Brady and Hindley (his partner) were child killers, both incarcerated for life and both died in prison.

This book was read for curiosity only, whilst writing my own ‘inside the mind of a psychopathic killer’ narrative, I wanted to understand how a ‘real serial killer’ would really think. He wrote The Gates of Janus whilst incarcerated at Ashworth high-security psychiatric hospital.

Brady’s intention was that it be published anonymously, however, this could never be allowed to happen. It is in 2 parts 1) He describes his involvement in the 6 murders from the perspective of ‘understanding himself’ and part 2) His advice as offered to law enforcement in solving such future cases (in this it falls flat).

I recommend it only if you want to understand his thought process – just as Hitler’s Mein… show more.

Graham Masterton grew to fame with his horror novels, including the best-selling novel The Manitou. It was only decades later that he began his Katie Maguire series of police procedurals, which have been equally successful. Having read Masterton over the years, I was fascinated by his shift from horror to crime fiction, often incorporating horror elements into his work. I started primarily as a horror writer, but have now shifted toward crime fiction. Masterton’s novels have been great “guides” in this respect.

An exploration of the suspected murder of an Italian child in London that along with the murders of Burke and Hare, changed how bodies are supplied for medical teaching. Set in London in the 1830s it is a factual look at the way cadavers were supplied for medical teaching at that point in history.

Two ex-con fathers reluctantly team up to find out who murdered their gay sons.

It’s a great premise for a book and it lives up to and surpasses all expectations. S.A.Cosby burst onto the crime writing scene with Blacktop Wasteland but in my opinion, this book is even better.

Gritty, muscular writing with heart, humour, and lines that are almost poetic in their beauty.

You feel the pain and loss of the main characters and their guilt too, for not accepting their sons for who they were – and boy, do you want them find those responsible for their deaths and serve them up some vengeance.

Definitely a page-turner. A dark mystery/thriller/romance that is fed to you through FBI profiler Lilah Love's eyes. FBI agent Lilah Love leads a complicated life. She's engaged to Kane Mendez, a man most call dangerous, but hey birds of a feather, do flock together. She's dangerous, too, and in ways only Kane understands. As for their happily ever after, well that might have to wait. Right now, an old enemy who should be dead is still living, Junior, her mystery letter writer, is stirring up trouble, and her family is trying to prove they're crazier than her. On top of that, she has a new case: a dead woman in a bloody wedding dress. And since Lilah knows all too well there is no such thing as coincidence, clearly, someone is sending her yet another message. If you love romantic suspense novels, secrets, and scandals with a bit of profiling… show more.

A long-time fan of brilliant television scripts by Anthony Horowitz—Foyle’s War, Midsomer Murders, Poirot, etc.—I became besotted with his mystery novels on first reading Magpie Murders. Thus, the moment my favorite mystery bookshop notified me that Horowitz’s latest whodunit was available for pre-order, I reserved my copy! 

The Twist of a Knife is the fourth in a series featuring Daniel Hawthorne as the astute private detective and Anthony Horowitz, himself, narrating as the hapless sidekick and chronicler of their crime-solving escapades. Last fall, while awaiting the new book’s arrival, I re-read the earlier books full of witty narration and intricate plot twists.

Then, with my first Michigan snowfall, I cozied up with Hawthorne and Horowitz for their latest compelling case. An irresistible read!

Ace Atkins is a master of the crime genre. It’s no wonder Robert B. Parker’s estate tapped him to carry on the Spenser series. He’s great at capturing places and the internal monologues of weary men. He’s also able to tell stories just seedy enough to keep readers curious, without making them cringe. The first book in Atkins’ Quinn Colson series is on par with Elmore Leonard’s Raylan Givens books. Quinn seems entirely real, the small town he returns to after a years-long absence feels lived in and believable. And the pacing is masterful. Whereas Perry drags readers along for the action, Atkins makes you feel as though you’re sitting in the backseat, riding down the winding roads of Tibbehah County in northeast Mississippi as Quinn uneasily approaches another backcountry crime scene.    

I’ve always been a fan of good writing, and I think Georges Simenon is head and shoulders above many other crime authors.

As I read this brooding and unsettling story of a murderer unraveling, I could vividly imagine the characters and the little town where they lived.

Howard Curtis, who translated the book into English, deserves an honorary mention because he manages to retain the atmosphere of the original text.

I try to avoid books about cozy girls’ weekends because they always seem to descend into goopy sentimentalism and cutesy dialogue, but this novel (thank goodness!) turned that tired old trope on its head.

Psychological thrillers with twisty plotlines and complicated characters are my absolute favorite reads, and this one piles on the suspense as the questions and misunderstandings—and the danger––grow more sinister with each passing day.

My takeaway: attending a getaway in the forest with a bunch of people you haven’t seen in a decade is NOT A GOOD IDEA. Politely decline the invitation, then stay the hell away!

Frances lives in the Victorian Era in London, but in her hometown of New York, it’s the Gilded Age. This is her background in all its glittering and horrifying glory. 

Crime novels fit quite naturally in this era. I love a loathsome villain and Rosemary Simpson serves up some of the worst in her Gilded Age series. She uses actual events, like the great blizzard of 1888, as catalysts for some heinous crimes. If you needed to dispose of a body, what better place than a snowdrift? 

Prudence MacKenzie, the dead man’s fiancé and our sleuth, doesn’t seem to realize the danger she’s in. I spent the entire read on the edge of my seat wondering if she’d make it to the end of the book alive. This is historical noir in elegant Gilded Age style.

Helen Jewett was a sex worker living in New York in the 1830s. She worked in a brothel under a matron, which should have been a safe enough situation—she wasn’t out on the street, at least, and others knew when she had clients. Early one morning, however, others in the house wake up to realize there’s a fire in Helen’s room, and that she’s dead. Was it a murder committed by her last client, a man quickly identified as Richard Robinson, or was it a suicide? If she hadn’t died so brutally, we wouldn’t know Helen Jewett’s name, so she’s become another victim only known for her murder. Cohen reminds us that she’s more than just her death.

Narrator Professor Hilary Tamar’s habits and character traits invite non-stop laughter; and yet amazingly the three young barrister characters are every bit as funny in an entirely different way. One of the barristers always carries the action; but Hilary is no Dr. Watson gasping at their brilliance; in every book, her perspicacity and specialist knowledge enable the murder motive to be unravelled and the murderer brought to justice.

These books are rich in comic dialogue, often given as indirect speech. Caudwell’s unique spin on technical legal language will have you laughing out loud. 

The storyline is enchanting. Without Hilary’s specialist knowledge of ancient Greek texts, there might well have been many more murders! And yet so cleverly is this charming novel plotted, that we almost feel her esoteric expertise is only what might be expected of any amateur sleuth worthy of the name.  

This is a book about failure – leadership failure from every echelon.

I hesitated to ever read this book about horrific war crimes committed by American soldiers because I absolutely did not want to see “them” as “us”. What I found instead was a systematic failure of the Army from every echelon that enabled these men to slip free of the bonds of civilization and become the embodiment of humanity’s worst impulses.

The soldier who reported them was nearly murdered as a traitor. This book speaks to the burden that those who come forward carry – and how men become monsters.

I don’t know if the men who committed that horrible atrocity were ever good men who the war made evil nor do I care – but what Frederick has shown in this book is the systematic unraveling of a platoon’s ties back to what made them human and the… show more.

Nicki's obsessive internal monologue seems to trap her somewhere between fantasy and reality.

But isn't this a truth about life in general? How much do we rationalize our desires as we navigate the world outside our heads?

Her desires keep her from seeing key aspects of her own personality. As she argues with herself in meticulous detail, so do the police who suspect her of murder. The reader must figure out to what extent Nicki is a reliable narrator, as well as whether the police's logic is sound.

What I relate to in this book is that I've sometimes learned that friends and acquaintances have really been more locked into their internal worlds than being upfront about what's true for them. There's an almost obsessive amount of detail, especially in Nicki's inner monologue as we learn increasingly more about her, but it serves the story's purpose as well as constructs… show more.

This book takes place in the windy city of Chicago and Clark is adept at making you feel like you are right there in the midst of the fast-paced, gritty city as you read.

The plotting helps by kicking off with a bang – a priest and a gang member found dead in church. Questions abound. But what really kept me turning the pages of this book (or technically swiping since I read it on my Kindle) was Cass Raines, retired cop turned PI.

Her last case on the police force left her reeling and she struggling to deal with the aftermath.

It’s Cass that makes this book stand out amongst other PI novels, you care about what she’s going through, about this new trauma that has been introduced into her life, and that through it all she’s still working to get justice for people that are often overlooked and… show more.

Columbine is a masterful piece of reportage from a journalist who covered from the start what is now perceived almost as a tragic prototype of mass school shootings in the US. Through meticulous, painstaking research—and with a compassionate and keenly observant voice that I especially admired—Cullen unspools the consequential misperceptions about the Columbine shooters that have distorted popular understandings of the “school shooter” ever since through repetition and media simplification.

What’s new and surprising here, and that remains relevant years after the book’s first publication, is that Columbine killers Eric Harris and Dylon Klebold weren’t victims of bullying, socially alienated by marauding gangs of “cool” kids and jocks, or radicalized by Goth culture. They had friends, jobs, and, perhaps most frightening of all, seemed largely to be average high school students, not appreciably different from our own children, who in fact did more bullying than they were bullied. “So we’re… show more.

I love mysteries that twine two time periods, and I’m especially fond of the early twentieth century.

The mystery set in 1907 is wonderfully creepy. I enjoyed how the author brought the setting so vividly to life. Her inclusion of twin revivalists—who could be poster-children for the word “odd”—was brilliant.

I couldn’t make up my mind about them. And obituaries appearing in a newspaper prior to the death of the subjects is just plain freaky. Both female leads are strong, and the story corkscrews enough for misdirection in more than one place. Deftly plotted with detailed genealogies. History, mystery, and secrets add up to a bubbling cauldron of suspense!