8 Murder Mystery Books For Your Reading List
We love a good puzzle and nothing spells a crime to solve more like a murder mystery. Calling all fans of shows like How to Get Away with Murder and films like Knives Out and Death on the Nile: take a break from the screen to crack open one of these eight murder mystery novels for a similar suspenseful emotional rollercoaster ride.
It’s early fall when a heatwave descends on Los Angeles. Private Detective Philip Marlowe is called to the Montgomery estate, an almost mythic place sitting high on top of Beverly Hills. Wealthy socialite Chrissie Montgomery is missing. Young, naïve, and set to inherit an enormous fortune, she’s a walking target, ripe for someone to get their claws into. Her dying father and his sultry bottle-blonde girlfriend want her found before that happens. To make sure, they’ve got Anne Riordan—now head of her own all-female detective agency—on the case, too.
The search for Chrissie takes the two investigators from the Montgomery mansion to the roughest neighborhoods of LA, through dive bars and boarding houses and out to Skid Row. And that’s all before they find the body at The Brody Hotel. Who will get to Chrissie first? And what happens when a woman doesn’t want to be found?
Then in 1901, just as abruptly as Conan Doyle had “murdered” Holmes in “The Final Problem,” he resurrected him. Though the writer kept detailed diaries of his days and work, Conan Doyle never explained this sudden change of heart. After his death, one of his journals from the interim period was discovered to be missing, and in the decades since, has never been found…. Or has it?
When literary researcher Harold White is inducted into the preeminent Sherlock Holmes enthusiast society, The Baker Street Irregulars, he never imagines he’s about to be thrust onto the hunt for the holy grail of Holmes-ophiles: the missing diary. But when the world’s leading Doylean scholar is found murdered in his hotel room, it is Harold-using wisdom and methods gleaned from countless detective stories-who takes up the search, both for the diary and for the killer.
Thomas De Quincey, a writer infamous for his memoir Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, becomes a major suspect in a ferocious series of mass murders identical to ones that terrorized London forty-three years ago. One of his essays, On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts, seems to be a blueprint for the killings. Now, with the help of his daughter Emily and a pair of Scotland Yard detectives, Thomas must become a sleuth, himself, to clear his name.
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Emily Hoang is a writer and editor who is obsessed with haunted houses, ghosts, and dreams. More info can be found on her website.