Best and worst murder mysteries / thrillers
I've been on a binge this year of reading some fairly good and some terribly bad thrillers and mystery books. I just finished reading "And Then There Were None" by Agatha Christie, which I greatly enjoyed, particularly after reading the Silent Patient, which I thought was awful.
Any favorites of the genre you'd recommend? Any terrible ones you'd steer away from?
For me, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd is the best Agatha Christie. Go in blind. For non-Poirot books, Crooked House and Murder at the Vicarage are also top shelf.
If you like Christie, I would also recommend Louise Penny. She's very stylistically and thematically similar. Still Life is a great mystery and also a nice window into a cute pastoral Canadian town.
For something off the wall, Leech by Hiron Ennis. A detective is dispatched to a snowbound manor house to investigate the death of his predecessor. However, the detective is a sentient parasitic leech hivemind and the killer he pursues is an alien fungus body snatcher.
Oooh these all sound great! Haven't read a ton of Christie so am looking forward to checking these out
@Hstansss For light mystery, The Thursday Murder Club books are a good read. A group of retirees in a senior living center have a hobby of trying to solve cold cases. The characters are funny and quirky.
Exactly what I was going to recommend. There are three so far, the first (The Thursday Murder Club) is the best but the other two (The Man Who Died Twice and The Bullet That Missed) are also both a lot of fun. They're light easy reads, but with enough seriousness and depth to keep you interested, and the character are just wonderful! They're by Richard Osman, famous for being on the telly and very tall prior to this!
I actually wrote a super long post on some of my favorite mystery series of a couple different flavors for another post when I was bored at work the other day.
Dark, more substantial, more explicit
Victorian Era
-second post because I wrote way too much
Light, shorter, on the wacky side:
Yeah, it's a lot, but I could do more. I read way too many audiobooks.
Seconding the Jack Reacher novels. There's a lot of them, and of course some are not as good as others, but they're all very readable.
I started a bit seeing my hometown mentioned as the setting for a series of books. I will have to check that out now!
Since it's the only one I mentioned I'm guessing Sacramento? Great series, great arc, but I'll mention again that you need to know going in that the villains are dark. In this one specifically, there are characters who have been the victims of sexual crimes at young ages and obviously the bad guys who have a pattern of doing it.
I love all the books, but every arc gets a little more polished and this is the most recent one, so I really love it. It's just one I can't tell people to go into entirely blind.
Short thriller/comedy/sci-fi that I really liked was The Murderbot Diaries series by Martha Wells
I only read the first in the series (though I've heard the whole series is great), but I was really surprised by how much I liked All Systems Red. Really entertaining quick read.
The audiobooks are a great quick listen (I think about 4 hours long or so on average)
I got those via my library and Libby.
The protagonist has such a unique narrative perspective
One series I got into for a while was skull duggery pleasant. Very dick Tracey vibes from the main detective, but the catch is he is an animated skeleton who investigates mysteries in the world of magic and has a teenage girl that tags along as his apprentice. All in all a fun read that stays in the detective noir vein but also takes a couple steps into the fantasy realm.
I'm not sure they really fit into the category of murder mystery that you're looking for, but I recently read both The Seven Deaths if Evelyn Harcastle and The Devil and the Dark Water and absolutely loved both of them.
Henning Mankell's Wallander books are great, if you're into the slightly depressing Nordic vibe.
I was also disappointed in the Silent Patient!
I like the Jimmy Perez series by Ann Cleeves set in the Shetland Islands. The descriptions of the scenery alone are worthwhile.
Highly recommend Raymond Chandler’s books. He’s one of the reasons I got so into reading.
Some other good books are by Rodica Ojog Brasoveanu and George Arion, but sadly I don’t think they’re translated to English.
Everyone in my Family has Killed Someone was a very fun read for me! Family drama in an Australian ski resort told after the fact in 1st person.
Ooh haven't heard of this one! Will check it out
The book that got me back into reading for pleasure after many years of not doing so was a comic called Whiteout by writer Greg Rucka and artist Steve Lieber. It's a murder mystery set on an Antarctic research station.
I would also suggest pretty much anything written by Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips published by Image. Some of the best noir (in any format) you will ever read is by them. I particularly enjoyed
I have really enjoyed Japanese honkaku mysteries. They're based on the classic British mysteries of the 1930s. Not many are translated but I liked The Honjin Murders and The Tattoo Murder Case. Search honkaku and read them for the Japanese take on the country house murder.
Give Sinful Purity by KA Standen a try. (3 book series)
https://www.amazon.com/Sinful-Purity-K-Standen/dp/1480129119