The Setup Alex Michaelides’s debut novel opens with a premise that is nearly irresistible: Alicia Berenson, a celebrated painter, shoots her husband five times in the face and then never speaks another word. She is committed to a forensic psychiatric unit, where she remains mute for years. Theo Faber, a criminal psychotherapist obsessed with her…
Hercule Poirot’s Greatest Case Murder on the Orient Express is the Poirot novel that non-mystery readers have heard of, and the one that most mystery readers think of first when Christie’s name is mentioned. Published in 1934, it presents a murder aboard the luxury train that joins Istanbul to Calais – a sealed compartment, a…
Ten strangers, each invited to an island off the Devon coast under different pretenses, discover they have been brought together by an unknown host who does not appear to exist. The evening of their arrival, a recorded voice accuses each of them of an undetected murder. By morning one of the guests is dead. The…
In November 1959, four members of the Clutter family were murdered in their farmhouse in Holcomb, Kansas. Six years later, Truman Capote published the account of those murders, their investigation, and the execution of the two men convicted of the crime — and in doing so produced a book that changed what nonfiction could do….
A disgraced financial journalist is hired by an elderly industrialist to investigate a family mystery that has remained unsolved for forty years — the apparent murder of a teenage girl on an island where the bridge was closed for a parade, making the killer impossible to have left and impossible to identify among those who…
The Marriage as Crime Scene Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl opens on the morning of Nick and Amy Dunne’s fifth wedding anniversary, the day Amy disappears. The setup is genre-familiar: missing wife, suspicious husband, media frenzy. What Flynn does with this premise is anything but familiar. She dismantles the domestic thriller from the inside out, using…
The Idea That Started It All Phil Knight graduated from Stanford Business School in 1962 and, instead of taking a job, spent a year traveling the world. In Japan, he visited the Onitsuka Tiger factory and, on an impulse, told the manufacturer he represented a company called Blue Ribbon Sports. He had no such company….
The Habit Loop Charles Duhigg’s The Power of Habit is the book that put the habit loop into mainstream conversation. Published in 2012, it drew on decades of neurological and behavioral research to explain how habits form, why they are so resistant to change, and how individuals, organizations, and societies can be restructured around better…
The Golden Circle Simon Sinek’s Start with Why is built around a single, elegant idea: that the most inspiring leaders and organizations communicate from the inside out. They start with why – their purpose, cause, or belief – then explain how they achieve it, then describe what they do. Most organizations and individuals communicate in…
Daniel Kahneman spent his career demonstrating that human beings are not the rational agents that economic theory assumes — that judgment and decision-making are systematically biased in predictable ways. Thinking, Fast and Slow is his attempt to synthesize a lifetime of research into a unified account of the two cognitive systems that he argues govern…