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In the Woods
Tana French published In the Woods in 2007 as her debut novel, and it arrived fully formed: a literary mystery set in the suburbs of Dublin that announced a writer who cared more about character and atmosphere than about the mechanics of the puzzle. The book is the first entry in French’s Dublin Murder Squad…
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The Big Sleep
In the spring of 1939, Alfred A. Knopf published a detective novel by a former oil executive from Los Angeles. The author was Raymond Chandler, the novel was The Big Sleep, and the private eye at its center, Philip Marlowe, changed crime fiction permanently. Chandler was 51 years old when this book came out, a…
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The Maltese Falcon
When Dashiell Hammett published The Maltese Falcon in 1930, the dominant model of mystery fiction was English, drawing-room, and cerebral. Hercule Poirot observed. Miss Marple intuited. The detective stood above the fray, gathered the suspects, and delivered a solution in clear light. Hammett looked at that tradition and wrote something entirely different: a novel set…
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A Time to Kill
John Grisham’s debut novel arrived in 1989 from Wynwood Press, a small publisher that gave it a modest first printing of five thousand copies. Grisham had spent three years writing it while serving in the Mississippi state legislature, and the book carries that insider perspective in nearly every scene: small-town Southern courtrooms, county sheriffs who…
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The Midnight Library
Matt Haig published The Midnight Library in September 2020, near the end of a year when many people were already living with a heightened awareness of time slipping away and of roads not taken. The timing amplified what was already in the book. Haig is a British author best known for Reasons to Stay Alive,…
