Mystery & Thriller

Four Retirees and a Body Richard Osman is a British television presenter who wrote The Thursday Murder Club while between commitments, fully expecting, he has said, that it would sell modestly and be forgotten. It became one of the bestselling British novels of the past decade, launched a series, and was adapted for film. The…

Trivandrum Beach Parent Group Liane Moriarty’s Big Little Lies announces its tonal sophistication in its first pages: the novel is told partly through transcripts of police interviews with parents from a school’s kindergarten cohort, conducted after something terrible has happened at the school’s trivia night fundraiser. We don’t know what happened for most of the…

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…

A review of Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, a medieval murder mystery and philosophical tour de force that makes rigorous scholarship feel like the most gripping of puzzles.