FHS Crime & Mystery Reading List U VI by

FHS_Library — 2025-04-23 07:57:10 UTC

Bombay, 1921: Perveen Mistry, the daughter of a respected Zoroastrian family, has just joined her father's law firm, becoming one of the first female lawyers in India. Mistry Law is handling the will of Mr. Omar Farid, a wealthy Muslim mill owner who has left three widows behind. But as Perveen goes through the papers, she notices something strange: all three have signed over their inheritance to a charity. What will they live on if they forefeit what their husband left them? Perveen is suspicious.

Yellow = Classic Crime

FHS_Library — 2025-04-23 07:57:10 UTC

Staples of the genre!

Green = Cozy Crime

FHS_Library — 2025-04-23 07:57:10 UTC

These are still crime novels/mysteries, but tend to have more humour and/or be a bit less graphic - think more Miss Marple than Wallander, or more Nick and Nora Charles than Phillip Marlowe...

Red = Gritty & Dark

FHS_Library — 2025-04-23 07:57:10 UTC

What it says on the tin - dark crime novels, mysteries, and thrillers...

Blue = YA Crime

FHS_Library — 2025-04-23 07:57:10 UTC

Crime & mysteries written for teenagers & young adults

FHS_Library — 2025-04-23 07:57:10 UTC

The Moonstone, a priceless yellow diamond, is looted from an Indian temple and maliciously bequeathed to Rachel Verinder. On her eighteenth birthday, her friend and suitor Franklin Blake brings the gift to her. That very night, it is stolen again. No one is above suspicion, as the idiosyncratic Sergeant Cuff and the Franklin piece together a puzzling series of events as mystifying as an opium dream and as deceptive as the nearby Shivering Sand.

FHS_Library — 2025-04-23 07:57:10 UTC

Just after midnight, a snowdrift stops the Orient Express in its tracks. The luxurious train is surprisingly full for the time of the year, but by the morning it is one passenger fewer. An American tycoon lies dead in his compartment, stabbed a dozen times, his door locked from the inside. Isolated and with a killer in their midst, detective Hercule Poirot must identify the murderer - in case he or she decides to strike again.

FHS_Library — 2025-04-23 07:57:10 UTC

When Dr John Watson takes rooms in Baker Street with amateur detective Sherlock Holmes, he has no idea that he is about to enter a shadowy world of criminality and violence. Watson is startled to find a dead man whose face is contorted in a rictus of horror. There is no mark of violence on the body yet a single word is written on the wall in blood. Holmes's brilliant analytical skills soon uncover a trail of murder, revenge and lost love...

FHS_Library — 2025-04-23 07:57:10 UTC

1939. Europe teeters on the brink of war. Ten strangers are invited to Soldier Island, an isolated rock near the Devon coast. Cut off from the mainland, with their generous hosts Mr and Mrs U.N. Owen mysteriously absent, they are each accused of a terrible crime. When one of the party dies suddenly they realise they may be harbouring a murderer among their number. One by one they are picked off. Who will survive? And who is the killer?

FHS_Library — 2025-04-23 07:57:10 UTC

Los Angeles Private Investigator Philip Marlowe is hired by wheelchair-bound General Sternwood to discover who is blackmailing him. A broken, weary old man, Sternwood just wants Marlowe to make the problem go away. However, with Sternwood's two wild, devil-may-care daughters prowling LA's seedy backstreets, Marlowe's got his work cut out. And that's before he stumbles over the first corpse.

FHS_Library — 2025-04-23 07:57:10 UTC

In a peaceful retirement village, four unlikely friends meet up once a week to investigate unsolved murders. But when a brutal killing takes place on their very doorstep, the Thursday Murder Club find themselves in the middle of their first live case. Can our unorthodox but brilliant gang catch the killer before it's too late?

FHS_Library — 2025-04-23 07:57:10 UTC

Meet Flavia: Mystery Solver. Master Poisoner. 11 Years Old.

England 1950: very-nearly-eleven-year-old Flavia is plotting revenge on her older sisters. Then a dead bird is left on the doorstep, which has an extraordinary effect on Flavia's eccentric father, and a body is found in the garden. As the police descend on Buckshaw, Flavia decides to do some investigating of her own.

FHS_Library — 2025-04-23 07:57:10 UTC

All murder mysteries follow a simple set of rules. Grant McAllister, an author of crime fiction and professor of mathematics, once sat down and worked them all out. But that was thirty years ago. Now he's living a life of seclusion on a quiet Mediterranean island - until Julia Hart, a sharp, ambitious editor, knocks on his door. His early work is being republished and together the two of them must revisit those old stories. But as she reads the stories, Julia is unsettled to realise that there are parts that don't make sense. Intricate clues that seem to reference a real murder...

FHS_Library — 2025-04-23 07:57:10 UTC

When editor Susan Ryeland is given the tattered manuscript of Alan Conway's latest novel, she has little idea it will change her life. She's worked with the revered crime writer for years. But Conway's latest tale of murder at Pye Hall is not quite what it seems. Yes, there are dead bodies, but hidden in the pages of the manuscript there lies another story: a tale written between the very words on the page, telling of real-life jealousy, greed, ruthless ambition and murder.

FHS_Library — 2025-04-23 07:57:10 UTC

Sidney Chambers, the Vicar of Grantchester, is a thirty-two year old bachelor. Sidney is an unconventional clergyman and can go where the police cannot. Together with his roguish friend Inspector Geordie Keating, Sidney inquires into the suspect suicide of a Cambridge solicitor, a scandalous jewellery theft at a New Year's Eve dinner party, the unexplained death of a well-known jazz promoter and a shocking art forgery, the disclosure of which puts a close friend in danger. Sidney discovers that being a detective, like being a clergyman, means that you are never off duty...

FHS_Library — 2025-04-23 07:57:10 UTC

It's time to solve the murder of the century... Forty years ago, Steven Smith found a copy of a famous children's book, its margins full of strange markings and annotations. He took it to his remedial English teacher, Miss Isles, who became convinced it was the key to solving a puzzle. That a message in secret code ran through all Edith Twyford's novels. Then Miss Isles disappeared on a class field trip, and Steven's memory won't allow him to remember what happened. Now, out of prison after a long stretch, Steven decides to investigate the mystery that has haunted him for decades. Was Miss Isles murdered? Was she deluded? Or was she right about the code? And is it still in use today?

FHS_Library — 2025-04-23 07:57:10 UTC

November 1924. The Endeavour sets sail for New York, with 2,000 passengers - and a killer - on board. When a body is found on deck, ship's officer Timothy Birch is ready to declare the death a tragic accident. But Scotland Yard inspector James Temple is certain there's more to this misfortune than meets the eye. Now, with just days remaining until the Endeavour reaches New York, their search for the culprit is fraught with danger. And all the while, the passengers roam the ship with a killer in their midst...

FHS_Library — 2025-04-23 07:57:10 UTC

On an island off the windswept Irish coast, guests gather for the wedding of the year - the marriage of Jules Keegan and Will Slater. Old friends. Past grudges. Happy families. Hidden jealousies. Thirteen guests. One body. The wedding cake has barely been cut when one of the guests is found dead. And as a storm unleashes its fury on the island, everyone is trapped. All have a secret. All have a motive. One guest won't leave this wedding alive...

FHS_Library — 2025-04-23 07:57:10 UTC

Everyone's invited. Everyone's a suspect. Bristling with tension, bitter rivalries, and toxic friendships. In a remote hunting lodge, deep in the Scottish wilderness, old friends gather for New Year: The beautiful one; the golden couple; the volatile one; the new parents; the quiet one; the city boy; the outsider; the victim. Not an accident - a murder among friends.

FHS_Library — 2025-04-23 07:57:10 UTC

Under the influence of their charismatic classics professor, a group of clever, eccentric misfits at an elite New England college discover a way of thinking and living that is a world away from the humdrum existence of their contemporaries. But when they go beyond the boundaries of normal morality their lives are changed profoundly and for ever.

FHS_Library — 2025-04-23 07:57:10 UTC

It is 1537, a time of revolution that sees the greatest changes in England since 1066. But on the Sussex coast, events have spiralled out of control. Cromwell's Commissioner Robin Singleton, has been found dead, his head severed from his body. His horrific murder is accompanied by equally sinister acts of sacrilege - a black cockerel sacrificed on the altar, and the disappearance of Scarnsea's Great Relic. Dr Matthew Shardlake, lawyer and long-time supporter of Reform, has been sent by Cromwell into this atmosphere of treachery and death. But Shardlake's investigation soon forces him to question everything he hears, and everything that he intrinsically believes...

FHS_Library — 2025-04-23 07:57:10 UTC

The Maidens are Cambridge University's most exclusive society, whose members are selected by the charismatic professor of Greek tragedy, Edward Fosca. When one of the Maidens is murdered, grieving young therapist Mariana Andros is drawn back to the idyllic campus where she was once herself a student. Because beneath the university's ancient traditions and beauty is a web of secrets, jealousy and lies. And when the killer threatens the person she loves most, Mariana will give anything to stop them - even her own life...

FHS_Library — 2025-04-23 07:57:10 UTC

Oliver Marks has just served ten years for the murder of one of his closest friends - a murder he may or may not have committed. On the day he's released, he's greeted by the detective who put him in prison. Detective Colborne is retiring, but before he does, he wants to know what really happened ten years ago. As a young actor studying Shakespeare at an elite arts conservatory, Oliver noticed that his talented classmates seem to play the same roles onstage and off - villain, hero, tyrant, temptress. When tragedy strikes, one of the seven friends is found dead. The rest face their greatest acting challenge yet: convincing the police, and themselves, that they are blameless.

FHS_Library — 2025-04-23 07:57:10 UTC

A white woman is killed or harmed in some way, real or imagined, and then, like the moon follows the sun, a black man ends up dead. But when it comes to law and order, East Texas plays by its own rules - a fact that Darren Mathews, a black Texas Ranger working the backwoods towns of Highway 59, knows all too well. So when allegiance to his roots puts his job in jeopardy, he is drawn to a case in the small town of Lark, where two dead bodies washed up in the bayou.