Here are 96 books that Dublin Murder Squad fans have personally recommended once you finish the Dublin Murder Squad series.
Book DNA is a community of authors and super-readers sharing their favorite books with the world.
I’ve always thought that the most clear-eyed, unforgiving observers in literature are teenagers, not because adolescence is simple (it’s the opposite), but because young people haven’t yet learned to shrug and look away. The novels I've chosen here all have central characters who see the adult world's failures, hypocrisies, and prejudices with a directness that most of us gradually lose; and they all use coming of age as a way to confront a world that is already, in some fundamental way, broken – by grief, violence, or the gap between what adults promise and what they deliver. Those are exactly the themes I love to write about.
I’ve always been fascinated by strange social enclaves and secretive, sealed-off, private worlds, and this book has both.
But in fact, the thing I admire most here is the sense of place and atmosphere. Tartt writes with a lush, immersive style which I found is increasingly compelling as the book went on.
Using a murder as the gateway drug to what’s really a literary fiction character study is both sneaky and brilliant: I was hooked by the story in the first chapter, but once I’d finished the book, it was Richard’s voice, those eerie characters, their strange insular co-dependency, and the biting Vermont winter landscape that really stayed with me.
'Everything, somehow, fit together; some sly and benevolent Providence was revealing itself by degrees and I felt myself trembling on the brink of a fabulous discovery, as though any morning it was all going to come together---my future, my past, the whole of my life---and I was going to sit up in bed like a thunderbolt and say oh! oh! oh!'
Under the influence of a charismatic classics professor, a group of clever, eccentric misfits at a New England college discover a way of thought and life a world away from their banal contemporaries.…
I like fiction which makes a character confront what the poet Thom Gunn called ‘the blackmail of his circumstances’: where you are born, the expectations of you. I like to think I am very much a self-created individual, but I can never escape what I was born into; the self is a prison that the will is trying to break out of. I like literature which reflects that challenge.
I find Tom Ripley such a wonderful character—a con man who commits crimes under the guise of someone else, a male protagonist written by a lesbian.
I love the levels of deception the reader is pulled in, so is on the side of the criminal throughout, hoping for him not to get caught in his awful, amoral behaviour.
It is a masterful use of the narrative voice in crime fiction at its best.
It's here, in the first volume of Patricia Highsmith's five-book Ripley series, that we are introduced to the suave Tom Ripley, a young striver seeking to leave behind his past as an orphan bullied for being a "sissy." Newly arrived in the heady world of Manhattan, Ripley meets a wealthy industrialist who hires him to bring his playboy son, Dickie Greenleaf, back from gallivanting in Italy. Soon Ripley's fascination with Dickie's debonair lifestyle turns obsessive as he finds himself enraged by Dickie's ambivalent affections for Marge, a charming American dilettante, and Ripley begins a deadly game. "Sinister and strangely alluring"…
I’ve been teaching in prep schools for twenty-five years, and I also attended one. As both student and teacher, I’ve been fascinated by student social dynamics—how groups form, fracture, and define what they value or reject. I’m equally interested in how teachers’ experiences mirror yet differ from students’. Though I always looked forward to summer breaks, I was drawn to literature—especially mysteries—set in prep schools. These stories helped me better understand the complexity of these relationships while offering a lens to reflect on my own experiences, often with far more drama than real life.
I loved the storyline of an adult returning to teach at the school where she’d gone and how this return surfaces a host of memories that she hasn’t fully come to terms with yet.
I connected so deeply with the care the teacher has for the place as it is, the confusion she has about the place as it was, and how she struggles to not repeat the mistakes of the past. Plus, the mystery is so well-paced.
Jane Hudson never thought she would return to Heart Lake. Her years there as a scholarship girl ended in a fatal and mysterious double tragedy.
Now she is back, struggling to adjust to her new life teaching Latin and as a single mother. But the events that haunted her memories for so many years begin to recur in front of her eyes. It seems she alone can see what is happening, and only she will be able to prevent a second catastrophe...
Surrounded by the lake that gives the school its name, steeped in history and overflowing with the emotions…
I’ve been teaching in prep schools for twenty-five years, and I also attended one. As both student and teacher, I’ve been fascinated by student social dynamics—how groups form, fracture, and define what they value or reject. I’m equally interested in how teachers’ experiences mirror yet differ from students’. Though I always looked forward to summer breaks, I was drawn to literature—especially mysteries—set in prep schools. These stories helped me better understand the complexity of these relationships while offering a lens to reflect on my own experiences, often with far more drama than real life.
I love fantasy, and I love when fantasy meshes with reality in a way that comments on the real world through the fantasy. Emily Tesh nails that.
I also loved how evident it was that Tesh had worked at schools and made some of the drudgery of faculty meetings and admin work sparkle with humor in her novel. The characters are deeply and believably flawed.
'A searingly brilliant fantasy. This is magical school with teeth . . . an unmissable read' Tasha Suri, author of The Jasmine Throne
'Fans of Naomi Novik's Scholomance series won't want to miss this' Publishers Weekly
Dr Walden is the Director of Magic at Chetwood School and one of the most powerful magicians in England. Her days consist of meetings, teaching A-Level Invocation to four talented, chaotic sixth formers, more meetings and securing the school's boundaries from demonic incursions.
Walden is good at her job - no, Walden is great at her job. But demons are masters of manipulation. It's…
While I love many novels about individuals, there’s something about weird groups of people—for example, cults—that I’ve always been drawn to. The Book of Fred plays with this dynamic by showing the intersection between a doomsday cult, the Fredians, and the quirky liberal community that foster child Mary Fred Anderson finds herself in. What I find fascinating about cults is how appealing they are, how being part of a group has a seductive quality that can so easily go horribly wrong. I love novels and memoirs that show that seductive side while zeroing in on the complications groups pose to individual identity.
When I taught in Okinawa, the base library happened to have a few books by Iris Murdoch: I read one and was hooked. I read as many of her books as I could find, even buying bootleg copies in Taipei.
Several years later I was teaching in England when the librarian mentioned that the officers’ wives’ book club was scheduled to meet Murdoch but none of them had ever read her. Thrilled, I joined them in Murdoch’s husband’s messy Oxford office where I literally knelt at the author’s feet and asked her stupid questions. Were her novels autobiographical? OF COURSE NOT, she snapped. Everything, she insisted, was invented.
After her death, I read biographies of her, and of course, it turned out that the weird groups of people she wrote about were often based on people she knew. This book hosts one of my favorite groups of Murdoch characters who…
From the Booker Prize-winning author of The Sea, The Sea comes a story about revenge and reconciliation, and the difference between being nice and being good.
John Ducane, a respected Whitehall civil servant, is asked to investigate the suicide of a colleague. As he pursues his inquiry, he uncovers a shabby, evil world of murder, blackmail, and black magic. He begins to feel more trapped than trapping.
In contrast to a stagnant summer in London, Octavian and Kate Gray's adoring community on the Dorset coast seems to offer Ducane refuge, but even here the after-effects of violence poison an atmosphere…
I am always enthralled by stories about people who are faking it. I want to read any story where someone either inflates their importance to get their foot in the door, scrambles to keep their secrets from being revealed, or flat-out lies and scams people out of millions. Lying is incredibly human, and witnessing how long one will keep a lie going is fascinating to me because it’s always a house of cards that will eventually tumble. Most crime stories and mysteries revolve around someone desperately trying to keep something in their life secret, and often that comes from a space of gaining access to affluence or making sure you keep your affluence.
To be clear, Belle Gibson is not fabulous because lying about having cancer and pretending to have the cure is not just despicable but also dangerous. However, there is a glamour and allure to becoming Insta-famous or social media famous which many people still crave. We never ask the question if someone is “doing something for attention”: what’s going on that they feel like they need so much attention? Why are they addicted to that dopamine rush?
Gabbi in Pretty Girls Get Away With Murder is a character who wants to be Insta-famous because she longs so much for everyone to see her and for someone to choose her. She wanted to be picked above all others.
Belle Gibson convinced the world she had healed herself of terminal brain cancer by eating a healthy diet. She built a global business based on her story. There was just one problem: she never had cancer in the first place.
In 2015, journalists uncovered the truth behind Gibson's lies. This hero of the wellness world, with over 200,000 followers, international book deals, and a best-selling mobile app, was a fraud. She had lied about having cancer - to her family and friends, to her business partners and publishers, and to the hundreds of thousands of people who were inspired by…
I am always enthralled by stories about people who are faking it. I want to read any story where someone either inflates their importance to get their foot in the door, scrambles to keep their secrets from being revealed, or flat-out lies and scams people out of millions. Lying is incredibly human, and witnessing how long one will keep a lie going is fascinating to me because it’s always a house of cards that will eventually tumble. Most crime stories and mysteries revolve around someone desperately trying to keep something in their life secret, and often that comes from a space of gaining access to affluence or making sure you keep your affluence.
Lucy Foley always writes characters who are hiding their true nature, but with this one she really doubled down on the Fake It Until You Make It attitude of fabulous phonies everywhere. And this time, it had a Goop twist. The rustic luxury of the resort where the events occur is all glamour.
Many of the characters I wrote about in Pretty Girls Get Away With Murder try to hide who they really are. Whether it’s a desire to be seen as feminine, likable, sexy, or successful, they are calculating how they are seen. In the end, their true nature always shows itself. Sometimes it’s liberating for them, and sometimes it’s ugly.
I have just written my twelfth novel and quite possibly my last. I’ve returned to where my heart is. My first five crime novels came about through the generous help of some undercover California wildlife agents. Now, in a sense, I’m back where I started, except that my latest book is also a love story. We make plenty of mistakes in life, some much worse than others. My characters deal with them in their own way. I can understand that, and I like that. And hey, there’s always the possibility of redemption.
This book got a lot of well-deserved buzz when it was published in 1976, about a year after North Vietnamese tanks rolled into Saigon. It’s not hard to remember tear gas and chants of “Hell no, we won’t go.”
Thornburg captured a mood and feel of what was like out on the street, an America divided. Cutter is wounded badly in Vietnam. Bone had a loathing of self, and the novel opens with, “It was not the first time Richard Bone had shaved with a Lady Remington, nor did he expect it to be the last.” He and Cutter were odd, but somehow, they fit into the zeitgeist. If you come across it someday, read it.
The headline reads ? LOCAL GIRL SLAIN, BODY FOUND IN TRASHCAN. When Richard Bone sees a picture of conglomerate tycoon J.J. Wolfe in the newspaper, he's struck by how closely he resembles the man Bone saw dumping the body: could this millionaire redneck be the killer? Bone's close friend Cutter, a crippled Vietnam vet, is convinced that Wolfe is the killer. With nothing much more to lose, the reckless Cutter and handsome gigolo Bone hit the road to the Wolfe headquarters in the Ozarks, totally unprepared for what awaits them. Cutter and Bone are two of the most brilliantly drawn…
I have just written my twelfth novel and quite possibly my last. I’ve returned to where my heart is. My first five crime novels came about through the generous help of some undercover California wildlife agents. Now, in a sense, I’m back where I started, except that my latest book is also a love story. We make plenty of mistakes in life, some much worse than others. My characters deal with them in their own way. I can understand that, and I like that. And hey, there’s always the possibility of redemption.
I don’t know of anyone else who so captures time, place, and the idiosyncratic language of the moment that we tend to shake our heads at years later but is exactly right at the time. Winslow is a magician with the nuances.
Here’s how the novel opens in Laguna Beach, California.
"Is what O is thinking as she sits between Chon and Ben on a bench at Main Beach and picks out potential mates for them.
"That one?" she asks, pointing at a classic BB (Basically Baywatch) strolling down the Boardwalk."
"Chon shakes his head."
And further down,
"O was made for sunshine.'
"California girl."
I live in California. I grew up here. Winslow captures the moment. Future historians should read him.
From the New York Times bestselling author of The Cartel, The Force, and The Border
In Savages, Don Winslow introduced Ben and Chon, twenty-something best friends who risk everything to save the girl they both love, O. Among the most celebrated literary thrillers, Savages was a Top 10 Book of the Year selection by Janet Maslin in The New York Times and Stephen King in Entertainment Weekly.
Now, in this high-octane prequel to Savages, Winslow reaches back in time to tell the story of how Ben, Chon, and O became the people they are. Spanning from 1960s Southern California to…
For too long, single life has been characterized as a lesser life. As a 70-year-old who has been happily single my whole life, I want that to end. As I said in my book, “In the enlightened world that I envision, every child will understand, as a matter of course, that living single is a life path that can be just as joyful and fulfilling as any other—and for some people, the best path of all. Every adult will forsake forever the temptation to pity or patronize single people and will instead appreciate the profound rewards of single life."
The stars of this book are “solitaries,” people who choose to live alone or spend substantial stretches of time alone. Upending the demeaning caricatures of people who spend a lot of time alone, Johson shows that some of the most renowned artists and authors have been solitaries.
They have rich inner lives and contribute meaningfully to society. Even unknown solitaries are artists–they design their own lives. Solitaries value friendship and do not see romantic relationships as sitting atop a relationship hierarchy. Free of a conventional focus on The One, they are more open to more different people and the world.
Fenton Johnson's lyrical prose and searching sensibility explore what it means to choose solitude and to celebrate the notion that solitude is a legitimate and dignified calling. He delves into the lives and works of nearly a dozen iconic solitaries he considers his kindred spirits, from Thoreau at Walden Pond and Emily Dickenson in Amherst, to the fiercely self-protective Zora Neale Hurston. The bright wakes these figures have left behind illuminate Fenton Johnson's journey from his childhood in rural Kentucky to his solitary travels in America, France, and India. Woven into his musings about better-known solitaries are stories of friends…
