70 Books Like The Murder Book

I’ve always been fascinated by the “dreaming spires” of Oxford University and enjoy Gaudy Night because it immerses me in the world of a (fictional) women’s college set in 1930s Oxford.

As a former professor, I’m intrigued by the internecine political and personal battles in the Senior Common Room (SCR), or college faculty lounge, as well as the friction between those professors devoted entirely to an academic career versus those trying to maintain the challenging balance of work and family, the same issues women struggle with today, nearly one hundred years later.

Sayers weaves together these tensions with a mysterious “poltergeist” who torments the college with poison-pen letters, pranks, vandalism, and violence into a compelling mystery under the dreaming spires.

Agatha Christie has got to be considered as one of the master craftsmen of the “whodunnit”. In this novel, she presents us with an intriguing mystery and brings in her famous character, Hercule Poirot to solve it. As always, Poirot faces a varied array of possible suspects and the highly-credible reasons as to why he/she may be the guilty party. The pace is consistent and keeps the reader turning the page and trying to guess until the unmasking at the very end.

I’ve been a sucker for the entire Brother Cadfael series since long before Derek Jacoby got a hold of the character (and knocked it out of the park, too). Ellis Peters did such a great job of recreating 12th-century England; I really felt like I was there.

In fact, this book got me hooked on the whole historical mystery genre. I could practically smell the drying herbs in Cadfael’s herbarium.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It’s set in Sweden and takes the reader to Latvia during the disintegration of the Soviet Union, so it touches on another genre that I like to dip into—spy novels. The hero is Kurt Wallander, a sympathetic character, who’s just trying to do his job which, in this case, means dealing with the bodies of two torture victims that have been discovered on the Swedish Coast. Now read on …

The Harry Bosch series has been long and often predictable.

Bosch has a strong belief that if everybody doesn’t count, nobody counts. He has to hold up his image of justice against an LAPD that plays politics, and a city populace easily swayed by the latest headlines.

What I love about The Last Coyote is that it’s a very personal novel where Bosch examines his relationship with his deceased mother Marjorie Phillips Lowe, a prostitute who was brutally murdered. While on psychiatric leave, Bosch takes on the case of his mother’s unsolved murder.

It’s a wonderfully nuanced exploration of the relationship between a mother and son, a cop and his own psyche, and a city and its most reviled citizens.

In the ninth book featuring Connelly’s iconic character, (now retired) LAPD detective Harry Bosch, the quintessential modern knight errant is working a case that’s haunted him for years – the murder of Angella Benton.

Her death might be linked to a bold and bloody robbery of 2 million dollars from a movie set where she worked as a production assistant, but neither crime was ever solved. Now Harry is intent on finding Angella’s killer.

The story is set against the backdrop of the movie industry and the celebrity-obsessed culture of Hollywood. Unimpressed by the trappings of power, Harry follows his instincts, led only by his guiding principle, “Everybody counts or nobody counts.”

But this time, he’s on his own without a badge or backup, and when his investigation hits very close to home, Harry finds himself facing brutal enemies determined to strike him down. 

As a high school senior planning a career in law enforcement, I was mesmerized by Joseph Wambaugh’s account of the kidnapping of two Los Angeles police officers in 1963, and the murder of one of them.  Wambaugh unsympathetically details the stories of the two men convicted in the case, while at the same time humanizing the officer who survived and suffered from humiliation and guilt again and again throughout seven years of court proceedings against the men who kidnapped him and murdered his partner. The courtroom dialogue is verbatim, and to me, that leads to a feeling that the reader is actually there watching the proceedings. Wambaugh is a superb writer, and I consider this book is another must-read.

For me, there’s something extra compelling about a crime novel set in Los Angeles. I can’t remember why I picked up this first book in the Elouise (Lou) Norton series, but I’m glad I did.

In the first few pages, Lou is called out to the scene of an apparent suicide that may have connections to her own sister’s long-ago disappearance, which instantly intrigued me. I loved getting to follow fierce, tough Lou around the city as she investigated her current case, broke in her newbie partner, and also tried to figure out, once and for all, what really happened to her sister.

Between 1960 and the 1990s, the budget, size, and power of LAPD dramatically grew in spite of attempts to use regulatory powers of the government to control the police. “Racial targeting was central to the LAPD’s expansion despite twenty years of liberal leadership of the city. The problem in LA, similar to most urban centers, was a reliance on the police to manage social problems that were “rooted in Los Angeles’ history of segregation, inequality, and poverty.” But such an approach “led to disciplinary practices of surveillance, harassment, and arrest that criminalized and excluded black and Latino/a residents.”

Black Los Angeles citizens were seen by the police as threats to public safety and not deemed worthy of the protection of the law. In its battle against crime, social movements, and drug gangs, the Los Angeles Police Department was able to legitimate their authority to use coercive power to control the… show more.

James Ellroy’s 1987 novel exploring the infamous unsolved and ghoulish murder of Elizabeth Short, the so-called “Black Dahlia,” gripped me with its chilling portrayal of two very different cops who become obsessed with solving the 1947 murder.

Although this is a relatively early work of Ellroy’s and extremely visceral owing to the nature of the historical crime, it’s arguably the author’s first mature novel, proved to be his breakout book, and pre-dates the rather alliterative, staccato prose style he would adopt not long after.

Post-war Los Angeles is seedily, disturbingly rendered in surreal and gothic relief, while Ellroy also masterfully portrays many of the haunted LAPD detectives who actually worked the case.