Books like The Murder Game — picked by fans

The Trope: The Unknown Threat

Lisa Jewell is a master of psychological suspense, and I felt this was one of her best. I love true crime podcasts, so using a podcaster as a protagonist and having clips from her show in the story added a layer of reality to the fiction. 

The main character meets a woman with the same birthday as her while out celebrating. She decides to do a podcast series around the theme of birthday twins—an innocent, even fun beginning to a story that becomes anything but. For much of the book, the main character knew something was very, very wrong but had no idea where the menace was coming from. It made me squirm—in a good way. I couldn’t put it down.

I love a great mystery and I adore fantastic characters.

That’s why A Spoonful of Murder is so high on my list. It’s cozy crime with attitude. Having a detective story that doesn’t feature any actual detectives is the challenge for all cozy crime writers.

And J.M. Hall does this with such verve, vigour, and lightness of touch that you find it impossible not to fall in love with Liz, Pat, and Thelma.

There’s a wonderful fraternity amongst us cozy crime writers and I’m very lucky to count Mr. Hall as a friend. He makes me want to be a better author, just to keep up with him!

This is a psychological thriller with a difference. This story appears to be one thing and is, in fact, something else. Following the path of a struggling working mother with post-natal depression, we see the world through her paranoid eyes.

What I really enjoyed about this book is the unexpected twists and turns. Is she really imagining this, or did she see that little girl on the platform? It makes you question everything, including the motives of those surrounding the main character (always a good thing!). It is a masterpiece of misdirection and an unreliable narrator.

In this gripping courtroom drama, an explosion in Miracle Creek, Virginia, destroys the business of South Korean immigrants Pak and Young Yoo and puts their daughter Mary into a monthslong coma. As arguments mount against the woman accused of starting the fire, Young struggles with a question many immigrants must face. Maybe she shouldn’t have brought her child to the US, where Mary struggles as a teenager and where she was almost killed. The tension between the two generations resonated with me as a parent and immigrant. As Young hopes to discover who caused the explosion that killed two other people, she must also help Mary imagine a future in their adoptive country.

As I’d ended up enjoying Eeny Meeny I didn’t hesitate to pick up The Players.

Following a similar vein of psychological manipulation and exploitation of secrets, the game in this novel refers to a series of dangerous activities orchestrated by ‘The Host’ who carefully chooses two ‘players’ to fight to the death. And if that’s not twisted enough, the fights are posted to social media. This gives a modern edge to the novel and plays on fears about the far-reaching implications of the internet.

I felt a sense of unease all the way through and particularly enjoyed the underlying dilemma of whether you would be able to live with the guilt of killing someone to protect your family or make the decision to sacrifice yourself for another’s sake.

As the daughter of a mom who suffered a mental breakdown shortly after my birth, I have always been strongly interested in stories of mothers who experience emotional difficulties following the births of their children. In this book, a young woman abandons her infant in a hospital shortly after giving birth and disappears.

Her husband attributes her behavior to postpartum psychosis, a malady that she’s been monitored for throughout her pregnancy, given her own mother’s struggles with the disorder. But is that what really led to the mom’s sudden disappearance? Told in multiple viewpoints, it’s unclear who is telling the truth about what happened to the young mother. I found the plot twist at the end of this propulsive tale especially satisfying. 

I couldn't get enough of the character, Rocco Schiavone, from the TV series Ice Cold Murders, so I decided to check out the original novels by Antonio Manzini. They are equally good—or better.  Rocco is a police inspector from Rome who gets transferred to Aosta, an alpine ski resort town. In Black Run, Rocco instructs his provincial team in big-city police techniques, including cutting corners and avoiding superiors. He contrives useless errands to get his two dumbest cops out of the office. And he introduces his classification of Things That Are a Pain in the Ass, with "sand in your clams" at Level Seven and "unsolved homicide" at Level 10. Black Run begins on the slopes, at Level 10, with the discovery of an unidentified corpse mangled by a snowcat.

Just about any of Leonard’s several dozen suspense novels could have a top spot in this reckoning, including the better known Get Shorty, Freaky Deaky, and Glitz. My vote for the best goes, however, to Killshot, his dark, deftly plotted, highly comedic 1989 thriller about two bumbling killers and a ballsy middle-aged married couple the killers mistake for easy marks. Armand Degas, a soulful Ojibway known as the Blackbird, has grown tired of being a hit man for the Detroit mob. He’s befriended by a moronic thug named Richie Nix, whose bucket list includes robbing a bank in every state. When they decide that Carmen, a real estate agent, and her steelworker husband Wayne Colson hold the keys to a fortune, they learn that, like the Bible says, the wages of sin is death.  

Elroy wrote many other books before he took on this epic noir crime novel (one in a quartet). He made his bones in writing, and it's evident in his skill level, story, and prose. Elroy excels in this novel (and the other three) in voice. And voice is the Big Kahuna in writing, it’s the everything in writing and Elroy has it in spades.

Another great addition to the above is the length (because you don’t want this book to ever end) and that it’s a historical novel that absolutely captures the time period and adds the historical nuance to all the characters.

This was the first book I’ve read from the point of view of an investigative journalist, and I really enjoyed this angle. And I really loved the character of Ingrid, a very strong female lead who will stop at nothing to get to the truth. Ingrid delves deeper into the story of 8-year-old Kelly Doherty’s murder, believing that there's a chance the man convicted is innocent. But she's soon warned off by someone who’ll do anything to keep the past buried.   

Claire's writing style is entertaining and engaging. This atmospheric story is told from multiple viewpoints, which keeps the pages turning quickly. It's dark and chilling with a plot that builds and builds and kept me guessing until the climactic ending that I totally didn’t see coming.