Historical Philosophical & Religious Fiction/Thriller/Mystery
Explore gripping historical fiction, philosophical mysteries, and religious thrillers in our curated list of books. Uncover profound narratives blending intrigue, faith, and deep thought for an unforgettable reading journey.
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An Instance of the Fingerpost
by Iain Pears
A national bestseller and one of the New York Public Library's Books to Remember, An Instance of the Fingerpost is a thrilling historical mystery from Iain Pears. "It is 1663, and England is wracked with intrigue and civil strife. When an Oxford don is murdered, it seems at first that the incident can have nothing to do with great matters of church and state....Yet, little is as it seems in this gripping novel, which dramatizes the ways in which witnesses can see the same events yet remember them falsely. Each of four narrators—a Venetian medical student, a young man intent on proving his late father innocent of treason, a cryptographer, and an archivist—fingers a different culprit...an erudite and entertaining tour de force." —People Iain Pears's The Dream of Scipio and The Portrait are also available from Riverhead Books.
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The Club Dumas
by Arturo PĂ©rez-Reverte
Lucas Corso, middle-aged, tired, and cynical, is a book detective, a mercenary hired to hunt down rare editions for wealthy and unscrupulous clients. When a well-known bibliophile is found hanged, leaving behind part of the original manuscript of Alexandre Dumas's The Three Musketeers, Corso is brought in to authenticate the fragment. The task seems straightforward, but the unsuspecting Corso is soon drawn into a swirling plot involving devil worship, occult practices, and swashbuckling derring-do among a cast of characters bearing a suspicious resemblance to those of Dumas's masterpiece. Aided by a mysterious beauty named for a Conan Doyle heroine, Corso travels from Madrid to Toledo to Paris in pursuit of a sinister and seemingly omniscient killer. "A cross between Umberto Eco and Anne Rice. Think of The Club Dumas as a beach book for intellectuals."--New York Daily News. Part mystery, part puzzle, part witty intertextual game, The Club Dumas is a wholly original intellectual thriller by the internationally bestselling author of The Flanders Panel and The Seville Communion. Lucas Corso's search for the original copy of a book of the occult takes him from Madrid to Paris and into a secret society of antiquarians.
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The Dante Club
by Matthew Pearl
Nineteenth-century Boston is plagued by a series of grisly murders inspired by visions of Dante's Inferno. Four renowned scholars join together to stop the killer.
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World Without End
by Ken Follett
#1 New York Times Bestseller In 1989, Ken Follett astonished the literary world with The Pillars of the Earth, a sweeping epic novel set in twelfth-century England centered on the building of a cathedral and many of the hundreds of lives it affected. World Without End is its equally irresistible sequel—set two hundred years after The Pillars of the Earth and three hundred years after the Kingsbridge prequel, The Evening and the Morning. World Without End takes place in the same town of Kingsbridge, two centuries after the townspeople finished building the exquisite Gothic cathedral that was at the heart of The Pillars of the Earth. The cathedral and the priory are again at the center of a web of love and hate, greed and pride, ambition and revenge, but this sequel stands on its own. This time the men and women of an extraordinary cast of characters find themselves at a crossroads of new ideas—about medicine, commerce, architecture, and justice. In a world where proponents of the old ways fiercely battle those with progressive minds, the intrigue and tension quickly reach a boiling point against the devastating backdrop of the greatest natural disaster ever to strike the human race—the Black Death. Three years in the writing and nearly eighteen years since its predecessor, World Without End is a "well-researched, beautifully detailed portrait of the late Middle Ages" (The Washington Post) that once again shows that Ken Follett is a masterful author writing at the top of his craft.
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Foucault's Pendulum
by Umberto Eco
Three editors, inspired by an extraordinary fable about a mystic source of power greater than atomic energy, begin feeding esoteric bits of knowledge into a sophisticated computer, creating an incredible game that begins taking over. Reprint.
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The Garden of Evil
by David Hewson
The discovery of two corpses next to an unknown Caravaggio masterpiece in an art studio in Rome sends Detective Nic Costa on a quest to uncover the truth about a modern-day crime and a centuries-old secret concealed in the painting.
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The Angel's Game
by Carlos Ruiz ZafĂłn
From the author of the international phenomenon The Shadow of the Wind, comes a riveting masterpiece about love, literature, and betrayal. In this powerful, labyrinthian thriller, David MartĂn is a pulp fiction writer struggling to stay afloat. Holed up in a haunting abandoned mansion in the heart of Barcelona, he furiously taps out story after story, becoming increasingly desperate and frustrated. Thus, when he is approached by a mysterious publisher offering a book deal that seems almost too good to be real, David leaps at the chance. But as he begins the work, and after a visit to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, he realizes that there is a connection between his book and the shadows that surround his dilapidated home and that the publisher may be hiding a few troubling secrets of his own. Once again, Ruiz ZafĂłn takes us into a dark, gothic Barcelona and creates a breathtaking tale of intrigue, romance, and tragedy