Some great literary thrillers and crime fiction
Discover the best literary thrillers and crime fiction books. Explore gripping, high-quality reads that blend suspense with masterful storytelling for an unforgettable experience.
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Dead I Well May be
by Adrian McKinty
This New York Irish bad-boy thriller--brimming with violence, greed, and sexual betrayal--brings a gripping new voice to the literary turf of Michael Connelly, Chuck Palahniuk, and Dennis Lehane.
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Smilla's Sense of Snow
by Peter Hoeg
She thinks more highly of snow and ice than she does of love. She lives in a world of numbers, science and memories--a dark, exotic stranger in a strange land. And now Smilla Jaspersen is convinced she has uncovered a shattering crime... It happened in the Copenhagen snow. A six-year-old boy, a Greenlander like Smilla, fell to his death from the top of his apartment building. While the boy's body is still warm, the police pronounce his death an accident. But Smilla knows her young neighbor didn't fall from the roof on his own. Soon she is following a path of clues as clear to her as footsteps in the snow. For her dead neighbor, and for herself, she must embark on a harrowing journey of lies, revelation and violence that will take her back to the world of ice and snow from which she comes, where an explosive secret waits beneath the ice....
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The Blind Man of Seville
by Robert Wilson
Investigating the brutal murder of an artist's son, the first of several victims, detective inspector Javier Falcn reads the artist's journals and learns several disturbing truths before realizing that he is the killer's next target. Reprint. 50,000 first printing.
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The Vanished Hands
by Robert Wilson
Javier Falcon, still struggling with the psychological trauma of his last case, investigates an apparent suicide in a wealthy neighborhood and becomes increasingly alarmed when subsequent suicides have suspicious links to the first.
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Motherless Brooklyn
by Jonathan Lethem
When Lionel's friend is killed, he is forced to delve into the complex, shadowy web of relationships, threats, and favors that make up the Brooklyn world he thought he knew so well.
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Absolute Friends
by John le Carre
An absolutely triumphant bestseller-everywhere hailed as the masterpiece toward which John le Carre has been building since the fall of communism. This thrilling tale of Joyaity, betrayal and international espionage spans the lives of two friends from the not-torn West Berlin of the 1960s to the grimy looking-glass of Cold War Europe to the present day of terrorism and uncertain new alliances-alliances that aren't always what they seem to be.
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Gorky Park
by Martin Cruz Smith
"Brilliant...One of the best books of the season." ASSOCIATED PRESS A triple murder in a Moscow amusement center: three corpses found frozen in the snow, faces and fingers missing. Chief homicide investigator Arkady Renko is brilliant, sensitive, honest, and cynical about everything except his profession. To identify the victims and uncover the truth, he must battle the KGB, FBI, and New York police as he performs the impossible--and tries to stay alive doing it.
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The Book of Evidence
by John Banville
Returning to Ireland to reclaim a painting that is part of his patrimony, a thirty-eight-year-old man commits a ghastly and motiveless murder, which he confesses in a novel-length narrative.
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Father's Music
by Dermot Bolger
Tracey is a streetwise 22-year-old born to a middle-class English woman. All she knows about her father is his name, Eoin MacSweeney, and that he was a travelling fiddle-player from Donegal. Then her mother dies.
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Complicity
by Iain Banks
In Scotland, a self-appointed executioner dispenses justice to fit the crime. Thus the lenient judge who let a rapist go is punished by being raped, while a man who killed is killed in turn. By the author of The Wasp Factory.
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The Innocent
by Ian McEwan
A member of a British-American surveillance team in Cold War Berlin finds himself in too deep in this "wholly entertaining" work (The Wall Street Journal) from the Booker Prize winner and bestselling author of Atonement. Twenty-five-year-old Leonard Marnham’s intelligence work—tunneling under a Russian communications center to tap the phone lines to Moscow—offers him a welcome opportunity to begin shedding his own unwanted innocence, even if he is only a bit player in a grim international comedy of errors. His relationship with Maria Eckdorf, an enigmatic and beautiful West Berliner, likewise promises to loosen the bonds of his ordinary life. But the promise turns to horror in the course of one terrible evening—a night when Marnham learns just how much of his innocence he's willing to shed. Don’t miss Ian McEwan’s new novel, Lessons, coming in September!
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Divorcing Jack
by Colin Bateman
In Belfast, reporter Starkey arrives in the apartment of his mistress, a politician's daughter, to find her dying from bullet wounds. Her last words send him on a hunt for an audio tape, pursued by various factions in the Northern Ireland war. Irish politics, Irish humor.