Posts tagged with mystery
Josephine Tey
Josephine Tey is not an easy writer to pigeonhole. All of her books are mysteries, but they vary so much in tone and style that it’s difficult to classify them. Brat Farrar, for example, has lit...
Wendelin Van Draanen
Once, during a long-ago NPR interview, I listened to an Amazon.com employee blithely recommending Wendelin Van Draanen's Sammy Keyes mysteries to the parent of a five-year-old. Um… no. (Unless y...
Caroline Stevermer
Caroline Stevermer is a woman who clearly isn't afraid of a little experimentation. Her alternative history/fantasy stories feature truly unusual settings, characters, and resolutions, and even i...
John Lanchester
I have only read the first of John Lanchester's books, 1996's The Debt to Pleasure. This wickedly amusing book begins as an epicurean memoir and ends up as the only horror/cookbook hybrid I've ev...
Arturo Perez-Reverte
Arturo Perez-Reverte’s books always fall apart in the last few chapters, but the rest of the story is so much fun that you have to forgive him. If you’re looking for enjoyably atmospheric mysteri...
Laurie R. King
Best known for her Sherlock Holmes/Mary Russell mysteries, Laurie R. King is a highly literary mystery/suspense novelist with a tendency to develop stories around her other interests, particularly...
E.L. Konigsburg
Elaine Lobl Konigsburg is the only author to have both won the Newbery Award (for 1968’s From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler) and been the runner-up (for Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth...
Charlotte Bronte
Although Jane Eyre is commonly described as a Gothic love story, only about half of the book is devoted to Jane's romance with Mr. Rochester. The first quarter of the novel focuses on Jane's mise...
A.S. Byatt
A. S. Byatt is smarter than you are. She knows it, and when you read one of her novels, you'll know it, too. When she's in a rub-this-in-your-face mood, this can make wading through one of her n...
Dashiell Hammett
Possibly the first (and definitely one of the best) of the "hardboiled" mystery writers, Dashiell Hammett's spare, sharp prose can be found in the gloriously atmospheric The Maltese Falcon and gid...
Georgette Heyer
I firmly hold the following to be true: Georgette Heyer was an amazing writer.She is tragically underappreciated (particularly here in the United States).The fact that no one has made a film vers...
Isaac Adamson
The first thing that attracted me to Isaac Adamson’s 2001 novel Tokyo Suckerpunch: A Billy Chaka Adventure was its gloriously lurid pink-and-yellow cover art, which, along with the book’s title, s...
Joan Aiken
Few Wordcandy authors are as uneven as Joan Aiken--but then few authors are as prolific or as ambitious, so we have to forgive the occasional bomb. Joan Aiken wrote over a hundred books, tackling...