Crime/Mystery Recommendation & Discussion Thread

Michael Connelly- Bosch series

John Sandford- Prey series with Lucas Davenport..Virgil Flowers novels are also good

I'm a big fan of the Pendergast series by Preston & Child.

Slowly working my way through Agatha Christie's Poirot novels.

I've got 4 or 5 Bond books by Ian Fleming left. They vary wildly from the movies, but I'm gonna finish them out this year

I envy you on the Bond books. I was 14 when I read them and was transported away into all that shite. It’s not the same now.

To the OP:
I enjoyed the Kathy Reichs Temperance Brennan books (TV show BONES based on this…VERY different). Forensic pathology stuff.

Karin Slaughter’s Will Trent books are excellent. I am currently on the one released last year, then I’m all caught up. She has another character, Sara Linton, who appears in the Grant County series she wrote, and she merges the Grant County world with Will Trent’s world with great results.
Start with Triptych.
Will Trent is a detective The TV show has DEI checkboxes ticked, but it’s tolerable…gonna leave that there. Books are NOT like the show, tho the show uses some good plot and story lines from the books.
Sara Linton is a coroner/doctor.

She even teamed with Lee Child for a Will Trent / Jack Reacher team-up in an entertaining story Cleaning the Gold.

The Jack Reacher books by Lee Child are fun reads.

I also grew up on Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct books. LOVE them, tho they may seem dated now. Good old pound-the-pavement police work in a big city based on New York.

Start with The Killing Floor.

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Start with The Killing Floor.

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Yeah you gotta start reacher with killing floor. A solid book and a great intro to the character

The next one is for sure read is “without fail” where reacher helps the secret service try to stop the VP being assassinated. I think it’s my fav reacher book.

I'm a classic crime/mystery fan. I could go on a rant of how the genre has really gone off a cliff. For the most part, modern crime/murder mystery is a bad genre.

All of Con Doyle/Sherlock.
The Big Sleep - Raymond Chandler
Rebecca - Daphne de Maurier
The 39 Steps - John Buchane
All of Agatha Christie
A Thief of Time - Tony Hillerman
Red Harvest - Dashiel Hammett
All of Cormac McCarthy

Nero Wolfe

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Nero Wolfe is a fictional character, a brilliant, oversized, eccentric armchair detective created in 1934 by American mystery writer Rex Stout. Wolfe was born in Montenegro and keeps his past murky. He lives in a luxurious brownstone on West 35th Street in New York City, and he is loath to leave his home for business or anything that would keep him from reading his books, tending his orchids, or eating the gourmet meals prepared by his chef, Fritz Brenner. Archie Goodwin, Wolfe's sharp-witted, dapper young confidential assistant with an eye for attractive women, narrates the cases and does the legwork for the detective genius.

Stout wrote 33 novels and 41 novellas and short stories from 1934 to 1975, with most of them set in New York City. The stories have been adapted for film, radio, television and the stage. The Nero Wolfe corpus was nominated for Best Mystery Series of the Century at Bouchercon 2000, the world's largest mystery convention, and Rex Stout was a nominee for Best Mystery Writer of the Century.

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The Wolfe series is unique in that it's part Great Detective, and part hard boiled private eye (legman Archie Goodwin). Many of the repartee exchanges are classics.

If you like audiobooks check out these old time radio shows:

The Adventures of Nero Wolfe -- stars Sydney Greenstreet (The Maltese Falcon) as Wolfe. My favorite Wolfe series in any medium (IMHO, aside from the isolated TV movie-pilot starring Thayer David in the late '70s -- which you can watch here -- the TV attempts at Wolfe have been mediocre at best)

Hercule Poirot -- Unfortunately only a handful of episode from this entertaining WWII-era series survive. One of the episodes is a rewrite of Death On The Nile, with the action transferred to... a freighter on Lake Michigan!?

Lagniappe:

"The ABC Murders" -- an adaptation of the novel starring Charles Laughton (who had played Poirot on stage in the late '20s), done for the great radio show Suspense in 1943 -- but with the character of Poirot completely removed!

Harry Bosch series Michael Connelt
Eddie Flynn series Steve Cavanagh
Dismas Hardy/Abe Glitsky series John Lescroart
Sam Capra series by Jeff Abbott

John Corey by Nelson DeMille - more international terrorism

Jo Nesbo murder mysteries if you like Scandanavia.

If you like wilderness based crime and mystery there's C.J. Box novels and Paul Doiron books.

Alex Grecian and Charles Finch write 19th century Britain mystery novels.

If you want something more cerebral and literary, Tana French is excellent