I love mystery novels…here’s a list of some of my favorites (in no particular order):
- Daughter of Time (Josephine Tey)
- The Thursday Murder Club (Richard Osman)
- The Man Who Died Twice (Richard Osman)
- The Maltese Falcon (Dashiell Hammett)
- The Dublin Murder Squad series
- Any of the Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries by Dorothy L. Sayers, but especially Gaudy Night
- Any of the Dortmunder caper novels by Donald Westlake, including The Hot Rock and God Save the Mark.
- The Nero Wolfe mysteries by Rex Stout
- The Man with a Load of Mischief, the first in the Richard Jury/Melrose Plant series by Martha Grimes
- The Fabulous Clip Joint by Frederic Brown
- Fadeout by Joseph Hansen
- The Confidence Men by Margalit Fox
- East of Hounslow by Khurrum Rahman
- How Lucky by Will Leitch
- Any of Lawrence Block’s Burglar series with Bernie Rhodenbarr, like The Burglar Who Traded Ted Williams
Need more? Check out these awesome lists (which have some of the same books I’ve mentioned):
- The Top 100 Crime Novels of All Time (chosen by the UK Crime Writers’ Association in 1990)
- The Top 100 Mystery Novels of All Time (chosen by the Mystery Writers of America in the mid 1990s)
- Julian Symons’s 100 Best Crime Stories (an older list–nothing after 1957)