If you liked
Books like The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
Loved The Spy Who Came in from the Cold by John le Carre? Here are 10 books with a similar appeal — drawn mostly from mystery & thriller, ranked by how confidently we'd recommend them next.
10 books · ranked
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1
The Name of the Rose
In a 14th-century Italian monastery, the English friar William of Baskerville investigates a series of murders whose resolution turns on a forbidden book. Eco's debut novel is simultaneously a medieval detective story, a meditation on heresy and textual interpretation, and a literary novel about the relationship between truth, authority and the books that preserve or destroy both.
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2
And Then There Were None
Ten strangers are lured to an isolated island off the Devon coast — each convicted in a recording of a crime they are believed to have escaped justice for. One by one they are murdered. Christie's bestselling detective novel is the best-selling crime novel of all time and the foundational locked-room mystery.
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3
The Big Sleep
Private detective Philip Marlowe is hired by an elderly General to handle a blackmailer — and finds himself in a Los Angeles of corruption, murder and double-crossing that extends far beyond the original case. Chandler's first novel introduced one of fiction's iconic protagonists and established the hardboiled detective as an American archetype.
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4
Rebecca
A new bride is haunted by her husband's glamorous dead wife in a brooding country house; gothic suspense at its finest.
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5
The Silence of the Lambs
A young FBI trainee bargains with a brilliant killer to catch another; a flawless, terrifying thriller.
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6
Murder on the Orient Express
Hercule Poirot boards the Orient Express snowbound in Yugoslavia and wakes to find a fellow passenger has been murdered. Everyone on the train is a suspect. Christie's most famous novel turns the conventions of the whodunit inside out with a solution that raises genuine moral questions about justice and collective vengeance.
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7
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
Journalist Mikael Blomkvist teams up with the brilliant, damaged hacker Lisbeth Salander to investigate a 40-year-old disappearance from a wealthy Swedish family — and uncovers something far darker. Larsson's novel launched the Millennium series and introduced one of the most compelling anti-heroines in crime fiction.
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8
Still Life
In the Quebec village of Three Pines, a woman is found dead in the woods on the morning after Thanksgiving. Inspector Armand Gamache of the Sûreté du Québec arrives to investigate — and finds a village of artists, eccentrics and buried secrets. Penny's debut introduced one of crime fiction's most beloved series and established Three Pines as a genuinely compelling literary setting.
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9
Gone Girl
A wife vanishes and her husband becomes the prime suspect; the twisty thriller that redefined the genre.
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10
Down the River unto the Sea
Joe King Oliver, a former NYPD detective framed and imprisoned years earlier on charges that destroyed his career and marriage, is approached by the woman who set him up — now wanting his help — while he investigates the case of a journalist accused of killing two police officers. Mosley's Edgar Award-winning novel is a hardboiled meditation on corruption, race and the New York City justice system from one of crime fiction's most distinctive voices.