BVBook Verdict

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Books like The Middle Temple Murder

Loved The Middle Temple Murder by Joseph Smith Fletcher? 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

  1. 1

    Murder on the Orient Express

    Agatha Christie · 1934 · Mystery & Thriller

    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.

  2. 2

    Rebecca

    Daphne du Maurier · 1938 · Mystery & Thriller

    A new bride is haunted by her husband's glamorous dead wife in a brooding country house; gothic suspense at its finest.

  3. 3

    And Then There Were None

    Agatha Christie · 1939 · Mystery & Thriller

    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.

  4. 4

    The Big Sleep

    Raymond Chandler · 1939 · Mystery & Thriller

    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.

  5. 5

    The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

    Arthur Conan Doyle · 1892 · Mystery & Thriller

    The classic short stories that made Holmes immortal; the best place to meet the great detective.

  6. 6

    The Sign of Four

    Arthur Conan Doyle · 1890 · Mystery & Thriller

    Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson are engaged by Mary Morstan to investigate the mysterious death of her father and a series of pearls left for her by an unknown benefactor. The case leads to a stolen Indian treasure, a pact of vengeance and one of Holmes's most elaborate investigations. The novel also introduces Watson's courtship of Mary, who becomes his wife.

  7. 7

    The Spy Who Came in from the Cold

    John le Carre · 1963 · Mystery & Thriller

    Alec Leamas, a burned-out British intelligence officer, is sent on one final mission into East Germany — supposedly to destroy an East German spymaster. Le Carré's breakthrough novel dismantled the romantic myth of the Cold War spy and replaced it with a portrait of moral compromise, institutional cynicism and the expendability of individuals to state interests.

  8. 8

    The Name of the Rose

    Umberto Eco · 1980 · Mystery & Thriller

    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.

  9. 9

    The Silence of the Lambs

    Thomas Harris · 1988 · Mystery & Thriller

    A young FBI trainee bargains with a brilliant killer to catch another; a flawless, terrifying thriller.

  10. 10

    Gone Girl

    Gillian Flynn · 2012 · Mystery & Thriller

    A wife vanishes and her husband becomes the prime suspect; the twisty thriller that redefined the genre.

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