Mystery & Crime

Chester Himes’s 1965 novel Cotton Comes to Harlem is the sixth and best-known novel in his Harlem Detective series. The book follows black detectives Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed as they search for $87,000 stolen from hardworking African American families who dream of returning to Africa and to escape poverty in America. The novel’s popularity led to other crime novels featuring African American cops and detectives, earning Himes the reputation as the father of... Read Cotton Comes To Harlem Summary

Steve Bogira’s nonfiction work Courtroom 302: A Year Behind the Scenes in an American Criminal Courthouse was published in 2005. Bogira, as a Chicago native and long-time writer for the Chicago Reader, is a social justice advocate and focuses much of his work on poverty and segregation. The work addresses themes of The Injustices of the US Justice System, The Prison-Industrial Complex, and The Influences of Corruption and Politics on Criminal Courts.Content Warning: The source... Read Courtroom 302 Summary

Crime and Punishment is a novel by Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky, first published in 1866. The story charts the alienation of a student named Raskolnikov who decides to commit the perfect crime to philosophically proving his superiority over others. The novel traces the depths of his mental disintegration as he comes to grips with the psychological consequences of being a murderer, exploring themes like Alienation and Shame, Criminality, and The Necessity of Suffering.Dostoevsky, a stalwart... Read Crime and Punishment Summary

Published in 2010, Tom Franklin’s Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter is a literary crime novel centered around two unsolved murders that connect past and present. The novel follows Silas Jones, a black constable in a small town in Mississippi, and Larry Ott, the white suspect in a decades-old, unsolved murder. Silas and Larry grew up alongside each other and developed a tentative friendship that the two grown men explore through flashbacks. When another teenaged girl goes... Read Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter Summary

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Deacon King Kong was published in 2020 and written by American author James McBride. It is an example of near-historical fiction written about American cities and social issues. McBride’s 1995 memoir about growing up in a mixed-race family in Brooklyn, The Color of Water, was both a commercial and critical success, and his own life experience aligns with some of the narratives and issues in Deacon King Kong.McBride’s novel The Good Lord Bird won the... Read Deacon King Kong Summary

An elderly widow named Lois considers the Toronto condominium she moved into after her husband’s death. She’s happy to no longer have to deal with caring for a lawn, but she’s even happier to have found a place where she can fit all of her paintings. Lois’s art collection comprises work by the “Group of Seven”—a school of 20th-century painters who depict scenes of the Canadian wilderness. Contrary to what some of her friends think... Read Death By Landscape Summary

Beautiful twenty-year-old Linnet Ridgeway is one of the wealthiest women in England, the heir to a vast fortune. She is in the final stages of renovating her newly-acquired estate, Wode Hall, when her best friend, the poor but clever Jacqueline “Jackie” de Bellefort asks a favor: could Linnet hire Jackie’s fiancé, Simon Doyle, who is penniless and recently out of a job? Linnet agrees to meet Simon and is immediately drawn to him. Soon the... Read Death On The Nile Summary

Defending Jacob is a 2012 crime novel by William Landay. The main character is Andy Barber, a Massachusetts assistant district attorney, who finds his personal and professional life thrown into turmoil when his son, Jacob Barber, is accused of murdering his classmate Ben Rifkin. Andy, a resident of Newton, Massachusetts, narrates the events of the 2007 murder and trial alongside the transcripts of a 2008 grand jury investigation whose subject remains unstated until the final... Read Defending Jacob Summary

Desert Blood: The Juárez Murders is a 2005 thriller by American novelist, poet, and essayist Alicia Gaspar de Alba. The novel takes place in 1998 when Juárez, Mexico is experiencing a spate of brutal killings of poor young women and girls, mostly factory workers. The protagonist, Ivon Villa, is a women’s studies professor from Los Angeles who returns to her hometown of El Paso, Texas—just across the border from Juárez—to adopt a baby. When the... Read Desert Blood Summary

Devil in the Grove by Gilbert King, subtitled Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America, is an account of an important but relatively little-known legal case that paved the way for the advances of the civil rights era. The book begins with the story behind the case: In July 1949, in Groveland, Florida, a 17-year-old girl named Norma Lee Padgett claims a group of four young black men raped her... Read Devil in the Grove Summary

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Introduction Different Seasons (1982) by Stephen King is a collection of four novellas that are tied together by a connection to the four seasons. Three of the four stories (“Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption”, “Apt Pupil”, and “The Body”) have been made into films, and the fourth (“The Breathing Method”) is under consideration for adaptation.This guide refers to the 1983 Signet edition.Content Warning: This book contains references to death by suicide, sexual assault, racism... Read Different Seasons Summary

Disappearing Earth (2019) is a debut novel by Julia Phillips published by Alfred A. Knopf, New York, a division of Penguin Random House. This cross-genre novel combines elements of Mystery, Thriller, Women’s Fiction, and Literary Fiction. In 2019, it was a National Book Award finalist for fiction, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize, and a finalist for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. New York Times Book Review named... Read Disappearing Earth Summary

Doctor Sleep is a 2013 horror novel by Stephen King. It is a sequel to the events that occurred in King’s popular novel The Shining and features the return of Danny Torrance. Decades after the horrors at the Overlook Hotel, Dan Torrance must now reckon with the renewed threat of the spirits. When the novel begins, the dead woman from the Overlook’s Room 217 has returned and threatens Danny in his bathroom. King uses this... Read Doctor Sleep Summary

Dolores Claiborne (1992) is a psychological thriller by the American novelist Stephen King. The novel, narrated from Dolores’s first-person point of view, tells the story of her work as a housekeeper for the wealthy Vera Donovan and Dolores’s eventual murder of her abusive husband. Unique among King’s work for its unconventional narrative style, including a lack of chapter designations and section breaks, the novel deals with themes of revenge, family, physical and sexual abuse, and... Read Dolores Claiborne Summary

Down These Mean Streets is a 1967 memoir written by Piri Thomas detailing his late childhood through young adulthood. Piri is the eldest son of two Puerto Rican immigrants living in the New York City area with his family. He spends his childhood in the Puerto Rican section of Harlem, though his family later moves to the Italian-American section of Harlem, where Piri gets in fights with the Italian-American kids. One of these fights leads... Read Down These Mean Streets Summary

Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic (Bloomsburg Press, 2015) is a nonfiction book by American journalist and writer Sam Quinones. It won the NBCC Award for General Nonfiction and was on Amazon’s list of best books of the year in 2015 as well as Slate’s list of the 50 best books of the past 25 years. In the book Quinones charts the parallel rise of prescription opiates and black tar heroin, and describes... Read Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic Summary

Olga Tokarczuk is among Poland’s most famous and critically acclaimed contemporary authors. She has received multiple national and international literary awards, including the 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature. Her most well-known novels and their translation dates into English are House of Day, House of Night (2003), Primeval and Other Times (2010), Flights (2018), and The Books of Jacob (2021).Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead was published in Poland in 2009 but didn’t... Read Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead Summary

Elizabeth Is Missing by British author Emma Healey was published in 2014 and tells the story of Maud Horsham, an old woman suffering from dementia. Maud’s older sister, Sukey, disappeared in the 1940s. Seventy years later, this tragic event continues to haunt Maud, who now thinks her best friend Elizabeth is missing. Maud is desperate to figure out what happened to Sukey and Elizabeth before she loses her ability to piece together the clues. Maud’s... Read Elizabeth is Missing Summary