Book recommendations
10 of the best Booker-nominated murder mysteries, for Knives Out fans
As Wake Up Dead Man, the latest Knives Out mystery, hits our screens this Christmas, here are 10 mould-breaking whodunnits from the Booker Prizes back catalogue
There’s something undeniably cosy about a classic murder mystery, with a puzzle to solve alongside a detective who often feels like an eccentric friend. Navigating your way together through a twisty list of suspects, clues and red herrings, you use your wits to establish who committed the crime and why.
Rian Johnson – the filmmaker behind the Knives Out series – told Rolling Stone magazine that these kinds of stories offer us the ‘comforting feeling [that] everything will make sense by the end. The person responsible will go to jail, and order will be restored. That idea felt pretty good in the Thirties, when there was a lot of turbulence and uncertainty in the world… And that idea feels pretty good right now, too.’
Rather than following a rigid formula, the 10 novels on this list take the whodunnit mould and break it into puzzling, sometimes troubling, but always interesting new shapes. From afterlife noir to thrilling rom-com, via gripping historical fiction, could one of these Booker-nominated murder mysteries solve the conundrum of what to read this Christmas?
Daniel Craig and Josh O’Connor in Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery
© FinnHale / MovieStillsDBThe Trees by Percival Everett
Something strange is afoot in Money, Mississippi. A series of brutal murders are linked eerily by the presence a second dead body at each crime scene: that of a man who resembles Emmett Till, a young Black boy lynched in the same town 65 years before.
The investigating detectives soon discover that uncannily similar murders are taking place all over the country. As the bodies pile up, the detectives seek answers from a local root doctor, who has been documenting every lynching in the country for years.
Shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2022, the book was described by the judges as ‘a mash-up of genres – murder mystery, southern noir, horror, slapstick comedy – handled with such skill that it becomes a medieval morality play spun through 20th-century pop culture to say something profound and urgent about the present moment. There aren’t too many of those around.’
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The Nice and the Good by Iris Murdoch
On a hot summer’s day, a gunshot rings out through the corridors of power. A British government official has apparently killed himself, but the circumstances are suspicious – prompting Octavian Gray, head of the department, to investigate. Lawyer John Ducane is charged with leading the task. Everything becomes even more mysterious when Ducane travels to Gray’s Dorset home, where nothing is quite as it seems.
Iris Murdoch’s thriller-meets-romantic-comedy was shortlisted for the very first Booker Prize in 1969. In a review for the New York Times, Elizabeth Janeway said, ‘This is Murdochland. One expects complications, revelations, tricks and red herrings, invitations to guess at what is coming, echoes, jokes and clues… But the mystery she [Murdoch] is exploring is the universal ambiguity of living creatures in relation to each other, of good behavior and bad, of pleasure and pain, of responsibility, obligation, influence, meddling and neglect; or, if you like, of the Nice and the Good.’
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The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon
This is 15-year-old Christopher Boone’s story; one he’s asked to write at school. There are no lies in this story because Christopher can’t tell lies. Christopher does not like strangers, the colours yellow or brown, or being touched. On the other hand, he knows all the countries in the world and their capital cities, and every prime number up to 7507.
When Christopher decides to find out who killed Wellington, his neighbour’s dog, his story becomes more complicated than he could have ever predicted.
Longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2003, this is a murder mystery like no other, one as popular with young readers as it is with adults. Jay McInerney, writing in the New York Times, said, ‘Mark Haddon’s stark, funny and original first novel… is presented as a detective story. But it eschews most of the furnishings of high-literary enterprise as well as the conventions of genre, disorienting and reorienting the reader to devastating effect.’
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The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka
War photographer Maali Almeida has woken up dead in what seems to be a celestial visa office. His dismembered body is sinking in the Beira Lake and he has no idea who killed him. At a time when scores are settled by death squads, suicide bombers and hired goons, the list of suspects is depressingly long.
But time is running out for Maali. He has ‘seven moons’ to try and contact the man and woman he loves most and lead them to a hidden cache of photos that will rock Sri Lanka.
Winner of the Booker Prize 2022, Karunatilaka’s novel was described by the judges as ‘an afterlife noir’ that ‘fizzes with energy, imagery and ideas’. They remarked that, ‘This is Sri Lankan history as whodunnit, thriller, and existential fable’.
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The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton
It’s 1866 and Walter Moody has come to make his fortune upon the New Zealand goldfields. On arrival, he stumbles across a tense gathering of 12 local men, who have met in secret to discuss a series of unsolved crimes.
A wealthy man has vanished, a sex worker has tried to end her life, and an enormous fortune has been discovered in the home of a luckless drunk. Moody is soon drawn into the mystery: a network of fates and fortunes that is as complex and exquisitely patterned as the night sky.
Winner of the Booker Prize 2013, Eleanor Catton’s fiendishly clever novel is both ghost story and gripping mystery that richly evokes a mid-19th century world of goldrush boom and bust. The judges said, ‘You read every sentence and you are astonished by its knowledge and its poise. In a way, the winner is a classic Victorian novel with murder, red herrings, conspiracies and fallen women.’
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The Silver Bone by Andrey Kurkov, translated by Boris Dralyuk
Kyiv, 1919. When Samson Kolechko’s father is murdered, his last act is to save his son from a falling Cossack sabre. Deprived of his right ear instead of his head, Samson is left an orphan, with only his father’s collection of abacuses for company.
Until, that is, his flat is requisitioned by two Red Army soldiers, whose secret plans Samson is somehow able to overhear with uncanny clarity. Eager to thwart them, he stumbles into a world of murder and intrigue that will either be the making of him – or finish what the Cossack started.
Inflected with Kurkov’s signature humour and magic realism, The Silver Bone crafts a propulsive narrative that bursts to life with rich historical detail.
The novel was longlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2024, with the judges describing it as ‘a crime mystery’ set during ‘a time of chaos, shifts of power and random violence… Inspired by real-life, post-First World War Bolshevik secret police files, Kurkov’s novel creates an atmosphere that ranges from 19th century Russian literature to the immediacy of the current war in Ukraine.’
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Elena Knows by Claudia Piñeiro, translated by Frances Riddle
After Rita is found dead in the bell tower of the church she used to attend, the official investigation into the incident is quickly closed. Her mother Elena, who has Parkinson’s, is the only person still determined to find out what really happened.
Chronicling a slow and painful journey across the suburbs of Buenos Aires, the calling in of an old debt and a revealing conversation, Elena Knows unravels the secrets of its characters and the hidden authoritarianism and hypocrisy at play in society.
The novel was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2022. Writing in the New York Times, Kathleen Rooney said, ‘Short and stylish… It’s a tight and terse mystery with a decisive protagonist. But it’s also a piercing commentary on mother-daughter relationships, the indignity of bureaucracy, the burdens of caregiving and the impositions of religious dogma on women.’
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Something Might Happen by Julie Myerson
In a small seaside town in Suffolk, a woman is brutally murdered. There are no obvious suspects. As the police go about their routine investigation, a friend of the victim, Tess, finds her world beginning to unravel.
Suddenly nothing is certain, the mundane becomes charged with significance, established relationships begin to crumble, and places that once were safe no longer are.
In a novel determinedly described as ‘not a whodunnit’, Myerson investigates the effect of a murder on an ordinary community, a family – and one grieving woman. It was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2003.
Reviewing it for the Guardian, Kate Kellaway said, ‘It lifted me into a nightmare so convincing that I had to put everything on hold to finish it. That feeling of being out of time is, I realise, the atmosphere in which extreme emotions occur – grief, love, fear. After it was over, I felt as though the story had passed like a sharp, single intake of breath.’
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Child 44 by Tom Rob Smith
In Stalin’s Soviet Union, the State executes disloyal citizens at will. Now a different kind of deadly threat, a child murderer, is on the loose. But in a society that is officially paradise, it’s a crime to suggest that a criminal, let alone a serial killer, is at large.
Secret police officer Leo finds himself demoted and denounced by his enemies, his life turned upside down. The only way for him to save himself and his family is to catch a serial killer the State won’t even admit exists.
In Tom Rob Smith’s gripping thriller – longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2008 – the biggest threat to the main protagonist is not the serial killer he is hunting, but the State he is fighting to protect.
Noting how the author ‘uses a murder mystery to explore Stalinism’, Angus Macqueen in the Guardian said, ‘this is a compelling detective story that I read in the proverbial single sitting… I can think of few novels that have touched so eloquently on the complex moral climate of life in the Soviet Union while delivering all the pleasures of a brilliant airport read.’
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The Keepers of Truth by Michael Collins
The last of a manufacturing dynasty in a dying industrial town, Bill lives alone in the family mansion and works for the Truth, a moribund local paper. When a man called Lawton goes missing, suspicion fixes on Lawton’s son, Ronny, the local bad boy.
The violent death breathes new life into the small town, with network TV attention and national scoops for the Truth. But for Bill, a deeper, more disturbing involvement with the Lawton family ensues.
Set in the post-industrial US rust belt, The Keepers of Truth was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2000. The Independent called it a ‘fabulous fusion of hard-boiled mystery and American social history… a complex and literary book, but also a fast-paced and cinematic one’.
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Features
Book extract
An extract from Jimi Hendrix Live in Lviv by Andrey Kurkov, translated by Reuben Woolley
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