Loreful
HomeDiscover
Search series, authors…⌘K
Loreful

Reading orders for SF/F series and shared universes — with your place kept in every one.

Explore

UniversesSeriesWorksAuthorsAtlas

Help

FAQAboutSite map

Account & legal

Sign inCreate accountPrivacyTerms

Data

Built on ISFDB, Wikipedia, Wikidata and Open Library. Curated reading orders carry their reasoning on the page; the rest follow publication order. Data sources & licenses

© Loreful · data: ISFDB · CC BY

More like Catnap

anchored on:mystery & detectivecozy mysterymurder investigationour worldcontemporarynorth america+3 more

but

Mood

The mood the book leaves you in.

  • The reading experience is propelled by journeys, exploration, and physical risk; excitement and forward momentum dominate over dread or introspection.
  • Joy and loss are deliberately mixed; the resolution grants characters something real while taking something else away, leaving warmth and sorrow together.
  • The book demands work from the reader — dense prose, difficult structure, unfamiliar ideas, or morally uncomfortable material — as part of its intended effect.
  • Grim events, cruelty, or despair dominate the atmosphere, and the book does not soften them with comfort or comic relief.
  • The atmosphere is quietly unsettling — wrongness, unease, and the uncanny pervade the book without necessarily escalating into overt horror.
  • The book is built to move the reader; character feeling is foregrounded and major scenes aim at a strong emotional response.
  • Humor is a primary aim and the prose plays for laughs — comic situations, wit, or dialogue produce sustained comedy, not occasional levity.
  • The book insists that things can improve; effort and decency are shown to matter, and the arc bends toward better outcomes even through hardship.
  • The book teaches as it goes — real facts, history, science, or craft are conveyed in enough depth that learning is part of the reading experience.
  • The book is designed to uplift and motivate, presenting perseverance or achievement in a way that invites the reader to aspire or act.
  • The overall register is cheerful and easygoing; stakes are kept gentle and the book avoids dwelling on pain or dread.
  • Withheld information drives the experience; the book sustains enigmas and secrets the reader wants resolved, whatever its genre.
  • The book is contemplative and inward-looking, giving more weight to thought, memory, and meaning than to external events.
  • The book works as comfort reading — low tension, a soothing pace, and an atmosphere the reader can unwind in.
  • Grief, loss, or melancholy set the dominant register, and the book lets sorrow stand rather than resolving it into comfort.
  • Sustained suspense is the point; the book keeps the reader braced for what happens next through danger, pressure, or impending revelation.
  • Playful invention and charm define the register — fanciful conceits, light absurdity, and a narration that delights in its own oddity.

About

What the story runs on.

  • Stories in which extraterrestrial beings are central — as characters, cultures, or the object of the plot.
  • Stories structured as a quest — a journey undertaken to find, deliver, or destroy something of great import.
  • Stories in which staying alive against nature, catastrophe, or scarcity is the central problem.
  • Stories of lovers kept apart by law, family, faith, or station, where the obstacle to love is the plot.
  • Stories in which a friendship — its making, testing, or loss — is the emotional center.
  • Stories of growing up — a young protagonist crossing from childhood into adult knowledge and responsibility.
  • Stories about who a character truly is — self-discovery, doubled lives, and the search for a self.
  • Stories about mourning — living through the death of a loved one and what loss does to the survivors.
  • Stories in which a buried family truth — hidden parentage, crimes, or shames — surfaces and reorders the present.
  • Stories driven by maneuvering for power — factions, conspiracies, and statecraft conducted in shadow.
  • Stories in which war itself is the subject — combat, occupation, and what warfare does to soldiers and civilians.
  • Stories organized around investigating a killing — the case, the clues, and the pursuit of the killer, in any genre's clothing.

Shelf

Where it sits in the library.

    • Fiction built on magic or other supernatural elements that have no scientific explanation.
    • Secondary-world fantasy at large scale, where the fate of nations or the world turns on the protagonists' struggle.
    • Fantasy set in a recognizably modern city or contemporary world where the supernatural intrudes on everyday life.
    • Fantasy that blends in horror's atmosphere and imagery, keeping a fantastical frame around grim or frightening material.
    • Action-driven fantasy following warriors or rogues with personal stakes against sorcerous threats, rather than world-spanning conflicts.
    • Fantasy set in a real historical period or a close analogue of one, with magic woven into the era.
    • Fantasy in which protagonists cross from the ordinary world into another world through a portal or similar passage.
    • Fiction that retells or reworks a traditional fairy tale in a new form or setting.
    • Fantasy drawing directly on myths, legends, and folklore, retelling them or building on their figures and logic.
    • Fantasy of ghosts, vampires, shapeshifters, psychics, and similar phenomena, usually set in an otherwise ordinary world.
    • Fiction mixing science-fictional trappings with overtly magical or impossible elements in one setting.
    • Low-stakes fantasy emphasizing comfort, community, and everyday pleasures over conflict and peril.
    • Speculative fiction of pervasive moral ambiguity, violence, and cynicism that rejects heroic conventions — fantasy and SF alike.
      • Fiction that extrapolates from science and technology — future societies, space travel, or speculative inventions — within at least nominally natural laws.
      • Science fiction of interstellar scope — starships, galactic polities, and adventure across star systems.
      • Science fiction committed to scientific rigor, where technical plausibility constrains the story.
      • Science fiction centered on armed forces and warfare, told largely from a military point of view.
      • Science fiction of networked, corporate-dominated near futures, pairing high technology with social decay.
      • Science fiction styled on nineteenth-century steam-powered technology, often in a Victorian or pseudo-Victorian setting.
      • Fiction depicting an oppressive or catastrophic society, presented as a warning.
      • Fiction set after civilization's collapse, following survivors in the ruins of the old world.
      • Fiction in which characters move between past and future, and the mechanics or consequences of that travel drive the plot.
      • Fiction exploring a world where a historical event went differently and history diverged from ours.
      • Science fiction about humanity's first encounter and communication with an alien intelligence.
      • Science fiction in which extraterrestrial forces attack or occupy Earth and humanity resists.
      • Fiction whose primary aim is to frighten or unsettle the reader through dread, menace, or the monstrous.
      • Horror of vast, indifferent, incomprehensible entities before which humanity is insignificant, in the Lovecraft tradition.
      • Horror of decaying houses, buried family secrets, and oppressive atmosphere in the Gothic literary tradition.
      • Horror centered on hauntings and the returning dead.
      • Horror located in the mind — paranoia, obsession, and unreliable perception rather than external monsters.
      • Horror built around the reanimated dead and survival amid their outbreaks.
      • Horror defined by explicit, transgressive gore that refuses to cut away from violence.
      • Speculative fiction of the strange and uncanny that resists both natural explanation and standard genre categories.
      • Fiction organized around solving a crime or puzzle, typically following an investigator toward the identification of a culprit.
      • A puzzle-first mystery that lays out clues so the culprit's identity can be deduced before the reveal.
      • Crime fiction of moral ambiguity, fatalism, and hard-edged style, set among the corrupt and the doomed.
      • A mystery following the realistic routines of police work — forensics, interviews, and case-building.
      • A gentle mystery with an amateur sleuth, a small community, and violence kept off the page.
      • A mystery set in a past era, where the investigation works within that period's methods and society.
      • Fast-paced fiction driven by imminent danger, pursuit, or high-stakes conspiracy, built to sustain tension.
      • A thriller of espionage — agents, tradecraft, and intelligence services in conflict.
      • A thriller centered on lawyers and the courtroom, where litigation carries the suspense.
      • A thriller driven by detailed contemporary or near-future technology, often military or scientific.
      • A thriller whose tension comes from mental states and manipulation between characters rather than external action.
      • Fiction whose central plot is a romantic relationship and its development toward an emotionally satisfying resolution.
      • Romance in which one or both partners are supernatural beings, blending fantasy elements into the love story.
      • A fantasy-romance hybrid in which the romantic arc and the fantasy plot carry equal weight.
      • Romance set in a past era, with courtship shaped by the period's society and manners.
      • Romance set in the present day, without supernatural or historical elements.
      • Fiction set in a real past period, where the historical setting materially shapes characters and events.
        • General and literary fiction emphasizing prose style, character interiority, or formal ambition over genre plot conventions.
        • Fiction in a realistic world where magical events occur and are treated as ordinary, in the tradition of Latin American literature.
        • Fiction that ridicules people, institutions, or society in order to criticize them.
        • Fiction of dreamlike, irrational imagery and logic that breaks from realistic representation.
        • Fiction that plays with narrative convention through metafiction, fragmentation, and self-reference.
        • Fiction propelled by journeys, exploration, and physical peril, where action and survival carry the plot.
        • Adventure fiction of ships and seafaring — naval engagements, voyages, and life at sea.
        • Fiction of the American frontier West — gunmen, ranchers, and lawmen, typically in the late nineteenth century.
        • Fiction centered on soldiers, campaigns, and the experience of warfare, historical or imagined.
          • Fiction written primarily to amuse, using comedic situations, wit, or parody as its organizing principle.
            • Multi-generational fiction following a family or dynasty across decades, with inheritance and kinship as the through-line.
              • Fiction whose world runs on explicit game mechanics — levels, stats, and skills that characters can see and exploit.
                • Fiction about costumed or superpowered heroes and their conflicts with comparable villains.

                Practical

                How long a commitment, whether it stands alone, and whether it has finished.

                Tap a chip to ask for it · tap again to rule it out · once more to clear. Numbers show what would be left.

                • Cover of Nursery Crimes
                  Nursery Crimes

                  series · 2 books · 2005

                  similar bymurder investigationcontemporarymystery & detectivefunny+1 more

                  In an alternate Reading, England, where nursery-rhyme and fairy-tale characters live as ordinary if eccentric citizens, Detective Inspector Jack Spratt of the Nursery Crime Division investigates cases that keep colliding with their source material. The Big Over Easy turns Humpty Dumpty's fall into a murder investigation; The Fourth Bear follows with the Gingerbread Man as a serial killer. Jasper Fforde plays the premise for satire and wordplay as much as plot, in the same absurdist vein as his Thursday Next novels.

                • Cover of Half-Moon Investigations
                  Half-Moon Investigations

                  Eoin Colfer · standalone novel · 2006

                  similar bymurder investigationcontemporarymystery & detectivefunnycozy mystery+1 more

                  Half Moon Investigations is a novel by the Irish author Eoin Colfer. It was first published in United States in March 2006 and was released in the UK and Ireland on 1 June 2006. The paperback edition was released in the UK on 5 July 2007. It has also been adapted as a television series starring Sebastian Charles & Rory Elrick, which aired on the BBC from January 2009.

                • Cover of The Yiddish Policemen's Union
                  The Yiddish Policemen's Union

                  Michael Chabon · standalone novel · 2007

                  similar bymurder investigationcontemporarymystery & detectivenorth americabig city

                  In an alternate present where Jewish refugees settled Alaska during World War II rather than Israel, homicide detective Meyer Landsman -- divorced, drinking, living in a run-down hotel -- catches a case in his own building: a former chess prodigy, shot dead beside an unfinished game. Landsman and his half-Tlingit partner Berko Shemets learn the dead man was more than he seemed, connected to a messianic movement within Sitka's Orthodox community, just as the settlement faces a countdown of its own -- its status as a federal district about to expire, everyone's future up for grabs. Michael Chabon's Hugo- and Nebula-winning noir, told as hardboiled alternate history.

                • Cover of Joe Grey
                  Joe Grey

                  series · 22 books · 1996

                  completed

                  similar bymurder investigationcontemporarymystery & detectivecozy mysterynorth america+1 more

                • Cover of Daniel McEvoy
                  Daniel McEvoy

                  series · 2 books · 2011

                  similar bymurder investigationcontemporarymystery & detectiveour world+3 more

                • Cover of The Cat Who...
                  The Cat Who...

                  series · 32 books · 1966

                  completed

                  similar bymurder investigationcozy mysterylightheartedmystery & detectivenorth america+1 more

                  The Cat Who... is a series of twenty-nine mystery novels and three related collections by Lilian Jackson Braun and published by G. P. Putnam's Sons, featuring a reporter named Jim Qwilleran and his Siamese cats, Kao K'o-Kung and Yum Yum. The first was written in 1966, with two more following in 1967 and 1968. The fourth appeared eighteen years later, after which at least one new novel was published every year until 2007. A thirtieth novel, originally announced for 2008, was postponed indefinitely by its publisher and then canceled after the author's death in 2011. It remains unpublished.

                • Cover of The City & the City
                  The City & the City

                  China Miéville · standalone novel · 2009

                  similar bymurder investigationcontemporarymystery & detectivebig city

                  Inspector Tyador Borlú must travel to Ul Qoma to search for answers in the murder of a woman found in the city of Besźel. (Source: OCLC record)

                • Cover of Grim Reaper mysteries
                  Grim Reaper mysteries

                  series · 5 books · 2009

                  similar bymurder investigationcontemporarymystery & detectivenorth america

                  After a bad car accident, Casey Maldonado hits the road and finds herself unable to shake an unwelcome companion: Death itself, which won't take her but won't leave her alone either. Judy Clemens's Grim Reaper mysteries follow Casey as her wandering keeps landing her in small towns hiding real crimes, starting with a struggling Ohio farm community where a supposed suicide looks more like a cover-up. It's amateur-sleuth mystery with a wry supernatural conceit rather than straight horror.

                • Cover of The Colorado Kid
                  The Colorado Kid

                  Stephen King · standalone novel · 2005

                  similar bymurder investigationcontemporarymystery & detectivenorth america

                  The Colorado Kid is a mystery novel by American writer Stephen King, published by the Hard Case Crime imprint in 2005. The book was initially issued in one paperback-only edition by the specialty crime and mystery publishing house. King's next novel for Hard Case Crime was Joyland, which was published in June 2013. Hard Case Crime reissued The Colorado Kid in an illustrated paperback edition in May 2019.

                • Cover of Sherry Holmes Baldwin
                  Sherry Holmes Baldwin

                  series · 4 books · 2008

                  similar bymurder investigationcontemporarycozy mysterynorth america+5 more

                • Cover of The Donut Legion
                  The Donut Legion

                  Joe R. Lansdale · standalone novel · 2023

                  similar bymurder investigationcontemporarymystery & detectivefunnyour worldnorth america

                  The Donut Legion is a comedy-mystery novel by American author Joe R. Lansdale.

                • Cover of Dinosaur Mafia
                  Dinosaur Mafia

                  series · 3 books · 1999

                  similar bymurder investigationcontemporaryfunnymystery & detectivebig cityour worldnorth america

                • Cover of Haunted Tour Guide Mysteries
                  Haunted Tour Guide Mysteries

                  series · 1 book · 2014

                  similar bymurder investigationcontemporarymystery & detectivecozy mysteryour worldnorth america+1 more

                • Cover of Midnight Louie
                  Midnight Louie

                  series · 38 books · 1990

                  completed

                  similar bymurder investigationcontemporarymystery & detectivenorth americabig city+3 more

                  Midnight Louie follows an alley cat turned amateur detective in Las Vegas, whose feline instincts and knack for trouble intersect with his human companion Temple Barr's own investigations into murders around the city's casinos and nightlife. Carole Nelson Douglas' long-running mystery series, most entries titled with cat-and-color wordplay such as Cat in a Diamond Dazzle, follows both Louie and Temple across dozens of books.

                • Cover of Finders Keepers (Stephen King)
                  Finders Keepers (Stephen King)

                  series · 7 books · 2014

                  similar bymurder investigationcontemporarymystery & detectivenorth america

                  The books gathered here follow Holly Gibney, who first appeared as a supporting character in Stephen King's Bill Hodges trilogy (Mr. Mercedes, Finders Keepers, End of Watch) before graduating into her own strand of stories: a major role in The Outsider, then top billing in the novella If It Bleeds and the novels Holly and Never Flinch, where she works as a private investigator taking on cases with a supernatural edge. The mix of true-crime procedural instincts and creeping horror is a hallmark of King's later work with the character.

                • Cover of Kenni Lowry
                  Kenni Lowry

                  series · 6 books · 2016

                  similar bymurder investigationcontemporarycozy mysterynorth america+3 more

                • Cover of Regina's Song
                  Regina's Song

                  David Eddings & Leigh Eddings · standalone novel · 2002

                  similar bymurder investigationcontemporarymystery & detectivenorth americabig city

                  Regina's Song, written by David and Leigh Eddings, is a murder mystery novel, with some fantasy themes present as well. The story takes place in Seattle, Washington.

                • Cover of Bailey Ruth Raeburn
                  Bailey Ruth Raeburn

                  series · 10 books · 2008

                  similar bymurder investigationcontemporarycozy mysterylightheartednorth america+1 more

                • Cover of Rising Sun
                  Rising Sun

                  Michael Crichton · standalone novel · 1992

                  similar bymurder investigationcontemporarymystery & detectivenorth americabig city

                  Rising Sun is a 1992 novel by Michael Crichton. It was his eighth under his own name and eighteenth overall, and is about a murder in the Los Angeles headquarters of a Japanese corporation. The book was published by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. An image of fashion model Gia Carangi is incorporated in the cover art for the original edition.

                • Cover of Magical Dressmaking Mystery
                  Magical Dressmaking Mystery

                  series · 6 books · 2011

                  similar bymurder investigationcontemporarycozy mysterylightheartednorth america

                • Cover of Witchcraft Mysteries
                  Witchcraft Mysteries

                  series · 11 books · 2009

                  similar bymurder investigationcontemporarycozy mysterynorth americabig city+1 more

                • Cover of Booking Agents
                  Booking Agents

                  series · 2 books · 2021

                  similar bymurder investigationcontemporarymystery & detectivenorth america+3 more

                • Cover of Pepper Martin
                  Pepper Martin

                  series · 10 books · 2006

                  similar bymurder investigationcontemporaryfunnycozy mysterynorth america+3 more

                • Cover of Nela Farley
                  Nela Farley

                  series · 1 book · 2012

                  similar bymurder investigationcontemporarymystery & detectivecozy mysteryour worldnorth america