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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 Greed & Stuff

anchored on:north americacontemporary

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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 mental unraveling — descent into madness, delusion, and minds at war with themselves.
  • 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 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 Dirk Gently
                  Dirk Gently

                  series · 3 books · 1987

                  completed

                  part of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Universe

                  similar byfunnycontemporarymystery & detectivehumor+1 more

                  Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (1987) introduces Douglas Adams's eccentric investigator, whose approach treats all events and objects as ultimately connected however implausibly, as a case involving time travel, a ghost, and a Cambridge murder tangles into one plot. Adams completed one further full novel, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul (1988), before his death; The Salmon of Doubt (2002) later collected his unfinished notes toward a third book alongside essays and other writing, rather than completing the story.

                • Cover of The Dresden Files
                  The Dresden Files

                  series · 56 books · 2000

                  similar bycontemporarynorth americafirst person+2 more

                  The Dresden Files is an urban fantasy series written by American author Jim Butcher. The novels are narrated from the first-person perspective of Harry Dresden, a private detective and wizard, as he investigates supernatural disturbances in contemporary Chicago. The first entry, Storm Front, was published in 2000 by Roc Books.

                • Cover of Dan Shamble, Zombie P.I.
                  Dan Shamble, Zombie P.I.

                  series · 37 books · 2012

                  similar bycontemporarymystery & detective+3 more

                • SP
                  Stephanie Plum Universe

                  series · 4 books · 2002

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                • Cover of Dinosaur Mafia
                  Dinosaur Mafia

                  series · 3 books · 1999

                  similar bymurder investigationfunnycontemporarymystery & detectivenorth america+2 more

                • Cover of Rivers of London
                  Rivers of London

                  series · 32 books · 2011

                  similar bymurder investigationcontemporarymystery & detective+2 more

                  The Rivers of London series is a series of urban fantasy novels by English author Ben Aaronovitch, and comics/graphic novels by Aaronovitch and Andrew Cartmel, illustrated by Lee Sullivan.

                • Cover of Midnight Louie
                  Midnight Louie

                  series · 38 books · 1990

                  completed

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                  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 Nursery Crimes
                  Nursery Crimes

                  series · 2 books · 2005

                  similar bymurder investigationfunnycontemporarymystery & detective+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 Charley Davidson
                  Charley Davidson

                  series · 19 books · 2011

                  similar bycontemporarymystery & detectivenorth america+3 more

                  Charley Davidson is Darynda Jones's long-running paranormal mystery series beginning with First Grave on the Right (2011) and running to eighteen novels plus companion novellas. It follows Charley, a part-time private investigator who is also the reincarnation of Death itself, solving murders by talking to the ghosts of the victims, while her relationship with the supernatural being Reyes Farrow complicates the mythology around her. Each book is a largely self-contained case within one long-running arc about Charley's own nature.

                • Cover of Thursday Next
                  Thursday Next

                  series · 8 books · 2001

                  similar byfunnycontemporary+1 more

                  Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next novels follow a literary detective in an alternate England who can jump physically into the world of books to solve crimes against literature itself. Beginning with The Eyre Affair, the series mixes metafiction, wordplay and parody across increasingly personal plots as Thursday balances family life with adventures inside classic novels. Fforde has extended the sequence across eight books and several decades, with further installments in the works.

                • Cover of Bimbos of the Death Sun
                  Bimbos of the Death Sun

                  series · 2 books · 1987

                  similar byfunnynorth americamystery & detective+3 more

                  Bimbos of the Death Sun is a satirical mystery set at a science-fiction convention, where an engineering professor moonlighting as a fantasy novelist gets entangled in a murder investigation amid costumed fans, gaming tournaments, and convention politics. Sharyn McCrumb's send-up of fandom culture won the Edgar Award and was followed by a loosely connected sequel, Zombies of the Gene Pool, set at a different fan gathering. Both novels were later republished together.

                • Cover of Daniel McEvoy
                  Daniel McEvoy

                  series · 2 books · 2011

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                • Cover of Southern Witch
                  Southern Witch

                  series · 5 books · 2009

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                • Cover of The Donut Legion
                  The Donut Legion

                  Joe R. Lansdale · standalone novel · 2023

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

                • Cover of John Justin Mallory
                  John Justin Mallory

                  series · 12 books · 1987

                  completed

                  similar bycontemporary+3 more

                  Mike Resnick's John Justin Mallory series follows a private detective across a sequence of comic fantasy mysteries, beginning with Stalking the Unicorn and continuing across Stalking the Vampire, Stalking the Dragon, and Stalking the Zombie, along with the linked novella Shell Game.

                • Cover of Hap Collins and Leonard Pine
                  Hap Collins and Leonard Pine

                  series · 46 books · 1990

                  similar bynorth americamystery & detectivecontemporary+1 more

                  Joe R. Lansdale's Hap and Leonard novels follow two working-class East Texas friends, Hap, a straight white ex-activist, and Leonard, a gay Black Vietnam veteran, who keep getting pulled from odd jobs into local crime they can't leave alone, beginning with Savage Season. The long-running series mixes hardboiled crime plotting with the two leads' running banter and loyalty to each other. Other contributors have added short pieces to the same continuity over the years.

                • Cover of Pals in Peril / M. T. Anderson's Thrilling Tales
                  Pals in Peril / M. T. Anderson's Thrilling Tales

                  series · 6 books · 2005

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                • Cover of Jane Jameson
                  Jane Jameson

                  series · 4 books · 2009

                  part of Half Moon Hollow

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                • Cover of Bailey Ruth Raeburn
                  Bailey Ruth Raeburn

                  series · 10 books · 2008

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                • BU
                  Bunnicula Universe

                  series · 20 books · 1979

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                • Cover of Felix Gomez
                  Felix Gomez

                  series · 7 books · 2006

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                • Cover of Support Group
                  Support Group

                  series · 2 books · 2009

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                • AS
                  A Series of Unfortunate Events Universe

                  series · 19 books · 1999

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                • Cover of Drusilla Jaco / Sentinels of New Orleans
                  Drusilla Jaco / Sentinels of New Orleans

                  series · 8 books · 2012

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