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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 Necropolis

anchored on:mystery & detectivehistorical mysterymurder investigationbritish isles19th centuryalternate history+4 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 centered on witches and the practice of witchcraft — covens, hedge magic, familiars, and the witch's place in her community.
  • 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 Fire, Burn!
                  Fire, Burn!

                  John Dickson Carr · standalone novel · 1957

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                  Fire, Burn! is a 1957 historical mystery novel by John Dickson Carr. Carr considered this one of his best impossible crime novels.

                • Cover of On Her Majesty's Psychic Service
                  On Her Majesty's Psychic Service

                  series · 1 book · 2015

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                • Cover of Sebastian St. Cyr
                  Sebastian St. Cyr

                  series · 1 book · 2012

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                • Cover of The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque
                  The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque

                  Jeffrey Ford · standalone novel · 2002

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                  "The toast of 1893 New York society, the portraitist Piero Piambo has his pick of choice assignments. Acclaimed by his peers and his "betters," he is a fixture in the city's most opulent salons, yet he fears he has sold his soul to arrive there. But then comes a commission unlike any other - one that will test Piambo's talents, his will .. and his sanity.". "The client is a Mrs. Charbuque, and the offer she makes to the artist is as bizarre and intriguing as it is financially rewarding. Piambo must paint the lady's portrait, and for the service he may name any price. However, though he may question her at length on any topic, he must never look upon his subject. And if the painting ends up a true likeness, his payment will be doubled.". "With sketchbook in hand and his "model" hidden behind an elegant screen, the artist begins his haunting descent into her life and mind. Carried by her words through a strange childhood in a world of ice - where she aided an obsessed, perhaps murderous, father in his study of the divine language of snowflakes - and across a history marked by fame and despair, desire and rage, phantasm and myth, Piambo is alternately seduced and repulsed by the story she has to tell. Yet each session leaves him more determined than ever to unwrap the enigma that is Mrs. Charbuque.". "But while he struggles to capture in oils the face of a woman he has never seen, a series of horrific and inexplicable deaths rocks the outside city. On street corners, in the alleys off the bustling shopping areas, and between the crumbling tenements, anonymous women are dying, their lifeblood flowing freely like tears from their eyes. And the deeper Piambo is drawn into Mrs. Charbuque's world, the more he begins to suspect that these terrible events, his impossible task, and his odd "benefactress" are somehow intimately connected."--BOOK JACKET.

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

                  China Miéville · standalone novel · 2009

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                  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 The Lamplighter
                  The Lamplighter

                  Anthony O'Neill · standalone novel · 2003

                  similar bymurder investigation19th centuryfamily secretsmysterioushistorical mysterybritish islesbig city

                  Edinburgh, 1860s: At the Fountainbridge Institute for Destitute Girls, clever orphan Evelyn Todd spins fantastic tales of the lamplighter who passes her window nightly. Her imaginings, forbidden by the home's strict governor, are all but forgotten when Evelyn is spirited away by a man who claims to be her father. Years later, a wave of vicious killings stains the city's cobbled streets. Three men from different worlds are drawn to the sensational case: a detective hungry for recognition, a disillusioned professor of logic, and a strapping gravedigger. Their paths lead to Evelyn Todd, a woman haunted by dreams of the murders and of a mysterious lamplighter. As her nighttime terrors begin to illuminate the face of the dreadful predator, this unusual trio of investigators uses reason, intuition, philosophy, and luck in a hunt that rapidly hurtles past the bounds of conventional detection

                • Cover of The Mysteries
                  The Mysteries

                  Lisa Tuttle · standalone novel · 2005

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                  From award-winning author Lisa Tuttle comes a riveting novel that combines the contemporary story of one man's search for a missing young woman with history's most enduring legends of the disappeared. Gripping and unforgettable, here is a spellbinding mix of the mysteries that inhabit our everyday lives--and a mind-bending exploration of what happens when someone vanishes without a trace.Ever since his father disappeared when he was nine years old, Ian Kennedy has had a penchant for stories about missing people--and a knack for finding them. Now he's a private investigator with an impressive track record. But when a woman enters his London office and asks him to find her lost daughter, Ian faces a case he fears he cannot solve--and one he knows he must.Laura Lensky's stunning twenty-one-year-old daughter, Peri, has been missing for over two years--a lifetime, under the circumstances. But when Ian learns the details of her disappearance, he discovers eerie parallels to an obscure Celtic myth--and to the haunting case that launched his career, an early success he's never fully been able to explain. Though Ian suspects Peri may have chosen to vanish, his curiosity leads him to take on the search. Soon he finds himself drawing not only from the mysteries that have preoccupied his adulthood, but from the fables and folklore that pervaded his youth. What follows is a journey that takes Ian and those who care for Peri into the Highlands of Scotland, as the unknowns of the past and present merge in the case--and in their lives. Rich in pathos and steeped in secrets, The Mysteries opens a thought-provoking door from one world into the heart of another, where some of our most perplexing enigmas--and their answers--are startlingly alive.From the Hardcover edition.

                • Cover of The Dead Secret
                  The Dead Secret

                  Wilkie Collins · standalone novel · 1857

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                  The late Mrs. Treverton and her maid Sarah Leeson had a secret between them. When young Rosamond Treverton marries, the secret will trouble her marriage, and Sarah Leeson (who carries a ghost with her everywhere she goes) will not find rest until matters are resolved.

                • Cover of The Man Who Was Poe
                  The Man Who Was Poe

                  Avi · standalone novel · 1989

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                  In Providence, R.I., in 1848, Edgar Allan Poe reluctantly investigates the problems of eleven-year-old Edmund, whose family has mysteriously disappeared and whose story suggests a new Poe tale with a ghastly final twist.

                • Cover of The Bedlam Detective
                  The Bedlam Detective

                  Stephen Gallagher · standalone novel · 2012

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                  "Sebastian Becker, a former policeman and Pinkerton agent who now works as the special investigator to the Masters of Lunacy, looking into cases involving any man of property whose sanity is under question. His latest assignment takes him to the small town of Arnmouth to determine whether Sir Owain Lancaster has gone around the bend."--Provided by publisher.

                • Cover of Sarah Tolerance
                  Sarah Tolerance

                  series · 2 books · 2003

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                • Cover of Houses of Stone
                  Houses of Stone

                  Barbara Michaels · standalone novel · 1993

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                  It is a find of inestimable value for Karen Holloway. The battered manuscript she holds in her hand—written in the nineteenth century and bearing the mysterious attribution "Ismene"—could prove a boon to the eager young English professor's career. But Karen's search for the author's true identity is carrying her into the gray shadows of the past, to places fraught with danger and terror. For the deeper she delves into Ismene's strange tale of gothic horror, the more she is haunted by the suspicion that the long-dead author was writing the truth . . . and that even now she is guiding Karen's investigation, leading her to terrible secrets hidden behind the cold walls of houses of stone.

                • Cover of Fata Morgana
                  Fata Morgana

                  William Kotzwinkle · standalone novel · 1977

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                  From the flaps of the Knopf first edition: "In Fata Morgana a celebrated novelist turns conjurer to bring us a supremely theatrical magic show - a rich exotic entertainment of crime, treble-trickery, and legerdermain, with Europe as its stage and the golden leaders of the Uppercrust and the Underworld as its players. The time and place are Paris, 1861 - the extravagant capital of Louis Napoleon and his Empress Eugenie, the gaudy, blatant public arena of Great Whores and fabulous charlatans; the treacherous private labyrinth of Police Inspector Paul Picard and the human prey he stalks. Picard is a hunter of the purest instincts, with an appetite for the ladies, a taste for lemon tarts, and a policeman's nose for hard realities. As the book opens he is on his way to the Opera, for music and murder: among the guests is as elegant a killer as ever sliced his way through Parisian high society, and on his arm is the young woman he means to decapitate tonight. A strange encounter with them precipitates Picard into a new and (apparently) trivial assignment - a case that is fated to disrupt and then transform, irrevocably, his life. At first it seems routine: a man - Ric Lazare - has recently arrived in Paris and in a short time has captured the jaded attention and the favors of the entire city. His aura of opulence, his bewitching wife, Rene, and, above all, his unearthly fortune-telling machine have won him entree to the salons (and the bank vaults) of the most dazzling leaders of society, including, it is whispered, the Emperor himself. But, who - and what - is Lazare? Is he a crook? A master of illusions? A real magician? Or - more terrible - a reincarnation from an Older World? To find the answer, Picard must follow the thread of the man's past. His quest takes him from Paris to Vienna, Nuremberg, Budapest, and on to the dark, menacing valleys and steppes of eastern Hungary, uncovering a trail of deceit and violent death: a fabled toy maker driven to destroy himself and a lifetime's priceless creations... a man ruthlessly killed over a dice game... a beautiful woman purchased at auction, then stolen away... the sudden death of a priest. Beset by intimations of his own mortality, by a sense of inexplicable entrapment in a malign world of mechanical and deadly playthings, by a slowly suffocating conviction that he is undertaking a journey he has made before, Picard, caught up in the quickening pace, returns to Paris - and to a terrifying confrontation with his quarry and his own destiny."

                • Cover of The Mystery of Cloomber
                  The Mystery of Cloomber

                  Arthur Conan Doyle · standalone novel · 1889

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                  "What dark deed from the past put a lifelong curse on Major Heatherstone of Cloomber Hall? The master of detective fiction and creator of the Sherlock Holmes mysteries reveals his deep fascination with spiritualism and the paranormal in this gripping tale of mystery and the supernatural, set on the remote Scottish coast." — quoted from the product description that is found on the Dover edition's product page on Amazon.com.

                • Cover of The Peculiarities
                  The Peculiarities

                  David Liss · standalone novel · 2021

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                  All of his life, Thomas Thresher has been free of obligation and responsibility, but that is over now. He is a twenty-three-year-old man whose best days are behind him. Thomas's older brother Walter has trapped him in a tedious clerical job at the family bank in London, and Thomas is expected to wed a wealthy young woman in whom he has no interest. But Thomas has more serious problems than those of a disaffected young man. There are irregularities at the bank he cannot explain. His childhood friend has mysteriously turned up dead. Worse, a verdant skin malady has infected him: leaves have begun sprouting on his skin. Thomas must conclude that it is due to the long-rumored Peculiarities. London's famous grey fog has been concealing a rash of unnatural afflictions--and worse, the murderous Elegants. As Thomas grows leafier, the conspiracies surrounding him become more apparent. He cannot determine whom to trust: his own family; his banking co-workers and superiors; the beautiful widow of his companion; the woman he is to marry. Or perhaps a lycanthropic medium; the members of a secret occult society...or even Aleister Crowley.

                • Cover of The Wizard's Daughter
                  The Wizard's Daughter

                  Barbara Michaels · standalone novel · 1980

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                  WorldCat: When Marianne Ransom, a lovely orphan from the slums of Victorian London, moves to the mansion of the Duchess of Devonbrook, she finds her hidden psychic powers activated and learns their awesome power when she tries to summon her dead father's spirit.

                • Cover of Sally Lockhart
                  Sally Lockhart

                  series · 4 books · 1985

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                  Philip Pullman's Sally Lockhart quartet follows a resourceful, unconventional heroine navigating Victorian London - a sharpshooting, mathematically gifted young orphan who builds an improbable career as a financial consultant against the era's expectations for women. The Ruby in the Smoke opens with Sally investigating her father's death and a mysterious jewel; the following novels widen out into fraud, opium-trade crime, and international intrigue, tracking Sally's evolving relationships, including with the journalist Daniel Goldberg, across four Victorian-set mysteries.

                • Cover of Castle Barebane
                  Castle Barebane

                  Joan Aiken · standalone novel · 1976

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                  Near the top of a three-hundred-foot crag perched a roofless ruin with crumbling battlements and shattered buttresses....Apart from the ruined castle there seemed to be no other sign of human life, unless you counted a couple of fishing boats well out to sea.... Val Montgomery, young, warm-hearted, and confident -- but no lady, according to the grande dames of New York in the 1880's -- had abandoned a promising job on a newspaper and a claustrophobic engagement to a society lawyer and sailed to England to help her spendthrift half-brother, Nils, whose Scottish heiress wife, Kirstie, had fallen ill. Arrived in a London terrorized by a series of lurid murders, Val can find no trace of Nils or Kirstie. Horrified, she discovers that her small nephew and niece seem to have been callously abandoned in a London slum. Seeking a safe domicile for the children, Val travels to Edinburgh, intending to leave them with their mother's old nurse at Ardnacarrig, the family home on the Scottish coast -- but she soon begins to doubt that old Elspie is the loving guardian she had hoped for. In the quest for her brother, Val encounters four men destined to change her life forever: Lord Clanreydon, slated as England's next prime minister -- a man of mysterious origins and enigmatic habits; Sir Marcus Cusack, an editor who befriends her; Davie, a brilliant young Scottish doctor; and Mungo, an old sailor. Soon the apparent peach of Ardnacarrig (known as Castle Barebane by the locals) is threatened by dark emanations from London's underworld, and Val begins to apprehend that it might be better for all if Nils were never seen again. But her realization comes too late. Guilty and innocent alike are whirled in a wild eruption of violence as events more quickly to a terrifying climax in a savage confrontation between the forces of good and evil on the cliffs of Ardnacarrig. In this, her most compelling and suspenseful novel to date, Joan Aiken has created a variety of memorable characters: from the deserted children and their hostile great-aunt, the Marchioness of Stroma, to cab drivers and sailors, London clubmen and music-hall singers.

                • Cover of Glass Town
                  Glass Town

                  Steven Savile · standalone novel · 2017

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                  "In 1924, two brothers both loved Eleanor Raines, a promising young actress from the East End of London. She disappeared during the filming of Alfred Hitchcock's debut, Number 13, which itself is now lost. It was the crime of the age, capturing the imagination of the city: the beautiful actress never seen again, and the gangster who disappeared the same day. Generations have passed. Everyone involved is long dead. But even now their dark, twisted secret threatens to tear the city apart. Joshua Raines is about to enter a world of macabre beauty, of glittering celluloid and the silver screen, of illusion and deception, of impossibly old gangsters and the fiendish creatures they command, and most frighteningly of all, of genuine magic." --

                • Cover of Dr. Thomas Bond
                  Dr. Thomas Bond

                  series · 2 books · 2013

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                • Cover of This House Is Haunted
                  This House Is Haunted

                  John Boyne · standalone novel · 2013

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                  This House Is Haunted is a novel written by Irish novelist John Boyne. It was first published in 2013 by Doubleday.

                • Cover of The Prestige
                  The Prestige

                  Christopher Priest · standalone novel · 1995

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                  A magician called Borden (at least in private) writes his own version of his life as a magician. There's a lot of focus on a trick, where he seems to move across any width of stage in an instant, and on a feud with another magician, Angier. The account includes passages, where he can't decide what exactly to write, arguing with himself. 3 generations later a Borden (at least biologically) learns about his ancestor. He's also convinced, he somehow has a twin brother, who's happy about this development.

                • Cover of Death Is a Lonely Business
                  Death Is a Lonely Business

                  Ray Bradbury · standalone novel · 1985

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                  Death Is a Lonely Business is a mystery novel by American writer Ray Bradbury, published in 1985. The story, set in 1949, is about a series of murders that happen in Venice, California, then a declining seaside community in Los Angeles where Bradbury lived from 1942 to 1950. The main character and narrator is a sensitive, modest writer, with a girlfriend studying in Mexico City. In the course of the story he meets Elmo Crumley, a detective who helps him solve the mystery behind all the semi-murders occurring among a series of eccentric characters in the forgotten town.

                • Cover of Picture the Dead
                  Picture the Dead

                  Adele Griffin & Lisa Brown · standalone novel · 2010

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                  After Jennie Lovell's fiance , Will, is killed during the Civil War, she forms an alliance with a spirit photographer and uses her ability to talk to the dead to investigate the secrets Will was hiding and how he really died.