I want to suggest putting a mystery on my bookclub’s reading list, but I’m having trouble thinking of the right one. It needs to be something very discussable, and preferably, not part of a series, or the start of a series. I’d suggest something by Rankin, since I think there’s a lot going on in them besides the mysteries, but the series aspect makes it hard – I don’t want to spend the whole discussion explaining the history of Rebus & Cafferty, after all.
I highly recommend this (Indie Next List | IndieBound.org):
MISTRESS OF THE ART OF DEATH: A Novel
By Ariana Franklin
“Coming from Salerno, where she is a respected physician and medieval pathologist, the ‘Mistress of the Art of Death’ is on a secret mission to discover the method of death, and murderer, of the children of Cambridge, England. Ariana Franklin’s passion for the 12th century fills this wonderful mystery with the authentic flavor of village life, tales of the Crusaders, and the struggles of the royalty versus the Church.” --Becky Milner, Vintage Books, Vancouver, WA
She did a ton of research. The book is fascinating and there’s tons of stuff to talk about. There’s a sequel, which I haven’t read, but it stands on its own.
Beat Not the Bones sounds interesting. The latter I’m not sure about – they describe it as a mystery for people who don’t like mysteries. That might describe my group, but they like to read books outside their usual genres, so I don’t want to present them with mystery-lite.
I’ll recommend Case Histories by Kate Atkinson. The novel has an unusual structure and the characters are interesting. Atkinson has won a Whitbread award, so I guess that makes her literary.
Mystery writer icon Ed McBain’s “Downtown.” Not an 87th Precient or Matthew Hope mystery, a stand alone book that is one of his absolute most wonderful.
I don’t know how you’d define highbrow, but I recommend Fredric Brown’s The Fabulous Clipjoint. It was his first mystery novel (although he’d published plenty of shorts before), and won him an Edgar. It’s true that he later built a series using the main characters, but the novel stands alone.
I really liked The Dante Club. Very creepy, very literary (main characters are Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, James Russell Lowell and J. T. Fields) and definitely a page-turner.
I recommend “Thus was Adonis murdered” by Sarah Caudwell.
“The Daughter of Time” isn’t exactly mystery-lite, it’s just the solution (some say the true solution) to a 500-year-old historical mystery. (Having read a fair amount of Tey, I think it is part of a series, but her writing is very elliptical in some ways, and so is her method of building a series. There are recurring characters, and setting, but it’s all very free-form. Re-reading that, it sounds snarky, but I’m actually a fan.)
Anything by Dorothy Sayers should qualify. Yes, a series, but “The Nine Tailors” is a classic, and very much stand alone.
Though it has George Smiley in it it isn’t a spy book.
Its a book where what you believe about the protagonists characters in the beginning proves to be topsy turvey,a good mystery but more then a Who Dunnit.