Recently been reading a lot of mystery novels but I'm kind of burnt out on the police procedural side of things, but I'm still hungry for more mysteries.
Recently read The Whisper Man by Alex North and The Chestnut Man by Søren Sveistrup. Both very good, but I'd love a story with an amateur person or a private eye solving the case with little to no help from the police.
Thrillers, fiction, fantasy/supernatural, noir, all welcome. Thank you! 😀
by worry_some
5 Comments
I recently read *Magic for Liars* by Sarah Gailey – it has a private detective investigating at a magical school. Early on in the story, a decision is made not to involve the police at all. It’s a pretty dark take on the magical school theme. Check out content warnings if needed! This book is not for everyone (I am not entirely sure whether or not it’s for me) but it may be for you.
Of course, there is the whole category of classic private and/or amateur detectives like Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot, Miss Marple or even Amelia Peabody, in which the police sometimes plays a role but always proves incompetent and inferior to the private investigator. Another classic of crime fiction would be *The Moonstone* by Wilkie Collins, in which the main suspect investigates the crime in order to prove his innocence. It’s a great book – I highly recommend it!
Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem – a big part of the humor of the book is that the protagonist thinks of himself as a professional, even though he’s very much an amateur
*The Thin Man* by Dashiell Hammet. A couple whose only goal in life is to get drunk/have sex/play with their dog agrees to help a woman solve a murder if she will just *leave them the fuck alone!*
Lockwood & Co. if you’re okay with YA. It’s horror-mystery about an alternate earth where ghosts started terrorizing humanity en-masse starting in the early 1900s and no one knows why. Adults can’t see the ghosts so teenagers are put to work as ghost hunters/exterminators. The story follows an underdog ghost hunting group (Lockwood & Co), and they do have run-ins with more official companies/government entities, but the dynamics are completely different because everything ghost-related is either being run by teenagers, or adults who know their survival is completely dependent on teenagers. If you liked Roald Dahl as a kid and don’t mind going even younger there’s The Mysterious Benedict Society which has 0 police presence and is a fun silly time.
Pretty baby by Mary kubica. It’s about a woman who takes in a young woman and her baby, but starts to look into the young woman’s past and find a whole mystery