Books like “The Leavenworth Case”

What to read after “The Leavenworth Case” by Anna Katharine Green: a list matched by tropes, mood and atmosphere. Under each book you will see what it has in common.

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1
The Murders in the Rue Morgue
Edgar Allan Poe · 1841
Same genre: “Detective fiction”
- Locked Room Mystery
- Twist Ending
In a locked Paris apartment, a woman and her daughter are found brutally murdered with no sign of how the killer entered or left. The reclusive, eccentric C. Auguste Dupin takes up the case and solves it by pure reasoning, in the story often called the first detective tale.
2
The Three Coffins
John Dickson Carr · 1935
Same genre: “Detective fiction”
- Locked Room Mystery
- Twist Ending
On a foggy London evening a professor is shot dead inside a room locked from within, with fresh snow outside showing no footprints. Dr. Gideon Fell investigates the impossible killing and, along the way, explains how a locked-room murder can be done.
3
The Red House Mystery
A. A. Milne · 1922
Same genre: “Detective fiction”
- Locked Room Mystery
- Twist Ending
At a country house party, the host's brother is found shot in a locked room and the host has vanished. Antony Gillingham, a guest with a taste for detective stories, and his friend Bill play at being Holmes and Watson, poking into the household's secrets before the police arrive.
4
Murder on the Orient Express
Agatha Christie · 1934
Same genre: “Detective fiction”
- Locked Room Mystery
- Twist Ending
A snowdrift halts the Orient Express, and by morning an American passenger is found stabbed in his locked compartment. With the train stranded, Hercule Poirot questions thirteen passengers whose accounts do not add up, and uncovers the threads of an old crime.
5
The Innocence of Father Brown
G. K. Chesterton · 1911
Same genre: “Detective fiction”
- Locked Room Mystery
- Twist Ending
A quiet Catholic priest with a mild manner and an eye for human nature solves impossible crimes that baffle the police. Across twelve stories he uncovers murderers, thieves and impostors, often relying on ordinary details that everyone else has overlooked.
6
The Mysterious Affair at Styles
Agatha Christie · 1920
Same genre: “Detective fiction”
- Locked Room Mystery
When wealthy Emily Inglethorp is fatally poisoned at her country estate, the household is sealed off with a killer among the guests. Captain Hastings, home from the war, brings in his old acquaintance Hercule Poirot, a Belgian refugee detective, to work out who could have reached her locked bedroom.
7
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
Arthur Conan Doyle · 1892
Same genre: “Detective fiction”
- Locked Room Mystery
Twelve stories follow London's most observant detective and his friend Dr Watson as they untangle impossible crimes, strange clients and quiet suburban mysteries from their rooms on Baker Street.
8
The Moonstone
Wilkie Collins · 1868
Same genre: “Detective fiction”
- Twist Ending
A priceless yellow diamond looted from an Indian temple is left to Rachel Verinder on her birthday, and vanishes the same night. Family, servants, doctors and a famous detective each tell their part of the story as suspicion moves from one person to another.
9
The Hate U Give
Angie Thomas · 2017
Similar plot moves: “Courtroom Drama”
- Courtroom Drama
Starr splits her life between her mostly white school and her neighbourhood, until she witnesses a police officer shoot her unarmed friend. As the case becomes public, she must decide whether to stay silent or find her voice and speak for him.
10
Magpie Murders
Anthony Horowitz · 2016
Same genre: “Detective fiction”
- Locked Room Mystery
- Twist Ending
Editor Susan Ryeland receives the manuscript of the ninth Alan Conway mystery, but the last chapters are missing and the author is dead. As she reads the country-house puzzle inside the book, the writer's real quarrels and the missing pages draw her into a case of her own.
11
The Poisoned Chocolates Case
Anthony Berkeley · 1929
Same genre: “Detective fiction”
- Twist Ending
A box of poisoned chocolates kills a man at his club, and the police can find no culprit. Six members of the Crimes Circle, an armchair detective society, each offer a different solution to the same murder, until amateur sleuth Roger Sheringham tests their theories against the facts.
12
Where the Crawdads Sing
Delia Owens · 2018
Similar plot moves: “Courtroom Drama”
- Courtroom Drama
Abandoned by her family as a child, Kya grows up alone in a North Carolina marsh, shunned by the nearby town as the Marsh Girl. She teaches herself to survive on the land and inches toward love, until a local man is found dead and she becomes the chief suspect.