Books like “The Moonstone”

What to read after “The Moonstone” by Wilkie Collins: 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 Murder of Roger Ackroyd
Agatha Christie · 1926
Same genre: “Detective fiction”
In the village of King's Abbot, the wealthy Roger Ackroyd is stabbed hours after learning a secret. Hercule Poirot, retired nearby to grow marrows, is drawn into the case, where everyone, including the narrator, seems to be telling less than the whole truth.
2
The Murders in the Rue Morgue
Edgar Allan Poe · 1841
Same genre: “Detective fiction”
- Eccentric Detective
- 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.
3
The Poisoned Chocolates Case
Anthony Berkeley · 1929
Same genre: “Detective fiction”
- Eccentric Detective
- 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.
4
The Moving Toyshop
Edmund Crispin · 1946
Same genre: “Detective fiction”
- Eccentric Detective
- Twist Ending
Poet Richard Cadogan arrives in Oxford, finds a woman's body in a toyshop and is knocked out. When he returns with the police the shop has become a grocer's. With his friend, eccentric professor Gervase Fen, he hunts for the vanished corpse and the trick behind the impossible scene.
5
The House of Silk
Anthony Horowitz · 2011
Same genre: “Detective fiction”
- Eccentric Detective
- Twist Ending
Sherlock Holmes is asked to guard a London art dealer who is being followed, and the case opens onto two mysteries: a gang known as the House of Silk, and a crime so dangerous that Watson can only set it down years later, in a final untold adventure.
6
Whose Body?
Dorothy L. Sayers · 1923
Same genre: “Detective fiction”
- Eccentric Detective
Lord Peter Wimsey is intrigued when a corpse is found in a bathtub wearing nothing but a pair of gold pince-nez, while a financier has gone missing. Aided by his butler Bunter and a Scotland Yard inspector, he works out how the body came to be there.
7
The Innocence of Father Brown
G. K. Chesterton · 1911
Same genre: “Detective fiction”
- Eccentric Detective
- 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.
8
Murder on the Orient Express
Agatha Christie · 1934
Same genre: “Detective fiction”
- Eccentric Detective
- 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.
9
The Three Coffins
John Dickson Carr · 1935
Same genre: “Detective fiction”
- Eccentric Detective
- 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.
10
Lady Audley's Secret
Mary Elizabeth Braddon · 1862
Same genre: “Sensation novel”
- Dual Identity
- Twist Ending
When a new, much younger wife arrives at Audley Court, her charm hides an unsettled past. Her husband's nephew's idle curiosity about a missing man turns into a quiet investigation of the woman everyone else adores, and of the secret she has buried.
11
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
Arthur Conan Doyle · 1892
Same genre: “Detective fiction”
- Eccentric Detective
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.
12
Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone
Benjamin Stevenson · 2022
Same genre: “Detective fiction”
- Unreliable Narrator
- Twist Ending
Crime-writing teacher Ernest Cunningham joins his family at a snowbound mountain lodge for his brother's release from prison. When a body turns up, Ernest decides to follow the rules of Golden Age detective fiction to work out which of his relatives is responsible.