What to read after “The Taking of Pelham One Two Three” by John Godey: a list matched by tropes, mood and atmosphere. Under each book you will see what it has in common.
Five killers board the same bullet train from Tokyo to Morioka, each with a different mission and a different plan. A suitcase of ransom money ties their missions together, and the confined carriages turn every polite encounter into a threat.
In 1855 a polished thief plans to steal a shipment of gold being carried by train from London toward the Crimea. He gathers a crew, copies the four keys to the safes and studies the timetable, while a police informant threatens to expose the scheme.
After Kristallnacht, a Jewish businessman escapes his Berlin apartment and begins moving from train to train across Germany. Unable to leave the country, he tries to hide his identity while the network of trains becomes both shelter and trap.
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.
Michael Smith has not spoken since a violent event in his childhood. As a teenager he discovers he can open almost any lock, a talent that draws criminals who need a safecracker. His skill also brings him to Amelia, and protecting her pulls him into an elaborate con he cannot easily escape.
On a train through continental Europe, a young Englishwoman befriends an older governess. After a nap she finds the woman gone, and every other passenger denies she ever existed. Alone and doubting her own mind, Iris searches the carriages for proof.
Parker, a career thief, is shot and left for dead after a heist by his own crew. He walks back into New York with no money and one goal: recover his share from the men who betrayed him, even if that means taking on the organized crime outfit protecting them.
In 1973 Paul Theroux set out from London to travel through Asia by train. He crosses Europe, the Middle East, India and Southeast Asia, and returns on the Trans-Siberian Railway, recording the trains, stations and people he meets.
Between 1941 and 1943 the German and French police arrested hundreds of women who had worked for the Resistance. Drawn from interviews and archives, this book follows 230 of them from prison in France onto the trains to Auschwitz, and the friendships that sustained them.
Katarina Bishop has left her family's life of theft for a boarding school, but her father is accused of stealing five paintings from a dangerous collector. To save him, Kat assembles a crew of young thieves and plans a museum heist against a two-week deadline, with Interpol and a mobster close behind.
A journalist barred from flying takes a cross-country train from Washington to Los Angeles for a Christmas story. Along the way he meets an old love, a thief, and a trainload of strangers, and the journey becomes a second chance he did not expect.
A young German soldier boards a troop train bound for the Eastern Front. Convinced he will die within days, he watches the passengers and countryside pass by, and begins to wonder whether fate can be resisted.
A Finnish student leaves Moscow by train for Mongolia, hoping to study ancient rock carvings and escape a failed affair. She shares compartment six with a loud, hard-drinking former soldier, and the long ride across Russia becomes an uneasy companionship.
A boy lies awake on Christmas Eve when a steam train stops outside his house. The conductor invites him aboard, and the train carries a crowd of children through the night toward the North Pole, where a special gift awaits the one who still believes.
Three men find a crashed plane, a dead pilot and a bag of money in the snow. What starts as a quiet decision to keep the cash spirals into suspicion, lies and violence, as each tries to hold together a plan that keeps changing.
Ten years after surviving a massacre at a remote cabin in the woods, Quincy has built a quiet life out of pills, baking and careful routine. When another survivor from that group of women dies and a third turns up at her door, the past she cannot fully remember starts to close in again.
Tom Ripley, a poor young man in New York, is sent to Italy by a rich shipbuilder to bring home his son Dickie. Instead Tom is drawn into Dickie's comfortable world and, when it is threatened, does whatever it takes to keep it.
Sancia Grado is a thief in Tevanne, a city where scribing commands objects to obey written orders. Hired to steal a key, she finds it holds power that could break the four merchant houses' grip on magic, and the houses will kill to keep that power buried.
In the city of Vienne, the aristocrat Nicholas Valiarde plays the careless nobleman while secretly running a network of thieves. He is funding a long revenge against the man who ruined his family through a series of elegant heists. Then eerie deaths and a forbidden necromantic power interrupt his carefully built scheme, and Nicholas has to decide how far his deception and his private code will carry him.
Bernie Rhodenbarr is a polite, skilled burglar who never hurts anyone and only steals from people who can afford it. Hired to steal a small blue box from a Manhattan apartment, he is still there when the police arrive and a dead body is found in the bedroom. To clear his name he has to work out how the murder was done.
Paris, 1889. Severin Montagnet-Alarie, a hotelier and treasure-hunter, is offered the chance to reclaim the inheritance his family was denied. To earn it he must assemble a crew and steal an ancient artifact, a job that takes them into the secret society that rules the city's magic.
Through letters to her estranged husband, Eva looks back on the life of their son Kevin and on the years she struggled to feel any bond with him. She tries to understand the person he became, and to face her own part in what happened.
A man is pulled from the Mediterranean with bullet wounds and no memory. Clues point to a life as a professional assassin, and both the CIA and a killer called Carlos are hunting him. To survive, he must reconstruct who he was before he is caught.
Seven members of a university mystery club sail to a remote island that was the scene of an unsolved family murder a year earlier. Cut off by a storm, they are killed one by one, and the survivors must use the rules of detective fiction to name the killer before none are left.
What should I read after “The Taking of Pelham One Two Three”?
Start with “Bullet Train”, “The Great Train Robbery”, “The Passenger”: they are the closest to “The Taking of Pelham One Two Three” in tropes and mood. Under each book in the list you will see what exactly it has in common.
How are similar books chosen?
We compare tropes (for “The Taking of Pelham One Two Three” these are Train Journey, Heist, Survival), genre, plot, era and tone. It is not “readers also bought”; it is similarity in the content itself.
Are there recent books in this list?
Yes. Among the newer ones are “Bullet Train”, “The Lock Artist”, “A Train in Winter”. Switch the “Modern” filter to keep only books from 2000 onward.
