Crime Fiction Author Guides
Discover the crime authors and novels that define a city, a setting, or a subgenre — from Las Vegas noir to small-town stalker thrillers. Curated recommendations from Phillip Strang, author of 150+ crime novels.
The best cosy mystery books set in Ireland trade on something no other setting can replicate: a landscape where myth sits just beneath the surface of everyday life, and where a village’s warmth can conceal its darkest secrets.
Ireland has always been fertile ground for crime fiction, but the best...
The best cosy mystery books set in Wales prove that the country’s brooding hills, isolated villages, and rain-lashed coastlines are not merely backdrops — they are characters in their own right, shaping the crimes and the people who must solve them.
Wales has long deserved its own canon of cosy...
The best cosy mystery books set in England don’t just solve crimes — they conjure a version of English life so vivid and particular that the murder almost feels like an intrusion on a world you’d happily inhabit forever.
There’s a reason the cosy mystery endures, and it has everything...
The best spy novels set in Vienna understand something that spy fiction set elsewhere rarely captures: that the most dangerous city in Europe has always been the one that looks the most civilised.
Few cities reward the spy novelist quite like Vienna. Its coffeehouse culture, its imperial grandeur, its...
Red Square, Cold Shadows: The Spy Novels That Make Moscow Feel Like the Most Dangerous City on Earth
The best spy novels set in Moscow don’t just use the city as backdrop — they weaponise it, making every shadowed archway, every bugged embassy corridor, and every frozen street a character in its own right.
No city in espionage fiction carries the weight that Moscow does. It is a place of surveillance...
No city on earth has produced a richer, more morally complex body of espionage literature than Berlin — and the best spy novels set in Berlin remain the definitive benchmark for the entire genre.
Berlin is not merely a backdrop for the best spy novels set in Berlin; it is a character in its own right...
The best thriller books set in Moscow demand more than tension — they demand a reckoning with a city that has always kept its darkest truths buried beneath the snow.
Moscow is not merely a backdrop. It is a participant — brooding, paranoid, magnificent, and ruthless in equal measure. The best thriller...
No city on earth has gifted thriller writers more raw material than Berlin — and the best thriller books set in Berlin prove exactly why this haunted, layered metropolis remains the genre’s most compelling stage.
Berlin is not merely a backdrop. It is an argument — about history, betrayal, ideology,...
London has always been the natural home of the crime thriller — and the best thriller books set in London prove that no city on earth yields its secrets more reluctantly or more dramatically.
There is something about London that thriller writers cannot resist: the sheer density of its history, the collision...
The best thriller books set in New York don’t just use the city as backdrop — they make Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Bronx as morally complex and dangerous as any character on the page.
New York has always been crime fiction’s greatest muse. The best thriller books set in New York draw on...
The Best Mystery Books Set in Yorkshire prove that England’s largest county — all windswept moors, crumbling mill towns, and tight-lipped communities — is one of crime fiction’s richest and most underrated settings.
There is something about Yorkshire that crime writers keep returning to,...
The best mystery books set in the Scottish Highlands don’t simply use the landscape as wallpaper — they let the mist, the isolation, and the ancient silence do the work that lesser crime novels leave to contrivance.
Few settings in world crime fiction carry the psychological weight of the Scottish...