The Big Sleep

Author: Raymond Chandler

Genre: Detective, Thriller, Hardboiled, Classic

Source: Audiobook

Rated: 5/5

Read: Jan-March 2015

Chandler’s writing is like a slap of crisp, hot breeze on the face, late on a tiring summer’s day – clean, brutal, uncompromising, and unforgettable. Clean, more than anything else. Sparse. Hard. And enough.

You know that this is genre fiction. And while reading it (and I have read only one Chandler earlier), you know that this is literature that is defeating the genre it is part of. You know that this is a classic. You are mesmerized. You are pulled. You carry on. You are carried on.

Raymond Chandler is the writer I want to write like.

Gone Girl

Author : Gillian Flynn

Genre: Thriller, Mystery

Source - Audiobook

Rating - 5

April 14

Shudder. A delicious, twisted, evil, satan of a book. Unreliable, lying, attractive, detestable, addictive narrators; the most realistic take on a crumbled marriage I've read in recent times; twists and double twists and triple twists and then --- just as we were slowly moving towards some kind of an expected conclusion, a whoosh-what-the-f**k-was-that howitzer of an ending. I hated, HATED the ending. Perfect ending. Hated it. Loved it.

The Devotion of Suspect X

Author - Keigo Higashino

Genre - Mystery, Crime, Thriller, Murder, Japan

Source - Audiobook

Rating - 4 (a high 4)

December 2013

The most brilliantly convoluted plot for a murder mystery story you will ever read. Not a whodunit (you know who is the murderer in chapter 1.. or do you?), not quite a whydunit (pretty obvious), but a masterful howdunit, probably the most difficult to convert to a very good book, and indeed the best of its type you will ever come across. You will find mystery stories that are better-written, you will find mystery stories that are better, fullstop; but you will struggle to find another with a more incredibly labyrinthine plot-twist.