Read The Secret History

A boy walks out of a bombed museum with a Dutch painting; 800 pages and a Pulitzer.

Sam Spade and the black bird; the hard-boiled detective novel in its first form.

Philip Marlowe's first case in a corrupt Los Angeles; Chandler's similes.

Poirot, a snowbound train and twelve suspects; the solution everyone knows and still enjoys.

Ten strangers on an island die one by one; Christie's best-selling book.

A disgraced journalist and a hacker investigate a forty-year-old disappearance; Larsson's Millennium trilogy begins.

Oedipa Maas and a secret postal system; Pynchon in 150 pages.

A girl raised alone in the North Carolina marsh and a murder trial; the bestseller of the 2010s.