Books like A conspiracy of paper by David Liss

In an elite New England college, a charismatic classics professor lures a group of eccentric students into obsessive study, leading them from intellectual curiosity to corruption, betrayal, and ultimately murder.

Oliver Twist, Charles Dickens’s 1837-39 social novel, follows an orphan raised in a workhouse who flees to London, joins a gang of pickpockets, and uncovers family secrets while exposing child labour and exploitation.

In 1896 New York City, reporter John Schuyler Moore partners with psychologist Dr. Laszlo Kreizler and police secretary Sara Howard to pioneer a psychological profile of a serial murderer, confronting the era’s gritty underbelly and institutional skepticism.

Detective William Monk investigates the murder of arms dealer Daniel Alberton while a romantic entanglement between Alberton’s daughter and the American Lyman Breeland threatens to eclipse the crime.

After Sir Edward Grey is murdered, his widow Julia partners with private investigator Nicholas Brisbane to uncover the brutal truth behind his death, confronting London’s hidden dangers and her own painful revelations.

Private detective William Monk is drawn into a perilous investigation that links a stolen cargo of African ivory, a mysterious murder at a docked schooner, and a desperate woman sent to his wife's clinic, threatening both their lives and their world.

In Victorian London, private detective William Monk investigates a baffling missing-person case that spirals into a series of murders, exposing the era’s social mores and hidden scandals.

Maisie Dobbs, a former housemaid turned Cambridge student, serves as a war‑zone nurse during World War I. After the conflict, she begins a career as a private investigator, and her first case unravels a darker secret that forces her to confront the war’s lingering trauma.

Stunningly dark, hugely intelligent and thoroughly addictive, Ghostman announces the arrival of an exciting and highly distinctive novelist. When a casino robbery in Atlantic City goes horribly awry, the man who orchestrated it is obliged to call in a favor from someone who’s occasionally called Jack. While it’s doubtful that anyone knows his actual name or anything at all about his true identity, or even if he’s still alive, he’s in his mid-thirties and lives completely off the grid, a criminal’s criminal who does entirely as he pleases and is almost impossible to get in touch with. But within hours a private jet is flying this exceptionally experienced fixer and cleaner-upper from Seattle to New Jersey and right into a spectacular mess: one heister dead in the parking lot, another winged but on the run, the shooter a complete mystery, the $1.2 million in freshly printed bills god knows where and the FBI already waiting for Jack at the airport, to be joined shortly by other extremely interested and elusive parties. He has only forty-eight hours until the twice-stolen cash literally explodes, taking with it the wider, byzantine ambitions behind the theft. To contend with all this will require every gram of his skill, ingenuity and self-protective instincts, especially when offense and defense soon become meaningless terms. And as he maneuvers these exceedingly slippery slopes, he relives the botched bank robbery in Kuala Lumpur five years earlier that has now landed him this unwanted new assignment. From its riveting opening pages, Ghostman effortlessly pulls the reader into Jack’s refined and peculiar world—and the sophisticated shadowboxing grows ever more intense as he moves, hour by hour, toward a constantly reimprovised solution. With a quicksilver plot, gripping prose and masterly expertise, Roger Hobbs has given us a novel that will immediately place him in the company of our most esteemed crime writers.

In the misty Yorkshire moors, Lady Julia Grey returns to her ancestral home and is drawn into a deadly mystery involving a ruined manor, hidden family secrets, and a sinister past haunting the upper class.

Rider Sandman returns from the Napoleonic Wars to investigate a condemned prisoner at Newgate Prison, navigating London’s shadows to uncover the truth.

Disconsolate BBC journalist Damien March inherits a ramshackle island house from his eccentric uncle, thrusting him into an unexpected adventure in the New England coast.

A historical thriller set in 18th-century London, featuring a brilliant and cunning private investigator who must infiltrate a powerful corporation to protect his friends and family from a dangerous conspiracy.

Adam Miller's love affair with a Jewish woman in post-war Venice is threatened by the dark underbelly of the Occupation and the murky past of the city itself.

In Anne Perry’s Victorian London mystery, two women are strangled in a famed artist’s studio. Investigators William Monk and his wife hunt clues to clear the suspected Viennese surgeon, Dr. Kristian Beck, unraveling the victims’ hidden lives.

Detective Bernie Gunther is pulled back into the shadows of Berlin’s 1934 Nazi world and Havana’s 1954 political turmoil as he confronts past enemies and a new threat that could end his life.