The Theakston Old Peculiar Crime Novel of the Year have announced their 2026 shortlisted titles! The award celebrates excellence, originality, and the very best in crime fiction by UK and Irish authors.
Take a look at these gripping crime thrillers, available to borrow with your library card!
Want more suggested books? Browse more of our recommendations.
The Midnight King
Tariq Ashkanani
Lucas Cole is a writer, a father, a widower, and a beloved celebrity in his small town. He is an unassuming man – tall, thin and quietly friendly. Lucas Cole is also a serial killer.
Nathan has known the truth about his father since he was ten. He ran away from home as soon as he was able, carrying the guilt of leaving his sister behind. But when Lucas is found dead, Nathan returns home.
It’s there he finds his father’s final unpublished manuscript, a fictionalised account of his hideous crimes, in a box of trinkets taken from his victims. Trinkets that include a ribbon belonging to a girl who disappeared only days before his father’s death.
Now, Nathan must deal with the consequences of keeping his father’s secret. But it may not be as simple as finding a lost child. For the manuscript holds Nathan’s secrets, as well as Lucas’s, and he’s not the only one searching for the truth.
The Death of Us
Abigail Dean
That spring night in South London, when Isabel and Edward’s lives were torn apart. The night Isabel learned that the worst things wait, just outside the door.
The night Edward learned that he was powerless to stop them. The night they never talk about. When their attacker is caught, it’s finally time to tell the story of that night. Not to the world. Or to the man who did it. But to each other.
This is a story of murder. This is a story of survival. But most of all, this is a story of love.
Beautiful Ugly
Alice Feeney
Author Grady Green is having the worst best day of his life. Grady calls his wife as she’s driving home to share some exciting news. He hears Abby slam on the brakes, get out of the car, then nothing.
When he eventually finds her car by a cliff edge, the headlights are on, the driver door is open, her phone is still there – but his wife has disappeared.
A year later, Grady is still overcome with grief and desperate to know what happened to Abby. He can’t sleep, and he can’t write, so he travels to a tiny Scottish island to try to get his life back on track.
Then he sees the impossible: a woman who looks exactly like his missing wife.
The Frozen People
Elly Griffiths
Ali Dawson and her cold case team investigate crimes so old, they’re frozen – or so their inside joke goes. Most people don’t know that they travel back in time to complete their research.
The latest assignment sees Ali venture back farther than they have dared before: to 1850s London in order to clear the name of Cain Templeton, the eccentric great-grandfather of MP Isaac Templeton. Rumour has it that Cain was part of a sinister group called The Collectors; to become a member, you had to kill a woman.
Fearing for her safety in the middle of a freezing Victorian winter, Ali finds herself stuck in time, unable to make her way back to her life, her beloved colleagues, and her son, Finn, who suddenly finds himself in legal trouble in the present day. Could the two cases be connected?
Clown Town
Mick Herron
Chief of the intelligence service, Diana Taverner, doesn’t appreciate threats. So, when a team involved in a double-agent operation during the height of the Troubles are threatening to expose the truth and lay bare the dark side of state security, Taverner turns this blackmail into an opportunity.
Slow horse, River Cartwright, is out in the cold waiting to be passed fit for work. To kill time, and with his grandfather – a former head spy – long dead, River investigates the secrets of his private library where a book has gone missing. Or perhaps it never existed.
Back at Slough House, the repository for failed spies, Louisa Guy is pondering her future. Shirley Dander is wondering if the new kid, Ash Khan, is as annoying as she seems. Roddy Ho wants the team to know that his tattoo is a hummingbird, and not, as Lech Wicinski claims, a platypus.
Quantum of Menace
Vaseem Khan
After Major Boothroyd (aka Q) is unexpectedly ousted from his role with British Intelligence developing technologies for MI6’s 00 agents, he finds himself back in his sleepy hometown of Wickstone-on-Water.
His childhood friend, renowned quantum computer scientist Peter Napier, has died in mysterious circumstances, leaving behind a cryptic note. The police seem uninterested, but Q feels compelled to investigate and soon discovers that Napier’s ground-breaking work may have attracted sinister forces.
Can Q decode the truth behind Napier’s death, even as danger closes in?
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