Hello, readers! Welcome to another #5OnMyTBR update. The rule is relatively simple. I have to pick five books from my to-be-read pile that fit the week’s theme.

This week’s theme: Murder

5OnMyTBR is a bookish meme hosted by E. @ Local Bee Hunter’s Nook where you chose five books from your to-be-read pile that fit that week’s theme. If you’d like more info, head over to the announcement post!

Title: Alias Grace
Author: Margaret Atwood
Publisher: Virago
Publishing Date: 1998
No. of Pages: 542

Synopsis: 

“Sometimes I whisper it over to myself: Murderess. Murderess. It rustles, like a taffeta skirt along the floor” Grace Marks. Female fiend? Femme fatale? Or weak and unwilling victim?

Around the true story of one of the most enigmatic and notorious women of the 1840s, Margaret Atwood has created an extraordinarily potent tale of sexuality, cruelty and mystery.

Title: The ABC Murders
Author: Agatha Christie
Publisher: HarperCollins
Publishing Date: 2018
No. of Pages: 266

Synopsis: 

Murder is a very simple crime. But in the hands of a maniac, a serial killer, it becomes a very complicated business.

With the whole country in a state of panic, the killer is growing more confident with each successive execution – Mrs. Ascher in Andover, Betty Barnard in Bexhill, Sir Carmicheal Clarke in Churston… But laying a trail of deliberate clues to taunt the proud Hercule Poirot might just be his first mistake.

Title: The Maid
Author: Nita Prose
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Publishing Date: 2022
No. of Pages: 285

Synopsis: 

Molly Gray is not like everyone else. She struggles with social skills and misreads the intentions of others. Her gran used to interpret the world for her, codifying it into simple rules that Molly could live by.

Since Gran died a few months ago, twenty-five-year-old Molly has been navigating life’s complexities all by herself. No matter—she throws herself with gusto into her work as a hotel maid. Her unique character, along with her obsessive love of cleaning and proper etiquette, make her an ideal fit for the job. She delights in donning her crisp uniform each morning, stocking her cart with miniature soaps and bottles, and returning guest rooms at the Regency Grand Hotel to a state of perfection.

But Molly’s orderly life is upended the day she enters the suite of the infamous and wealthy Charles Black, only to find it in a state of disarray and Mr. Black himself dead in his bed. Before she knows what’s happening, Molly’s unusual demeanor has the police targeting her as their lead suspect. She quickly finds herself caught in a web of deception, one she has no idea how to untangle. Fortunately for Molly, friends she never knew she had unite with her in a search for clues to what really happened to Mr. Black—but will they be able to find the real killer before it’s too late?

Both a Clue-like, locked-room mystery and a heartwarming journey of the spirit, The Maid explores what it means to be the same as everyone else and yet entirely different—and reveals that all mysteries can be solved through connection to the human heart.

Title: Gone Girl
Author: Gillian Flynn
Publisher: Wiedenfield & Nicholson
Publishing Date: 2014
No. of Pages: 463

Synopsis: 

There are two sides to every story…

Who are you?

What have we done to each other?

These are the questions Nick Dunne finds himself asking on the morning of his fifth wedding anniversary, when his wife Amy suddenly disappears. The police suspect Nick. Amy’s friends reveal that she was afraid of him, that she kept secrets from him. He swears it isn’t true. A police examination of his computer shows strange searches. He says they weren’t made by him. And then there are the persistent calls on his mobile phone.

So what did happen to Nick’s beautiful wife?

Title: The Outsiders
Author: S.E. Hinton
Publisher: Speak
Publishing Date: 1995 (1967)
No. of Pages: 180

Synopsis: 

No one ever said life was easy. But Ponyboy is pretty sure that he’s got things figured out. He knows that he can count on his brothers, Darry and Sodapop. And he knows that he can count on his friends – true friends who would do anything for him, like Johnny and Two-Bit. And when it comes to the Socs – a vicious gang of rich kids who enjoy beating up on “greasers” like him and his friends – he knows that he can count on them for trouble. But one night someone takes things too far, and Ponyboy’s world is turned upside down….

Title: Ice
Author: Vladimir Sorokin
Translator (from Russian): Jamey Gambrell
Publisher: New York Review of Books
Publishing Date: 2007 (2002)
No. of Pages: 321

Synopsis: 

Moscow has been hit by a wave of brutal murders. The victims are of both sexes, from different backgrounds, and of all ages, but invariably blond and blue-eyed. They are found with their breastbones smashed in, their hearts crushed. There is no sign of any motive.

Drugs, sex, and violence are the currency of daily life in Moscow. Criminal gangs and unscrupulous financial operators run the show. But in the midst of so much squalor one mysterious group is pursuing a long-meditated plan. Blond and blue-eyed, with a strange shared attraction to a chunk of interstellar ice, they are looking for their brothers and sisters, precisely 23,000 of them. Lost among the common heart of humanity, they must be awakened and set free. How? With a crude hammer fashioned out of the cosmic ice. Humans, meat machines, die under its blows. The heart of the chosen answer by uttering their true names. For the first time they know the ecstacy of true life.

For the awakened, the future, like the past, is simple. It is ice.

What is Ice? A gritty dispatch from the front lines of the contemporary world, a gnostic fairy tale, a hard-boiled parable a New Age parody, a bitingly funny fantasy in the great Russian tradition that begins with Gogol and continues with Nabokov, a renegade fiction to set beside those of Philip K. Dick and Michel Houellebecq, and the most ambitious and accomplished novel yet by Vladimir Sorokin, the stylistic virtuoso and master of provocation who, in the words of The Moscow Times, is “the only living Russian author who can be called a classic.”