Hello, readers! It is Monday again! As it is Monday, welcome to another #5OnMyTBR update. The rule is relatively simple. I must pick five books from my to-be-read piles that fit the week’s theme.

This week’s theme: Mystery

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: The Plotters
Author: Un-Su Kim
Translator (from Korean): Sora Kim-Russell
Publisher: Doubleday
Publishing Date: 2019
No. of Pages: 292

Synopsis: 

Behind every assassination, there is an anonymous mastermind, a plotter, working in the shadows. Plotters quietly dictate the moves of Seoul’s most dangerous criminals, but their existence is little more than legend. Just who are the plotters? And more important, what do they want?

Reseng is a seasoned assassin. Orphaned at birth and raised by a cantankerous killer named Old Raccoon in the criminal headquarters “the library,” Reseng never questioned anything: where to go, who to kill, or why his home was filled with books that no one but him ever read. But one day, a job goes wrong, toppling a set of carefully calibrated plans. And when he uncovers an extraordinary scheme set into motion by an eccentric trio of young women – a convenience store clerk, her wheelchair-bound sister, and a cross-eyed librarian – Reseng has to decide if he will remain a pawn or finally take control of the plot.

Un-Su Kim has crafted a fiercely original and literary novel crackling with action, unforgettable characters, humor, and soul. But make no mistake, The Plotters is a top-notch thriller in which the gun is always loaded, the knife is always sharpened, and you should think twice about getting a cut and shave from someone called the Barber.

Title: Seventeen
Author: Hideo Yokoyama
Translator (from Japanese): Louise Heal Kawai
Publisher: Riverrun
Publishing Date: 2018 (2003)
No. of Pages: 394

Synopsis: 

Five hundred and twenty people died on that mountain. That sparkling mountain.

1985. Kazumasa Yuuki, a seasoned reporter at the North Kanto Times, runs a daily gauntlet against the power struggles and office politics that plague its newsroom. But when an air disaster of unprecedented scale occurs on the paper’s doorstep, its staff are united by an unimaginable horror, and a once-in-a-lifetime scoop.

2002. Seventeen years later, Yuuki remembers the adrenaline-fuelled, emotionally charged seven days that changed his and his colleagues’ lives. He does so while making good on a promise he made that fateful week – one that holds the key to its last unsolved mystery, and represents Yuuki’s final, unconquered fear.

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: 4:50 From Paddington
Author: Agatha Christie
Publisher: HarperCollins
Publishing Date: 2011
No. of Pages: 271

Synopsis: 

For an instant the two trains ran together, side by side. In that frozen moment, Elspeth witnessed a murder. Helplessly, she stared out of her carriage window as a man remorselessly tightened his grip around a woman’s throat. The body crumpled. Then the other train drew away.

But who, apart from Miss Marple, would take her story seriously? After all, there were no suspects, no other witnesses… and no corpse.

Title: The Historian
Author: Elizabeth Kostova
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Publishing Date: 2005
No. of Pages: 642

Synopsis: 

Late one night, exploring her father’s library, a young woman finds an ancient book and a cache of yellowing letters. The letters are all addressed to “My dear and unfortunate successor,” and they plunge her into a world she never dreamed of – a labyrinth where the secrets of her father’s past and her mother’s mysterious fate connect to an inconceivable evil hidden in the depths of history.

The letters provide links to one of the darkest powers that humanity has ever known – and to a centuries-long quest to find the source of that darkness and wipe it out. It is a quest for the truth about Vlad the Impaler, the medieval ruler whose barbarous reign formed the basis of the legend of Dracula. Generations of historians have risked their reputations, their sanity, and even their lives to learn the truth about Vlad the Impaler and Dracula. Now one young woman must decide whether to take up this quest herself – to follow her father in a hunt that nearly brought him to ruin years ago, when he was a vibrant young scholar and her mother was still alive.

What does the legend of Vlad the Impaler have to do with the modern world? Is it possible that the Dracula of myth truly existed – and that he has lived on, century after century, pursuing his own unknowable ends? The answers to these questions cross time and borders, as first the father and then the daughter search for clues, from dusty Ivy League libraries to Istanbul, Budapest, and the depths of Eastern Europe. In city after city, in monasteries and archives, in letters and in secret conversations, the horrible truth emerges about Vlad the Impaler’s dark reign – and about a time-defying pact that may have kept his awful work alive down through the ages.

Parsing obscure signs and hidden texts, treading codes worked into the fabric of medieval monastic traditions – and evading the unknown adversaries who will go to any lengths to conceal and protect Vlad’s ancient powers – one woman comes over closer to the secret of her own past and a confrontation with the very definition of evil. Elizabeth Kostova’s debut novel is an adventure of monumental proportions, a relentless take that blends fact and fantasy, history and the present, with an assurance that is almost unbearably suspenseful – and utterly unforgettable.

Title: Butter
Author: Asako Yuzuki
Translator (from Japanese): Polly Barton
Publisher: Ecco Books
Publishing Date: 2024 (2017)
No. of Pages: 452

Synopsis: 

There are two things I simply cannot tolerate: feminists and margarine.

Gourmet cook Manako Kajii sits in the Tokyo Detention House convicted of the serial murders of only businessmen, whom she is said to have seduced with her delicious home cooking. The case has captured the nation’s imagination, but Kajii refuses to speak with the pres, entertaining no visitors. That is until journalist Rika Machida writers a letter asking for her recipe for beef stew, and Kajii can’t resist writing back.

Rika, the only woman in her news office, works late each night, rarely cooking more than ramen. As the visits unfold between her and the steely Kajii, they are closer to a master class in food than journalistic research. Rika hopes this gastronomic exchange will help her soften Kajii, but it seems that Rika might be the one changing. With each meal she eats, something is awakening in her body. Do she and Kajii have more in common than she once thought?

Inspired by the real case of a convicted con woman and serial killer – the “Konkatsu Killer” – Asaku Yuzuki’s Butter is a vivid unsettling exploration of misogyny, obsession, romance, and the transgressive pleasures of food in Japan.