Eight novels featuring unlikely detectives

Peter Colt was born in Boston, MA in 1973 and moved to Nantucket Island shortly thereafter. He is a 1996 graduate of the University of Rhode Island and a 24-year veteran of the Army Reserve with deployments to Kosovo and Iraq. He is a police officer in a New England City and the married father of two boys.

Colt's new novel is Back Bay Blues.

[My Book, The Movie: Back Bay Blues; The Page 69 Test: Back Bay Blues; Q&A with Peter Colt]

At CrimeReads, Colt tagged eight novels featuring "amateur sleuths [who] never asked to get mixed up in a murder investigation—but they won't stop looking until they find the truth," including:

Arturo Perez-Reverte, The Club Dumas

The protagonist of Arturo Perez-Reverte’s excellent The Club Dumas is Lucas Corso. Corso is a very Unlikely Detective, as he is a mercenary of a sort, whose moral code, if it can’t be bought, can certainly be rented if the price is right. Corso is referred to as a book mercenary who, for the right price, will chase down rare books and acquire by means fair and foul. He draws the line at murder. Corso lives out of a canvas shoulder bag that he carries his tools of the trade in, passport, cash, notebooks, pens and manuscripts. His clients are rich and, as the rich often are, unscrupulous when it comes to acquiring their desires. Corso is their guy.

He is hired to find a rare portion of the original manuscript of The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas. Corso moves through Europe meeting with collectors and dealers, femme fatales and a mysterious young woman. His search for the manuscript brings him into contact with a secret society, devil worship, murder and characters that are straight out of the book he is looking for. The Club Dumas is an intellectual puzzle wrapped in a mystery story and, like Hive of Glass, provides a close look at the dark side of collecting.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue