Credit: Netflix

Netflix viewers and book adaptations can be quite a volatile mix. Especially when it’s a book people already adore, because readers do not just turn up and see how it goes. Not a chance. They have already cast everyone in their heads and played the big scenes out about fifty times, so the second Netflix changes anything, they notice it immediately.

And murder mysteries? They are brilliant for adaptations, but they are murder to get right, because you are not just a viewer anymore. You are investigating. Everything matters here, everything!

The good thing is Netflix knows exactly how to play that as well. Give people a story they already recognise, and that’s your evening gone. Some films stay dead close to the book, while others take the basic story and leg it somewhere completely different.

So these next five films all started on the page, but every one of them has a mystery waiting to make a show of your first theory.

Stream these five Netflix mystery movies based on books

The Woman in Cabin 10 (based on ‘The Woman in Cabin 10’ by Ruth Ware)

Author Ruth Ware has got a gift for taking the readers somewhere that should feel safe and making it look like the worst idea anyone’s ever had. In her 2016 bestseller, it’s a luxury yacht, which sounds lovely at first. A bit of sea air, fancy food, everyone pretending they’re loaded. Just when you’re taking all that in, the movie helps you realise that you are stuck miles from land with a possible murderer knocking about. Netflix has handed the mess to Keira Knightley, and she did a splendid job.

Knightley plays travel journalist Lo Blacklock, who hears a scream in the middle of the night and sees a woman go overboard. Bad enough, but when she tells the crew, they insist every passenger is still there. So now Lo is the only one convinced something has gone wrong, while everyone else is looking at her like she’s talking rubbish. The film changes bits from Ware’s novel but keeps the best part intact: nobody believes Lo, and because she is trapped on a yacht, she has got nowhere to go and no easy way to prove she is not losing the plot.

The Thursday Murder Club (based on ‘The Thursday Murder Club’ by Richard Osman)

Richard Osman found the seed for this story in his mum’s retirement community, where he met people with fascinating pasts who were too often treated as though their most interesting years had finished. That observation became his 2020 bestseller, and Netflix has given the adaptation an amazing cast and direction.

Helen Mirren plays Elizabeth, alongside Pierce Brosnan as Ron, Ben Kingsley as Ibrahim and Celia Imrie as Joyce. The four residents of Coopers Chase spend Thursdays poring over cold cases, but their hobby becomes rather more serious when a local murder gives them fresh evidence to examine. Chris Columbus has directed the movie and you can see his touch in it. The appeal lies in watching people others overlook become the sharpest minds in the room. They may live in a retirement village, but nobody here has retired from solving murders.

The Pale Blue Eye (based on ‘The Pale Blue Eye’ by Louis Bayard)

Long before Edgar Allan Poe became the patron saint of ravens and unfortunate floorboards, he spent time as a cadet at West Point. Louis Bayard looked at that curious chapter of his life and thought that it could use a murder. His 2003 novel supplies the fictional case behind this snowbound Gothic thriller. What a mind-blowing thought!

And it’s got Christian Bale. He plays Augustus Landor, a retired detective summoned after a cadet is found dead and the body is subjected to a gruesome act. Landor recruits Poe, played by Harry Melling, whose fascination with death makes him a useful partner. Scott Cooper directed the film after pursuing the project for more than a decade, with Bale also serving as a producer. The title nods to Poe’s ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’, though the investigation itself never really happened. How about that! It’s delightful to watch history being bent for entertainment, and on this occasion, it wears the distortion rather well.

Luckiest Girl Alive (based on ‘The Weekend Away’ by Sarah Alderson)

That title is funny from the start, because Ani FaNelli’s glamorous life has been quite the opposite. It rests on a past she has spent years trying to keep under control. Mila Kunis plays the successful magazine writer, whose wedding plans begin to lose their shine when a documentary filmmaker asks her to revisit a school tragedy.

Jessica Knoll adapted the screenplay from her own 2015 bestseller, which meant the author could decide what survived the move to film. Chiara Aurelia plays Ani as a teenager, and the story keeps moving between the woman she became and the events that made her who she is. Knoll has spoken about drawing from her own experience, making the whole thing a lot more personal. Ani builds an image to impress everyone around her, but the film is more interested in what that performance has cost. The perfect life, as it turns out, comes with some ghastly terms and conditions.

The Woman in the Window (based on ‘The Woman in the Window’ by A. J. Finn)

Films have spent decades warning us against watching the neighbours, but as the title suggests, everything’s about to go south. Before you watch Amy Adams peer through the glass, it is worth knowing that The Woman in the Window had a bumpy trip to Netflix. Shot in 2018 and once set for a 2019 cinema release, the film underwent rewrites and reshoots before studio changes and the pandemic delayed it until 2021. Adams plays Anna Fox, a child psychologist whose agoraphobia keeps her inside her New York brownstone. She watches old films and studies the Russell family across the street, then believes she sees Jane Russell stabbed.

The trouble is that another woman appears, claiming to be Jane, while Anna’s medication, drinking and trauma make her account easy to dismiss. Gary Oldman plays the threatening Alistair Russell, with Julianne Moore, Jennifer Jason Leigh and Fred Hechinger adding to the puzzle. Based on A. J. Finn’s 2018 bestseller, the story owes a clear debt to Rear Window.