Column | Top books to read this month: February 2026

Discover captivating mysteries and haunting tales in February 2026's top book recommendations for thrilling reads this month.

This has been a generous reading month, allowing me to bring you several books that travel well. From a murder aboard a zeppelin fleeing Nazi Germany to a locked room in the Naga Hills, from a haunted house to a housing complex thick with civility and secrets. Each story tightens the walls around its characters. There are no exits, only reckonings.

(Pushkin Vertigo; ₹799)

A murder aboard a luxury zeppelin leaving Nazi Germany for Rio de Janeiro turns the cabin-pressure setting into a moral vice: everyone’s trapped together, everyone’s compromised. The title is the dare — what does “good” mean inside a regime built on brutality? It reads like a stylish puzzle that keeps its smile tight and its questions sharp.

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(Hodder & Stoughton; ₹799)

It is the 1950s, and Persis Wadia, India’s first woman police detective, is exiled from Bombay to the Naga Hills for defying orders. She lands in a crumbling hotel, just in time for a politically explosive locked-room murder. Khan, known for his crime fiction series, keeps the investigation clean, but the real thrill is in how the setting presses in: mist, isolation, and the sense that the “outpost” is its own kind of trap.