I highly recommend the works of Dan Brown, particularly Angels and Demons and Deception Point. I hesitate to say why I recommend them, because I can't really do that without massive spoilers.

I will say this: just because the characters in the books are not particularly rational does not mean the story itself is not rational. These books have a very important lesson to teach, and even though the characters may or may not learn that lesson, an observant reader should.

Another way of alluding to what's going on here: experience has taught us to reason about plots and attempt unravel mysteries in fiction according to certain tropes. However what's frequently true in fiction is often almost never to never true in real life. You will make more sense of these books if you come to the same conclusions from the scenes you read as you would were you to encounter those scenes in real life, rather than to the conclusions you would usually come to in a standard work of suspense fiction.