100 books like A Person of Interest

While this novel is a suspenseful psychological thriller in its own right, the story also tackles racial tensions and contemporary family dynamics. I admire the way Steph Cha explores grief, revenge, violence, racism, and justice over the course of Your House Will Pay’s fast-paced plot. This is absolutely a must-read.

In this gripping courtroom drama, an explosion in Miracle Creek, Virginia, destroys the business of South Korean immigrants Pak and Young Yoo and puts their daughter Mary into a monthslong coma. As arguments mount against the woman accused of starting the fire, Young struggles with a question many immigrants must face. Maybe she shouldn’t have brought her child to the US, where Mary struggles as a teenager and where she was almost killed. The tension between the two generations resonated with me as a parent and immigrant. As Young hopes to discover who caused the explosion that killed two other people, she must also help Mary imagine a future in their adoptive country.

There are some writers I read purely for the pleasure of a well-written sentence. Don is one of those, because he is a Literary Writer™ – he edited one of the premier literary journals for many years. But here’s the thing – he is also one hell of a plotter. This first novel of his caught the letters community by surprise, but not me; the intricate construction of his short stories could only lead to a tale as labyrinthine as this one. Featuring classic mystery tropes, Country of Origin is a missing person case that leads our hero, an American Embassy officer in Tokyo, to seedy strip clubs, dangerous love affairs, and the CIA, all delivered with surgical prose that would make Raymond Chandler blush.

Imagine for a moment that you receive an email that states the following: “Liquidate everything and return immediately.” Now imagine you are a North Korean spy who has lived in South Korea for almost twenty years, and after your handler disappeared more than a decade ago, you’ve heard nothing. Until this email. Is it real? Or has the South Korean CIA found you out and is trying to trick you? What about your wife and your daughter, both completely unaware of your true identity? Your Republic Is Calling You takes place entirely in a single day of this unfortunate spy’s life, and now you’ll have to read it to see how it ends: does he stay or does he go?

This book breaks all the rules because, well, Ji-won, a young Korean-American girl, literally breaks the rules (and the law) by becoming a serial killer in the face of societal expectations. I love a woman who’s not concerned with being or acting pretty, and we see that in Ji-won far before she ever gets a bite of her first blue eye.

The commentary in this novel is sharp, and much of what Ji-won experiences resonates with me as a Korean-American. Though she is by no means a role model, it was satisfying to see someone who might typically be overlooked go on a grotesque, revenge-fueled violence spree. This book was intelligent and subversive in all the right ways.

Ezekiel Farragut is a former university professor and current inmate at Falconer prison.

A drug addict and a murderer for killing his own brother during an argument, while incarcerated Farragut must wean himself from his addiction with methadone, and suffer visits from his profoundly disappointed wife. He is also involved romantically with a fellow prisoner—the captivating Jody, who all the guys want to screw.

When Jody successfully escapes, Farragut is left to contemplate how his own failures got him to this lonely place, and how to be a better man if he is ever able to leave it. This is where the grim, dreamlike beauty of Cheever’s best-known signature works shines through.

If you like this, also check out Blake Bailey’s biography of Cheever. The parallels between fact and fiction are fascinating.

Abbott Awaits follows the spectacularly ordinary life of a father with a two-year-old; husband to an insomniac, pregnant wife; and university teacher. Bachelder evokes beauty in the mundane, dazzling splendor in domestic tedium, and in the middle of cleaning up his daughter’s vomited-up raspberries, a revelation that gets to the heart of Abbot’s heart-crushing yet devastatingly funny tour of his wildly imaginative inner life: “The following propositions are both true: A) Abbott would not, given the opportunity, change one significant element of his life, but B) Abbot cannot stand his life.”

In a genre full of stories of almost infinite variety, this is one that caught my eye.

A middle-aged female professor of mathematics goes on a quest with her cat to track down a former student who is the only one who can save their world from destruction. Sounds cozy, doesn’t it? Except for the world-ending part.

And the fact that Vellitt’s path lies straight through a dreamscape out of the Lovecraftian mythos in this critique/homage to H.P. Lovecraft’s The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath. But you don’t have to have read the latter to enjoy the journey.

Vellitt is a marvelous character, the world-building is brilliant and the cat is the perfect addition that helps set the tone for a new and different kind of quest fantasy.

Helen McInnes books made their way into my family via those Readers Digest Condensed books that used to come in the mail. They were hard bound and heavy to hold, but it was fun to open them and explore new books. The only one I remember, though, is one by Helen McInnes. I had to go find the complete book because when they condense? You miss a lot. I recommend starting with her first book, Above Suspicion. I loved her characters right off. This isn’t one of those stories that starts with a big bang. The tension rises very slowly and you don’t realize you are being wound up like a spring until it’s too late to put it down. And cool factoid, the author was in the OAS in World War II. She knew her stuff. 

Start with the classic, this legendary British satire about cloistered college life and the darker side of the academic way of life. The story of a hapless lecturer in medieval history trying to secure his job (and get his dream girl), the book works for me on every level: it’s funny, it’s insightful, it can be scathing, and it manages to simultaneously value this strange way of life (what can be stranger than dedicating your life to study within the bubble of the academy?) while also skewering its foibles and flaws. Come for the comedy; stay for the insight and skewering. As an academic myself, this book hits very close to home.