100 books like McNally's Secret

It takes guts to write a protagonist who’s hard to like. Agatha Raisin, a tough businesswoman who retires to the tiny village of Carsley, is so beautifully flawed she’s impossible to ignore. She’s somewhat of a bully, prone to conniving, and deeply competitive, which is why she buys her quiche at a shop and enters it as her own creation. Of course, someone drops dead after eating it. This crusty woman of a certain age just bulldozes her way through the investigation and her flaws are so funny and refreshing that you wind up rooting for her. She’s a breath of fresh air in the cozy mystery world.

I enjoyed the silly and irreverent humor in this book and was happy to hitch a ride along with protagonist Thursday Next, a literary detective for an English government agency that safeguards literary masterpieces against time travelers.

Having majored in English literature myself, I was delighted by the characters’ discussions on literature, including the evergreen debate on the true author of Shakespearean plays. I also relished the setting–an alternative England in the 1980’s. All in all, this novel is a classic and well worth the read.

If rolling on the floor laughing your ass off is your thing, then Carl Hiaasen is for you. This was my entry into whack-job Florida crime capers, and it still puts me in stitches.

The carousel of nuttiness starts spinning when two rare “blue-tongued voles” are nicked from Amazing Kingdom of Thrills, a low-rent theme park. Bouncing off each other is a crowd of madcap and/or menacing characters. The racketeer park owner. The two boneheaded thieves. An enviro-radical granny. An oversexed dolphin. A security chief hopped up on steroids. An actress who plays a goofy park critter. A gonzo former Florida governor turned eco-guerrilla. And, as the only normal person in sight, an ex-journo PR flak. Now, just climb aboard and hang on.

This is the mystery on my list with the weirdest setting of all. It’s a science fiction novel full of genetically engineered talking animals, super-intelligent toddlers, and a government that awards “karma points” for good deeds and takes them away for infractions. And woe be to the person who reaches zero karma.

This book is one wild ride. I wouldn’t say that the world is believable, but it is a lot of fun, and I enjoyed the social satire.

Travis McGee lives aboard a houseboat he won in a poker game. A self-described “salvage consultant,” he’ll keep half of whatever he recovers for you. Travis locates a stolen boat for a friend, but this offends some South American drug dealers and they put him on a hit list. A subplot develops when somebody leaves little cats made of pipe cleaners on his houseboat. I enjoyed the strong female characters in this book and the non-stop action. The resolution is wonderful and shows a side of McGee the reader has never seen before. This is the last of twenty-one Travis McGee novels written by MacDonald.

The first Travis Magee novel hooked me. The image of a beach bum, living on a houseboat won in a poker game was enough. But when that bum transformed into a more modern version of Don Quixote all MacDonald had to do was to play me, gaff me, and pull me on board for the remainder of the series. Magee takes his retirement in chunks, righting wrongs and recovering that which was stolen. His life is full of brawling, babes, and bodies. All good stuff for the reader. 

MacDonald wrote twenty-one novels in his classic Travis McGee series, which has been praised by many best-selling writers, from Dean Koontz to Lee Child, Sue Grafton to Stephen King, as foundational to their own careers. This one’s my favorite.

Travis is in New York City to find out what happened to his old friend’s sister’s fiancé. Her fiancé is dead. She’s prickly and resistant to dredging up the past.

As Travis untangles a massive financial crime, he’s drugged and put in a mental hospital. Can he free himself and expose the truth?

I guess I like this one best because chemically-induced hypnosis is a frequent subject of my own series. Full of action, serious questions about the human mind, romance, and fun.

As much as the late 80s and early 90s are prevalent in the story, the Magnum PI-esque crime novel features more than meets the eye in its characters. If you go beyond the often hilarious and familiar pop culture situations, you find a deeply disturbing chain of events by equally disturbed people. Even the main character is a bit of an unapologetic anti-hero, which only adds depth beyond the printed word.

At times I wasn’t sure who I should be rooting for, and for that, I highly recommend this book and others in his Skink Series of stories.

No one does Florida-Funny like Carl Hiaasen.

A long-time columnist for the Miami Herald, Hiaasen has written theme-based novels about the foibles of Florida living—the politics, the sugar industry, the plastic surgery industry, the lottery. I imagine him banging out these novels with sardonic ire, seething at what has happened to his beloved Florida. But his rants are so funny readers need to stop from choking and hold onto to their hats.

I’ve read all of his books, and Tourist Season is one of my favorites, hooking me on page one with that mysterious limb found on the beach, page one. Then the race is on to find the culprit—and the rest of the poor devil who’s missing a leg. When asked where he gets his ideas, Hiaasen once said, “The police blotter…You can’t make this stuff up.”

John D. MacDonald is the father of modern fictional detectives—especially Robert Parker—who, like MacDonald, is a writer of sparse dialogue. John D. MacDonald’s main character is the unforgettable Travis McGee. Travis McGee lives on his houseboat, The Busted Flush, which he won in a poker game. McGee has no steady job. Instead, he takes on salvage jobs as he can find them and is paid 50% of the value of the recovered items he returns to the owner.  

Bright Orange for the Shroud—interestingly, is typical for John D. MacDonald as each of his books is connected to a color—The Deep Blue Goodbye, A Purple Place for Dying, and The Empty Copper Sea. 

While enjoying another short “retirement” Travis McGee is visited by Arthur Wilkinson, a friend from days gone by. In terrible health, McGee nurses him back to health only to find that Wilkinson has been bankrupted in… show more.