85 books like 13 Bullets

I love the adrenaline-pumping action that blends seamlessly into the horror elements of this book. I read it in a single sitting because I could not put it down. Every page was filled with monsters, action, and suspense. I also love the core characters at the heart of this book.

All of them share different backgrounds but come together through a common thread. The humor in this book made me laugh out loud while reading it. I can’t stress enough just how fun it was to turn the page and see what happened next.  

This is the first book that made me feel like I was in a fully realized location. I couldn’t put it down and continue to revisit it annually because the depth of detail in the town and its citizens draws me in and makes the events more impactful as they unfold.

I’ve always enjoyed a good vampire story, but Salem’s Lot was the first vampire story that made me a little nervous of the creaking sounds in the hallway or a tapping at a window. 

I loved the tie-in to classic superstitions and historical events that lay the foundation for this story. I found the spreading evil within the town to be one of the most compelling parts of the story. While the heroes were nice, I wanted to see just how far this malignant force would spread before being stopped.

I liked that the protagonists truly struggle and are in real peril. I enjoyed the more subdued action of the book and the real-world tone that it set.

I was hooked after meeting the characters and seeing them interact with one another. I could easily imagine these people as real and the town of Hettford felt like a slice of life. The comedic tone caught me off-guard, but I quickly grew to want to spend more time with the loveable losers that form the Hettford Witch Hunt group.

Lisa Regan is a stellar writer, and Vanishing Girls was a literal can’t-put-it-down read. I raced through the first four books in this series (Detective Josie Quinn series) and can’t wait to read the rest. I promise if you try it, you’ll feel the same—it’s addictive! Detective Josie is a mess—but you’ll be rooting for her big time. This situation is dark and disturbing, and this author excels at making things worse and worse for her characters. The writing is fast-paced and twisty—seriously, you’ll want to hold on tight to the armchair!

We think of the American victories at Saratoga in 1777 and Yorktown in 1781 as the decisive battles of the war (and so, in a sense, they were). But in this Pulitzer Prize winner, Fischer makes a strong case that George Washington’s surprising victories at Trenton and Princeton were just as momentous, keeping “the Cause” alive at a moment when the Continental Army was on the verge of dissolution. Fischer provides a vivid account of the flow of battle and the key decisions that gave the Americans their advantage.

The story of how the Continental Army suffered bitterly through the winter of 1777-78 at Valley Forge has been the subject of many books and the inspiration for many a patriotic myth. In this well-researched history, Bodle dispels many of those myths and carefully explains why the army had to stay so close to Philadelphia, when normally it would have moved further to the interior of Pennsylvania and sent many of its troops home for the winter. He provides a sophisticated account of the relationship between military needs and civilian politics, one that broadens our understanding of the Revolution.

The four Updike Rabbit novels are written in the present tense, which is uncommon for fiction but done to help bring more immediacy to the action. This causes the novels to read more like screenplays than when written in the past tense. I chose to write my own book in the present tense as a new challenge after reading all four Rabbit novels in succession. Updike was a master at getting into the interior lives of his characters, revealing their longings, typically not to be obtained. The character Rabbit is a wayward former high school basketball star who marries a childhood sweetheart and is gradually worn down over time by her mother and his own insouciance about everything. Rabbit is a sexist character and Updike wrote with truth about his many characters. 

While a lot of attention has been paid to the industrial decline in cities, the loss of jobs in industries such as mining has caused distress in rural areas. Recently, we have seen rises in drug abuse, overdose deaths, and suicides in rural America. Jennifer Silva did fieldwork in a rural Pennsylvania area that has experienced these shocks to its system, and she shows us the difficulties its residents are having.

I live in the same world where too many modern novels (including mine!) take place—a world of professionals and students, people whose hands get dirty only if we’re repotting our tomato plants. So it’s wonderfully eye-opening to enter the setting of this book, along with farmers, prison guards, nurses, and other rural folks who are actually living out the current debate over natural-gas fracking. While the gas-company officials are clear villains, the townspeople on both sides are portrayed with compassion and complexity. Who are the “good guys” and “bad guys” when a prison guard sells his mineral rights to the frackers for the cash to start a dairy farm? Or when a gas driller has an affair with a woman whose husband died of environmental cancer?