74 books like A Catskill Eagle

As a reader of mysteries and thrillers, I always look for intriguing characters, a great storyline, and something special. Not all books in the genre have these. This one does. The secret element is that it’s extremely charming. I love the relationship between the protagonist, Myron, and his best friend, the wealthy Win. For instance, they are both TV trivia nuts of classic TV shows from the ‘60s and forward.

Additionally, Win is very much not what he seems. This other side is intriguing and adds depth to the character. In Coban’s book, I rooted for Myron (I didn’t always agree with his choices) but was on his side the whole time.

I liked this novel because I was in Vietnam, have friends forever changed by contact with the mad god Mars, and could easily relate to the main character.

After his time in the military, Vietnam war tunnel rat Harry Bosch has to fight his own PTSD as well as very real present dangers in his job with the Los Angeles police force. Since I have studied the L.A. police for some of my novels, Connelly’s writing rings very true to me.

I love reading a thriller with a complex plot that has me trying to figure out who did what, where and when, and what or who may be connected in the main or subplot.

This was one of those books I had to read twice, not because I didn’t “get it” but because I admired the way Chandler weaved his characters around, like the actors in a Whitehall farce play. This is a book I kept turning back a few pages to keep up with the who, where, and when. Fantastic read.

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.

Early Autumn made me cry from two directions. As a tween, reading about Spenser’s rescue of Paul, a shut-down, emotionally neglected boy that Spenser first assesses as “an unlovely little bastard”, I cried in sympathy and relief for Paul.

Over a summer, Spenser taught him skills, built up his strength and gave him the confidence to find his own dreams, before leaving him at the doorway to the life he now knew he wanted. As an adult, I cried with joy for Spenser, who connected with a stranger, taught what he had to teach, and changed a life.

Really helping someone in a lasting way is rarely so easy as it was in this book, but it’s a worthwhile dream and this Cinderella story gets me every time.

Street names, the Charles River, bridges, the Back Bay, the Public Gardens, actual hotels and restaurants—Robert B. Parker’s forty Spenser novels make Boston so much a character that Parker wrote Spenser’s Boston. The sixth novel in the series, published in 1980, has Spenser searching for a missing lesbian activist who’s been kidnapped by an anti-gay group. Like Buffalo, Boston sometimes gets a lot of snow. Unlike Buffalo, which is not the snowiest city in New York but is depicted as such, Boston is not known as a snow capital. That Spenser must search during a blizzard is a welcome dose of realism.

Robert B. Parker’s Cold Service is one of my favorite Spenser novels because it provides more insight into the character Hawk. Hawk is in the hospital, three bullets in his back from trying to protect a bookie from the Ukrainian mob. The Ukrainians are spreading their turf from NYC to the Boston area (a town called Marshport). Spenser comes to the rescue, and the two men take on the impossible task of defeating the Ukrainian mob and their Afghani heroine-dealing overlords while avenging Hawks shooting. Alone, Hawk can’t deal with the thought of showing weakness and Spencer ponders his mortality. Together Spenser and Hawk appear to be invincible. Their code allows them to engage in brutality and come out as likable characters. The way in which Parker spins a tale using simple dialogue is ingenious. His main characters Spenser, Hawk, and Susan Silverman are a joy to get to know… show more.

As great as it was, Eddie Coyle didn’t leave much of a cultural footprint, at least not until the movie adaptation starring Robert Mitchum was rediscovered decades after its initial release. Robert B. Parker’s Spenser is another matter entirely, having spawned nearly 40 novels by Parker, another 10 by Ace Atkins, a popular ‘80s TV series, and a Netflix movie starring Mark Walhberg. Picking just one of the durable shamus’s adventures is a daunting task, but I’ll give the nod to Ceremony for its evocation of the seedy seventies Combat Zone (Boston’s long-gone red light district) and the murky morality of Spenser’s dealings with a teen runaway turned sex worker.

Like Paretsky’s V. I. and Grafton’s Kinsey Milhone, six-foot, former police officer and intrepid Boston P.I. Carlotta Carlyle is dogged, street smart, and tough while navigating the vagaries of big city corruption and big money influence.

She is bored by her desk job undercover assignment investigating fraud in Boston’s Big Dig construction project. She craves the action that I, as a reader, want to see her undertake. I hope this is also the type of character I have created in my book.

Gone Baby Gone is book 4 in Lehane’s Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro series. As private detectives, Gennaro and Kenzie are a top-notch investigative team and the story itself is one that will suck you in from the start. It keeps you guessing with its mix of characters, reliable, and unreliable, upfront and in the shadows. It’s my kind of story and one I often referred to while writing my book. Beyond the story of a missing girl, Lehane uses the relationship between Gennaro and Kenzie as a subplot. The friction, the conflict, the barriers in their personal life continue to give the reader angst even after the facts are uncovered. Gone Baby Gone is a suspense story that doesn’t just solve a crime, but also takes the reader into the lives of the investigators, questioning their morality, their decisions and ultimately asking the reader, is the truth always worth… show more.