Here are 75 books that A Fine Dark Line fans have personally recommended if you like
A Fine Dark Line.
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I have spent over twenty years over (fifteen in Texas) recommending crime fiction as a bookseller in a couple of prominent stores. Texas and its writers have always fascinated me. Now that I get to call myself one, I am connected more to the genre literature of my adopted state and have an insider's view as both writer and resident.
Still one of the most disturbing books I’ve ever read from one of the great noir artists.
Thompson gets into the mind of Lou Ford, a psychotic killer who works as a sheriff’s deputy in a West Texas town. The book skillfully maneuvers through Ford dealing with his own crimes and the political maneuvering and blackmail plots in the town that build into an explosion.
This book showed me how turning down the volume in a story can be effective in a novel.
Deputy Sheriff Lou Ford is a pillar of the community in his small Texas town, patient and thoughtful. Some people think he's a little slow and boring but that's the worst they say about him. But then nobody knows about what Lou calls his 'sickness'. It nearly got him put away when he was younger, but his adopted brother took the rap for that. But now the sickness that has been lying dormant for a while is about to surface again and the consequences are brutal and devastating. Tense and suspenseful, The Killer Inside Me is a brilliantly sustained masterpiece…
I have spent over twenty years over (fifteen in Texas) recommending crime fiction as a bookseller in a couple of prominent stores. Texas and its writers have always fascinated me. Now that I get to call myself one, I am connected more to the genre literature of my adopted state and have an insider's view as both writer and resident.
The first in Locke’s Highway 59 series, featuring African American Texas ranger Darren Matthews involving two bodies one black, one white that wash up in a small East Texas town.
The story combines procedural, western, and Southern gothic to give an entertaining, human, yet unflinching look at race both past and present. This book enlightened me on how much African Americans contribute to what we call Texas culture.
Waterstones' Thriller of the Month June 2020 Shortlisted for the Orwell Prize 2020 A Sunday Times Book of the Year 'Political crime fiction of the highest order' Sunday Times
Nine-year-old Levi King knew he should have left for home sooner; instead he found himself all alone, adrift on the vastness of Caddo Lake. A sudden noise - and all goes dark. Ranger Darren Mathews is trying to emerge from another kind of darkness; his career and reputation lie in the hands of his mother, who's never exactly had his best interests at heart. Now she holds the key to his…
I have spent over twenty years over (fifteen in Texas) recommending crime fiction as a bookseller in a couple of prominent stores. Texas and its writers have always fascinated me. Now that I get to call myself one, I am connected more to the genre literature of my adopted state and have an insider's view as both writer and resident.
Crumley used his PI Milo Milodragovich to look at the state “with more guns than cows” in all its colorful insanity.
The search for a runaway pool shark wife puts Milo in the middle of plot involving firearms, drugs, and crimes in various forms as Crumley draws from two of his favorite writers, Raymond Chandler and Warren Zevon.
I got to know Jim near the end of his life and see his broad, loving, cynical personality, and the feelings of his birth state when I read this.
It's business as usual for Milo Milodragovitch, watching a relationship go sour and running a bar whose real business is cleaning some dirty money, until he gets sent off to hunt a drug dealer’s killer. Prodded by the twin motivations of his prickly conscience and his tight finances, Milo sets off on a trip to find the promised land. The end of the road will be where he first began: Montana, where a beautiful woman, a dangerous man, and a motherlode of truth are waiting for their favorite son to come home—bringing with him…
Buried Secrets. A web of deceit, betrayal, and danger. Can she survive her fight for justice and truth? Laura thought she knew everything about her late husband before he died. Now, her life and the lives of those she loves are in danger. As Laura delves into his previous role…
I have spent over twenty years over (fifteen in Texas) recommending crime fiction as a bookseller in a couple of prominent stores. Texas and its writers have always fascinated me. Now that I get to call myself one, I am connected more to the genre literature of my adopted state and have an insider's view as both writer and resident.
This coverage of the crime wave of the Overton gang who burgled, pimped, and committed various crimes up and down I-35 is nonfiction, but hard to believe at times.
The story paints vivid time in Austin with a supporting cast of colorful lawyers, madams, and even UT Tower sniper Charles Whitman. Jesse Sublett, author, musician, painter, journalist, and photographer is basically as close as Austin has to royalty and portrays the events in a rock n’ roll style.
I’d also recommend Jesse’s fiction series staring bass player and skip tracer Martin Fender.
Timmy Overton of Austin and Jerry Ray James of Odessa were football stars who traded athletics for lives of crime. The original rebels without causes, nihilists with Cadillacs and Elvis hair, the Overton gang and their associates formed a ragtag white trash mafia that bedazzled Austin law enforcement for most of the 1960s. Tied into a loose network of crooked lawyers, pimps and used car dealers who became known as the "traveling criminals," they burglarized banks and ran smuggling and prostitution rings all over Texas. Author Jesse Sublett presents a detailed account of these Austin miscreants, who rose to folk…
Too often, I find that novelists force the endings of their books in ways that aren’t true to their characters, the stories, or their settings. Often, they do so to provide the Hollywood ending that many readers crave. That always leaves me cold. I love novels whose characters are complex, human, and believable and interact with their setting and the story in ways that do not stretch credulity. This is how I try to approach my own writing and was foremost in my mind as I set out to write my own book.
How can one not love this book? The sensitivity with which Steinbeck renders his lead characters, broody, sensitive George, and childlike, powerful Lenny, is unparalleled. The reader can’t help but love them and feel their pain as their dreams inevitably slip away from their grasp.
The only fitting ending for this masterpiece is Steinbeck’s heartrending ending, foreshadowed throughout the book. It will leave you in tears, but make you a better person in the process.
Introducing Little Clothbound Classics: irresistible, mini editions of short stories, novellas and essays from the world's greatest writers, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith.
Celebrating the range and diversity of Penguin Classics, they take us from snowy Japan to springtime Vienna, from haunted New England to a sun-drenched Mediterranean island, and from a game of chess on the ocean to a love story on the moon. Beautifully designed and printed, these collectible editions are bound in colourful, tactile cloth and stamped with foil.
Drifters in search of work, George and his childlike friend Lennie have nothing in the world except…
Dugan was my grandmother’s maiden name. Her family was from County Wexford, Ireland near Rosslare on the island’s east coast. In recent years I have extensively studied my Irish heritage and have discovered much about my family, and about the DNA running through my own Irish blood. The inquiry has revealed much about my love of storytelling, good conversation, and generally about the way I move through the world. As a writer of several books of personal narrative and fiction, I have tried to write books that capture a certain emotion, and now through my own ancestral discoveries, I understand how those emotions and familial ties are so tightly linked.
What could be more Irish than two old friends meeting in a pub to tell stories?
Thing is, one of the friends has a life-changing secret to tell. He’s left his wife and kids for another woman, a woman they both know from their school days. Throughout the night, in pub after pub, and pint after pint, the story of the friend’s new love is revealed as the conversation delves deeper into each man’s version of the past they have shared—their fathers, their lovers, and even their collective memories of their Irish childhoods.
At times the story is both amusing and genuinely moving.
'A profound examination of friendship, romantic confusion and mortality' John Boyne
One summer's evening, two men meet up in a Dublin restaurant. Old friends, now married and with grown-up children, their lives have taken seemingly similar paths. But Joe has a secret he has to tell Davy, and Davy a grief he wants to keep from Joe. Both are not the men they used to be.
As two pints turns to three, then five, Davy and Joe set out to revisit the haunts of their youth. With the ghosts of Dublin entwining around them - the pubs, the parties, the…
Riley Masterson has moved to Greenbrier, SC, anxious to escape the chaos that has overwhelmed her life.
Questioned in a murder in Alabama, she has spent eighteen months under suspicion by a sheriff’s office, unable to make an arrest. But things in gentrifying Greenbrier are not as they seem. As…
I grew up as a closeted homosexual in a fundamentalist Christian home, enduring nearly two decades in a crisis of faith. Sermons frequently warned of damnation for my natural inclinations, pushing me to fast, pray, and achieve to resist temptation. This crisis gradually resolved over the eight years I spent writing Playing by the Book, the first coming-out novel to win a National IPPY Medal in religious fiction. Although I don’t consider myself a spiritual writer, I am drawn to stories that explore existential struggles and triumphs, including those related to a crisis of faith—much like the characters in the novels on this list.
I love this book because it shows that being different does not exclude one from being an instrument of God. Owen Meany, with his unusual voice and diminutive stature, is an unforgettable character who, despite seeming out of place, becomes integral to a grander plan. His story resonated deeply with me, reminding me of my journey as a closeted gay man.
Like Owen, I felt different from everyone else and struggled with feelings of unworthiness—feelings that are now far behind me. This book celebrates the unusual and beautifully illustrates that every life has meaning and every person has a role to play.
'Marvellously funny . . . What better entertainment is there than a serious book which makes you laugh?' Spectator
'If you care about something you have to protect it. If you're lucky enough to find a way of life you love, you have to find the courage to live it.'
Summer, 1953. In the small town of Gravesend, New Hampshire, eleven-year-old John Wheelwright and his best friend Owen Meany are playing in a Little League baseball game. When Owen hits a foul ball which kills John's mother, their lives are changed in an instant.
I’m intrigued by baseball. The passion and drama of the games and the way the sport is nearly always linked to a meaningful relationship with someone dear. That curiosity has only been fueled by the books I’ve read over the years and inspired me to write a baseball story of my own. The All-American is my ninth novel and I couldn’t feel more privileged to have been able to write it.
My friend and fellow novelist, Allison Pittman, recommended this one to me.
It’s a story told in letters written between a goofball kid named Joey and a New York Giants player named Charlie. I laughed and cried my way through this winner of a novel, rooting for both Joey and Charlie the entire time. It’s a story about the love of baseball, yes.
But it’s also a book about ambition and friendship, heartache and dreams, disappointments and hope. And with every page I read, I fell more and more in love with baseball. It’s one of the finest novels I’ve read.
A contemporary American classic—a poignant and hilarious tale of baseball, hero worship, eccentric behavior, and unlikely friendship
Last Days of Summer is the story of Joey Margolis, neighborhood punching bag, growing up goofy and mostly fatherless in Brooklyn in the early 1940s. A boy looking for a hero, Joey decides to latch on to Charlie Banks, the all-star third basemen for the New York Giants. But Joey's chosen champion doesn't exactly welcome the extreme attention of a persistent young fan with an overactive imagination. Then again, this strange, needy kid might be exactly what Banks needs.
Brian Conaghan has written seven Young Adult novels. When Mr. Dog Bites, was shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal. The Bombs That Brought Us Together, won the 2016 Costa Children’s Book Award. We Come Apart - a collaboration with Sarah Crossan - won the United Kingdom Literary Award. His novel, The Weight of a Thousand Feathers, won the 2018 An Post YA Irish Book of the Year. The M Word was shortlisted for the An Post YA and Teen Book of the Year. Cardboard Cowboys, to date, has been nominated for the Carnegie Medal. Brian lives and works in the Scottish town of Coatbridge.
A day in the life of two inseparable friends in an impoverished Scottish town where everything seems challenging. They learn what friendship truly means in the face of certain dangers. Dillon’s award-winning debut depicts the vitality and intensity of boyhood friendship, as well as painting a vivid picture of contemporary working-class Scotland.
A story of boyhood friendship and irrepressible vitality told with the speed of trains and the understanding of the awkwardness, significance and fragility of that time. This is a day in the life of two boys as told by one of them.
After solving her first case, private eye Siobhan O’Brien is hired by Phillip Ahn, an octogenarian billionaire with his own personal island in the Pacific Northwest. Ahn, a genius in artificial intelligence, swears that Duke, his youngest child and only son, is an impostor. Is Ahn crazy, or is Duke…
I am instantly drawn to stories with voyages, spices, and trade. But as much as these, I love meddlesome and crafty gods. I’m not a religious person, but I love to understand how people behave around religion, how it influences their choices, and how our world’s history can be chronologized as a series of fanatical events and conquests. Fantasy gives me the option to explore characters and worlds where gods are not only inherently intrusive but also cast a long shadow on people’s nature, giving birth to folklore, myths, and, of course, great stories to tell. They drive destinies, but more importantly, they drive the resistance against being puppeteered.
This was one meaty book! Ken Liu has thrown away all the rules of writing and has yet written an absolute masterpiece of fantasy fiction.
I don’t remember being this thrilled, terrified, angry, and chuffed with scene after scene, battle after battle. I am a sucker for sprawling epic fantasies. Give me intricate maps, dozens of characters, multiple POVs, betrayals, puppeteering gods, and a complex plot that ties them all together.
The Grace of Kings is all that and more in its rich and silken reimagining of the Han dynasty and the Chu Han Contention. Imagine my delight when I found out there are three more books to this saga, each meatier than the previous.
Emperor Mapidere was the first to unite the island kingdoms of Dara under a single banner. But now the emperor is on his deathbed, his people are exhausted by his vast, conscriptive engineering projects and his counsellors conspire only for their own gain.
Even the gods themselves are restless.
A wily, charismatic bandit and the vengeance-sworn son of a deposed duke cross paths as they each lead their own rebellion against the emperor's brutal regime. Together, they will journey to the heart of the empire; witnessing the clash of armies, fleets of silk-draped airships, magical books and shapeshifting gods. Their…
