Here are 68 books that A Maiden's Grave fans have personally recommended if you like
A Maiden's Grave.
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I am a veteran novelist who believes this over all else: The opening is everything. This has been my modus operandi as a storyteller for over thirty books, as well as a half dozen screenplays. I love a great opening. It is how a reader or viewer will subconsciously decide whether they will devote themselves to a story. It is the first kiss. The first shot over the bow. The ignition, the countdown, and the launch. It is the alpha and omega… because the beginning dictates the ending. Oh my, how I love the beginning!
Stephen Hunter’s crime fiction masterpiece,Dirty White Boys, begins with a sentence lovingly detailing the villain’s genitals.
I assure you this opening is in no way gratuitous or prurient; it signals that we’re in for a wild ride, informing us that only “…three men at McAlester State Penitentiary had larger penises than Lamar Pye….”
Pye is one of the great literary villains of all time – racist, crude, violent, and cruel… and smart as a whip. And the tone here is pitch-dark hillbilly noir. If you’re brave enough to read this book it will live in your imagination for the rest of your life.
Three convicts on the run with an arsenal of weaponry and only one rogue cop can stop them. Lamar Pye has escaped from Oklahoma State Penitentiary, accompanied by his idiot cousin and a vicious, but cowardly artist. To have stayed in prison was certain death, but his chances on the outside are not much greater: his excesses know no bounds - one killing follows another. But one murder brings his nemesis upon him: Bud Pewtie of the Highway of the Highway Patrol loses his partner in a blood-soaked shoot-out with Lamar, and from that moment on, nothing will stop him…
I’m agnostic to book genre. If I see it, I will try it. I read all over the place. I just finished a book on online dating and race, the buzzy fiction of the moment, and a self-help book. There are two genre’s that are my absolute favorites, though, women’s fiction, and police procedurals. I’ve read Elizabeth George, Julia Spencer Fleming, Michael Connelly, and Tana French since they started publishing. While I enjoy the whodunit nature of the books, my favorite parts are those quiet moments of pure, unfettered relations between people who care for each other in an otherwise chaotic world. It’s what I write and what I read.
The Harry Bosch series has been long and often predictable.
Bosch has a strong belief that if everybody doesn’t count, nobody counts. He has to hold up his image of justice against an LAPD that plays politics, and a city populace easily swayed by the latest headlines.
What I love about The Last Coyote is that it’s a very personal novel where Bosch examines his relationship with his deceased mother Marjorie Phillips Lowe, a prostitute who was brutally murdered. While on psychiatric leave, Bosch takes on the case of his mother’s unsolved murder.
It’s a wonderfully nuanced exploration of the relationship between a mother and son, a cop and his own psyche, and a city and its most reviled citizens.
LAPD detective Harry Bosch is down on his luck - his house is condemned in the aftermath of the earthquake, his girlfriend has left him and he has been suspended for attacking his superior officer.
To occupy time, he examines the old case files covering a murder which took place on October 28, 1961. The victim was Marjorie Phillips Lowe - his mother . . .
The case forces Bosch to confront the demons of the past, and as he digs deeper into the case, he discovers a trail of cover-ups that lead to the high-ups in the Hollywood Hills…
In the 50s I was a shy minister’s daughter in small-town Canada. Friends, life skills, coping skills, and career skills were in short supply. My refuge came in books where I found sisterhood, ordinary courage, and life skills. I learned my skills from the heroines who faced trials, solved mysteries, and never gave up. I gravitate to women who persevere, risk, and make their way in life against all odds. Several careers, a family, and decades later these story elements still inform and inspire me. They are what I read and what I write.
Reading for me is often a temporary escape. There are people who need a permanent escape to avoid harm or death. Want to vanish? Jane Whitefield, member of the Wolf Tribe of the Seneca people, can make it happen. She uses ancient and modern techniques and a few twists she invented herself to spirit people to safety. But no good deed goes unpunished. In this first book in the series, Jane finds she’s the one in a trap and in need of escape. Not all new situations are without problems. An engaging read right to the end and an introduction to the other eight books in the series.
“A challenging and satisfying thriller . . . [with] many surprising twists.”—The New York Times
Jane Whitefield is a Native American guide who leads people out of the wilderness—not the tree-filled variety but the kind created by enemies who want you dead. She is in the one-woman business of helping the desperate disappear. Thanks to her membership in the Wolf Clan of the Seneca tribe, she can fool any pursuer, cover any trail, and then provide her clients with new identities, complete with authentic paperwork. Jane knows all the tricks, ancient and modern; in fact, she has invented several of…
Ever since taking a college course in film noir, I've been in love with the cigarette-smoking, fedora-wearing, wisecracking tough guys (and gals) who inhabit the darkest corners of the modern world’s back alleys. The protagonist of Tears for the Dead, Bonnie Parker – named for the distaff half of Bonnie and Clyde – is my modest way of paying homage to this tradition, and incidentally having a lot of fun in the process.
Gerald Petievich must have used a crystal ball when writingEarth Angels in 1989, because only nine years later, all the basic elements of the story would hit the headlines, as rogue elements within the LAPD were exposed in a wide-ranging criminal conspiracy known as the Rampart scandal. The book’s eerie prescience is only one reason it’s a modern classic. Its depiction of police procedure is almost unmatched in accuracy and detail, and it perfectly captures the dark, gritty side of Los Angeles, far away from the bright lights of movie premieres. If I ever need to remind myself why I left L.A. after twelve years, I only need to revisit Petievich’s open-eyed exposé of official corruption, casual lawlessness, and random violence.
Detective Sergeant Jose Stepanovich and his elite tactical team were the toughest cops in the Los Angeles police force, handed the toughest jobs, like going up against the city's most vicious criminal element - the street gangs of East L.A. But somewhere along the lines the cops broke a few rules, turning a job into a personal vendetta, and suddenly it wasn't only the gangs they were fighting. It was the community, the media, and their own brass, who decided they were expendable. Hard-boiled Detective Stepanovich - returning to the barrio where he grew up to battle the criminals he…
I’m an author of YA fiction who spent his earlier years “wiggling dollies” (as the Brits say) in the trenches of Jim Henson’s Muppet world and then spent a decade writing children’s television of the PBS kind. After writing my first kids’ novel (Out of Patience), I never looked back. OK, I did glance back for the inspiration for a second novel…
The “deep map” that Least Heat-Moon unfolds for us in this revelatory book is the history of Chase County, Kansas, home of the largest and least corrupted stand of tallgrass in America. He takes us with him—by car, on foot, and in mind—as he explores this story-rich land, its plants, animals, and the homespun people who have struggled to occupy this forbidding landscape.
In one breath, he reminds us it was the tall grasses of the African savannah that first made humankind stand up. In another, he tells us that the humans who peer across America’s tall grasses have “prairie eyes.” In “a place where you see twenty miles sitting down,” you have prairie eyes if you take in the horizon with stoic calm, knowing it can bring the deliverance of rain or the destruction of a tornado, dust storm, prairie fire (the “red buffalo”), or locusts.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER. By the author of Blue Highways, PrairyErth is “a majestic survey of land and time and people in a single county of the Kansas plains” (Hungry Mind Review).
William Least Heat-Moon travels by car and on foot into the core of our continent, focusing on the landscape and history of Chase County—a sparsely populated tallgrass prairie in the Flint Hills of central Kansas—exploring its land, plants, animals, and people until this small place feels as large as the universe.
Called a “modern-day Walden” by the Chicago Sun-Times, PrairyErth is a journey through place, through time, and…
Reading was a childhood passion of mine. My mother was a librarian and got me interested in reading early in life. When John F. Kennedy was running for president and after his assassination, I became intensely interested in politics. In addition to reading history and political biographies, I consumed newspapers and television news. It is this background that I have drawn upon over the decades that has added value to my research.
I found this book so helpful in explaining why it wasn’t “the economy stupid” but values that moved voters. His work was helpful in illuminating my own extensive work on how values move voters.
Frank is especially good at describing the role of the evangelical movement in putting cultural issues, including abortion, front and center in our politics. I found that he was onto something important and that has helped my understanding of today’s politics. A very readable, down-to-earth book.
Reveals how conservatism became the preferred national political ideology, exploring the origins of this philosophy in the upper classes and tracing its recent popularity within the middle class.
As a former Division 1 basketball player at Marquette University and current ecommerce executive, I’m always looking for new sources of inspiration. Please enjoy my list and send me any comments on what you find inspiring!
Win By Two is the true story about a Kansas City drug dealer and a private school teacher, bonded together through basketball. This is a powerful story about race, leadership, and what can happen when people get outside of their comfort zones and build bridges in their community. It also challenges our internal biases that we may not even know exist.
A drug dealer, who grew up in the urban core of Kansas City. A private school teacher who grew up in San Diego and dared to hire a convicted felon as his assistant coach. And the game that saved both their lives. A drama so powerful no storyteller would script the details that unfold. It all starts in a crack house on the west side of the Paseo, and in a broken low income home in east San Diego. It unfolds in a private school gymnasium, a state penitentiary, a chapel in downtown Kansas City, the Johnson County Suburbs, and…
I am fascinated by the process of sharing stories and finding unique ones to experience. A member of the LGBTQIA+ community, I share my unmanageable at times life with others so they can see my life as typical, not abnormal. I believe I was put here on this earth to witness to others and open eyes and hearts to alternate lifestyles. I want to make a difference, and hope my writing may touch readers. No one else could have written my story, and it needs to be told. Mental health issues are difficult to share, but if we all remain silent, it will never get any easier.
Bring on the Blessings is one of the finest series I have ever read. I am always eager to find a new series that keeps me waiting for the next installment. Blessings by Beverly Jenkins is the best example I can think of.
When I read about the all Black town that took in 5 orphans and raised them, I got so caught up in each of their stories. I learned so much. Beverly calls her type of writing "edutainment." I now know why. Based on the true town in Kansas (Nicodemus) settled in the migration of the dusters of the civil war, I was all in. Fictional characters based on a real town make me want to visit the historic site.
My heart melted when the little mute girl finally spoke, the car thief who became a mechanic, and the whole town that deals out punishment by making those…
Bestselling author Beverly Jenkins makes the move to trade paperback with this rich and moving story that introduces us to the beautiful Kansas town of Henry Adams, and the townspeople who make it unique
Bernadine Brown is a woman with money to spend. Henry Adams is a town in desperate need of cash. But after Bernadine puts up the money, she has some ideas about how the town should be run. Will the townspeople be willing to shake up their comfortable lives to share the gift they’ve been given with others who really need it?
I’m a multi-award-winning novelist and Kansas historian. Through reading letters written by African Americans in Kansas, I realized that black people were a major political force. In fact, with the settlement of Nicodemus, for the first time in American history, enough black people had gathered in one place to dominate political decisions and prevail over the white community. No one had told the story of the three black powerhouses who shaped politics on a county, state, and national level. I was thrilled when University of Oklahoma Press published my academic book. It won second place in the Westerner’s International Best Book contest.
I’m a native Kansan. I have a special appreciation for books about my beloved state. So, finding this superb work about African Americans moved me to tears. Painter writes about the great migration from the South after the Civil War. Kansas was literally regarded as “The Promised Land” due to the Homestead Act and the promise of free land. Painter is unflinching in her telling of the violence that occurred to prevent black people from leaving. The Exodus to Kansas was feverish and dangerous. She tells of heroics required to leave the South, due to black people's “fear of future evil, and their dread of renewed slavery.”
I am an award-winning, national best-selling author who loves reading as much as I love writing. Combine that with a good, smooth bourbon and it’s a win-win. Like my literary journey, my love for bourbon has been filled with surprises and challenges. Romance writing found me. I didn’t go looking for it. The journey introduced me to great writers and amazing stories and taught me to write better. Distilleries could extol the health benefits of bourbon, but I discovered it can be subtle, soul-searing, and pairs beautifully with a good meal and an even better book. Like my writing, bourbon leaves you feeling like you’ve had a great meal and threw in dessert!
Before being published I was very much a romance snob. I was a bookshelf elitist who thought that good literature did not include romance.
When my first book was labeled a romance novel, romance fans quickly let me know that what I’d written wasn’t true romance, but they loved the book. So, I had to learn how to write romance and what better way than to read it.
Night Song was my first foray into historical romance with characters who looked like me. It was life changing and one of the most beautiful tales I had ever read. Lesson learned! The romance genre includes incredible stories, superb writing, and bourbon-sipping storylines and I had been missing out.
Cara Lee Henson knows no soldier can be trusted to stay in one place—and that includes handsome Sergeant Chase Jefferson of the Tenth Cavalry. Dallying with the dashing man in blue could cost the pretty, independent Kansas schoolteacher her job and her reputation. So Cara is determined to repel Chase’s advances—even though her aloof facade barely masks her smoldering desire.
A Blazing Passion . . .
Never before has Chase longed for a woman the way he ached for lovely Cara Lee. The strong-willed ebony beauty, however, will not surrender easily. But with tender…
