Here are 100 books that A Sight for Sore Eyes fans have personally recommended if you like
A Sight for Sore Eyes.
Shepherd is a community of 11,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.
Shepherd is reader supported. When you buy books, we may earn an affiliate commission.
In my early twenties, I worked in a maximum security, Category A men’s prison. I got to know the prisoners, who were usually polite, funny, and, for want of a better word, ‘normal,’ even if guilty of terrible crimes. It made me realize you can’t simply tell if someone is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ by looking at them. It left an indelible mark on me: a fascination with people who lie easily and fool the world. My fascination grew when I became a journalist, but writing fiction has given me the freedom to truly explore liars of all types and try to understand them.
He’s charming, he’s intelligent, and he’s a professional conman who is out to steal his new best friend’s life. And I can’t get enough of Tom Ripley! I absolutely love an anti-hero, and I like nothing better than getting a look inside a psychopath’s mind. I’ve read this book at least five times.
The writing is tight as a drum, Italy is brought to life, and it’s understandable why Tom falls in love with it…and Dickie. He falls in love so much he wants to become Dickie. The more Tom is backed into a corner, the more clever, audacious, and vicious he becomes. It’s no surprise to me that this book is such a classic.
It's here, in the first volume of Patricia Highsmith's five-book Ripley series, that we are introduced to the suave Tom Ripley, a young striver seeking to leave behind his past as an orphan bullied for being a "sissy." Newly arrived in the heady world of Manhattan, Ripley meets a wealthy industrialist who hires him to bring his playboy son, Dickie Greenleaf, back from gallivanting in Italy. Soon Ripley's fascination with Dickie's debonair lifestyle turns obsessive as he finds himself enraged by Dickie's ambivalent affections for Marge, a charming American dilettante, and Ripley begins a deadly game. "Sinister and strangely alluring"…
My mother got cancer when I was seven and died when I was in college. So, I began to consider death and the afterlife from a very young age. I don’t know if ghosts are real, but I know that people are haunted. I explore this idea—that haunted houses are really settings for haunted humans—as well as the ambiguity between ghosts and mental descents in my own teaching and writing. I love haunted house novels because they’re wonderful vehicles for this sort of exploration and because they’re so much fun to read! I hope you enjoy these books as much as I do!
I believe that the best haunted house books are ones in which it’s the characters who are haunted. In this bookby Daphne du Maurier, I’m not sure if the house is haunted by the specter of Rebecca, but I know the narrator certainly is.
I love how the author creates an atmosphere filled with dread as the new wife imagines her predecessor, tries to live up to her reputation, and finally learns who she really was.
* 'The greatest psychological thriller of all time' ERIN KELLY * 'One of the most influential novels of the twentieth century' SARAH WATERS * 'It's the book every writer wishes they'd written' CLARE MACKINTOSH
'Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again . . .'
Working as a lady's companion, our heroine's outlook is bleak until, on a trip to the south of France, she meets a handsome widower whose proposal takes her by surprise. She accepts but, whisked from glamorous Monte Carlo to brooding Manderley, the new Mrs de Winter finds Max a changed man. And the memory…
I’ve loved learning about history since childhood, as attested by my bookshelves full of American Girl series, Laura Ingalls Wilder, and The Royal Diaries (Cleopatra was my favorite). After writing my first book about reenactors pretending to be French explorers, I worked as a history writer for Smithsonian Magazine. I especially love the philosophical and political questions of how we still interact with the past and how history is presented. I hope you’ll enjoy thinking about that and learning some history from these books!
This is the only fiction on a list otherwise full of nonfiction, but it more than deserves a place on this list. There are so many things to love about this book—its audacious opening line, the lush writing, the twisted relationships—but what I think history lovers might appreciate most is how deeply entwined the characters get with the history of Antiquities.
After all, the main group of characters in this dark academia only come together because they’re all studying Greek and Latin. In fact, the plot hinges on their obsession with Antiquity—but I won’t get too much more into that. I just recommend picking the book up and going along for the ride.
'Everything, somehow, fit together; some sly and benevolent Providence was revealing itself by degrees and I felt myself trembling on the brink of a fabulous discovery, as though any morning it was all going to come together---my future, my past, the whole of my life---and I was going to sit up in bed like a thunderbolt and say oh! oh! oh!'
Under the influence of a charismatic classics professor, a group of clever, eccentric misfits at a New England college discover a way of thought and life a world away from their banal contemporaries.…
I have always been intrigued by missing persons. I wonder how their family copes with having no closure on the situation and how they can live wondering where their loved one is and whether they are dead or alive. I have read these recommended books many times to satisfy this craving. I enjoy a sense of the macabre even though the story may be about mundane everyday topics. This only adds to the sense of dread and wonder. I enjoy the intriguing twists and turns, keeping me on my toes and wanting more until the end. I hope you enjoy the books on this list as much as I have.
I recommend this book and the author’s fabulous writing, comprising of
dread and humour (which I love), all rolled into one. Three separate case
histories, interlinked, each littered with fabulous, memorable
characters. Jackson Brodie, the Detective trying to solve the case, is one of the best, with brilliant detective skills and a haunting
personal life.
An intriguing mix of family drama and mystery, giving it
more depth than just an ordinary thriller. I have read this book many
times, and it’s always new, never boring, and the ending is still a surprise.
Case one: A little girl goes missing in the night. Case two: A beautiful young office worker falls victim to a maniac's apparently random attack. Case three: A new mother finds herself trapped in a hell of her own making - with a very needy baby and a very demanding husband - until a fit of rage creates a grisly, bloody escape.Thirty years after the first incident, as private investigator Jackson Brodie begins investigating all three cases, startling connections and discoveries emerge ...
Do you see the pattern in the five books I’ve recommended? In each of them, a woman writer explores the darker side of human nature and lures the law-abiding reader to explore it, too. I do not expect to ever commit a murder or to have to cover one up for the sake of a loved one. But could I? Could the person next to me in the grocery store line? Hmmm, I wonder. Traditional mystery stories and police procedurals reassure the reader that in the end, justice will be served and order restored. The women writers of noir/psychological suspense make us contemplate the world very differently.
The Vault is the sequel to A Sight for Sore Eyes. It is a police procedural with the detective trying to identify several dead bodies found in an abandoned coal cellar. The dead seem to have no connection to each other, so the detective must also puzzle out how each of them came to be there. I recommend it because the reader has some fun: She knows the answers to all those questions from having read the first book. It’s a great twist on mystery-as-riddle whodunits.
INCLUDES AN EXCERPT OF RENDELL’S FINAL NOVEL, DARK CORNERS
In the stunning climax to Rendell’s classic 1998 novel A Sight for Sore Eyes, three bodies—two dead, one living—are entombed in an underground chamber beneath a picturesque London house. Twelve years later, the house’s new owner pulls back a manhole cover, and discovers the vault—and its grisly contents. Only now, the number of bodies is four. How did somebody else end up in the chamber? And who knew of its existence?
With their own detectives at an impasse, London police call on former Kingsmarkham Chief Inspector Wexford, now retired and living…
Do you see the pattern in the five books I’ve recommended? In each of them, a woman writer explores the darker side of human nature and lures the law-abiding reader to explore it, too. I do not expect to ever commit a murder or to have to cover one up for the sake of a loved one. But could I? Could the person next to me in the grocery store line? Hmmm, I wonder. Traditional mystery stories and police procedurals reassure the reader that in the end, justice will be served and order restored. The women writers of noir/psychological suspense make us contemplate the world very differently.
The Blank Wallis a departure from my first three recommendations. It focuses on a woman who leads a frazzled but ordinary life during World War II. She must keep her family and home going while her husband is at war. She has to fight a source of evil that invades her home to preserve the norms that seem all-important to her. The fight means stepping outside of those very norms. I recommend this book as an exploration of what it means to do whatever it takes to protect a loved one.
In The Blank Wall (1947) ‘a suburban matron, harassed by wartime domestic problems – her husband is overseas – finds herself implicated in the murder of her young daughter’s extremely unattractive beau’ (The New Yorker). An outstanding example of the psychological thriller genre, ‘worthy of the great Patricia Highsmith herself,’ as Lady Antonia Fraser said in the Spectator, it was filmed as The Reckless Moment in 1949 and as The Deep End in 2001, starring Tilda Swinton. In 1950 Raymond Chandler asked his English publisher, ‘Does anybody in England publish Elisabeth Sanxay Holding? For my money she’s the top suspense…
I have always been intrigued by missing persons. I wonder how their family copes with having no closure on the situation and how they can live wondering where their loved one is and whether they are dead or alive. I have read these recommended books many times to satisfy this craving. I enjoy a sense of the macabre even though the story may be about mundane everyday topics. This only adds to the sense of dread and wonder. I enjoy the intriguing twists and turns, keeping me on my toes and wanting more until the end. I hope you enjoy the books on this list as much as I have.
I was drawn to this book by the insight into the mind of a mother who swears that the child she sees is not her own, despite reassurances from her husband, friends, and doctors, who say it is.
I always feel a sense of heart-thumping dread as I read it. I want to help the mother, who nobody will listen to. I feel it is a great piece of suspenseful writing.
One of the Sunday Times 100 Best Crime Novels and Thrillers Since 1945
The first extraordinary psychological suspense thriller from internationally bestselling author Sophie Hannah. Not to be missed for readers of Clare Mackintosh and Paula Hawkins
'Terrifying' Scotsman 'Ingenious' Sunday Times
It's every mother's nightmare . . .
She's only been gone two hours.
Her husband David was meant to be looking after their two-week-old daughter. But when Alice Fancourt walks into the nursery, her terrifying ordeal begins, for Alice insists the baby in the cot is a stranger she's never seen before.
I have always been intrigued by missing persons. I wonder how their family copes with having no closure on the situation and how they can live wondering where their loved one is and whether they are dead or alive. I have read these recommended books many times to satisfy this craving. I enjoy a sense of the macabre even though the story may be about mundane everyday topics. This only adds to the sense of dread and wonder. I enjoy the intriguing twists and turns, keeping me on my toes and wanting more until the end. I hope you enjoy the books on this list as much as I have.
I loved this author’s brilliant writing and also
the sense of menace that oozes from every page. As each page turns,
you delve deeper into mundane activities with family filled with the
possibility of murder. Culminating in a clever ending, carrying out an
everyday household task.
A very clever book that I’ve read time and time
again. Even long into the night.
A contemporary psychological thriller in the style of Ruth Rendell, from one of today's most versatile and compelling storytellers.
It was easy for Elizabeth. She married the man she loved, bore him two children and made a home for him which was the envy of their friends.
It was harder for Ruth. She married Elizabeth's son and then found that, somehow, she could never quite measure up...
Isolation, deceit and betrayal fill the gaps between the two individual women and between their different worlds. In this complex thriller, Philippa Gregory deploys all her insight into what women want and what…
When I was not yet a teen, a neighbor had what I considered to be a valuable treasure—all of the Nancy Drew Mystery series. Her daughter had died of leukemia, and she had held onto them as a reminder of her precious child. To my surprise, she entrusted them to me to read. That was the beginning of my passion for mysteries. As I got older, I couldn’t get enough of Agatha Christie and P. D. James. I visit them often, like old friends, but I am also eager to make new literary acquaintances. My list has only five, but it could have included thousands. Enjoy this diverse sampling.
I love all of Jacqueline Winspear’s books about Maisie Dobbs and am sorry to see that the author is retiring this character. I liked Maisie from the first, maybe because the 1920s are an era of fascination for me.
Not only was the mystery a good read, but it led me to do further research on the after-effects of World War I and the toll it took on the young soldiers, most of them barely out of their teens. Winspear is a great storyteller with a compelling heroine.
A favorite mystery series of Hillary Clinton (as mentioned in What Happened, The New York Times Book Review, and New York Magazine) A New York Times Notable Book of the Year Agatha Award Winner for Best First Novel Macavity Award Winner for Best First Novel Alex Award Winner
Fiercely independent Maisie Dobbs has recently set herself up as a private detective. Such a move may not seem especially startling. But this is 1929, and Maisie is exceptional in many ways.
Having started as a maid to the London aristocracy, studied her way to Cambridge and served as a nurse in…
My name is Christian Klaver, and I’ve had, in turn, many different jobs as a bookseller, martial arts instructor, and bartender before settling into a career in internet security. Books have always been a passion of mine, with science fiction, fantasy, and mystery as my main focus. I’ve been a lifelong fan of Sherlock Holmes and am a proud member of two different Sherlock Holmes Societies.
This is possibly a more Lovecraftian selection than a Holmesian one, as the monsters and the unfathomable world of Lovecraft and Cthulhu really dominate thematically. The sinister darkness of Lovecraft really comes through here.
It’s a little heartbreaking to see Holmes in over his head, struggling with non-Euclidian magic, but very well done and a gripping story.
The third novel in six-time New York Times best-selling author Lois H. Gresh's Sherlock Holmes vs. Cthulhu series.
THE OBLITERATING SHADOW
The deadly dimensions over London have been sealed, and the monsters have departed. But word has come to Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson of a more terrifying creature still - the great Cthulhu has been sighted off the waters of Innsmouth, Massachusetts. Only Holmes can defeat him.
And in the muddy village of Innsmouth, surrounded by villagers who are more sea-monster than human, Holmes meets again his nemesis, Moriarty, and yet greater foes: Amelia Scarcliffe and Maria Fitzgerald, harbingers…
