100 books like A Time to Kill

Connally is not a lawyer, but he does a great job of accurately portraying the nitty gritty of the practice of street law, where the clients are usually on the lower economic rung of society. Mikey Haller is a lawyer who practices law from the back seat of a Lincoln Town Car, and these are his typical clients. Haller is a likable, memorable character who can sometimes sail close to the wind but has a solid inner moral compass.

In this novel, the first in the series, Haller takes on the defense of a rich playboy type. While he is happy to have a good fee, and it looks like he may, for a change, have an innocent client, things get complicated quickly, and Haller finds himself facing an ethical dilemma. How he resolves the conflict between his professional duty and his individual moral compass is clever and entertaining. And… show more.

A murder mystery and so much more. Set in the marshlands of North Carolina in the United States, it’s an unusual read with the emotional content tugging at my heartstrings. It describes life in the marsh and a child’s heartbreaking struggle to survive.

Nevertheless, I found the author’s description of the natural world in the marshlands brilliant and the haunting tale stayed with me long after I finished reading the book.

This book is about defending justice, using a legal system to fight something you know is wrong, and sticking to what is right at all costs. It is about knowing what’s right and what’s wrong.

My main character, too—Miss Pink sticks to what is right at all costs. This touching, powerful story shows the worst of people and the best. 

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 found the premise of this book intriguing. A detective with amnesia discovering his identity through his interactions with those who knew him before his accident? Yes, please! It's so unique!

This first book in the Inspector Monk series sets the stage for the many great books that follow with a brilliant murder mystery, interesting characters, and an immersive setting. I loved the intersection of Victorian London and the Crimean War and the many ways in which Perry brought the history to life with characters Dickens would be proud of, puzzles that would please Agatha Christie, and world-building that would satisfy Brandon Sanderson.

This was one of the hardest books to "get into," but a friend of mine told me to stick with it because the rewards of getting through the first quarter would be so great. I'm glad I did. It is an astounding piece of work, quite different from anything I've ever read before or since, and remains one of my top five books.

The tangents the book takes, and the blasé attributes of the leading character are superbly crafted. It was suggested it was "unfilmable," and there's one scene in particular I thought they'd never get away with, but if you look at the movie version carefully, it's in there. 

The novel’s evocative intensity hit me like a brick in the head. From page one, it never let up. I urge readers to set aside if they can, the literary/political ethnicity storm that the book engendered and simply accept and enjoy the quality of the storytelling by Ms. Cummins.

I initially listened to it as an audiobook. I wondered if my favorable view might be attributable to some degree to the extremely effective first-person female narration. When I then read the book in print, I was disabused of any such impression. The writing is terrific.

In the dark world of hardboiled literature, anything can happen at any time for any reason—or no reason at all. In my view, that makes things easy for this debut novel about an unemployed LA factory worker named Easy Rawlins, and that makes things challenging for the story—for the character—as well. 

A man with money and power offers Easy a job looking for a missing blond-haired, white-skinned beauty. Rawlins faces only two problems: He has no experience as a private detective, and he needs to do the detecting with black skin in a segregated, remarkably unequal 1948 America. 

But I think Mosley has found the perfect genre for his character, one whose tough and humane and even psychologically insightful qualities have enabled him to adjust to, learn from, and survive in a place where laws can break out or disappear, depending on the color of his skin. Rawlins finds it… show more.

I grew up in rural Ireland, so not exactly the gritty urban Scotland of Welsh’s novel, but the first thing that struck me about the book was its savage, semi-feral, intensely real Scottish dialect. I’d never seen anything quite like it in print.

The prose feels almost illegal, a ne’er-do-well that has simply decided to break into the publishing house and force its way onto the page without anyone’s permission. I didn’t consciously plan to steal this technique for my own novel, but how could I not endorse it?

Welsh has written more explicitly psychedelic works, but this book remains for me his masterwork, underscoring how, in many ways, his protagonist Renton’s life is at its weirdest when he tries to get sober.  

I read it in high school, again in college, and still again (twice) as an adult, once aloud to my 3 young daughters over 3 weeks at bedtime. For me, it is the most powerful, frontier-themed American novel out there. 

 I love a novel that educates me and tells me things I am surprised I didn’t know because I should have, in beautifully constructed sentences.

The dialogue carries its characters so naturally that it is as if you are speaking with them yourself at your main room table in your 18th-century frontier home in Pennsylvania.