Fans pick 100 books like All That's Left to Say

Family secrets make great slowburn mysteries.

In You Have A Match, Abby accidentally uncovers a big one: she has a secret, full-blooded, slightly older sister. The burning question of “What happened to make my parents give my sister up for adoption?” carries the book. Abby is somehow both sure of herself and awkward, and I really felt her desperation to find out what happened in her parents’ past.

The chemistry (or lack thereof) between Abby and her secret sister Savannah is palpable and makes for many tense and amusing moments. I laughed. I wondered. I wanted to go to summer camp. And I did not predict the ending.   

I’m drawn to sister stories, which is something I only realized when I started writing this list, and it occurred to me that a number of my recommendations use the slowburn mystery as a means to explore sisterhood (something my own book does, as well).

I have a sister (hi, Diana!) and we have an uncomplicated and happy relationship. So maybe I subconsciously craved more drama growing up? Kidding aside, there’s something innately compelling about the dynamics between two people who may be very different or very similar, who share blood and memories, and who are tied together, for better or worse, for life.

How to Live Without You is a sister story at its best, as Emmy is the only person who’s capable of following Rose’s breadcrumbs.  

The main mystery in this book is not a mystery to the reader. It’s a mystery to the main character, Stevie. I love this twist.

I don’t think I’ve ever read another book where the protagonist is trying to uncover their own past, and the reader knows what answers she’ll find if she succeeds. (Though there are a few surprises that the reader isn’t privy to until Stevie unearths them.) The heart of this story is its romance, which is beautiful, heartwarming, and heartbreaking all at once.

I loved everything about this book, honestly. I read it in two days, and the only reason I didn’t read it in one sitting is because I have a small child and that precludes sequestering yourself in a room to finish a book. 

Nine years is quite the slowburn. That’s how long it takes Sheldon Horowitz to achieve revenge for his father’s murder in Derek B. Miller’s dark comedy thriller How to Find Your Way in the Dark.

Of course, a lot of other things happen throughout the course of what is arguably more of a coming-of-age novel set against the backdrop of World War II than “YA,” but what hooked me in this story was Sheldon’s tenacity as he grows up, doggedly determined to find out who killed his father and why. The misadventures he gets into as a result, along with his cousins and best friend, are simultaneously bumbling and thrilling.

Like Green for Danger, this is a more classic mystery novel, though it is also a dystopian fiction.

The ‘hospital’ in which it is set is a facility for the elderly, who, denied access to antibiotics, wait there until, through accident or nature, they contract an infection and are allowed to die. Yet much of the novel takes place years earlier in South Africa and England, before the antibiotic crisis when the main character meets the love of her life. How we have progressed from today’s society to the society described in the book is gradually revealed, as is the narrator’s part in it. There are also mysterious happenings in the facility.

This is a vividly told tale set in an all too believable near future with restricted access to life-saving drugs. I admire the clever conceit and the intricate interweaving of past and present and was caught up… show more.

This book will always stick with me because of the amazing thought put behind one of the main character’s plotting. Kaz easily has one of the best minds in any book I’ve ever read. Along with Kaz, though, there are multiple other POVs which are equally as important to the story.

It had more POVs than any book I had read previously, but the way Bardugo wrote them had me wanting more of them all and unable to pick a favorite. Each character has a unique voice and story that perfectly complements the overarching plot.

Even when I wasn’t sure how something would fit into the main thread of the story, it wove back in at the right moment and made perfect sense.

A best-seller in the UK, it never garnered the attention it deserved in the US. As a trained physician, Goldacre explains why doctors cannot trust the information concerning prescription drugs that is made available to them, and why this should concern every patient. The incentives motivating drug regulators constitute a big part of the problem, but the actual conduct of clinical trials comes in for intensive scrutiny as well. The rigors of double-blinded trials are useless if owners of the data can hide whatever outcomes they don’t like. His chapter on how to bend a clinical trial has become a classic.

I find Angell’s The Truth About the Drug Companies extremely valuable for teaching students about how the pharmaceutical industry translates high profits into power resources to protect and increase those profits over time.

The former New England Journal of Medicine editor exposed how drug companies enlist politicians, the FDA, and medical academia for their cause. And armies of lawyers to extend monopoly marketing rights for years.

It was my first introduction to how they spend more on marketing than research, much of that on “copy-cat” drugs of dubious superiority to ones with expired patents.

As a tax (and high drug price) payer, I was disturbed to learn how they use government funds for basic research and then rig and spin their reporting of clinical studies to inflate their products’ therapeutic value and underplay their risks. 

This account of the early years of Vertex Pharmaceuticals, from its inception as a scrappy start-up to its early work in HIV, is a must-read classic for anyone interested in how science turns into new drugs. Barry Werth’s journalistic play-by-play is a cinematic, true-to-life picture of the strategic decisions, real-world challenges, and larger-than-life personalities that underlie modern drug development. His riveting follow-up, The Antidote, continues the saga by taking readers through Vertex’s pathbreaking work to transform the care of patients with hepatitis C and cystic fibrosis.

I found, as a history buff, The Struggle for Drug Reform to be an eye-opener about how America’s exceptionally high drug prices among other deficits in health care quality and coverage resulted from the past exercise of power by the pharmaceutical industry, the lynchpin of America’s “medico-industrial complex.”

I was impressed by historian Tobbell’s meticulously researched account of the industry’s strategic alliances with self-interested medical scientists, not just conservative political forces, and its use of anti-communist propaganda to fight off the threat of drug pricing regulations.

I personally found important her discussions of how the industry allied with the American Medical Association against universal health care, against FDA demands for evidence about drug efficacy and safety before allowing drugs on the market, and against the threat to its profits from generic drugs.