66 books like Black Danube

I was fascinated with the heroine Isabella and enjoyed watching her grow throughout this series. In Book 1, The Tower's Alchemist, she is like most young women her age. She could be content to spend her time having fun with friends, reading brides' magazines, and planning a future with the man she loves. But the world is at war and the good guys need her for her unique and particular talents. She accepts what she thinks will be her last mission. It’s no small task; she aims to stop the Nazis from deploying a monstrously deadly bio-weapon. The secret service she works for and the bio-warfare were inspired by actual WWII events which made the story even more believable. By Book Three she has embraced her special powers without losing her humanity. I liked her persistence and dedication.

The story opens with Elsa waking from a coma to discover that she has lost her memory. Recovering from her injuries would seem to be a sufficient challenge but Elsa does remember enough to realize that stakes are bigger than her personal trauma. An epic struggle is being waged between the two races of her world. Elsa’s a warrior; she knows that she’s a part of it and that it’s her duty to fight. So she soldiers on even though she doesn’t know who are the allies and who are the enemies. The fast-paced suspenseful story kept me reading because I wanted to know how this plucky woman got into this predicament and how she was going to get out of it.

The series begins with Missing. The first puzzle is what happened to Rhonda? And what's Sandra running from, and will she overcome the obstacles to making her escape? What secret is Dr. Linda's husband hiding? Even more interesting to me was the fate of Maria Gonzales. Would the young officer, pressed into service on a case that looks like a career-killer, solve the mystery and gain the respect of her partner, a veteran detective? I had great fun following the story's interwoven threads all the way to the end. A huge fan of Alice Marks's shorter works, I was thrilled to have an entire novel of hers to read, and was delighted to see that the series and Maria Gonzales both continue on through Breaks and RV Murder.

I am a huge fan of Tony Hillerman’s Leaphorn and Chee novels. I was privileged to meet Mr. Hillerman at a writers convention. He was gracious and supportive of other authors and I learned a lot from his presentation. The main characters of his series are two male Navajo police officers but in The Fallen Man he introduced Bernadette “Bernie” Manuelito. In that story she is a new officer with the tribal police but in Skeleton Man she has become a federal Customs Patrol officer. Smart and capable, she holds her own, be it in the office with senior male officers or in the harsh, challenging American Southwest desert territory that is her “beat.” As an indoor girl, I was almost more impressed with the latter as I was with her role in solving the case.

On the face of it, this seems like a straightforward book. Magris traces the geography of the Danube from Furtwangen or Donauschingen in southern Germany to the Black Sea, and in so doing surveys the history of the regions through which it passes. That would be a bold enough project in its own right, but the book itself is so much more than this and is one that I’ve returned to many times since I first stumbled across it fifteen years ago. The riverine structure of the book sweeps the reader from prehistory to the twentieth century and back again, individual eddies linger on intriguing episodes – the building of the cathedral tower at Ulm, the significance of the Iron Gates – and then we’re off again on another evocative description of the river or aside on the forgotten history of Mitteleuropa. A terrific read.

The Best Ghost Stories of Algernon Blackwood features the author’s scariest tales, including “The Willows” and “The Wendigo”. Blackwood piles detail after detail atop one another until the reader nearly suffocates from the gloom and terror they create! He also squeezes much fear from isolated places like Canada and the Danube River.

Have you ever ridden a camel in the desert? I admit I have not been to Arabia, but I did ride a camel along the beach at sunset in Western Australia. I know the smell, the bumping from side to side, and the resulting aching bottom. That experience, while I did enjoy it, is not one I wish to repeat in a hurry. To read about it from a comfy chair at home is my preferred option. Amanda takes us on an unforgettable ride through history and culture, complete with intrigue, action, and drama for everyone. I tend to read adventure books with male protagonists because I have three sons and know they would prefer to read about boys, so to read a story with a female hero is delightfully refreshing. 

This book is the second in a trilogy about a long journey Fermor made—mostly on foot—from Holland to Istanbul in 1934, when he was nineteen years old. Fermor wrote the books from memory many years afterward, so their veracity is open to question, but his imagination and skill aren't: he might resent the comparison, but his books gave me the same thrills as an adult that I remember from my parents reading The Lord of the Rings to me as a child. Though all three are astounding, Between the Woods and the Water is my favorite— it begins as he crosses the Danube into Hungary from the west, follows him across Romania, and ends up in the Balkans, a region that would soon be transformed (and, in part, erased) by World War II. Fermor knows that too, but he doesn't mention it: he lets the places he walks through and… show more.

As an infantry veteran, I felt especially drawn to the daughter’s loyalty and love of her dad; I shared her passion for exploring his diaries and traveling to the places in Hungary he described when his bomber was shot down in WWII.

I was thrilled at each stage of the daughter’s search for her dad near Budapest, and I tensed as she tried to decide which locals were on her side and which were out to deceive or harm her. I loved her passion to find the woman who had saved her dad’s life and I marveled at the wonders and charm of the two halves of the city, split by the Danube.

Elli tells the true story of a teenage Holocaust survivor – when I first read the book I was still a teenager myself; I could sympathise with Elli’s everyday fears and anxieties over boys she liked or troubles with her family, even as her world descended into the most unimaginable of horrors. It’s one of the most moving books I’ve ever read, and her story stayed with me for a very long time after I finished reading.