Here are 68 books that Black Heart fans have personally recommended if you like
Black Heart.
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I made up Faythe of North Hinkapee by being a jerk! I was ranting about
how bad a "best seller" book I had read was. My wife looked at me and
said, "So, could you write a bestseller?" I was challenged, and then,
somehow, this book just tumbled out. It was about a girl in Colonial
Times—her family burned as witches—vowing vengeance and how she gets
it. My wife looked at me and said: “My God, that could be a bestseller!’ My kids also loved the story. For about twenty years, I
planned to write it, and after a ton of work, I finally finished.
Lisbeth Salander, the lead female character, is one of the most beautifully drawn, exciting, indomitable, and powerful women I have ever read about in a story. She is not just strong, she is also brilliant – as a super-hacker on the internet to boot.
Thankfully there were two sequels as I could read book after book with her in it.
Forty years ago, Harriet Vanger disappeared from a family gathering on the island owned and inhabited by the powerful Vanger clan. Her body was never found, yet her uncle is convinced it was murder - and that the killer is a member of his own tightly-knit but dysfunctional family.
He employs disgraced financial journalist Mikael Blomkvist and the tattooed, truculent computer hacker Lisbeth Salander to investigate. When the pair link Harriet's disappearance to a number of grotesque murders from forty years ago, they begin to unravel a dark and appalling family history.
I have cerebral palsy, but the list of things that I absolutely can’t do is surprisingly short: I can climb a flight of steps or walk the length of a football field, for example, but those tasks are going to take a lot more time and energy for me than they would an able-bodied person. We all choose where to invest in life, but cerebral palsy makes that process much more deliberate, and I’ve been fascinated by it for a long time. I’m always on the hunt for stories that demonstrate that our choices shape our life, not our limitations, and I’m determined to choose joy.
I love this book because it’s the best fictional example I’ve ever seen of a character’s disability being eclipsed by his talent. Lincoln Rhyme is paralyzed, but his talent as a criminologist is far more important—and Deaver showcases Rhyme’s genius and passion as often as he details the difficulties of disability.
I find the book’s mystery compelling and the characters well-written, and I couldn’t get enough of the relationship between Lincoln Rhyme and Amelia Sachs. I’ve never seen a better portrayal of a partnership based solidly on mutual respect and admiration. I’m so grateful for how this story demonstrates that disability doesn’t need to stop you from making a real impact through the gifts and talents you’ve been given.
From the Sunday Times bestselling author of The Goodbye Man, discover Jeffery Deaver's chilling thriller that inspired the film starring Angelina Jolie and Denzel Washington and is now a major NBC TV series.
Their first case, their worst killer . . .
New York City has been thrown into chaos by the assaults of the Bone Collector, a serial kidnapper and killer who gives the police a chance to save his victims from death by leaving obscure clues. Baffled, the cops turn to the one man with a chance of solving them - Lincoln Rhyme.
My life has taken a very interesting path with twists and turns that can be found in many peoples’ journeys, but diving into the pages of a book and getting lost fantastical worlds has helped me navigate my way through the rougher patches. There is something about the possibility of worlds so close to our own but touched by the extraordinary that is so alluring, it’s hard to leave. Thus, my love of series was ignited. That little bit of different that these series offered sparked a love for creating my own worlds where magic existed, families weren’t always limited to DNA, and perseverance led to a happy ending. Enjoy!
If you’re looking to binge a great murder mystery series with futuristic elements, JD Robb’s In Death series should be on your list. This is an auto-buy for me.
I fell in love with Eve Dallas, a New York City Lieutenant from page one. I love the creative mix of future elements (it’s set in 2058) and the in-depth character development of film noire stereotype of a cop on the edge of burnout.
As a homicide cop with a decade of experience, she’s no stranger to unraveling a killer’s motive, means, and opportunity, but when an investigation brings her into the orbit of Roarke, a billionaire with a murky past, her innate moral code and gut instincts are pitted against an irresistible attraction.
This is a fantastic entry into a compelling murder mystery series with a captivating cast of characters that never gets old.
Crime and punishment is Lieutenant Eve Dallas's business. Murder her speciality. Named by the social worker who found her when she was a mere child roaming that city's streets, Eve Dallas is a New York police detective who lives for her job. In over ten years on the force, she's seen it all - and knows her survival depends on her instincts. But she's going against every warning telling her not to get involved with Roarke, a charismatic Irish billionaire - and a suspect in Eve's latest murder investigation. But passion and seduction have rules of their own, and it's…
I’m an author from England who set out one lunchbreak to write the type of book I wanted to read. I like strong, imperfect heroines who fight for justice, both in their own lives and for others. Plus most of my books involve romance, so hot guys are a must too. I’ve written over fifty novels and novellas, from romcoms to thrillers, and one constant is strong female characters who do things for themselves.
Greg Rucka is better known for comic books, but he writes awesome novels too.
I borrowed Critical Space from the library years ago, and Drama is a character who has stuck with me throughout my life. In previous books in the series, she was cast as the bad guy, but in this installment, she drags the hero, Atticus Kodiak, over to her world and we find out that it’s not as black-and-white as we were led to believe.
Critical space: it's all that stands between you and death...Code-named Drama, she is a lightning-fast death machine - a hit-woman sought by intelligence agencies around the world. Drama kills as easily as she breathes...And the last time she met Atticus Kodiak, they barely escaped each other alive. Atticus has a reputation as one of the toughest bodyguards in the business, and is used to calling the shots. But all that changes when he is forced to take on Drama as a client. From New York's Russian enclaves to the Swiss Alps and the Carribean, Atticus becomes Drama's only hope for…
I walked to the library every Saturday to find a new mystery. I think I read everyone and read some more than once. As I matured, I discovered the mixture of romance and suspense I was hooked. I literally read every book in the genre’ at my local library.
A romantic suspense with an unlikely hero with a dark, murderous past and a female FBI agent with a history that haunts her.
It is packed with action and an ending that will shock you. It’s a story of redemption, self-forgiveness, and righting wrongs. A real page-turner.
Alex Parker has become one of my all-time favorite characters. A former CIA agent and now a computer wizard is forced to kill those that escape justice to settle a debt.
She's an FBI agent hunting her twin sister's killer. He's an assassin who'll die to keep her safe. His secret will destroy them both.
Read this award-winning novel from a New York Times bestselling author with over five-thousand 5-star reviews on Goodreads!
FBI agent Mallory Rooney spent the last eighteen years searching for her identical twin sister’s abductor. With a serial killer carving her sister’s initials into the bodies of his victims, Mallory thinks she may finally have found him.
Former soldier Alex Parker is a highly decorated but damaged war hero with a secret—he’s a covert government assassin who…
John Marks is co-author of The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence, a New York Times best-seller in hard-cover and paperback. He has written for the Washington Post, New York Times, Playboy, Foreign Policy, and Rolling Stone. He was the founder and long-time President of Search for Common Ground, the world’s largest peacebuilding organization that was nominated for the 2018 Nobel Peace Prize.
This is a great book about former CIA Director Richard Helms and the agency he directed. Helms was the quintessential CIA man, and Powers tells the story of his 30-year career in spying in this beautifully written book, which somehow captures both Helms’ elusiveness and his essence.
An account of the thirty-year career of the quintessential CIA man details his activities and attitudes as an intelligence agent and official and reveals--objectively and comprehensively--the workings of the CIA itself
My introduction to mystery writing was a competition for a first crime novel. I was lucky enough to win with Wobble to Death, about a Victorian long-distance race. When I went to collect the prize, I was startled to be asked if I was already at work on the next one. The publishers Macmillan had started a crime list and were looking for a career writer. I knew practically nothing about the genre and had to give myself a crash course. How I needed the support of books like these! After five years, I had the confidence to give up the day job and have made my living from mystery writing for almost fifty years.
Here is a rare treat: a chance to see inside the homes and workplaces of seventeen great American authors and hear them questioned about their beginnings as writers and their work habits. It’s both a picture book and a series of dialogues. I have been fortunate enough to know and visit several of them personally - Sue Grafton, Evan Hunter, Sara Paretsky, and Donald Westlake - and it’s a joy to see and hear them again explaining their ways of writing a mystery. You soon realize how many different approaches are possible.
The past president of the Mystery Writers of America shares the results of his nationwide interviews with eighteen of the top mystery writers in the country, including Tony Hillerman, Mickey Spillane, Sara Paretsky, Martin Cruz Smith, Sue Grafton, and others.
I'm a military historian and an author. To get inspiration for my writing, I spent 35 years in Special Forces (as a "Green Beret") and as a CIA officer in strange places working with interesting people. I first wrote non-fiction but I needed US Government approval for everything. So, following the saying “Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth,” I tell my tales as “faction”—stories reflecting a reality most people don’t know or understand. I write about “Us Versus Them”—stories about teamwork—and the result is The Snake Eater Chronicles. I leave it to the reader to decide where fact ends and fiction begins.
A newcomer to
fiction, David McClosky is another “former” who infuses his storytelling with details only an insider would know.
He tells an excellent tale, diving deep into
the fractured regime of Bashar al-Assad's Syria and showing what harm the nasty
world of despots and the dark world of spying can wreak on souls. The story
intertwines a forbidden love affair between a CIA officer and his agent with collecting
intelligence on Syrian chemical weapons and Washington bureaucrats trying to
decide what to do next.
It is an excellent representation of what it’s like to serve in a denied area and, having served in Damascus, I can
say the scenery is accurate, the personalities are spot on, and the tradecraft
is good. I’m looking forward to Moscow X.
CIA case officer Sam Joseph is dispatched to Paris to recruit Syrian Palace official Mariam Haddad. The two fall into a forbidden relationship, which supercharges Haddad's recruitment and creates unspeakable danger when they enter Damascus to find the man responsible for the disappearance of an American spy.
But the cat and mouse chase for the killer soon leads to a trail of high-profile assassinations and the discovery of a dark secret at the heart of the Syrian regime, bringing the pair under the all-seeing eyes of Assad's spy catcher, Ali Hassan, and his brother Rustum, the head of the feared…
When I realized I didn’t have what it takes to join the CIA, I made it my life mission to find out everything it takes to be a spy—which, of course, made it necessary to watch every show and read every espionage story ever told. In the process, I discovered a passion for uncovering truth, as well as a love of writing. After writing three young adult spy novels, I feel like I’ve found the linguist, code breaker, and crime fighter in myself. My work for LitJoy Crate has given me the ability to know a good story when I read it, and then recommend that book to book lovers everywhere.
I fell in love with the main character, Loveday (no pun intended), in the first few pages. She’s strong and tough, like all spies should be, and sarcastic—which is so fun to read.
I love her motivation as a spy, but she does have one flaw: she's in love with another member of the team and has been keeping him off missions to keep him safe. This makes me like her even more because she wants to protect him. Overall, the action, explosions, love story between Loveday and Vale, and the spy world had me reading until the very end.
I can’t wait to jump into the next book in the series.
Known only to the CIA and her handler father, Loveday aspires to be the greatest teenage spy who ever lived. In a hidden bunker under a swanky hotel, she and her team train and execute missions without being noticed by the outside world.
When Loveday and her team are recruited for their first international mission, it's their big chance to prove their worth to the CIA. But when her comms specialist boyfriend, Vale lobbies for a shot at field work, Loveday is caught between duty and forbidden passion. She knows putting…
I'm a British-born American historian, currently residing in Long Beach, California. I’ve published four books on the CIA and lectured about it for the Great Courses. Why spies? I’ve always loved spy novels and movies but my historical interest was piqued years ago when I stumbled across the weird story of how the CIA secretly funded various American artists and writers in the so-called Cultural Cold War. Decades on, I’m still fascinated by the subject: there’s so much human drama involved, and it’s a great lens through which to examine recent American and world history.
Taking the story from the endgame of the Cold War to the dawn of the War on Terror is this extraordinary book on the rise of Islamist terrorism and the CIA’s efforts to defeat it prior to 9/11. Coll’s research, based on interviews with a vast range of senior officials, is dazzling, yet it never overwhelms a narrative that combines human interest and geopolitical sweep seamlessly. No less impressive is his accomplishment in documenting not just the U.S. and Afghan perspectives but the Saudi and Pakistani as well, all in the same painstaking detail. If this whets the appetite for more of the same, Coll’s Directorate S resumes his account of the intelligence wars in Afghanistan, providing necessary background to understanding the failure of the U.S. occupation there.
The explosive, New York Times bestselling first-hand account of America's secret history in Afghanistan
Prize-winning journalist Steve Coll has spent years reporting from the Middle East, accessed previously classified government files and interviewed senior US officials and foreign spymasters. Here he gives the full inside story of the CIA's covert funding of an Islamic jihad against Soviet forces in Afghanistan, explores how this sowed the seeds of bn Laden's rise, traces how he built his global network and brings to life the dramatic battles within the US government over national security. Above all, he…
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