Here are 65 books that Earth Angels fans have personally recommended if you like
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I am a veteran novelist who believes this over all else: The opening is everything. This has been my modus operandi as a storyteller for over thirty books, as well as a half dozen screenplays. I love a great opening. It is how a reader or viewer will subconsciously decide whether they will devote themselves to a story. It is the first kiss. The first shot over the bow. The ignition, the countdown, and the launch. It is the alpha and omega… because the beginning dictates the ending. Oh my, how I love the beginning!
Stephen Hunter’s crime fiction masterpiece,Dirty White Boys, begins with a sentence lovingly detailing the villain’s genitals.
I assure you this opening is in no way gratuitous or prurient; it signals that we’re in for a wild ride, informing us that only “…three men at McAlester State Penitentiary had larger penises than Lamar Pye….”
Pye is one of the great literary villains of all time – racist, crude, violent, and cruel… and smart as a whip. And the tone here is pitch-dark hillbilly noir. If you’re brave enough to read this book it will live in your imagination for the rest of your life.
Three convicts on the run with an arsenal of weaponry and only one rogue cop can stop them. Lamar Pye has escaped from Oklahoma State Penitentiary, accompanied by his idiot cousin and a vicious, but cowardly artist. To have stayed in prison was certain death, but his chances on the outside are not much greater: his excesses know no bounds - one killing follows another. But one murder brings his nemesis upon him: Bud Pewtie of the Highway of the Highway Patrol loses his partner in a blood-soaked shoot-out with Lamar, and from that moment on, nothing will stop him…
I’m agnostic to book genre. If I see it, I will try it. I read all over the place. I just finished a book on online dating and race, the buzzy fiction of the moment, and a self-help book. There are two genre’s that are my absolute favorites, though, women’s fiction, and police procedurals. I’ve read Elizabeth George, Julia Spencer Fleming, Michael Connelly, and Tana French since they started publishing. While I enjoy the whodunit nature of the books, my favorite parts are those quiet moments of pure, unfettered relations between people who care for each other in an otherwise chaotic world. It’s what I write and what I read.
The Harry Bosch series has been long and often predictable.
Bosch has a strong belief that if everybody doesn’t count, nobody counts. He has to hold up his image of justice against an LAPD that plays politics, and a city populace easily swayed by the latest headlines.
What I love about The Last Coyote is that it’s a very personal novel where Bosch examines his relationship with his deceased mother Marjorie Phillips Lowe, a prostitute who was brutally murdered. While on psychiatric leave, Bosch takes on the case of his mother’s unsolved murder.
It’s a wonderfully nuanced exploration of the relationship between a mother and son, a cop and his own psyche, and a city and its most reviled citizens.
LAPD detective Harry Bosch is down on his luck - his house is condemned in the aftermath of the earthquake, his girlfriend has left him and he has been suspended for attacking his superior officer.
To occupy time, he examines the old case files covering a murder which took place on October 28, 1961. The victim was Marjorie Phillips Lowe - his mother . . .
The case forces Bosch to confront the demons of the past, and as he digs deeper into the case, he discovers a trail of cover-ups that lead to the high-ups in the Hollywood Hills…
In the 50s I was a shy minister’s daughter in small-town Canada. Friends, life skills, coping skills, and career skills were in short supply. My refuge came in books where I found sisterhood, ordinary courage, and life skills. I learned my skills from the heroines who faced trials, solved mysteries, and never gave up. I gravitate to women who persevere, risk, and make their way in life against all odds. Several careers, a family, and decades later these story elements still inform and inspire me. They are what I read and what I write.
Reading for me is often a temporary escape. There are people who need a permanent escape to avoid harm or death. Want to vanish? Jane Whitefield, member of the Wolf Tribe of the Seneca people, can make it happen. She uses ancient and modern techniques and a few twists she invented herself to spirit people to safety. But no good deed goes unpunished. In this first book in the series, Jane finds she’s the one in a trap and in need of escape. Not all new situations are without problems. An engaging read right to the end and an introduction to the other eight books in the series.
“A challenging and satisfying thriller . . . [with] many surprising twists.”—The New York Times
Jane Whitefield is a Native American guide who leads people out of the wilderness—not the tree-filled variety but the kind created by enemies who want you dead. She is in the one-woman business of helping the desperate disappear. Thanks to her membership in the Wolf Clan of the Seneca tribe, she can fool any pursuer, cover any trail, and then provide her clients with new identities, complete with authentic paperwork. Jane knows all the tricks, ancient and modern; in fact, she has invented several of…
Ever since taking a college course in film noir, I've been in love with the cigarette-smoking, fedora-wearing, wisecracking tough guys (and gals) who inhabit the darkest corners of the modern world’s back alleys. The protagonist of Tears for the Dead, Bonnie Parker – named for the distaff half of Bonnie and Clyde – is my modest way of paying homage to this tradition, and incidentally having a lot of fun in the process.
I might have picked A Maiden’s Grave for the title alone, though you’ll have to read it to learn the subtle double meaning packed into those three words. But of course there’s a lot more to this fast-paced story of a school for the deaf caught in the crossfire of a police standoff. Jeffery Deaver deftly intertwines full-bodied characters, crackling tension, and emotionally affecting backstories. Reading it, I realized that it could have been a pretty ordinary police procedural and that only the author’s determination to add layers of depth and detail lifted it to a new level.
When a trio of desperate convicts hijack a bus carrying a group of deaf and mute schoolgirls, everyone is braced for a terrible tragedy.
FBI agent Arthur Potter is flown in to negotiate. But he has competition: local police, state troopers, politicians and the media are swarming. Not everyone has the same agenda.
And the killers will murder one innocent child an hour, on the hour, until their demands are met...
'A real chiller, seething with violence and heart-stopping tension' Sunday Telegraph
I'm a novelist and screenwriter best known for my fourth novel, Under Color of Law, which features Black detective Trevor "Finn" Finnegan of the LAPD. I'm a lover of crime fiction, preferably noir, that works to entertain and enlighten readers by exploring the topical issues of today. I hold an MFA in Writing from Otis College and I’ve taught college-level English and creative writing courses for over ten years.
A solid police procedural that influenced my own book, the novel explores race relations in Los Angeles amid the 1992 Uprising spurred by the beating of motorist Rodney King. Detective Charlotte Justice not only is tasked with solving the murder of a man responsible for killing her family but also contends with the misogynistic, racist, and overall toxic good old boy culture of the LAPD. The novel delivers a twisty mystery and deconstructs an event that should have served as the tipping point for police reform in America.
Meet Detective Charlotte Justice, a black woman in the very white, very male, and sometimes very racist Los Angeles Police Department. The time is 48 hours into the epochal L.A. riots and she and her fellow officers are exhausted. She saves the curfew-breaking black doctor Lance Mitchell from a potentially lethal beating from some white officers - only to discover nearby the body of one-time radical Cinque Lewis, a thug who years before had murdered her husband and young daughter. Was it a random shooting or was Mitchell responsible? And what had brought Lewis back to a city he'd long…
I retired from the Metropolitan Police Department in Washington, DC, as a detective assigned to the Major Crimes Unit, but I’ve always been a writer at heart and an avid reader. I graduated from California State University in Long Beach, CA, with a major in Film. I am the author of six crime fiction books, three of which involve retired detective turned PI Frank Marr. This trilogy was critically acclaimed.
This pick is a classic from an author who played a huge part in growing the police procedural genre. Wambaugh was also a detective sergeant but with the LAPD. He paved the way for other cops, like me, who want to write books.
All of Wambaugh’s books are wonderful reads, but this is one I remember most because I read it as a teenager, and it blew me away. It delves into some of the tougher aspects of being a cop, though, and the negative side of police culture.
Meet the Los Angeles blues—a new breed of cop. From the baby-faced rookies to hashmark heroes, they are besieged men, dealing daily with a world coming apart. Hunting killers, quelling gang wars, fighting corruption, they risk death every day . . . every night.
Joseph Wambaugh was a damn good cop and LAPD detective. For fifteen years he prowled the streets, solved murders, took his lumps. Now he’s the hard-hitting, tough-talking bestselling writer who tells the brutal, true stories of the men who risk their lives every time a siren screams.
I love history and I love to laugh. That’s why I brand myself as a writer of Victorian Whodunits with a touch of humor. I’ve spent decades learning about 1800s America. I began sharing that knowledge by performing in costume as real women of history. But I couldn’t be on stage all the time so I began writing the books I want to read, books that entertain while sticking to the basic facts of history and giving the flavor of an earlier time. I seek that great marriage of words that brings readers to a new understanding. As Albert Einstein said, “Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.”
This book is laugh-out-loud funny. The rich socialite heroine is quite
intelligent in some things and ridiculously stupid in others. The whole
book is absolutely unbelievable, but utterly delightful – and way beyond
society's terms of approval for women in 1907 Los Angeles. Sometimes a
book doesn’t have to be anything but a joy to read. This one delivers.
It's 1907 Los Angeles. Mischievous socialite Anna Blanc is the kind of young woman who devours purloined crime novels—but must disguise them behind covers of more domestically-appropriate reading. She could match wits with Sherlock Holmes, but in her world women are not allowed to hunt criminals.
Determined to break free of the era's rigid social roles, Anna buys off the chaperone assigned by her domineering father and, using an alias, takes a job as a police matron with the Los Angeles Police Department. There she discovers a string of brothel murders, which the cops are unwilling to investigate. Seizing her…
I am a British crime writer with a love of American crime fiction, particularly books with dark plots and quirky, unique characters. I am the author of the Sunday Times bestselling, multiple award-winning, Washington Poe series and the new Ben Koenig series but am first a reader—I read over a hundred books a year. I love discovering a new-to-me series that has a back catalogue for me to work through, and I appreciate recommendations. I’ve been a full-time author since 2015 and, as I suspected, it’s my dream job.
Although many fans consider Crais’s preceding book, L.A. Requiem, to be his masterpiece, I’ve chosen this because it perfectly encapsulates the relationship between flamboyant Elvis Cole and his partner, the enigmatic Joe Pike.
Pike is the ultimate sidekick. He’s taciturn, monosyllabic, and extremely complex. Dangerous as hell and completely loyal to Cole and anyone in Cole’s life; he’s taken bullets, knives—a whole bunch of weapons during the nineteen-book series.
In The Last Detective, the son of Cole’s girlfriend gets kidnapped and the evidence points to Cole’s service in Vietnam. Cole’s first call isn’t to the LAPD, it’s to Joe Pike. His message: ‘Joe, I’m scared.’ Pike drops everything and together they start hunting...
Pike is the third sidekick on my list to get his own series.
'THE LAST DETECTIVE is literally a thrill-a-minute read. Crais is on top form, which, believe me, is about as good as it gets. Don't miss it' INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY
'The narrative is taut, the menace palpable, the suspense unbearable' DAILY TELEGRAPH
Elvis Cole has got a problem to solve - and this time it's personal.
Elvis Cole's girlfriend, Lucy, is out of town, and she has left her young son Ben in Elvis's care. Elvis and Lucy have had a few problems lately - not least over his job as a private investigator. But at last things seem to be…
As a romance, romantic comedy, and cozy mystery writer, I not only have a passion for the swoon-worthy moments when I’m creating them but crave them as a reader. There are so many great books out there but chemistry, particularly between a main character and her love interest, is what really makes me want more of a series. It’s not always easy to create that sigh-worthy-make-you-smile element of romance and love in a book that is geared toward solving a murder so I really appreciate when it’s done well. It’s not only enjoyable for me as a reader but a great example for me as a writer.
This book is adorable and hilarious. My favorite cozies have a heavy punch of romance and sparks in them and this one definitely fits the bill. Maddie lands herself in all the wrong places, at all the wrong times, with all the wrong people. Watching her back, and the rest of her, is an LAPD detective who doesn’t want to fall for her charms but, like readers, absolutely can’t help himself.
#1 Amazon, New York Times & USA Today Bestselling series! High Crime meets High Fashion when shoe designer turned amateur sleuth Maddie Springer is on the case...with laugh-out-loud results!
Struggling LA shoe designer, Maddie Springer, lives her life by three rules: Fashion. Fashion. Fashion. But when her boyfriend suddenly disappears--along with $20 million in embezzled funds--her life takes an unexpected turn from Manolos to murder. Now her every move is under scrutiny by the LAPD's sexiest cop, dead bodies are dropping around her faster than last season's trends, and the deeper she digs the more she realizes maybe she didn't…
I’ve always enjoyed murder mysteries, with spy novels coming a very close second. I like the puzzle aspect of the story and the unravelling thereof. From early in my childhood I have written and it has never occurred to me to write in any other genre than Crime Fiction. I do like, however, both in my own output and that which I read, to gain an insight into other people’s lives and histories. I like to learn about the surroundings in which the stories are set. Also, for me a must, the characters have to be rounded and three dimensional.
This is the first Alex Delaware book that I read, and I became immediately hooked. Delaware is a psychologist-detective based in Los Angeles, who works very closely with his good friend, Milo Sturgis, a detective with the Los Angeles Police Department. This story has them both looking back in time to a murder that Milo failed to solve. Between them they scour the “City of the Angels” and get to grips with this old case that never quite went away.
Twisting, brutal and terrifying but ultimately redemptive, THE MURDER BOOK by New York Times No. 1 bestselling author Jonathan Kellerman, author of KILLER and BREAKDOWN, is recommended for fans of David Baldacci and Harland Coben. 'Optimism is a feature of The Murder Book although the premise is macabre . . . Kellerman ameliorates the horror with a surprising number of generous characters' (Telegraph)
Alex Delaware's relationship with his long-term partner is on the rocks. He is floored when Robin announces she's heading off on a three-month music tour.
But he soon has other things to think about. He is sent…
