Here are 54 books that Eight Million Ways to Die fans have personally recommended if you like
Eight Million Ways to Die.
Shepherd is a community of 12,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.
You’ve got to root for the underdog, right? And there’s no bigger underdog than fictional villains. While real-life criminals are doing very nicely, thank you very much, in fiction, the bad guy is screwed from the start. What could be more relatable than knowing on a bone-deep, existential level that you’ve already lost? And what could be more heroic than stepping out onto the field of play knowing that no matter how hard you play, you’re still going down? Keep your flawed anti-heroes; they’re just too chicken to go over to the losing side. I’ll cheer for the doomed bad guy every single time.
Everyone loves a bastard, and Pinkie, the hero of Brighton Rock, is such an awful bastard. He doesn’t like his friends, hates his girlfriend, and is driven by a pathetically brittle ego that can never be satisfied. But it’s the fact he’s so hopelessly trapped in the prison of his own angry, petty horizons that makes me love him. I love a doomed character.
When an author can make you know, it’s all going to end badly and still make you hope it won’t? That’s magic. I love it when I’m reading books that I can feel playing with my emotions but I’m enjoying it so much I don’t care. Pinkie is a bastard, and he sort of knows it, when it comes to the crunch, and he goes out like a coward, I can’t help but wish he’d managed to pull it off.
Pinkie Brown, a neurotic teenage gangster wielding a razor blade and a bottle of sulfuric acid, commits a brutal murder - but it does not go unnoticed. Rose, a naive young waitress at a rundown cafe, has the unwitting power to destroy his crucial alibi, and Ida Arnold, a woman bursting with easy certainties about what is right and wrong, has made it her mission to bring about justice and redemption.
Set among the seaside amusements and dilapidated boarding houses of Brighton's pre-war underworld, Brighton Rock by Graham Greene is both a gritty thriller and a study of a soul…
I have been writing for many years, and my main preference is political thrillers with criminal overtones. I first became interested in politics when I worked at several political conferences in the 60’s and 70’s. I have been involved in several criminal cases, including my own, and within my family, I have a nephew in the police force. For many years I have had the opportunity to mix with the upper tiers of society as well as the criminal classes and this has given me great insight into creating my characters and plots.
I love reading a thriller with a complex plot that has me trying to figure out who did what, where and when, and what or who may be connected in the main or subplot.
This was one of those books I had to read twice, not because I didn’t “get it” but because I admired the way Chandler weaved his characters around, like the actors in a Whitehall farce play. This is a book I kept turning back a few pages to keep up with the who, where, and when. Fantastic read.
Raymond Chandler's first three novels, published here in one volume, established his reputation as an unsurpassed master of hard-boiled detective fiction.
The Big Sleep, Chandler's first novel, introduces Philip Marlowe, a private detective inhabiting the seamy side of Los Angeles in the 1930s, as he takes on a case involving a paralysed California millionaire, two psychotic daughters, blackmail and murder.
In Farewell, My Lovely, Marlowe deals with the gambling circuit, a murder he stumbles upon, and three very beautiful but potentially deadly women.
In The High Window, Marlowe searches the California underworld for a priceless gold coin and finds himself…
It’s all my father-in-law’s fault. Before I ran into him, I was a card-carrying “literary” high-brow. Shoot, I was reading Faulkner’s “The Bear” in high school and thought I would be the next generation Steinbeck if I ever got around to writing novels. But one weekend, while visiting my wife’s folks, I found myself with nothing to read—a problem solved by my father-in-law’s complete collection of Richard Stark novels. Those books knocked me head-over-heels, which is why when I did get around to writing novels, the first six were hard-edged crime fiction.
This book pulled me from classical American literature (think Steinbeck, Faulkner, and Hemingway) to hardboiled crime fiction, and I haven’t come up for air since.
I was captured by both the substance and the style—the rich possibilities of an antihero protagonist delivered in a prose as direct and compelling as a bullet to the brain. After this one, I couldn’t stop until I had devoured the entire series!
You probably haven't ever noticed them. But they've noticed you. They notice everything. That's their job. Sitting quietly in a nondescript car outside a bank making note of the tellers' work habits, the positions of the security guards. Lagging a few car lengths behind the Brinks truck on its daily rounds. Surreptitiously jiggling the handle of an unmarked service door at the racetrack.They're thieves. Heisters, to be precise. They're pros, and Parker is far and away the best of them. If you're planning a job, you want him in. Tough, smart, hardworking, and relentlessly focused on his trade, he is…
As a writer, I consider myself lucky to be born and raised in the Deep South. Although I currently live near Los Angeles, I continue to draw upon the region’s complex history, regional color, eccentric characters, and rich atmosphere for inspiration. I also love to read fiction set in the South, especially mysteries and thrillers—the more atmospheric, the better!
Although the film version is better known, Dickey’s gut-wrenching saga of four men who decide to take one last canoe trip in the remote North Georgia wilderness is one of my favorite novels of all time. I love Dickey’s vivid prose, which is at times poetic but never obtrusively so.
Simply put, To me, this book represents thriller storytelling at its finest.
“You're hooked, you feel every cut, grope up every cliff, swallow water with every spill of the canoe, sweat with every draw of the bowstring. Wholly absorbing [and] dramatic.”—Harper's Magazine
The setting is the Georgia wilderness, where the states most remote white-water river awaits. In the thundering froth of that river, in its echoing stone canyons, four men on a canoe trip discover a freedom and exhilaration beyond compare. And then, in a moment of horror, the adventure turns into a struggle for survival as one man becomes a human hunter who is offered his own harrowing deliverance.
It’s all my father-in-law’s fault. Before I ran into him, I was a card-carrying “literary” high-brow. Shoot, I was reading Faulkner’s “The Bear” in high school and thought I would be the next generation Steinbeck if I ever got around to writing novels. But one weekend, while visiting my wife’s folks, I found myself with nothing to read—a problem solved by my father-in-law’s complete collection of Richard Stark novels. Those books knocked me head-over-heels, which is why when I did get around to writing novels, the first six were hard-edged crime fiction.
This is another author I read religiously, and the connection between Spenser and Hawk is one of the primary reasons why. But this book has stayed with me in a way the others haven’t because of the dramatic way Parker clarified the difference between these two characters in one of the most impactful closing scenes in the entire series.
When Spenser is hired to protect a senatorial candidate and his promiscuous wife, he finds himself involved in blackmail and drug dealing in Washington, D.C
Some of us are confronted, amid life, with the need to look at ourselves and to change. It’s usually a question of survival. Do I want to live? Better stop this, better start that. I consider myself fortunate to have been forced down this path. So, who am I, really? Will I double down on my past mistakes, or can I change up and make some new ones? I love stories of the pain that precedes growth, redemption, and freedom that comes with it. Here are five of my favorite novels about recognizing what you are and becoming something new.
Redemption is not just about stopping this or quitting that. Whether your problems are chemical or behavioral, those simple changes are a necessary beginning, but they are rarely enough to get the monkey’s teeth out of your neck.
In this novel, Block’s protagonist from 8 Million Ways to Die wrestles with the post-addiction problem of who you are, really, after that thing that has been propping you up is taken away. Redemption isn’t about what happens when you stop digging the hole. It’s about what happens when you climb out of the hole and start becoming.
Detective Matt Scudder is on the trail of a killer - but solving the case might be his undoing...
Matt Scudder and Jack Ellery were at school together but never exactly friends. Twenty years later, when Scudder was a detective and Jack was standing on the other side of the one-way glass in a police line-up, it was clear their lives had taken very different paths.
What they shared, however, was a battle with alcohol. Now Jack is on the ninth step of the AA program and it's time to make amends to the people he's wronged over the years…
It’s all my father-in-law’s fault. Before I ran into him, I was a card-carrying “literary” high-brow. Shoot, I was reading Faulkner’s “The Bear” in high school and thought I would be the next generation Steinbeck if I ever got around to writing novels. But one weekend, while visiting my wife’s folks, I found myself with nothing to read—a problem solved by my father-in-law’s complete collection of Richard Stark novels. Those books knocked me head-over-heels, which is why when I did get around to writing novels, the first six were hard-edged crime fiction.
I love the way this book got me beneath the glossy veneer of our national capital and made me come to grips with the cold reality hiding there. And the perfectly imperfect guides who took me on that trip are unforgettable creations, which I ultimately discovered is par for the course for Pelecanos.
A fatal shooting that strikes too close to home leaves PI Derek Strange determined to find the killer - whatever the cost. From one of the award-winning writers of THE WIRE.
Set in darkest, downtown Washington, Hell to Pay begins with Quinn and Strange dealing with the usual detritus of the world's most violent city - a bent cop and a missing teenage-girl-turned-hooker - but then a senseless death on a sunny afternoon shakes even Derek Strange's existence.
A victim shot down by bullets meant for another; a tragic accident that strikes just too close to home. Strange's grief is…
Some of us are confronted, amid life, with the need to look at ourselves and to change. It’s usually a question of survival. Do I want to live? Better stop this, better start that. I consider myself fortunate to have been forced down this path. So, who am I, really? Will I double down on my past mistakes, or can I change up and make some new ones? I love stories of the pain that precedes growth, redemption, and freedom that comes with it. Here are five of my favorite novels about recognizing what you are and becoming something new.
This is how good Mosley is: I couldn’t escape the feeling that I knew his protagonist the whole time I was reading this. I swear I had met the guy somewhere. I walked those same Brooklyn streets, and Mosley’s portrait of them was strong enough and real enough to make me miss the place, even though Brooklyn is overrun with lawyers and stock brokers these days.
And Mosley’s secondary characters are just as real, and if you screw up, you just might meet some of them. One last thing: when Mosley writes about race, he does it in lowercase. That way, the story sneaks under your defenses and hits you much harder than if it was all in caps. Walter Mosley is not just a writer; he’s an artist.
I created Hard Case Crime 20 years ago to revive the look, feel, and storytelling style of the great paperback crime novels of the 1940s and 50s: slender, high-velocity tales with irresistible premises, crackling dialogue, and powerful emotions, all presented behind gorgeous painted covers in the classic pulp style. Since then, I’ve had the opportunity to publish Stephen King, Joyce Carol Oates, Ray Bradbury, James M. Cain, Erle Stanley Gardner, Mickey Spillane, Brian De Palma, Ed McBain, and many more extraordinary authors.
Malamud isn’t thought of as a crime writer, but this story of a robber who goes to work for the man he robbed as a kind of silent penance is very much a story of crime and punishment, of sin and redemption, and it directly inspired one of my own stories about a killer who winds up working for the mother of the man he killed.
A sad and troubling book, this book is about how even good intentions can lead to bad outcomes and how atonement might never be enough but is still necessary.
The Assistant, Bernard Malamud's second novel, originally published in 1957, is the story of Morris Bober, a grocer in postwar Brooklyn, who "wants better" for himself and his family. First two robbers appear and hold him up; then things take a turn for the better when broken-nosed Frank Alpine becomes his assistant. But there are complications: Frank, whose reaction to Jews is ambivalent, falls in love with Helen Bober; at the same time he begins to steal from the store.
Like Malamud's best stories, this novel unerringly evokes an immigrant world of cramped circumstances and great expectations. Malamud defined the…
I created Hard Case Crime 20 years ago to revive the look, feel, and storytelling style of the great paperback crime novels of the 1940s and 50s: slender, high-velocity tales with irresistible premises, crackling dialogue, and powerful emotions, all presented behind gorgeous painted covers in the classic pulp style. Since then, I’ve had the opportunity to publish Stephen King, Joyce Carol Oates, Ray Bradbury, James M. Cain, Erle Stanley Gardner, Mickey Spillane, Brian De Palma, Ed McBain, and many more extraordinary authors.
Early in his career, Stephen King wrote half a dozen books under the pen name “Richard Bachman,” and decades later, he revived Bachman for one last novel about a small-time crook who depends on advice from his deceased partner in crime when attempting to pull off the kidnapping of a millionaire’s baby.
It reminds me of Steinbeck, with its pairing of a hapless, brutish soul and a smarter, slicker partner who can’t save him from himself, and the windings of fate as King spins them out broke my heart.
Does a kidnapper deserve sympathy? No, but then again, yes, and the amazing thing is how powerfully Stephen King puts you in this unfortunate man’s shoes and makes you feel what he’s feeling.
Master storyteller Stephen King (writing as Richard Bachman) presents this gripping and remarkable New York Times bestselling crime novel about a damaged young man who embarks on an ill-advised kidnapping plot—a work as taut and riveting as anything he has ever written.
Once upon a time, a fellow named Richard Bachman wrote Blaze on an Olivetti typewriter, then turned the machine over to Stephen King, who used it to write Carrie. Bachman died in 1985 (“cancer of the pseudonym”), but this last gripping Bachman novel resurfaced after being hidden away for decades—an unforgettable crime story tinged with sadness and suspense.…
