67 books like Even Though I Knew the End

This tightly-plotted murder mystery takes place in one of the most compelling imagined settings I’ve ever encountered: a double city somewhere in the Balkans where the inhabitants of each half are required by law not to see the inhabitants of the other half.

Equal parts Kafka and Philip K Dick, Miéville’s The City and the City offers a thought-provoking meditation on the haves and have-nots, as well as life in the Balkanized cities of the world, those “double places” where one-half of the population conspires not to notice the other half.

Not all noir fiction are detective stories, and this is one of the best.

Dolly is a thief with a past who has promised to turn over a hard to acquire a magical mask to pay her debts. As she tightens her noose on her mark for the con she’s going to use to pull off the theft, she must face the biggest danger any con artist must face, getting emotionally involved. The price of failure will be more than just her life, but the lives of people she wishes she didn’t care about.

I was on the edge of my seat and couldn’t put this book down.

Mixing elves and eldridge powers into the gang warfare of prohibition Chicago, this book is a fast-paced wild ride into the dark and seedy lives of those who use violence to hold on to power.

The key to a good noir story is that it forces the protagonist to confront something they’d rather not know and to survive, they must find a way to live with that dark truth. This is a journey too many of us face, and Ford writes just such a brilliant journey for his protagonist, Doc.

Once I started reading this, it gripped me like cold iron until I was done.

In this noir story with a philosophical bent, Miles has been hired to track the reincarnation of a demonic guardian by a Tibetan monk on the eve of a visit of the Dali Lama to New York, and Miles finds himself over his head as an apparent gang war erupts in Chinatown, killings that some on the force think he had a role in. He must avoid capture by the cops so that he can find the killer and the demon, if they are not the same, and avoid becoming the demon's next victim.

I loved the weaving of Tibetan myth into a story of gang warfare and revenge.

Paranormal Women’s Fiction: This is a relatively new genre that “celebrates either a midlife or older woman who navigates her life while discovering or developing her own magical powers. Being an older woman, I leapt on this one! Magic realism is present here as is often the case with the paranormal. Interweaving individual paranormal abilities within the town of Myrtlewood, which is itself a city of quirks, with a mystery and a murder demanding to be solved. 

The personalities of the two main characters seem to ruffle the feathers of some readers. However, I viewed the interactions of the mother and daughter as evolutionary journeys, individually and in their relationships with each other. Did it present frustrating moments? Of course, but this is what makes it good.

If you love the strange and unusual in Michigan, this book is a wonderful addition to your book self for all ages. Linda Godfrey delivers a lively and fun collection of ghosts, UFOs, monsters, and other oddities. Plus, many fellow Michiganders lent their own experiences and spooky encounters with the paranormal to the book making it much more personal than just a list of paranormal locations.

Bullard, a scholar of literature and folklore, has exhaustively catalogued more UFO encounters than a casual reader might imagine have ever occurred.

The book delves into dozens of cases, from well-known stories like the supposed UFO crash at Roswell to popularly overlooked events like the Chicago sightings of 2006.

He then distills this myriad of stories down to their mythic bones, trying to understand how the strange raw material of a sighting—somebody seeing an odd light in the sky—is translated again and again through the narratives of film and television, popular culture and academic analysis, and how the UFO becomes a myth: a story that means something to people in our time, and perhaps tells us something about ourselves too. 

I loved this book. This is the tenth book I’ve read this month and I haven’t had a bad one yet, so either I’m really good at picking, or the standard of writing out there is improving all the time. I would give this book 9.5 out of 10. I couldn’t wait to get my day finished so that I could settle and read in the evenings. Can’t praise this highly enough.

The plot was riveting, the pace built well, the characterisation is up there, and his description is powerful and draws you right into the visuals and meaning of the story.  What really captured me with this book was the child’s voice. It was so damned subtly done. If anything, the boy is written in an understated way—but before it ever got sinister, you just knew with that creepy little kid’s voice that it was going to. The ‘out… show more.

Stephen King. I know, I know. I can practically hear people rolling their eyes.

But in 2014, King wrote what he described as his first hard-boiled detective story. It was a complete change of pace. The story of Bill Hodges, a retired cop desperate to crack the unsolved case that haunts him, Mr. Mercedes buzzes with interesting characters.

Most prominent among them is Holly Gibney. She emerges as the hero of this story, someone who overcomes her own obstacles to help Bill Hodges catch a killer. You get the sense in Mr. Mercedes that King cares about all his characters.

Even the killer is portrayed as the victim of a horrific environment. And the crime that begins the story? It haunts me to this very day.

Hollie’s debut novel is a combination of romantic suspense and paranormal with an interesting concept. The female protagonist is a memory surgeon in Chicago. She removes and keeps painful memories from her patients, which weighs on her psyche. Dean, a police officer, asks her to look at the memories of someone in a coma in an attempt to catch a serial killer. As the two become more and more entangled, their search for clues and growing romance, may make Kiera the next victim.

The paranormal aspect is intriguing, and the concept was completely unfamiliar to me. The book is not for the faint of heart because her depictions can be graphic, but if you like urban grit and sexy romance, this may be the book for you.