98 books like Field of Blood

Benny Griessel has elements of a stereotypical cop who drinks too much and loses his family as a result, but Griessel’s humanity and self-loathing set him apart as a protagonist. He doesn’t believe that he’s any good as a detective or a human being, yet his ability to solve murders and to connect with people contradict this self-destructive inner dialogue. Themes of redemption, forgiveness, and revenge drive the book (and series), making this more layered than a simple whodunit. I like Griessel’s resolve to change and become a better person, even as he fights having a drink every hour of every day. His compassion, empathy, and humility ultimately seal the deal for me. I particularly enjoy the glimpses Meyer gives into South African society and policing.

McKinty takes you right to the streets of a city in chaos. An excellent, edgy, police procedural with a great sense of place––and McKinty doesn’t spare the language or violence in DS Sean Duffy’s first appearance.

In 1981 Belfast, it seems a serial killer is targeting homosexuals––an anomaly in Ulster during the troubles when most murders are sectarian. Just as Duffy starts to doubt this angle, a young woman, ex-wife of a hunger striker, commits suicide, or was she murdered––and was she connected somehow to the killings?

We’re immediately caught up in Duffy’s dysfunctional world, he’s a Catholic detective in the predominantly Protestant RUC. A hard drinker, too smart for his own good, but with a strong moral compass. 

The popularity of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie may have obscured its structural genius.

Never have I read a book so comfortable drifting between present and future within a single paragraph, even a single sentence. The short novel simultaneously exists inside a classroom in the 1930s and throughout the lives the students will later have as women.

If the Scottish author Muriel Spark had a literary model for this design, I’ve yet to discover it. Sometimes an artist creates something entirely new.

I’m full of admiration for this book. Morrison is a fifty-something bloke, but this narrative is told in the first person by a teenage girl, Haley, and the voice is totally perfect: opinionated, funny, sulky, naïve. The novel’s full of dark humour, and a real page-turner. Haley is kidnapped by her father to join a group of apocalyptic pandemic survivalists. Are they barking mad or the only people clear-sighted enough to see the danger the world is in from Virus X? You’ll veer from one viewpoint to the other throughout. You’ll also learn how to use a crossbow and what to put in your survival pack. (Warning: I could only read the bit about amputation through my fingers.) 

This is one of the most unsettling books I’ve ever read.

For weeks after finishing it, I would find myself coming back to scenes I remembered and feeling a prickle down the back of my neck. Isserly, the main character of the book, isn’t really a woman but an alien wearing a human suit to draw in her victims while driving around rural Scotland.

I’m Scottish myself, and recently, I found myself feeling a genuine sense of paranoia while out hillwalking and seeing a lone figure in the distance. It’s a hard read, almost sickening at times, but I’m not exaggerating when I say I believe I will be thinking about it for the rest of my life. I wouldn’t recommend it for the faint-hearted, and it’s definitely not a comfort read, but if you have the stomach for it, this is a truly remarkable novel. 

This historical novel is based on quite horrifying fact. In Edinburgh in 1732, Lord Grange was apparently mourning the death of his estranged wife Rachel. Except he’d actually had her kidnapped and marooned on the remote and desolate island of St Kilda. Lawrence isn’t only a historical novelist: she’s a respected cookery and food writer, and former winner of the BBC’s MasterChef. She first heard of Lady Grange when she was researching her cookbook on Scottish islands. And she discovered that Rachel’s life had been recorded by male writers in the 18th and 19th centuries, all of whom blackened her reputation. So this book, for the first time, gives Rachel a voice. 

I absolutely love Blunt’s writing in this series. It is nuanced and beautifully paired with the troubled, multi-faceted characters. The books are set in the fictional town of Algonquin Bay, based in North Bay in Northern Ontario, a part of the country I know well having grown up a bit farther north and west. The setting permeates the stories—small town, dead of winter, lots of bush and conifer trees. The discovery of a body in a mine shaft fits perfectly. John Cardinal, lead cop, is struggling to help his clinically depressed wife and has recently been demoted. He’s a compelling character and so well drawn as is his new partner Lise Delorme. The books have been made into a gritty television series with superb acting, but I’d say read the books first because the writing is just that good.

Annika Bengtzon is another strong woman reporter working in a man’s world. She’s married to a man very involved in his own career. They have two children and Annika struggles to balance chasing after a story with looking after the kids and keeping house. Most women can relate to her very real pressures and will empathize with all that she goes through on the home front. I liked her tenacity and intelligence and almost reckless pursuit of a killer. Marklund is Swedish and I enjoy learning more about the country—another cold, northern setting. Her character develops over the series with gritty crimes at the centre of the stories.

Flint’s novel combines literary fiction with the darkness of true crime and draws its inspiration from the 1965 Alice Crimmins case in Queens, NY. Her own small children disappeared from home, later found dead. The prosecution portrayed Crimmins as a woman with poor morals. An all-male jury convicted her on thin circumstantial evidence. Flint’s chronicle of the case is heartbreaking and perfectly evokes the time period.

A Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for the New York Times, Rick Bragg’s writing is poetry.

He grew up dirt poor in Alabama. I grew up in a middle-class suburb in New Jersey. He and I have little in common but our love for our mothers. This story touched me on many levels. All mothers sacrifice to some extent in raising their children, but Rick’s mother went above and beyond while facing dire circumstances to provide for hers.

It made me appreciate my mother even more. And though I hadn’t discovered this book prior to my story, it reconfirmed my commitment to my mother.