53 books like Four Dead Horses

Los Angeles is perhaps too large and varied for any one novel to describe well, but specific neighborhoods are easier, and Lou Mathews captures the mythic “Shaky Town” (the real-life LA neighborhoods of Frogtown and Glassell Park) with the loving and honest perspective of a native son. One of the best and most underrated novels of 2022, Mathews’ hypnotic and empathetic writing brings to life the down-and-out alcoholics, gangbangers, bored teens, and local characters that give Shaky Town its inimitable verve.

I’ve lived in Wisconsin since 1985, and somehow I had no idea there used to be a thriving Playboy resort in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin.

After the book came out I learned I even have a family member who worked security there—that’s how little people around here talk about this juicy history. Christina Clancy’s book is set in the 1980s in both Lake Geneva and the smaller community of East Troy, and she does an excellent job of balancing the celebrity and historical elements with the young Wisconsin women themselves and the complex relationship so many of them had with the seedy perception of Playboy. A lot of them were from farms and rural towns, and their families didn’t even know they worked there.

This particular Playboy resort was even known as a family-friendly destination. I loved learning about a world I had no idea existed, set against one I thought… show more.

An early favorite for my top book of 2023 is Napolitano’s latest, set almost entirely in and around Chicago. Sports fans will particularly enjoy a narrative thread that tracks a basketball player turned trainer from Northwestern to the United Center, but the entire book is steeped in the city, from its murals and libraries to its gentrifying neighborhoods. As a former resident of Evanston, I love it when someone gets the details right. Exquisite and perfectly structured, you’ll miss Napolitano’s vibrant Windy City family drama long after it’s over. 

Perhaps it says something about where I live now that the best novel I’ve read that takes place in the San Fernando Valley is largely told through an unreliable and chemically addled narrator. Through a self-medicating veteran named Shep and the people he encounters – from a convenience store clerk to an actress he believes to be his daughter – Kinney conjures an often bleak but never hopeless vision of the Valley. In her hands, familiar sights to us Valley residents take on unnerving new contexts, and for any readers unfamiliar with the 818, her brilliant, hypnotic, and compassionate writing will be an exemplary guide.

Should there be an afterlife and if there’s someone greeting me in the sweet hereafter, let it be Willa Cather. 

Maybe you read her in high school and did or didn’t fall in love, but in any case, no one in school reads The Professor’s House. As always, Cather looks down upon her characters with severe compassion, the sharp eye of someone who has seen all, and she’s wryly amused by her people. 

Professor Godfrey St. Peter is going through a mid-life crisis, he’s got a wife, two daughters, and he’s trying to see the way ahead. The center of the novel is devoted to a former student of St Peter’s, Tom Outloud, now dead, who it also happens was his daughter’s fiancé. 

At the center: Tom Outland’s experience of an ancient cliff city in New Mexico. It’s not a snooze, I promise! St. Peter’s recollection of Tom’s spiritual… show more.

Social media expert Maddy Montgomery, left standing at the altar, is #StartingOver in small-town Michigan after inheriting her great-aunt’s bakery and a 200-pound English Mastiff named Baby. Her plan to sell the bakery and go back to her sophisticated life is spoiled by a restriction in the will requiring her to spend a year in New Bison. Maddy doesn’t bake, and her Louboutins aren’t made for walking giant dogs, but the locals are friendly, and Lake Michigan is beautiful. Maddy feels ready to take on the challenge—until New Bison’s mayor is fatally stabbed, and her fingerprints are on the knife. When there’s another murder, she even begins to suspect the one person she has trusted. Maddy’s snarky dialog and clever use of hashtags, along with the irresistible Baby, make this a stand-out.

I’m referring to his Arisen series here. There hasn’t been a zombie epic of this calibre ever. It’s a fast-paced, high-octane kinetic blast through the apocalypse, told from (mainly) the point of view of tier-one operators. The way the characters evolve alongside the virus is so engaging that if anyone asked me to give them a run-down of the series I’d prepare a PowerPoint presentation and organise catering. This series does not quit, and the individuality of the characters will make you cry, laugh, and definitely spit your coffee out.

The Face of the Moon was the most important lunar book of the 20th century and perhaps of all time. Ralph Baldwin was an astronomer who studied stars, but while waiting to give public lectures at Chicago’s Adler Planetarium in 1941 he became fascinated by huge photos of the Moon on the planetarium’s walls. Baldwin saw that craters were everywhere, from tiny ones to giants hundreds of miles wide that had gouged surrounding terrain and ejected bright streamers of debris in all directions.

During World War 2 he recognized that myriads of craters from the Allied bombardment that had devasted France and Germany were tiny versions of what he saw on the Moon. The Moon’s craters were not volcanoes as commonly believed, they formed by explosions of projectiles – asteroids and comets. After the war, Baldwin investigated the physics of crater formation by setting off dynamite charges along the sandy… show more.

This book focuses on Octave Chanute's work in aeronautics.

He is best known for his scientific and collaborative support of the Wright Brothers. But as the author clearly demonstrates, this engineer's contributions to the field of aviation have often been underestimated, even though almost every famous and not-so-famous aviation enthusiast contacted him and used the readily available drawings of his glider to build and then learn to fly their own design.

Chanute's biplane glider design, developed and first flown in 1896 in the Indiana Dunes along Lake Michigan, proved to be a key step in the evolution of the flying machine.

By freely sharing not only drawings of the general design of this aircraft, but also the lessons learned, the biplane became the starting point or prototype for many experimenters and can be considered the foundation of the modern airplane.

In a complete departure from the previous book, Gods of New Orleans is a dieselpunk science fiction adventure. Emma Farnsworth, her saxophone-playing boyfriend Eddie Collins, and the Conroy family have escaped from Chicago City and are going to start life again in New Orleans. However, everything they think they know about New Orleans is turned on its ear.

People of color are in charge. White people are expected to keep their eyes averted, refer to people of color as "sir" or "ma'am" ... and mixed ethnicity couples like Emma and Eddie are eyed askance. White people are also expected to carry a little tin badge with them if they're "working out" -- which is what slaves who were allowed to "sleep out" in New Orleans during the 19th C. were required to do. In short: Sikes has turned the typical examination of racism on its ear with this book. 

I… show more.