Fans pick 65 books like Hidden Beneath

Reading a book by Barbara Ross is like taking an actual trip to a charming coastal Maine town.

Loaded with lobster, seafood dishes, and desserts with blueberries in almost every chapter; my mouth was watering for the east coast. The interesting plot line on a lobster boat held my interest and led me to investigate the other books in the series as well. 

Financial whiz Julia Snowden returns to her Maine hometown to rescue the family’s clambake business. Although she has financial acumen, she lacks true knowledge of how a clam bake works. She learns the hard way when a murder and a wedding reception don’t mix. I wasn’t familiar with the inner workings of clam bakes, from menu to preparation, but I learned with Julia. I also enjoy Ross’s writing style. The combination of the storytelling plus the facts interwoven make this a good book choice.

Addiction, grief, generational trauma… all these things exist in Talty’s work. But his prose lifts all that heaviness and makes it not only bearable, but often strangely beautiful.

His characters are raw and real, and his skill with dialogue is enviable. I love the way the book is structured as a collection of linked stories, each one informing and contributing to the rest. The book is set on the Penobscot reservation in Maine, an area often overlooked both in literature and reality.

Talty is a natural storyteller, and his voice rings with wisdom, dry humor, and honesty, giving readers rare insight into this community. 

I love this book because it is not afraid to look at deep sadness and disappointment in an honest and complex way. This novel is a collection of short stories that all take place in a coastal Main town and are connected by the large presence of Olive.

Olive is intelligent, acerbic, and abrasive. She is anything but easy. I appreciate the compassion Strout gives her imperfect characters as they struggle with their messy lives. I grew to care more for Olive as I traveled her rocky path with her, even as she was often the one to throw down the rocks before her.

This is a quiet book, which I read in a quiet way. It brought me comfort in its illumination of uncomfortable things. 

The fascinating thing about this book is the overall lack of a plot.

It pairs McCloskey’s crisp pen-and-ink drawings with simple prose to evoke the bucolic feeling of life on the coast of Maine. Although not as universally known as McCloskey’s Make Way for Ducklings or Blueberries for Sal, this entry can bring one to a calm place and let them breathe for a while.

No one wrote better than E. B. White, and no one captured the essence of daily life on the home front better than White in this collection of essays. “This is my country and my night,” he wrote from his farm in Maine, “this is the blacked-out ending to the day, the way they end a skit in a revue.” Yet White acknowledged that it was nearly impossible for him or anyone else to truly convey all the ways that the war was changing ordinary Americans. “You write something that sounds informative, throwing the words around in the usual manner, then the thing explodes in your hands, and you look down at your hands,” he explained. “As though you had crushed a light bulb and were bleeding slightly.”

I love a good sisters novel—maybe because I always wished for a sister of my own? This cast of unique and engaging characters quickly drew me into their lives as these young women with very different personalities found ways to accept their widowed dad's plans to reopen the summer camp where he’d met their mother. I also enjoy a good plot twist, and the one at the end of this book was just right, a touching way to tie everything together. This book was primarily the eldest sister Cam's story, which means more books to follow with insights into the other sisters’ lives. Have I mentioned I love sequels? Once I connect with a set of characters, it’s hard to let them go!

This was my first delightful introduction to Susan Elizabeth Phillips's romantic comedies. I adore genre-benders, and this romance also has suspense and mystery.

I was curious by the unconventional set-up: a female ventriloquist who talks to her puppets has to live on a remote island off the coast of Maine in winter. There, she encounters an unlikable boy from her childhood—now a man who’s become a huge horror author and may or may not be a killer. The rugged island setting and its quirky cast of characters let Phillips have some fun with gothic tropes, a favorite of mine. 

Even though Jewett wrote the stories in this book in the late 1800s, there is a timeless feeling to her prose that reverberates today.

I love Jewett’s attention to and reverence for the natural beauty that surrounds the fictional town of Dunnet Landing. Her descriptions of the Maine coastline—a blend of craggy rocks, forest, meadows, and sea—are visceral, sensory, and alluring. Jewett also nicely captures the hardworking, humorous, quietly resilient spirit of the year-round residents of Dunnet Landing, with a particularly keen and kind eye toward her female characters.

Her care for the everyday rituals of life, the small moments that make up an existence, are lovingly rendered and evocative. There’s a reason this is a Maine classic. 

When I first started writing mysteries, I realized that a different approach had to be used when I wrote in a first-person point of view. Only those clues that are seen by the main character can be shown to the reader. So that might limit what I, the author, can use as clues.

In Doiron's book, the main character is in law enforcement, and he has access to methods and information that a non-LEO person can access. But despite that Mike Bowditch, the main character, often doesn't realize that he's found a clue or a key to a mystery until it almost slips out of his hands. That makes him a person I can relate to.

And I also like that he explains a lot about policies and procedures just as he decides he's not going to follow said procedures.