94 books like I Don't Forgive You

Oh my goodness, first of all: this book will make you so hungry. So, be prepared for that.

Taking place in a warm, intimate Filipino restaurant outside Chicago, Arsenic and Adobo forces recently dumped Lila Macapagal into action after a brutal restaurant critic (who just so happens to be her ex-boyfriend) drops dead while eating her aunt’s food.

She and Tita Rosie are the main suspects, so Lila has to put on her amateur sleuth hat and figure out what really happened to stay out of jail and save her aunt’s business. Arsenic and Adobo is funny, charming, and layered with enough sweetness and spice to keep you devouring it until the last crumb. 

As much as I love this book’s hero, former television commercial star Dayna Anderson, her tight circle of got-your-back friends is what made this mystery really shine.

To say the cast has big personalities is like calling Hollywood’s Dolby Theater a quaint venue. I laughed out loud throughout and wished I could ride along with these ladies (there are some guys involved, a love interest in particular) as they doggedly unravel the deftly plotted mystery.

I am grateful to Garrett that there is a sequel to this first in the series, Hollywood Ending.

I was lucky enough to read an early copy of this book, and I am blown away at how Jesse Sutanto continues to smash both her novel concepts and character voices out of the park!

Vera Wong herself is the ultimate amateur sleuth, but she is not reluctant whatsoever. When a dead body turns up in her tea shop, Vera Wong—the most wonderfully grandmotherly non-grandmother—decides the police aren’t up to the task of realizing the young man was murdered, obviously, and so she decides to hunt down the suspects and interview them herself.

Vera is at turns heartwarming and hilarious, infuriating, and delightful. Told through the perspective of Vera and all her murder suspects, this book will keep you guessing until the end—and might just charm your socks off.

Megan has been transparent about the fact that Behind the Red Door is not the most popular of her books, but it’s my personal favorite!

Fern Douglas is out of the loop: a missing woman shows up on the news whose famous kidnapping two decades ago—and subsequent return—everyone seems to have heard about. But Fern has no memory of that story; she only knows that she has seen the woman’s face before, and she comes to fear that she might have somehow been involved in what happened to her.

This book has one of the best portrayals of chronic anxiety I’ve read, and one of the most twisted and f-ed up stories, which I absolutely tore through. Read it, and prepare to be chilled to the bone.

Tinder and other dating sites may seem like a very modern way to meet a spouse but, as Francesca Beauman’s book Shapley Ankle Preferred demonstrates, people have been advertising for love almost since the first newspaper advertisement was invented. Shapley Ankle shows how matrimonial advertising dramatically changed marriage and courtship. With the invention of these ads, single men and women were no longer dependent on friends and family for their marital futures. Suddenly, they could advertise for the kind of spouse they wanted and thousands did so -- many with amusing specificity.

Some examples include the man looking for a wife with “but one leg” and the woman who requested her future husband not drink “above two bottles of claret in a sitting.” Nevertheless, other advertisements were less humorous and revealed authors hoping marriage could save them from penury, cruel families, or simply loneliness. These motivations remain highly relevant today.… show more.

Political scientists don’t always write with verve and insight, but the late Glenn Tinder did. This book takes the ever-challenging theme of liberty and shows me how to understand it as more than an Independence Day slogan.

Tinder provoked me to consider how my freedom should be about more than me but used instead to assist others less resourced than I am. I found this book a refreshing change from the selfish agenda of so many authors writing about liberty and freedom without also considering responsibility and community.

I can’t stand it when people say individual actions don’t matter – because they do. And Kimberly Nicholas gets that. In this book, she acknowledges yes, companies and governments are hugely responsible for the mess we’re in. But individuals can create real, significant, and lasting change to solve this problem.  She also explores finding purpose in a warming world, both reflecting on her scientific finds and her life experiences. 

I love a book rich with flawed characters; this one is full of them. Perrotta’s peek into the mundane life of a stay-at-home mother at war with her lot in life is delicious. Sarah once coined herself a feminist, and now, she’s wiping noses. It’s a struggle many mothers of little children face, and while most don’t go to the lengths Perrotta’s characters explore, it’s a valiant example of losing oneself for the sake of a higher calling: motherhood. 

I first read this book at graduate school, with two babies at home. Perrotta taught me that exploring the human condition is necessary for connecting with readers. I’ve received many letters from readers citing that they connected with Veronica on the pages of Trespassing, and that’s the best accolade.

This book is engaging because it shows how the base of the Democratic party has changed since Franklin Roosevelt first assembled the New Deal political coalition in the 1930s. 

Today, it is increasingly the party of college-educated suburban voters and reflects their cultural and political priorities. From the Great Depression until the 1960s, however, working-class urban voters formed the heart of the party. Geismer uses metropolitan Boston as a template to depict this important transition, which helped produce suburban candidates such as Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis, whose political career emerged from and was shaped by his life in Brookline, MA.  

Lassiter presents a nuanced examination of how social and political conflicts in Richmond, Atlanta, and Charlotte during enabled Richard Nixon and other Republicans to resurrect the GOP from its 1964 electoral disaster through reliance, not on a “southern strategy,” as many pundits have long claimed, but rather on a suburban strategy that involved the complex interplay of race, class, and other factors. 

The messages that enabled the GOP to gain traction in the suburban South, Lassiter emphasizes, worked across the nation. The South was not as different as many observers have long claimed. Lassiter also chronicles how these conflicts reshaped the Democratic Party in the South, as by the early 1970s more moderate figures such Jimmy Carter had supplanted the staunch segregationists of decades past.