100 books like If I Could Die

This book is about a private investigator in London in the early 1900s. It is the first of a long series about Maisie’s cases and the people who are dear to her.

This first book gives us an introduction to Maisie and her working-class background, the people who influenced her, and the way she uses her own version of second sight to understand both clients and criminals. Her description of Maisie mimicking someone’s body movements to figure out their motives actually made me try it out.

I also got a strong sense of London during the difficult years of wars and depression and a bedraggled peace. If you enjoy this one, you’ll have a nice backlog to return to whenever you need more.

I love so many things about this book, starting with the title (double-entendre!) and the setting (bookstore!).

I love the snippets of real life (e.g., it’s the author’s bookstore). And then there’s the ghost, Flora. Erdrich does such a good job with Flora. This is not the movie Ghostbusters and it’s not the TV show Ghosts. Flora is just an unseen character, a former customer who keeps hanging out in the bookstore in the time of Covid. Erdrich weaves both Covid and the ghost into the story so smoothly—the book is not about either one of them, but they are both in the background and color everything going on, leaving me with the impression that the ghost is just one more part of the fever dream that was 2020.

Going into it, I have to say that the cohort of talking animals was a bit much for a realist like me.

But I kept reading as the animals inhabit the dreams of a young neuroscientist who is dealing with personal issues while trying to complete her graduate studies. I realized that the animals became what people couldn’t be for her at this precise time. Maybe they were figments of her imagination. It doesn’t matter in the end. They enlightened her struggles and got her through.

By the time I finished reading the book, I looked at them the way I look at talking animals in really good children’s books: they do the work, say the things, and be the “people” that human characters couldn’t manage nearly as well. 

This one gets all the way to the end before the mysterious creeps in, where it felt completely natural.

I find Trafford’s novels both engrossing and enlightening—genre-merging legal/psychological thrillers that are also thoughtful and literary. I loved the books prior to this one, but this is the one that first introduces a little supernatural healing that was surprising and then . . . good. Intriguing. He carries it forward into the second book of the Dark River series.

The bridge in this book is an actual bridge over an actual river (the Mississippi) connecting Missouri and Illinois at St. Louis. The story is fiction, involving a body that washed up on the Missouri side of the river, which sets the stage for all that follows.

The unexpected cover art was just the beginning of the odyssey that is this book. Abdurraquib masterfully explores the intersection of civics and pop culture, weaving personal history with modern-day ethics, all to a soundtrack that is both memorable and urgent.

This is the sort of book that unlocks a hidden door to our collective compassion. One of the best things I’ve ever read. 

Just to get this out of the way: Adam is one of my closest friends. We both started our second novels New Year’s week of 2014 on a trip we took for the explicit purpose of starting new novels. I spent the next ten years trying to write my book, but Adam finished Sensation Machines in a more reasonable time frame. It was published in the summer of 2020, a basically impossible time to promote a book because we were all in lockdown. (Yes, I know, it wasn’t the worst thing that happened that summer, but still.)

It is a marriage story, a murder mystery, a cultural satire, a tech farce, and a reckoning with all the lessons we failed to learn from the last financial crisis. And it’s a great Brooklyn novel, in the tradition of Zadie Smith’s The Autograph Man (also a second novel!) and Jonathan Lethem’s The… show more.

Malamud isn’t thought of as a crime writer, but this story of a robber who goes to work for the man he robbed as a kind of silent penance is very much a story of crime and punishment, of sin and redemption, and it directly inspired one of my own stories about a killer who winds up working for the mother of the man he killed.

A sad and troubling book, this book is about how even good intentions can lead to bad outcomes and how atonement might never be enough but is still necessary.

Remember Mia is dark, emotional, and twisty. What I liked most about this book is how much the main character riled me up!

She’s an unsympathetic and unreliable narrator, and it propels the story forward. As this story unravelled, I questioned everything: Is the mother’s postpartum psychosis to blame for the missing child? Why didn’t she report the baby missing? Is there even a missing baby in the first place?

I enjoy when a novel makes me question what I thought I knew.

This novel is an invigorating thrill ride along the streets of “Old Brooklyn” in a modern-day setting. As a former New Yorker who once listed Brooklyn as a hangout, it is rather easy to empathize with Sydney Green while she witnesses her cherished neighborhood being overtaken by invader investors perusing the streets in the guise of tourists. Something strikes her as peculiar when For Sale signs continue popping up at the existing homes with long-time neighbors suspiciously relocating to the suburbs. 

Ironically, Sydney encounters an unlikely helpmate in the form of someone whom she considers one of the intruders; Theo, a new neighbor. There’s a mutual distrust between them but it is not enough to override their suspicions about the things that are taking place. Is it overly accentuated paranoia or a genuine fear that compels the unlikely pair of sleuths to discover what is actually happening? Will their homes… show more.

If Indiana Jones was based in Brooklyn and was also an expert at magic and arcane lore, you'd have Piers Knight, the titular character of this book. Although a bit lighter on humor than the other entries here, I found this book to be fun and snappy, and as an additional bonus delves into the real (and weird!) historical factoids about New York City.