Here are 100 books that Jackson Rule fans have personally recommended if you like
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I love romances because the stories always end happily, and also because of the heroes! They are my ideal men—handsome, of course, but always strong and honorable. They always do the right thing, even if it requires hardship and sacrifice, and at the end of the story, when they pledge their love to the heroine, we know that love will be forever. I sold my first book back in 1982, and in every one of my stories I feature this kind of hero.
I love stories where the heroes are facing great challenges. In One Perfect Rose, as the story begins, Stephen Kenyon, Duke of Ashburton, has just learned from his doctor that he has only a short time left to live. Shocked, he runs from his wealthy world and wanders the country as an ordinary man. When he rescues a young boy who had been swept away by a flood, he is embraced by the boy’s family and finds all that he had been missing in his life—the warmth of a family and our heroine, Rosalind. His hidden past and his knowledge of his impending death made this a page-turner for me.
Few romance novels have touched readers as deeply or as lastingly as this classic by New York Times bestselling author Mary Jo Putney. Poignant, passionate, and tender, One Perfect Rose is the story of two mismatched lovers drawn into a fragile, unforgettable union. . .
One Perfect Rose
Stephen Kenyon, the new Duke of Ashburton, has always known exactly what society expected of him. But a doctor's grim diagnosis leaves him longing to experience life as never before. Traveling incognito, he becomes entangled with a wandering theater family and their spirited adopted daughter, Rosalind Jordan. With no time to waste…
I love romances because the stories always end happily, and also because of the heroes! They are my ideal men—handsome, of course, but always strong and honorable. They always do the right thing, even if it requires hardship and sacrifice, and at the end of the story, when they pledge their love to the heroine, we know that love will be forever. I sold my first book back in 1982, and in every one of my stories I feature this kind of hero.
The hero Mitchell Shaw is a Navy SEAL, but as the story begins, he wakes up in a homeless shelter with amnesia. He does have a gun in his boot and money, too, but no clue how he got there. He finds a note that says “Looking forward to meeting you.”—Rebecca Keyes, the Lazy Eight Ranch. He heads for the ranch, hoping it will help him figure out who he really is. What a great hero!
I love romances because the stories always end happily, and also because of the heroes! They are my ideal men—handsome, of course, but always strong and honorable. They always do the right thing, even if it requires hardship and sacrifice, and at the end of the story, when they pledge their love to the heroine, we know that love will be forever. I sold my first book back in 1982, and in every one of my stories I feature this kind of hero.
I got soooo hooked on Julie’s contemporary suspense books. In Heartbreaker, as the story opens, we learn our hero agent Nick Buchanan has just saved a young boy’s life by taking out a serial killer who held him captive. Nick then gets to take some time off for a vacation, and as he’s on the plane waiting to depart, he stops an armed man from trying to free a prisoner another lawman has on the plane. He is definitely the white knight showing up at just the right time. When he meets up with his best friend, he learns a serial killer is after his friend’s sister. I couldn’t wait to see how he was going to protect the heroine, Laurant, from the psychopath and bring him in. This is my kind of hero—courageous, up for anything, never afraid to put his life in danger to right a wrong.
When a serial killer reveals the identity of his next victim--a beautiful woman named Laurant Madden--FBI agent Nick Buchanan steps in to protect her, but quickly finds his mission complicated by his feelings for her. Reissue.
Zombies are not my writer’s passion, family is. I chose the zombie backdrop to showcase the family I wanted to write about at both their best and worst moments. Because when it all comes down to the end of the world, it really doesn’t matter what happened to end it. But who you’re with at the end can make all the difference.
In a list about zombie apocalypse references, this is definitely a quirky entry. But it is important for all writers to read outside of their genre, or they run the risk of becoming generic.
Far more important than the story’s backdrop is the story’s focus. People predominantly care and read about people.
Whether that means writing about people resisting zombies, as is the case with most zombie stories, or writing about zombies doing their best to become human—as seen in Elantris and The Girl With All The Gifts—writers need to know how to tell stories about people.
I don’t write books about zombies, I write books about families. And there is probably no more famous family right now than the Bridgertons (though if I had one more recommendation, it would definitely be Swiss Family Robinson).
By reading books about strong families, I’m better able to translate my own…
From #1 New York Times bestselling author Julia Quinn comes the story of Daphne Bridgerton, in the first of her beloved Regency-set novels featuring the charming, powerful Bridgerton family, now a series created by Shondaland for Netflix.
In the ballrooms and drawing rooms of Regency London, rules abound. From their earliest days, children of aristocrats learn how to address an earl and curtsey before a prince-while other dictates of the ton are unspoken yet universally understood. A proper duke should be imperious and aloof. A young, marriageable lady should be amiable...but not too amiable.…
I’m a scholar of gender and state violence, and I live and work at the US-Mexico border. For the past several years, I’ve worked collaboratively with large teams of Latinx-identified students to study the impacts of US immigration policies on migrants from Mexico and Central America. We realized that even though about half of immigrants are women, around 95% of deportees are men. So, we started to think about how US policies criminalize immigrant men. I became especially interested in how immigration enforcement (at the border and beyond) intersects with mass incarceration. In the list, I pick up books that trace the multinational reach of the carceral apparatus that comes to treat migrants as criminals.
Reuben Jonathan Miller’s book Halfway Home illuminates the ways men get forced to carry prison with them after release, in everything from struggling to find work to being unable to drive a car.
Telling the stories of people he first met as a chaplain at Cook County Jail, Miller walks alongside men as we see the painful and lasting impacts of prison on them and their lives.
Each year, more than half a million Americans are released from prison and join a population of twenty million people who live with a felony record.
Reuben Miller, a chaplain at the Cook County Jail in Chicago and now a sociologist studying mass incarceration, spent years alongside prisoners, ex-prisoners, their friends, and their families to understand the lifelong burden that even a single arrest can entail. What his work revealed is a simple, if overlooked truth: life after incarceration is its own form of prison. The idea that one can serve their debt and return to life as a full-fledge…
I love crime fiction, but the genre can be very much a boys’ club where women are sometimes reduced to femmes fatales or victims who need to be saved. When I look at my bookshelves, I realize how many of the books I’ve read are written by men about men. There’s nothing wrong with stories about men, but I have a lot of strong women in my life, and I’ve learned so much from listening to their perspectives. As a writer, I like pushing myself to try and create strong female characters who find themselves ensnared in a crime and have to figure their way out.
This book grabbed me by the throat and refused to let go.
Jordan Harper does more with suggestion and a few well-crafted sentences than some writers accomplish in an entire novel. When he needs to be brutal, he’s a monster. When he needs to be tender, your eyes sting.
Polly is both a badass and a little girl—I don’t know how Harper pulled that off. And I have never cared so much about a stuffed animal as I have Polly’s teddy bear.
*WINNER OF A 2018 EDGAR AWARD FOR BEST DEBUT NOVEL*
*WINNER OF AN ALEX AWARD FROM THE ALA*
NAMED A BEST BOOK OF 2017 BY St. Louis Post-Dispatch • Booklist
A propulsive, gritty novel about a girl marked for death who must fight and steal to stay alive, learning from the most frightening man she knows—her father.
Eleven-year-old Polly McClusky is shy, too old for the teddy bear she carries with her everywhere, when she is unexpectedly reunited with her father, Nate, fresh out of jail and driving a stolen car. He takes her from the front of her school…
I have been a Francophile for as long as I can remember. Something about France and French literature grabbed me by the heart when I was a young man and continues to do so. I’ve lived in France twice–a year each time–and have written about those experiences in books and essays. It’s 19th-century French literature that especially draws me and has deeply influenced my own writing.
We all know the title. It’s become a record-breaking musical phenomenon. The book is a phenomenon in itself. It was a voyage I took for a few spellbound weeks, and I read it in a stone house in a small village in the South of France. It is a book of great sympathy and grace.
Victor Hugo’s heart is large—at least measured by this story of an escaped prisoner who tries to do good with his life but is pursued relentlessly by a police officer, Javert. I found with this book, as the great writers always show me, that character is all. Hugo drew me into the struggles and losses of his people so ably and memorably that I still think of them years later.
The only completely unabridged paperback edition of Victor Hugo’s masterpiece—a sweeping tale of love, loss, valor, and passion.
Introducing one of the most famous characters in literature, Jean Valjean—the noble peasant imprisoned for stealing a loaf of bread—Les Misérables ranks among the greatest novels of all time. In it, Victor Hugo takes readers deep into the Parisian underworld, immerses them in a battle between good and evil, and carries them to the barricades during the uprising of 1832 with a breathtaking realism that is unsurpassed in modern prose.
As a published author, Debra’s passion for fast-paced, unputdownable novels is unquenchable. She can be ruthless in her criticism, applying the rule, “three strikes and you’re out!” A firm believer that life is too short to read mediocre books, if she isn’t grabbed by chapter 3, she puts the book down and moves on. She wants a book to make her life better, she wants to feel excitement at picking it back up again, and burying herself in the characters and moods, twists and turns, of a great story. Her writing reflects this same trait, if her words won’t keep the reader totally engrossed, then she won’t write them.
Lesley has a beautiful way of engaging the reader, her characters are relatable, many of them will feel like people you already know, your friends, family, maybe even you. The story is captivating and imaginative, yet this book feels real. It could happen in your town; it could happen to you. This book has an intriguing, ‘girl next door’ feel to it.
When single mum Joanna hears a rumour at the school gates, she never intends to pass it on. But one casual comment leads to another and now there's no going back . . .
Rumour has it that a notorious child killer is living under a new identity, in their sleepy little town of Flinstead-on-Sea.
Sally McGowan was just ten years old when she stabbed little Robbie Harris to death forty-eight years ago - no photos of her exist since her release as a young woman.
So who is the supposedly reformed killer who now lives among them? How…
Like many readers, I am drawn to stories of vengeance. Stories of someone seeking revenge have a built-in tension and narrative drive. But as the saying goes, when you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves. Yes, these tales seldom go smoothly. The consequences of this and the violence that ensues are what I wanted to explore in my latest novel, but several books on my shelf make fascinating stories out of this desire for revenge.
None of Guthrie’s characters are anyone you want to get on the wrong side of. Pearce, an ex-con and Edinburgh hard man, may be his most dangerous creation. Guthrie’s black humor is fully displayed in this novel of a man out for blood and bound to get it in ever more inventive ways.
The Scottish writer Guthrie is in danger of falling into obscurity, but several of his other evangelists and I are intent on not letting that happen. This book is a good place to start with his work; if you like it, you will have a world of dark pleasures waiting in his other books.
Has Pearce finally found his match? A time-served Edinburgh hard man, Pearce is still recovering from the recent loss of his mother in a stabbing incident in a post office robbery. He's invited by the dysfunctional Baxter family to protect their pregnant 16-year-old daughter from Wallace, her 26-year-old husband, a man with a penchant for killing family pets. Having found out that the baby's not his, Wallace has sworn vengeance. Pearce declines the job: he's no babysitter. But when Wallace kills Pearce's dog, he goes too far. Now it's personal. It's time to find out who the real hard man…
After living in Europe for nearly 10 years, I’ve spent more time in planes, trains, and cars than I could ever count. I was able to travel more in that time than I ever dreamed possible, making trips ranging from Gibraltar to Romania to the Isle of Skye. Most of my time was spent all around Ireland where I took tour groups around to help them get beyond Blarney and experience the real Ireland.
Travel back in time to 18th century France, then Louisiana in this sweeping historical romance Christy Award-winning novel. This epic story will not only fill your travel void, but also touch your heart with its uplifting story of faith, survival, and redemption. This is a multi-re-read for me because of Green’s masterful writing, making me feel as though I was right there with the characters.
Sweeping Historical Fiction Set at the Edge of the Continent
After being imprisoned and branded for the death of her client, twenty-five-year-old midwife Julianne Chevalier trades her life sentence for exile to the fledgling 1720s French colony of Louisiana, where she hopes to be reunited with her brother, serving there as a soldier. To make the journey, though, women must be married, and Julianne is forced to wed a fellow convict.
When they arrive in New Orleans, there is no news of Benjamin, Julianne's brother, and searching for answers proves dangerous. What is behind the mystery, and does military officer…
