Here are 100 books that Miranda Warning fans have personally recommended if you like
Miranda Warning.
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I love a good, clean mystery/suspense story that's light enough to be escape fiction but has enough heart that I engage with the characters. Let me root for them and watch them grow. Give me hope and a happy ending. Bonus if there are some quirky ones who make me smile or some snappy dialogue. Double bonus if it's Christian fiction with an organic, non-preachy faith element and characters who grow spiritually. Why leave faith out of our fiction if it's part of our lives? I hope you'll make some new imaginary friends in the books I've listed!
I can't resist a good pun, so this book had me with the title. I found plenty to make me grin in the middle of the action, and I couldn't help rooting for Serena as she tried to prove herself on the job as a new FBI field agent and resist her mother's matchmaking.
I love a story where a quirky support character adds complications, and Serena's Aunt Martha is a hoot. And I like the hint of a coming romance, although I like both men in Serena's life and don't want to see either of them hurt.
Serena Jones has a passion for recovering lost and stolen art--one that's surpassed only by her zeal to uncover the truth about the art thief who murdered her grandfather. She's joined the FBI Art Crime Team with the secret hope that one of her cases will lead to his killer. Now, despite her mother's pleas to do something safer--like get married--Serena's learning how to go undercover to catch thieves and black market traders.
When a local museum discovers an irreplaceable Monet missing, Jones leaps into action. The clues point in different directions, and her boss orders her to cease investigating…
I love a good, clean mystery/suspense story that's light enough to be escape fiction but has enough heart that I engage with the characters. Let me root for them and watch them grow. Give me hope and a happy ending. Bonus if there are some quirky ones who make me smile or some snappy dialogue. Double bonus if it's Christian fiction with an organic, non-preachy faith element and characters who grow spiritually. Why leave faith out of our fiction if it's part of our lives? I hope you'll make some new imaginary friends in the books I've listed!
How could I not love this spry elderly widow who self-describes as an "LOL" ("Little Old Lady")? Especially when she pulls a solo midnight stakeout after the police won't follow her advice? I love how Ivy turns a senior's apparent "invisibility" to society into a strength—and a crime-fighting attribute.
Ivy's struggle to find her place in the aging process, her strong friendships, and her "mutant curiosity gene" appeal to my heart.
She's not your average crime fighter! Ivy Malone has a curiosity that sometimes gets her into trouble, and it's only aggravated by her discovery that she can easily escape the public eye. So when vandals romp through the local cemetery, she takes advantage of her newfound anonymity and its unforeseen advantages as she launches her own unofficial investigation. Despite her oddball humor and unconventional snooping, Ivy soon becomes discouraged by her failure to turn up any solid clues. And after Ivy witnesses something ominous and unexplained, she can't resist putting her investigative powers to work again. Even the authorities' attempts…
I love a good, clean mystery/suspense story that's light enough to be escape fiction but has enough heart that I engage with the characters. Let me root for them and watch them grow. Give me hope and a happy ending. Bonus if there are some quirky ones who make me smile or some snappy dialogue. Double bonus if it's Christian fiction with an organic, non-preachy faith element and characters who grow spiritually. Why leave faith out of our fiction if it's part of our lives? I hope you'll make some new imaginary friends in the books I've listed!
I held my breath for some of Desiree's daring cat-burglar-type acts. I found this one a fun, fast ride, but again, the character makes it work for me. I love how, in the middle of her drive to do the right thing, Desiree is real enough to have self-doubts and struggle with applying faith to life.
Her sense of humor adds that little extra to satisfy me, and I like the attraction that grows between her and the FBI agent who appears at the most inconvenient times.
Surrounded by no good options, much less safe ones, Desiree Jacobs knows that no matter what she must protect her father's reputation and his legacy.
If Desiree Jacobs knows anything, it’s art. Her father, whose security company is internationally renowned, taught her everything he knew. Most of all, he taught her about honor. Integrity. Faith. So surely God will forgive her for despising the one man--Special Agent Tony Lucano, who's determined to destroy her father’s good name?
Agent Lucano knows that Hiram Jacobs is an art thief. But what he can’t figure out is Desiree. Is she an innocent victim…or…
I love a good, clean mystery/suspense story that's light enough to be escape fiction but has enough heart that I engage with the characters. Let me root for them and watch them grow. Give me hope and a happy ending. Bonus if there are some quirky ones who make me smile or some snappy dialogue. Double bonus if it's Christian fiction with an organic, non-preachy faith element and characters who grow spiritually. Why leave faith out of our fiction if it's part of our lives? I hope you'll make some new imaginary friends in the books I've listed!
I love how nothing fazes Nicole, even when she gets into awkward situations. Her novelty socks (so not lawyerly) and occasional geeky lines make me smile, and I like the friends she finds in the middle of trying to prove—and solve—her uncle's murder.
I always take sides with characters whose parents have manipulated their life's path, so I feel Nicole's conflict over her profession and the distance it causes within her family. She comes into this story feeling like a failure, and I want to see her succeed. Plus, I like the potential for romance with the county medical examiner.
**Mystery/Cozy Gold Medalist in the 2018 IPPY Awards**
**Grand Prize Winner of the 2018 Writer's Digest Ebook Awards**
Sometimes the truth can be a sticky thing…
Nicole Fitzhenry-Dawes feels like she’s the only failure amid a family of high achievers. Her last serious boyfriend turned out to be married and her career as a criminal defense attorney is in tatters. When her uncle passes away and leaves her his maple syrup farm in Michigan, she thinks it might be time for a career change—hopefully one that allows her to stay as far away from murderers and liars as possible.
I’m a certified crime junkie beginning with Helter Skelter and, more recently, FBI profiler Jack Douglas’ Mindhunter. This genre is a passion, but here’s the kicker, I started my writing journey in Western historical romance. I know, right? Then I had this wild idea: a psychologist who’s got a secret – her mother is a notorious serial killer on death row, and someone is imitating her crimes. Just like that A Killer’s Daughter was born! Now I’m always reading and listening to thrillers and true crime podcasts. Check out my newsletter to see what’s grabbing me.
I attended an author event at the coolest bookstore in Tampa in The Exchange building, and Lisa Unger was being interviewed by Colette Bancroft, the book editor for the Tampa Times.
Well, the book sounded wonderful, and it really is. The heroine in this story is smart, clever, and managed to keep one step ahead of the unusual, troubled boy she is hired to babysit. I loved this story and now have a signed copy on my keeper shelf.
A Best Book Nominee in the Goodreads Choice Awards
A CBC Morning Show Top Book Pick
An Amazon Best Book of the Month
An Indie Next Best Books of the Month Pick
"A brisk, crafty and fascinating psychological thriller... In The Blood is a complex mosaic as well, one that's tricky, arresting and meaningful." (The Washington Post)
Liar, liar, pants on fire . . .
College senior Lana Granger has told so many lies about her…
My PhD work focused on horror fiction and film, and I spent ten years teaching about horror (I even included two of my recommended books in courses). The academic stuff is more a symptom than a cause of my passion for the scary. I’ve been a horror freak forever, becoming interested in vampires by age four, reading Stephen King and writing stories to frighten classmates by age nine, and putting a poster of Freddy Krueger on my wall at age ten. Extremes of fiction take me away from extremes of real life, which are much harder to handle.
I’ve been blown away by the high quality in a lot of 21st-century splatterpunk/hardcore/extreme horror, but nobody’s extremes have impressed me quite like Wrath James White’s.
I love the insane magic he works with a deceptively simple premise: a young man can resurrect people who forget the circumstances of the deaths and return, but he’s a bad young man. The result is a blend of classic Gothic tropes related to a woman terrorized by a powerful man combined with just about every kind of physical violation imaginable.
I respect White’s gross-outs, but more than that, I respect the bleakness, the deep, deep horror of the premise taken so far in such a bad way.
Dale McCarthy has a unique and miraculous ability. He can bring the dead back to life, though the resurrected have no memory of their deaths. But not every miracle comes from God, and not every healer is a saint.
Ever since her new neighbor moved in, Sarah Lincoln has been having terrible nightmares. Last night she dreamed she and her husband were brutally murdered in their beds. This morning she found bloody sheets in the laundry and bloodstains on her mattress. And the nightmare is the same, night after night after night. With no one prepared…
I'm a professor of history at the Graduate Center and Queens College at the City University of New York, where I'm also director of the Irish Studies program and the MA program in Biography and Memoir. My specialty, covered in five books that I’ve authored or co-edited, is English and Irish history in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; my new book represents the culmination of a decade’s research devoted to Ireland. In addition to teaching British and Irish history, I offer more unusual and wide-ranging classes including the history of the devil, the history of crime and punishment, and the history of the body. My life is divided between New York City and mid-coast Maine.
The 1840 burial of Napoleon’s remains in the Invalides coincided with the psychiatric admission of fourteen men who claimed they were the real Napoleon, and he lived on yet. A number of Napoleons—or those claiming to be Napoleon’s son—had also emerged during the emperor’s own lifetime, suffering from the recently identified “delusions of grandeur” diagnosis.
Murat offers a larger study of madness and asylums in nineteenth-century France, and the impact of political events, including the French Revolution and the Terror, on psychiatric patients and doctors. Her chapter on “madhouse Napoleons” is particularly intriguing, as it reveals how the ghosts of powerful historical leaders can infiltrate the minds of the disturbed. For me, the book also raises questions about memory and psychology more generally, about why the mad latched onto Napoleon specifically, and how history or historical figures can live on in surprising places.
The Man who thought he was Napoleon is built around a bizarre historical event and an off-hand challenge. The event? In December 1840, nearly twenty years after his death, the remains of Napoleon were returned to Paris for burial - and the next day, the director of a Paris hospital for the insane admitted fourteen men who claimed to be Napoleon. The challenge, meanwhile, is the claim by great French psychiatrist Jean-Etienne Dominique Esquirol (1772-1840) that he could recount the history of France through asylum registries. From those two components, Laure Murat embarks on an exploration of the surprising relationship…
A lifelong horror fan, I have always been fascinated by haunted landscapes and creepy buildings. My childhood in the Midlands of England prepared me for my career as a horror writer and filmmaker with its abundance of spooky ruins and foggy canal paths. I have since explored ancient sites all across the U.K. and Europe and my novels are inspired by these field trips into the uncanny, where the contemporary every day rubs shoulders with the ancient and occult. Places become characters in their own right in my work and I think this list of books celebrates that. I hope you find them as disturbing and thought-provoking as I have.
I once worked on a film shoot at the infamous Friern Barnet Asylum in London, an imposing building that boasts the longest corridor in Europe at over a third of a mile long. It was my job to lock up after filming was over each night, and to do so, I had to walk the long corridor with just a flashlight for company… and the ghosts rumoured to haunt the building! I have never forgotten the feeling of dread and despair in that place, and my heart went out to the patients who were isolated in the creepy basement wards. Barbara Taylor gives an inside perspective on this fearsome institution in her book, which is both an achingly honest account of mental illness and addiction, and a critique of community care.
The Last Asylum is Barbara Taylor's haunting memoir of her journey through the UK mental health system.
A RADIO 4 BOOK OF THE WEEK
SHORTLISTED FOR THE RBC TAYLOR PRIZE
In July 1988, Barbara Taylor, then an acclaimed young historian, was admitted to what had once been England's largest psychiatric institution: Colney Hatch Lunatic Asylum, later known as Friern Hospital.
This searingly honest, thought-provoking and beautifully written memoir is the story of the author's madness years, set inside the wider story of the death of the asylum system in the twentieth century. It is a meditation on her own experience…
I understand how stressful it is to be a teenager today. And we’re talking stress across a variety of fronts, from academics to personal matters and everything in between. In my book on college admissions, I advise high schoolers to use data so they can get the most value from their university education as well as reduce the anxiety of what can be an overwhelming process. In my book recommendations, I’ve chosen novels the teenaged me thought honestly depicted the emotional challenges teenagers face and how those challenges are resolved. Whether it be applying to college or developing relationships, the key is to be authentic in who you are!
I would say this book, which delves into the complexities of mental illness, was way ahead of its time. Even as a teenager, I understood the deftness of using two simple words in the title to clearly illustrate the complexities of extreme moods.
The author sets this story in a suburban high school, which I could relate to, as a group of friends witness the increasingly erratic behavior of one of their classmates, Lisa. In deciding how to help, each friend must confront her own fears and prejudices.
Even though the girls often don’t know what to do, I loved how steadfastly supportive and loyal they remained. As a result, the book ends up being less about mental illness and more about how empathy and compassion can overcome the stigma surrounding it.
Hailed as a "work of art" by the New York Times, this bestselling classic brings a deft touch and understanding spirit to the story of a teenage girl's descent into madness-and the three friends who are determined to walk with her where adults fear to tread.
I’ve always been attracted to the overlooked, the obscure, the forbidden. Maybe it’s as simple as the fact I grew up in a time when it seemed natural to rebel against norms. Or maybe it’s that I inherited an oddball gene from some ancient ancestor. Anyway, it led me to interesting adventures—hanging out with a crew of gun runners in eastern Turkey—and interesting career choices—strike organizer, private detective, etc. It also shaped my reading and my writing. I read everything, but I’m particularly drawn to the quirky—Grendel, the fiction of Christine Rivera Garza for instance. And in my writing too: Lynerkim, the protagonist of my novella, is undoubtedly an odd duck.
If you need inspiration to write strange stories, then read the Brazilian Machado de Assis. In his photos he looks like a prim and proper gentleman, giving no hint he wrote some of the whackiest fiction you’ll ever encounter—for example, one story is told from the perspective of a needle. The Alienist is a favorite. Bacamarte, a man devoted to science, opens an insane asylum in the town of Itaguaí, taking in the mentally ill. But his scientific mind leads him to the inevitable conclusion that he must also include healthy people who, according to his diagnosis, are about to go crazy. Soon, his asylum, Casa Verdi, accommodates the entire town. Then, in the ending of the story… Well, you’ll have to read it yourself to find out.
A classic work of literature by “the greatest author ever produced in Latin America.” (Susan Sontag)
Brilliant physician Simão Bacamarte sacrifices a prestigious career to return home and dedicate himself to the budding field of psychology. Bacamarte opens the first asylum in Brazil hoping to crown himself and his hometown with “imperishable laurels.” But the doctor begins to see signs of insanity in more and more of his neighbors. . . .
With dark humor and sparse prose, The Alienist lets the reader ponder who is really crazy.
