15 books like Murder on the Dance Floor

Having lived as an expat for thirteen years, the title immediately grabbed me. I’ve since read all of Chris Pavone’s books.

Kate moved to Luxembourg for her husband’s job and is trying to settle into her role as a housewife, but a series of strange events make her wonder whether her past life in an unconventional career is catching up with her.

I related to Kate’s struggles of leaving a job she loved to focus on family, both the positives and negatives (minus the life-threatening danger). When I left my career, I started writing to create a portable job I could take with me as we traveled the world for my husband’s work, so I completely understood Kate’s need to find purpose in her life.

I am Australian, and while I haven’t been to Newcastle, the atmospheric bushland, venomous snakes, and stunning but treacherous coastline made me feel right at home. This is Lee Christine’s hometown, and her love and respect for the land are right there on the page.

Layer in a detective with a complicated past, a journalist with a connection to the case, a dead judge, and missing lawyers, and Lee has created a wonderful blend of intrigue, scandal, and budding romance.

I enjoy mysteries with well-developed characters who make me care about their personal lives as well as wanting to solve the case, and Lee achieved this.

I lived in Lagos for four and a half years, so a mystery in Nigeria grabbed my attention right away. Vanessa’s descriptions are so vivid that I was transported back there on the page.

I loved the insight into the lives of the Nigerwives—women from other countries married to Nigerian men. The power dynamics within the family were fascinating, and even as I wanted to know what happened to the missing Nigerwife, I was just as intrigued by the cultural insights.

I loved this book because, well, Paris—what’s not to love?—and at a micro level, the setting is an apartment with attics, spyholes, and lots of stairs. I’ve always wanted to live in a house with a hidden doorway, and this was exactly that kind of place.

Jess goes to the apartment to find her half-brother but instead finds a bunch of creepy inhabitants who seem reluctant to tell her where he is. Lucy’s novels feel like modern-day Agatha Christies, with a locked-room vibe and defined set of suspects, and this is no exception, right up my alley.

Discount Armageddon is the first of the InCryptid novels.

The Price family comes from a long line of monster hunters, but a few generations back, they decided they didn’t agree with the prevailing definition of “monster.” Now they’re dedicated to protecting the cryptid community—as long as it’s not chowing down on the neighbors.

I love this universe because there’s such a wide variety of characters that are each convinced that their way is the right way. Sometimes you never quite know whose side someone will come down on. Discount Armageddon introduces us to Verity Price.

Verity is tough, resourceful, and yeah—kinda selfish at times. She’s no goody-two-shoes, but she does a lot of good, just the same.

Darvas’s book How I Made 2 Million In The Stock Market wasn’t the first book I read, but it was the one that gave me the biggest confidence boost when I was trading part-time. 

Darvas was a professional ballroom dancer who taught himself how to trade part-time back in the 1950s. Back then there was no internet, he drew his charts by hand, and transaction fees were over $100 in today’s money. 

He saw not being glued to the market all day as his advantage and he leveraged it. He even threatened his broker not to call him in the middle of the day. He did all of his work at night and on weekends. 

This book reads like a novel. If you’re looking for inspiration, and a basic philosophy that can still work today, this is it!

Kestrel’s father is the fierce general who won the Herran War and enslaved its people. When she buys a Herrani house slave named Arin at the market, Kestrel gets more than she bargained for – a challenge to her privileged, sheltered life, an epic love, and a part in the revolution. This is the first in the trilogy, and it is a genuine pleasure to watch Kestrel, from the beginning a character with an independent streak, navigate impossible choices as she grows into the person she wants to be. A lush and detailed world full of intrigue, politics, and gripping romance. 

Maddison weaves varied measures into a history of GDP, population, and perforce GDP per capita of the world and its regions and of countries as the data allow, going back to ‘year 0’ (the year that’s not between 1 BC and 1 AD).

His effort is continued by the Maddison Project.

Careful measurement could be said to differentiate the scientific from the discursive disciplines.

I must have read a hundred books about story structure over the years. Somehow, perhaps because of some story-related blind spot on my part, none of them ever seemed to stick.

My problem was always the middle. Middles can sag. It seems that a story's interior becomes little more than the wasteland a protagonist must traverse to get from the mystery of a beginning to the ultimate challenge of an ending.

Yorke's Into The Woods celebrates the middle. He reminds us that the essential crux of a story lies in its midpoint. Right at the heart of an effective story, he argues, lies a fundamental transformation, a change so great that the protagonist emerges with new powers into a new world.

Furthermore, by analysing stories in five acts rather than three, he allows for an elegant symmetry in which the first and fifth, second, and fourth acts mirror one another.… show more.

Big data can be beautiful and visualisations make for a wonderful coffee-table book. In Information is Beautiful, David McCandless turns dry-as-dust data into pop art to show the kind of world we live in, linking politics to life expectancy, women’s education to GDP growth, and more. Through colourful graphics, we get vivid and novel perspectives on current obsessions, from maps of cliches to the most fashionable colours. A testament to how the power of big data comes from being able to distill information to reveal hidden patterns and discern trends.