66 books like None of This is True

This is a psychological thriller with a difference. This story appears to be one thing and is, in fact, something else. Following the path of a struggling working mother with post-natal depression, we see the world through her paranoid eyes.

What I really enjoyed about this book is the unexpected twists and turns. Is she really imagining this, or did she see that little girl on the platform? It makes you question everything, including the motives of those surrounding the main character (always a good thing!). It is a masterpiece of misdirection and an unreliable narrator.

I couldn't get enough of the character, Rocco Schiavone, from the TV series Ice Cold Murders, so I decided to check out the original novels by Antonio Manzini. They are equally good—or better.  Rocco is a police inspector from Rome who gets transferred to Aosta, an alpine ski resort town. In Black Run, Rocco instructs his provincial team in big-city police techniques, including cutting corners and avoiding superiors. He contrives useless errands to get his two dumbest cops out of the office. And he introduces his classification of Things That Are a Pain in the Ass, with "sand in your clams" at Level Seven and "unsolved homicide" at Level 10. Black Run begins on the slopes, at Level 10, with the discovery of an unidentified corpse mangled by a snowcat.

I love a great mystery and I adore fantastic characters.

That’s why A Spoonful of Murder is so high on my list. It’s cozy crime with attitude. Having a detective story that doesn’t feature any actual detectives is the challenge for all cozy crime writers.

And J.M. Hall does this with such verve, vigour, and lightness of touch that you find it impossible not to fall in love with Liz, Pat, and Thelma.

There’s a wonderful fraternity amongst us cozy crime writers and I’m very lucky to count Mr. Hall as a friend. He makes me want to be a better author, just to keep up with him!

In this gripping courtroom drama, an explosion in Miracle Creek, Virginia, destroys the business of South Korean immigrants Pak and Young Yoo and puts their daughter Mary into a monthslong coma. As arguments mount against the woman accused of starting the fire, Young struggles with a question many immigrants must face. Maybe she shouldn’t have brought her child to the US, where Mary struggles as a teenager and where she was almost killed. The tension between the two generations resonated with me as a parent and immigrant. As Young hopes to discover who caused the explosion that killed two other people, she must also help Mary imagine a future in their adoptive country.

Just about any of Leonard’s several dozen suspense novels could have a top spot in this reckoning, including the better known Get Shorty, Freaky Deaky, and Glitz. My vote for the best goes, however, to Killshot, his dark, deftly plotted, highly comedic 1989 thriller about two bumbling killers and a ballsy middle-aged married couple the killers mistake for easy marks. Armand Degas, a soulful Ojibway known as the Blackbird, has grown tired of being a hit man for the Detroit mob. He’s befriended by a moronic thug named Richie Nix, whose bucket list includes robbing a bank in every state. When they decide that Carmen, a real estate agent, and her steelworker husband Wayne Colson hold the keys to a fortune, they learn that, like the Bible says, the wages of sin is death.  

As I’d ended up enjoying Eeny Meeny I didn’t hesitate to pick up The Players.

Following a similar vein of psychological manipulation and exploitation of secrets, the game in this novel refers to a series of dangerous activities orchestrated by ‘The Host’ who carefully chooses two ‘players’ to fight to the death. And if that’s not twisted enough, the fights are posted to social media. This gives a modern edge to the novel and plays on fears about the far-reaching implications of the internet.

I felt a sense of unease all the way through and particularly enjoyed the underlying dilemma of whether you would be able to live with the guilt of killing someone to protect your family or make the decision to sacrifice yourself for another’s sake.

Charting the interactions of various low-life characters in a stream-of-consciousness collage, tracing the city’s restless pace, Berlin Alexanderplatz, a novel by Alfred Döblin, published in 1929, mines the underbelly of the seething metropolis bursting at the seams. Considered by many to be one of the modern masterpieces of 20th-century literature, the novel follows the peregrinations of Franz Biberkopf, a pimp just out of prison, and his interactions with his erstwhile love interests and various shady associates. Döblin presents his protagonist as a kind of Everyman. I swear I encountered Biberkopf’s reincarnation in a homeless derelict crooning the German version of Sinatra’s “I Did it My Way” at an outdoor karaoke arena.  

Reacher is dedicated to his “family” 5000%. Nothing else matters. Nothing. He is an incredibly simple and driven character who cannot resonate with the world around him nor give a moment to care that he does not. He is. That is all. Family is his team and, in this case, one actual family member. All are on equal footing.

While most details from books fade from my memory, this book (read when it first came out and eons before the TV show) is etched into my memory completely. The characters, the places, the fights, the sights and smells. I fell for Reacher’s plight and his steadfast mission to prove his innocence. My favorite image is hobo Reacher sleeping wherever and thinking nothing strange in that.

A masterful book about a tough subject.

Separated from her young son, Romy Hall is serving two consecutive life sentences for killing a customer from the Mars Room, a strip club where she’d been dancing. Brilliantly written with compassion and dry, dark humor, the book explores Romy’s relationships with her fellow prisoners and the despair, dangers, and absurdities of life behind bars.

I loved this novel’s gritty texture, its sentences, its characters, and how it forced me to think more deeply about why and how we incarcerate people. The final sequence in Muir Woods is heart-pounding, wondrous, devastating, and strangely hopeful.

This is a less sophisticated mystery than the other four but doesn’t suffer for that reason.

Mickie Mckinney is a schoolboy detective and the setting is a school. I like the conceit that his office is in a cupboard under the stairs. The crimes are not sophisticated, which will suit some readers, and the humour is good.