Fans pick 79 books like Scene of the Crime

This will be one of my more controversial picks – there are plenty of people who disagree with Campbell as a folklorist, a mythographer, and with his depiction of the Hero’s Journey. But, what is important about Campbell is his exploration of why the elements that appear in stories have the impact they do on our psyche, and how they fit together. One may not agree with all of Campbell’s conclusions, but I don’t think there’s a writer out there who won’t benefit from his exploration of the subject. I know I did.

I stumbled upon this one in a library. Yes, they still have things called Libraries. And this book is a little ripper if you are writing fiction. 

If you have ever attempted to write a novel, you would have no doubt found yourself saying things like his heart was racing; he held his breath, a shiver ran up his spine, blah, blah, blah. It’s not until you go back through your manuscript that you realize how many times you have used the same descriptions. Over and over and over again. 

This little gem of a book is jam-packed with alternatives. It offers brilliant tips on expressing the same emotions and feelings with originality and without repetition.

I sold three novels before I found this book, and it transformed how I think about writing. If you want to write stories that grab your readers by the throat and makes them want more, this is the book for you.  Swain’s basic premise is simple: fiction is movement, action, and reaction. He deduces from this specific, actionable ways to construct compelling sentences that turn movement to action, action to scenes, and scenes to stories. Swain’s influence on screenwriting is everywhere, from The Rockford Files to The Mandalorian. His influence on contemporary fiction is just as pervasive. His ideas about “motivation reaction units” and “scenes/sequel pairs” are now in many “how-to” books, but no one describes them better than the man who invented them.   

I’m a mathematician. Mathematicians start with basic ideas—axioms and definitions—and use logic to deduce magical things called theorems. When I decided I wanted to write fiction, I looked for books on writing. I found lots of good books, but they left my mathematical brain unsatisfied. Then I found Gardner’s book. Gardner’s genius is that he provides a theory of fiction, a framework for understanding what makes writing come alive. Reading Gardner, I saw at once the difference between, say, Edgar Allen Poe and Stephen King. They’re both geniuses, to be sure, but King’s writing draws you into his fictional worlds in ways Poe’s never does. The underlying theory, the fictional dream, makes all the difference. The fictional dream is the secret to compelling writing.

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.

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.

As the daughter of a mom who suffered a mental breakdown shortly after my birth, I have always been strongly interested in stories of mothers who experience emotional difficulties following the births of their children. In this book, a young woman abandons her infant in a hospital shortly after giving birth and disappears.

Her husband attributes her behavior to postpartum psychosis, a malady that she’s been monitored for throughout her pregnancy, given her own mother’s struggles with the disorder. But is that what really led to the mom’s sudden disappearance? Told in multiple viewpoints, it’s unclear who is telling the truth about what happened to the young mother. I found the plot twist at the end of this propulsive tale especially satisfying. 

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.

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.