Here are 100 books that Shadow Woman fans have personally recommended if you like
Shadow Woman.
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I am a survivor. Whether flaming engines on a plane, a hurricane, or breast cancer, I have made many unusual journeys. The way I see it, I am also a writer, and God keeps giving me material for my adventure novels. Of course, I’m also a reader and could fill this page with more than five recommendations. Hopefully, you’ll want to read one of these awesome books. I guarantee they will make you escape reality.
I love any book written by Carl Hiaasen for the simple fact that he’s not boring, and of course, his writing, though somewhat politically incorrect, makes me laugh. I can forget about everything when reading one of his books.
In this novel, there’s a twist that the bad guy doesn’t think about when he pushes his wife off a cruise ship. The book is seriously hilarious. If you want to disappear into some Floridian madness, you’ll want to read this book.
Joey Perrone is a woman with a mission. She's just been pushed overboard from a cruise liner by Chaz, her scumbag husband, and survived to tell the tale. But rather than reporting him to the police, she decides to stay dead and - with a little help from her friends and a few of Chaz's enemies - instead of getting mad, she's going to get even.
Filled with a host of endearingly offbeat characters, and a narrative that is hilarious, romantic and thought-provoking by turns, Skinny Dip takes us on a journey through the warped politics of Southern Florida and…
I grew up in a family of strong women, and have always been drawn to women with brains and a sense of humor. When I worked in theater as an actor, director, and designer, my favorite stage manager and designers were women because they looked at the production challenges from a different angle than mine, so we both learned something while coming up with the best possible ideas and solutions. I can’t stand fluffy “victim” females. The women in my stories are always looking for a better way and a better world. Both my detective series feature several strong, resourceful women that complement the male detective, adding humor and insight, and—I hope—more humanity.
Although it’s 100 years old, The Bat ages remarkably well with a mysterious stranger, a tough detective, a missing fortune, and an indomitable “old lady,” Cornelia Van Gorder, who rents the house where all these characters come together and where death and menace hover nearby. The book, later a play, and later still filmed twice, has humor, suspense, romance, and a surprise twisty ending that should satisfy any mystery reader.
For months, the city has lived in fear of the Bat. A master criminal hindered by neither scruple nor fear, he has stolen over one million dollars and left at least six men dead. The police are helpless, the newspapers know nothing—even the key figures of the city's underworld have no clue as to the identity of the Bat. He is a living embodiment of death itself, and he is coming to the countryside. There, he will encounter the only person who can stop him: adventurous sixty-five-year-old spinster Cornelia Van Gorder. Last in a long line of New York society…
I have always had a passion for anything crime fiction—books, movies, podcasts, or TV shows. It didn’t matter. I loved it all. It was probably because I grew up in a family with six police officers that seldom talked about anything unrelated to policing. I was like a sponge and picked up some terminology and learned about different police procedures they would discuss. There was rarely a family gathering that didn’t have some type of story or anecdote being shared by each of them and I always found myself being drawn right in. For those reasons, I fell in love with trying to figure out the who’s, how’s and why’s of any story.
Kathy Mallory is a character unlike any other. Kathy was a child of the streets who had the good fortune of being adopted into the loving home of a police officer who saw her brilliance and resourcefulness even at a young age. Years later, Kathy has become an NYPD officer who brings justice to victims through her own sense of right and wrong. She is a street-hardened, lone wolf who doesn’t stop until she gets what she wants. I love the complexity of this tough-as-nails female officer who bends all the rules in her pursuit of justice. This book is so well written I immediately read every book I could find by this author.
Jonathan Kellerman says Mallory's Oracle is "a joy." Nelson DeMille and other advance readers have called it "truly amazing, " "a classic" with "immense appeal." It is all of that, and more: a stunning debut novel about a web of unsolved murders in New York's Gramercy Park and the singular woman who makes them her obsession.
At its center is Kathleen Mallory, an extraordinary wild child turned New York City policewoman. Adopted off the streets as a little girl by a police inspector and his wife, she is still not altogether civilized now that she is a sergeant in the…
I grew up in a family of strong women, and have always been drawn to women with brains and a sense of humor. When I worked in theater as an actor, director, and designer, my favorite stage manager and designers were women because they looked at the production challenges from a different angle than mine, so we both learned something while coming up with the best possible ideas and solutions. I can’t stand fluffy “victim” females. The women in my stories are always looking for a better way and a better world. Both my detective series feature several strong, resourceful women that complement the male detective, adding humor and insight, and—I hope—more humanity.
Doctor Sarah Linton, the star of an earlier series before this one, is now a medical examiner and her partner is Will Trent of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. When a group of domestic terrorists and survivalists bomb two hospitals and the office of the Center for Disease Control, Sarah rushes to the scene to help. The group kidnaps her and she’s forced into a male-dominated commune where she has to rely on her wits and her acting skills to survive, while trying to get word out to Will and his colleagues where the group is hiding…hopefully, before they strike again to unleash an environmental disaster that will kill millions of people.
It begins with an abduction. The routine of a family shopping trip is shattered when Michelle Spivey is snatched as she leaves the mall with her young daughter. The police search for her, her partner pleads for her release, but in the end...they find nothing. It's as if she disappeared into thin air.
A month later, on a sleepy Sunday afternoon, medical examiner Sara Linton is at lunch with her boyfriend Will Trent, an agent with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. But the serenity of the summer's day is broken by the wail of…
The author of biographies, histories, and true crime books, Howard Sounes is best-known for Down the Highway: The Life of Bob Dylan, now in an updated edition; Charles Bukowski: Locked in the Arms of a Crazy Life; and Fred & Rose, the bestselling story of married English serial killers Fred and Rose West. Other books include Amy, 27, Seventies, Heist, and biographies of Paul McCartney and Lou Reed.
A doctor interviews an elderly Japanese yakuza (gangster) as he recalls his life. Adhering to his own criminal code, the yakuza exudes a wayward nobility as he discusses the choices he made. Bob Dylan saw romance in this and quoted from the yakuza’s dialogue on his album, Love and Theft.
This is the true story, as told to the doctor who looked after him just before he died, of the life of one of the last traditional yakuza in Japan. It wasn't a good' life, in either sense of the word, but it was an adventurous one; and the tale he has to tell presents an honest and oddly attractive picture of an insider in that separate, unofficial world. In his low, hoarse voice, he describes the random events that led the son of a prosperous country shopkeeper to become a member, and ultimately the leader, of a gang organizing…
Early in my career, I attended a writer’s conference in southern Louisiana. During a discussion of the best-selling Louisiana-based novels of Vermont-born author Francis Parkinson Keyes, a local historian said with great ire, “That woman came down here and picked our brains for her books!” As a follower of my state’s incredible past, I immediately saw the attraction. Since then, I’ve written more than 65 historical and contemporary novels, most set in New Orleans and broader Louisiana. Hours have been spent at the famed Historic New Orleans Collection, talking to people and walking the streets of the French Quarter—and, of course, collecting a library of famous Louisiana histories.
It was in Asbury’s social history of the French Quarter that I first read about the deadly yet intriguing fencing masters of old New Orleans that swagger through my own series.
I was also fascinated by the richly painted French and Spanish culture from the colonial period, the daily life among the French Creole elite in the city, the unique courting and marriage customs, male and female amusements, education, religious observances, and much more.
In addition, the book is famous, or infamous, for its gritty details of the city's underworld at that time, from cutthroat barrel houses and gambling dens to the names of famous madams and the locations of their brothels in the red-light district known as Storyville.
Home to the notorious "Blue Book," which listed the names and addresses of every prostitute living in the city, New Orleans's infamous red-light district gained a reputation as one of the most raucous in the world. But the New Orleans underworld consisted of much more than the local bordellos. It was also well known as the early gambling capital of the United States, and sported one of the most violent records of street crime in the country. In The French Quarter, Herbert Asbury, author of The Gangs of New York, chronicles this rather immense underbelly of "The Big Easy." From…
Growing up in a strait-laced Southern family, I was always fascinated with casinos. In my twenties on a summer hiatus from teaching in North Carolina, I drove to California and became a dealer at Caesars in Lake Tahoe. My mother highly disapproved of my working in a casino, "a place so bad it has 'sin' in the middle." Eventually, I returned east to take a hi-tech job in Boston. I also began working on my MFA in writing at Emerson. My characters were breathed into life from my years in the gambling industry. You learn a lot about the human personality when you watch thousands of people from behind the felt of a blackjack table.
Standing behind the table, blackjack dealers are always on the lookout for card counters, find one and they are booted out. Can a team from M.I.T. really break the casino? Card counting is all in the math and as he and his fellow team members hit Vegas they learn how to bet on the count. I think this book really shines when he goes behind the scenes to explore the deceptions the team went through to try to deceive the casino. Well, they can for a while and it’s fun to follow them on their rise and fall.
The #1 national bestseller, now a major motion picture, 21—the amazing inside story about a gambling ring of M.I.T. students who beat the system in Vegas—and lived to tell how.
Robin Hood meets the Rat Pack when the best and the brightest of M.I.T.’s math students and engineers take up blackjack under the guidance of an eccentric mastermind. Their small blackjack club develops from an experiment in counting cards on M.I.T.’s campus into a ring of card savants with a system for playing large and winning big. In less than two years they take some of the world’s most sophisticated…
I was a mailman when I became obsessed with card counting at blackjack. Not having enough money to play at a pro level, I decided to sell a mathematical formula I’d devised for evaluating games and systems. I offered it for sale through gambling newsletters at $100. I immediately had big sales because no one had ever seen a method for estimating card counters’ win rates. I got letters from college math professors asking me how I’d come up with the math. So, I started my own blackjack newsletter where I published my discoveries. I was inducted into the Blackjack Hall of Fame in 2002 and soon had big investors funding my play.
Really fun true stories about six gambling legends. Titanic Thompson never entered an official PGA event, yet made more money playing golf than most of the top pros in his era, often by beating the famous pros at their own game. Minnesota Fats never won a major pool tournament, but made so much money traveling from city to city to hustle the local pool sharks he became a legend in the Midwest pool halls. Johnny Moss cut his gambling teeth in illegal poker games in Texas and Oklahoma, then went on to win the first two World Series of Poker championships in 1970 and 1971, winning nine WSOP bracelets in total, his last one in 1988 at the age of 81, making him the oldest WSOP bracelet winner ever.
In this classic book, Jon Bradshaw singled out from the world of full-time gamblers six men who consistently win - the men who year after year, deal after deal and proposition after proposition come away with their pockets filled and their sense of infallibility intact.
Bradshaw follows three legendary poker players - Johnny Moss, Pug Pearson, and Titanic Thompson; tennis player Bobby Riggs; pool player Minnesota Fats and backgammon player Tim Holland. His evocation of ambience and his dramatic description of the games themselves are fascinating but Bradshaw also deftly probes their minds and hearts as he attempts to define…
I have been studying Celtic myth and history since I was in college and took a class on Arthurian literature. Drawing heavily from Irish and Welsh lore to build my “land beyond the veil” known as the Five Quarters, I have always been intrigued by the Celtic view of the land of the dead as a distinct world to which we go and then return, like two sides of the mirrored surface of a well. I hope you enjoy these mythic fantasy books as much as I did!
As I read this book, it made me think of American Gods. The presence of god-like forces of good and evil interfering with human lives is the basis for all mythic stories, and I love the wit and humor with which Powers delivers this tale.
The story references myth directly, and the random chance so loved by the gods is a driving force behind this novel of redemption and crazy, universal connections.
Twenty years ago Scott Crane abandoned his career as a professional poker player and went into hiding, after a weird high-stakes game played with Tarot cards. But now the cards - and the supernatural powers behind them - have found him again.
Crane's father killed gangster Bugsy Siegel in 1948 to become the Fisher King, and to keep that power he is determined to kill his son. Now Scott Crane must cross the Mojave Desert to his father's Perilous Chapel in Las Vegas, and take up the cards again for one last poker duel. And the stakes are the highest…
As the kid of tournament bridge and Scrabble players, I’ve been hooked on games my whole life. None more so than poker, which has helped me make a living both at the tables and as a writer. I’m currently working on a TV adaptation of Ship It Holla Ballas!
In a self-conscious effort to re-enact Positively Fifth Street’s reimagining of the writer’s journey,Grantland Magazine assigned Colson Whitehead to cover the 2011 World Series in exchange for the $10,000 entry fee. He falls short of matching McManus’ success on the felt, but that’s not really the point: the meat is in the interaction between the poker and Whitehead’s struggle with depression. Which might be unbearable in the hands of anyone other than Colson Whitehead, maybe the best there is at crafting sentences that will make you laugh and wince at the same time.
From the two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys • “Whitehead proves a brilliant sociologist of the poker world.” —The Boston Globe
In 2011, Grantland magazine gave bestselling novelist Colson Whitehead $10,000 to play at the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas. It was the assignment of a lifetime, except for one hitch—he’d never played in a casino tournament before. With just six weeks to train, our humble narrator took the Greyhound to Atlantic City to learn the ways of high-stakes Texas Hold’em.
Poker culture, he discovered, is marked by joy, heartbreak, and grizzled…
