Fans pick 100 books like Spanking Watson

This is not a book about animals, but it is a great book in which animals play a critical role.

This is the seventh book in Hiassen’s Florida-based Skink series and possibly the best. One of the main characters, Angie Armstrong, is a wildlife wrangler with extraordinary skills which leads to hilarious consequences.

This book also manages intriguing social and political commentary including Kiki Pew Fitzsimmons’ efforts to support a fictional president whose behavior is similar and almost as wacky as our former leader who is apparently running again – I hope someone reads this book to him.

This debut novel from former Magnum P.I. writer and producer Reuben Leder is a tale of surgery gone wrong and the length it takes to affect revenge. Based on true medical misdeeds, the author indeed gets his revenge in this fast-paced story about a former baseball player, Nick Glass, whose surgery ruins a promising career. With the help of his fiancé, Dr. Julie Toffoli, they turn the tables on the medical profession in a gory yet humorous manner. 

This book is one of a series of Mathew Scudder stories by Block. I enjoy his books because his main character is as flawed as we are. Matt is a hard-drinking former cop who goes about helping friends out of their troubles. And his friends are in a lot of trouble. Action and close calls, as well as humor, abound in this well-crafted story.

While not as funny as the above books, I like this one for its story of betrayal, dignity, and revenge. Set in Mussolini’s fascist regime and the Nazi occupation, young Angelina Rosini witnesses her mother’s brutal murder and will enact revenge no matter how long it takes. She escapes to Rome with her daughter and joins the resistance where she encounters spies, and friends that are not really friends. Who can you really trust? The characters are believable and flawed like most of us. This novel is full of action, Nazi cruelty, and a relentless determination to make things right.

Did this book give birth to hardboiled literature? No, but I feel it mothered and fathered it. 

Did this book—when filmed in 1941—give rise to film noir? I would say yes or “oui.”

This book lives on in libraries and bookstores, in minds and memories, on screens big and small, as a cultural masterpiece. But please don’t get me wrong about masterpiece. Hammett’s existential story of antiheroic private detective Sam Spade wriggling out of death as he fends off the cagey but crazed pursuers of a worthless “jeweled” bird breathes more deeply, more compellingly every time I re-read it. Through the book, I face the dark—and find the gloom almost charming. 

“I poured a few drops of an ’87 Mondavi Chardonnay into her navel and leaned down to slurp it out.” Thus begins the first adventure of Archie McNally, Lawrence Sanders’s foppish gumshoe. I first heard of him on a golf course not too far from his Palm Beach digs. I’ve been a fan ever since.

Think of Archie as the love child of Bertie Wooster and Sam Spade. He tootles around town in his red Miata, sleuthing for his barrister father and hiding his extracurricular ding-dongs from girlfriend Connie. Along the way, he rubs elbows with the one percent and collars crooks. And at day’s end, he can be found sipping martinis at the Pelican Club. I wish I could join him.

I picked up this book when I was much younger. Until this point all the fantasy I read had been serious and gritty. This book showed me that fantasy could be amusing too, but still have high stakes. It follows the ongoing story of Thraxas, a down-on-his-luck and disreputable private investigator with some magical skill whose city is now besieged by orcs. He has to try and survive the siege, which mainly comprises of finding some decent food and drink, whilst searching for an artifact that could change the outcome of the war.

A fun read with some quirky characters and an engaging story.

Elvis Cole is the first-person narrator of a classic private eye series set in Los Angeles.

It is fun and unpretentious while being full of sociological truisms. The novels are first and foremost crime thrillers, but the comedic voice and observations make for a somewhat genre-bending experience every single read.  

From the first sentence, “There’s a bullet in my chest…,” you know this story is going to be exciting. Set in the U.P. on the banks of Lake Superior, Paradise is a town with plenty of work for a newly-licensed private investigator. Hamilton’s protagonist is an ex-cop who barely escaped death, is dealing with PTSD, and just wants to live a quiet life chopping wood, having a beer at the pub, and on occasion getting a non-violent case to work. 

This author knows how to ramp up the action and keep the reader turning pages. He makes a well-worn mystery twist (a convicted murderer serving a life sentence appears to be killing people on the outside), seem brand-new and completely original.

I was hooked from the start by the notion that when the Earth has been ravaged by climate change, the rich descend under the sea to lush habitats, complete with staff. The tension between those who pay to live in luxury and those who make their lives luxurious is at the heart of this contemporary cyberpunk murder mystery—and there’s a sapient octopus stripper to boot! I loved the snarky main character—Marrow Nightingale, private eye—and her investigation of her murdered sibling Rocket sets the stage for a fast-paced, fun, and flirty story. I inhaled this book in an afternoon. The characters are great, the atmosphere is fantastic, and the mystery goes to all kinds of science-fictional places.