Here are 92 books that Sycamore Row fans have personally recommended if you like
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I've been a lawyer for 30 years, 20 of them as an elected district attorney, and writing relieves stress for me. Real crime is messy and irrational; crime fiction restores order. But literary fiction is too slow—a novel must compel the reader to turn the page. Good thrillers tackle major issues, revealing themes that deepen our understanding of humanity. I've witnessed courage during grief and stress, but I'd never betray that trust by writing nonfiction accounts. I deliberately jumbled character traits and real events and combined them with my understanding of modern police techniques like geofencing and DNA.
The king of the cowboy detectives, Walt Longmire, must choose a course for his life after Vietnam. We know our hero devoted his life to serving his neighbors, yet here we confront the moment of stark paths before him. The choice not only represents a personal sacrifice but requires those he loves to sacrifice. The calling to seek justice demands a constant commitment.
Johnson presents a villain who has surrendered to his baser nature. A trope of mystery fiction contrasting with a hero capable of overcoming such self-destructiveness. I listened to the audiobook.
The thirteenth novel in Craig Johnson's beloved New York Times bestselling Longmire series, the basis for the hit Netflix series Longmire
Sheriff Walt Longmire is enjoying a celebratory beer after a weapons certification at the Wyoming Law Enforcement Academy when a younger sheriff confronts him with a photograph of twenty-five armed men standing in front of a Challenger steam locomotive. It takes him back to when, fresh from the battlefields of Vietnam, then-deputy Walt accompanied his mentor Lucian to the annual Wyoming Sheriff's Association junket held on the excursion train known as the Western Star, which ran the length of…
I've been a lawyer for 30 years, 20 of them as an elected district attorney, and writing relieves stress for me. Real crime is messy and irrational; crime fiction restores order. But literary fiction is too slow—a novel must compel the reader to turn the page. Good thrillers tackle major issues, revealing themes that deepen our understanding of humanity. I've witnessed courage during grief and stress, but I'd never betray that trust by writing nonfiction accounts. I deliberately jumbled character traits and real events and combined them with my understanding of modern police techniques like geofencing and DNA.
My next pick, by C.J. Book, presents Joe Pickett with the dilemma of facing his failings. He didn’t do enough to save his daughter. Further confounding his guilt is the fact the girl was more of an adopted child. Did self-preservation and the preservation of his family compel him to sell her out, or did he do all he could?
Pickett comes to terms with assisting a fugitive to promote a greater good.
Wyoming game warden Joe Pickett heads for the forests of Twelve Sleep County to investigate a massive explosion that may have killed a colorful environmental activist and uncovers evidence of a deadly conspiracy that challenges his courage, survival skills, and ethics. By the author of Open Season. 30,000 first printing.
I've been a lawyer for 30 years, 20 of them as an elected district attorney, and writing relieves stress for me. Real crime is messy and irrational; crime fiction restores order. But literary fiction is too slow—a novel must compel the reader to turn the page. Good thrillers tackle major issues, revealing themes that deepen our understanding of humanity. I've witnessed courage during grief and stress, but I'd never betray that trust by writing nonfiction accounts. I deliberately jumbled character traits and real events and combined them with my understanding of modern police techniques like geofencing and DNA.
James Lee Burke’s book presents the common trope of the cowboy detective out of time and place. The reader would assume the series-leading Texan would enjoy beautiful Montana; however, the setting is awash in corruption and evil.
The hero navigates this moral morass, revealing the harsh consequences of selfishness for humanity.
America's finest crime writer sends hero Billy Bob Holland deep into Montana - paradise to some, to others a savage wilderness...
'Still the greatest, bar none' LITERARY REVIEW
'Powerful stuff and confirms Burke's place in the forefront of contemporary American crime fiction' SUNDAY TELEGRAPH
'BITTERROOT is beautifully written and still stands head and shoulders above most other crime fiction' OBSERVER
When Billy Bob Holland visits his old friend Doc Voss, he finds himself caught up in a horrific tragedy. Doc's daughter has been brutally attacked by bikers, and the ringleader, Lamar Ellison, walks free when the DNA samples 'get lost'.…
I have been writing for many years, and my main preference is political thrillers with criminal overtones. I first became interested in politics when I worked at several political conferences in the 60’s and 70’s. I have been involved in several criminal cases, including my own, and within my family, I have a nephew in the police force. For many years I have had the opportunity to mix with the upper tiers of society as well as the criminal classes and this has given me great insight into creating my characters and plots.
Pete West, a political columnist, travels to Prague to find a missing diplomat, later found murdered. He attempts to discover more about a cryptic note received from the diplomat and is immediately entangled in the secret Bilderberg Club’s strategy to form a world federation.
Pete meets a Czechian agent who wants asylum. She has a murdered EU Commissioner’s diary containing clues to the civil unrest planned by the club, encrypted in algebraic chess notations. West seeks answers and links up with retired MI6 officer Tosh. While escaping would-be captors, they decode enough chess moves to reveal the anarchy of the…
Pete West, a political columnist, travels to Prague to find a missing diplomat, later found murdered. He attempts to discover more about a cryptic note received from the diplomat and is immediately entangled in the secret Bilderberg Club’s strategy to form a world federation.
Pete meets a Czechian agent who wants asylum. She has a murdered EU Commissioner’s diary containing clues to the civil unrest planned by the club, encrypted in algebraic chess notations. West seeks answers and links up with retired MI6 officer Tosh. While escaping would-be captors, they decode enough chess moves to reveal the anarchy of the…
I've been a lawyer for 30 years, 20 of them as an elected district attorney, and writing relieves stress for me. Real crime is messy and irrational; crime fiction restores order. But literary fiction is too slow—a novel must compel the reader to turn the page. Good thrillers tackle major issues, revealing themes that deepen our understanding of humanity. I've witnessed courage during grief and stress, but I'd never betray that trust by writing nonfiction accounts. I deliberately jumbled character traits and real events and combined them with my understanding of modern police techniques like geofencing and DNA.
This book, by Joe R. Lansdale, tells a coming-of-age story. A world where evil prevails, testing the hero’s Christian faith. His morals are inconsistent with the norms of society.
It presents more of a moral forest far more than the real Big Thicket described in greater detail in my novel.
In The Thicket, award-winning novelist Joe R. Lansdale lets loose like never before, in a rip-roaring adventure set at the dark dawn of the East Texas oil boom, the perfect introduction to an acclaimed writer whose work has been called "as funny and frightening as anything that could have been dreamed up by the Brothers Grimm -- or Mark Twain" (New York Times Book Review)
Jack Parker thought he'd already seen his fair share of tragedy. His grandmother was killed in a farm accident when he was barely five years old. His parents have just succumbed to the smallpox epidemic…
I love the combination of action and romance and suspense. It’s a real juggle as an author to balance the two main elements (suspense and romance mostly), give each depth and page time, and make us care about the people both in love and in peril. I’ve always been drawn to suspense, even as a kid. But I gotta have the relationships, too. I used to direct plays with my childhood friends, and there were always bad guys and the romance—and this was long before I was thinking of having a real romance!
I read this long ago, but its sensual southern essence stays with me. Less action but definitely suspenseful, it pairs a chilly violinist needing some time to hide away with a sexy southern charmer from a wealthy family who may be her undoing…or he may be a killer. I like, and have written, these kinds of stories with heroes who are also suspects. In a romantic suspense, though, we readers *know* that the hero is *not* going to be the killer. Where’s the HEA in that??? But we can be uneasy about him, which is all part of the ride!
A retreat to the bayou for some rest and relaxation becomes anything but for celebrated concert violinist Caroline Waverly as she finds herself falling in love . . . with a man who may be a serial killer in this novel from 'the greatest novelist on Planet Earth' (Washington Post)
Burned out by a whirlwind musical career, Caroline Waverly arrives in the small Mississippi town of Innocence desperate for some peace and quiet.
Relaxing in her grandmother's beautiful home by the bayou, Caroline has no intention of indulging in a summer fling . . . until she meets Tucker Longstreet.…
I’m a Canadian thriller and suspense novelist with an abiding affinity for stories of good ultimately overcoming evil. I’m partial to reluctant heroes battling powerful entities that are inflicting injustice. If our protagonist is flawed and forced to overcome internal demons and/or challenges, so much the better! My Tony Valenti thrillers feature a mom-and-pop law firm known asLawyers to Little People and Lost Causes, so I know a thing or two about this type of book. Characters using brains, integrity, and bravery—moral and/or physical—fascinate me every time.
If there is an heir to Harper Lee in the realm of legal thrillers, my vote goes to John Grisham. There’s a basic sense of decency in Grisham’s books that appeals to me. In A Time for Mercy, Grisham’s enduring character Jake Brigance returns to Clanton, Mississippi in a story constructed around a polarizing small-town murder. However, precious little can be categorized along strictly black and white lines in this crime. Grisham understands that we live in a world where the grays of reality are predominant and inherently more interesting. He makes sure we understand the characters, even those we may dislike or disagree with. Grisham doesn’t take the easy way out in A Time for Mercy. The story unfolds to a surprisingly untidy yet satisfying conclusion that leaves the reader with plenty of food for thought.
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Jake Brigance is back! The hero of A Time to Kill, one of the most popular novels of our time, returns in a courtroom drama that The New York Times says is "riveting" and "suspenseful."
Clanton, Mississippi. 1990. Jake Brigance finds himself embroiled in a deeply divisive trial when the court appoints him attorney for Drew Gamble, a timid sixteen-year-old boy accused of murdering a local deputy. Many in Clanton want a swift trial and the death penalty, but Brigance digs in and discovers that there is more to the story than meets the…
I’m a writer, theatre artist and calligrapher who has spent a lifetime dedicated to the look, sound, texture and meaning of words. Writing in verse and prose poetry gives me a powerful tool to explore hard themes. Poetry is economical. It makes difficult subjects personal. Through poetry, I can explore painful choices intimately and emerge on a different path at a new phase of the journey. While my semi-autobiographical novel These Are Not the Words “is about” mental health and drug addiction, I’ve shown this through layers of images, sounds, textures, tastes—through shards of memories long submerged, recovered through writing, then structured and fictionalized through poetry.
In A Wreath for Emmett Till, Marilyn Nelson reminds us of the unique beauty of a life, of the vibrancy of youth at 14 years old. Written as a “crown of sonnets,” where the last line of one sonnet becomes the first of the next, it is a book that bears witness and conveys huge themes of justice, loss, and remembrance while focussing on small moments, gestures, and images. I am in awe of Nelson’s ability to use a very formalized writing style to depict one of the most brutal murders of the twentieth century.
In 1955, people all over the United States knew that Emmett Louis Till was a fourteen-year-old African American boy lynched for supposedly whistling at a white woman in Mississippi.The brutality of his murder, the open-casket funeral, and the acquittal of the men tried for the crime drew wide media attention.
Award-winning poet Marilyn Nelson reminds us of the boy whose fate helped spark the civil rights movement.This martyr's wreath, woven from a little-known but sophisticated form of poetry, challenges us to speak out against modern-day injustices, to 'speak what we see.'
I was never a little boy who played soldier. But when I was 13, I read Barbara Tuchman’sThe Guns of August, and developed a lifelong fascination (unusual for an American) with the First World War. Decades later, having achieved a happy life as a gay man, I started to wonder during the debate over “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”: What would life have been like for two soldiers in the Great War who fell in love? So, I traveled to the battlefields and cemeteries of France, and to the Imperial War Museum in London, and read anything and everything I could about WW1. And then I wrote Flower of Iowa.
Perhaps the most powerful story surrounding The Bitterweed Path concerns the creation of the novel itself. This tale of cross-class, same-sex love set in late 19th century rural Mississippi – a place and time so well evoked you can feel the heat – was originally published in 1950(!). They say historical novels reflect the time in which they’re written at least as much as the time in which they’re set, and there’s a distinct obliqueness to the writing here. That does not detract from the astonishing eroticism of main character Darrell’s first glance at Roger, the boy he will fall in love with (and vice versa). Nor does it diminish the radical shift, in more than one sense of the term, when Roger’s father also emerges as a mutual love interest for Darrell.
This long out-of-print and newly rediscovered novel tells the story of two boys growing up in the cotton country of Mississippi a generation after the Civil War. Originally published in 1950, the novel's unique contribution lies in its subtle engagement of homosexuality and cross-class love. In The Bitterweed Path , Thomas Hal Phillips vividly recreates rural Mississippi at the turn of the century. In elegant prose, he draws on the Old Testament story of David and Jonathan and writes of the friendship and love between two boys--one a sharecropper's son and the other the son of the landlord--and the complications…
I’m from North Carolina, and Inside the Wolf is the first book I’ve written about the American South. For a long time, I resisted writing about my home state. I moved to New York and tried to write elegant New York stories. But writing is thinking for me, and I had to think through some of the stories and memories and hauntings of my youth. The books on this list have made me want to keep doing it
Faulkner is a problem, and for a Southern writer, he’s a problem that must be confronted.
The Bear is about the annual hunt for the “taintless and incorruptible” Old Ben, the legendary animal living along the Tallahatchie River. It’s also about ownership and inheritance and ‘manhood,’ filtered through Faulkner’s obsessions and nostalgia and limitations.
A story that taught me that grappling with, and arguing with, a work of literature is an unending struggle but sometimes a necessary one.
“I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.” —William Faulkner, on receiving the Nobel Prize
Go Down, Moses is composed of seven interrelated stories, all of them set in Faulkner’s mythic Yoknapatawpha County. From a variety of perspectives, Faulkner examines the complex, changing relationships between blacks and whites, between man and nature, weaving a cohesive novel rich in implication and insight.
I’m a nonfiction author whose success owes enormously to fiction. It challenges me to portray real people as vividly as characters in novels, and to use narrative and dialogue to keep readers turning the pages. Reading great novelists has taught me to obsessively seek exactly the right words, to fine-tune the cadence of each sentence, and to heed overall structural rhythm; continually, I return to the fount of fiction for language and inspiration. The astonishing novels I’ve shared here are among the most important books I’ve recently read to help grasp the critical times we’re living in. I’m confident you’ll feel the same.
I hesitate to describe The Trees — in fact, I recommend you avoid reading any reviews, or even the back cover, because the book is so full of surprises that it would be a sin to spoil any of them. I’ll only say that of all the recent books dealing with the intractable shame of racial struggles, this is my favorite, hands-down. Prepare yourself to be alternately sick with laughter or sick with horror — which is exactly the experience of the protagonists, and of their real-life compatriots. Afterward, like me, you’ll want to read everything else Percival Everett has written.
An uncanny literary thriller addressing the painful legacy of lynching in the US, by the author of Telephone
Percival Everett's The Trees is a page-turner that opens with a series of brutal murders in the rural town of Money, Mississippi. When a pair of detectives from the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation arrive, they meet expected resistance from the local sheriff, his deputy, the coroner, and a string of racist White townsfolk. The murders present a puzzle, for at each crime scene there is a second dead body: that of a man who resembles Emmett Till.
