Here are 100 books that The Final Solution fans have personally recommended if you like
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When I was growing up, my mother and I borrowed armfuls of books from the library every week. As I worked my way through classic novels, she devoured mysteries and imparted her enthusiasm to me. After earning a Ph.D. in English, I taught college-level writing and literature. I currently write the Five-Ingredient Mysteries, each with five suspects, five clues, and five-ingredient recipes. My recent books unite my love of mysteries and classics. Though set in the present, they revolve around iconic authors or events of the past. Poe, Dickens, and Christie, along with suspense master Hitchcock, have influenced the characters, plots, and themes of my books.
As a mystery reader and writer, I idolize Agatha Christie, the bestselling fiction writer of all time. In her 60+ detective novels, the mystery is always solved, but she left behind an unsolved mystery about herself. In 1926, after Archie Christie asked for a divorce to marry his lover, Agatha vanished for eleven days. Found after a massive manhunt, she never revealed why or how she disappeared. The Christie Affair solves that mystery in an inventive way, narrated by Archie’s mistress, a character I didn’t expect to like but grew to understand. I love the novel’s intertwining of history and mystery. It explores the effect of war on the hearts and minds of the characters and includes a murder solution worthy of Dame Agatha.
Why would the world's most famous mystery writer disappear for eleven days? What makes a woman desperate enough to destroy another woman's marriage? How deeply can a person crave revenge?
"Sizzles from its first sentence." - The Wall Street Journal A Reese's Book Club Pick
In 1925, Miss Nan O’Dea infiltrated the wealthy, rarefied world of author Agatha Christie and her husband, Archie. In every way, she became a part of their life––first, both Christies. Then, just Archie. Soon, Nan became Archie’s mistress, luring him away from his devoted wife, desperate to marry him. Nan’s plot didn’t begin the day…
When I was growing up, my mother and I borrowed armfuls of books from the library every week. As I worked my way through classic novels, she devoured mysteries and imparted her enthusiasm to me. After earning a Ph.D. in English, I taught college-level writing and literature. I currently write the Five-Ingredient Mysteries, each with five suspects, five clues, and five-ingredient recipes. My recent books unite my love of mysteries and classics. Though set in the present, they revolve around iconic authors or events of the past. Poe, Dickens, and Christie, along with suspense master Hitchcock, have influenced the characters, plots, and themes of my books.
This novel explores the mysteries of the heart, much as Jane Austen did. The book’s chapters correspond with Austen’s six novels and the six meetings of the book club focused on her. As five women of various ages and one man discuss each Austen novel, their witty sparring reveals the complexity of their own searches for love and meaning. By studying Austen’s novels, the book club members, all of them at a crossroads, understand themselves better and forge a path forward. Having read and re-read Austen for decades, I love this book for showing how Jane Austen speaks to us two centuries after she died.
Six people five women and a man meet once a month in California's Central Valley to discuss Jane Austen's novels. They are ordinary people, neither happy nor unhappy, but each of them is wounded in different ways, they are all mixed up about their lives and relationships. Over the six months they meet, marriages are tested, affairs begin, unsuitable arrangements become suitable under the guiding eye of Jane Austen a couple of them even fall in love 'A thoroughly delightful comedy of contemporary manners' Entertainment Weekly
When I was growing up, my mother and I borrowed armfuls of books from the library every week. As I worked my way through classic novels, she devoured mysteries and imparted her enthusiasm to me. After earning a Ph.D. in English, I taught college-level writing and literature. I currently write the Five-Ingredient Mysteries, each with five suspects, five clues, and five-ingredient recipes. My recent books unite my love of mysteries and classics. Though set in the present, they revolve around iconic authors or events of the past. Poe, Dickens, and Christie, along with suspense master Hitchcock, have influenced the characters, plots, and themes of my books.
This entertaining book about the man who invented the armchair detective is perfect for armchair travelers and for researchers. I pored over it for the 4th mystery in my series, with its cast of Poe fanatics. Poe-Landexplores the life and legacy of Poe through the places where he lived and where museums and monuments now honor him. His best-known stories stem from his time in Philadelphia, home of the Poe National Historic Site. The Philadelphia Free Library’s collection of Poe-phernalia (Ocker’s word) includes Charles Dickens’s stuffed pet bird, the raven said to have inspired Poe’s famous poem. Ocker unravels the mystery of how the bird got there, but neither he nor anyone else can solve the puzzle of Poe’s mysterious death in Baltimore.
Edgar Allan Poe was an oddity: his life, literature, and legacy are all, well, odd. In Poe-Land, J. W. Ocker explores the physical aspects of Poe's legacy across the East Coast and beyond, touring Poe's homes, examining artifacts from his life-locks of his hair, pieces of his coffin, original manuscripts, his boyhood bed-and visiting the many memorials dedicated to him.
Along the way, Ocker meets people from a range of backgrounds and professions-actors, museum managers, collectors, historians-who have dedicated some part of their lives to Poe and his legacy. Poe-Land is a unique travelogue of the afterlife of the poet…
Edge of the Known World is a near-future love and adventure story about a brilliant young refugee caught in era when genetic screening tests like 23AndMe make it impossible to hide a secret identity. The novel is distributed by Simon & Schuster. It is a USA Today Bestseller and 2024 American Fiction Awards Winner in multiple categories, including Best New Fiction, Political Thriller, and Science Fiction: General.
Alexandra is a gifted student, adoring daughter, and exuberant prankster. She is also hiding in the open. After a blissful childhood, Alex learned she’s an illegal refugee from a brutal regime, smuggled into…
Fans of Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake will be swept away by this riveting speculative fiction adventure and love story about family, genetic privacy, and the onrushing future of surveillance technology.
2024 American Fiction Awards Winner in multiple categories, including Best New Fiction, Political Thriller, and Science Fiction
Alexandra Tashen is a brilliant student, adoring daughter, merry wit, and exuberant prankster. After a blissful childhood on a Texas ranch, she learns the truth: She is a refusé, an illegal refugee smuggled into the Allied Nations as an infant. Everyone from her birth region carries a harmless but detectable bit of…
When I was growing up, my mother and I borrowed armfuls of books from the library every week. As I worked my way through classic novels, she devoured mysteries and imparted her enthusiasm to me. After earning a Ph.D. in English, I taught college-level writing and literature. I currently write the Five-Ingredient Mysteries, each with five suspects, five clues, and five-ingredient recipes. My recent books unite my love of mysteries and classics. Though set in the present, they revolve around iconic authors or events of the past. Poe, Dickens, and Christie, along with suspense master Hitchcock, have influenced the characters, plots, and themes of my books.
This novel is two books for the price of one. It contains the unfinished manuscript of The Mystery of Edwin Drood that Dickens was writing when he died. Chapters from the Dickens book alternate with scenes from a conference in Rome devoted to unfinished works. The conference attendees who resemble fictional sleuths, including Sherlock Holmes, Philip Marlowe, and Hercule Poirot, look for clues in the Dickens text to deduce how he would have finished the story. The book also offers insights into the life and death of Charles Dickens and a stunning ending. I love the book for its unique combination of a mystery and a novel by a literary giant.
The authors combine the text of The Mystery of Edwin Drood, literary scholarship, the detective genre, and their knowledge of Rome to produce a hilarious, offbeat satire. Translated by Gregory Dowling. A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book
As an enthusiastic and eclectic reader, one of my great joys is recommending books to others. I was able to indulge this joy consistently while teaching at a university, introducing students to authors and books and topics they otherwise might never have encountered. I find this same excitement in my own writing, searching for ways to reveal to others the magnificent wealth I find in modern poetry and in the brilliant concepts of poetic thinking.
The Cuban mystery writer Leonardo Padura offers an amazing presentation of Jewish history and the art of painting as they collide in modern Havana.
He weaves together three stories: the attempted escape from Hitler by Jews aboard a ship that is turned back from the Havana harbor in 1939; the aborted career of an imaginary Jewish disciple of Rembrandt, who defies the biblical prohibition against creating human likenesses; and a contemporary attempt by a Cuban Jew to track down his exterminated family’s Rembrandt masterpiece.
I love how the vastly different worlds of modern Havana and 17th-century Amsterdam embark on a conversation that reveals so much about Jewish history and art.
"Padura’s Heretics spans and defies literary categories . . . ingenious." ―Maureen Corrigan, Fresh Air
A sweeping novel of art theft, anti-Semitism, contemporary Cuba, and crime from a renowned Cuban author, Heretics is Leonardo Padura's greatest detective work yet.
In 1939, the Saint Louis sails from Hamburg into Havana’s port with hundreds of Jewish refugees seeking asylum from the Nazi regime. From the docks, nine-year-old Daniel Kaminsky watches as the passengers, including his mother, father, and sister, become embroiled in a fiasco of Cuban corruption. But the Kaminskys have a treasure that they hope will save them: a small Rembrandt…
I spent over 30 years as a fire rescue officer, and my investigative experience in arsons and fires of all types had me working with police at times. Firefighters come in contact with a lot of crimes. Crime scene protection is important before cops and detectives arrive. I’m curious by nature, and I like cops. They have so many rules. Firefighters aren’t like that. When we arrive, there is little time to follow rules. I have a firefighter crime series published, but I chose Teeth of the Cocodrilo in the theme of exotic crime. I'm the only firefighter in Canada who has written firefighter crime novels.
Another crime book that takes you places you never thought you’d venture into. Fesperman creates a sympathetic protagonist Vlado Petric. Vlado, a former homicide detective in Sarajevo, lives in exile but is recruited to return to the place of horrors that have haunted his life. His assignment: help capture an aging Nazi collaborator who has become a war profiteer, surrounded by a sympathetic population who will protect him with their lives. The story is dark and filled with suspense and dread. The Balkans were and are a very dangerous place. As a writer Fesperman creates suspense and fear in a very different place with very different people.
Vlado Petric, former detective in war-torn Sarajevo, has left his beloved homeland to join his wife and daughter in Germany, where he scratches a meagre living among the dust of former conflicts on the building sites of the new Berlin. Returning home one evening, he finds an enigmatic American investigator waiting for him in the small apartment he now shares with his wife and daughter. The investigator, Calvin Pine, works for the International War Crimes Tribunal, and he tells Petric that they want him to go to The Hague. It doesn't take Petric long to accept, especially when Pine tells…
I was a misbegotten child of World War II, my father an anonymous stranger on a train returning to war, thus setting me in search of an answer. While driving through rural France one day in my sixth decade I realized I'd been searching for my father through writing, and an understanding of his experience in war. My seventh decade produced Dutch Children of African American Liberators, with co-author Mieke Kirkels, about the puzzling lives of the European children of African American soldiers of World War II. As I got to its final chapters, my own father’s identity was revealed to me through DNA, and that will be the subject of my final book.
Eventually, my travels to understand and write about the times in which I had been born took me to the Auschwitz concentration camp near Krakow, then to its source in Berlin and some excellent walking tours into the heart of its lights and shadows – which is much of the world of Philip Kerr’s fictional Bernie Gunther. A 1930s Berlin detective, Bernie must navigate the attempt to maintain a humanity that is both moral and faulted in a time of brutality and absurdity over the course of fifteen novels that will puzzle through the human dilemma of World War II Europe. Field Gray, which ranges from the Spanish Flu epidemic of World War I to the corruption of 1950s Cuba is perhaps the most comprehensive of the series.
'One of the greatest anti-heroes ever written' LEE CHILD
'A man doesn't work for his enemies unless he has little choice in the matter.'
So says Bernie Gunther. It is 1954 and Bernie is in Cuba. Tiring of his increasingly dangerous work spying on Meyer Lansky, Bernie acquires a boat and a beautiful companion and quits the island. But the US Navy has other ideas, and soon he finds himself in a place with which he is all too familiar - a prison cell. After exhaustive questioning, he is flown back to Berlin and yet another prison cell with a…
History is nearly always relegated to heavy tomes and stuffy museum rooms. Learning about our past seems no longer important, and we keep promoting it in such uncool and unsexy ways. I feel any of our histories, with either a capital or lower case ‘h’, whether focused on big world events or local life, deserve to be told in a special kind of way, with that sprinkle of “magic realism” only fiction authors can deliver. Alternative history, historical fiction, magic fabulism, they are the sides of the same dice creating new, different stories inspired by our collective memory of things that have happened. These books touch this topic so dear to me.
Although not historical fiction per se, Sherlock Holmes is a strong product of his time. He embodies the revolutionary modernism of the late Victorian period and for this reason alone the famous fictional detective has become a real character himself embedded in history. The fact his home address half-exists in London makes him even more real. His stories were one of the sources to inspire me for the Wynnman. This idea of creating real characters in a real setting that share their way of thinking, their passions, their curious attitudes, without having to answer to the hard, crude boundaries of factual reality.
Is there a more enduring, legendary detective than Sherlock Holmes? This quintessential collection includes many of the famous cases that made the legendary Sherlock Holmes one of fiction's most popular creations. Set against the foggy backdrop of London and the English countryside, each story unravels an exciting new mystery, from mistaken identity and ominous omens to counterfeit currency and jewellery theft. Including 'A Scandal in Bohemia', 'The Five Orange Pips', 'The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle', 'The Speckled Band' and 'The Final Problem', the collection follows Sherlock Holmes and John Watson on some of their most enjoyable cases. First published…
I’ve obviously read a lot of Holmes retellings. Part of the impetus behind my new novella was trying to figure out whyI was so attracted to them. Part of it, I realized, is the neurodivergence aspect: fundamental to the Holmes story is the idea of someone who thinks differently—and who finds a way to interact with the world that uses that as an asset. The other component I love is the Holmes-Watson dynamic. Whether it's romantic or not, the development of a relationship of affection between two people who think very differently is an emotional counterpoint to plot-driven mysteries. Those elements—along with stellar writing, gripping mysteries, and characters I love spending time with.
The Irene Adler books mirror the Holmes-Watson relationship—brilliant detective, adoring documenter—centering Holmes’s famously successful adversary.
This story builds a much more interesting narrative into the original Adler story, changing the way we understand the stakes and the outcome, and then continues, lifting Irene Adler into a fascinating character in her own right.
Winner of the American Mystery Award for Best Novel of Romantic Suspense, and the Romantic Times Award for Best Historical Mystery
Miss Irene Adler, the beautiful American opera singer who once outwitted Sherlock Holmes, is also a superb detective, as Oscar Wilde and Bram Stoker can attest. Even Holmes himself must admit--albeit grudgingly--that she acquits herself competently.
But in matters of the heart she encounters difficulty. The Crown Prince of Bohemia--tall, blonde, and handsome--proves to be a cad. Will dashing barrister Godfrey Norton be able to convince Irene that not all handsome men are cut from the same broadcloth?
I’m a crime historian and storyteller. I study old crimes, particularly those of scientific interest, and present my findings in public presentations. Sometimes I write about them-
in the NY Times, Smithsonian, Lancet, Ellery Queen. I’ve researched in autopsy suites, crumbling archives, and crime labs. I was the founder and moderator of the annual Forensic Forum at Stony Brook University. I’ve consulted on criminal matters for PBS, BBC, and commercial stations.
I am fascinated by ancient crime because so much great literature derives from it - the sadly dysfunctional Oedipus family, the fraternal dispute between Cain and Abel- the unhappy Borden family of Fall River. All grist for my mill.
Along with a complete reprinting of all the Sherlock Holmes stories, this is an incredibly well-researched account of the background from which they sprang. Leslie Klinger clarifies and defines many of the archaic terms and complex historical quirks which sometimes makes the initial reading of Sherlock Holmes difficult for newcomers to the Canon.
He delineates the tales connection to the true crimes upon which Conan Doyle drew. It’s a bit like seeing an old, somewhat blurry photograph suddenly sharpened to give maximum impact.
It’s simply necessary for anyone with a serious interest in Mr. Holmes.
The publication of Leslie S. Klinger's brilliant new annotations of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's classic Holmes short stories in 2004 created a Holmes sensation. Available again in an attractively-priced edition identical to the first, except this edition has no outer slipcase (Volume Two is available separately).
Inside, readers will find all the short stories from The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, with a cornucopia of insights: beginners will benefit from Klinger's insightful biographies of Holmes, Watson, and Conan Doyle; history lovers will revel in the wealth of Victorian literary and cultural details; Sherlockian fanatics will…
