82 books like The Lindbergh Nanny

This book is both future fiction and historical. An Oxford historian journeys back in time and ends up by accident in a plague-filled village in the Middle Ages.

What I love about this novel is the bravery of the characters and their commitment to the good. Willis makes me a believer that humans have not changed much in a thousand years. Ties of love, faith, and humor are the stronghold for confused humans in the past, present, or future, and Willis’ universe is a benevolent one that responds to reward those acts of faith.

Although this book could be classified as science fiction, it is lovingly historical with a deeply researched and rich experience of our past. I absolutely love this book. 

What I love about historical novels is their ability to transport me into a past that was beyond my imaginings before I read the book.

The harrowing opening scene of this novel is something I could not imagine. But the main character of the novel, a black woman living in the Jim Crow South, has no such luxury. She knows full well the perils of being a black woman in the South. She must fight against deadly sexism and racism to try to claim a life for herself and solve a mystery with ties to a true historical crime.

Wanda Morris writes in a style reminiscent of John Grisham (if he had the life experience of a black woman). Plan to read this over the weekend because once you start, you won’t be able to put it down. 

I loved this book because of its setting: during World War II, in the house of Agatha Christie.

We follow the heroine as she escapes the bombs of London to take care of children in an unfamiliar countryside and a large manor house. She is keeping secrets about her past, as is every other character!

The novel uses multiple points of view, so we, as readers, slowly learn about the lies everyone is telling. The war provides the perfect backdrop and raises the stakes as the murderer might not just be a killer but a fifth-column member, helping the Germans win the war. 

This Agatha Christie doesn’t feature her famous Hercule Poirot or Miss Marple. Instead, it introduces a likable young couple, Bobby and Frankie, who fall into adventure by accident.

This book has the best one-line denouement of all mystery novels. It is a line that will give you chills when you read it. (Or re-read it. This mystery is so good that I have reread it many times in my life, and I get chills each time.)

One question ties the whole mystery together. As a mystery writer, I wish I could find that turning point question for each of my novels. But, alas, Agatha Christie was the queen. 

This book is a comprehensive guide to US regulations regarding money laundering; it also mentions some international organisms that fight against this crime. By including real-life cases in which it is specified how money laundering was carried out, I learned a lot because money laundering is a complex crime, believe me! It’s ideal for those who also want to know how a financial investigation is carried out since it takes you by the hand to understand what to do. Without a doubt a very complete guide.

Megan has been transparent about the fact that Behind the Red Door is not the most popular of her books, but it’s my personal favorite!

Fern Douglas is out of the loop: a missing woman shows up on the news whose famous kidnapping two decades ago—and subsequent return—everyone seems to have heard about. But Fern has no memory of that story; she only knows that she has seen the woman’s face before, and she comes to fear that she might have somehow been involved in what happened to her.

This book has one of the best portrayals of chronic anxiety I’ve read, and one of the most twisted and f-ed up stories, which I absolutely tore through. Read it, and prepare to be chilled to the bone.

I picked up this biography of notorious Jazz-age criminal, conman, and crooked lawman Gaston Means for research on my own book – early in his career Means was a paid German agent who fed information to my subject, newsman John Rathom. But Hoyt’s brilliant book was much more valuable to me than that. It is a master class in how to tell the story of a less-than-wholesome character. Hoyt does not judge Means’ criminal behavior. Instead, his deliciously wry language left me chuckling at the towering ambition of the conman’s greatest schemes. Who else but Gaston Means would think to exploit the kidnapping of the Lindberg baby to con money out of the wealthy socialite who owned the Hope Diamond? 

The subtitle to Robert Sullivan’s The Meadowlands is Wilderness Adventures on the Edge of a City, and it’s Sullivan’s adventures exploring the vast New Jersey wetlands that make the book so entertaining. But Sullivan is right to use the word “wilderness” to describe the 32 square miles of swamp, landfills, and rusting industrial debris along the Hackensack River where it flows into Newark Bay just five miles from the Empire State Building in New York City. Like the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland, the Meadowlands have been abused and degraded for centuries but also show the resilience of nature and how people’s attitudes toward it have changed. “Now it is a good place to see a black-crowned night heron or a pied-bill grebe or eighteen species of ladybugs,” Sullivan writes, “even if some of the waters these creatures fly over can oftentimes be the color of antifreeze.” Sullivan’s loving description… show more.

Billy, an injured Iraq war vet, returns home and finds no real place for him at his former job. Milo, a German shepherd trained by the same police department, has aged out at seven years and is also unwanted. Since Milo and Billy previously worked together, they team up, and with Rosenfelt’s tongue-in-cheek humor, commit robberies to survive. Why not use the dog’s training to grab items from criminal hands and remove them? But on the fourth outing, things don’t go as planned.

Milo takes off and buries an envelope he took from the perp, Billy is framed for murder, and attorney Andy Carpenter, who loves dogs, agrees to represent the dog, jailed for his own safety. Carpenter’s snarky sense of humor leaps off every page as he twists and turns the justice system for yet another dog-related cause. Rosenfelt has rescued thousands of dogs through his Tara Foundation and… show more.

Folklore is not history, nor is history folklore, but they often intersect. Henry Charlton Beck, a journalist who became an Episcopal priest and who wrote a series of New Jersey folklife classics, began his career with this volume, stories of abandoned iron forges, villages, and forgotten legends in the state’s iconic Pinelands. Rutgers University Press reprinted Beck’s books, beginning with this book in 1961.