Fans pick 90 books like The Lock Artist

I love this book because it’s the best fictional example I’ve ever seen of a character’s disability being eclipsed by his talent. Lincoln Rhyme is paralyzed, but his talent as a criminologist is far more important—and Deaver showcases Rhyme’s genius and passion as often as he details the difficulties of disability.

I find the book’s mystery compelling and the characters well-written, and I couldn’t get enough of the relationship between Lincoln Rhyme and Amelia Sachs. I’ve never seen a better portrayal of a partnership based solidly on mutual respect and admiration. I’m so grateful for how this story demonstrates that disability doesn’t need to stop you from making a real impact through the gifts and talents you’ve been given.

Will Trent is a most unlikely hero of a series, especially as a GBI (Georgia Bureau of Investigation) agent. Why? Will is severely dyslexic. He can barely read and write. So why is he a top agent? His disability gives him an unusual way of looking at crimes, making his disadvantage an important element in solving those crimes. Raised in a series of orphanages and cruel foster homes, Will is like the injured puppy you want to care for and make his life better. His relationship with women is complicated, including his first-love Angie, who shares some of the same orphanage experiences; Amanda, his demanding boss; Faith, his partner; and Sarah, his true love. Will is naïve and street-smart at the same time, which makes him a fascinating hero.

Iron House, short for the Iron Mountain Home for Boys, is a thriller that features orphaned brothers: weakling Julian, and his strong and fiercely protective brother, Michael. After being bullied to the point of cracking, Julian kills his abuser. Michael escapes Iron House and takes the blame as he leaves.

This leads the brothers on two very different paths. Julian is adopted and, though mentally unbalanced, becomes a writer of dark children’s stories. Michael is also adopted off the streets by the head of a crime syndicate who teaches him how to kill. Iron House is a complicated story of abuse, torment, and love. The book is not for the faint of heart.

This is the first book in the Joseph O’Loughlin series, and my favorite because it shows Joe shortly after his Parkinson’s diagnosis.

I know it’s popular to portray sick people as angelic, long-suffering inspirations to us all, but reality often differs, especially as someone adjusts to a devastating diagnosis and its far-reaching impact. As a respected psychologist, Joe is normally thoughtful, intelligent, and kind, but as he becomes ensnared in the death of a former acquaintance, his personal despair over his illness sends him into a self-destructive tailspin. Rather than making me dislike Joe, the honesty of his struggle made me sympathize with him all the more. 

Stagolee, the bad man who will not back down, is an icon of African American mythology. His defining moment, the Christmas night murder of Billy Lyons is the subject of folk and blues songs from the turn of the twentieth century to the present day. Though many know the story, before Cecil Brown’s book, most did not realize that the story was true. On Christmas night, 1895, in St. Louis, “Stack” Lee Shelton shot Billy Lyons in a fight over a Stetson hat. Stagolee Shot Billy documents the events leading to the murder while shining a light on the culture, attitudes, and politics of the St. Louis black community in the 1890s. The shooting of Billy Lyons is a Gilded Age murder that continues to resonate.

I loved this book about Meyer Lansky, the financial wizard of the mob because it is so thoroughly researched. Author Robert Lacey draws on firsthand interviews with family members and friends and archival records. His writing is intelligent and insightful.

This book skips the cliches and goes beneath the surface. Lansky emerges as a complicated, and determined and utterly human gangster. It is impossible to understand organized crime without understanding Meyer Lansky.

Few scholars have done more to demystify the nature of crime in Mexico than Pablo Piccato. His book City of Suspects is a nuanced history that reveals that the very meaning of crime was contested in early twentieth-century Mexico City. While Mexican elites tried to define criminals as a social class, the urban poor, who experienced crime as a part of their everyday lives, saw crime as an individual phenomenon. This book, like the others on this list, is also a story about the ways people used and thought about public space. At a time when Mexico’s government sought to transform the capital into a modern metropolis along the lines of Paris or New York, the poor resisted efforts to exclude them from that future.

Algren has been called a proletarian writer. Working primarily in Chicago from the 1930s to the 1950s, he was intensely concerned with the plight of the common man. His milieux were the gambling dens, the sawdust bars, the decaying hooker-prowled streets, the beat-down police stations, the shooting galleries, the slums, the cheap walk-up flats where broken men and women fought each other in desperate battles to survive one more miserable day. His characters were the poor, the ignorant, the addicted, tramps, bums, card sharps, petty crims, accidental murderers... But in all of them he found something human, something that might have been good, might have been worthy of a decent life – if only it had been given half a chance.

This book grabbed me by the throat and refused to let go.

Jordan Harper does more with suggestion and a few well-crafted sentences than some writers accomplish in an entire novel. When he needs to be brutal, he’s a monster. When he needs to be tender, your eyes sting.

Polly is both a badass and a little girl—I don’t know how Harper pulled that off. And I have never cared so much about a stuffed animal as I have Polly’s teddy bear.

It wasn’t until I picked up this book that I realised how little I actually knew about Charles Manson and his followers.

Sure, it had filtered down to me – through a variety of popular culture – that he was a notorious murderer and that his female followers were truly brainwashed, but how had that come to be and was there any way of making sense of his seemingly senseless violence and crimes? Guinn’s meticulously-researched book has the answers.