100 books like The Master Executioner

About halfway into Red Dragon, you meet Francis Dolarhyde, and from then on, the book is all his. Forget the FBI who are looking for him, the only person you care about is Dolarhyde, the serial killer who’s been brutally murdering entire families.

As far as I’m concerned, he’s the hero. Hannibal Lecter isn’t Thomas Harris’ best villain. It’s Dolarhyde. He’s everything Lecter isn’t. He’s awkward, shy, hates his body, hates himself and spends all his time stewing on his inadequacies. If I’ve got to pick between the Virgin Dolarhyde and the Chad Lecter, it’s Dolarhyde every time.

Deep down, he just wants to be loved, but the way he goes about it is almost comically misguided. Dolardhyde is on an impossible, bloody mission to fix himself, and no matter how many bodies he drops trying to do it, I’m always rooting for him to make it out the… show more.

Connolly weaves taut crime thrillers that I have great trouble putting down once I start reading. Charlie Parker and the rest of the regular cast are beautifully rich characters I care about, which explains the 19 books in this series on my shelf. What sets Connolly apart is an undercurrent of supernatural evil that arcs through these crime stories. In The Black Angel, the shroud that conceals what the reader likely sensed in the early novels is pulled back a little to reveal an underworld of darkness beneath the stories. Charlie Parker is the detective you want on the case when there is more than just a crime and The Black Angel is a milestone in the series.

I chose this for the power of hook and title. This action & adventure novel with historical elements has the greatest title in the history of literature.

The purpose of a title is to sell the book, and no title ever succeeded so well. Raise the Titanic! was published a decade before the wreck of Titanic was discovered, so in the world’s imagination the ship was still largely intact. Cussler tapped into the intoxicating idea of the legendary ship’s resurrection and the completion of its maiden voyage.

I was so struck when I saw Raise the Titanic! in a bookstore, I decided to buy it before I picked it up. The book propelled Cussler from moderate success to the best-selling grandmaster of adventure, and it inspired my search for a hook and title.

Steve Berry has built a successful writing career mining interesting nuggets from history and asking a simple what-if question that sends his imagination racing. The seventh Cotton Malone thriller opens with the failed attempt to assassinate President Danny Daniels. Berry links this attempt with the successful, but seemingly unrelated presidential assassinations in 1865, 1881, 1901, and 1963. The historical gold nugget at the heart of The Jefferson Key is a clause in the United States Constitution, contained in Article 1, Section 8. Malone races across the U.S. to break a cipher created by Thomas Jefferson, unravel a mystery concocted by Andrew Jackson, and unearth a document drafted by the Founding Fathers in order to stop the secret society of American pirates.

The Hanging Tree is one of the best non-fiction books I’ve read about how the other half (more like seven-eights actually) lived. It describes the experience of the mainly lower-class people who suffered under the Bloody Code, when over 250 offences carried the death penalty. By using diaries, memoirs, broadsides, petitions for mercy, letters, and other contemporary documents, Gatrell gives voice to the executed, their executioners, witnesses, reformers, judges and juries. It’s an unflinching study of a ghastly reality that goes to the heart of what it means to be a civilized society and challenges several cozy myths along the way. I admit it doesn’t sound like a lot of fun, and of course, the subject matter is dark, but Gatrell is a compelling writer, vivid, forthright and passionate.

It’s not often I’m moved to tears by an academic book, but this book did it for me by putting me in the shoes of a Florentine patrician trying to comfort his friend the night before his execution. The main historical source of the book is an extraordinary ‘how-to’ manual: the one used by the ‘comforting confraternities’ of 16th-century Bologna, men who volunteered to spiritually prepare condemned criminals for their final moments on earth and, in so doing, hopefully increase their chances of salvation. The book explains the various methods and tools that the comforter could use, including prayers, songs, and pictures, and reveals the complex rituals of execution that began long before the prisoner’s arrival at the scaffold. A moving account of the realities of historical capital punishment.

Many think that the medieval period was the era of cruel and sadistic punishment, but it was, in fact, the Renaissance that saw the rise of the great spectacle of the 'theatre of horror': scaffolds erected to display the brutal dismemberment and suffering of executed prisoners in front of thousands of spectators. Although it focuses on France, Friedland's study explores why, all across Europe, this period saw an appetite for something so graphic. It explores the history of capital punishment from the Romans onwards, so it's essential reading for the theory behind executions, but the real strength lies in its exploration of the gulf between what theorists believed and what the general public actually did at executions, and why they attended in their thousands. 

In 1953, a working-class Jewish couple from Brooklyn was executed for allegedly selling nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union. Their two young children were orphaned. E. L. Doctorow’s novel about the Rosenbergs is an excruciating examination of these events from the fictionalized perspective of one of those children. Daniel’s point of view—naïve, angry, traumatized—brilliantly illustrates the absurdity and cruelty of American culture when it turns against those who, for reasons of class, race, or religion, have never been fully included in it. I’ve read it a dozen times and still find myself sobbing at the realization of how all the country’s history, all its dreams and delusions about itself and its destiny, were stacked up against this poor pair of nobodies. Their real crime lay in demanding that the United States live up to its ideals, something it has never been able to do.

This 2021 book, the latest in the Rosenberg oeuvre, not only recounts the history of what happened to the Rosenbergs but chronicles past historical accounts. One of the most important legacies of this literature is to remind us how all events are historically grounded. The Schneirs wrote that the Rosenberg trial “was a product of its times, displaying in microcosm many of the prevalent sociopolitical assumptions and preoccupations of the day.” The same could be said of the books by the Schneirs, the Meeropols, and Doctorow, which viewed the Rosenbergs through the sympathetic prism of American progressivism of the 1960s and 1970s.

Sebba also explores the enduring mystery of the “single-minded” Ethel Rosenberg, a “tragic figure” who herself committed no espionage but orphaned her sons rather than naming names or implicating her husband.

What must it have been like to be an executioner? In this detailed and moving study, Harrington explores the extraordinary diary of Meister Franz Schmidt, the 16th-century executioner of Nuremberg, who kept notes on every one of the 394 people he executed, as well as the countless others he tortured, whipped, and disfigured according to the law's demands. This book is therefore essential for understanding exactly how this mysterious craft was carried out, but the surprising twist in the tale is how Schmidt spent his entire life seeking to have his family's honour restored in a period when executioners were believed to be able to ritually 'pollute' another human simply by touch. Harrington's real achievement here is explaining how dishonour was the central force within public punishment—something we too easily forget today.