Here are 100 books that The Overseer fans have personally recommended if you like
The Overseer.
Shepherd is a community of 11,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.
Shepherd is reader supported. When you buy books, we may earn an affiliate commission.
I fell in love with Alfred Hitchcock’s films as a kid. Something that stuck out to me was that so many of his films featured an ordinary but resourceful hero who found themselves at the center of a crisis that they were totally ill-equipped to deal with. Still, they endured by rising above the situation. When I started writing, I wanted to write books with hardboiled heroes, but I fell back on first-time heroes who find themselves out of their depth and swim against the tide. Once I recognized this style, it was something I embraced. I’ve gotten out of my depth so many times…sometimes of my own making and sometimes not.
Guilt, shame, and family obligation…these human aspects are a great basis for a down-to-earth protagonist. A young woman is murdered in Will’s family home, and his brother is the prime suspect. On her deathbed, Will’s mother tells Will to find his brother.
This quest puts Will at the center of the investigation because many people want Will’s brother found…dead or alive. It’s one of those stories that escalates, which kept me hooked as a reader. It has a simple premise but evolves into something far more complex that will change Will forever.
Will Klein lost the love of his life and his brother in the same moment ... A superb thriller from the No.1 bestselling author.
On October 17, eleven years ago, Julie Miller was found brutally strangled in the basement of her house in the township of Livingston, New Jersey. On that day, Will's brother, Ken Klein, became the subject of an international manhunt accused of the crime. He has not been seen since.
Will has tried to get on with his life in the intervening years. He has a beautiful new girlfriend, Sheila, and a job working with the homeless.…
I fell in love with Alfred Hitchcock’s films as a kid. Something that stuck out to me was that so many of his films featured an ordinary but resourceful hero who found themselves at the center of a crisis that they were totally ill-equipped to deal with. Still, they endured by rising above the situation. When I started writing, I wanted to write books with hardboiled heroes, but I fell back on first-time heroes who find themselves out of their depth and swim against the tide. Once I recognized this style, it was something I embraced. I’ve gotten out of my depth so many times…sometimes of my own making and sometimes not.
This falls under the category of “Damn, I wish I’d written this.” This story has the quintessential out-of-their-depth hero who is drawn into a world much larger than himself and has to rise above the situation to survive.
I love how this book is about a man who lives in the shadow of his father and brother and has dedicated himself to academia and running but ends up facing off against spies and nazis. It’s a story that will make an ordinary protagonist a bona fide hero.
William Goldman's remarkable career spans more than five decades, and his credentials run the gamut from bestselling novelist to Oscar-winning screenwriter to Hollywood raconteur. He's beloved by millions of readers as the author of the classic comic-romantic fantasy The Princess Bride. And he's notorious for creating the most harrowing visit to the dentist in literary and cinematic history--in one of the seminal thrillers of the twentieth century. . . .
MARATHON MAN
Tom "Babe" Levy is a runner in every sense: racing tirelessly toward his goals of athletic and academic excellence--and endlessly away from the specter of his famous father's…
I fell in love with Alfred Hitchcock’s films as a kid. Something that stuck out to me was that so many of his films featured an ordinary but resourceful hero who found themselves at the center of a crisis that they were totally ill-equipped to deal with. Still, they endured by rising above the situation. When I started writing, I wanted to write books with hardboiled heroes, but I fell back on first-time heroes who find themselves out of their depth and swim against the tide. Once I recognized this style, it was something I embraced. I’ve gotten out of my depth so many times…sometimes of my own making and sometimes not.
This one is a banger. A serial killer has picked Bill, a bartender, to play a game of who lives and who dies. Choose your own slaughter, if you will.
What's so deviously gorgeous about this book is how the hero must learn how to beat the game so that no one dies and he can stop a twisted killer in his tracks. It’s such a great premise for an out-of-their-depth hero.
If you don’t take this note to the police . . . I will kill a lovely blond schoolteacher. . . . If you do . . . I will instead kill an elderly woman active in charity work. You have six hours to decide. The choice is yours.
The typewritten note under his windshield seems like just a sick joke. But in less than twenty-four hours, Billy Wiles, an ordinary, hardworking guy, is about to see his life take on the speed of a nightmare. Because a young blond schoolteacher is murdered—and now Billy has…
I fell in love with Alfred Hitchcock’s films as a kid. Something that stuck out to me was that so many of his films featured an ordinary but resourceful hero who found themselves at the center of a crisis that they were totally ill-equipped to deal with. Still, they endured by rising above the situation. When I started writing, I wanted to write books with hardboiled heroes, but I fell back on first-time heroes who find themselves out of their depth and swim against the tide. Once I recognized this style, it was something I embraced. I’ve gotten out of my depth so many times…sometimes of my own making and sometimes not.
I love a “Man on the Run” book. Books like The 39 Steps, Odd Man Out, and The Running Man are stories I truly love. There's something exciting about a chase book because the hero has to be resourceful and resilient, and that’s what we have here.
Harry has to prove his innocence. The other aspect of a chase story is all the odd characters a hero on the run has to turn to for help when there is no one else to turn to, even if they can't be trusted, but Harry has to put his faith in them for the few moments he needs them. Great stuff.
'One of Britain's most consistently excellent crime novelists' Marcel Berlins, The Times
A friendship renewed; a marriage going sour; Harry Bentick heads for the Lake District not knowing if he's going in search of something or running away.
Then two girls are found murdered in the high fells, and suddenly there's no doubt about it.
He's running.
Set in his native Cumberland, this was Reginald Hill's very first novel, a unique blend of detective story, psychological thriller and Buchanesque adventure that was to lay the groundwork for many books to come, taking him into the top ranks of British crime…
There’s something about leadership that intrigues me. I was an army child and that might help explain why I was expelled from school and had a rather unorthodox pre-academic career: I had fourteen jobs in nine years between leaving school and starting university, and several of those involved significant leadership roles that clashed with managerial authority. Both my undergraduate degrees and my doctorate were focused on trying to understand how authority worked, so it was almost inevitable that I ended up as a leadership scholar. But my greatest achievements have been co-founding the journal Leadership in 2005 and its related International Studying Leadership Conference, now in its 20th year.
Machiavelli is often despised as the man who promoted both authoritarian leaders and the notion that the ends justify the means, but this is to misunderstand the importance of the context within which he was writing: 16th century Florence – which was besieged by enemies on every side who proclaimed adherence to the Christian faith but acted as monsters. Machiavelli’s writing made two things clear to me. First, leaders and leadership cannot be understood if you abstract them from their context – when political morality is a contradiction in terms then leaders must be wary of sacrificing their followers for the sake of that same fallacious morality. Second, he lays out how dictators obtain and retain power – and in doing so establishes what we need to do to stop them or remove them.
Here is the world's most famous master plan for seizing and holding power. Astonishing in its candor The Prince even today remains a disturbingly realistic and prophetic work on what it takes to be a prince . . . a king . . . a president. When, in 1512, Machiavelli was removed from his post in his beloved Florence, he resolved to set down a treatise on leadership that was practical, not idealistic. In The Prince he envisioned would be unencumbered by ordinary ethical and moral values; his prince would be man and beast, fox and lion. Today, this small…
I’ve always read Sci-Fi and Fantasy. It’s my comfort place and haven’t we all needed that in the roaring '20s? It took a long while to clock that the books that stuck with me longest were all in that odd space where fantasy and sci-fi collide, (like Helliconia or Fire Upon the Deep or Dune) When I started writing, the ideas just poured out of me but after I realised I’d written a book like those I loved to read.
This book is so squarely in my wheelhouse, it could have been written for me. It’s a world-jumping, rip-roaring adventure that is literally breathtaking in its scope and its tempo. The protagonists have a real feel to them (very human failings) but it never feels forced, you’re just scooped up and flown along at a breakneck pace. The action scenes are heart-stopping (Kristine used to be a stunt woman!) but that’s never at the expense of the characters. Stunning, action-packed, sci-fi book.
An ambitious explorer. A rebellious captain. Together, they’ll change the course of history…
Seg Eraranat is desperate to prove his worth. The cultural theorist’s interdimensional expedition to restore his dying world could be just the chance he's looking for. While the rest of his group scours the beaten path, Seg sneaks off to explore the alien terrain. But the path to the biggest payload in history could be more treacherous than he ever thought possible…
Ama Kalder faces an impossible choice: hand over her beloved boat to her cruel overlords or betray her people. When a mysterious foreigner offers a…
My entire life I’ve been a historian, a treasure hunter, and a crime solver, which is likely why I became a broadcast journalist and investigative reporter. Having worked cases, worked with police, and asked the questions I believe the public wanted answered, there isn’t much which gets by me. I see every story as a movie and every scene in life as a story that needs telling. One of my passions has always been genealogy which fits right into all of the above. I live by a simple saying, “Be a student of history, not a victim of it.”
Logic! While Machiavelli is looked upon as a shrewd politician he is quite the opposite of John Potenza, the character in my book, but that’s where the similarities begin. Machiavelli was the most logical person ever. I’m fascinated by Logic. So is my crime-solving detective, who uses everything logical to figure out life. Potenza is a loyal Italian, so is Machiavelli. Machiavelli is loyal to himself and his cause, for Potenza it's the cause and family.
If you love logic and intrigue, you will love The Prince. It deals with the logic of human experience; one powerful tool in our repertoire. It certainly was for the politician. The same for a surfing cop trying to keep two biker gangs from going to mattress.
I grew up in a very small town in northern Minnesota (which also happens to be home to the world’s largest turkey). The town had a vibrant community spirit, which I took for granted then. For the last 15 years, I have been passionately learning how to create flourishing communities that can make our lives better and be great places for raising the next generation of children. This list reflects the best of what I have learned and incorporated into teaching classes on the topic of “building community.”
I didn’t expect to love this book as much as I did. Charles Marohn comes from an engineering background, which makes his urban design approach very interesting.
This book has changed the way I look at cities and towns. I drive past a new big box store with its huge parking lot and think, what a waste of economic opportunity. I can’t count the number of people I have recommended this book to.
A new way forward for sustainable quality of life in cities of all sizes
Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Build American Prosperity is a book of forward-thinking ideas that breaks with modern wisdom to present a new vision of urban development in the United States. Presenting the foundational ideas of the Strong Towns movement he co-founded, Charles Marohn explains why cities of all sizes continue to struggle to meet their basic needs, and reveals the new paradigm that can solve this longstanding problem.
Inside, you'll learn why inducing growth and development has been the conventional response to urban financial…
Growing up in a post-industrial city that bore the scars of urban renewal, I developed an early fascination with historic preservation. I began my studies as an architecture major; by my second year, I switched to American history because my passion lay in studying and understanding existing buildings and landscapes. Preserved is the product of inspiration that hit me when I spotted a beautifully preserved funeral home. Most of the neighborhood’s nineteenth-century refined residential fabric had been erased, but the grand Italianate mansion served as a reminder of what the area was like at the start of the twentieth century. At that moment, I realized that this was a story worth telling.
I’m old enough to remember T.W. Rogers, the downtown department store that was still hanging on in Lynn, Massachusetts, in the early 1980s before finally succumbing to the same market and political forces that doomed so many similar enterprises during the postwar exodus of retail from the downtown to the suburbs.
This book pays tribute to the grand palaces of consumption, both large and small, that emerged in virtually every American city and town during the first half of the twentieth century. I was especially pleased that Howard chose to focus not only on the large urban retailers found in big cities but also on smaller establishments, similar to the one that I can still recall from my childhood.
Naturally, the younger generation today knows the department store as the anchor store at the mall, and once again, as happened more than half a century ago, it is under threat…
The geography of American retail has changed dramatically since the first luxurious department stores sprang up in nineteenth-century cities. Introducing light, color, and music to dry-goods emporia, these "palaces of consumption" transformed mere trade into occasions for pleasure and spectacle. Through the early twentieth century, department stores remained centers of social activity in local communities. But after World War II, suburban growth and the ubiquity of automobiles shifted the seat of economic prosperity to malls and shopping centers. The subsequent rise of discount big-box stores and electronic shopping accelerated the pace at which local department stores were shuttered or absorbed…
Ever since we were kids, we associated the summer with voracious reading. We loved competing in those Summer Reading Challenges to see who could read the most while school was out. (Lauren often won; Rachel was a slower but equally enthusiastic reader.) As we grew up, we realized that a specific type of book exists that aligns with the summer mood–like a bikini, but make it literature. Summer reads can be emotional but not too heavy and contain moments of sadness without dragging us into the abyss. (For winter, we recommend the collected works of the Nobel Prize-winning Icelandic novelist Halldór Laxness.)
We have both been huge fans of Adelle Waldman since she came out with her whip-smart romantic satire, The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P, around a decade ago. Her follow-up, our last pick, was stunning to us, not only because it's so good but because it's inspiring to see how a writer doesn't have to get cornered in by the "brand" she unwittingly establishes when she publishes her debut.
This book is set a world away from the Brooklyn coffee shops and house parties that the Nathaniel P. literary hipsters frequent; it all takes place in a big box store in upstate New York called Town Square, which may as well be Target.
It makes you chuckle, think, and feel, largely due to its well-researched content. Waldman immersed herself in the world in which her new book is set, taking a job at Target while she was writing it.…
Every day at 3:55 a.m., members of Team Movement clock in for their shift at big-box store Town Square in a small upstate New York town. Under the eyes of a self-absorbed and barely competent boss, they empty the day's truck of merchandise, stock the shelves, and scatter before the store opens and customers arrive. Their lives follow a familiar if grueling routine, but their real problem is that Town Square doesn't schedule them for enough hours-most of them are barely getting by, even while working second or third jobs. When store manager Big Will announces he is leaving, the…