100 books like The Small Boat of Great Sorrows

As a reader I simply couldn’t have one book without the other. Detective Cruz is the first female detective in Acapulco and fights for every inch of respect in a police department rife with corruption and misogyny in a country where Mexicans don’t trust the police, feeling that no one cares. But Det. Cruz cares. The recurring theme of so many girls gone missing is her passion which occasionally rises up during other investigations throughout the series. As a writer I enjoyed suspense and danger. Carmen Amato makes you feel the heat and taste the food of Acapulco. Best ever female cop protagonist.

I was excited to read another book with fascinating characters and of course, a great K-9. Nickless’ characters are well-developed and very believable. Her fictional K-9 Clyde is captivating and while he’s technically retired, still has the skillset to help his handler, Sydney Parnell.

I love the character arc with Sydney in each book as she recovers from the traumas of serving in the military. I also love that Nickless had Sydney return home to Denver to work as a railroad police special agent. This is a law enforcement job that I haven’t seen in any other book. I appreciated the thrilling storyline and how Nickless created strong tension that ratcheted up to a suspenseful ending. 

I picked up this book from the shelf of a holiday cottage and was hooked immediately. I love books which interweave personal human stories with big events.

The ordinary loves and lives of the people of Pompeii are unfolding as the mountain above them begins to behave strangely. Of course, we, the readers, know the disaster that is about to occur, which only adds to the suspense. Unputdownable.

Pelecanos creates a helluva crime story set in Washington, DC. Not so different of a place, right? Ah, but there is the backdrop of the Martin Luther King riots in 1968 and the cops are overwhelmed. Derek Strange is a Black rookie cop and with a white detective Frank Vaughan goes on a manhunt for his brother’s killer. The combination of the two is a great dynamic. Derek’s pretty sure he knows who the drug dealer is who killed his brother and won’t be put off by the riots. Trying to find the killer in the chaos is gripping. A lot of grit in here and tension. This is one story you

This novella is inspired by the iconic character, Sherlock Holmes. Its title recalls “The Final Problem,” the story in which Arthur Conan Doyle left his fictional detective for dead and then had to resurrect him after a public outcry. Chabon’s title also echoes the Nazi euphemism for the Holocaust. The story is set during World War II in an English village, where a mute Jewish boy, his talking parrot, and a famous detective in advanced old age come together. When a stranger is murdered and the parrot goes missing, the retired detective, nameless though clearly Holmes, agrees to find the boy’s bird, a task that incidentally leads to the murderer. I love Chabon’s elegant writing as he explores the solvable and unsolvable mysteries of unspeakable crimes.

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 best explanations I’ve read of the rise of Fascism in Hitler’s Germany. I agree that ignoring the lessons of history means we’ll be forced to endure repetition. And Kerr paints such a chilling scenario no one in their right mind would wish the maxim to come true. His prose applies color and form like an artist at the top of their game.

At times I found him reminiscent of Chandler in the way he portrays the Nazis as the worst gangsters in the game. This is the first book of the Bernard Gunther series, and I was so enthralled that I raced through the others in just a few days. His storyline is filled with horror, passion, fear, and pathos—a tour de force of emotions.

I came upon the novels of Philip Kerr later in life.

They were unique in as much as his main character, Bernie Gunther, was a German before, during, and after the Nazi party came to power. The tightrope Gunther had to tread between being a good German cop and having to deal with Nazi higher-ups without himself ever becoming a Nazi is what makes the series thrum with tension.

I had the great good fortune to meet Philip at the L.A. Times Book Fair to which we were both invited some years ago. Spending time with him was for me to meeting a rock star. I was privileged to make his acquaintance.

The time I subsequently spent reading his new novels gave me the distinct sense of standing beside Gunther wherever Philip chose to send him.

When, several years later, I learned that Kerr had died suddenly I was devastated.… show more.

Since the publication of Dorothy L. Sayer’s The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club in 1928, London’s gentlemen’s clubs, bastions of upper-class male privilege, have been fertile ground for murder and mayhem. Huang’s debut novel is set in 1924. With the memory of the Great War still fresh in everyone’s minds, the prestigious soldiers-only Britannia Club is rocked by the stabbing of a member within the club vaults. The killer must be a fellow club member, but when Eric Peterkin, descendant of one of the club’s founders, witnesses the Scotland Yard detective tampering with evidence, he is forced to launch an investigation of his own.

In many ways, Marcia Mueller started it all by introducing readers to Sharon McCone, a modern-day woman sleuth and staff investigator for All Souls Legal Cooperative. In Edwin of the Iron Shoes, she works to solve the murder of antiques dealer Joan Albritton. Her investigation takes Sharon from the antiques and curios shops of San Francisco’s Salem Street to a museum frequented by the city’s social elite. I love strong, self-deprecating women characters of which Sharon is one. From my observation, Sharon McCone became a role model for Kinsey Milhone, V.I. Warshawski, Stephanie Plum, and so many others including my sleuth, Ricky Steele.