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.

Okay, so you’ve read cop stories, PI tales, and lawyer crime fiction. How about a railroad detective? Yeah, they are for real.

Special Agent Sydney Rose Parnell and her trusty dog have an intimate knowledge of the railroad and who uses it. Not often is she called in for murder but when she does she bites off more than she can chew. She occasionally has a bit of romance with someone so it fills out that end of things.

She is vulnerable yet tough. I never knew railroad police went so deep into investigations. Gotta read her tales.

I included this book due to the historical research that went into writing this story.

Pompeii is told from the POV of a young engineer who takes over the maintenance of the reservoir that brings water to the city and has run dry. Young Attilius needs to determine how and why. The narrative highlights the months and weeks ahead of the devastating eruption that destroyed Pompeii, Herculaneum, and Stabiae.

Attilius faces corruption as he navigates the treacherous path to discovering the truth of the city’s impending doom and those who seek to reap financially from the city’s demise.

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 is a noir-style detective novel set in Berlin in the 1930s. The protagonist, private detective Bernie Gunther, is a disaffected police officer who has left its service because of the Nazi takeover of public institutions - and all the corruption and brutality that come with it.

I loved the book, the first of a trilogy, and I immediately read the next two because of its main character, Berlin. I have been visiting Berlin for 40 years and am fascinated by its seedy, gritty, and tragic history and its resilience as a city. Berlin Noir evokes the Berlin of the 1930s in a way that only fiction can do. Brilliant.

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.

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.

John Connolly is simply a terrific writer. In this Detective Charlie Parker novel, the Maine woods are a character in themselves—sinister, overbearing, and almost certainly harbouring—you guessed it—real evil. Connolly’s Charlie Parker is haunted—literally—and dangerous. He’s a complex and darkly charismatic figure that I find compelling. The Wrath of Angels has at its core the battle between Good and Evil, but it is played out by imperfect characters in a very spooky atmosphere. It has all the ingredients of a horror novel, doesn’t it? But John Connolly manages darker themes believably and again, for me, it mixes genres beautifully—and believe me, that’s not easy.

Although many fans consider Crais’s preceding book, L.A. Requiem, to be his masterpiece, I’ve chosen this because it perfectly encapsulates the relationship between flamboyant Elvis Cole and his partner, the enigmatic Joe Pike.

Pike is the ultimate sidekick. He’s taciturn, monosyllabic, and extremely complex. Dangerous as hell and completely loyal to Cole and anyone in Cole’s life; he’s taken bullets, knives—a whole bunch of weapons during the nineteen-book series.

In The Last Detective, the son of Cole’s girlfriend gets kidnapped and the evidence points to Cole’s service in Vietnam. Cole’s first call isn’t to the LAPD, it’s to Joe Pike. His message: ‘Joe, I’m scared.’ Pike drops everything and together they start hunting...

Pike is the third sidekick on my list to get his own series.