Fans pick 100 books like Whereabouts Unknown

Best Kept Secrets by Great Lakes author Tracey Phillips is a psychological mystery set in and around Indianapolis, Indiana. When I met Tracey at the Writers’ Police Academy in Appleton, Wisconsin, we ended hung out together and became fast friends. We bought each other’s books. And became fans.

Morgan Jewell is a homicide cop with a dark secret. Her best friend, Fay, was murdered years ago and Morgan, who can barely remember what happened that night, worries that she was somehow to blame. Now, as other bodies start surfacing, Morgan and her partner try to piece together the puzzle that might lead to catching a serial killer and resolve the mystery of Fay’s death. The twists and turns and the breakneck pace meant I could hardly put it down.

Geoff Herbach is the award-winning author of YA books. His latest, Cracking the Bell, deals with a major issue in contact sports—concussion. After several years of online writing with him, we met in person at a big mystery convention. A college professor in Minnesota, Land of a Thousand Lakes, he has produced radio comedy shows and toured rock clubs telling weird stories. 

When the main character, Isaiah, is knocked out on the field, the consequences reach far beyond his ability to play, forcing him to think about life with football. He has to consider tough decisions that will have an impact on his family, his team, and his future. How do you decide your path to the future when none of your choices are good?

Mindy Meija is another author I recently met at a conference. She is, appropriately enough, an accountant who lives in the Twin Cities and uses her expertise to craft thrillers that keep you on the edge and guessing what will come next.

Nora Trier is a forensic accountant, hired to check into missing prize money for a big kickboxing tournament. Expected to find both the thief and the cash, Unfortunately, Nora has a secret connection to the company sponsoring the tournament which made her reluctant to take the job until she came under pressure from her partner. 

Kirkus Reviews called Strike Me Down a tense and unpredictable thriller that “crackles with obsession, greed, lust, and plenty of ambition, and it’s loaded with more twists and turns than a spy novel.”

I first met Patricia Skalka when I joined Off-Campus Writers’ Workshop, the oldest continuous writer’s group in the Chicago area. She divides her time between Chicago and a cottage in Door County, Wisconsin. It’s not surprising that Park Ranger Dave Cubiak, her sleuth, moved from Chicago to Door County. 

Cubiak, a former Chicago homicide detective, quit his job and moved to Door County after the death of his wife and daughter. Six deaths among visitors to the popular tourist area entangle an unwilling Cubiak in the search for a clever killer who may be planning more murders as a popular festival floods the charming waterfront villages with more prospective victims. New to the area, Cubiak doesn’t know who to suspect and who to trust.

What Calloway does for Washington, Wallace does for Jefferson. Even more than Washington, Jefferson talked one game and played another. He could be splendidly eloquent on how much he wanted the Indian nations to become Americans, yet that could only happen, in Jefferson’s mind, if they surrendered their identity as Indians. If anything, the situation was even worse than Wallace suggests, as I point out in detail in my book on William Wells. While there is much to admire about Jefferson, his Indian policy shows how idealism can serve as a front for blatant exploitation and near genocide.  

The Middle Ground is by far the best overview of the Great Lakes frontier over a period of almost two hundred years. White traces how French fur traders were able to establish a fluctuating “middle ground” with the Indian nations of the region that allowed for a degree of respect, understanding, and intermarriage. When the French were succeeded by the British, this middle ground began to shrink, as English traders wanted to let the cash nexus determine their business practices. When the Americans came to dominate the situation, the middle ground, with the exception of a few figures like William Wells, almost entirely disappeared. The result was devastating for the Indian nations, whose cultures nearly disappeared. White’s thesis has been challenged by Alan Taylor and other historians of the period, but the book remains an essential classic.  

Historians of the Midwest were deprived of one of their finest by the early death of Andrew Cayton. Frontier Indiana is the best of a series of books published by Ohio State University Press on the states of the Old Northwest. Combining chapters on various men and women, Little Turtle’s Miami resistance, and William Henry Harrison’s land-hungry settlers, Cayton’s impressive research and thoughtful writing go a long way toward illuminating the frontier of the late 18th and early 19th centuries.  

I’m a historian, and I didn’t want to bog down this list with academic history books exclusively. But if I had to recommend one history book, written by a top-notch scholar that offers an accessible and accurate picture of the history of the Great Lakes, it would be Tanner’s Atlas.

This is so much more than just a collection of maps; it is a labor of love by an expert who dedicated her career to understanding the human geography of the Great Lakes region. Readers will find guides to everything from the region’s environmental resources to military clashes between Europeans and Native peoples.

The beautiful maps are further contextualized with text sections laying out the history of the Native peoples of the Lakes from pre-contact through the end of the treaty era in 1871. As someone who believes geography is crucial to understanding history, this is one of my… show more.

If you want to know how the British and Canadians view the war, this is the book for you. The original edition was published in 1965 but lacked documentation. For the revised edition, a team of Canadian scholars headed by Donald E. Graves added a host of appendices with new material and tracked down sources to give the volume appropriate documentation. 

This is a novel about loss, family, and reconciliation, and it moved me deeply. It’s set in Minnesota, where I spent about half my childhood, and it deals with personal and family histories, which I find quite compelling. In the novel, Noah’s father, Olaf Torr, lives under the weight of survivor’s guilt. Years earlier, thirty men went out on the ore boat, the Ragnorak, and only three returned. One was Olaf. As the novel begins, Olaf is dying, and he contacts Noah, from whom he’s estranged. But Noah still hasn’t forgiven Olaf for his alcoholism. Also, Noah and his wife, Natalie, are struggling with infertility issues. But Noah and Natalie come to see Olaf, who starts telling Noah what happened on that boat.