100 books like Wrong Place Wrong Time

Okay, this might seem like a bit of a strange choice to be included in a list of best “ripped from the headlines” crime novels, but it really isn’t. I mean, the assassination of John F. Kennedy in Dallas on November 22, 1963, is probably the most famous big news headline of our times. 

I was totally blown away by King’s brilliant concept of using that legendary date in history to write this fascinating thriller about what “might have been” if someone could somehow go back in time and stop it from ever happening.

Like the other four books on my list, King takes a major real-life news story and uses it to create a fascinating work of fiction. I just love books like this!  

No one does dialogue and atmospheric tension like Tana French. Faithful Place is my favorite of hers.

I felt like the characters were so alive that I could hear their voices in my head long after I had closed the book. This story is rife with a gritty, urban Irish atmosphere and thick with familial tension. French does a cross between literary fiction and procedural that is devastating, at times quite dark, and yet ringing with hope—one of my favorite qualities in a mystery.

Best read on a dark, rainy afternoon with a mug of rich coffee—or a Guinness. 

There is a certain kind of literature that takes my breath away. In my experience, there is nothing more exhilarating than reading a book that you think is contemporary that veers, with the reader hardly noticing, into the speculative. I adore books that take the ordinary world and sprinkle it with magic and possibilities.

With this book, Matt Haig answers a question many of us contemplate: What if? What if I’d taken the other fork in the road? This book answers that question for one flawed, beautiful character, and I was enthralled with every page.  

When I was young, I quickly developed a taste for sci-fi. Thanks to my father, I also learned to love murder mysteries. I still remember us watching Columbo together.

My love for those genres makes it feel like The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle was written for me. At first glance, the setting is normal, a country house in the 1920s. The twist is that there’s a time loop, and the only way to break it is for the protagonist to solve the murder of Evelyn Hardcastle.

Even better, for every loop, the protagonist has his consciousness awakening in a different body, allowing him to experience the events through multiple points. This setting allows for a complex, dazzling narrative filled with twists and turns. I can’t recommend it enough.

This book is a quintessential version of this type of narrative, following a new recruit, Keiji, as he relives the same battle against invading aliens known as Mimics, who also do their own hive-mind version of time looping.

I’ve always loved how time loop stories use repetition to progressively work through a situation, and following Keiji movement by movement, as he learns how to defeat the Mimics, I really felt like I knew what the experience of a time loop would be like. 

Louise Penny has hooked me again with another great installment in the Inspector Gamache series. I was so excited when I opened the book and found I would be returning to Three Pines for a new murder and an old story line Penny has been dangling in front of me since book one.

Both are resolved in this book (I think, but you never know) and the end is more than satisfying. There's still a lot of unfinished business in that little town and this incredible cast of characters just keeps me coming back for more. Moreover, (I remind my husband every time I start a new book in the series), I would run away with Armand Gamache if given even the slightest chance. 

I loved the boldness of this book, as it does what most of these types of novels shy away from, and that is to let everyone in the world in on the knowledge of the loop, eventually.

In this book, once a character has looped back in time and changed things, everyone involved in the change catches up to the knowledge of the original version through “false memory syndrome.” The result is that by the end of the novel, the whole world seems to be conspiring to stop the protagonists in the most nerve-wracking last few chapters I can remember reading in a long time. 

I literally could not put this book down!

Not to brag, but I can usually spot whodunit early on in most murder mysteries. This novel, however, kept me in the dark as, one by one, each of the characters fell off Foley’s guest list and onto my suspect list.

The writing is suspenseful, the plot is fast-paced, and the story is cleverly told from numerous characters’ points of view. I truly did not see this ending coming! As a diehard murder mystery fan, Lucy Foley is my new Agatha Christie. I highly recommend this novel.

Patricia Highsmith is the original queen of psychological thrillers. This book, later made into a film by Hitchcock, was the inspiration for my novel. I wanted to see how the story could play out in modern times with young women as the lead characters. While I used Strangers on a Train as the jumping-off point, my own story went in slightly different directions.

In Highsmith’s book, when the main character is pulled into what he believes is an idle question on how one could get away with the perfect murder, he has to determine how far he’ll go to escape being blamed for a very real crime. Highsmith excels at getting ordinary people into extraordinary circumstances and then pushing them to see how they will react.

Robyn Harding’s secret skill is peeling back the layers of a family to expose both the love and the possible darkness hiding inside. When a “perfect” suburban family begins to be harassed by a mysterious stranger they first chalk it up to random vandals, until they begin to suspect that it’s being done for a very particular reason. 

The trick that Harding does is to give each family member a reason to be the target. She unravels the myth of perfection and kept me turning pages to determine the motivation behind the crime. I am always much more interested in the why of a mystery novel than the who—and this book delivers exactly that.