I’ve been writing for a long time and reading even longer. I enjoy intelligent books that are well written—not overwritten or over punctuated—and as we all do both of those, I mean that it’s been well edited. And I understand the struggle which is why four of my five choices are from indie authors like myself.
I loved this book. This is the tenth book I’ve read this month and I haven’t had a bad one yet, so either I’m really good at picking, or the standard of writing out there is improving all the time. I would give this book 9.5 out of 10. I couldn’t wait to get my day finished so that I could settle and read in the evenings. Can’t praise this highly enough.
The plot was riveting, the pace built well, the characterisation is up there, and his description is powerful and draws you right into the visuals and meaning of the story. What really captured me with this book was the child’s voice. It was so damned subtly done. If anything, the boy is written in an understated way—but before it ever got sinister, you just knew with that creepy little kid’s voice that it was going to. The ‘out…
I’ve always loved mysteries and puzzles and have been an avid mystery reader since devouring all the Nancy Drew books at our library. There’s such satisfaction that comes from solving a mystery. When I started writing, my faithful golden retriever was always resting at my feet. She was the inspiration and the reason I chose to include dogs in all my books. Having a dog alongside my character allows me to show more depth in the humans in my stories and reveal weaknesses and vulnerabilities they may not be able to show others. I hope you enjoy my top picks as much as I have.
I loved this book that’s a bit of women’s fiction and a mystery in one, woven together by one of my favorites, Nora Roberts. This one is set in the Pacific Northwest and Fiona, the main character, lives on a small island off the coast of Washington. I also write women’s fiction and my first series is set in the San Juan Islands of Washington, so this book appealed to me for the setting, along with the aspect of the canine search and rescue work the main character does.
A puppy named Jaws brings a new human into Fiona’s life and sets up the emotional elements of the story. I can’t resist a story where a dog introduces two of the main characters!
A canine Search and Rescue volunteer fights danger and finds love in the Pacific Northwest wilderness in this riveting #1 New York Times bestseller from Nora Roberts.
To most people, Fiona Bristow seems to have an idyllic life-a quaint house on an island off Seattle's coast, a thriving dog-training school and a challenging volunteer job performing Canine Search and Rescue. But Fiona got to this point by surviving a nightmare: an encounter with the Red Scarf Killer, who shot and killed Fiona's cop fiance and his K-9 partner.
On Orcas Island, Fiona has found the peace and solitude necessary to…
I’m a sucker for post-apocalyptic stories, and this one’s beautifully told.
In The Last, the big event just happened, and Jon’s struggling with being half a world away from his family after all the bombs drop. He’s torn between what he has to do for survival, stuck at this Swiss hotel with others from around the world, and how he might be able to get back to – or even simply contact – his wife. Their last conversation didn’t end well, and it’s haunting him on a personal level as he tries to keep up with the changing world and simple survival.
You care just as much about Jon’s internal struggle as the external, so he takes center stage even as a murder mystery unfolds around him.
This propulsive post-apocalyptic thriller “in which Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None collides with Stephen King’s The Shining” (NPR) follows a group of survivors stranded at a hotel as the world descends into nuclear war and the body of a young girl is discovered in one of the hotel’s water tanks.
Jon thought he had all the time in the world to respond to his wife’s text message: I miss you so much. I feel bad about how we left it. Love you. But as he’s waiting in the lobby of the L’Hotel Sixieme in Switzerland after an academic…
Visiting journalists regularly misinterpret California. Outside politicians twist it into bizarre caricatures. I know because I have worked as a journalist in all parts of the state. I covered crime for the LA Herald Examiner, spent 27 years at the LA Times, was a columnist and editorial page editor at the Sacramento Bee and, finally, was senior editor of the nonprofit news organization, CalMatters. I’ve covered governors, wildfires, a major earthquake, politics, mass incarceration, mass shootings, an execution, and all manner of policy. There are many great nonfiction books about California, including Jim Newton’s biographies of Earl Warren and Jerry Brown, Randy Shilts’s The Mayor of Castro Street, and Gladwin Hill’s Dancing Bear.
In The Devil’s Harvest, Jessica Garrison uses California’s Central Valley as an essential character in this fast-paced, thrilling, and chilling tale. Although she describes a prolific contract killer, Jessica Garrison has written much more than a meticulously researched true crime book. Readers will gain important insights into the nature of justice and California.
This suspenseful true story of a drug cartel hitman who got away with murder after murder in California's Central Valley over three decades reveals how the criminal justice system fails our most vulnerable immigrant communities.
On the surface, fifty-eight-year-old Jose Martinez didn't seem evil or even that remarkable—just a regular neighbor, good with cars and devoted to his family. But in between taking his children to Disneyland and visiting his mom, Martinez was also one of the most skilled professional killers police had ever seen.
He tracked one victim to one of the wealthiest corners of America, a horse ranch…
I grew up a child of the movies, open to watching anything at least once and countlessly rewatching the movies I loved. When not in front of a television, I was instead in front of a book, playing the words of the page out in my imagination. Now I write thrillers of multiple varieties (action, techno, paranormal, etc.), still visualizing words as movies playing out in my mind. Over the years, I’ve seen the quality of novel adaptations grow (e.g., Harry Potter, The Martian, etc.), and yet these staples of my youth have always stuck with me as lost opportunities to deliver a superior work to the general movie-watching audience.
On one hand, this sequel to the amazing The Silence of the Lambs might have been doomed from the start, given the pedigree it was expected to live up to. On the other hand, taken as its own work, Hannibal is an interesting, disturbing, and highly engrossing horror thriller.
The ending was extremely controversial, so much so that it was changed for the 2001 movie adaptation. Regardless of how one feels about each ending, however, one thing is certain: the book was the superior version of the tale.
Ridley Scott is an amazing director, but he was the wrong choice for this story, and it led to the overall feel of the movie, as well as the altered ending, not living up to the feel of other entries in the series. Keep an open mind, and the book will please.
_________________________ HANNIBAL LECTER HAS BEEN ON THE RUN FOR SEVEN YEARS.
And seven years after he helped FBI Special Agent Clarice Starling bring down Buffalo Bill, her career is collapsing after a disastrous drug bust.
Meanwhile, seven years after violently escaping from custody, Hannibal Lecter is hunted by Mason Verger, a psychopathic former client obsessed with feeding him to wild boars.
With the one-time partners at a low ebb, Hannibal is the one to reach out to Clarice, who has been plagued by dreams of his rasping voice.
It has been seven years since they both came to realise they…
My first published novel, Mahu, was about a gay cop coming out of the closet in Honolulu while investigating a dangerous case. I didn’t even realize there was a whole genre of gay mysteries until I’d finished it, but since then I have made it my business to read as much as I can of these books, both classics and new ones. My reading has deepened my understanding only of my protagonist’s life, but of my own.
Doug Orlando is a conflicted New York City detective with a past, and that gives him a lot of psychological depth. Originally published in 1992, this was one of the best of the wave of gay mysteries. I loved it because the police procedures seemed so authentic and Doug seemed like a guy I’d want to know, and want on my side in case of trouble.
LAMBDA LITERARY AWARD FINALIST FOR BEST MYSTERY! The bestselling crime novels of New York life in the early nineties are back. Gruff, weary, gay Brooklyn Homicide cop Doug Orlando is facing his most shocking case: Rabbi Avraham Rabowitz lay in a pool of his own blood, a prayer shawl stuffed down his throat, and his beard shaved off. The question for Detective Orlando isn’t who hated the right wing religious sect leader—Rabowitz had been the open enemy of blacks, gays, pro-choice women, even fellow Jews. In a case that moves from the depths of the ghetto to the high-rise office…
As a writer of Psychological Horror who specializes in stories about serial killers, the first-person serial killer narrative stands out as a fascinating vehicle to explore the psyche of real human ‘monsters.’ Which is precisely what I did, using books from this list as subject material for my Master’s thesis. The research also informed Blood Related, my debut novel, a first-person serial killer narrative and the most controversial book I’ve written so far. Perhaps, gaining insight from fictional serial killers would be a failed enterprise if life didn’t imitate art, but the fact is that these types of narratives are mostly informed by their real-life counterparts. Be warned – read at your own discretion.
This book blew my mind when I first read it. In my opinion, it is one of the most visceral, scary, and under-rated serial killer novels of all time. Published in 1986 in the midst of America’s much-hyped real and fictional serial killer ‘epidemic,’ Killer on the Road stands out as a first-person serial-killer narrative, as well as putting forward a new kind of character (for the 1980s) – the homosexual serial murderer. In this novel, Ellroy delves into the phenomenon of motiveless serial murder from the perspective of the killer on a subversive journey through a hellish suburban America. From the prologue to the epilogue the reader is presented an interior world-view saturated with violence and nightmarish insights into the psychopathology of a disturbed killer.
Martin Michael Plunkett is a product of his times -- the possessor of a genius intellect, a pitiless soul of brushed steel, and a heart of blackest evil. With criminal tendencies forged in the fires of L.A.'s Charles Manson hysteria, he comes to the bay city of San Francisco -- and submits to savage and terrible impulses that reveal to him his true vocation as a pure and perfect murderer. And so begins his decade of discovery and terror, as he cuts a bloody swath across the full length of a land, ingeniously exploiting and feeding upon a society's obsessions.…
Like most people I know, I have always been fascinated with serial killers, and more importantly why they do what they do. What makes one man murder multiple victims while another with a similar upbringing sells white goods and wouldn’t attract a traffic ticket. In my books, I am as interested in showing my readers why a killer kills, as I am in the hunt to catch him. My goal is to not so much get the reader to ‘like’ the antagonist but to understand, and dare I say even feel sorry for him. We are all products of our environment and upbringing, yet some of us murder others for fun.
Trust me when I say that any book by Michael Robotham will not disappoint, but this one is something special. Shatter features psychologist Joe who has his own problems and aids the police in tracking down a serial killer who can destroy his victims by getting them to kill themselves. Never have I read a book that has taken me on such an emotional roller-coaster.
A naked woman in red high-heeled shoes is perched on the edge of Clifton Suspension Bridge with her back pressed to the safety fence, weeping into a mobile phone. Clinical psychologist Joseph O'Loughlin is only feet away, desperately trying to talk her down. She whispers, 'you don't understand,' and jumps.
Later, Joe has a visitor - the woman's teenage daughter, a runaway from boarding school. She refuses to believe that her mother would have jumped off the bridge - not only would she not commit suicide, she is terrified of heights.
I’ve been fascinated by true murder cases ever since I started reading about them when I was sixteen years old. They draw on all your senses and emotions: your curiosity about the psychology behind the killer’s actions and your horror and sympathy for the victims, their families, and the families of the killers because they suffer too. As a writer I am particularly drawn to apparent miscarriages of justice and I think there must be a secret detective hidden deep in my soul because I love to delve and investigate these. I wrote my first book after retiring from my long career in Social Services and Mental Health Services.
In the early 1970s true crime writer Ann Rule discovered that the close friend she had been working with for several years was in fact the serial killer Ted Bundy. As a caring person she must have been completely shocked and horrified, but she would know at some level deep inside her that as a true crime writer she had been given a unique gift: the opportunity to write about a terrible crime from a very personal perspective. I was given the same “gift” when in 2014 I found an account of a murder that my grandma told me about many years ago, and I uncovered a miscarriage of justice. This led to me writing my first book and the rest as they say “is history”—I started a whole new career as a true crime writer.
In 1971, while working the late-shift at a Seattle crisis clinic, true-crime writer Ann Rule struck up a friendship with a sensitive, charismatic young coworker: Ted Bundy. Three years later, eight young women disappeared in seven months, and Rule began tracking a brutal mass murderer. But she had no idea that the "Ted" the police were seeking was the same Ted who had become her close friend and confidant. As she put the evidence together, a terrifying picture emerged of the man she thought she knew-his magnetic power, his bleak compulsion, his double life, and, most of all, his string…
Marc Cameron has a way of intertwining the specific details of law enforcement—gained from personal experience—with compelling, exciting, page-turning, nail-biting stories featuring Deputy US Marshal Arliss Cutter. Cutter’s assignment in Alaska finds him fighting crime in harsh and forbidding environments.
In Cold Snap, the hunt for a serial killer in Anchorage and a doomed prison transport from the far north prove connected as Cutter is stranded in a frozen wilderness with violent and murderous convicts, complicated by marauding wolves and bears. Besides all that, a storm rolls in that’s so cold and violent it can freeze your fingers to the pages.
In Alaska, nature can be cruel... but human nature is crueler.
After an early spring thaw on the Alaskan coast, Anchorage police discover a gruesome new piece of evidence in their search for a serial killer - a dismembered human foot.
In the remote northern town of Deadhorse, Deputy US Marshal Arliss Cutter escorts four very dangerous handcuffed prisoners onto a small bush plane. He's expecting a routine mission and a nonstop flight... But everything goes wrong.
When the plane goes down in the wilderness, all hell breaks loose. The prisoners murder the pilot and a guard and torch the…
