My favorite novels explore the workings of the human psyche. I want to finish a book thinking Damn, that was a good read—and realize only later that I learned something about psychology, medicine, or history. There are dozens of writers I'd like to add to my list, but these are the five I'd choose if I were stranded on a desert island and allowed to take just five books. Sure, I go dark—the human mind is dark; human history is dark. But there must be beauty to balance the darkness, whether that beauty is in the plot and characterizations, or simply in the elegant use of language.
Everything Sarah Waters writes is great, but this one is my favorite.
Waters is highly literary—her command of language and vocabulary is impressive—yet she is not afraid to roll around in the mud as her characters engage in petty deception, then...larger crimes.
Set in the early 1920's, the story is as alive and real and immediate as if it were happening right now. I love the way Waters includes plenty of historical details, from language to furniture and architecture, but she never gets lost in it—her characters are real and nuanced and very human. They are driven by need, greed, lust, anger—the real emotions that often trigger violent crimes.
This novel from the internationally bestselling author of The Little Stranger, is a brilliant 'page-turning melodrama and a fascinating portrait of London of the verge of great change' (Guardian)
It is 1922, and London is tense. Ex-servicemen are disillusioned, the out-of-work and the hungry are demanding change. And in South London, in a genteel Camberwell villa, a large silent house now bereft of brothers, husband and even servants, life is about to be transformed, as impoverished widow Mrs Wray and her spinster daughter, Frances, are obliged to take in lodgers.
I love Ruth Rendell and her alter ego, Barbara Vine.
Imagine being so talented and prolific an author that you need several names to spread among all your thrillers and mysteries! A Dark-Adapted Eye is probably my favorite, although every book she wrote is fire!
This book is grim; Vine explores how psychological trauma and family secrets can fester for years, or even generations. I was not able to put it down once I'd begun. Phenomenally good!
"Dazzling...writing at her formidable best, Barbara Vine taps the poetry as well as the pain of her characters' clamorous declarations of their need for love." -New York Times Book Review
"When the best mystery writer in the English-speaking world launched a second byline, she actually stepped up her writing a level." -TIME
Faith Severn has grown up with the dark cloud of murder looming over her family. Her aunt Vera Hillyard, a rigidly respectable woman, was convicted and hanged for the crime, but the reason for her desperate deed died with her. Thirty years later, a probing journalist pushes Faith…
Ann Davenport is sixty-eight, newly retired, and eager for a fresh start. She leaves her old life behind and settles in a quiet Oregon coast town, hoping to reinvent herself and heal old wounds. Her new beginning holds until she finds the body of a young boy tangled in a…
I love Jackson Brodie in every book of the series, but this is the first.
Brodie, a likable roughneck who sometimes works as a private investigator and who used to be a cop, solves three seemingly unrelated murders through a combination of intelligence and bumbling.
I finished the book in a single night, wowed by Atkinson and slightly in love with her main character. There is no mystery writer working today better than Kate Atkinson. Damn, she's good!
Case one: A little girl goes missing in the night. Case two: A beautiful young office worker falls victim to a maniac's apparently random attack. Case three: A new mother finds herself trapped in a hell of her own making - with a very needy baby and a very demanding husband - until a fit of rage creates a grisly, bloody escape.Thirty years after the first incident, as private investigator Jackson Brodie begins investigating all three cases, startling connections and discoveries emerge ...
I was dumbstruck after reading What Came Before He Shot Her.
All of Elizabeth George's Inspector Lynley novels are superb, but I did not think she could surpass With No One as Witness, in which Lynley's fiancée is murdered. Well, she did!
What Came Before He Shot Her is a very different kind of book—equally captivating—but not exactly a mystery, as we know who did it from the start—just not why. It's the story of the boy who murdered Helen, and how he came to do it. I felt real grief for Helen and Lynley, but I felt it for her killer, too.
The shocking conclusion of Elizabeth George's previous bestseller, With No One As Witness, saw the wife of New Scotland Yard's Thomas Lynley gunned down in the street outside her home. Under arrest for the crime is a twelve-year-old boy, Joel Campbell. What possible motive could he have? What chain of events could have led such a child from the housing estates of North Kensington to the elegant streets of Belgravia with such deadly intent? The answer to these questions is a complex mixture of fate and circumstance. Abandoned (albeit involuntarily) by his parents, Joel and two siblings are dumped on…
You’re grieving, you’re falling in love and you’re skint. On top of it all, Europe’s going to Hell in a handcart. Things can’t get any worse, can they?
London, 1938. William is grieving over his former teacher and mentor, killed fighting for the Republicans in Spain. As Europe slides towards…
I'm fascinated, horrified, and entranced by stories of the American Old West, and nobody tells these stories better than Paulette Jiles.
The Color of Lightning is based on the life of a real man, Britt Johnson, a Black cowboy who went to extraordinary lengths to rescue his wife and child from Comanche raiders shortly after the Civil War. A secondary plotline follows a Quaker Agent trying to prevent the massacre of Plains Indians by the U.S. Government.
The story is heartbreaking, inspirational, and in so many ways, unexpected. Jiles is a master storyteller and all of her books are excellent, but this is the one that lingers in my mind.
In 1863, as the War Between the States creeps slowly yet inevitably toward its bloody conclusion, former Kentucky slave Britt Johnson ventures west into unknown territory with his wife, Mary, and their three children. Settling on the Texas plains, the Johnson family hopes to build on the dreams that carried them from the Confederate South to this new land of possibility - dreams that are abruptly shattered by a brutal Indian raid upon the settlement while Britt is away establishing a business. Returning to face the unthinkable - his friends and neighbours slain or captured, his eldest son dead, his…
Once a brainy but naive PhD candidate, the former librarian we know as Cam Baker is on the run, forced to trust Witness Protection to keep her alive as she slips from one alias to another, always just a step ahead of her murderous ex and his deadly band of thugs. Cam must hide her intelligence and education, accepting menial jobs that will let her stay on the down-low, experiencing the best and worst of the human condition along the way.
The interlocked chapters form a novel-in-stories, growing darker as the book progresses. You'll find yourself checking the backseat as Cam's erudite, intellectual persona slips away and a cynical, world-weary woman takes charge of her own life—nearly losing it in the process.
This book is a literary historical novel. It is set in Britain immediately after World War II, when people – gay, straight, young, and old - are struggling to get back on track with their lives, including their love lives. Because of the turmoil of the times, the number of…
In The Raffle Baby, Ruth Talbot spins a luminous tale of three Depression-era orphans—Teeny, Sonny Boy, and Vic—riding the rails, chasing harvests, and stealing when they must.
Survival is their only destination, yet Teeny’s fantastical stories, told by firelight in hobo jungles and migrant camps, keep hope alive—including the…
