I’ve been hooked on crime fiction since I was old enough to heft around the collected adventures of Sherlock Holmes, and the older I get, the more I appreciate funny books about the excruciating ways that people interact with each other. I also love a book that does two things well, so a crime novel/comedy of manners is about the best reading experience I can imagine.
I wrote...
A Bad Deal in Mormon Land
By
T.I.M. Wirkus,
What is my book about?
A Bad Deal in Mormon Land is a historical crime novel/comedy of manners about—in part—a fraudulent spirit medium who gets…
I don’t want to describe this book as cozy, because it’s not, at least not in the “cozy mystery” sense of “yes, murders happen, but we’re not too troubled by them as readers.”
Truly terrible things happen to many characters in this book, and Atkinson really makes us feel them. Somehow, though, this book (and the subsequent entries in the Jackson Brodie series) is such a comfort read for me. I think a big part of it is the humanistic decency that informs the universe of the novel.
Also, Jackson Brodie is an outstanding straight man for the alternately grim and funny situations he finds himself in.
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 ...
Colson Whitehead always impresses me with his ability to make potentially tired genre elements feel fresh and vital.
Honestly, I enjoy even a workmanlike heist-gone-wrong story, but this one is firing on all cylinders. There’s a world-weary sense of humor suffusing all of it, coupled with complex, compelling characters that make this an irresistible read for me.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys, this gloriously entertaining novel is “fast-paced, keen-eyed and very funny ... about race, power and the history of Harlem all disguised as a thrill-ride crime novel" (San Francisco Chronicle).
"Ray Carney was only slightly bent when it came to being crooked..." To his customers and neighbors on 125th street, Carney is an upstanding salesman of reasonably priced furniture, making a decent life for himself and his family. He and his wife Elizabeth are expecting their second child, and if her parents…
Winner of the 2024 New Mexico - Arizona Book Award.
In this deeply researched novel of America's most celebrated outlaw, Mark Warren sheds light on the human side of Billy the Kid and reveals the intimate stories of the lesser-known players in his legendary life of crime. Warren's fictional composer…
I recently saw the critic Molly Young describe this book as the story of a woman who goes to prison essentially for being annoying.
That hooked me, so I went out and found a copy. I hadn’t read anything by Janet Malcolm before this, and I was sad it had taken me so long to get to her work. This one isn’t a novel, but Malcolm has such a knack for character that it often reads like one.
She also has so many great, cutting insights about the legal system, and a few lines that made me laugh out loud. I love a great short book, and this one fits the bill.
The Crime of Sheila McGough is Janet Malcolm's brilliant exposé of miscarriage of justice in the case of Sheila McGough, a disbarred lawyer recently released from prison. McGough had served 2 1/2 years for collaborating with a client in his fraud, but insisted that she didn't commit any of the 14 felonies she was convicted.
"[N]o other writer tells better stories about the perpetual, the unwinnable, battle between narrative and truth." --The New York Times Book Review
An astonishingly persuasive condemnation of the cupidity of American law and its preference for convincing narrative rather than the truth, this is also…
I love the opening of this novel: an offhand-feeling anecdote about Chili Palmer, the central character, getting his jacket stolen from a restaurant in Miami Beach. It feels breezy and inconsequential, but it does so much work to set the tone, establish the stakes, and introduce key characters.
I’m also a sucker for a fish-out-of-water comedy, although maybe this book is the opposite of that: tough-guy loan shark Chili Palmer falls in with a group of hapless Hollywood types and ends up thriving through the novel’s sometimes violent, sometimes funny twists and turns.
A thriller filled with Leonard's signatures - scathing wit, crackling dialogue, twisted plot, mad scams - and set in the drug sodden world of Hollywood.
A decades-old secret. A missing woman. A private investigator with everything to prove.
Newly minted PI Paula Moore takes on her first case: find Marion Taylor, who vanished from Portsmouth, England, years ago. Paula’s search leads her across the ocean to San Francisco—only to discover Marion has changed her name,…
I’ve read this book multiple times over various stages of my life, and I find it funnier and funnier (and more and more impressive) the older I get.
This novel has so much going on: yes, technically it’s a Western, but it’s also a crime novel about the corrosive power of revenge, a buddy comedy about a fourteen-year-old girl and an over-the-hill U.S. Marshal, an oddball historical novel, and a meditation on youth and morality.
And more things, probably, that I’ll spot next time I inevitably pick it up again.
There is no knowing what lies in a man's heart. On a trip to buy ponies, Frank Ross is killed by one of his own workers. Tom Chaney shoots him down in the street for a horse, $150 cash, and two Californian gold pieces. Ross's unusually mature and single-minded fourteen-year-old daughter Mattie travels to claim his body, and finds that the authorities are doing nothing to find Chaney. Then she hears of Rooster - a man, she's told, who has grit - and convinces him to join her in a quest into dark, dangerous Indian territory to hunt Chaney down…
A Bad Deal in Mormon Land is a historical crime novel/comedy of manners about—in part—a fraudulent spirit medium who gets hired in 1908 by an excommunicated Mormon apostle to summon the ghost of Joseph Smith to give his blessing to the former apostle’s breakaway sect.
The novel also follows a disillusioned wife of the polygamous apostle, a beautiful private detective with a grudge, a ruthless copper magnate, a ne’er-do-well henchman of the ex-apostle, a group of trans vaudevillians, and a beleaguered labor leader.
Jose Castillo is a cynical, wise-cracking Cuban-American who restores classic cars. He’s also a private eye whose sarcastic ways sometimes get him into trouble.
One day, in the process of installing a four-barrel carburetor on a 1965 Mustang, into his shop walks trouble—in the shape of a mysterious, beautiful woman…
On a foggy morning in New York City, a man and a woman run into each other, literally. The man, a writer, invites the woman, an artist, for coffee. They married just two months later. And four years later, their marriage is crumbling. On a foggy morning in New York…
