Here are 16 books that Chicago Mysteries fans have personally recommended once you finish the Chicago Mysteries series.
Shepherd is a community of authors and super-readers sharing their favorite books with the world.
I write the West Investigations series, a romantic thriller series, centered around the men and women running a private investigations firm. When I began the series I knew I wanted it to be set in an urban city, not just because I’m a city girl at heart, but because of the eclectic nature, diversity, and color that can be found in the big city. Each of the books I’ve recommended below features a big city PI that jumps off the page, grabs you, and doesn’t let go for 200+ pages.
I was shocked when I realized S.A. Lelchuck was male.
Nikki Griffin, a hardnosed San Francisco detective slash bookstore owner, is such a dynamic, fleshed-out female character I just assumed she’d been penned by a woman. Well, you know what they say about assuming. Nikki is a kick butt, take no prisoner’s PI with an agenda.
Like the PIs in the books above, she veers onto the wrong side of the tracks often. Actually, she jumps over them and runs along the wrong side of the tracks while brandishing brass knuckles and a baton.
Even when she’s breaking the law, you’re kinda okay with it because, well, Lelchuck’s bad guys are really bad.
Do you want women to do the rescuing? Are you craving a strong, independent heroine who can save herself? Did you love Killing Eve? Then this book is for you. Nikki Griffin is Villanelle - but she's on your side. * Bookseller by day. Bad ass by night.
Nikki Griffin owns a bookshop in California that has a resident cat, Bartleby. She drinks neat Jameson and rides an Aprilia motorcycle. She's a Private Investigator who spends her days talking about books and her nights fighting for women - and she could beat you in a fight, blindfolded.
I write the West Investigations series, a romantic thriller series, centered around the men and women running a private investigations firm. When I began the series I knew I wanted it to be set in an urban city, not just because I’m a city girl at heart, but because of the eclectic nature, diversity, and color that can be found in the big city. Each of the books I’ve recommended below features a big city PI that jumps off the page, grabs you, and doesn’t let go for 200+ pages.
If you’ve read this far, you know that I like my PIs off-beat, maybe even a little bit broken.
And Roxanne Weary, the Columbus, Ohio PI, is the definition of a hot mess. She’s a borderline alcoholic with a tendency toward sleeping with the absolute wrong people. Yet, you can’t help but feel for her. She’s also pretty funny.
It’s hard to find the sweet spot between humor and seriousness in a suspenseful plot but Lepionka manages to thread this needle very nicely.
'Seriously this is a must read. I loved it!' MARTINA COLE
'Utterly superb ... pure reading pleasure.' SOPHIE HANNAH
One of VAL MCDERMID'S New Blood choices for the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival, Harrogate 2017
What really happened to Sarah Cook?
A beautiful blonde teenager, Sarah Cook disappeared fifteen years ago, the same night her parents were brutally murdered in their suburban Ohio home. Her boyfriend Brad Stockton - black and from the wrong side of the tracks - was convicted of the murders and sits on death row, though he always maintained his innocence. As his execution nears,…
I write the West Investigations series, a romantic thriller series, centered around the men and women running a private investigations firm. When I began the series I knew I wanted it to be set in an urban city, not just because I’m a city girl at heart, but because of the eclectic nature, diversity, and color that can be found in the big city. Each of the books I’ve recommended below features a big city PI that jumps off the page, grabs you, and doesn’t let go for 200+ pages.
Fair warning: I grew up in the Washington, D.C. area so I’m not impartial here, but I love this book.
Pelecanos really just dropped me into the D.C. of my youth. The plotting here is great as is the characterization. Every character feels like a real person that you might meet in a bar or some seedy back room.
The suspense, the tension, the character’s individual motivations for stepping into the quagmire Pelecanos puts them in, is spot on. And it all leads up to an ending that is both shocking and, in hindsight, inevitable.
Fought when radio was first introduced, the Press-Radio war was an attempt on the part of print journalists to block the emergence of radio news. For nearly a decade, the newspapers of America fought to keep broadcast journalism off the air, exerting various forms of economic, regulatory, and legal pressure against new competitors. This study traces the stages and forms of institutional self-defense utilized by the press. Far more than mere battles to protect profits, media wars are fights to preserve the institutional power that derives from controlling the channels of communication.
I grew up reading mysteries and quickly realized that, for me, the best stories were those that peered into the very heart and soul of the protagonist. I also favored books with deep roots; I wanted the present-day crime to be linked to the past. Through work and personal experience, I also understood the heavy toll of loss and grief and found myself drawn to writing a mystery series that related both in a way that was honest and real. When readers tell me that my protagonist’s pain is their pain, that his story is their story, I am both humbled and honored.
At my daughters’ elementary school, sign language was part of the curriculum both for hearing and deaf students, so I was intrigued to see how A. F. Whitehouse used her knowledge and experience as a former sign language interpreter in Signs of Murder.
The book, the first in an intriguing new series, features Dana Demeter, a Chicago homicide detective who grew up hearing in an all-deaf family.
Demeter struggles with her grief over a miscarriage, her anxiety over the future of her marriage, her concerns for her aging parents, and a penchant to drown her sorrows in alcohol even as she searches for the person who killed her father’s deaf friend.
A solid and satisfying read, with a twisting trail of clues into a puzzling mystery and profound insight into the world of the deaf.
As the only hearing person in an all-Deaf family, Dana Demeter assumed a position of authority at a young age--interpreting for her parents, alerting to sounds that meant trouble, absorbing slights aimed at her twin brother.
A protector.
Now as a Chicago homicide detective, matters beyond Dana's control begin to pile up: Her father's Deaf friend is murdered and the lead investigator rejects her help, bungling the case; her husband refuses to return home until Dana deals with her grief over a miscarriage; and her Lieutenant suspends her for ten days citing a claim she was drinking on the job.…
I grew up reading mysteries and quickly realized that, for me, the best stories were those that peered into the very heart and soul of the protagonist. I also favored books with deep roots; I wanted the present-day crime to be linked to the past. Through work and personal experience, I also understood the heavy toll of loss and grief and found myself drawn to writing a mystery series that related both in a way that was honest and real. When readers tell me that my protagonist’s pain is their pain, that his story is their story, I am both humbled and honored.
I’ve never been able to resist the allure of a mystery with the fast, hard-driving pace of a Chandler-style noir story, the kind that Matt Coyle serves up in Yesterday’s Echo, the first in his Rick Cahill series.
Cahill is the perfect old-style protagonist: tough, honest, noble, and haunted by the past. An ex-cop and one-time suspect in his wife’s murder, he’s spent eight years building a new life when a beautiful woman tempts him with love.
After she’s arrested for murder, Cahill is drawn into a vicious web that again paints him as a potential killer and pulls him back into the blurred limelight of his wife’s death.
The story is superbly crafted and opens the door to an award-winning series. Not to be missed.
A dishonored ex-cop's desperate chance for redemption
While never convicted of his wife's murder, Rick was never exonerated either. Not by the police. Not by the media. Not even by himself. Eight years later, police suspicion and his own guilt remain over his responsibility in his wife's death.
When he meets Melody Malana, a beautiful yet secretive TV reporter, he sees a chance to love again. When she is arrested for murder and asks Rick for help, the former cop says no, but the rest of him says yes and he…
I grew up reading mysteries and quickly realized that, for me, the best stories were those that peered into the very heart and soul of the protagonist. I also favored books with deep roots; I wanted the present-day crime to be linked to the past. Through work and personal experience, I also understood the heavy toll of loss and grief and found myself drawn to writing a mystery series that related both in a way that was honest and real. When readers tell me that my protagonist’s pain is their pain, that his story is their story, I am both humbled and honored.
My late husband was a child immigrant, and for many years I listened as he and his family shared their experiences of balancing the opportunities this country offered with the deep and abiding loss they felt for the world they left behind.
Perhaps that’s whyThe Streelstruck such a deep chord. It’s a mystery –and the first book in an enticing new series – but it’s also the story of young Bridget Reardon, an Irish immigrant who gives up all she holds dear to build a new life for herself in the tumultuous America of the 1880s.
I empathized with Bridget as she ached for the past, cheered her on as she outsmarted a clever killer, and look forward to her continuing saga in Mary Logue’s next volume, The Big Sugar.
From "the reigning royalty of Minnesota murder mysteries" (The Rake) comes a striking new heroine: a young Irish immigrant caught up in a deadly plot in nineteenth-century Deadwood
When I was fifteen and my brother Seamus sixteen, we attended our own wake. Our family was in mourning, forced to send us off to America.
The year is 1880, and of all the places Brigid Reardon and her brother might have dreamed of when escaping Ireland's potato famine by moving to America, Deadwood, South Dakota, was not one of them. But Deadwood, in the…
I grew up reading mysteries and quickly realized that, for me, the best stories were those that peered into the very heart and soul of the protagonist. I also favored books with deep roots; I wanted the present-day crime to be linked to the past. Through work and personal experience, I also understood the heavy toll of loss and grief and found myself drawn to writing a mystery series that related both in a way that was honest and real. When readers tell me that my protagonist’s pain is their pain, that his story is their story, I am both humbled and honored.
Lark Chadwick is my kind of protagonist – gutsy, smart, and burdened with a past that won’t let go.
When the aunt who raised her dies, Chadwick refuses to believe that suicide was the cause. Digging into the circumstances surrounding one death she discovers the truth about the deaths of her parents who were killed in an accident that only she survived.
A fledgling journalist, Chadwick talks herself into a job with the local paper, a first step in the many adventures that follow her in an exciting series that takes her all the way to the White House. Author John DeDakis, a former veteran CNN journalist, infuses the award-winning series with real-life drama and authenticity.
Orphaned as an infant, sexually assaulted as a naïve college student, strong-willed, impulsive Lark Chadwick is vexed and trying to figure out what to do with her mixed-up life. When she discovers the body of the aunt who raised her, Lark goes on a search for answers.
She is stunned to learn from a 25-year-old newspaper clipping that she’s the “miracle baby” who survived a suspicious car accident that killed her parents at a rural railroad crossing in southern Wisconsin. Lark convinces Lionel Stone, the crusty Pulitzer-Prize winning editor, to let her do a follow-up investigation of the crash. Two…
I write the West Investigations series, a romantic thriller series, centered around the men and women running a private investigations firm. When I began the series I knew I wanted it to be set in an urban city, not just because I’m a city girl at heart, but because of the eclectic nature, diversity, and color that can be found in the big city. Each of the books I’ve recommended below features a big city PI that jumps off the page, grabs you, and doesn’t let go for 200+ pages.
Joe Pike may live in the City of Angels, but he is as far away from angelic as a man can get.
The ex-mercenary turned sometimes PI is tasked with protecting a spoiled Hollywood princess in this gritty, fast-moving novel. Joe has little patience for doing things the conventional way and no compunction about using violence to get what he wants.
Even though his investigatory methods can be destructive, to both him and others, he’s a man you find yourself rooting for…and wondering about. A compelling PI who anyone would want on their team when it really hits the fan.
'Packed with whiplash plot twists and taut dialogue...THE WATCHMAN is as good a psychological test case as it is a thriller' ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY
A long time ago, Joe Pike asked for help. In return, he would, one day, be called upon to return the favour, no questions asked. That day has come.
Joe Pike is asked to protect the life of Larkin Conner Barkley, a spoiled rich girl who happens to be a federal witness in a major case. But someone is leaking information about their whereabouts, and the killers are getting all too close. So Pike hatches a plan:…
My first career in archaeology fed my love of history and cultures, giving me insight into human motivations. As a writer, I also love a good action scene, and I began taking mixed martial arts when I was writing the Emma Fielding archaeology mysteries and then the “Fangborn” urban fantasy novels. I soon realized I wanted to write a thriller with female characters who were badass—tough and smart—women I’d want to have at my back in a fight. I found them when I wrote Exit Interview. I love a book where a woman takes charge to change things, whether it's in her community or more globally.
In an alternate 1930s America, Lizabeth Rose is known to be the best gunslinger around. Canny and a crack shot, Gunnie Rose is tough, and her life has been rough, but she's young enough to adapt to changing situations. She has strong feelings about her family (born and made), and not all of them are good, so she has to navigate politics, magic, and an often lawless countryside—all while keeping a dangerous secret. Harris switches the tone of her series effortlessly, and this world has its own unique voice: a brutal frontier life that never was, but drawing on history that makes it familiar all the same.
#1 New York Times and USA TODAY bestselling author Charlaine Harris returns to her alternate history of the United States where magic is an acknowledged but despised power in this fourth installment of the Gunnie Rose series.
Felicia, Lizbeth Rose’s half-sister and a student at the Grigori Rasputin school in San Diego—capital of the Holy Russian Empire—is caught between her own secrets and powerful family struggles. As a granddaughter of Rasputin, she provides an essential service to the hemophiliac Tsar Alexei, providing him the blood transfusions that keep him alive. Felicia is treated like a nonentity at the bedside of…
I’m a nerd by temperament (raised by a psychologist and a librarian, what else could I be?) and by profession (decades working as a U.S. diplomat and an academic administrator honed my people-watching faculties to a fine edge). So, of course, I’ve always been drawn to my opposite: that cynical loner whose pursuit of justice requires hard fists and a bent moral compass. Private eye mysteries are my perfect place. In them, I can exercise my passion for intellectual puzzles and my love for thrilling action. I enjoy the combination of social commentary and sheer entertainment I find when I dive into reading (or writing) a private eye mystery.
Ex-cop August Snow scrabbles through the rubble of his beloved Detroit to solve a twisted murder case no one wants him to pursue. Snow is everything I like in my PIs: witty, empathetic, combat-ready, and damaged by life’s cruel blows. The action is extremely gritty, the social commentary dark and biting. The flavorful descriptions of Snow’s Mexicantown neighborhood and its contrast with the snooty suburbs tugged at my Midwestern heart.
From the wealthy suburbs to the remains of Detroit’s bankrupt factory districts, August Snow is a fast-paced tale of murder, greed, sex, economic cyber-terrorism, race and urban decay.
Tough, smart, and struggling to stay alive, August Snow is the embodiment of Detroit. The son of an African-American father and a Mexican-American mother, August grew up in the city’s Mexicantown and joined the police force only to be drummed out by a conspiracy of corrupt cops and politicians. But August fought back; he took on the city and got himself a $12…
