Here are 8 books that City Blues Quartet fans have personally recommended once you finish the City Blues Quartet series.
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I worked for the last 25 years teaching literature classes and creative writing workshops—most of that time at the University of California at Davis. The students in my classes were mainly English majors and/or young writers. They tended to be serious about the potential of a text. To be serious, today, in America, about the potential of a text is to dwell in an inherently counter-cultural position. It is to conceive of the value of a text as something surpassing entertainment, i.e., use. Such a surpassing is a blasphemous notion… still tolerated in the context of the University. Its proliferation beyond those boundaries seems unworkable.
In the winter of 1926, when everybody everywhere sees nothing but good things ahead, Joe Trace, middle-aged door-to-door salesman of Cleopatra beauty products, shoots his teenage lover to death. At the funeral, Joe's wife, Violet, attacks the girl's corpse. This passionate, profound story of love and obsession brings us back and forth in time, as a narrative is assembled from the emotions, hopes, fears, and deep realities of black urban life.
I’ve loved jazz ever since I learned to play the clarinet as a child. My two great loves in life have been music and books, so it made sense to combine the two things and write novels with a link to jazz. These books are some of my favourites with a jazz theme. I promise that even if you’re not a jazz fan, these are all excellent novels, to be enjoyed with or without music playing in the background!
I love untold stories – those that look at people who history has often ignored. There are a lot of novels set in WWII, but this is the only one I’ve read that looks at what it was like to be an Afro-German during that period.
Hiero Falk is a mixed-race jazz trumpeter, member of a band who has been banned from playing live under Nazi laws. After escaping with two of his African-American bandmates to Paris, Hiero is forced into hiding as the trio struggle to get out of occupied France. There was so much history here that felt new to me and I was fascinated by Hiero’s story.
Man Booker Prize Finalist 2011 An Oprah Magazine Best Book of the Year
Shortlisted for the Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction
Berlin, 1939. The Hot Time Swingers, a popular jazz band, has been forbidden to play by the Nazis. Their young trumpet-player Hieronymus Falk, declared a musical genius by none other than Louis Armstrong, is arrested in a Paris café. He is never heard from again. He was twenty years old, a German citizen. And he was black.
Berlin, 1952. Falk is a jazz legend. Hot Time Swingers band members Sid Griffiths and…
I studied French language and literature from the time I was 13 until I graduated from college. Alongside that work, I also became more interested in African American literary and artistic histories, so I studied that as well. I realized there was a lot of overlap as many Black American artists would flee to Europe to “escape” American racism. Learning more about these historical writers throughout my graduate school journey made me very interested in researching further and writing my own take on the subject for young people.
I loved that this classic by one of America’s greatest literary minds gave me answers about what it would be like if I did what I always dreamed of doing: leaving America behind and moving to France. One of the important things I came to realize was that The Great Escape would not solve your problems, but it would help give you a fresh perspective on things.
'A masterwork... an almost unbearable, tumultuous, blood-pounding experience' Washinton Post
When Another Country appeared in 1962, it caused a literary sensation. James Baldwin's masterly story of desire, hatred and violence opens with the unforgettable character of Rufus Scott, a scavenging Harlem jazz musician adrift in New York. Self-destructive, bad and brilliant, he draws us into a Bohemian underworld pulsing with heat, music and sex, where desperate and dangerous characters betray, love and test each other to the limit.
'In Another Country, Baldwin created the essential American drama of the century' Colm Toibin
I've read mystery books since I was a kid in a small Iowa town and my
mother was on the library board and in charge of reviewing books for
purchase. She would bring home mysteries and I grew up reading about
James Bond, The Saint, Miss Marple, and many, many other 'classic'
detectives. I wrote my first mystery 'novel' when I was ten and it took
me forty more years to finally decide to get serious about it. I found I
wanted to write about an older demographic—my heroes and heroines are
usually in their 40s or 50s. I try to make my characters believable and
down-to-earth—except they get involved in the occasional murder!
I love reading books that look underneath what is shown to most people—how things work behind the scenes, or a glimpse into a different world.
This book takes what we think is a modern-day world and gives it a bit of a twist, with a special division of the London police charged with handling supernatural crimes that take place, well, in plain sight.
The thing that was most intriguing about this narrator was that I had the feeling I was learning with him about all the ghosts and goblins and beasties as he discovered them. I was as surprised as he was about the solving of the mystery.
I was my dad's vinyl-wallah: I changed his records while he lounged around drinking tea, and that's how I know my Argo from my Tempo. And it's why, when Dr Walid called me to the morgue to listen to a corpse, I recognised the tune it was playing. Something violently supernatural had happened to the victim, strong enough to leave its imprint like a wax cylinder recording. Cyrus Wilkinson, part-time jazz saxophonist and full-time accountant, had apparently dropped dead of a heart attack just after finishing a gig in a Soho jazz club. He wasn't the first. No one was…
From my first foray into poetry when I was in high school, I've been creative writing for over fifty years. Poetry proceeded into writing alternative song lyrics to established songs while in college. After graduating I naively pursued a career as a professional song lyricist, achieving limited success and unable to continue. While in the midst of a long career in the landscape industry, upon realizing that I wanted to write a novel based on an idea I had, I eventually completed a supernatural thriller titled, The Poe Consequence. Years of watching detective shows and reading memorable crime thrillers provided the inspiration to write a murder mystery as well. You Say Goodbye is the result.
Scientific cloning fears come to life and the possible consequences of that dynamic?The protagonist, a geneticist, makes a startling and extremely consequential discovery and away we go. The story is a combination of science, crime drama, and bad guy intrigue that keeps the reader wondering how things will play out in terms of experiments and mysterious, secretive plots. Follett offers an array of engaging characters that left me pulling for some and proverbially punching others. As with the other Ken Follett novels I’ve read, the man does his research which offers educational elements as a bonus without it interfering with the flow.And the ending is a beauty.
Questions about who we really are in terms of ourselves and maybe, just maybe, a cloned twin ‘out there’ who apparently isn’t the nice person you are?Why and how could that be? Creative ideas such as this, from the imagination…
A thrilling, chilling story of hidden evil, The Third Twin is a heart-stopping, spine-tingling story from master of suspense, Ken Follett.
An Impossible Result Jeannie Ferrami, a scientific researcher investigating the behaviour of identical twins who have been raised separately, uncovers a perplexing mystery; identical twins who were born on different days, to different mothers, in different places.
A Blossoming Love One, Steve, is a law student and the other, Dennis, a convicted murderer. As Jeannie works with Steve on her project she finds herself falling in love with him, but their world is shattered when he is accused of…
From my first foray into poetry when I was in high school, I've been creative writing for over fifty years. Poetry proceeded into writing alternative song lyrics to established songs while in college. After graduating I naively pursued a career as a professional song lyricist, achieving limited success and unable to continue. While in the midst of a long career in the landscape industry, upon realizing that I wanted to write a novel based on an idea I had, I eventually completed a supernatural thriller titled, The Poe Consequence. Years of watching detective shows and reading memorable crime thrillers provided the inspiration to write a murder mystery as well. You Say Goodbye is the result.
Steadman needed to offer the reader a believable character in terms of who she is in relation to the storyline.In this case, the protagonist is a clinical psychologist who is tasked with putting the pieces of information together to find out who the mysterious man is that was found wandering on the beach.The man doesn't know either, and is at a loss to explain how he wound up on the beach in the first place.But it’s not just a ‘simple’ case of amnesia because that would be too simple a diagnosis. The buildup to the eventual discovery, leading to the surprising and climactic ending, made this a fun read for me.
Authors who are able to combine elements of a mysterious character and an intriguing storyline that carries you through the action of a unique concept is a winning formula for whodunits or just good mysteries of…
'Fans of The Silent Patient will love it' CJ TUDOR 'Very clever, brilliantly compelling' BA PARIS 'Cinematic and gripping' SARAH VAUGHAN 'Original, ingenious and utterly gripping' JP DELANEY
*** Memento meets Sharp Objects in this superb thriller from the bestselling author of Something in the Water, a 2019 Richard & Judy Book Club pick ***
When a man is found on a Norfolk beach, drifting in and out of consciousness, with no identification and unable to speak, interest in him is sparked immediately. From the hospital staff who find themselves inexplicably drawn to him; to international medical experts who are…
As a psychologist who writes psychological suspense I love reading similar books where other writers bring their knowledge of psychology to their craft. Aside from writing, I enjoy cryptic puzzles, and I find that reading crime and suspense novels exercises similar lateral thinking as I try to identify the red herrings and work out the twist. And don’t we all love it when we get it right? But if you’re like me, you get an even bigger buzz when you’ve been fooled by a clever misdirection or plot twist. And gosh, are they fun to write!
This book features a child psychologist who is our unreliable narrator, and we are straight into her life with no introduction. We are in her head from the outset, witness to all her internal dialogue, her drunken episodes, and the minutiae of her claustrophobic lifestyle; her only entertainment spying on her neighbors as she now lives apart from her husband and child for unknown reasons.
The narrowness of her agoraphobic life is well depicted, and I was keen to discover what events had led her from a successful career and happy family to this depressed and depressing way of life.
Soon to be a major motion picture produced by 20th Century Fox, starring Amy Adams, Gary Oldman and Julianne Moore
'Astounding. Thrilling. Amazing' Gillian Flynn
'One of those rare books that really is unputdownable' Stephen King
'Twisted to the power of max' Val McDermid
'A dark, twisty confection' Ruth Ware
What did she see?
It's been ten long months since Anna Fox last left her home. Ten months during which she has haunted the rooms of her old New York house like a ghost, lost in her memories, too…
Growing up in Indiana and Illinois meant that Chicago has always been, for me, the city—the place where people went to make a name for themselves and took the world by storm. From my local Carnegie Library, I read voraciously across genres—history, science, literature. They transported me out of my small town—across the universe sometimes. I learned that setting in fiction was for me a major feature of my enjoyment, and Chicago was where I set my own mystery series. These books, when I read them, explored that grand metropolis—and brought Chicago to life on and off the page. I hope you enjoy these books as much as I have.
It is a book that deep dives into a historical event, in this case, the 1893 World Columbian Exposition. Check. It is a nonfiction book that reads like a gripping thriller, in this case, the serial killer H.H. Holmes, who built a three-story building featuring secret rooms, torture chambers, and a crematorium. Check. Chicago leaps off the page. By the end of the book, I was able to envision the massive exposition, its hundreds of temporary buildings, all white colored, interlaced with ponds and canals.
Much like that exposition helped raise Chicago up from its Great Fire, so I could see a Chicago of the past, in a glorious triumph of industry and innovation. Oh, and yeah, a serial killer constructing a horrific murder building.
The Chicago World Fair was the greatest fair in American history. This is the story of the men and women whose lives it irrevocably changed and of two men in particular- an architect and a serial killer. The architect is Daniel Burnham, a man of great integrity and depth. It was his vision of the fair that attracted the best minds and talents of the day. The killer is Henry H. Holmes. Intelligent as well as handsome and charming, Holmes opened a boarding house which he advertised as 'The World's Fair Hotel' Here in the neighbourhood where he was once…
