Here are 29 books that DC Quartet fans have personally recommended once you finish the DC Quartet series.
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My earliest filmgoing memory is of a bad guy getting pushed down the stairs in Alfred Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much. That shocking scene has stayed with me, leading me into a lifetime of exploring the dark visions of crime stories. It was only natural that my love of rock music, and in its interaction with other media would draw me to mystery writers whose books were fueled by their love of rock, blues and pop. "If not for music and movies, I wouldn't be a novelist," George Pelecanos once told me. "They have influenced me more than any author. I want to shout about it." Me too.
This novel by the author of Endless Love (fabulous novel, terrible movie adaptations) isn't a mystery novel in the strictest terms. But it's about one of the greatest human mysteries, Bob Dylan, represented by fictional singer-songwriter Luke Fairchild, and considering how little we know about Dylan, how can we not seize the chance to see him through the eyes of a great novelist? The novel is narrated by Fairchild's illegitimate son, who obsessively searches for his father after discovering he is a legendary artist. In an act of considerable nerve, Spencer punctuates the pages with Dylanesque lyrics.
A man’s impassioned search for his legendary rock star father becomes a journey of self-discovery in this masterful novel from bestselling author Scott Spencer
Billy Rothschild’s obsession with legendary ’60s folksinger Luke Fairchild could be considered fanatic, if not for the fact that Luke is actually Billy’s father. Raised by his beautiful, charismatic, former–flower child mother, Billy is a lost soul. Determined to learn something—anything—about his origins, he sets out on an illuminating quest to find and confront the father he always knew of but never knew.
Evocative and lyrical, The Rich Man’s Table is a moving portrait of a…
My earliest filmgoing memory is of a bad guy getting pushed down the stairs in Alfred Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much. That shocking scene has stayed with me, leading me into a lifetime of exploring the dark visions of crime stories. It was only natural that my love of rock music, and in its interaction with other media would draw me to mystery writers whose books were fueled by their love of rock, blues and pop. "If not for music and movies, I wouldn't be a novelist," George Pelecanos once told me. "They have influenced me more than any author. I want to shout about it." Me too.
Lots of books have been written about sixties pop culture, something I cut my teeth on as a music and movie fanatic, but few have captured it as well as Peter Robinson's Piece of My Heart. Named after the Janis Joplin classic, the book has Chief Inspector Alan Banks trace the recent murder of a rock journalist to the murder of a young woman at an outdoor rock concert in 1969. You might expect a strong dose of nostalgia, but Robinson, a Canadian with British roots, transcends the soft stuff with hard insight into what that era was all about—the good, the bad, and the sorrowful.
As volunteers clean up after a huge outdoor rock concert in Yorkshire in 1969, they discover the body of a young woman wrapped in a sleeping bag. She has been brutally murdered. The detective assigned to the case, Stanley Chadwick, is a hard-headed, strait-laced veteran of the Second World War. He could not have less in common with - or less regard for - young, disrespectful, long-haired hippies, smoking marijuana and listening to the pulsing sounds of rock and roll. But he has a murder to solve, and it looks as if the victim was somehow associated with the up-and-coming…
My earliest filmgoing memory is of a bad guy getting pushed down the stairs in Alfred Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much. That shocking scene has stayed with me, leading me into a lifetime of exploring the dark visions of crime stories. It was only natural that my love of rock music, and in its interaction with other media would draw me to mystery writers whose books were fueled by their love of rock, blues and pop. "If not for music and movies, I wouldn't be a novelist," George Pelecanos once told me. "They have influenced me more than any author. I want to shout about it." Me too.
You know an author is serious about his rock music when he names three of his novels after Rolling Stones albums. As much as I liked the Stones, growing up, my personal tastes leaned more toward the Beatles. But the more I read Scottish great Ian Rankin's Rebus novels, the more I gravitated toward Mick Jagger and the boys. When it comes to classic rock 'n' roll moments, you just can't beat the one in Let it Bleedin which down-and-out Inspector John Rebus finds solace in a Keith Richards guitar riff. "Women, relationships and colleagues had come and gone but the Stones had always been there. 'I don't have much,' Rebus thought, 'but I have this.'"
The seventh Inspector Rebus novel from the No.1 bestselling author of A SONG FOR THE DARK TIMES. 'Rankin continues to be unsurpassed among living British crime writers' THE TIMES
Struggling through another Edinburgh winter Rebus finds himself sucked into a web of intrigue that throws up more questions than answers.
Was the Lord Provost's daughter kidnapped or just another runaway? Why is a city councillor shredding documents that should have been waste paper years ago? And why on earth is Rebus invited to a clay pigeon shoot at the home of the Scottish Office's Permanent Secretary?
My earliest filmgoing memory is of a bad guy getting pushed down the stairs in Alfred Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much. That shocking scene has stayed with me, leading me into a lifetime of exploring the dark visions of crime stories. It was only natural that my love of rock music, and in its interaction with other media would draw me to mystery writers whose books were fueled by their love of rock, blues and pop. "If not for music and movies, I wouldn't be a novelist," George Pelecanos once told me. "They have influenced me more than any author. I want to shout about it." Me too.
As a jazz critic, I was long struck by the absence of knowledgable (and fun) references to this music in mystery novels, my second love. Then I happened upon a pair of remaindered books by British novelist John Harvey. A blurb referring to his police detective Charlie Resnick's devotion to bebop giants Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, and Thelonious Monk sealed the deal. Harvey doesn't just drop names and titles in Easy Meat, he plays jazz critic himself: "It was a bad sign, Resnick knew, when he played Monk last thing at night, the pianist’s fractured attempts at melody obeying no logic but their own. A big man, as Resnick was big, Monk’s fingers stabbed down at single notes, crushed chords into the beauty of an abstract painting, twisted scaffolding seen in a certain light."
Fifteen year old Nicky Snape is found hanging from the shower in a local authority home where he is awaiting trial for his involvement in a brutally violent burglary. Charlie Resnick, Nicky's arresting officer, knows the poor, working-class Snape family well and suspects foul play. When the investigation results in a vicious murder on the banks of the River Trent, Resnick's suspicions about the case appear to have been well founded. The deaths coincide with a series of brutal male rapes in the city and Resnick finds himself in charge of investigations that lead to some startling and sinister revelations.…
I write what I call civic noir, crime fiction where the real antagonist isn’t a person but an institution: a courthouse, a precinct, a city hall that already knows how the story ends. I’m drawn to these books because the most frightening thing in them is never the gun; it’s the machinery, the procedure, the quiet way a system decides who’s guilty before anyone enters a courtroom. As a writer, I’m less interested in the villain than in the architecture that produces him. These five novels taught me how to make a building feel dangerous, and how to keep ordinary people from disappearing into the gears.
This is the foundation the rest of us are building on.
Easy Rawlins takes one simple job in 1948 Los Angeles and learns the rules are different for a Black man asking questions in a white city. Mosley makes the menace feel like weather, always in the air and never quite nameable. He gives you a hero who survives a rigged system by reading it more honestly than the people who run it.
I love that the detective work and the social truth are the same work here. It taught me the outsider sees the machinery clearest.
The first novel by “master of mystery” (The New York Times) Walter Mosley, featuring Easy Rawlins, the most iconic African American detective in all of fiction. Named one of the “best 100 mystery novels of all time” by the Mystery Writers of America.
The year is 1948, the town is Los Angeles.
Easy Rawlins, a black war veteran, has just been fired from his job at a defense factory plant. Drinking in his friend’s bar, he’s wondering how he’ll manage to make ends meet, when a white man in a linen suit approaches him and offers him good money…
I write what I call civic noir, crime fiction where the real antagonist isn’t a person but an institution: a courthouse, a precinct, a city hall that already knows how the story ends. I’m drawn to these books because the most frightening thing in them is never the gun; it’s the machinery, the procedure, the quiet way a system decides who’s guilty before anyone enters a courtroom. As a writer, I’m less interested in the villain than in the architecture that produces him. These five novels taught me how to make a building feel dangerous, and how to keep ordinary people from disappearing into the gears.
Pelecanos is the poet of how a city carries its grief.
A long-cold case pulls three D.C. cops back to the night their lives forked, and what stays with me isn’t the killer. It’s his eye for which deaths get worked and which get filed, who gets remembered and who becomes a name in a closed folder. He writes Washington as a real place with its own gravity, its institutions pressing on ordinary lives.
He taught me you can be quiet and humane and still devastating, and that a city should never be a backdrop. It should be the thing applying the pressure.
A great novel from one of America's finest literary crime writers...
They never found the killer.
All they knew, back in the winter of 1985, was that someone was taking teenagers, killing them and leaving their abused bodies in public parks. Three victims in all, with no link between them except a oddity of their names. They read the same back-to-front - Otto, Ava and lastly Eve.
A lot has happened in the twenty years since. Detectives Gus Ramone and Dan Holiday - two of the leads on the case - have pursued very different paths. Gus has climbed to…
I write what I call civic noir, crime fiction where the real antagonist isn’t a person but an institution: a courthouse, a precinct, a city hall that already knows how the story ends. I’m drawn to these books because the most frightening thing in them is never the gun; it’s the machinery, the procedure, the quiet way a system decides who’s guilty before anyone enters a courtroom. As a writer, I’m less interested in the villain than in the architecture that produces him. These five novels taught me how to make a building feel dangerous, and how to keep ordinary people from disappearing into the gears.
This novel that taught a whole generation of us that the system is the story.
Price gives you the dealer on the corner and the homicide cop working his case with so much patience that you stop choosing a side and start watching the whole machine (corner, precinct, courts) grind everyone down to spare parts. Nobody writes dialogue that breathes like this. It’s no accident he went on to write for The Wire.
I return to this book whenever I need to remember that real authority lives in procedure, in paperwork, in who gets believed, and that you can render all of it without ever slowing the story down.
Rocco Klein, veteran homicide detective, has had enough of life on the edge. When a warm summer night brings yet another drug-related murder, he has no sense that the case is anything special. A young black man steps forward to confess but a little digging reveals that he's never been in any kind of trouble, whereas his half-brother, Strike, runs a crew of street-corner coke dealers 'clockers' in a nearby housing project. Soon Rocco is sure that Strike is the real killer and suddenly Rocco's appetite for the job is back. With a vengeance.
It’s all my father-in-law’s fault. Before I ran into him, I was a card-carrying “literary” high-brow. Shoot, I was reading Faulkner’s “The Bear” in high school and thought I would be the next generation Steinbeck if I ever got around to writing novels. But one weekend, while visiting my wife’s folks, I found myself with nothing to read—a problem solved by my father-in-law’s complete collection of Richard Stark novels. Those books knocked me head-over-heels, which is why when I did get around to writing novels, the first six were hard-edged crime fiction.
The protagonist of this book has to be based on the writer’s worst nightmare, and the version of NYC he inhabits is one of the blackest in all of crime fiction.
This protagonist is merciless, and so is Vachss—I once watched him tear a suburban mom to shreds at one of his book events for daring to suggest that all it takes to keep children safe in these times is to teach them about “stranger danger.” According to Vachss, it’s not strangers that children need to worry about—it’s the people closest to them.
Burke's newest client is a woman named Flood, who has the face of an angel, the body of a high-priced stripper, and the skills of a professional executioner. She wants Burke to find a monster for her-so she can kill him with her bare hands.
In this cauterizing thriller, Andrew Vachss's renegade investigator teams up with a lethally gifted avenger to follow a child's murderer through the catacombs of New York, where every alley is blind and the penthouses are as dangerous as the basements. Fearfully knowing, crackling with narrative tension, and written in prose as forceful as a hollow-point…
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,…
