29 books like Detective Maier Mysteries

The novel touches on the world of human trafficking and how often people go missing without anyone realizing it.

Its dark world is a burgeoning industry where children are abducted for profit and pleasure. The dogged protagonist follows a thin trail and unearths a huge ring of pedophiles. The pace and dialogue are excellent.

I learned how deep that world is and how easily it is for overwhelmed investigators to simply give up and relegate the files into cold cases.

This fabulous story is more or less historical fiction adventure.

From the first page when a Pakistani village wakes up, the exotic tone is set. Add a burned-out war correspondent and a young Afghan man with a wild, dangerous family steeped in warring traditions and you get a tale like no other. Crossing into Afghanistan for them is fraught with peril, suspicion, deceit, and suspense as both risk their lives in separate agendas. Loved it.

A slice of a time period in Afghanistan which is in a state of flux after the Russians retreat and before the U.S. gets involved. And a shocking twist.

I was excited to read another book with fascinating characters and of course, a great K-9. Nickless’ characters are well-developed and very believable. Her fictional K-9 Clyde is captivating and while he’s technically retired, still has the skillset to help his handler, Sydney Parnell.

I love the character arc with Sydney in each book as she recovers from the traumas of serving in the military. I also love that Nickless had Sydney return home to Denver to work as a railroad police special agent. This is a law enforcement job that I haven’t seen in any other book. I appreciated the thrilling storyline and how Nickless created strong tension that ratcheted up to a suspenseful ending. 

So good it was made into a movie. The movie however didn’t catch the suspense, and the investigation took far longer in the book.

Set in Stalinist Russia, the book is depressing, as was Commie Russia. The investigator, Leo Demidov’s friend has a child gone missing and a cursory investigation by the state goes nowhere. Leo Demidov, a Moscow investigator looks into it and is told to lay off—or else—because he makes the state look incompetent.

He and his family are exiled far away from Moscow and scorned by everyone. But he continues and discovers 44 children have been murdered along a railway line. Suspense and peril in this story combined with a vengeful Communist bureaucracy and its astounding ego make for a real thriller.

I visited the USSR in the late 70s and that bureaucracy is not to be challenged in any way or form.

A brilliant reference book on all aspects (and yes, this book is very thorough) of Thai popular culture. Concise chapters on anything from spirit tattoos to meat on a stick illuminate the far corners of contemporary Thai society, illustrated by hundreds of great photographs. This is a standard work for anyone interested in how Thai society ticks. Cornwel-Smith has served up a second title recently – Very Bangkok – which offers a similarly thorough picture of the Thai capital. 

I felt I needed to include one title about Thailand’s endlessly discussed, sordid sex industry. Houellebecq’s acidic 2004 novel takes the country’s massive sleaze trade head-on, crammed with self-loathing observations of its male protagonist, his world eventually smashed to pieces by a terrorist attack and a heart-breaking ending in the country’s Gomorra-by-the-sea beach resort Pattaya. Audacious, cynical, yet nonetheless filled with humanity, and there’s plenty of sex, Viagra, fun, and despair as well. Platform puts all other fiction covering the country’s exploitative underbelly to shame. 

I read this sultry and disturbing Thailand adventure story in one sitting. It transported me away from my out-of-work actor troubles that rainy day in London and took me to a beautiful and terrifying dreamscape, diving ever deeper into the backpacker protagonist’s murky quest. I can still picture the cut-glass water, the huts… the shark. I still feel the heat, the sting of mosquitoes, and the tang of blood.

I found it extraordinarily gripping, moody, and menacing. The speed at which the unexpected twists unfolded was mind-blowing.

Sightseeing is a contemporary short story collection that would appeal to any reader who appreciates great writing, beautiful imagery, finely sketched characters, and sensitive exploration of human relations.

I loved it because Rattawut Lapcharoensap is a Thai-American author whose depictions of both cultures ring true and whose Thai characters are not shy about sharing their opinions about farangs.

Though the focus is always on the personal and interpersonal, these stories have an underlying current of social commentary that touches on issues as wide-ranging as traffic safety, public health, prostitution, tourism, and animal welfare.

This classic travel book, first published in 1951, is said to have inspired Graham Greene to travel to Vietnam and to write The Quiet American, the greatest piece of fiction on white men in Southeast Asia. It is also a charming and charmed eyewitness account of the dying days of the French colonial occupation of Indochina which makes A Dragon Apparent a document so much of its time that readers might it find quaint, patronizing, and perhaps a little racist. The locals don’t come away very well but neither does the author who barely speaks to them. That said, Lewis’ observations of Luang Prabang are worth revisiting.

During the CIA’s covert war in Laos between 1964 and 1973, the US dropped more than 2 million tons of bombs on the country, a planeload every 8 minutes for 9 years and makes Laos, along with Cambodia, which shared a similar fate, is the most bombed country in the world. To this day, countless people, many of them children, are maimed and killed by unexploded ordinance that remains hidden in the country’s soil. Fred Branfman, a young American stationed in Laos in the late 1960s, discovered the bombing and exposed the CIA’s covert campaign of terror.

Branfman not only interviewed more than 2,000 refugees of the bombing but motivated many survivors to record their experiences in essays, poems, and pictures. This book, an excellent antidote and companion piece to Air America, is the result.