Here are 4 books that Flats Junction fans have personally recommended once you finish the Flats Junction series.
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I started reading mysteries in elementary school: Nancy Drew, Agatha Christie, and Stephen King fed my thirst for story, puzzles, and the “super-psychological.” There’s so much about the mind we don’t understand—including our relationships with animals (like an octopus detective)—or the bond between twins (like the one in my Cici series). When I worked with Irene Webb as an associate literary agent in the 2000s, my fascination with the written word and “super-psychological” blossomed. I enjoy connecting motivations, secrets, and passions into a tapestry of humanity. At their core, stories teach us how to be more human, and I want to be part of that lesson. Please enjoy this book list I’ve curated for you.
I almost chose the Sookie Stackhouse series because those are a rollicking treat! C’mon, a vampire detective is pretty fantastic!
But Lizbeth’s story starts with a bang—literally. The novel (and Lizbeth) is grittier than the sweet-as-pie Sookie, which we learn in the first chapter. This dystopian world of the failed United States in the mid to late twentieth century incorporates Russian magicians called grigoris, and a complex gotta-catch-‘em plot with shootouts a la the Old West.
Yup, Charlaine Harris produced another page-turner that’s quite a departure from her Sookie days.
From the beloved #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Sookie Stackhouse series, the inspiration for HBO’s True Blood, comes “a gripping, twisty-turny, thrill ride of a read” (Karin Slaughter, New York Times bestselling author) following a young gunslinging mercenary on deadly mission through the American Southwest.
In a fractured United States, a new world where magic is acknowledged but mistrusted, a young gunslinger named Lizbeth Rose takes a job offer from a pair of Russian wizards. Lizbeth Rose has a wildly fearsome reputation but these wizards are desperate. Searching the small border towns near Mexico, they’re trying to…
I read voraciously and have been fortunate to interact with people and situations such as those on my list. I also grew up in New York City, the melting pot displayed in Humans of New York. There I lived, jumped double-dutch, studied, and worked in a multicultural community. After moving to St Louis, I discovered it was a place that did not always embrace “others.” That inspired me to write my first book,Sugar Hill. Living in St Louis also strengthened my appreciation for diversity in race, religion, and to appreciate people whose sexual identity, or mental and physical ability might differ from mine.
I’ve always been fascinated by American Indian culture. Girls wore intricately beaded dresses and headbands with feathers. Moms carried elaborately decorated baby backpacks. Also, I didn’t understand why the cowboys couldn’t get along with the Indians. In this novel, based on a historical event, the government strikes a deal with the Cheyenne, trading 1000 white women for 1000 horses.
The women are culled from poorhouses, prisons, and asylums, like May whose father committed her for living in sin. May jumps at the opportunity to escape the asylum. Once on the reservation, the newcomers bond and slowly adapt to their new lives and families. Readers too get an intimate portrait of Indian life, and compared to actions of the US Army, it begs the question, who should be labeled savages?
Based on an actual historical event but told through fictional diaries, this is the story of May Dodd―a remarkable woman who, in 1875, travels through the American West to marry the chief of the Cheyenne Nation.
One Thousand White Women begins with May Dodd’s journey into an unknown world. Having been committed to an insane asylum by her blue-blood family for the crime of loving a man beneath her station, May finds that her only hope for freedom and redemption is to participate in a secret government program whereby women from “civilized” society become the brides of Cheyenne warriors. What…
Growing up in West Texas, westerns were just as good as bedtime stories to me. I grew up with all the greats… and the not as greats. The quality didn’t always matter because the spirit was the same. Freedom, opportunity, and possible lawlessness. Survival of the quickest draw. An untamed place where anything could happen. Someone once said that the western genre was America’s genre. It was invented here and our frontier spirit inspired the world. When I decided to write Hour Glass, I channeled the independent spirit of those westerns I grew up with. I wrote the first draft in sixteen days out of pure passion for the subject matter.
This book is probably the closest title to my own. Doc is centered around everyone’s favorite dandy gunslinger, Doc Holliday. It is a truly entertaining and informative tale of the real Doc’s life before his legendary stand at the O.K. Corral in Tombstone. While Wyatt and Morgan Earp play important roles in the story, Doc Holliday is definitely your Huckleberry.
If you love it like I do, the author wrote a continuation called Epitaph: An O.K. Corral Story. You won’t be sorry.
The year is 1878, peak of the Texas cattle trade. The place is Dodge City, Kansas, a saloon-filled cow town jammed with liquored-up adolescent cowboys and young Irish hookers. Violence is random and routine, but when the burned body of a mixed-blood boy named Johnnie Sanders is discovered, his death shocks a part-time policeman named Wyatt Earp. And it is a matter of strangely personal importance to Doc Holliday, the frail twenty-six-year-old dentist who has just opened an office at No. 24, Dodge House. Beautifully educated, born to the life of a Southern gentleman, Dr. John Henry Holliday is given…
I am a writer and novelist who comes to storytelling via several curious paths. I am a historian trained in archival research and the collection of oral histories. I also come from a long line of ghost magnets–all of the women in my family have been for generations. And while I am living in blissful exile on the West Coast, my heart remains bound to my childhood home, the Great State of Texas.
I was about thirteen years old when I picked up Charles Portis’ book, and from the very first line, I wanted to be Mattie Ross. The novel was the first Western I remember reading and remains imprinted on my brain as a first to mash up the traditional themes of the righteous Code of the West and the hopelessness of a world awash in lawlessness and violence, all the while eliciting whoops of laughter.
Mattie was the first female protagonist I remember encountering with pluck and impertinence to match the infamous U.S. Marshal Rooster Cogburn and inspire my own.
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…
