Here are 12 books that Jack Taylor fans have personally recommended once you finish the Jack Taylor series.
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As a kid I found myself watching cop shows and wondering “These cops seem to be on duty all day and all night. Don’t they have families?” And when I’d read dramas in which characters took lavish vacations and bought expensive cars, I’d think “Doesn’t anyone worry about money?” While I certainly don’t believe that fiction should always strive toward perfect realism (I love fantasy and sci-fi stories!) I do think that adding everyday problems and concerns makes a character much more relatable and interesting. A detective chasing a serial killer is exciting. A detective suffering from an excruciating toothache while chasing a serial killer adds another layer of delicious tension.
It’s difficult to choose just one book by Willy Vlautin, because the guy is so good at telling the stories of ignored lives in overlooked places. But his most recent, The Night Always Comes, may be his best.
In it, a working-class woman goes on a dangerous odyssey to get money she desperately needs. Valutin is one of those authors I read and think of his characters: “Oh my gosh, I know people just like this.”
“Willy Vlautin is not known for happy endings, but there’s something here that defies the downward pull. In the end, Lynette is pure life force: fierce and canny and blazing through a city that no longer has space for her, and it’s all Portland’s loss.”—Portland Monthly Magazine
Award-winning author Willy Vlautin explores the impact of trickle-down greed and opportunism of gentrification on ordinary lives in this scorching novel that captures the plight of a young woman pushed to the edge as she fights to secure a stable future for herself and her family.
Barely thirty, Lynette is exhausted. Saddled with…
I’m a Canadian writer born in Northern Ireland. My first book, A Nice Place to Die, introduced Northern Ireland detective DS Ryan McBride. In 2019, A Nice Place to Die won the RWA Daphne du Maurier Award for Mainstream Mystery and Suspense, was shortlisted in the Crime Writers of Canada Awards in 2021, and was a 2023 Silver Falchion Award finalist. As for my choices, each of these fabulous, atmospheric mysteries has richly drawn settings inhabited by characters the reader comes to care deeply about. This brings a book alive for me — each has a wonderful, compelling cast of characters and a clever, complex plot.
McGilloway writes a taut, intricate novel, his focus is on story and character.
We see an Ireland torn by the Troubles and how all this affects and plays into everyday life. His settings are concise and spare. Here is a novel with a strong and engaging protagonist who solves several disturbing murders by not giving in to outside pressures. A terrific read.
A man is found stabbed to death. Garda Inspector Ben Devlin is shocked to learn that he’s heard of him. The victim has just been released from prison after spending twelve years inside. As a young lad he was jailed for the rape and murder of a teenage girl.
Devlin’s beliefs are tested when the current opinion is that the man got what was coming to him, but is that justice? Devlin doesn’t think so.
'A compulsive police procedural, but it's so much more than that: thought-provoking, compassionate and beautifully-written. McGilloway is one of the finest crime-writers working today' Ann Cleeves
'Blood Ties is one of those rare gems; a beautifully written crime novel that's also brilliantly paced, skillfully plotted and utterly absorbing. Brian McGilloway is, quite simply, a master of his art. Bravo' Jo Spain
'Brian McGilloway's police procedurals are a masterclass in crime fictions' Andrea Carter
'A clever, engaging and beautifully crafted police procedural' Irish Independent
'Some of the very best crime fiction being written today' Lee Child on Bad Blood
I’m a Canadian writer born in Northern Ireland. My first book, A Nice Place to Die, introduced Northern Ireland detective DS Ryan McBride. In 2019, A Nice Place to Die won the RWA Daphne du Maurier Award for Mainstream Mystery and Suspense, was shortlisted in the Crime Writers of Canada Awards in 2021, and was a 2023 Silver Falchion Award finalist. As for my choices, each of these fabulous, atmospheric mysteries has richly drawn settings inhabited by characters the reader comes to care deeply about. This brings a book alive for me — each has a wonderful, compelling cast of characters and a clever, complex plot.
This is the first of Dervla’s Detective Cormac Reilly books - and what a wonderful start to a new series.
Here is a book as dark and unpredictable as the early spring weather in Galway. Cormac springs to life, fully formed as a complex, honest policeman, uncompromising and determined to solve a case that has re-emerged after haunting him for over twenty years.
Back then he rescued a little boy and his sister from terrible squalor and abuse. Now grown up, that boy has apparently committed suicide and his missing sister has returned claiming he was murdered and accusing the police of a cover up.
Add to this, Cormac’s own problems with a new posting in Galway, a hostile squad of detectives and a relationship he’s frantically trying to hold on to. A wonderful, complex, engrossing book.
It's been twenty years since Cormac Reilly discovered the body of Hilaria Blake in her crumbling Georgian home. But he's never forgotten the two children she left behind...
When Aisling Conroy's boyfriend Jack is found in the freezing black waters of the river Corrib, the police tell her it was suicide. A surgical resident, she throws herself into study and work, trying to forget--until Jack's sister Maude shows up. Maude suspects foul play, and she is determined to prove it.
Cormac Reilly is the detective assigned with the re-investigation of a seemingly accidental overdose twenty years ago--the overdose of Jack…
I’m a Canadian writer born in Northern Ireland. My first book, A Nice Place to Die, introduced Northern Ireland detective DS Ryan McBride. In 2019, A Nice Place to Die won the RWA Daphne du Maurier Award for Mainstream Mystery and Suspense, was shortlisted in the Crime Writers of Canada Awards in 2021, and was a 2023 Silver Falchion Award finalist. As for my choices, each of these fabulous, atmospheric mysteries has richly drawn settings inhabited by characters the reader comes to care deeply about. This brings a book alive for me — each has a wonderful, compelling cast of characters and a clever, complex plot.
Sarah Stewart Taylor is an American writer who has lived and studied in Ireland.
Her books offer complex, intelligent plots filled with flawed yet compelling characters. Maggie D'arcy, a detective in the North Shore of Long Island and divorced mother of a teenage girl, offers to go to Ireland to follow up on a phone call her uncle Danny received.
His daughter, and Maggie’s cousin, Erin, has been missing for twenty-three years, since disappearing on a hike in the Wicklow mountains. Back then, Erin went to Dublin to try and find her, and became involved in the initial enquiry. Now the Irish police have found something, a buried scarf they believe belonged to Erin. And another girl has gone missing.
The settings are finely-drawn––you can feel the rain and smell the peat fires. A beautifully written novel, not to be missed. That rarest of treats, a literary mystery.
Twenty-three years ago, Maggie D'arcy's family received a call from the Dublin police. Her cousin Erin has been missing for several days. Maggie herself spent weeks in Ireland, trying to track Erin's movements, working beside the police. But it was to no avail: no trace of her was ever found.
The experience inspired Maggie to become a cop. Now, back on Long Island, more than 20 years have passed. Maggie is a detective and a divorced mother of a teenager. When the Gardai call to say that Erin's scarf has been found and another young woman has gone missing, Maggie…
20 years ago a software company I founded had been acquired and my life should have been good. Instead, it was a Herculean mess. I had just been fired by a billionaire whom I had accused of crimes, and now I was out of work and broke. It would still be four more years before Bernie Ebbers was sentenced to 25 years in federal prison (where he became blind and demented and died) for the world’s largest fraud. But when I was writing the first words of Paper Targets, the executives who had pulled me into their world of the “Lie” were freely strutting on the World Stage of Greed.
Bukowski didn't thieve, solve crimes, or use high-tech. In fact, he worked hard and was poor and isolated most of his life. But he lived in the fringe of the noir world, and beat on his machines—manual typewriters, then an IBM Selectric, and finally, with some fame and money, a computer. He was South of his No North, real and genuine for so long that when Hollywood knocked, he was ready for them. This book is his first-hand account of the dumb ego and stupid money that goes into making a movie. Hilarious and dark at the same time. A poet's novel.
'What will you do?' 'Oh, hell, I'll write a novel about writing the screenplay and making the movie.' 'What are you going to call it?' 'Hollywood.'
Henry Chinaski has a penchant for booze, women and horse-racing. On his precarious journey from poet to screenwriter he encounters a host of well-known stars and lays bare the absurdity and egotism of the film industry. Poetic, sharp and dangerous, Hollywood - Bukowski's fictionalisation of his experiences making the film Barfly - explores the many dark shadows to be found in the neon-soaked glare of Hollywood's limelight.
As a kid I found myself watching cop shows and wondering “These cops seem to be on duty all day and all night. Don’t they have families?” And when I’d read dramas in which characters took lavish vacations and bought expensive cars, I’d think “Doesn’t anyone worry about money?” While I certainly don’t believe that fiction should always strive toward perfect realism (I love fantasy and sci-fi stories!) I do think that adding everyday problems and concerns makes a character much more relatable and interesting. A detective chasing a serial killer is exciting. A detective suffering from an excruciating toothache while chasing a serial killer adds another layer of delicious tension.
I disagreed with almost every action by every character in
this book. I’d find myself saying to them: “Don’t do that!” But
they did
do that. And it kept me reading nonstop.
It’s a strange feeling, to
watch
characters spin out of control, yet be unable to look away. It's also
the mark of terrific storytelling, and writing that I greatly admire.
“Spectacular. . . . Ten shades blacker and several corpses grimmer than the novels of John Grisham. . . . Do yourself a favor. Read this book.” —Entertainment Weekly
Two brothers and their friend stumble upon the wreckage of a plane–the pilot is dead and his duffle bag contains four million dollars in cash. In order to hide, keep, and share the fortune, these ordinary men all agree to a simple plan.
I have cerebral palsy, but the list of things that I absolutely can’t do is surprisingly short: I can climb a flight of steps or walk the length of a football field, for example, but those tasks are going to take a lot more time and energy for me than they would an able-bodied person. We all choose where to invest in life, but cerebral palsy makes that process much more deliberate, and I’ve been fascinated by it for a long time. I’m always on the hunt for stories that demonstrate that our choices shape our life, not our limitations, and I’m determined to choose joy.
I love this book because it’s the best fictional example I’ve ever seen of a character’s disability being eclipsed by his talent. Lincoln Rhyme is paralyzed, but his talent as a criminologist is far more important—and Deaver showcases Rhyme’s genius and passion as often as he details the difficulties of disability.
I find the book’s mystery compelling and the characters well-written, and I couldn’t get enough of the relationship between Lincoln Rhyme and Amelia Sachs. I’ve never seen a better portrayal of a partnership based solidly on mutual respect and admiration. I’m so grateful for how this story demonstrates that disability doesn’t need to stop you from making a real impact through the gifts and talents you’ve been given.
From the Sunday Times bestselling author of The Goodbye Man, discover Jeffery Deaver's chilling thriller that inspired the film starring Angelina Jolie and Denzel Washington and is now a major NBC TV series.
Their first case, their worst killer . . .
New York City has been thrown into chaos by the assaults of the Bone Collector, a serial kidnapper and killer who gives the police a chance to save his victims from death by leaving obscure clues. Baffled, the cops turn to the one man with a chance of solving them - Lincoln Rhyme.
I am an author, attorney, artist, and entrepreneur. My experience as a litigator for over forty years, as well as my experience as a painter and an investor, has inspired and influenced me to write the Chance Cormac legal thrillers series.
There isn’t an author more frightening than Cormac McCarthy.
No Country for Old Men is an existential novel about the pure evil that exists in a barren landscape. The antagonist Anton Cigurth is the darkest character imaginable in a world where there is no justice or remorse.
The sheriff pursuing Cigurth is forced to accept the reality that in the modern world, there is no way to control pure evil.
Llewelyn Moss, hunting antelope near the Rio Grande, instead finds men shot dead, a load of heroin, and more than $2 million in cash. Packing the money out, he knows, will change everything. But only after two more men are murdered does a victim's burning car lead Sheriff Bell to the carnage out in the desert, and he soon realizes that Moss and his young wife are in desperate need of protection. One party in the failed transaction hires an ex-Special Forces officer to defend his interests against a mesmerizing freelancer, while on either side are men accustomed to spectacular…
I’ve been a journalist who’s focused on culture, particularly film, and especially classic film and film noir. That sparked me to write two crime novels, with a third on the way, for Level Best Books. The first came out in February. The next will reach the market in May 2025. The third will come out in 2026. For more information, please go to my website.
Did this book give birth to hardboiled literature? No, but I feel it mothered and fathered it.
Did this book—when filmed in 1941—give rise to film noir? I would say yes or “oui.”
This book lives on in libraries and bookstores, in minds and memories, on screens big and small, as a cultural masterpiece. But please don’t get me wrong about masterpiece. Hammett’s existential story of antiheroic private detective Sam Spade wriggling out of death as he fends off the cagey but crazed pursuers of a worthless “jeweled” bird breathes more deeply, more compellingly every time I re-read it. Through the book, I face the dark—and find the gloom almost charming.
One of the greatest crime novels of the 20th century.
'His name remains one of the most important and recognisable in the crime fiction genre. Hammett set the standard for much of the work that would follow' Independent
Sam Spade is hired by the fragrant Miss Wonderley to track down her sister, who has eloped with a louse called Floyd Thursby. But Miss Wonderley is in fact the beautiful and treacherous Brigid O'Shaughnessy, and when Spade's partner Miles Archer is shot while on Thursby's trail, Spade finds himself both hunter and hunted: can he track down the jewel-encrusted bird, a…
I’ve been a stay-at-home mom and author for the past decade, and during that time, I went through the stillbirth of my second baby. Grief taught me a lot about compassion, including the importance of being able to see the nuance of difficult subject matters. I learned it’s easy to theorize what to do in a situation until you're in that situation. For that reason, I love books in all sorts of genres that are layered with characters’ past griefs, impossible scenarios, and tensions regarding the choices they make. I picked five of my favorite books with a heart-ripping plot that sparks interesting discussion and leaves readers pondering, "What would I have done?"
This book was a very bingeable read. I got caught up in the mystery of Hannah’s missing husband, and I also loved the layers of complicated family relationships shown with her stepdaughter.
I’m a sucker for the “he isn’t who he said he was” storyline, and this book masters that through Hannah’s husband, Owen. The entire story is weaved with surprises and plot twists, including the impossible choice Hannah faces at the end.
* SOON TO BE A MAJOR TV SERIES STARRING JULIA ROBERTS *
'Brilliant. Pacy tense and twisty' - LISA HALL
'I adored this beautifully written thriller' - JO SPAIN
IT WAS THE LAST THING HE TOLD ME: PROTECT HER
Before Owen Michaels disappears, he manages to smuggle a note to his new wife, Hannah: protect her. Hannah knows exactly who Owen needs her to protect - his sixteen-year-old daughter, Bailey, who lost her mother tragically as a child. And who wants absolutely nothing to do with her new stepmother.
As her increasingly desperate calls to Owen go unanswered, his boss…
