9 books like Moe Prager

This is a fun series. It starts off in the 50s in small-town Iowa with most of the small-time innocence that you’d imagine but Gorman likes to take a different look. He leads us through the era’s less-than-shining moments while we get to relive the 50s and early sixties.

In this one, a young Black civil rights worker turns up dead. Along the way, we learn about racism and the subtle forms it can take and how it can poison a whole community.

In the end, things are not what they seemed but it doesn’t change the facts about America during this era.

Message—People are people and fighting ignorance and hate is all our responsibility.

It is hard to beat Lawrence Block’s writing. It often seems like a conversation you’d have, late at night, on a bar stool while sipping a bourbon served neat. Later in the Scudder series, it might seem more like a conversation you might have in a diner after an AA meeting but that’s hardly important.

What is important in this book is Scudder’s motive. He’s hired to look after something and then his client winds up dead. Scudder has no reason to keep pursuing the case—he’s not getting paid and his client won’t ever know the difference.

A promise is a promise and Scudder isn’t stopping.

The message—Commitment is about all we have in life. Commitment means integrity.

Early Autumn made me cry from two directions. As a tween, reading about Spenser’s rescue of Paul, a shut-down, emotionally neglected boy that Spenser first assesses as “an unlovely little bastard”, I cried in sympathy and relief for Paul.

Over a summer, Spenser taught him skills, built up his strength and gave him the confidence to find his own dreams, before leaving him at the doorway to the life he now knew he wanted. As an adult, I cried with joy for Spenser, who connected with a stranger, taught what he had to teach, and changed a life.

Really helping someone in a lasting way is rarely so easy as it was in this book, but it’s a worthwhile dream and this Cinderella story gets me every time.

John D. MacDonald is the father of modern fictional detectives—especially Robert Parker—who, like MacDonald, is a writer of sparse dialogue. John D. MacDonald’s main character is the unforgettable Travis McGee. Travis McGee lives on his houseboat, The Busted Flush, which he won in a poker game. McGee has no steady job. Instead, he takes on salvage jobs as he can find them and is paid 50% of the value of the recovered items he returns to the owner.  

Bright Orange for the Shroud—interestingly, is typical for John D. MacDonald as each of his books is connected to a color—The Deep Blue Goodbye, A Purple Place for Dying, and The Empty Copper Sea. 

While enjoying another short “retirement” Travis McGee is visited by Arthur Wilkinson, a friend from days gone by. In terrible health, McGee nurses him back to health only to find that Wilkinson has been bankrupted in… show more.

Joy’s work is always deeply ethical, asking not only what his characters will do, but what they should do—and what it costs them to try.

In this novel, a hunting accident spirals into violence, loyalty, and impossible decisions in the North Carolina mountains. It’s a taut, morally complex thriller with the soul of a Greek tragedy, written in prose that sings.

This is the first in the Franky Dast series and it was nominated for a Shamus Award. Dast was convicted and sentenced to Death Row when he was 18, for the rape and murder of two adolescent boys. Eight years later, the verdict is overturned, in part as a result of the relationship Dast has established with the Justice Now Initiative, an organization specializing in cases of wrongful imprisonment. On his release, Dast joins the group and becomes involved in a case that hits close to home: the cop who arrested and coerced a confession from him is accused of shooting the son of a prominent judge. In Dast, Wiley has created the kind of complex character I’m drawn to, both as a writer and a reader. Wiley’s ability to dive deep into the psyche of complicated characters is something I’m always striving for.

Tom Straw is another one who came to crime writing via a circuitous route. For many years, he’s been a very successful TV writer for shows like Night Court, Nurse Jackie, Grace Under Fire, Craig Ferguson (he still is) but when asked to become “Richard Castle,” the fictional crime writer who works alongside a New York City female cop for the ABC-TV series Castle, he said yes and immediately became a best-selling crime writer. Buzz Killer is the first novel he wrote under his own name and he makes good use of all those skills he honed as a TV writer. NYC public defender Maci Wild takes on the homicide case of a burglar the tabloids call the Buzz Killer because of MO of lobby-buzzing apartments to select his targets. She forms a partnership with Gunnar Cody, an ex-cop from NYPD’s elite surveillance unit. Along the way, they cross… show more.

Reed Farrel Coleman, called “a hard-boiled poet,” and a “noir laureate” has written somewhere in the neighborhood of thirty crime novels, including a number of Robert B. Parker’s Jesse Stone novels. One of my favorites is Where it Hurts, which features divorced, retired cop Gus Murphy who’s picked up part-time work as a courtesy van driver for a run-down hotel. The only thing that interrupts his mindless routine comes when ex-con Tommy Delcamino asks Gus to investigate the mysterious death of his son. Coleman is particularly strong when it comes to character. This book especially resonates with me because of Coleman’s ability to dig deep inside his character’s psyche, not only examining how they tick but why they tick. His books, especially this one, are tightly plotted but for me the real attraction is his examination of personal, moral dilemmas. I’m especially attracted to and admiring of Coleman’s books,… show more.

Matt Goldman has led an interesting career. His roots are in comedy, having been a successful Hollywood TV writer on shows like Seinfeld, The New Adventures of Old Christine, and Ellen. But he made the unlikely career shift becoming a successful crime writer with his Nils Shapiro detective series. Carolina Moonset, his latest, is a standalone novel that tells the story of a young man who visits his family in his childhood home, Beaufort, South Carolina. His father suffers from Lewy Body dementia. He has trouble remembering what he had for breakfast but still connects to rich, childhood memories, some of which concern both a past and present-day crime.

Goldman is especially strong when it comes to depicting a family torn apart by the ravages of this insidious disease. But Goldman skillfully creates a mystery that grabs the reader and won’t let go. As someone who… show more.