Here are 4 books that Rocco Schiavone Mysteries fans have personally recommended once you finish the Rocco Schiavone Mysteries series.
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I grew up in a Jewish home more focused on comedy than religion. I readMad Magazine, watched The Three Stooges, and listened to Allan Sherman. The idea of a bar mitzvah was a cruel surprise, sprung on me at age 10. I flunked Hebrew school, yet got accepted at Yale. I majored in a Jewish girl who later broke my heart. So I began writing my first novel. It "almost" got published—another sad story—and I took a job with an editor in NYC who specialized in paranormal non-fiction. That was the spark for The Violet Crow—and my love for comic crime fiction. A new novel, Reveille in Birdland, is scheduled for completion in 2023.
Robert Crais' private detectives, Elvis Cole and Joe Pike, inhabit the same traffic-choked freeways as Harry Bosch, but in a much brighter key. I'm drawn to Elvis' non-stop banter, which is often laugh-out-loud funny. Tough-guy Joe has a gift for understatement that makes him a perfect foil for Elvis. In Voodoo River, Elvis falls in love with Lucy Chenier. (His wiseguy courtship style is something you shouldn't try at home.) The novel's set in Louisiana, where Crais grew up. Elvis is investigating a blackmail scheme run by Milt Rossier, a wily ex-con backed up by a gun thug named Leroy; Rene, a 400-pound brain-dead monster; and a vicious snapping turtle named Luther. Elvis is not intimidated, but he wisely calls in Joe to improve the odds for the inevitable confrontation.
In a search for a young woman's past PI Elvis Cole discovers far more than he expected . . .
Hired to uncover the past of Jodi Taylor, an actress in a hit TV show, Elvis leaves his native Los Angeles to head for Louisiana in search of Jodi's biological parents.
But before he can tackle the mystery of the actress's background, he is up against a whole host of eccentrics, including a crazed Raid-spraying housewife, a Cajun thug who looks like he's been made out of spare parts, and a menacing hundred-year-old river turtle named Luther.
To be a successful sales exec, required my being an observant student of human nature. The same skill applied to my becoming a successful author. I discovered the most unforgettable people I encountered throughout my career were a lot like the zany oddballs my favorite authors created and the perfect models to base my cast of characters on.
Maybe it’s because the protagonist and her group of amateur sleuths in my series manage to make every mistake imaginable before they finally succeed in bringing the real killer to justice, that I am tickled pink by Donald E. Westlake’s cast of over-the-top-miscreants.
Starring in Bank Shot, Westlake’s zany characters are more like the gang that couldn’t shoot straight. Gang leader John Dortmunder and the most inept group of criminals ever to stumble and bumble their way through an ill-fated caper are a rollicking treat that combines fast-moving suspense with laugh-out-loud wit as they attempt to steal a temporarily relocated bank that is inside a mobile home.
All Dortmunder has to do is get past seven security guards, put the bank-on-wheels in gear, and drive away. It’s a simple plan, until it all goes wrong…
A crew of thieves hopes to hijack a mobile home full of money in this crime caper from “the funniest man in the world” (The Washington Post).
John Dortmunder has been working an encyclopedia-selling scam while waiting for his next big heist. Unfortunately, his latest mark seems to be wise to the con, and he has to cut his sales pitch short and make a quick escape.
But opportunity awaits: Main Street bank has temporarily relocated to a mobile home. All Dortmunder has to do is get past seven security guards, put the bank-on-wheels in gear, and drive away. It’s…
I grew up in a Jewish home more focused on comedy than religion. I readMad Magazine, watched The Three Stooges, and listened to Allan Sherman. The idea of a bar mitzvah was a cruel surprise, sprung on me at age 10. I flunked Hebrew school, yet got accepted at Yale. I majored in a Jewish girl who later broke my heart. So I began writing my first novel. It "almost" got published—another sad story—and I took a job with an editor in NYC who specialized in paranormal non-fiction. That was the spark for The Violet Crow—and my love for comic crime fiction. A new novel, Reveille in Birdland, is scheduled for completion in 2023.
I had the good fortune to meet Thomas Perry at a writers' conference a few years back. Perry is best known for fast-paced thrillers such as The Butcher's Boy, the Jane Whitefield series, and The Old Man.
On the topic of comic crime fiction, he observed that violent crime is serious business that's difficult to treat with levity. Perry tried it in his second novel. Published in 1983, Metzger's Dogfollows Chinese Gordon and his gang as they romp through the southern California desert—blowing things up. Their target is a medical facility with a million dollars worth of cocaine. The heist goes perfectly, except Chinese Gordon also snatches a folder of documents that detail the CIA's meddling with foreign governments. Naturally the feds want those docs back—with extreme prejudice.
The much-loved comic thriller by the author of the Edgar Award–winning The Butcher’s Boy is now, by popular demand, back in print, featuring a new Introduction by bestselling author Carl Hiaasen.
When Leroy “Chinese” Gordon breaks into a professor’s lab at the University of Los Angeles, he’s after some pharmaceutical cocaine, worth plenty of money. Instead, he finds the papers the professor has compiled for the CIA, which include a blueprint for throwing a large city into chaos. But how is the CIA to be persuaded to pay a suitable ransom, unless of course someone actually uses the plan to…
To be a successful sales exec, required my being an observant student of human nature. The same skill applied to my becoming a successful author. I discovered the most unforgettable people I encountered throughout my career were a lot like the zany oddballs my favorite authors created and the perfect models to base my cast of characters on.
As a woman who was raised to have a moral compass, I am outraged whenever someone in authority abuses their power and gets away with it.
While I don’t condone revenge, nonetheless, I have to admit I cheered when lewd, lecherous, law-bending Florida Judge Robert “Maximum Bob” Gibbs finally gets his comeuppance and is judged guilty by a grudge-bearing malefactor and sentenced to death-by alligator, a unique means of execution, to say the least.
Ingenious, more than slightly off-kilter Elmore Leonard is the undisputed king of criminal mayhem. His wacky, raucous Maximum Bob is a delightfully dark humorous tale chocked full of zany characters; a group of magnificent miscreants Mr. Leonard created, knowing his readers would love to hate.
The New York Times bestselling author of Be Cool and Get Shorty
When someone delivers an alligator to Judge Bob Gibbs' porch, there's no shortage of suspects - hard-sentencing, womanising redneck 'Maximum Bob' is pretty much the most unpopular man in Florida.
Throw into the mix the Crowe clan - about as primitive and aggressive as any alligator - a doped-up doctor on early release with a tag, quick-witted probation officer Kathy Baker, a mermaid and a long-dead slave girl called Wanda, and things get a tad complicated. And inevitably, they don't work out the way you might expect...
