Here are 100 books that Backwater Channel fans have personally recommended if you like
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I’m an entrepreneur who was born literally within sight of the Intracoastal Waterway in South Florida. Got my first boat (a dinghy) when I was six. I used to drive an airboat on Lake Okeechobee and learned to fly back when I was a teenager. Since then, I’ve flown over a dozen different types of planes and even a helicopter. As a kid, I spent a lot of time in the Bahamas, Virgin Islands, and the Antilles. In my late teens I worked on various private sportfishing boats in Florida, Georgia, and the Bahamas. With this much time spent on, in, under, or around the water, I was destined to write coastal novels.
Dawn Lee was a friend and an inspiration to me. Cancer took her from us way too soon, but she left behind a large legacy of great books that were set on the Gulf coast in the panhandle of Florida. Low Tide is the first book in her Forgotten Coast Florida Suspense series which launched her into the bestseller ranks. If you ask anyone who’s read her what makes her writing so special, they’ll all tell you it’s her uniquely crafted characters. The plots and the twists of her stories are top-notch as well, but the characters are simply amazing.
In Apalachicola, Florida, sinister things are afoot, as sinister things tend to be.Lt. Maggie Redmond is called to a crime scene on St. George Island, where she is met with the body of Gregory Boudreaux. The medical examiner calls it a suicide, but no one knows that Maggie has a horrible connection to the dead man.When Gregory’s uncle, Bennett Boudreaux, the richest and scariest man in town, takes a sudden interest in Maggie, people start to wonder, Maggie included. Maggie knows he may suspect her of killing his nephew, but she finds herself slowly drawn to the man. As Maggie…
A moving story of love, betrayal, and the enduring power of hope in the face of darkness.
German pianist Hedda Schlagel's world collapsed when her fiancé, Fritz, vanished after being sent to an enemy alien camp in the United States during the Great War. Fifteen years later, in 1932, Hedda…
I’m an entrepreneur who was born literally within sight of the Intracoastal Waterway in South Florida. Got my first boat (a dinghy) when I was six. I used to drive an airboat on Lake Okeechobee and learned to fly back when I was a teenager. Since then, I’ve flown over a dozen different types of planes and even a helicopter. As a kid, I spent a lot of time in the Bahamas, Virgin Islands, and the Antilles. In my late teens I worked on various private sportfishing boats in Florida, Georgia, and the Bahamas. With this much time spent on, in, under, or around the water, I was destined to write coastal novels.
I have a deep and long-standing love of coastal adventure books, and Stolen Sommer is the best I’ve ever read. Yes, that’s a bold statement, but Nick Harvey’s work with this book resonated with me and backs up my choice completely. I even found myself holding my breath at a couple of points. Harvey keeps the reader guessing throughout the story with his carefully crafted characters that seem real enough to step off the pages. While that’s the ultimate goal of every author (at least it should be), few do it as well as Nick Harvey does in this great mystery that’s set in the beautiful Cayman Islands.
When the Cayman Islands police investigate a burglary, Constable Nora Sommer recognises the victim from a past she's desperate to forget.
As thefts continue, consuming the department's focus and resources, Nora can't shake her new found knowledge - a guilty man living a happy life… behind a lie.
A missing girl adds further strain, and with little evidence in either case, Nora develops an improbable theory she's determined to prove.
How far will Nora go to right the wrong one man will do anything to hide?
I grew up watching old Bogart movies on TV with my father. From Phillip Marlowe to Sam Spade, I was taken with the life of the P. I. Once I was old enough to read and enjoy the irony as well as the sex and violence in Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer tales, I’d pull the detective novels from under my old man’s bed and spend time with all the lowlifes. Guess I’ve never grown out of my love for noir. That’s why I started writing P. I. novels as well as reading them. I hope they bring as much entertainment to others as those old-school sagas brought to me.
I was drawn to this book by the concept of a private eye as a beach-bum savant.
One who’s a loner by his own design but conflicted about his decision to keep his personal life only to himself. Multiple bad guys, glamorous gals, and guns galore pile up in the pages, but the heart of the hunt is Travis McGee questioning his own lifestyle.
From a beloved master of crime fiction, The Lonely Silver Rain is one of many classic novels featuring Travis McGee, the hard-boiled detective who lives on a houseboat.
Travis McGee has luck to thank for his reputation as a first-rate salvager of stolen boats. Now Billy Ingraham, a self-made tycoon, is betting that McGee can locate his $700,000 custom cruiser. McGee isn’t so sure. He knows all too well the dangerous link between Florida boatjackings and the drug trade, and he’s vowed never to swim with the sharks—but if he wants to keep his head (AKA finances) above water,…
Delve into this internationally best-selling series, now complete! A fast paced laugh-out-loud mix of Urban Fantasy and Mystery.
I can tell when you’re lying. Every. Single. Time. I’m Jinx, a PI hired to find a missing university student, I hope to find her propped up at a bar–yet my gut…
I’m an entrepreneur who was born literally within sight of the Intracoastal Waterway in South Florida. Got my first boat (a dinghy) when I was six. I used to drive an airboat on Lake Okeechobee and learned to fly back when I was a teenager. Since then, I’ve flown over a dozen different types of planes and even a helicopter. As a kid, I spent a lot of time in the Bahamas, Virgin Islands, and the Antilles. In my late teens I worked on various private sportfishing boats in Florida, Georgia, and the Bahamas. With this much time spent on, in, under, or around the water, I was destined to write coastal novels.
As a veteran actor of stage and screen, Sullivan is well versed in the art of movie-making. In his best-selling book, Deep Focus, he blends this along with his love of SCUBA diving and the Cayman Islands into a great coastal mystery and suspense read. As he asks in his book description, “Who wouldn’t want to shoot a movie in paradise? What could possibly go wrong?” As it turns out, plenty of things. So, grab a good sipping rum, settle into your favorite reading chair, and prepare to be entertained.
Who wouldn't want to shoot a movie in paradise? What could possibly go wrong?
Divemasters Boone Fischer and Emily Durand have left the relative bustle of Cozumel to start anew on the sleepy Sister Island of Little Cayman; population 200, give or take. In the Cayman Islands, the reefs are so spectacular and extensive, you can dive a different site every day of the year.
When a prominent film studio decides to shoot their upcoming science-fiction flick in the waters of the Caribbean island of Grand Cayman, everything initially goes well. Eccentric director Heinz Werner is brought on board, and…
I began my own writing journey in 2007. I skipped many HS classes just to stay home and read. I want to know the ending of a story. I want happy ending. Life is hard, but when I have the ability to write the stories I write with the ending that so many are deprived of, at least I know I can find it in a book of my own choosing. That is my love of romance.
Whatever book you select from this author highlights the reason I selected this book. The witty dialogue.
I re-read my favorite books, and this one is no exception. Ms. Phillips goes beyond the normal stuff. The depth to her characters is awe-inspiring. Plus, this book is from her Chicago Stars series and I am a huge NFL fan.
A star quarterback and a feisty detective play for keeps in this sporty, sexy, sassy novel-a long-awaited new entry in the beloved, award-winning, New York Times bestselling author's fan-favorite Chicago Stars football series. Piper Dove is a woman with a dream-to become the best detective in the city of Chicago. First job? Trail former Chicago Stars quarterback, Cooper Graham. Problem? Graham's spotted her, and he's not happy. Which is why a good detective needs to think on her feet. "The fact is ...I'm your stalker. Not full-out barmy. Just ...mildly unhinged." Piper soon finds herself working for Graham himself, although…
When I was a child, I grew up in a very crowded house in suburbia with three sisters. Reading was the best way to escape all the mayhem. By the age of eight I was reading my parents’ novels, whatever books I could find. I wanted to move to a big city like the ones in their novels. At night I would tell myself Cinderella-type stories where I lived in a fabulous apartment and got to be the heroine. I took a class at Harvard Extension, and the professor read my story aloud to the group. From that day on I was hooked.
I was driving across country to move to Miami. When we stopped in Austin, I picked up a copy of Back to Blood by Tom Wolfe.
I was thrilled to find a novel about the city I was moving to. A thick book meticulously researched I settled back and immersed myself into a brilliant novel about multicultural Miami. The Cuban police officer, a Creole professor, Russian criminals, artists from Miami Art Basel, retired New York Yentas, and many more call Miami home.
It was a great primer for my move. That first year I went to Art Basel, visited Little Havana for pastries, and celebrated my birthday at a Russian nightclub all because of Back to Blood.
As a police launch speeds across Miami's Biscayne Bay - with officer Nestor Camacho on board - Tom Wolfe is off and running. Into the feverous landscape of the city, he introduces the Cuban mayor, the black police chief, an ambitious young journalist and his Yale-marinated editor; a psychiatrist who specialises in sex addiction and his Latina nurse by day, mistress by night - until lately, the love of Nestor's life; a refined, and oh-so-light-skinned young woman from Haiti and her Creole-spouting, black-gang-banger-stylin' little brother; a billionaire porn addict, crack dealers in the `hoods, `de-skilled' conceptual artists at the Miami…
On the morning of December 26, 2004, an undersea earthquake struck off the coast of Sumatra in the Indian Ocean. The resulting tsunami killed an estimated 230,000 people across fourteen countries, from Indonesia to Sri Lanka to Thailand to the Maldives to India and all the way to East Africa.…
I learned to love nature early, from the tadpoles in the swamps of ‘my’ New York woods to the scarlet tanagers that came through in the spring and the old tilted oak where I sometimes slept. In college in California, I became acquainted with the myriad ways in which we humans are still degrading the natural environment that is the prime source of our worldly and spiritual subsistence. Ever since, I’ve worked to protect the natural world, first as an activist, then a government official, then as a diplomat, and now as I write fictional intrigues set in the world we all need to conserve. I hope you’ll enjoy this latest effort.
If you’ve ever felt the sensation of being hunted by a predator who’s higher on the food chain than you are – a man-eater – Quammen's book will bring it all back to you. If you haven’t had that particular pleasure, the book’s discussion of the planet’s most exotic predators – crocodiles, lions, bears, and tigers – will fascinate and educate you. The focus here is not just the ‘big, fierce animals,’ but also the human communities that interact with them, fear them, track them, and try to understand them. In one desperately drawn passage, Quammen describes a tracker ‘who followed a single tiger for more than forty-five days... feeding himself from the leftovers of the tiger’s kills when his food stocks got low.’ Wow.
The beasts that have always ruled our jungles and our nightmares are dying. What will become of us without them? For millennia, lions, tigers, and their man-eating kin have kept our dark, scary forests dark and scary, and their predatory majesty has been the stuff of folklore. But by the year 2150 big predators may only exist on the other side of glass barriers and chain-link fences. Their gradual disappearance is changing the very nature of our existence. We no longer occupy an intermediate position on the food chain; instead we survey it invulnerably from aboveso far above that we…
David DeKok became interested in environmental disasters in his native Michigan in 1974, when PBB, a fire-retardant chemical, was accidentally mixed with animal feed, entered the food chain, and then most people in the state, probably including himself. As a journalist in Pennsylvania, he wrote extensively about the Centralia mine fire and the aftermath of the Three Mile Island nuclear accident, and is the author of four books. He tends to write about small towns and small-town people in crisis.
The world continues to consider nuclear power, despite the devastation to the nuclear industry caused by the accidents at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. Nuclear power can play a part in fighting climate change, but we need to be aware of the risks as well as the rewards. Beyond that, it is a well-researched and dramatic story about the trauma that ensues when human communities are beset by environmental disasters.
A New York Times Best Book of the Year A Time Best Book of the Year A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of the Year 2020 Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence Winner
From journalist Adam Higginbotham, the New York Times bestselling “account that reads almost like the script for a movie” (The Wall Street Journal)—a powerful investigation into Chernobyl and how propaganda, secrecy, and myth have obscured the true story of one of the history’s worst nuclear disasters.
Early in the morning of April 26, 1986, Reactor Number Four of the Chernobyl Atomic Energy Station exploded, triggering one of…
I have always had a passion to engage with the deepest questions of existence, from the interpretation of quantum mechanics to string theory and cosmology. My desire to understand is driven purely by curiosity, and my aim in writing about these topics is to make the wonders of the universe as widely accessible as possible. But scientific knowledge and the advance of technology also has a potentially darker side. It is vital for the future of humanity that science is widely understood so that democratic informed decisions can be made to safeguard against its misuse, and this was the motivation for recommending my list of books.
The world’s worst nuclear accident took place at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in 1986.
This short well-researched book is about what really happened before, during, and after the explosion and melt-down of the Unit 4 nuclear reactor. The author Andrew Leatherbarrow successfully interweaves his account of the accident with descriptions of his own visit to the abandoned city of Pripyat close to the power plant.
I like the book’s engaging style; it is informative and very readable without resorting to sensationalism or wild speculation. As Leatherbarrow explains, much is known about the causes of the Chernobyl accident but even some of the important details remain a mystery.
At 01:23:40 on April 26th 1986, Alexander Akimov pressed the emergency shutdown button at Chernobyl’s fourth nuclear reactor. It was an act that forced the permanent evacuation of a city, killed thousands and crippled the Soviet Union. The event spawned decades of conflicting, exaggerated and inaccurate stories.
This book, the result of five years of research, presents an accessible but comprehensive account of what really happened. From the desperate fight to prevent a burning reactor core from irradiating eastern Europe, to the self-sacrifice of the heroic men who entered fields of radiation so strong that machines wouldn’t work, to the…
Nelson West, a former Chicago homicide detective, is hired by wealthy heir Lionel Bing to discreetly help “fix” scandals and legal problems for his father’s wealthy friends.
Bing, a brilliant but troubled investigator, suffers from PTSD symptoms as a result of being kidnapped and witnessing the murder of his mother…
David DeKok became interested in environmental disasters in his native Michigan in 1974, when PBB, a fire-retardant chemical, was accidentally mixed with animal feed, entered the food chain, and then most people in the state, probably including himself. As a journalist in Pennsylvania, he wrote extensively about the Centralia mine fire and the aftermath of the Three Mile Island nuclear accident, and is the author of four books. He tends to write about small towns and small-town people in crisis.
We Almost Lost Detroit was published in the mid-1970s at a time of growing concern over nuclear power in America that would reach a boiling point with the Three Mile Island nuclear accident in Pennsylvania in 1979. There was no love lost between the two sides. Utility executives were believed to be liars trying to save their investment in a costly, difficult technology. Nuclear critics were portrayed by the industry as deluded tree-huggers. It was a real debate with real consequences, and this book shows why. The cover of the Ballantine paperback edition shows the terrified face of a man inside a radiation protective suit.
A valuable contribution to the debate over nuclear power, this book documents the Fermi accident that so frightened the AEC and nuclear industry that they did not want the details and significance leaked to the public. At the time of the publication of this book, many critics of nuclear power were demanding to know all the pertinent information regarding the safety of nuclear reactors.
