Here are 94 books that Beat the Reaper fans have personally recommended if you like
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As a travel writer, author, broadcaster, speaker, and producer, I’ve reported from over 100 countries on 7 continents for major print and digital publications worldwide and networks like National Geographic and Travel Channel. I kicked off my career with a solo, 12-month round-the-world backpacking adventure, largely inspired by the formative books I read below. Embracing the world with insatiable curiosity, an open heart, an open mind, a sense of humour, and enthusiasm to share my stories clearly resonated. Here I am, two decades later, author of a half-dozen bestselling books that focus on my own eclectic travels, which will hopefully inspire others as these books inspired me.
A deserved, all-time classic, this book seems to transcend time to capture the spirit of wanderlust. I was young and impressionable when I read it for the first time, and it inspired a sense of profound restlessness to explore, grow, and hit the road to see for myself.
Neal Cassidy and Jack Kerouac are wild, occasionally unhinged protagonists, and their journey consists of hustling, romance, and drinking their way to a good time. Kerouac’s writing made me long for similar misadventures, where life is simple and finding the road is all that matters. Subversively, the novel promotes a full life and whole human experience, which makes working 9 to 5 that much more difficult.
The legendary novel of freedom and the search for authenticity that defined a generation, now in a striking new Pengiun Classics Deluxe Edition
Inspired by Jack Kerouac's adventures with Neal Cassady, On the Road tells the story of two friends whose cross-country road trips are a quest for meaning and true experience. Written with a mixture of sad-eyed naivete and wild ambition and imbued with Kerouac's love of America, his compassion for humanity, and his sense of language as jazz, On the Road is the quintessential American vision of freedom and hope, a book that changed American literature and changed…
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
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…
“Write what you know.” Every writer knows this. I have done that; first, in a novella, Losing Addison, which I recently made into a psychological thriller featuring Sherilyn Fenn (release date: June 28, 2022). The story is based on a nightmare I had in 2011. In addition, I have written two novels, By A Thread and The Falls, both of which involve Mormon missionaries caught up in events that test their integrity, forcing them to make difficult choices as said missionaries discover same-sex attractions more deeply rooted than they—and their superiors—would like to admit.
Senselessis the embellished account of Nick Prince, a jaded census worker, who is required to prowl rural backwoods in search of the folks who, for one reason or another, didn’t return their completed census questionnaires as required by law. Bannon, who actually worked for over a decade in this role, explains that Title 13 of the U.S. Code forbids census employees from revealing anything they learn about the individuals they visit, under penalty of hefty fines and prison time. This conceit makes for some hysterical maneuverings that, according to Bannon, are based on some actual events he’s forbidden to relate in non-fiction prose. It’s hard to tell where fiction and non-fiction diverge as Nick encounters a sequestered polygamist compound far off the grid. Hilarity ensues when a desperate wife decides he’s her ticket out of captivity and she convinces him to help her rescue the rest of the clan…
Nick Prince just wants to go drown his sorrows at the Safari Club and pine for Beth, his lost college love. But before he can do that, his job with the U.S. Census Bureau requires him to face down reluctant respondents in the remote forests of Oregon, who repel him with everything from pit bulls to shotguns.
When a chance encounter in the tiny town of Elwood lands him in the midst of a loopy polygamist clan, it sets off a wild, wacky race to save himself, his job, and his bleeding heart. You won't know whether to laugh or…
A Duke with rigid opinions, a Lady whose beliefs conflict with his, a long disputed parcel of land, a conniving neighbour, a desperate collaboration, a failure of trust, a love found despite it all.
Alexander Cavendish, Duke of Ravensworth, returned from war to find that his father and brother had…
Thanks to formative experiences playing Where In The World Is Carmen Sandiego?, I’ve long been obsessed with international true crime capers. There’s just something about the genre, and how it ties together colorful characters, audacious escapades, and fantastic locales, that sucks me in. As a longtime journalist, I’ve sought out and chronicled many narratives in this vein – from snowboarding bank robbers, to an expedition in search of the origins of the world’s most expensive coffee bean, to the wild story that led to my bookThe Curse of the Marquis de Sade. Here are my favorite nonfiction books on international capers, guaranteed to take readers on globetrotting adventures.
This book jumped out at me at a bookstore one day, and I loved it so deeply that I sought out the author when I learned he lived nearly and we became good friends.
Rubinstein stumbled upon a true crime story most reporters only dream of – that of hard-drinking third-string Hungarian hockey goalie Attila Ambrus, who took up bank robbing and triggered the largest manhunt in post-communist Eastern European history – and then was smart enough to let the story tell itself, bit by incredible bit.
The result is a wild ride through the chaos of post-Cold War Hungary with a rambunctious antihero for whom you can’t help but root.
Attila Ambrus was a gentleman thief from Transylvania, a terrible professional hockey goalkeeper - and preferred women in leopard-skin hot pants. During the 1990s, while playing for the biggest hockey team in Budapest, Ambrus took up bank robbery to make ends meet. Arrayed against him was perhaps the most incompetent team of crime investigators the Eastern Bloc had ever seen: a robbery chief who had learned how to be a detective by watching dubbed Columbo episodes, a forensics officer who wore top hat and tails on the job, and a driver so inept he was known only by a Hungarian…
“Write what you know.” Every writer knows this. I have done that; first, in a novella, Losing Addison, which I recently made into a psychological thriller featuring Sherilyn Fenn (release date: June 28, 2022). The story is based on a nightmare I had in 2011. In addition, I have written two novels, By A Thread and The Falls, both of which involve Mormon missionaries caught up in events that test their integrity, forcing them to make difficult choices as said missionaries discover same-sex attractions more deeply rooted than they—and their superiors—would like to admit.
Patrick Dennis’s “hyperbolized” version of his life with his aunt and legal guardian, Mame Dennis, has a history both on Broadway (“Mame” portrayed by Lucille Ball) and on the silver screen (“Auntie Mame” portrayed by Rosalind Russell). It was the film that led me to the book, which Dennis admits is filled with hyperbole and imaginary details. It is, however, based on the sometimes outlandish and often controversial life of his “progressive” aunt, who believed “life is a banquet and most poor suckers are starving.”
It’s hard to tell where reality ends and fiction begins, but in truth you won’t want to. Auntie Mame manages to be both touching and hysterical as it follows Mame’s swinging New York lifestyle through the Great Depression into the workforce (a first for the heretofore wealthy heiress) and beyond into marriage into a “proper” Southern family, whose scrutiny Mame does not always survive intact.…
With a wit as sharp as a vodka stinger and a heart as free as her spirit, Auntie Mame burst onto the literary scene in 1955--and today remains one of the most unforgettable characters in contemporary fiction.
Wildly successful when it was first published in 1955, Patrick Dennis’ Auntie Mame sold over two million copies and stayed put on the New York Times bestseller list for 112 weeks. It was made into a play, a Broadway and a Hollywood musical, and a fabulous movie starring Rosalind Russell. Since then, Mame has taken her rightful place in the pantheon of Great…
There's something about broken people trying to do good that has always resonated with me. In basic training, a drill sergeant with debilitating PTSD told us what combat would be like through a storm of choking sobs and a haze of tears. He needed us to know. Even if it broke him. Working as an investigator in Denver and Washington, I watched people with complicated pasts and uncertain futures fight tooth and nail (sometimes literally) to put human traffickers behind bars. Literature has always been a bridle for that wildness I saw in the world. A tool for taking the ghashing, stomping, unruliness of the human experience and making it rideable, relatable, survivable.
This one is a standout of the Longmire series. A bus full of serial killers mashes its potatoes into the side of a mountain during a whiteout and it’s up to Absaroka County Sheriff Walt Longmire to get rounded them up. There’s an epicness about this story that leaves you feeling like you’re riding a literary wave into the pilings and Craig Johnson paints the whole debacle with a Hillerman-esque mysticism and his own singular brand of stoic humor.
The seventh book in the New York Times bestselling Longmire series, featuring Sheriff Walt Longmire.
Raynaud Shade, an adopted Crow Indian and one of the country's most dangerous sociopaths, has just confessed to murdering a boy twenty years ago and burying him deep within the Bighorn Mountains. Absaroka County Sherriff Walt Longmire must escort Shade through a snowstorm to the site, but the mission turns personal when Walt learns whom the dead boy's family is.
Guided only by Indian mysticism and a battered paperback of Dante's Inferno, Walt braves the icy hell of the Cloud Peak Wilderness Area, cheating death…
The Duke's Christmas Redemption
by
Arietta Richmond,
A Duke who has rejected love, a Lady who dreams of a love match, an arranged marriage, a house full of secrets, a most unneighborly neighbor, a plot to destroy reputations, an unexpected love that redeems it all.
Lady Charlotte Wyndham, given in an arranged marriage to a man she…
There's something about broken people trying to do good that has always resonated with me. In basic training, a drill sergeant with debilitating PTSD told us what combat would be like through a storm of choking sobs and a haze of tears. He needed us to know. Even if it broke him. Working as an investigator in Denver and Washington, I watched people with complicated pasts and uncertain futures fight tooth and nail (sometimes literally) to put human traffickers behind bars. Literature has always been a bridle for that wildness I saw in the world. A tool for taking the ghashing, stomping, unruliness of the human experience and making it rideable, relatable, survivable.
The first of the Virgil Flowers novels, which is an offshoot of the (also spectacular) Lucas Davenport series. The story follows BCA investigator Virgil Flowers through the Minnesota backwoods as he works an arson/murder case. This book is different from a few of the others on this list in that it isn’t going to ruin you emotionally. It’s funny. Hell, its just fun. The hero is a well-meaning horndog who regularly forgets to bring his gun to work. The case is twisty and satisfying and the characters are so well fleshed out that when it’s over you just want to pick up your phone and invite them out for a burger. I eat this series like candy.
The first Virgil Flowers novel from #1 New York Times bestselling author John Sandford.
"Virgil Flowers, introduced in bestseller Sandford's Prey series, gets a chance to shine...The thrice-divorced, affable member of the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA), who reports to Prey series hero Lucas Davenport, operates pretty much on his own.."*
He's been doing the hard stuff for three years, but he's never seen anything like this. In the small rural town of Bluestem, an old man is bound in his basement, doused with gasoline and set on fire. Three weeks before, a doctor and his wife were murdered.…
There's something about broken people trying to do good that has always resonated with me. In basic training, a drill sergeant with debilitating PTSD told us what combat would be like through a storm of choking sobs and a haze of tears. He needed us to know. Even if it broke him. Working as an investigator in Denver and Washington, I watched people with complicated pasts and uncertain futures fight tooth and nail (sometimes literally) to put human traffickers behind bars. Literature has always been a bridle for that wildness I saw in the world. A tool for taking the ghashing, stomping, unruliness of the human experience and making it rideable, relatable, survivable.
A Native American teen goes on a terrible spirit quest. Every teenager should have to read this book. It captures a stilted, youthful, rage in a way that is bracing and it examines it unapologetically but without glorification. Then, when you are lost in the woods of all that, Alexie takes your hand and leads you back out of it. Builds a perspective out of a kaleidoscope of violence that is cathartic and memorable.
From the National Book Award–winning author of The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, the tale of a troubled boy’s trip through history.
Half Native American and half Irish, fifteen-year-old “Zits” has spent much of his short life alternately abused and ignored as an orphan and ward of the foster care system. Ever since his mother died, he’s felt alienated from everyone, but, thanks to the alcoholic father whom he’s never met, especially disconnected from other Indians.
After he runs away from his latest foster home, he makes a new friend. Handsome, charismatic, and eloquent, Justice soon persuades Zits…
I was born in 1957, the year the Space Race started when the USSR launched its first satellite and grew up with astronauts and cosmonauts on the TV. Yuri Gagarin and Gordon Cooper were familiar names to me as a child but I only really started to take notice as the Apollo programme ramped up. Science fiction influenced me at an very early age with books like Kemlo and Tom Swift and, having pestered my English teacher with my embryonic works decided at seventeen to write my own novel. Some years later and just short of sixty I finally wrote Sirkkusaga and now have seven published works out there - as well as two anthologies.
A three novel serial with tones of Victorian adventure and steampunk fantasy that sets three disparate characters against a mysterious cabal with influence in the government of an unnamed European country (possibly an analogue of Victorian England) – with the sinister glass of which the books are made able to record and play back real-life events (quite often sexual or violent) to be experienced (quite literally) by the reader.
Each chapter of the books are seen from the point of view of one of the main characters; Miss Celeste Temple – a stereotypical Victorian adventuress and heir to a fortune who finds herself drawn to both Cardinal Chang – neither a cardinal nor Oriental, he is a dichotomy, capable of extreme violence but with a decent side and a love of poetry; and to the Contessa – ostensibly evil, she is a beautiful, cunning and deadly woman who seems to…
Here begins an extraordinary alliance—and a brutal and tender, shocking, and electrifying adventure to end all adventures.
It starts with a simple note. Roger Bascombe regretfully wishes to inform Celeste Temple that their engagement is forthwith terminated. Determined to find out why, Miss Temple takes the first step in a journey that will propel her into a dizzyingly seductive, utterly shocking world beyond her imagining—and set her on a collision course with a killer and a spy—in a bodice-ripping, action-packed roller-coaster ride of suspense, betrayal, and richly fevered dreams.
This book follows the journey of a writer in search of wisdom as he narrates encounters with 12 distinguished American men over 80, including Paul Volcker, the former head of the Federal Reserve, and Denton Cooley, the world’s most famous heart surgeon.
In these and other intimate conversations, the book…
I have loved stories all my life, not only to read but to write. I have a particular passion for mysteries and will soon be releasing the sixth book in my Meg Sheppard Mystery Series. I read for enjoyment and prefer fast-paced stories with compelling characters. I’ve selected these books because they’re great reads and I hope you find them as entertaining as I did!
I loved the creativity and intensity of this mystery, which features Margaret Harness and Arthur Conan Doyle.
I was captivated by the setting of London, UK, in 1888–the time of the Whitechapel murders (Jack the Ripper). Harper brings fascinating characters to life and paints a vivid scene of abject poverty.
I was enthralled by this piece of historical fiction and loved Harper’s ingenuity in casting Arthur Conan Doyle as a detective, much like his creation, Sherlock Holmes.
Winner of Killer Nashville's 2019 Silver Falchion Award for Mystery and Edgar Finalist for Best First Novel, its audiobook won Audiofile Magazine's Earphone Award for Mystery and Suspense. Recently named as a "Recommended Read" by the Arthur Conan Doyle Estate.
This debut novel is the first in a series starring the real-life author and suffragette Margaret Harkness, continued in Queen's Gambit.
"Ardent feminism and cerebral detection face down the Ripper in the fog-shrouded streets of London: a feast for lovers of historical crime!"
--Laurie R. King, author of The Beekeeper's Apprentice and Island of the Mad
