Here are 63 books that Bruno, Chief of Police fans have personally recommended if you like
Bruno, Chief of Police.
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I went to Paris the first time when I was nineteen. I was sitting in a cheap restaurant when a man entered carrying a burlap sack filled with escargots, and put some on my plate (all very unsanitary) for me to taste. Delicious! I was in France in the 1970s when Robert Parker was discovering French wine. (We didn’t meet then, but did after my series was published many years later.) Subsequent stays in Paris and other areas of France (Champagne, Bordeaux, Burgundy) afforded me a food and wine sensibility that over decades has permeated my lifestyle, my friendships—and my writing.
The description above segues nicely into The New Paris by Lindsey Traumata, published in 2017. Traumata now has a second book published, and hosts a podcast, and is popular on social media. I have spent at least a month (and sometimes three) in Paris annually over the past six years and think of Traumata’s first book as a good friend. She writes wonderful profiles of people, and she keeps readers updated about bistros, winemakers, new cuisine. Her writing is elegant, and I read her descriptions as avidly as I do a novel, constantly making notes. So different from the usual guidebooks.
The city long-adored for its medieval beauty, old-timey brasseries, and corner cafes has even more to offer today. In the last few years, a flood of new ideas and creative locals has infused a once-static, traditional city with a new open-minded sensibility and energy. Journalist Lindsey Tramuta offers detailed insight into the rapidly evolving worlds of food, wine, pastry, coffee, beer, fashion, and design in the delightful city of Paris. Tramuta puts the spotlight on the new trends and people that are making France's capital a more whimsical, creative, vibrant, and curious place to explore than its classical reputation might…
Cleo Cooper is living the dream with ocean-dipping weekends, a good job, good friends, fair boyfriend, and a good dog. But, paradise is shaken when the body of a young woman is dragged onto a university research vessel during a class outing in Hilo Bay.
I went to Paris the first time when I was nineteen. I was sitting in a cheap restaurant when a man entered carrying a burlap sack filled with escargots, and put some on my plate (all very unsanitary) for me to taste. Delicious! I was in France in the 1970s when Robert Parker was discovering French wine. (We didn’t meet then, but did after my series was published many years later.) Subsequent stays in Paris and other areas of France (Champagne, Bordeaux, Burgundy) afforded me a food and wine sensibility that over decades has permeated my lifestyle, my friendships—and my writing.
This is a novel that I read in one day, warming to the grieving protagonists who have found each other, and particularly struck by their first meal together—fish poached in cream and white wine, new potatoes roasted in garlic and rosemary, pears and cheese, and with a beautiful French wine to accompany it. In my mind romance can’t exist without meals prepared from scratch and wine to go with it. The other secret ingredient in the novel is books, and the combination of food and wine, a romance, and a love of books gives this book a permanent place in my library. In fact, I am rereading it.
The international bestseller, translated from the German by Simon Pare.
On a beautifully restored barge on the Seine, Jean Perdu runs a bookshop; or rather a 'literary apothecary', for this bookseller possesses a rare gift for sensing which books will soothe the troubled souls of his customers.
The only person he is unable to cure, it seems, is himself. He has nursed a broken heart ever since the night, twenty-one years ago, when the love of his life fled Paris, leaving behind a handwritten letter that he has never dared read. His memories and his love have been gathering dust…
This list reflects my focus as a writer about and researcher of cultures very different from my own. I grew up in the country of New Zealand and have been based in Australia for a long time–but I have worked and lived in places like India, Barbados, Malaysia, Canada, Jordan, Syria, Cambodia, and Laos. All of those experiences contribute to my evolution as a writer through academic works, biography, creative nonfiction, memoir, and, more lately, crime fiction and screenwriting. I would not be the writer I am without this curiosity for the “Other,” and it continues to drive me.
When I first visited Venice, I had the strange sense that I already “knew” the city because I had read this first and all the subsequent Leon novels set in the city and featuring Commissario Guido Brunetti. From those books, I recognized landmarks and hidden alleys, cafes and restaurants, how to take the Vaparetto, and where the main police stations and markets were.
I wanted to write like that, make the city a main character–and I love other series that do the same, like Andrea Camilleri’s Montalbano series set in Sicily. These books “take you there.”
'A splendid series . . . with a backdrop of the city so vivid you can almost smell it.' The Sunday Telegraph
Winner of the Suntory Mystery Fiction Grand Prize __________________________________
The twisted maze of Venice's canals has always been shrouded in mystery. Even the celebrated opera house, La Fenice, has seen its share of death ... but none so horrific and violent as that of world-famous conductor, Maestro Helmut Wellauer, who was poisoned during a performance of La Traviata. Even Commissario of Police, Guido Brunetti, used to the labyrinthine corruptions of the city, is shocked at the number of…
Grape Expectations: A Family's Vineyard Adventure in France
by
Caro Feely,
What does it take to follow your dreams?
‘Delicious.’ A picture of a vineyard drenched in sunlight formed in Caro's mind as the wine swirled in her mouth. Sean drew her rudely back to their small suburban home.
‘How can they be in liquidation if they make wine this good?’…
I’ve been a traveler and a dreamer ever since I was a little girl. I used to write to the tourism bureaus of different countries and tape pictures of faraway places onto the walls of my bedroom. It’s no surprise I ended up living in Europe, my home base for excursions all over the world. My historical fiction always features places that mean a lot to me, whether it’s Germany (where I live now), or Sicily – where my mother’s family came from. Digging into my Sicilian heritage and the culture and life of the island for my third novel was like discovering a new home.
I have very romantic notions of Sicily, and I look to the Inspector Montalbano series of detective novels to show me the grit and corruption that Sicily is actually known for.
This is the first novel in the series and introduces Montalbano as an honest cop in a dishonest world, a Sicilian town where everyone hustles for work and murders are common. Even if everybody is corrupt in their own ways, they’re still very human, and Montalbano’s tolerance of human failings makes him one of the great detectives to read.
The Shape of Water is the first in Andrea Camilleri's wry, brilliantly compelling Sicilian crime series, featuring Inspector Montalbano. This edition with a stunning redesigned cover.
The goats of Vigata once grazed on the trash-strewn site still known as the Pasture. Now local enterprise of a different sort flourishes: drug dealers and prostitutes of every flavour. But their discreet trade is upset when two employees of the Splendour Refuse Collection Company discover the body of engineer Silvio Luparello, one of the local movers and shakers, apparently deceased in flagrante at the Pasture. The coroner's verdict is death from natural causes…
Bad things happen to good people every day, and it seems unfair. I’ve lost friends to cancer, heart disease, and accidents, and I always wonder why it had to be someone who was decent and good and kind. At the same time, other people get away with all sorts of crimes, including murder. I can’t change the way the world works. So, in my own books and the books I like to read, the good guys might have some tough times, but in the end, they win. And the bad guys get what they deserve.
I laugh out loud at the awkward social situations Lady Georgina, 34th in succession to the throne of England, gets into.
Although she has been trained in all the proper graces, she is impoverished, and I find her creative, muddled attempts to figure out who murdered the body in her bathtub while meeting royal expectations endearing and amusing. I also enjoy glimpses into the mores of the royal family in 1930.
The New York Times bestselling author of the Molly Murphy and Constable Evan Evans mysteries turns her attentions to "a feisty new heroine to delight a legion of Anglophile readers."*
London, 1932. Lady Victoria Georgiana Charlotte Eugenie, 34th in line for the English throne, is flat broke. She's bolted Scotland, her greedy brother, and her fish-faced betrothed. London is a place where she'll experience freedom, learn life lessons aplenty, do a bit of spying for HRH-oh, and find a dead Frenchman in her tub. Now her new job is to clear her long family name...
Bad things happen to good people every day, and it seems unfair. I’ve lost friends to cancer, heart disease, and accidents, and I always wonder why it had to be someone who was decent and good and kind. At the same time, other people get away with all sorts of crimes, including murder. I can’t change the way the world works. So, in my own books and the books I like to read, the good guys might have some tough times, but in the end, they win. And the bad guys get what they deserve.
I love learning how people lived in other times via historical fiction, and Cadfael, a Benedictine monk who practiced healing arts in England in the 1100s, is one of my favorite characters.
I like hearing his opinions about the civil war that raged at that time and the church’s role in it. I like the fact that he’s a bit of a maverick who pushes beyond the bounds of his role as a monk to solve mysteries.
In the gentle Shrewsbury spring of 1140 the midnight matins at the Benedictine abbey suddenly reverberates with an unholy sound - a hunt in full cry. Pursued by a drunken mob, the quarry is running for its life. When the frantic creature bursts into the nave to claim sanctuary, Brother Cadfael finds himself fighting off armed townsmen to save a terrified young man. Accused of robbery and murder is Liliwin, a wandering minstrel who performed at the wedding of the local goldsmith's son. But his supposed victim, the miserly craftsman, is still alive, although a strongbox lies empty. Brother Cadfael…
She sells books, eats well, and has a very large brain. Criminals fear her.
Meet Beatrice Valentine, a larger-than-life bookshop owner with a penchant for three things in abundance—delicious Italian food, vino, and murder. For decades, she has sold used and rare books from her stylish-but-cluttered domain on New York…
Alongside my early career as a children’s writer, I was a consultant to police forces about anti-corruption measures. It gave me a great look inside investigations…but my NDAs meant I couldn’t use any of that information in a mystery story. So, an amateur sleuth it had to be—but one who didn’t do stupid things instead of going to the police! Before that, I worked in children’s television, and I understand the power of the media to get people to talk. I brought those two sides of my work life together to create Poppy, my main character, and put her in Sydney, Australia, the city of my heart.
So, I might be favorably inclined towards archaeologists (I married one, just like Elly Griffith did). When I read the first of the Ruth Galloway series (local archaeologist in Britain), what I liked most was the authenticity of the archaeological sequences.
I’ve also worked with police as a consultant, and the police procedural parts of this series are solid. A great combination! I’m about to start the Ali Dawson series of Griffiths, and I have high hopes for that too—but read these first.
Discover the Dr Ruth Galloway Mysteries, one of the most popular crime series in Britain, with this beautiful special edition.
START THE JOURNEY HERE AND YOU WILL BE HOOKED
Dr Ruth Galloway is called in when a child's bones are discovered near the site of a prehistoric henge on the north Norfolk salt marshes. Are they the remains of a local girl who disappeared ten years earlier - or are the bones much older?
DCI Harry Nelson refuses to give up the hunt for the missing girl. Since she vanished, someone has been sending him bizarre anonymous notes about ritual…
I went to Paris the first time when I was nineteen. I was sitting in a cheap restaurant when a man entered carrying a burlap sack filled with escargots, and put some on my plate (all very unsanitary) for me to taste. Delicious! I was in France in the 1970s when Robert Parker was discovering French wine. (We didn’t meet then, but did after my series was published many years later.) Subsequent stays in Paris and other areas of France (Champagne, Bordeaux, Burgundy) afforded me a food and wine sensibility that over decades has permeated my lifestyle, my friendships—and my writing.
Adam Gopnik’s book, The Table Comes First: Family, France and the Meaning of Food has it all: essays on the history of restaurants, followed by second on taste, then come the recipes (a stellar one on leg of lamb prepared with bacon and anchovies, saffron and cinnamon), and finally, in Chapter Ten, an essay on wine that is a far cry from the plethora of books on “how to taste.” It calls wine what it is, alcohol, and talks about why it makes us happy. I downloaded this book onto my Kindle a long time ago, and writing about it reminds me to purchase a hard copy of the book in order to place It on my shelf next to Gopnik’s book, Paris to the Moon, written way back in 1995, which is about the year he and his wife and infant son spent in Paris, with great stories…
Never before have we cared so much about food. It preoccupies our popular culture, our fantasies, and even our moralizing—“You still eat meat?” With our top chefs as deities and finest restaurants as places of pilgrimage, we have made food the stuff of secular seeking and transcendence, finding heaven in a mouthful. But have we come any closer to discovering the true meaning of food in our lives?
With inimitable charm and learning, Adam Gopnik takes us on a beguiling journey in search of that meaning as he charts America’s recent and rapid evolution from commendably aware eaters to manic,…
I went to Paris the first time when I was nineteen. I was sitting in a cheap restaurant when a man entered carrying a burlap sack filled with escargots, and put some on my plate (all very unsanitary) for me to taste. Delicious! I was in France in the 1970s when Robert Parker was discovering French wine. (We didn’t meet then, but did after my series was published many years later.) Subsequent stays in Paris and other areas of France (Champagne, Bordeaux, Burgundy) afforded me a food and wine sensibility that over decades has permeated my lifestyle, my friendships—and my writing.
This was a gift from a friend, and I absolutely love it. From the jacket copy: “It is the riveting portrait of a gay man struggling to overcome the reverberating shame and guilt of a long-buried childhood secret.” On the very first page he includes his ode to a sandwich, written when he was a child. It starts: "The BLT is the most perfect sandwich. The bacon brings it salt and the rich taste of pork. The tomato is sweet and juicy…” Labrano eventually became a famous food critic, and his memoir is peppered with fabulous descriptions of food and wine. His description of a dinner in Val-les-Bains in the Ardèche region of France is downright inspiring. A great read!
In this debut memoir, a James Beard Award-winning writer, whose childhood idea of fine dining was Howard Johnson's, tells how he became one of Paris's most influential food critics
Until Alec Lobrano landed a job in the glamorous Paris office of Women's Wear Daily, his main experience of French cuisine was the occasional supermarket eclair. An interview with the owner of a renowned cheese shop for his first article nearly proves a disaster because he speaks no French. As he goes on to cover celebrities and couturiers and improves his mastery of the language, he gradually learns what it means…
Bad things happen to good people every day, and it seems unfair. I’ve lost friends to cancer, heart disease, and accidents, and I always wonder why it had to be someone who was decent and good and kind. At the same time, other people get away with all sorts of crimes, including murder. I can’t change the way the world works. So, in my own books and the books I like to read, the good guys might have some tough times, but in the end, they win. And the bad guys get what they deserve.
I love quirky characters like Nick Fox, a witty and sexy-as-sin thief and con artist. I lap up the sparks that fly when Kate O’Hare, an attractive, dedicated FBI agent, gets paired up with Fox, the criminal she’s determined to catch.
The stage is set for a dash of romance, which is, of course, taboo, and I’m always wondering how long Kate will hold out. I’ve read this book twice and will probably read it again, just for the fun.
