Here are 92 books that Crane fans have personally recommended if you like
Crane.
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I’m a multi-genre writer who loves hearing the characters’ voices and getting their stories out there in the world. A lot of my characters are shaped by their gifts, whether they have supernatural ones or not. The things that happen to them shape who they are and how they react to future events. I exist on sarcasm, sass, and hot tea, so many of my characters do too.
It’s been a while since I read this book, but I remember thinking every place described felt real. It hits all the right notes of thriller with a fallible yet strong heroine who gets the job done, sometimes at great personal cost. Michael is as close to a shapeshifter as normal humans can be. She can become anybody. (Content warning – contains strong language)
Governments pay her. Criminals fear her. Nobody sees her coming.
Vanessa “Michael” Munroe deals in information—expensive information—working for corporations, heads of state, private clients, and anyone else who can pay for her unique brand of expertise. Born to missionary parents in lawless central Africa, Munroe took up with an infamous gunrunner and his mercenary crew when she was just fourteen. As his protégé, she earned the respect of the jungle's most dangerous men, cultivating her own reputation for years until something sent her running. After almost a decade building a new life and lucrative career from her home base in…
The Victorian mansion, Evenmere, is the mechanism that runs the universe.
The lamps must be lit, or the stars die. The clocks must be wound, or Time ceases. The Balance between Order and Chaos must be preserved, or Existence crumbles.
Appointed the Steward of Evenmere, Carter Anderson must learn the…
I’m a multi-genre writer who loves hearing the characters’ voices and getting their stories out there in the world. A lot of my characters are shaped by their gifts, whether they have supernatural ones or not. The things that happen to them shape who they are and how they react to future events. I exist on sarcasm, sass, and hot tea, so many of my characters do too.
I heard this one on audiobook first. The first book is amazing.
What drew me to this one was the character of Cal James. She’s got an unenviable gift of being able to see recent ghosts and interact with them. Her personal life’s a hot mess, but she has a heart of gold, and doesn’t mind punching ghosts.
In Red River, the Wild West is alive and well. When Calamity James reluctantly returns to her hometown for a funeral, she wants answers that no one will give her. Soon, the local sheriff blackmails Cal into helping him solve a missing persons case. Though no one knows it, Cal is uniquely qualified to find homicide victims—she can see the dead. Of course, the dead don’t always cooperate. As the mystery unfolds, Cal falls deeper into her troublesome past, navigates burdensome family matters, and digs up new mischief with old rivals, both dead and alive.
I’m a multi-genre writer who loves hearing the characters’ voices and getting their stories out there in the world. A lot of my characters are shaped by their gifts, whether they have supernatural ones or not. The things that happen to them shape who they are and how they react to future events. I exist on sarcasm, sass, and hot tea, so many of my characters do too.
This story featured a cop just trying to get her job done. She’s not a saint, but she busts her backside to solve the mystery while wading through office politics.
Kate’s not perfect. She makes mistakes, but she’s got an admirable sense of determination to see justice done.
I think there’s a killer fight scene at the end of the book.
What would you do if someone murdered your daughter?
Jasmine, a lovely, teenage kid with a bright future was brutally murdered and thrown away like a rag doll.
It was Lt. Kate Gazzara’s first case as lead detective. For eight years she played Dr. Watson to Sergeant Harry Starke’s Sherlock Holmes, and then he was gone. Jasmine changed her life.
Who killed the poor kid?
Why did she have to die?
What could she have done to deserve such a fate?
It was her parent’s worst nightmare. It’s every parent’s worst nightmare, and it begs the question: What would you…
Magical realism meets the magic of Christmas in this mix of Jewish, New Testament, and Santa stories–all reenacted in an urban psychiatric hospital!
On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argue…
I’m a multi-genre writer who loves hearing the characters’ voices and getting their stories out there in the world. A lot of my characters are shaped by their gifts, whether they have supernatural ones or not. The things that happen to them shape who they are and how they react to future events. I exist on sarcasm, sass, and hot tea, so many of my characters do too.
Logan loses it all. Then her best friend’s charged with murder. Time’s running out and a deranged killer wants her dead.
In the first novel of Davisson’s thrilling, best-selling series, Logan loses her husband, her illusions, the company they built together, her music, and now, probably her job. But when a young glassblower is brutally killed at the local arts festival and her good friend, Thomas Delgado, a Native American artist, is accused of the crime, Logan drops everything to come to his defense.
It doesn’t help that Thomas is refusing to defend himself. As Logan struggles to maintain her…
I was a weird kid. Often accused of ‘thinking too much’, I cut my literary teeth on Stephen King, Ray Bradbury, Phillip K Dick, and Shirley Jackson. Raised on their dark milk, I grew up wanting more than hollow scares and mindless eviscerations. Don’t just give me a scary story, give me a scary story that resonates, one that raises a lens to our world, our history, the rules we’re asked to live by. Unsettle me, make me think. Most of all, give me characters worth my precious time. These are the kind of stories I endeavor to write and the ones I most enjoy reading. I hope you enjoy this small selection as much as I have.
More beautifully written magic realism, with compelling characters and a fascinating plot. Fowley-Doyle uses the obliqueness of the supernatural and the compelling tropes of a mystery story to explore Ireland's troubled history with women and children. There's something of the road trip to this one, with a warm, supportive, found-family providing kindness and companionship to the main character in a story that otherwise might be too bleak to bear. Release yourself to the prose and to the experience, let the book carry you. It’ll be worth the journey.
On Deena's seventeenth birthday, the day she finally comes out to her family, her wild and mysterious sister Mandy is seen leaping from a cliff. The family is heartbroken, but not surprised. The women…
I am an Irish writer, perenially fascinated by the question: Who gets to tell the story? Who owns the narrative? I’ve discovered, over and over again, that women often don’t. We are airbrushed out of all kinds of stories: Political, social, and personal. That’s why the power of absence, of silence, has always been at the root of my inspiration as a writer. And Greek myth is a rich source of the silencing of women everywhere. These books that I have listed are but a small sample of the hundreds that have intrigued me over the years, or angered me, but above all, have made me think.
The author is one of Ireland’s most respected historians. In this superb analysis, he explores the public and private worlds of Irish sex.
Over the decades, Irish society, hand-in-hand with a dominant Catholic Church, succeeded in silencing generations of women.
We are still trying to come to terms with the iniquitous system of Magdalen Laundries and mother and baby homes, where pregnant young girls and women were hidden from sight so that the public would not be shamed by their sexual transgressions.
The text is accessible and illuminating. It explores hidden areas of modern Irish society and is a must-read, in my view, for anyone interested in this country.
Ferriter covers such subjects as abortion, pregnancy, celibacy, contraception, censorship, infanticide, homosexuality, prostitution, marriage, popular culture, social life and the various hidden Irelands associated with sexual abuse - all in the context of a conservative official morality backed by the Catholic Church and by legislation. The book energetically and originally engages with subjects omitted from the mainstream historical narrative. The breadth of this book and the richness of the source material uncovered make it definitive in its field and a most remarkable work of social history.
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…
Like anyone else who takes an interest in Ireland, I’ve been fascinated by the long and often very difficult history of the island’s experience of religion. Where I live, in county Antrim, religious imagery appears everywhere – in churches and schools, obviously, but also on signboards posted onto trees, and in the colourful rags that are still hung up to decorate holy wells. This book is the fruit of twenty years of thinking about Christian Ireland - its long and difficult history, and its sudden and difficult collapse.
Why, from the 1990s, did the Irish Catholic consensus so suddenly disappear? And what might be the effect of this sudden-onset secularisation? This brilliant account of the recent revolution in Irish religion describes the effects of the clerical scandals that brought down a government, demoralised a denomination, and drove social change on a massive and structural scale. Ganiel shows how the older religious monopolies that did so much to shape the institutions and culture of Ireland, north and south, have given way to a much more fluid religious market, in which individuals can believe without belonging just as much as they might formerly have belonged without believing.
Transforming Post-Catholic Ireland is the first major book to explore the dynamic religious landscape of contemporary Ireland, north and south, and to analyse the island's religious transition. It confirms that the Catholic Church's long-standing 'monopoly' has well and truly disintegrated, replaced by a mixed, post-Catholic religious 'market' featuring new and growing expressions of Protestantism, as well as other religions. It describes how people of faith are developing 'extra-institutional' expressions of religion, keeping their faith alive outside or in addition to the institutional Catholic Church.
Drawing on island-wide surveys of clergy and laypeople, as well as more than 100 interviews, Gladys…
I was a teenager when I discovered that my grandfather was an Irish rebel during the War of Independence. As a Canadian, I was astounded by the stories he told me when we were alone during my first visit to Dublin. At 16, I promised him I would write a book about him. Alas, he was long gone when I got started. Researching, I would think of him, whispering anecdotes to me he never told his children. I discovered the stories were much worse than he let on. I could not stop until I got the whole story down on paper. I think he is smiling.
I love the voice of authenticity that emanates from this story. The location is what was once considered one of the most remote, poor parts of Ireland, West Cork.
The author is a mere teenager at the time of the Rising. I love his deep regard for the men and women of his community, his understanding of the simple pleasures of their hard lives, his ability to communicate their stoic determination to fight the enemy in the face of possible disaster, particular cruelty, and severe punishment if they are caught.
I love how, without even trying, the author presents an explanation of how the rebel mindset permeated whole swathes of the country.
Where Mountainy Men have Sown gives a first-hand account of the fight for freedom in West Cork from 1916-21. It chronicles the social and military aspects of the War of Independence and describes the IRA's activities in the area, from Macroom to as far west as Ballingeary and Coolea, and covering Inchigeelagh to Ballyvourney and the Derrynasaggart Mountains. Micheal O Suilleabhain joined the armed struggle for freedom in his local area of Kilnamartyra at the age of thirteen and describes attacks on armed police patrols, barracks and a large-scale engagement against the elite of Britain's specially recruited fighting forces in…
As a kid growing up in the northeast of England I became fascinated by the insects, flowers, birds, geology, and seashore life around me. That fascination with natural history never left me and I had the fortune to turn my childhood interests into a professional career as a research scientist, teacher, and writer. My work on pollinators and plants has taken me around the world, from the grasslands of Oxfordshire to the deserts of Namibia and the mountains of Nepal, from the rainforests of Brazil and Australia to the thorny shrublands of Tenerife. The result has been more than 135 articles plus a couple of books. I must get back to writing the next one…
This ground-breaking book was the first illustrated field guide to cover all of the more than 270 species of bees that occur in Great Britain and Ireland. It provides a detailed account of the natural history of these fascinating insects, plus photographs and taxonomic keys to help you to determine what they are. Be warned, however, as the author acknowledges, many bees are challenging to identify! Nonetheless, Falk and Lewington’s book is invaluable for anyone interested in the natural history of bees.
This is a brand new field guide to Britain's bees that for the first time makes this fascinating and important group of insects accessible to the general naturalist. The guide covers over 270 species, and is fully illustrated with stunning photographs and Richard Lewington's beautiful colour artwork.
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…
Give me a castle ruin or guide me through ancient Roman mosaics and you make my day. Accordingly, my preferred reading is historical fiction. I read (and review) lots of it, like 100 books/year. I am also ridiculously romantic. I want there to be some heart with the blood and war, I want characters I can root for despite the horrifying odds facing them. I want protagonists that step out of the past to drag me back with them. When I read, these are the books I choose. When I write, these are the books I aspire to create—Romantic Historical Fiction, if you will.
Rebel Knot is set in 17th-century Ireland, torn apart by religious conflict between Catholics and Protestants. This is a war-ravaged Ireland, a land where hope is in short supply and peace is more of a dream than a possibility. And yet, in the midst of all that violence fragile love can flourish—even between people who belong on opposite sides of the religious fence. Ms. Bazos does a fantastic job of transporting the reader back in time, and her two main characters, Niall and Ainé, are wonderfully complex and relatable. The harshness of the times is vividly depicted—as is the growing attraction between the innocent and traumatised Ainé and her new protector, Niall.
Ireland 1652: In the desperate, final days of the English invasion . . .
A fey young woman, Áine Callaghan, is the sole survivor of an attack by English marauders. When Irish soldier Niall O'Coneill discovers his own kin slaughtered in the same massacre, he vows to hunt down the men responsible. He takes Áine under his protection and together they reach the safety of an encampment held by the Irish forces in Tipperary.
Hardly a safe haven, the camp is rife with danger and intrigue. Áine is a stranger with the old stories stirring on her tongue and rumours…
