58 Books Like Crow's Row

I love a book that you can dive into, and it takes you into a whole other world. A mysterious world that takes the good and the bad and turns it upside down, inside out, and twists everything until nothing is at seems or you believe it should be. I love new and exciting characters that haven’t been touched on yet or even just a twist of ideas that gets your mind racing with new possibilities. You can’t wait for the next page to see where this new world will take you.  

I love that Luisa sells her beauty to the highest bidder at the start of the book. It’s very rare to see a non-innocent heroine, and so this is tops for me. The icing on the cake, and I’m trying not to send spoilers here, is that Luisa doesn’t really understand that Salvador is and will continue to act like a cartel man.

Luisa realizes very quickly that the deal is a lousy one and that she’s sold herself to a predator. And this is what I love about the book: Luisa doesn’t hang about and wail; she acts, runs into even more trouble, and then learns to play the people she’s in with at their own game. It’s a fun book but very dark.  

When it first came out, mob erotica was hugely popular. What set this one apart was that the gorgeous steamy bits were not overwhelming; there’s a story to this. You do have to set aside your principles, though, because Naz is a mobster in his mid-30s, and Karrisa is 18. That’s one of the things I love about dark romance. Loving a monster and a huge age gap is absolutely unconscionable in real life, but it's fabulous for a fictional tale.

What I loved about the book most is that mobster Naz loves Karrisa against his principles. That’s what makes the romance!

I first read this because the author received a raft of nasty reviews. That happens to many dark authors; it’s amazing how many people think they have the right to censor what other adults read, so I thought I’d have a go-and-see for myself.

What I found was a nicely tense mafia romance in which the heroine kicks off with a murder. I loved the set-up because I’m fascinated by morally grey people, and these two are definitely that! As for the style, it’s emotional, what I would call a Mills and Boon-style flow of feeling. I thoroughly enjoyed it and found it a fab read. 

I’ve covered rock, classical, a capella, and new wave in my list, so I thought I’d round it out with sugar-sweet pop. Kill the Boy Band is a darkly hilarious journey into fangirl obsession filled with quirky characters and sitcom situations that are as fun to read as they are improbable. The boy band in question is The Ruperts, a quartet of British heart-throbs with an eerie resemblance to One Direction. When four superfans score a room in the hotel where The Ruperts are staying, they hatch a plan that goes awry fast, leaving the band with one fewer Ruperts and the girls with a…very incriminating situation.

I loved this book for so many reasons, but my favorite was the deep dive into superfan culture. A lot of the book is spent questioning the nature of this culture, but in a way that's genuinely soul-searching and not condescending—the narrator… show more.

Invisible City is the first book in Julia Dahl’s Rebekah Roberts series. Julia Dahl cleverly weaves together Jewish culture and a murder mystery, using a rookie journalist as her main character.

I think journalists make great detectives in crime fiction, with their investigative skills, enthusiasm, communication skills, persistence, and perseverance. They bridge the gap between amateur sleuths and the police (not that different from a private investigator).

Invisible City portrays journalists in a positive light and also provides an insight into an unknown world, with a non-judgmental portrayal of the ultra-religious Hassidic Jewish community in Brooklyn. I enjoyed following the main character’s personal journey too.

This was one of the first books I read that showed me how powerful true crime can be as a vehicle for historical narrative. Jewett’s murder in 1830s New York was all but forgotten until Cline recovers that case and the social world of sex workers in that era.

It’s the writer’s eye for narrative details and her contemporary sleuthing into the complexities of Jewett’s life that keeps me coming back to this book again and again. Cline continually reveals her research process, and by doing so, I felt like I was part of the story as she reconstructs the crime and New York in the 1830s. 

This witty and suspenseful tour-de-force is set in a Paris most tourists never see: the Nineteenth Arrondissement, a sprawling, multicultural district where working-class grit coexists uneasily with encroaching gentrification.

The author, who doubles as a well-known documentary filmmaker, is also a friend of mine from the French noir world.

Arab Jazz, first published in 2012, sardonically explores the religious fanaticism of Jews, Muslims and evangelical Christians while weaving a thrilling intrigue that earned it France's top prize for crime fiction.

Similar to my second choice, this American study explores the impact of a sensational unsolved death on early Victorian New York and America in general. In 1841 Marie Rogers, an attractive young woman who worked in a tobacco shop, was found dead in the Hudson River, suspected to be a victim of murder. The case was well covered in the press and exposed weaknesses in the city’s system of policing.  The author details how Edgar Allen Poe furthered early detective fiction in his story The Mystery Marie Roger, which although set in Paris borrowed heavily from the New York events. An example of how the public can make a celebrity out of a murder victim who is not from the elite.     

Richard Price, in my opinion, is one of today’s best writers in any genre. The Whites, a book about five detectives finally getting the criminal that always eluded them, was just the most recent book of his I’ve read. His classics—Clockers, Freedomland, The Night of, Sea of Love—were all adapted for the big screen. His prose is cliché free, no one captures New York City and its denizens the way Price does, and the dialogue in his books is pitch perfect and realistic.