95 Books Like Dark Game

Dead Man's Grave introduces DS Max Craigie and DC Janie Calder, along with the wonderfully irascible DI Ross Fraser.

This book combines not only an extremely good detective yarn with excellent procedure, in a beautiful location, it also does a very good job of setting up the premise for the rest of the series.

The author is a former Metropolitan Police detective, and although the location is Scotland, it is full of authentic police procedure. This book (and the series as a whole) has a well-balanced mixture of crime, police procedure, and well-developed characters with a generous splash of humour.

Sergeant Washington Poe and analyst Tilly Bradshaw are top of many folks’ favourites list.

Like Rachel Lynch’s Kelly Porter series, the setting is largely Cumbria. However, Poe and Tilly work for the National Crime Agency, specialising in highly sensitive and unusual cases (eg serial killers), giving a different spin on the police procedural.

Each book has a compelling and devious central mystery, but the real joy is the pairing of Poe and Tilly. Poe is a clever but taciturn grump, who favours the simple life, living largely off-grid in a stone shepherd’s hut. Tilly is a naïve computer genius, with few social filters.

Put them together and initially sparks fly, before they become close friends. With laugh-out-loud dialogue, these are an absolute pleasure to read.

This series has a character seen too rarely in this genre.

DI Isobel Blood is a middle-aged woman with a teenage daughter. We see her trying to juggle her often emotionally draining work with parenting duties. This is a really good introduction to DI Blood and a strong cast of supporting characters.

Set in Derbyshire, it has a really strong sense of place. The story is tightly plotted, with deeply satisfying reveals and reversals, and the author balances the investigation with Blood’s personal challenges.

The mystery itself is imaginative and original and difficult issues are dealt with sensitively and compassionately.

This is an original and timely twist on the classic mismatched-partners story.

An extremely well-crafted police procedural, the central mystery is a missing person investigation. As the first in a series, it expertly sets up a compelling cast of supporting characters, with a well-written, likable, and relatable central protagonist.

The unique selling point is the pairing of DCS Kat Frank with an advanced AI detective that appears in holographic form. The book is set just a few years from now and is in principal entirely possible.

AIDE Lock is very much a work in progress and it’s no spoiler to say that despite Frank’s misgivings, she learns as much from the artificial officer as it learns from her. There are more books planned and I look forward to reading them.

I love a “Man on the Run” book. Books like The 39 Steps, Odd Man Out, and The Running Man are stories I truly love. There's something exciting about a chase book because the hero has to be resourceful and resilient, and that’s what we have here.

Harry has to prove his innocence. The other aspect of a chase story is all the odd characters a hero on the run has to turn to for help when there is no one else to turn to, even if they can't be trusted, but Harry has to put his faith in them for the few moments he needs them. Great stuff.

I am recommending this book because I fell in love with it as a child.

First, those beautiful watercolor illustrations of pure whimsy and secondly, I secretly loved the mischievous squirrel Nutkin and his riddles. As an adult, I love cuddling with my family's nutkins and sharing a laugh and a lesson on the sly.

There is just something special about sharing with your grandchildren a book you loved as a child!

Describing a series of journeys on horseback and by foot through south-east England and the Midlands during the 1820s, Rural Rides is one of the great travelogues. Cobbett was a man of many parts – journalist, soldier, farmer, politician, and social reformer. In Rural Rides he blends lyrical description with fist-shaking fury about the injustices he encountered. He writes so well that you feel that you are travelling through the countryside with him.

Although the main character in this warm and funny book is a boy, I include it in my list of favorite books about girls who love sports because the best athlete in this story of a middle-school cross country team is a girl. She’s the team member all the other kids depend on. The team member who pushes Joseph Friedman – a boy with attention challenges, innumerable phobias, and no athletic “gifts” – to keep trying. She just won’t let Joseph give up. I love the relationships between the teammates in this book. And I love the way Asher shows that in running – as in life – winning doesn’t always mean coming in first. It means trying to do just a little bit better each time you step onto the track.

The shout line on the jacket is “This will overturn everything you thought you knew about…The First World War”, and it certainly delivers. No other conflict has been so misrepresented, and for most people, their idea of it comes straight from Blackadder Goes Forth. But men did not spend months at a time in the trenches; a whole generation did not die; the generals were not cowardly, incompetent fools.

When I first began to write about WW1 for my Morland Dynasty series, I knew as little as anyone, and what I thought I knew was all wrong! By the time I was researching for War At Home, I knew a lot more, but Corrigan opens my eyes to many more subjects. Informative, well-researched, but above all wonderfully readable, this book should be required reading for anyone who is interested in what really happened, not just the made-for-tv version.

Written by an author from the English West Country city of Bristol, this story accurately captures the inequality of life in the 1970s. Fifteen-year-old Carol lives in a council estate on the edge of town. She goes to school with a farmer’s son who will inherit rolling acres. One day, she meets handsome Frankie, who is staying with his aunt in a manor house nearby.

Every reader will know louche Frankie is bad news. Carol, of course, falls for him and finds herself pregnant. So far, so predictable. What is far less predictable is the way Carol herself is sucked into crime, secrets, and lies. Forty years later, how far will she go to evade exposure? Emotional, clever, and exquisitely written, this book is hard to put down.