83 Books Like Dead Man's Trail

I love tasty writing as much as I do a juicy story. This book delivers on both counts.

It’s a murder mystery that reads like the best of literary fiction. I’ve been a fan of Kortya since devouring his earlier novel Those Who Wish Me Dead, which begins with a young boy witnessing a murder. This novel starts with a murder after the fact, on a rudderless boat adrift at sea: perpetrator unknown.

Its strong characters seem plucked from real life. Its twists and turns kept me guessing. Its humdinger of a climax kept me up past my bedtime. To work your way through the author’s oeuvre is to take a master class in writing, while being thoroughly entertained. More, please.

The best of historical fiction is like time travel: transporting. 

I enjoy reading The Phoenix Crown as it swept me away to the San Francisco of the early 1900’s. I was drawn into the story of three women—an opera singer, a Chinese laundress, and an elderly botanist—whose paths cross, and who unite in a quest that has them battling evil forces while the city burns in the wake of the epic earthquake of 1906.

I’m a sucker for female-centric stories that illustrate the saying “Women are like tea bags. You don’t know their strength until they’re in hot water.” The female characters of this highly entertaining tale show us what they’ve got and then some. “Beam me up, Scottie!”   

It has all my favorite elements of fiction: an intriguing location (Catalina Island), a propulsive narrative, and characters you’d want to have coffee with, or throw from a bridge, as the case may be.

The Catalina Island of Nightshade is the Island of Misfit Toys for the disgraced cops who secure it. Its protagonist, Sheriff’s Detective Stilwell, battles bad guys, both criminal and law enforcement, while battling his own demons. And he makes patrolling his beat in a golf cart, the sole motorized transport permitted on Catalina, seem badass.

If they make a movie of this novel, I’d love to see what a “car chase” using golf carts looks like. Nail-biting? Probably not, although the book has no shortage of chills. It begins with two crimes which may or may not be related: a murder and the beheading of a buffalo.

I can’t wait to see what Stillwell gets up… show more.

I come from a dysfunctional family. Perhaps that’s why I’m drawn, like a rubbernecker to the scene of an accident, to novels about dysfunctional families.

To quote Tolstoy: “Happy families are all alike. Unhappy families are different, each in their own way.” To call the family that inhabits the house in We All Live Here unhappy is putting it mildly. They’re more like survivors of a shipwreck adrift at sea in a lifeboat, hoping to be rescued before they die or kill each other.

This novel is funny, wickedly so at times, with a lot of heart. And like the patriarch of its fictional family, a failed actor with substance abuse issues and a habit of stretching the truth when it suits him, never dull.  

In mostly rhyming couplets, Sayre’s book celebrates the lowly turkey vulture, an unsung and underappreciated creature that plays a very vital role in maintaining a healthy ecosystem—scavengers are nature’s clean-up crew! View vultures as they circle, soar, and glide on thermals, up, UP! Watch them sniff, search, seek and eat things that reek, the more rotten the better. Vultures feast, then clean and preen. At night, they roost and rest in trees like families. Jenkins’ cut paper collages complete this homage to the venerable turkey vulture. Explore more turkey vulture facts in the concluding pages.

Couturier writes of a region I grew up in, namely the cities and suburbs of the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic States.

I loved how she explored not just the often-ignored natural history of small forests, turkey vultures, crows, coyotes, and snakes (of course) but also the spirit and compassion that flies within tales of citizen science and wildlife restoration. Stories of home and family life nestle alongside a wild nature, often unseen, but always here.

This book is a practitioner’s guide to applied creativity in business, from yet another Stanford University professor. What is it about Stanford? I learned Design Thinking at Stanford, and I’ve had the honor of spending time with Tina Seelig. In many respects, this book is volume two of Creativity in Business a few decades apart. She introduces a conceptual model she calls the Innovation Engine, which explains how creativity is produced on the inside…our “in-genius,”…but is then influenced by the outside world. For anyone looking to create something from scratch, this book is for you.

For a basic understanding of how the plant world functions and fits into the web of life, this book will give the reader a good foundation for entering into the vast domain of botany. The study of plants should be the first undertaking of the survival student. Why? Because plants provide most of your resource materials, and – unlike animals – they are accessible all the time. Meaning, they don’t run away.

The McPhersons cover a lot of ground: tool making, hide tanning, fire making, cooking, traps, containers, shelters, all of it geared mostly toward the Great Plains since they live in Kansas. I found the accompanying photographs to be a big plus, making the skills easier to replicate for the reader. The voice of the authors is personable and believable.

The most critical stage of using plants is identification. An error in naming a plant could result in tragedy. Nature manufactures many chemicals harmful to humans. A plant practitioner must never guess. An ID must be positive. For that purpose, any woodsman/woman needs a reliable field guide with a user key that allows the reader to determine the name of a plant before any part of it is harvested. Mr. Newcomb has developed a user-friendly key for the layperson. It is much more efficient than most field guides without overwhelming the reader with intricate botanical vocabulary.