Books like Death by Sample Size — picked by fans

Louise Penny has hooked me again with another great installment in the Inspector Gamache series. I was so excited when I opened the book and found I would be returning to Three Pines for a new murder and an old story line Penny has been dangling in front of me since book one.

Both are resolved in this book (I think, but you never know) and the end is more than satisfying. There's still a lot of unfinished business in that little town and this incredible cast of characters just keeps me coming back for more. Moreover, (I remind my husband every time I start a new book in the series), I would run away with Armand Gamache if given even the slightest chance. 

I found this to be a wonderful read. It's fun, entertaining, and filled with just enough twists and misdirection to keep me turning pages.

Kendall built such great characters and left just enough clues that I thought maybe the whole town had done it right up until the end. She also gave me a glimpse behind the scenes into the world of handbag design (not a subject I thought I cared about until I read this book).

A great book for a rainy afternoon. I hear she has another In Purse-Suit Mystery in the works. And who doesn't like a mystery series?

This story has so many of my favorite things: cops, lawyers, murder, courtroom drama, and a sinister backstory that kept me unsettled and guessing throughout. Keera Duggan (former chess prodigy and district attorney) finds herself at her family’s firm defending the bad guys she used to convict. She views the world as one big chess match, which gives her the ability to see the whole board when she takes on her first murder case.

It’s a thinker, so no wading through pages of high-speed car chases and flying bullets—well, a couple of bullets. I enjoyed the way Dugoni moved his characters around, and kept me wondering how it would end.

And the end? It doesn't disappoint. I can’t wait for the next book.

To say Revenge in 3 Parts is a page-turner doesn’t do it justice. And justice is the name of this game for Angeline Porter, a woman who makes no excuses for any and all actions needed to find out who killed her sister.

Book one of the trilogy kept me on edge, wondering what Ang was going to do at any given moment. About halfway through, I stopped trying to predict what was on the next page and just enjoyed it with full abandon.

Three cheers for the Femme Noir!

Connor introduces us to the McKinney brothers with this emotional single mom romance. This book tugs are your heartstrings, making you fall in love not only with Matt and Abby, but with Abby’s kids and the entire McKinney clan. Once you’re done with the McKinneys, you’re going to want to dive right into the Walkers—whose sister is featured in book two of the McKinney Brothers series!

What I love about this book is what it reveals about a writer’s process.

Ellroy’s theme, in books like The Black Dahlia and LA Confidential, is the dark, violent, seamy underside of post war LA, particularly as it relates to prostitution and the exploitation and abuse of women. Before I read his memoir, I had no idea about the event in his past that foreshadows his subject matter, the grisly, unsolved murder of his mother, and his efforts to solve that crime, or at least understand it.

Perhaps it is too obvious to draw a direct line from his experience to his writing, but frankly, his memoir changed my perspective on his other books. 

As a high school senior planning a career in law enforcement, I was mesmerized by Joseph Wambaugh’s account of the kidnapping of two Los Angeles police officers in 1963, and the murder of one of them.  Wambaugh unsympathetically details the stories of the two men convicted in the case, while at the same time humanizing the officer who survived and suffered from humiliation and guilt again and again throughout seven years of court proceedings against the men who kidnapped him and murdered his partner. The courtroom dialogue is verbatim, and to me, that leads to a feeling that the reader is actually there watching the proceedings. Wambaugh is a superb writer, and I consider this book is another must-read.

I am a huge fan of mystery novels written by Michael Connelly featuring the detective Harry Bosch, so I was delighted to read Jill Leovy’s account of real-life homicide detectives in Los Angeles working under very difficult circumstances to provide a measure of justice to otherwise ignored crime victims and their families.

The book does a wonderful job of documenting the craft of good police work and shows how poorly functioning formal legal systems – a legacy of Jim Crow – negatively impacts Black communities.

As the fictional detective Harry Bosch likes to say, “everyone counts or no one counts.”

Leovy’s book shows what it takes for that vision of everyone counting to become a reality. 

I enjoyed the character of Junior Bender in the first book in this series, and I loved this one even more.

Junior is one of those wrong-side-turned-right-side-of-the-law characters, and sometimes it’s fun to ride shotgun with a character who gets his hands dirty. Rounding out the music industry connection is an old record producer who had some sketchy business dealings back in the sixties.

I confess, just the mention of the sixties for the backstory was enough for me (I love experiencing that era through different stories), and with an already-loved protagonist, I was all in.

An excellent nonfiction account of an actual Hollywood killing, this is a well-written and researched investigation of the (as yet) unsolved 1922 shooting of director William Desmond Taylor. The murder was committed right when scandals, including Fatty Arbuckle’s, besieged an ascendant Hollywood.

Also of interest: A Murder in Hollywood by Casey Sherman, which recaps the killing of Johnny Stompanato, Lana Turner’s gangster boyfriend, supposedly by her teenage daughter, Cheryl. This crime inspired entertainment from Harold Robbin’s potboiler, Where Love Has Gone, to Woody Allen’s self-serious movie, September.