Books like Escape from Five Shadows — picked by fans

Only through a novel can a long-dead writer convey to a Texas farm boy what it is like to be a great opera singer. As much as I celebrate popular fiction, on rare occasions beautifully constructed prose pulls me to an author like Willa Cather. Like many of her fans, My Ántonia won me over. Song of the Lark paints a portrait of the artist, and it is not always beautiful. Talent drives an artist to perfection. They derive no satisfaction from the merely good. They can be insensitive, exacting and rude because the artist suffers pain from witnessing anything less than greatness. For example, she cannot compliment those whose talent does not match her own because their failure is repugnant. The artist suffers the wrong notes as much as she appreciates the right notes. This quality makes the artist unique. Only during the brief window when she achieves the… show more.

Exciting, fun, delightful are all words to describe, Don’t Let the Devil Ride. The setting provides the reader a window into Memphis culture. The author serves as a tour guide from glimpses of the Old South with its complicated and archaic inequities to the King and Graceland, followed by the modern privilege, excess, and success of the New South. Likewise, the characters are equally eclectic including a Russian mobster obsessed with cowboy movies, a woman clinging to fame by her fingernails as a onetime Elvis co-star, the ultimate in geriatric cool private eyes, and a half dozen other mysterious individuals. The plot revolves around an unknown treasure sought by fascinating people who do not know what they are searching to find. The more literary minded could read the novel as a satire, yet it works so well on the surface as a page turning mystery/thriller.

I love the opening of this novel: an offhand-feeling anecdote about Chili Palmer, the central character, getting his jacket stolen from a restaurant in Miami Beach. It feels breezy and inconsequential, but it does so much work to set the tone, establish the stakes, and introduce key characters.

I’m also a sucker for a fish-out-of-water comedy, although maybe this book is the opposite of that: tough-guy loan shark Chili Palmer falls in with a group of hapless Hollywood types and ends up thriving through the novel’s sometimes violent, sometimes funny twists and turns.

While this is a short story, not a novel, it is, in my opinion, the quintessential psychological Western. Depicting the struggle of an ordinary man saddled with extraordinary tasks, to maintain his honor and his values in the face of temptation, it delves into the minds of the two participants, and takes the reader on a wild ride as they wait for the train. Tension you could cut with a knife replaces action, keeping the reader on the edge of his/her seat until the end.

As a woman who was raised to have a moral compass, I am outraged whenever someone in authority abuses their power and gets away with it.

While I don’t condone revenge, nonetheless, I have to admit I cheered when lewd, lecherous, law-bending Florida Judge Robert “Maximum Bob” Gibbs finally gets his comeuppance and is judged guilty by a grudge-bearing malefactor and sentenced to death-by alligator, a unique means of execution, to say the least.

Ingenious, more than slightly off-kilter Elmore Leonard is the undisputed king of criminal mayhem. His wacky, raucous Maximum Bob is a delightfully dark humorous tale chocked full of zany characters; a group of magnificent miscreants Mr. Leonard created, knowing his readers would love to hate.

I’ve read this book multiple times over various stages of my life, and I find it funnier and funnier (and more and more impressive) the older I get.

This novel has so much going on: yes, technically it’s a Western, but it’s also a crime novel about the corrosive power of revenge, a buddy comedy about a fourteen-year-old girl and an over-the-hill U.S. Marshal, an oddball historical novel, and a meditation on youth and morality.

And more things, probably, that I’ll spot next time I inevitably pick it up again.

Here is another masterpiece.

It purports to be historical fiction set in the Old West, following one of the last great cattle drives. Yet within a few chapters, it begins to feel like a series of episodes from Grimm’s fairy tales.

I remember at UC Irvine, where I earned my Fiction MFA, several fellow writers were reading this novel alongside me. We kept stopping each other in the hall or at cocktail parties to relive this or that chapter, struggling to understand how it could be both so entertaining and so good.

The fact that it is long—a real doorstopper of a book—adds to its “too-big-for-one-genre” feel.

One of my favorite novels of any length, Nathanael West’s short 1939 classic is at the very least the most disturbing portrait of Golden Age Hollywood and its hangers-on ever written—hideous, poignant, horribly funny.

West himself wrote scripts for B-movies in the thirties. His death at thirty-three in a car crash was perhaps, in its awful and infuriating ridiculousness, fitting. And it was the day after F. Scott Fitzgerald died.

Tolkin doesn’t hit you with belly laughs so much as tickle the upper corners of your mind with his knowing take on the mores and follies of the Hollywood of the late 1980s. (Of special interest to me, as that’s the moment I arrived there to begin my own TV and film career.) The trenchant satire is exemplified by the crime at its center: studio exec Griffin Mill, badgered by threats from some anonymous screenwriter he’s mistreated, focuses his attention on a different C-list scribe and winds up strangling him to death. Get it? In a business full of writer-killing executives, Tolkin’s big-wig antihero literally kills a writer.

For starters, I was sucked into the story by the name of the protagonist, Hieronymus Bosch. I had long been drawn to the dark paintings of the artist and expected a lot from his namesake.

In this first book in this series, the body of a man who fought side-by-side with Bosch in a hellish battle in Vietnam was found in a drainpipe. To solve the case, Harry has to relive the horror of Nam and make the choice between justice and vengeance.