Here are 100 books that Fundraising the Dead fans have personally recommended if you like
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I am the Agatha-winning author of the Rare Books Cozy Mystery series. My first in the series, below, won the Agatha Award for Best First Mystery Novel. I’ve worked for more than twenty years in museums and symphonies and have the great fortune of being married to a librarian. When not writing, I’m drawing and painting. I live in Maryland with her family. Although I’m not much of a baker, I won’t ever turn down a sweet lokshen kugel.
Kate Carlisle’s Bibliophile Mystery series is what made me fall in love with cozy mysteries. I wanted to restore the book bindings on old books like her main character, Brooklyn Wainwright.
Since that wasn’t going to happen, I loved living vicariously through her adventures, learning more about how she works and how that knowledge can be used to solve crimes.
Book expert Brooklyn Wainwright discovers that murder is always a bestseller in the first novel in the New York Times bestselling Bibliophile Mystery series.
Brooklyn Wainwright is a skilled surgeon. Sure, her patients might smell like mold and have spines made of leather, but no ailing book is going to die on her watch. The same can’t be said of Abraham Karastovsky, Brooklyn’s friend and former employer.
On the eve of a celebration for his latest book restoration, Brooklyn finds her mentor lying in a pool of his own blood. With his final breath Abraham leaves Brooklyn with a cryptic…
A moving story of love, betrayal, and the enduring power of hope in the face of darkness.
German pianist Hedda Schlagel's world collapsed when her fiancé, Fritz, vanished after being sent to an enemy alien camp in the United States during the Great War. Fifteen years later, in 1932, Hedda…
I am the Agatha-winning author of the Rare Books Cozy Mystery series. My first in the series, below, won the Agatha Award for Best First Mystery Novel. I’ve worked for more than twenty years in museums and symphonies and have the great fortune of being married to a librarian. When not writing, I’m drawing and painting. I live in Maryland with her family. Although I’m not much of a baker, I won’t ever turn down a sweet lokshen kugel.
Who wouldn’t want to go to a quaint town where the streets are lined with bookstores? Sign me up! Lorna Barrett’s series features mystery bookshop owner Tricia Miles ending up solving her own crimes, including one featuring a rare cookbook.
The idea of owning a bookstore, sharing a love of mysteries, and being part of such a special community really grabbed me as a reader. Since I can’t actually move to Booktown—aka Stoneham, New Hampshire—I’m glad I can read so many books about it!
The streets of Stoneham, New Hampsire are lined with bookstores...and paved with murder.
When she moved to Stoneham, city slicker Tricia Miles met nothing but friendly faces. And when she opened her mystery bookstore, she met friendly competition. But when she finds Doris Gleason dead in her own cookbook store, killed by a carving knife, the atmosphere seems more cutthroat than cordial. Someone wanted to get their hands on the rare cookbook that Doris had recently purchased-and the locals think that someone is Tricia. To clear her name, Tricia will have to take a page out of one of her…
I am the Agatha-winning author of the Rare Books Cozy Mystery series. My first in the series, below, won the Agatha Award for Best First Mystery Novel. I’ve worked for more than twenty years in museums and symphonies and have the great fortune of being married to a librarian. When not writing, I’m drawing and painting. I live in Maryland with her family. Although I’m not much of a baker, I won’t ever turn down a sweet lokshen kugel.
One of the reasons I started working for museums was that I trained as a painter and in art history, so Hailey Lind’s Annie Kincaid Mystery series was a particular delight. Her main character, Annie, is a former art forger turned faux finisher.
However, she can’t seem to put her past behind her after realizing her curator ex-boyfriend’s new big painting acquisition is a fake. I enjoy a good redemption story, especially when mixed with history and artifacts.
When Annie Kincaid informs her ex-boyfriend, curator Ernst Pettigrew, that the Brock Museum's fifteen-million-dollar Caravaggio painting is a fake, a bizarre chain of events is set in motion, forcing Annie to enter into an underworld of art forgers--a place she swore she left behind. Original.
Sine, a professor of creative writing, accompanies Sam, a neuroscientist, on a conference trip to a Hotel Castle. Sam wants to present a new device, the "monitor." Sine hopes to recover from tending to her mother who just passed away.
When they arrive, Sine is in a dream-like state. Real…
I am the Agatha-winning author of the Rare Books Cozy Mystery series. My first in the series, below, won the Agatha Award for Best First Mystery Novel. I’ve worked for more than twenty years in museums and symphonies and have the great fortune of being married to a librarian. When not writing, I’m drawing and painting. I live in Maryland with her family. Although I’m not much of a baker, I won’t ever turn down a sweet lokshen kugel.
Gigi Pandian has gone on to write several series I adore, including the Secret Staircase and Accidental Alchemist mysteries, but her first series about history professor Jaya Jones remains my favorite.
A bejeweled and mysterious artifact sends her globe-trotting, and I, for one, enjoyed the ride every step of the way. Jaya is smart and confident, and I would want to hang out with her and her friends any day of the week—especially that roguish possible art thief she encounters.
A Scottish legend that hides a secret. A treasure from India that vanished long ago. An unexpected package that ignites an adventure.
History professor Jaya Jones is reeling from the news of a former flame's untimely death when she receives a mysterious parcel he’d sent from abroad. Inside is a cryptic plea for help, along with a jewel-encrusted artifact hinting at a treasure from India shrouded in a Scottish legend. As she starts to unravel the mystery, the unsettling discovery of her ransacked apartment makes it clear she's not the only one on the trail.
I became a historian of the American Revolution back in the early 1970s and have been working on that subject ever since. Most of my writings pivot on national politics, the origins of the Constitution, and James Madison. But explaining why the Revolution occurred and why it took the course it did remain subjects that still fascinate me.
We think of the American victories at Saratoga in 1777 and Yorktown in 1781 as the decisive battles of the war (and so, in a sense, they were). But in this Pulitzer Prize winner, Fischer makes a strong case that George Washington’s surprising victories at Trenton and Princeton were just as momentous, keeping “the Cause” alive at a moment when the Continental Army was on the verge of dissolution. Fischer provides a vivid account of the flow of battle and the key decisions that gave the Americans their advantage.
Six months after the Declaration of Independence, the American Revolution was all but lost. A powerful British force had routed the Americans at New York, occupied three colonies, and advanced within sight of Philadelphia.
Yet, as David Hackett Fischer recounts in this riveting history, George Washington-and many other Americans-refused to let the Revolution die. On Christmas night, as a howling nor'easter struck the Delaware Valley, he led his men across the river and attacked the exhausted Hessian garrison at Trenton, killing or capturing nearly a thousand men. A second battle of Trenton followed within days. The Americans held off a…
I became a historian of the American Revolution back in the early 1970s and have been working on that subject ever since. Most of my writings pivot on national politics, the origins of the Constitution, and James Madison. But explaining why the Revolution occurred and why it took the course it did remain subjects that still fascinate me.
The story of how the Continental Army suffered bitterly through the winter of 1777-78 at Valley Forge has been the subject of many books and the inspiration for many a patriotic myth. In this well-researched history, Bodle dispels many of those myths and carefully explains why the army had to stay so close to Philadelphia, when normally it would have moved further to the interior of Pennsylvania and sent many of its troops home for the winter. He provides a sophisticated account of the relationship between military needs and civilian politics, one that broadens our understanding of the Revolution.
Of the many dramatic episodes of the American Revolution, perhaps none is more steeped in legend than the Valley Forge winter. Paintings show Continentals huddled around campfires and Washington kneeling in the frozen woods, praying for his army's deliverance. To this day schoolchildren are taught that Valley Forge was the "turning point of the Revolution"-the event that transformed a ragged group of soldiers into a fighting army. But was Valley Forge really the "crucible of victory" it has come to represent in American history? Now, two hundred and twenty-five years later, Wayne Bodle has written…
In an age of splendor, a heretic king strips Egypt bare—forcing his queen to quell rebellion and plunging his children into a conspiracy against the crown.
Salvation in the Sun follows Nefertiti as she ascends the throne beside Pharaoh Amenhotep—soon to become Akhenaten—just as he declares war on Egypt’s ancient…
I grew up in western Pennsylvania where my dad loved history and always tried to stop at any battlefield or historic sign that happened to be within his field of vision. My mom was a passionate researcher of our family ancestry and I spent our childhood looking in cemeteries for specific names and gravestones. When I was ten years old, we joined a living history reenactment group that portrayed everyday life in the 1750s, and I was immediately hooked. I began researching about our group known as “Captain William Trent’s Company” and after almost thirty years of living and breathing summer weekends at 18th Century historic sites, the pages of Pittsburgh’s Lost Outpost: Captain Trent’s Fort came to life. I picked these five books because I want future readers to be transported like I was when I first read them.
This book is unique because it shows the reader how you can walk in the footsteps and travel like those trekking across Pennsylvania in the early 18th Century where there were no interstates or turnpikes, but instead, indigenous paths that influenced the roadways we know today. It also gave me a visual where I could experience firsthand what a traveler saw when he or she walked this route.
Since its original publication in 1965, Indian Paths of Pennsylvania has remained the standard volume for charting the foot trails forged and followed in Pennsylvania by Native Americans, documenting an era of interaction between Indians and European settlers in the 17th and 18th centuries. With the advent of European settlement, the Indian trails that laced the wilderness were so well-situated that there was little reason to forsake them until the age of the automobile. The trails that traverse the mountains “kept the level” so well that they remain an engineering curiosity. Equally as remarkable are the complexity of the system…
We think we know the American founders, who have offered subject matter for countless biographies. But those piles of books on the same circle of founders tend to flatten them out with a tiresome formula. Aren't there other ways to approach the lives of figures at the heart of the nation's earliest, formative years? As a U.S. historian, I prefer exploring that important time and place through less-traveled byways. I got pulled into that world by attempting to spin Robert Morris’s dramatic rags-to-riches-to-rags story in Robert Morris’s Folly. The other characters on this list have further widened those horizons for me.
A book on George Washington must be on this list. We can ask for no better than Levy’s highly entertaining study of Washington through the lens of archaeological discoveries made at all the sites of importance connected to the man, from Virginia to Barbados to the Ohio Valley to Philadelphia.
Through these sites and new discoveries, we meet the man in unusual ways. And Levy strikes the perfect balance between guarded cynicism and awe. I loved the final chapter on the relevance of it all to our world today.
No figure in American history has generated more public interest or sustained more scholarly research around his various homes and habitations than has George Washington. The Permanent Resident is the first book to bring the principal archaeological sites of Washington's life together under one cover, revealing what they say individually and collectively about Washington's life and career and how Americans have continued to invest these places with meaning.
Philip Levy begins with Washington's birthplace in Westmoreland County, Virginia, then moves to Ferry Farm-site of the mythical cherry tree-before following Washington to Barbados to examine how his only trip outside the…
I am a journalist who has written books on American history for the general reader but not an academic historian or specialist, though I have the utmost respect for both. I like to think I have an independent mind and that I look for ideas that challenge conventional wisdom but are rooted in good sense and critical intelligence. The books I have recommended here reflect this temperament and, I believe, an innate sense of the comic and absurd. These are desperately needed at a time when people take themselves much too seriously—as in a presidential election year.
I recommend this book because it uses Washington’s own expense accounts submitted to Congress—$400,000 worth of reimbursements he expects—to cast a comic light on the sober and solemn business of war. We tend to take figures like Washington so seriously that we do not see the human—and humorous—side of their lives and works. Kitman did a superb job of showing the lighter side of commanding the Continental Army without diminishing Washington’s greatness.
I love this book because it is consistently amusing when so many books on George Washington are so serious in tone. Kitman manages to humanize Washington, which too few authors do, and in the process, helps the reader keep his or her perspective on the momentous events of the American past. Also, the book is just a lot of fun. We take ourselves much too seriously these days, especially in a presidential campaign year.
In George Washington's Expense Account -- the best-selling expense account in history -- Kitman shows how Washington brilliantly turned his noble gesture of refusing payment for his services as commander in chief of the Continental Army into an opportunity to indulge his insatiable lust for fine food and drink, extravagant clothing, and lavish accommodations. In a close analysis of the document that financed our Revolution, Kitman uncovers more scandals than you can shake a Nixon Cabinet member at -- and serves each up with verve and wit.
Born the heir of a master woodcutter in a queendom defined by guilds and matrilineal inheritance, nonbinary Sorin can’t quite seem to find their place. At seventeen, an opportunity to attend an alchemical guild fair and secure an apprenticeship with the…
During my twenty-nine nears in the federal government, I maintained a Top Secret clearance while being a CIO, Chief Architect, & Director of various things with the White House, US Congress, Department of Homeland Security, and the Department of Justice, where I served in a senior management role for the National Security Division, the agency responsible for serving as the liaison between the Attorney General and the Intelligence Community. Today, my passion is writing about my White House experiences, in both fiction and non-fiction.
This is a fantastic book about George Washington after the end of the war for independence, travelling to Annapolis resigning his military commission to the Confederation Congress then going home to farm for what he believed would be the remainder of his life, only to be talked into being our first president. Very well written and taught me a lot of what I thought I already knew!
"An elegantly written account of leadership at the most pivotal moment in American history" (Philadelphia Inquirer): Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Edward J. Larson reveals how George Washington saved the United States by coming out of retirement to lead the Constitutional Convention and serve as our first president.
After leading the Continental Army to victory in the Revolutionary War, George Washington shocked the world: he retired. In December 1783, General Washington, the most powerful man in the country, stepped down as Commander in Chief and returned to private life at Mount Vernon. Yet as Washington contentedly grew his…
