Here are 100 books that Gorky Park fans have personally recommended if you like
Gorky Park.
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For people who know something about a technical field, there is nothing that can ruin a book or movie faster than inaccuracies about that field. I’ve worked as an armored car driver, police officer, and private investigator in and around Detroit, and have been writing for outdoor magazines for close to twenty years, so not only do I know a lot about the featured subjects/characters of most thrillers, I care about how accurately they’re portrayed, and have brought that passion to my writing. I’ve written five thrillers set in Detroit, many of them featuring a private investigator, and when writing Bestiarii and its sequels did extensive research on dinosaurs.
What Tom Clancy did for submarines with The Hunt For Red October, Stephen Hunter did with rifles and long-range shooting in Point of Impact, which was made into the movie Shooter with Mark Wahlberg in addition to a cable TV show of the same name.
Hunter had already proven himself a talented thriller writer when he penned Point of Impact, but the excellent plot (a famous Vietnam sniper framed for an assassination by a shadowy conspiracy) combined with never-before-seen firearms technical detail that enhanced rather than bogged down the story made this novel a huge success and catapulted Hunter to the A-list.
Bob Lee Swagger is one of the best snipers in the world, but he is about to be set up. In 1963, RamDyne, the illegal sub-agency linked to the CIA, framed Lee Harvey Oswald for J.F. Kennedy's assassination. Now the FBI and RamDyne are after Bob as the potential assassin of the President.
The Victorian mansion, Evenmere, is the mechanism that runs the universe.
The lamps must be lit, or the stars die. The clocks must be wound, or Time ceases. The Balance between Order and Chaos must be preserved, or Existence crumbles.
Appointed the Steward of Evenmere, Carter Anderson must learn the…
I am an author, attorney, artist, and entrepreneur. My experience as a litigator for over forty years, as well as my experience as a painter and an investor, has inspired and influenced me to write the Chance Cormac legal thrillers series.
Connelly is the GOAT of the legal thriller genre. He is the creator of Mickey Haller and Hieronymus Bosch.
The Lincoln Lawyer introduces Mickey Haller, the LA lawyer whose office is his Lincoln Town Car. A criminal defense lawyer, Haller agrees to defend a prominent real estate agent who claims he is being framed for assault and attempted murder.
In Connelly’s novels, things are never what they seem. Connelly understands the challenges facing attorneys in investigating and trying difficult cases for difficult clients.
They're called Lincoln Lawyers: the bottom of the legal food chain, the criminal defence attorneys who operate out of the back of a Lincoln car, travelling between the courthouses of Los Angeles county to take whatever cases the system throws in their path.
Mickey Haller has been in the business a long time, and he knows just how to work it, how to grease the right wheels and palms, to keep the engine of justice working in his favour. When a Beverly Hills rich boy is arrested for brutally beating a woman, Haller has his first high-paying client in years.…
As a UK registered lawyer, I have spent most of the past 35 years writing about my work. But what has always excited me, from my childhood, is the science fiction worlds which state a truth which is yet to happen, The worlds of H.G Wells; Huxley; Aldous; Orwell; Bradbury; and Atwell. An individual's struggle against overwhelming odds. Not always somewhere where you would want to go. But from which you will always take something away.
I'd heard about this famous book many years before I actually got around to reading it. What I loved about this book was its originality.
I am always reminded about Orwell's book whenever I hear phrases like ‘ thought police’ or ‘big brother’, which have become part of our everyday language. Probably one of the most influential books ever written. For me, the message of Orwell’s book is that the State will always win.
1984 is the year in which it happens. The world is divided into three superstates. In Oceania, the Party's power is absolute. Every action, word, gesture and thought is monitored under the watchful eye of Big Brother and the Thought Police. In the Ministry of Truth, the Party's department for propaganda, Winston Smith's job is to edit the past. Over time, the impulse to escape the machine and live independently takes hold of him and he embarks on a secret and forbidden love affair. As he writes the words 'DOWN WITH BIG…
The Guardian of the Palace is the first novel in a modern fantasy series set in a New York City where magic is real—but hidden, suppressed, and dangerous when exposed.
When an ancient magic begins to leak into the world, a small group of unlikely allies is forced to act…
I have traveled almost my entire life as a US Navy Sailor and civilian, and I still am. The cities, countries, and locations are composites of places I have visited. I have been a Correctional Counselor and a Criminal Investigator in addition to other positions. My extensive travel and background provide me with a unique view of the world that I try to reflect in my stories.
This isn’t a typical murder story, but it has it all: personal dilemmas, paranormal lines, and killings wrapped around a dystopian world where good and evil are on a collision course. This is, perhaps my favorite book.
It was King’s gold standard for decades. The traveling east to west, the sages met, the people killed. Those turned against their friends. Twists galore. It is a long read, a bit over 1,100 pages. Don’t let that scare you, it is a page turner from start to finish.
Stephen King's apocalyptic vision of a world blasted by virus and tangled in an elemental struggle between good and evil remains as riveting and eerily plausible as when it was first published.
Soon to be a television series.
'THE STAND is a masterpiece' (Guardian). Set in a virus-decimated US, King's thrilling American fantasy epic, is a Classic.
First come the days of the virus. Then come the dreams.
Dark dreams that warn of the coming of the dark man. The apostate of death, his worn-down boot heels tramping the night roads. The warlord of the charnel house and Prince of…
I readTinker Tailor Soldier Spyfor the first time many years ago, while traveling aboard a Canadian National Railway train from Montreal to British Columbia. Something about the contrast between the majestic Canadian Rockies and the dark alleys of John Le Carré’s Berlin brought the Cold War fully to life and set me on the path to writing a novel of my own set during that time. (Living through some of those tense years of superpower stand-offs didn’t hurt.) Tinker Tailor Soldier Spyis told in third-person, but many Cold War novels written in the first person do a masterful job of evoking that troubled era.
The sins and tragedies of the Cold War are resurrected in Le Carré’s late-career novel, A Legacy of Spies.
After retiring from MI6, Peter Guillam is summoned back to London by his former bosses, intent on clearing up a botched spy operation first described in The Spy Who Came in From the Cold.
A Legacy of Spies shows that a story revolving around bureaucratic turf wars and incriminating paper trails can be just as suspenseful as any of James Bond’s implausible high-tech adventures.
George Smiley, among the 20th century’s most compelling fictional characters, makes a guest appearance, drawing us back into the Cold War’s darkest days, when men and women served as pawns in a geopolitical power game—and often paid the price for their role in these international dramas.
The undisputed master returns with his first Smiley novel in more than twenty-five years--a #1 New York Times bestseller and ideal holiday gift.
Peter Guillam, staunch colleague and disciple of George Smiley of the British Secret Service, otherwise known as the Circus, is living out his old age on the family farmstead on the south coast of Brittany when a letter from his old Service summons him to London. The reason? His Cold War past has come back to claim him. Intelligence operations that were once the toast of secret London, and involved such characters…
I’ve always read and loved crime fiction – so much so I did a doctorate in it. I believe good crime fiction has the capacity to explore particular societies, places, and times in interesting and enjoyable ways. I also like crime fiction’s focus on character, and particularly in crime series which show a character evolving over time. That’s why I chose the theme of ‘flawed detective’ and that’s what I’m trying to do in my Schalk Lourens series, of whichPresent Tenseis the first. I hope you enjoy it, and also the other books I’ve recommended here.
Deon Meyer is one of South Africa’s best crime writers, and this novel is the second in a series featuring policeman Benny Griessel. Benny is a good cop and an ordinary guy. He’s also an alcoholic and his drinking has destroyed his family. Thirteen Hours is set in Cape Town and the action, as the title suggests, spans thirteen hours. A backpacker goes missing and the cops must find her before the bad guys do. It’s an edge-of-the-seat ride and I promise you’ll be cheering Benny on.
A Sunday Times '100 best crime novels and thrillers since 1945' pick!
Shortlisted for the CWA International Dagger Award 2010
They killed her best friend. Now they are chasing Rachel Anderson through the streets of Cape Town. The young tourist doesn't dare trust anyone - except her father, back home in America. When he puts pressure on the politicians, they know that to protect their country's image, they must find Rachel's hiding place before the killers.
So Benny Griessel - detective, maverick and father of teenagers himself - has just 13 hours to crack open a conspiracy which threatens the…
Aury and Scott travel to the Finger Lakes in New York’s wine country to get to the bottom of the mysterious happenings at the Songscape Winery. Disturbed furniture and curious noises are one thing, but when a customer winds up dead, it’s time to dig into the details and see…
Thomas Perry is a 74 year old writer who is working on his 30th novel. His books have won a number of honors and awards, including the Edgar from the Mystery Writers of America for The Butcher's Boy, the Gumshoe for Pursuit, the Barry for The Informant, and again for Eddie'sBoy. Metzger's Dog was voted by NPR's listeners one of "100 Killer Thrillers--Best Thrillers Ever." He has always believed that a writer's most important job is learning to be a better writer.
This is only Patrick Hoffman’s second book, but it is a wonderful model of how to write a complex and controlled work without leaving loose ends, lingering too long in one phase, or letting the reader lose interest. The novel presents us with a drug cartel that stretches around the world like a giant organism. A single disturbance in one location causes violent and self-protective reactions in each of the other locations, like reflexes of the giant organism’s body. The novel is a brilliant study of cause and effect. Hoffman portrays a world that is dangerous and dark, but every bit of it makes sense.
Patrick Hoffman burst onto the crime fiction scene with The White Van, a captivating thriller set in the back streets of San Francisco, which was named a Wall Street Journal best mystery of the year and was shortlisted for the CWA Ian Fleming Steel Dagger Award. Hoffman returns with Every Man a Menace, the inside story of an increasingly ruthless ecstasy-smuggling ring.
San Francisco is about to receive the biggest delivery of MDMA to hit the West Coast in years. Raymond Gaspar, just out of prison, is sent to the city by his boss - still locked up on the…
Thomas Perry is a 74 year old writer who is working on his 30th novel. His books have won a number of honors and awards, including the Edgar from the Mystery Writers of America for The Butcher's Boy, the Gumshoe for Pursuit, the Barry for The Informant, and again for Eddie'sBoy. Metzger's Dog was voted by NPR's listeners one of "100 Killer Thrillers--Best Thrillers Ever." He has always believed that a writer's most important job is learning to be a better writer.
This is a risky choice because the author is my old university colleague and later television writing partner, to whom I’ve been married for 41 years. I feel comfortable about it because of the number of fine British and American writers who have recommended this and her earlier books. I picked it because it’s the first novel I’ve read that makes a credible artistic attempt to grasp the experience of the current Pandemic. It’s a murder mystery that takes place during those first few months, when what was happening in the world seemed unthinkable, going out meant breaking a lockdown, and contact with anyone might be fatal. The amateur investigator, a young woman with an aimless and undisciplined past, takes a deep expedition into death, and it galvanizes her into taking charge and being really alive.
"Faultlessly imagined and beautifully written, this is one of the best novels I've read all year." –Timothy Hallinan, author of the acclaimed Simeon Grist series
Caught in a pincer movement between the sudden death of Evelyn (her favourite aunt) and the Corona virus, Ascher Lieb finds herself unexpectedly locked down in her aunt’s retirement community with only Evelyn’s grief-stricken dog Freddie for company.
As the world tumbles down into a pandemic shaped rabbit-hole Ascher is wracked with guilt that her aunt was buried without the Jewish burial rights of purification.
In order to atone for this dereliction of familial duty,…
I’m a medieval historian, and I’ve written academic books and articles about the history of the medieval world, but I have also written two historical novels. I became interested in history in general and the Middle Ages in particular from reading historical fiction as a child (Jean Plaidy!). The past is another country, and visiting it through fiction is an excellent way to get a feel for it, for its values, norms, and cultures, for how it is different from and similar to our own age. I’ve chosen novels that I love that do this especially well, and bring to light less well-known aspects of the Middle Ages.
It is difficult to imagine a list of great novels about the Middle Ages that does not include this book.
I read it first when I was in graduate school, and it brought so much of what I was studying to life – the monastic world of its setting with all its contradictions and spectacular architecture; fights over religion and the true nature of spirituality; the non-linear nature of medieval literature.
I love how it can be read on one level as a page-turny murder mystery and on another as a post-modern novel that explores the nature of signs and meaning. Its mystificatory preface reveals the distance between the medieval world and what we can say about it.
The year is 1327. Franciscans in a wealthy Italian abbey are suspected of heresy, and Brother William of Baskerville arrives to investigate. When his delicate mission is suddenly overshadowed by seven bizarre deaths, Brother William turns detective.
William collects evidence, deciphers secret symbols and coded manuscripts, and digs into the eerie labyrinth of the abbey where extraordinary things are happening under the cover of night. A spectacular popular and critical success, The Name of the Rose is not only a narrative of a murder investigation but an astonishing chronicle of the Middle Ages.
Magical realism meets the magic of Christmas in this mix of Jewish, New Testament, and Santa stories–all reenacted in an urban psychiatric hospital!
On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argue…
I have always loved history and art. Combining the two makes perfect sense and provides the inspiration to keep writing. I can spend hours in a museum, just soaking up the magic in Impressionist paintings. I never get tired of researching the artists or their paintings, and I relish the unexpected discoveries.
I love the way there is a mystery within a mystery. A group of actors is staging a play for the benefit of the passengers on a transcontinental train trip across Canada. The protagonist, who is undercover and posing as a waiter, befriends the lead actor and takes a page out of Hamlet, using the play to pressure the villain into making a mistake and incriminating himself. Accurate details about working as a waiter lend a sense of ‘David versus Goliath’ to the storyline.
To the Jockey Club, the racing world would be a better place without Julius Apollo Filmer. An expert in corruption with a devastating line in witness intimidation - and proving to be a slippery character to put behind bars.
Baffled, they call in undercover security agent Tor Kelsey to keep an unflinching eye on Filmer and his associates. A mission that takes him from the finest of English racecourses to the wild Canadian interior - on a luxury transcontinental train journey to end them all.
On board, a troupe of actors are playing out a murder mystery for…
