94 Books Like He Had It Coming

Many years ago, when I first moved to a small cabin in the Rocky Mountains, a friend gave me a copy of A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains and inscribed it to "one of the bravest mountain ladies I know."

I relished the book and learned a lot about the history of my new home through the eyes of an English woman who, in 1873, traveled alone and on horseback, to places I now know and love. Instead of fading into the past, Isabella Bird pulled herself out of the shadows. I even named my cat after her. 

Mollie was 18 years old and a new bride in 1860 when she and her husband left eastern Nebraska for the gold diggings of Colorado.

The 7-week journey across the plains tested her strength and endurance, but Mollie battled the hardships and isolation of pioneer life with humor, intelligence, and honesty. She never intended her journal to be published, but it was, and I found it inspirational.

I love a writer who is willing to put his life at risk to solve a mystery. And I love history and biography. The mystery? What happened to Glen and Bessie Hyde, a young couple who vanished on their honeymoon while trying to run the length of the canyon in 1928 in a scow—a boat that looked like a water trough.

Dimock, a Grand Canyon guide and builder of wooden dories, researched this type of craft and, together with his wife, braved the rapids because he thought this would provide clues about the disappearance. Having rowed unwieldy baggage boats in the canyon myself, I emphasized with their plight, and the story of the honeymooners is one guides often tell the clients sitting in camp chairs in the after-dinner circle.  

Brilliant Bylines is more than a historical narrative of women in journalism, as it also includes samples of the women's writings.

My favorite is Elizabeth Cochrane Seaman, better known as "Nellie Bly." She was not unknown, but she was mysterious in her own way and certainly was intriguing. Not only did she travel around the world in 1890, but she also feigned mental illness in order to get the inside scoop on an insane asylum. I named another cat after her, as well.

In 1920s Chicago, the theater and the courtroom collided as a pair of men dropped dead in the vicinity of beautiful, duplicitous women. The musical Chicago has always been one of my favorites, and I was delighted to read this book about the real women who inspired Velma Kelly and Roxie Hart. It did not disappoint.

Douglas Perry tells the story of Beulah and Belva with all the flair and drama of the musical. I will never forget reading about how callously Beulah Annan sipped cocktails and listened to music for hours as her lover lay bleeding on the floor. It sent chills down my spine.

Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb set out to commit the perfect crime and ended up in newspapers as the perpetrators of “the crime of the century.” They kidnapped and murdered a teenage boy in Chicago in 1924, but both Leopold and Loeb were still considered boys themselves at the time. Clarence Darrow defended them at trial, arguing that they were guilty but that the situation had extenuating circumstances. Baatz’s book explores how two college students from good families ended up in prison for murder. Leopold’s family even came from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, near where I currently live, so even though the case is almost 100 years old, it’s not as distant as it might seem.

If screwball detective fiction intrigues you, you must read Craig Rice. Why not start with Eight Faces of Three, the mystery introducing the wacky, rye-soaked team of Jake Justus, Helene Brand, and John Joseph Malone?

Justus is a good-looking press agent and the book’s moral center; Brand is a gorgeous heiress and non-stop partier; and Malone is a stumpy lawyer-slash-PI with good instincts and better luck. Imagine Philip Marlowe meets the Marx Brothers.

In Eight Faces of Three, a young woman awakes to find her aunt murdered, all the house’s clocks set to 3 am, and herself the prime suspect.

Craig Rice was the first mystery writer to grace the cover of Time magazine. Her private life was strewn with ex-husbands and empty booze bottles, and she died way too young at 49.

However, her literary legacy—one critic dubbed her the “Dorothy Parker of detective fiction”—will keep her… show more.

Despite being published in 1975, Hal Higdon’s book about the Leopold and Loeb case remains the definitive account, at least to me.

If you’re looking for a factual, in-depth look at the crime, investigation, and sentencing hearing, look no further. Higdon was able to interview and correspond with dozens of people who were close to the case and who personally knew the killers and victim. He weaved those recollections into the narrative along with newspaper reports and quotes from the court documents in addition to the rest of his vast research, which gives his book a wonderful richness and depth. 

Lynching is central to the late 19th century and thus the theme that I explore in my recommendations, but Shepherd.com covers this tragic subject elsewhere. Instead, for my last book, I offer Adler’s study that explains the persistently high and even increasing rates of violence and homicide in Chicago during an era when varied modern social controls—urban reform, the discipline of the factory floor, expanding education and the bureaucratic state—swept over that city as they did over America, too. According to older theories about social turbulence and murder, these should have declined. Instead, the opposite was true, though the forms that violence took did change. Perhaps it was Adler’s intention to leave frighteningly unanswered what it is about people generally, and Americans specifically, that the dark impulses they have run so deeply that they are impervious to social control.

The perfect murder is not possible, right? Well…this book may have changed my mind! I don’t generally like brooding, self-absorbed characters, but Simon–ah, Simon, odd and way past cute-quirky. But somehow, Ellis makes him a compelling character. And the twists in what at first glance is a typical murder mystery with a spurned lover, a big trust fund, and lots of lies make a sharp 180-degree turn in the final pages.

As puzzles go, this book has it all. Dark history, long-held grudges, cross, double-cross…is triple-cross a thing? If not, it should be after this ending. And beware the Grim Reaper next Halloween!