90 Books Like Inceptio

This book made me realise that women’s role in fiction didn’t have to be the ‘little woman’ or the ‘love interest’.

It was published back in 2001 when female protagonists were a rarity, but James Patterson gives us not one, but four strong women who get together to solve crimes that the police alone cannot. I love the fact that these women are willing to break the rules in order to succeed in a man’s world. But at the same time, they are a club in the traditional sense: they eat, drink, and have fun together, while watching each other’s backs.

It was a wonderfully empowering experience to discover this book (and even more so when I realised there were a whole series of books about the same group of women).

Linwood Barclay is adept at dreaming up quirky characters. Find You First frequently switches between points of view, but there is no confusion because the characters are distinct and interesting.

On the face of it, this is a tale of two men with too much money. Tech billionaire Miles donated sperm as a student and wishes to trace his natural children. Meanwhile, sleazy Jeremy, a Jeffrey Epstein-style character, is trying to silence his victims. However, the real stars are two sparky young women, Chloe and Nicky. Chloe, suddenly confronted by the father she never knew, joins forces with Miles to find out why his other kids are being killed. Fifteen-year-old Nicky is the victim who fights back. When the disparate strands of the story come together, these ladies kick butt.

This one had my head spinning right round, baby! Happy marriage, babies, a nice home—what more could a young wife ask for?

How about someone she can trust, for starters, and how ’bout her husband’s ex-lover quits coming around all the time, tattling tales of his murky past? It reminded me of an old friend of mine who fell in love with a guy she’d met through an online dating site. He claimed he was long divorced, but—whoops—was actually still married, and living with his estranged wife in separate parts of their house.

You can probably guess how that ended, but not this book. With every wild plot turn, I was grabbing for the Oh sh*t handle and gasping for breath.

Ruth Rendell is famous for her detective stories, but she also wrote exquisitely nuanced and layered psychological thrillers. Exploring love, greed, and selfishness, The Tree of Hands is about two very different women. Benet has achieved success as a writer but is grappling with bereavement. Carol, a goodtime girl, didn’t plan to have two-year-old Jason and is relieved when he goes missing.

Benet is tricked into looking after Jason and falls in love with him before discovering his identity. There is a heart-stopping moment when Benet takes Jason to Carol’s local library, intending to leave him there to be returned to his mother. Benet thinks she is doing the right thing, while the reader knows how hellish Jason’s life will be. Can Benet’s love overcome her scruples?

Written by an author from the English West Country city of Bristol, this story accurately captures the inequality of life in the 1970s. Fifteen-year-old Carol lives in a council estate on the edge of town. She goes to school with a farmer’s son who will inherit rolling acres. One day, she meets handsome Frankie, who is staying with his aunt in a manor house nearby.

Every reader will know louche Frankie is bad news. Carol, of course, falls for him and finds herself pregnant. So far, so predictable. What is far less predictable is the way Carol herself is sucked into crime, secrets, and lies. Forty years later, how far will she go to evade exposure? Emotional, clever, and exquisitely written, this book is hard to put down. 

I saw Cathy Ace speak at a crime writers’ conference, and she was such a bundle of energy and a joy to listen to that I was already hooked before I read this book.

And I loved her collection of WISE women working together as a detective agency: one from Wales, one from Ireland, one from Scotland, and one from England. (I would never have spotted the opportunity those four initials provide.)

Four ordinary women, from different backgrounds, and with different experiences (and accents) learning to live together, work together, and solve crimes together. This is at the cosy end of the crime spectrum, but that’s why I like it so much. The crimes are real, but there’s not too much grit, and there’s bags of humour.

This book has so much I love about it: it’s set in Dublin, the home of my father and therefore part of my heritage.

It features a group of feisty women, the youngest of whom is in her fifties (way younger than me), while the rest are old enough to know better. It’s packed full of humour—who wouldn’t laugh at the idea of the older generation behaving worse than the teenagers. And there’s a huge dollop of old Irish magic to add to the mix.

Despite the fact that this wonderful group of women seem to attract dead bodies like magnets, this is definitely in the cosy sub-genre. And I loved every word of this book and the rest of the series.

This is a funny book that made me laugh out loud from the start, which may seem odd, as it’s definitely not a cosy crime novel. In fact, it’s a gritty thriller, with some quite dark elements, but definitely leavened by the humour.

I love the fact that the two strong female protagonists are anti-heroines and it’s not clear whether they are working together or against each other. There were a number of twists that I completely missed. And I found the continual switch between the two women’s viewpoints kept me guessing throughout.

A scintillating and enjoyable romp.

Peter Heather’s work is one of the broadest in scope on the topic of the European ‘Barbarians’, while still retaining enough detail to keep the reader’s attention pinned. A great starter for this period of history, encompassing the entire first millennium AD, the time when the heart of European civilization gradually moved from the Mediterranean South to the cold Barbarian North. It reads like a novel – but is supported by years of painstaking research. If you can only read one book on Barbarian Europe, this is the book.

Evliya Çelebi's Book of Travels has remained a well-kept secret—until now. Evliya was a seventeenth-century Ottoman courtier who wandered the empire and beyond for over 40 years and recorded his adventures in what is considered to be the longest travel account in world literature. This well-chosen selection of excerpts from his entertaining and informative masterpiece brings glimpses of the many climes and cultures he explored to an English-speaking readership, while luring us irresistibly into his idiosyncratic world.