Here are 77 books that Lake of Fire fans have personally recommended if you like
Lake of Fire.
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In 2015, I moved to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, a world all its own. I live only four blocks from Lake Superior, and I can’t imagine living anywhere without that lake. I pay much more attention to the weather—those waves really crash during Winter storms—and I’ve become more interested in things like geology and local history since moving to such a unique place. Everything I notice eventually enters my poetry, which has become filled with water, shorelines, copper, and white deer. And best of all, our long winters give me a lot of time to read.
This book appealed to me because of its strong central character, Helena, who’s carrying around a big secret. Let’s face it—we all have secrets. But most of our secrets are comparatively minor. Helena’s is anything but. Helena’s past is complicated, which makes the plot complicated, just the way I like plots, but the book is still easy enough to follow.
I was interested to see how Helena appreciated some aspects of her past life, even if most people would consider her present life much better. I kept wanting to know more about this imagined place in the U.P., which seemed so strange even though it’s not that far from St. Ignace or Sault Ste. Marie or even the Mackinaw Bridge.
You'd recognise my mother's name if I told it to you. You'd wonder, briefly, where is she now? And didn't she have a daughter while she was missing?
And whatever happened to the little girl?
Helena's home is like anyone else's. With a husband and two daughters, and a job she enjoys. But no one knows the truth about her childhood.
Born into captivity and brought up in an isolated cabin until she was 12, Helena was raised to be a killer by the man who kept her captive - her own father.…
The dragons of Yuro have been hunted to extinction.
On a small, isolated island, in a reclusive forest, lives bandit leader Marani and her brother Jacks. With their outlaw band they rob from the rich to feed themselves, raiding carriages and dodging the occasional vindictive…
For the last 19 years, I have worked narcotics K-9s for a private company called Sherlock Hounds Detection Canines. I recently retired from the K-9 work, but over the years, I loved seeing how dogs solve crimes in real life. Not only do they help us solve crimes, but dogs have a way of reaching people and changing lives. Dogs are quite literally “man’s (or woman’s) best friend,” and because of that, they become the best partners for many characters in books. There’s nothing better than discovering a new K-9 series that depicts the real-life love and bond between K-9 and handler.
I was excited to read another book with fascinating characters and of course, a great K-9. Nickless’ characters are well-developed and very believable. Her fictional K-9 Clyde is captivating and while he’s technically retired, still has the skillset to help his handler, Sydney Parnell.
I love the character arc with Sydney in each book as she recovers from the traumas of serving in the military. I also love that Nickless had Sydney return home to Denver to work as a railroad police special agent. This is a law enforcement job that I haven’t seen in any other book. I appreciated the thrilling storyline and how Nickless created strong tension that ratcheted up to a suspenseful ending.
A young woman is found brutally murdered, and the main suspect is the victim's fiance, a hideously scarred Iraq War vet known as the Burned Man. But railroad police Special Agent Sydney Rose Parnell, brought in by the Denver Major Crimes unit to help investigate, can't shake the feeling that larger forces are behind this apparent crime of passion.
In the depths of an icy winter, Parnell and her K9 partner, Clyde-both haunted by their time in Iraq-descend into the underground world of a savage gang of rail riders. There, they uncover a wide-reaching conspiracy and…
I chose my favorite books, and through careful psyche analysis, I see a theme in them: stubborn characters who persevere through miserable elements. I cave, hike, kayak, motorcycle, etc. A lot of it is not comfortable. It
starts with having an explorer’s heart. It isn’t glamorous. It is 90%
talking yourself into the fact that you can do something you at first
don’t believe you can do. The similar-minded friends that one finds
along the way are lifelong, and there’s a bond that forms from crazy
people like this. That comes through in my writing – companionship against a backdrop of stubborn exploration in an indifferent
environment.
It’s the love and respect of nature that gets me. First, the main character is a park ranger who is often out in the field alone. I wish I had known that was a career option as a kid. Second, she is courageous, headstrong, and dangerously stubborn—all my favorite traits.
I love a thriller that keeps the pace moving and ends each chapter with a sharp stab to the soul.
THE FIRST ANNA PIGEON NOVEL-WINNER OF THE AGATHA AWARD.
The fascinating hero of Nevada Barr's award-winning series-park ranger Anna Pigeon-has brought an unyielding love of nature and sense of fair play to the mystery genre. Track of the Cat is the acclaimed novel that first introduced readers to Anna, as a woman looking for peace in the wilderness-and finding murder instead...
Patrolling the remote West Texas backcountry, Anna's first job as a national park ranger is marred by violence she thought she had left behind: the brutal death of a fellow ranger. When the cause of death is chalked up…
Jake Sledge, a rugged ex-cop turned private eye, teams up with his colossal partner Bobo to navigate the gritty streets of River City.
A murdered lawyer drags them into a web of political intrigue, neo-Nazi thugs, and bloody showdowns. With sharp wit and hard-hitting action, Jake tackles scumbags the only…
I grew up in a small, rural, mountain community in Colorado, which is where I learned to love the outdoors. I explored every inch of “my mountain” with my dog, Blueberry. I skied by age three, and my father taught me to fish, shoot a rifle and drive a Jeep before I turned twelve. And I loved to read. To my good fortune, a small stone house at the bottom of our hill housed the public library. The librarian was my best friend. My favorites were mysteries, suspense, and thrillers with strong female characters, which is how I came to be a mystery writer and a founding member of the Rogue Women Writers.
Seventh in Mizushima’s series, this is her best book ever! It’s a very personal story with ties back to Deputy Mattie Cobb’s past. In Striking Range, a woman who has recently given birth is found dead in a mountain campground and her baby is nowhere to be found. While Mattie and her K-9 Robo search for the missing newborn, a deadly storm descends on the Colorado Rockies, and then Mattie’s partner Cole goes missing. Soon she finds herself pitted against a mastermind killer with a cold-blooded plan and personal vendetta. Mizushima is a master at building relationships, but her depiction of the treacherous weather conditions was incredible. Having lived in the mountains of Colorado all my life, and she put me there for every frozen, heart-pounding moment.
A deadly secret is buried in the Colorado high country--and murder is only the beginning in the seventh gripping installment of Margaret Mizushima's Timber Creek K-9 mysteries.
He was suspect number one--the man who tried to kill Deputy Mattie Cobb and may have killed her father thirty years earlier. But when Mattie and cold case detective Jim Hauck reach the Colorado state prison where they will finally get to interview him, he's found dead in his cell. There's only one clue: a map leading to Timber Creek and rugged Redstone Ridge.
Though she usually works with veterinarian Cole Walker, Mattie's…
All of my novels explore, in some way, how the characters are affected by trauma or loss, and how they respond to these difficulties over time. This comes partly from my impatience with the notion of “closure” and with the idea that we can ever truly find it after a traumatic event or a significant loss. I’m drawn to fiction and nonfiction that doesn’t shy away from the messiness of finding a way to live with these difficulties, or trying to. In addition to writing fiction, I’ve spent nearly ten years recommending novels and story collections through my Small Press Picks website.
I love the complex, nuanced way in which this novel explores the long-range consequences of a single tragedy: in the case of this book, the death of a young man who was on the edge of becoming a father. As we enter the perspectives of his sister, the mother of his child, and (in later years) his child, we learn how lives can be rebuilt in the aftermath of a loss, a time when survivors can feel hopelessly broken. We also learn how new—and sometimes unexpected—bonds can be formed. In other words, we see that tragedies can leave more than darkness in their wake. I took hope from this book, and it provided a refreshing perspective, especially in these troubling times.
Melanie Henderson's life is a lie. The scandal of her birth and the identity of her true parents is kept from her family's small, conservative Colorado town. Not even she knows the truth: that her birth mother was just 14 and unmarried to her father, a local boy who drowned when he tried to take a shortcut across an icy river. Thirty-five years later, in Denver, Melanie dabbles in affairs with married men while clinging to a corporate job that gives her life order even as her tenuous relationships fall apart. She still hasn't learned that the woman who raised…
I got interested in long-distance backpacking in my mid-twenties, looking for an escape from the messy life I had created for myself. I wanted to reinvent myself, and a blog about the Appalachian Trail suggested a perfect solution. After 650 miles on the trail and the death of my mother, I knew I would never be the same. In the years since, I have hiked the Wonderland Trail (as featured in Alone in Wonderland) and the Colorado Trail. Backpacking has become more than an escape – it has become home.
Mary's story shows the harsh reality of being a woman in a man's world – wildland firefighting. Her vulnerability and truth were incredibly relatable to me. The pressure to always be on, always strong, always performing, lest one moment of softness be held up as an example of why women don't belong.
FIRE IN THE HEART is a powerful memoir by a woman, once a shy, insecure schoolgirl, who reinvented herself as a professional wildlands firefighter. Determined to forge herself into a stronger, braver person, Mary devotes herself to fire from the Florida swamp to Alaska's interior. Filled with literal struggles for survival, tough choices and Mary's burning passion for what she does, Fire in the Heart, is an unflinching account of one woman's relationship with fire. But when she loses a close friend to the famous Storm King Mountain forest fire in Colorado, which killed fourteen firefighters, Mary faces the hardest…
Caroline Herschel has always lived in the shadows. Beholden to her wildly popular older brother, William, who rescued her from servitude, she's worked hard to build a life for herself – one where she can go unnoticed and repay the debt she believes she owes him. But when her brother…
I grew up in rural Virginia on farms and in the forests where we used fire as a tool, and I loved it. In college, I become a wildland firefighter and squad boss for the US Forest Service, as well as “studying” the topic to augment my practical experience. This followed me into my current academic career that now includes research and teaching in several areas of wildland fire science and management: fire history and ecology, fuels management, ecological restoration, prescribed fire, and post-fire recovery and land management. My career now spans the timeline and societal change covered in several of these books, and I yearn to see a transition.
Humans are a fire species living on a fire planet; we always have been and it is fundamental in our evolution and the development of our civilization.
This book takes the longest and most global perspective on fire, which Scott argues (correctly) will be fundamental to understanding any solution to the wildfire crisis. I am always struck by how dependent on fire we have been and still are for our lives and standard of living (think “internal combustion” engines and energy production); yet, how we have forgotten how to balance our co-existence after generations of thinking we can control it.
The modern world holds this paradox with dangerous consequences.
Raging wildfires have devastated vast areas of California and Australia in recent years, and predictions are that we will see more of the same in coming years, as a result of climate change. But this is nothing new. Since the dawn of life on land, large-scale fires have played their part in shaping life on Earth.
Andrew Scott tells the whole story of fire's impact on our planet's atmosphere, climate, vegetation, ecology, and the evolution of plant and animal life. It has caused mass extinctions, and it has propelled the spread of flowering plants.
I have been passionate about the underlying drivers of environmentally destructive human behavior since I was invited to participate in a study of the impacts of oil development on coastal California when I was in graduate school. At a basic level, I have always been interested in economic development, organizational behavior, and public policy. This project gave me the opportunity to explore the intersection of those interests and expand them into the impacts of humans generally on natural and human-made environments. Southern California oil development and its impacts were not my dissertation topic, but it is one that literally hits close to home, and I have been pursuing it for almost three decades.
I love this book because it hammers home the consequences of relentless energy development. One quote in particular says it all as far as drilling for oil is concerned: “One place cannot be drained for the sake of another without damage to a larger interconnected whole.” Santa Barbarans learned this in 1969. Extraction Ecologies warns of the consequences of climate change for all of us and the species with whom we share an increasingly fragile existence.
I also love this book because Miller uses books I had not read since high school, such as King Solomon’s Mines, to analyze the changes to landscapes and economic and social structures catalyzed by nineteenth-century industrialization and imperialism. Since reading the book, I have been rereading these books in a whole new light.
How literature of the British imperial world contended with the social and environmental consequences of industrial mining
The 1830s to the 1930s saw the rise of large-scale industrial mining in the British imperial world. Elizabeth Carolyn Miller examines how literature of this era reckoned with a new vision of civilization where humans are dependent on finite, nonrenewable stores of earthly resources, and traces how the threatening horizon of resource exhaustion worked its way into narrative form.
Britain was the first nation to transition to industry based on fossil fuels, which put its novelists and other writers in the remarkable position…
I have been passionate about the underlying drivers of environmentally destructive human behavior since I was invited to participate in a study of the impacts of oil development on coastal California when I was in graduate school. At a basic level, I have always been interested in economic development, organizational behavior, and public policy. This project gave me the opportunity to explore the intersection of those interests and expand them into the impacts of humans generally on natural and human-made environments. Southern California oil development and its impacts were not my dissertation topic, but it is one that literally hits close to home, and I have been pursuing it for almost three decades.
I love this book because it explains in a compelling and highly readable way why we humans have charted a path utterly dependent on fossil fuels that marks the Anthropocene and threatens our way of life, if not our very existence. And ultimately, why California will continue to burn. Like Elizabeth Carolyn Miller and Michael Lobel, Stoll shows us our future by digging into our nineteenth-century past.
It is our relentless quest to accumulate and consume that will spell our doom. This need translates into a global and collective pursuit of economic growth. To be sure, oil companies have sowed doubt about the consequences of fossil fuel combustion. But we love our stuff. Even now we are looking for ways to keep on having more of it. And so we are all complicit.
Economic growth is more than an observable fact - it's a belief in the limitless abundance of the natural world. But when did people begin to believe that societies should - even that they must - expand in wealth into the indefinite future? Did they think about the limits of the natural environment? In this vivid book, the historian Steven Stoll considers the way people across the Atlantic world read wealth into nature during the 1830s and 1840s. Opening among the supersized products and high-stacked shelves of Costco, "The Great Delusion" weaves past and present together through the life of…
Rodney Bradford comes into Lindsay's restaurant, offers to buy her small house for double its value, eats her brownies, and drops dead on the sidewalk in front. Next, her almost-ex-husband offers to sign the divorce papers, but only if she'll give him her small,…
I am Lex Fullarton, an innovator of Australia’s first privately owned, industrial-sized solar farm. As a descendant of Australia’s 19th Century Colonials who settled here and turned an ancient productive land into a modern wasteland, I have witnessed the disasters of floods, fires, and hurricanes that plague Northern Australia firsthand. I watch temperatures rise year on year with trepidation. I see hurricanes grow in devastation and experience rising flood levels as deluges pour from the barren land. Action should have been taken decades ago, but today is the only day in our grasp. These books are not the end of the list but rather the beginning.
This book was written by a man who, for decades, was ‘Johnny on the Spot.’ He not only gives a first-hand witness to forest fires in Australia but also the shortcomings of authorities and governments in dealing with them. He also suggests how some of these disasters can be avoided and mitigated. His personal experiences are invaluable in the conquest to fight the factors affecting global warming and climate change.
Combines thrilling stories of what it’s like to be on the front line of Australia’s first giga-fire with the hard truths of human-caused climate change, and what we do about it. Greg Mullins followed his father into fighting bushfires – it was in the blood. He fought major fires around Sydney and the Blue Mountains for decades, and studied bushfires in Europe, Canada and the US. He risked his life in the 1994 Sydney fires and, later, during our catastrophic Black Summer of 2019–20. As a career firefighter, he worked his way up the ranks to become Commissioner of one…
