Books like Last Warriors on the Llano — picked by fans

Georgie Gail is one of the most colorful characters I’ve ever read. There is nothing conventional about her personality, profession, or her bird-watching hobby. The author made me feel like Georgie was an old, dear friend very early in the story. I felt her pain over failed relationships and loved her gumption as she tried to provide for herself. The way the author brought a mix of romance and action, while pairing up two opposite main characters with plenty of comedic dialogue, made the story come alive for me. It was one of the most entertaining novels I’ve read in a long time.

Large publishers have, by and large, turned their noses up at horror and left the indie presses to carry the genre's baton. Set in rural 1920s Texas, this novel brings a few new elements to its chosen trope, and author Timothy Hobbs creates memorable and entertaining characters.

His prose is easy to read—an admirable quality lacking in a lot of modern fiction, I think—yet he generates a sense of place, builds atmosphere, and paints wince-inducing images of gruesomeness. As I write this, I can still ‘see’ his town of Hamilton and remember the people that populate it.

Dead Man’s Walk is the third book in the Lonesome Dove series. It is difficult for me to write a review because the book and film are part of my family story. Dead Man’s Walk is a true story inspired by McMurtry’s research into the failed Santa Fe Expedition of 1841. His fictional characters Matilda Jane Roberts, Gus McCrae, and Woodrow Call make a brutal story of humanity, a fun read. Most of the characters' names are fictitious, however, the Comanche Indian Chief named Buffalo Hump was real. His tribe in 1841 killed my great-great-great grandfather Thomas W. Smith and his son James in separate attacks. The Comanche also captured my great-grandmother’s nine-year-old cousin Fayette Smith in the attack that killed his father Judge James Smith on the banks of Shoal Creek. I have written their story in my book and its soon-to-be-released sequel.   

The first in Locke’s Highway 59 series, featuring African American Texas ranger Darren Matthews involving two bodies one black, one white that wash up in a small East Texas town.

The story combines procedural, western, and Southern gothic to give an entertaining, human, yet unflinching look at race both past and present. This book enlightened me on how much African Americans contribute to what we call Texas culture.

This coverage of the crime wave of the Overton gang who burgled, pimped, and committed various crimes up and down I-35 is nonfiction, but hard to believe at times.

The story paints vivid time in Austin with a supporting cast of colorful lawyers, madams, and even UT Tower sniper Charles Whitman. Jesse Sublett, author, musician, painter, journalist, and photographer is basically as close as Austin has to royalty and portrays the events in a rock n’ roll style.

I’d also recommend Jesse’s fiction series staring bass player and skip tracer Martin Fender.

In contrast to his books about the Old West, McMurtry’s contemporary Westerns tell a more unvarnished truth. I read this book for the umpteenth time just prior to beginning my first novel, Where the Hurt Is. My book was a crime novel. McMurtry’s was a coming-of-age story. Nevertheless, his depiction of his book’s quasi-fictional Thalia, Texas rang so many bells and reminded me so much of the small Oklahoma towns where I grew up, I can’t deny being influenced by it.

At times, I would grow short of breath as I was reminded of parallel characters and events from my own childhood. Even today, the claustrophobia of Thalia and its characters’ fear of being unable to escape scares the crap out of me.

After reading a lot of true crime, I need a break from reality. That’s when I escape into murderous thrillers by May Cobb, an author many people call the Jackie Collins of Texas.

Whereas Jackie wrote about the glamorous and cosmopolitan, May writes about the small-town scions of East Texas, who think they’re glamorous and cosmopolitan.

A Likeable Woman, which comes out July 11, 2023, revolves around Kira, who has believed since she was 12 years old that her mother was murdered. Everyone else in Longview, Texas, including her grandmother and sister, knows that Sadie Foster committed suicide.

Decades later, Kira learns that her grandmother holds an unpublished memoir written by Sadie that indicates Kira might have been right all along.

A Likeable Woman contains everything that drives my writing passions—murder, memoir, and East Texas—and reads at breakneck speed. 

For me, this book is the best of the Vietnam War “aftermath” novels, books dealing with veterans’ post-war physical and psychological struggles. Winner of the 1987 National Book Award for fiction, this novel, according to the author in our 2005 interview, was written to “get the hair up on the back of your [reader’s] neck.” Haunting, as well as times cynical, ironic, and brutally graphic, the author accomplishes his goal. Heinemann deftly portrays Army veteran Paco Sullivan’s cross-country odyssey, via interstate buses, in search of both spiritual and physical homes. This interstate nomad is a tragic character—mysterious and complex. At the end of this thought-provoking and uncomfortable novel, I am left with an unresolved question: is Paco a sympathetic victim of the war and America’s indifference to veterans or an active agent in his own physical and psychological turmoil? 

I appreciate Dina's dedication. It makes her predictable in some ways, but this book does such a great job of showing the many facets of her dedication and endorses many of her actions while also forcing her to face the consequences and the need to rethink some things.

But I also come and stay and reread for the many wonderful, diverse secondary characters! I'd love to stay at Gertrude Hunt and listen (and shiver) over Caldenia's stories. I'd go for the chance to try Orro's cooking in an instant! There are too many other great characters for me to pick from, or I'd go on and on and on.

It's Dina's story, but I admire how multi-faceted her world is and how many secondary characters are fully realized. Not to mention Dina's skill at making guest rooms to suit guests, can she come and do my place?

Lawman was my introduction to the novels of Diana Palmer, which have become my go-to for contemporary romance. Perhaps I found Lawman compelling because the heroine's history of trauma stirred some memories of my own. The taut thriller quality of the tale certainly kept me reading, as well. And a happy ending is a must, even if I want to slap a stubborn hero upside the head from time to time. (Well, yes, the heroine sometimes needs an attitude check, too.)