Books like Loving Chloe — picked by fans

If you’re interested in locked-room mysteries, cozy crime, or magic, then you need to read this book.

Gigi Pandian is one of the best in the business, and with Under Lock & Skeleton Key she launches a brand new and exciting series. Gigi is excellent at creating charming characters that the reader cannot help but care about – this makes the mysteries themselves all the more compelling – and this book captures everything that’s great about her writing. 

This is a seriously funny book full of great dialogue. It’s also a great premise…the hero who makes a bet with his friend to sleep with said friend’s very cranky ex-girlfriend.

Min has just been recently dumped by a man she didn’t love, but she’s not in the mood to deal with any man’s ****. Cal is stupidly handsome, successful, and charming, but he needs to be brought down a peg or ten. This is opposites attract romance with lots of heart!

I fell in love with Kate Shugak as soon as I met her on the page.

Kate's an Aleutian private investigator who lives with Mutt, her half-wolf, half-husky, on a 160-acreage homestead in Alaska. Do you know why Kate carries a scar from ear to ear? Do you know why Kate and Mutt's nearest other neighbors are a grizzly bear and a moose, and why they like it that way?

If so, you probably know how everyone turns to Kate for justice and that this very first book won an Edgar Award. Maybe you, like me, have read all 26 books in this series. High five.

What if you wanted to practice law in India in 1922?

Women weren't allowed in court, but Perveen Mistry becomes a solicitor instead, working behind the scenes on wills and estate files. Perveen's gender becomes an asset when she can speak to women in purdah, a practice where women seclude themselves from men in some Muslim or Hindu communities.

I liked the first book, The Widows of Malabar Hill, but truly enjoyed The Satapur Moonstone, where Perveen heads out to the Sahyadri mountains to help a royal family after the maharaja has died and the crown prince is too young to rule.

In addition to the mystery, and learning about the history of India, I could hear the buzz of mosquitoes, the tree frogs peeping, and the hooting of owls, as well as imagine the tigers and leopards in the jungle.

As with Tara Westover’s book, I was inspired by David Crow’s story of self-determinism in the face of incredible adversity. David was raised in abject poverty on a Navajo reservation. His father was a “violent ex-con who forced his son to commit crimes.”

I related to David’s unwavering resolve, forging his way into college and ultimately creating a successful lobbying firm in D.C. I was drawn in by his simple, unadorned writing and was profoundly moved by his willingness to tell his life story unvarnished and unapologetically.

Most meticulously researched book on the worst blood feud in U. S. History, but, being Mr. Dedera was a news journalist and columnist with The Arizona Republican, it is very readable. Prior to the publication of this manuscript, books about the feud between the Tewksbury and Graham families tended to be biased, sympathizing with the latter while condemning the former (in part because the Tewksburys were half Native American). Dedera was one who discovered the document which proved it conclusively was the Graham who had turned on the Tewksburys. Still, Dedera does not take sides, and he does not pull his punches. He lays out the facts before the reader, and when he does draw conclusions, they are based on the evidence presented. Highly recommended.

A biography that summarily destroys the myth of one of the great outlaws of western cinema. As it turns out, Johnny Ringo was a very minor outlaw and not a particularly good one at that. He was a depressive, an alcoholic, a poor shot, shunned by his friends, rejected by his family, and pretty much a ne’er-do-well. Finally, after an extended binge, he found a comfortable spot beside Turkey Creek in Cochise County and put a bullet through his head (there are a number of authors who have invented elaborate conspiracy theories on how Ringo really came to his death which are only worth reading for their absurd entertainment value). After considering all the facts, Burrows concludes the only reason John Ringo is remembered today is because he had a wonderfully mellifluous name).

This was the book that inspired me to look at Arizona histories with a more critical eye,… show more.

We take our sunsets seriously in Arizona, enough that we put a variation of one on our state flag. But Bruce Berger's book made me rethink how I look at the smeared colors in the evening sky.

Look not west, he says, but to the mountains in the east: the “decreasing wavelengths and cooling colors–vermillion to salmon to plum” on the slopes that provide a lightbox to the garish display at your back.

This is only the start. In finely wrought prose befitting the author’s other career as a pianist, he renders the harsh beauty of the Southwest in a set of twenty essays that draw a portrait of landscape and memory.

The ‘crime’ in Animal Dreams is a legal technicality, and this is a literary contemporary novel rather than a crime one, but its narrative drive comes from the same need to untangle the past to set the characters free (or as free as they can be) in the present.

The writing is glorious – rich, deep, surprising, layered – reaching levels of technical mastery that few other writers even glimpse. There are several point-of-view characters and, unlike most books with this structure, Kingsolver wrings every last drop of drama and interest from the nuances this offers.

Instead of longing to get back to a preferred perspective, the reader revels in how vivid, how real, each character feels in turn. If you love LP Hartley’s The Go-Between, you’ll probably adore this.

The less I say about the plot of this book, the better your reading experience will be. I avoided reading the flap copy, and I recommend you do too. What I can promise you is this: a book set in Arizona and firmly grounded in the reality of racism and deportation in the USA, mixed together with spirituality, mythology, sci-fi pop culture, a surprising solution to a mystery, and, just possibly, aliens from outer space. Plus, beautiful writing! This is one of those books with super short chapters, each of which is a little gem. I loved it.