Here are 58 books that Never Coming Home fans have personally recommended if you like
Never Coming Home.
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Ten-year-old me once looked in the bathroom mirror wondering who I would become. I tried to memorize the patterns in the tiles to hold on to that moment and carry it with me. My fascination with memory and the past permeates my novels. I love a good cold case—and my August Monet thriller trilogy is all about how the past weaves through the present—informing it, haunting it, transporting secrets. Maybe it’s our long, dark winters, but I see this same fascination in the novels of my fellow Canadian thriller writers. Many have created messy characters haunted by their messy pasts. Here’s a list of my favourites.
In the opening pages of Bury Your Dead, Penny gives us a heart-pounding glimpse into a moment that went horribly wrong.
Right away, she lays bare the terrible incident in the past that now haunts her beloved character, Chief Inspector Armand Gamache in the present. He’s come to Quebec City to get his head straight, to walk his friend’s dog, to disappear for a while. But nothing’s ever that simple.
A mystery bubbles up and Gamache can’t resist getting involved. It’s in his blood, despite still struggling with past demons. What I love about this novel is the snowy, history-laden atmosphere Penny creates that beautifully mirrors Gamache’s desire to hide away from the world, making it a wonderful book to snuggle up with on a cozy winter’s night.
'Outstanding ... a constantly surprising series' THE NEW YORK TIMES
There is more to solving a crime than following the clues. Welcome to Chief Inspector Gamache's world of facts and feelings.
As Quebec City shivers in the grip of winter, its ancient stone walls cracking in the cold, Chief Inspector Armand Gamache plunges into the strangest case of his celebrated career.
A man has been brutally murdered in one of the city's oldest buildings - a library where the English citizens of Quebec safeguard their history. And the death opens a door into the past, exposing a mystery that has…
Set against the backdrop of the flourishing musical community during the 1940s in Baltimore, Notes of Love and War weaves together the pleasure of musical performance with the dangers of espionage and spying.
Audrey Harper needs more than home and hearth to satisfy her self-worth. Working as a music critic…
Ten-year-old me once looked in the bathroom mirror wondering who I would become. I tried to memorize the patterns in the tiles to hold on to that moment and carry it with me. My fascination with memory and the past permeates my novels. I love a good cold case—and my August Monet thriller trilogy is all about how the past weaves through the present—informing it, haunting it, transporting secrets. Maybe it’s our long, dark winters, but I see this same fascination in the novels of my fellow Canadian thriller writers. Many have created messy characters haunted by their messy pasts. Here’s a list of my favourites.
I picked up Tector’s novel because it’s set in my hometown of Ottawa, and I kept reading because she’s crafted a wonderfully flawed character who just won’t quit.
Cate Spencer is a coroner who relies on two things: her instincts and too much scotch to numb her painful past. When a woman is found hanging in the vaults of an archives building, Cate arrives on the scene.
It looks like suicide, but Cate can’t bring herself to rule the death accidental. Not yet. Something’s not right. The more she digs, the more menace stalks her, and the more the past threatens to derail her world completely.
Was the death a murder and if so, why? Dripping with long-buried secrets, this thriller kept me reading long into the night.
“A literary joyride.” —Louise Penny, New York Times bestselling author of the Chief Inspector Gamache novels
More than ten years after The Foulest Things, murder and mayhem return to Ottawa in the highly-anticipated next installment of Amy Tector’s acclaimed Dominion Archives Mystery series.
It’s a stormy summer day when Ottawa coroner Dr. Cate Spencer is called to the scene of an alleged suicide. Inside a narrow vault in the Dominion Archives’ nitrate film storage facility—kept separate from the rest of the collection due to its dangerous combustibility—officers pressure Cate to rule the death a suicide. When parts of the scene…
Ten-year-old me once looked in the bathroom mirror wondering who I would become. I tried to memorize the patterns in the tiles to hold on to that moment and carry it with me. My fascination with memory and the past permeates my novels. I love a good cold case—and my August Monet thriller trilogy is all about how the past weaves through the present—informing it, haunting it, transporting secrets. Maybe it’s our long, dark winters, but I see this same fascination in the novels of my fellow Canadian thriller writers. Many have created messy characters haunted by their messy pasts. Here’s a list of my favourites.
A thriller with a kick-ass premise: Chloe wakes up on the side of a highway not knowing who the heck she is or how she got there.
It’s a haunting, scary, unnerving story about a woman trying to figure out what could have happened to completely wipe out her memory. What I love about the novel is how Wong’s relentless pace matches lockstep with her protagonist’s frenzied and fractured state of mind.
Bits of the past begin to slip through the cracks as Chloe searches for the truth. I love that Wong chose to tell the story from Chloe’s POV so we’re only privy to what this messy character remembers—or chooses to tell us that she remembers. Twisted, damaged characters with secrets are my cup of tea.
“A chilling, nerve-jangling journey into lost memories and unforgettable terrors. Sandra Wong knows what scares us all—and what we can never forget.” —Tess Gerritsen, New York Times–bestselling author of Listen to Me
A jolting psychological suspense novel from an up-and-coming Chinese-Canadian crime writer about missing parents, a winning lottery ticket and the lies we tell ourselves in order to survive.
Some things are better left forgotten . . .
When a woman wakes up with amnesia beside a mountain highway, confused and alone, she fights to regain her identity, only to learn that her parents have disappeared—not long after her…
Set against the backdrop of the flourishing musical community during the 1940s in Baltimore, Notes of Love and War weaves together the pleasure of musical performance with the dangers of espionage and spying.
Audrey Harper needs more than home and hearth to satisfy her self-worth. Working as a music critic…
Ten-year-old me once looked in the bathroom mirror wondering who I would become. I tried to memorize the patterns in the tiles to hold on to that moment and carry it with me. My fascination with memory and the past permeates my novels. I love a good cold case—and my August Monet thriller trilogy is all about how the past weaves through the present—informing it, haunting it, transporting secrets. Maybe it’s our long, dark winters, but I see this same fascination in the novels of my fellow Canadian thriller writers. Many have created messy characters haunted by their messy pasts. Here’s a list of my favourites.
Clare is on the run and on the hunt for a missing girl.
What kept me reading was the tumult of questions that kept bubbling to the surface as Clare reluctantly and relentlessly searches—so many questions followed her on her solo journey. Who is she really running from and who is she working for? What is her end game? Where is the missing girl, Shayna and who doesn’t want her to discover the truth?
Clare is a woman with a very messy past—which is why she’s perfect for the job. She’s got nothing to lose. But she’s also got the past hot on her heels. There’s nothing like a strong, female character haunted by her past to get me turning the pages.
A taut psychological thriller in the vein of The Good Girl by Mary Kubica.
Clare is on the run.
From her past, from her husband, and from her own secrets. When she turns up alone in the remote mining town of Blackmore asking about Shayna Fowles, the local girl who disappeared, everyone wants to know who Clare really is and what she’s hiding. As it turns out, she’s hiding a lot, including what ties her to Shayna in the first place. But everyone in this place is hiding something—from Jared, Shayna’s secretive ex-husband, to Charlie, the charming small-town drug pusher,…
I am a Canadian with bachelor's degrees in history and communications and over thirty-five years of experience in the Canadian Army reserves. My interest in the German Army of the Third Reich period has led to interviews with surviving veterans, visits to various battlefields, a successful YouTube channel, and involvement in military-themed hobbies such as war re-enactment and wargaming which in turn has led to the publication of many related books and magazine articles. Like all of us writing on the subject of Germans in the Second World War, I find it often poorly understood yet hugely compelling for its complex legal, historical, and moral aspects.
I think it is only natural to include an autobiography in a list like this, and Bruno Friesen's book is compelling to me for several reasons, mainly because he was a Canadian who ended up in the German Army.
Friesen talks about these curious circumstances honestly and with good humour, and the book transitions quickly from light-hearted reminiscences to a really very good technical study of what it was like to fight in tanks on the Eastern Front.
I thought the book illustrated well how an individual could fight against the multiple dehumanizing forces of modern war and come out the other end with spirit intact. The book juxtaposes well the helplessness of men fighting in machines with their human survival instincts.
There are few memoirs available of German Panzer crews that focus on the climactic last 12 months of the war on the Eastern Front, 1944-45. What makes Bruno Friesen's account virtually unique is his family background: his parents came from a German-speaking Mennonite community in Ukraine, and were to all intents and purposes culturally German. To make matters even more complex, in 1924 his parents left Ukraine for Canada, where Bruno was born.
In March 1939 he and his brother Oscar found themselves on a ship bound for Bremerhaven in Germany. He barely spoke German, and had never been to…
I am a Canadian-American writer of Indian heritage, an award-winning novelist and short fiction writer, playwright, and poet. I grew up in Delhi, hearing stories from my maternal grandparents who were refugees during the 1947 Partition of India. So, as my work reflects, I’m drawn to stories of resilience in the face of cultural conflict, religious upheaval, migration, immigration, and displacement. My MBA is from Marquette University, and my MFA from the University of British Columbia. I am working on another novel.
In 1984, a 15-year old Indo-Canadian Maya travels with her father to India to consign her mother's ashes to the Ganges. Prime Minister Indira Gandhi is assassinated the very day they arrive and Delhi descends into state-sponsored carnage as Sikh men and women are held collectively responsible. Separated from her father, Maya has to find her way home. This novel in verse is by Canadian writing across ethnic and religious lines. As a Sikh, I am familiar with details of the pogrom. Instead of applying the usual Western label of “senseless violence” Ostlere sensitively explores the impact on two ordinary young people.
It is 1984, and fifteen-year-old Maya is on her way to India with her father. She carries with her the ashes of her mother, who recently committed suicide, and arrives in Delhi on the eve of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi's assassination.
Maya is separated from her father and must rely upon the mysterious, kindhearted Sandeep to safely reunite them. As her love for Sandeep begins to blossom, Maya must face the truth about her painful adolescence...if she's ever to imagine her future.
True crime stories offer a window into the past, transporting readers to another time and place. They reveal human behaviour at its worst and people striving to do the right thing. And the narrative is always dramatic and compelling, with mysteries to be solved, suspects to be captured, justice to be done. My books profile a Jazz Age con artist, a Victorian Era serial killer, and a gentleman jewel thief of the 1920s. I write a column of true crime stories and book reviews for Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and I teach in the MFA in Creative Nonfiction program at the University of King’s College in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
Wallace—a history professor, librarian, and bookseller—was one of Canada’s first true crime writers. This collection of sixteen stories of murder and mayhem, first published in 1931, is a trove of long-forgotten tales. Some of the crimes he chronicles made international headlines. Harry and Dallas Hyams, identical twin brothers from New Orleans, were accused of killing an employee in Toronto in 1893 to collect on insurance policies. Adelard Delorme, a Catholic priest in Montreal, stood trial four times for the 1922 murder of his brother and was ultimately set free. Wallace apologized for straying from mainstream history into the realm of the gruesome and sensational to record, as he put it, “what God in His wisdom saw fit to permit to happen.”
I am a historian and a social geographer whose main interest is in examining why some of us are embraced (legally, politically, economically, culturally) by the society we live in while some others are excluded. Probably due to my status as someone who is an immigrant to Canada and also a person with a disability, the topic of belonging and exclusion fascinates me.
Omar Khadr is a personal friend of mine, the gentlest soul I have met since setting foot on Canadian soil. This collection has been essential to my understanding of Canada’s unwillingness to stand up for one of its own citizens. It highlights how belonging in the nation is not necessarily a right all citizens enjoy, and invites a serious reflection on what citizenship means in this country.
In 2002 a fifteen-year-old Canadian citizen was captured in Afghanistan for allegedly killing an American soldier. A badly wounded Omar Khadr was transferred to the US Bagram Air Force base and then Guantanamo Bay detention camp. He would remain there without trial until October 2010, when a military commission admitted evidence considered tainted by Canadian courts. A plea bargain and guilty plea initiated his promised return to Canada a year later. Some Canadians see Khadr as a symbol of terrorism in action. For others he is the victim of a jihadist father and Canadian complicity in the unjust excesses, including…
I love gathering poets together to celebrate different causes. In fact, I hosted a weekly literary radio show, Gathering Voices, for seven years and published a book/cd collection, Gathering Voice. Since 1972, I have been publishing poetry as well as editing anthologies that collect differing voices, as an activist and poet/editor: gathering voices for women, nature, and social justice is my passion. Given the immensity of suffering in the war on Ukraine, I was galvanized to gather together poems in solidarity with Ukrainians. The anthology, co-edited with Richard-Yves Sitoski, was launched 3 months after the invasion began: a huge endeavor that included 48 activist poets.
This anthology attempts to answer ongoing questions about struggle in poems that engaged, challenged, and comforted me. What might survival sound or look like to us in our daily lives? Is it loud, refusing silence, demanding action? Or quiet, interior? What does surviving feel like in the body, this long into the pandemic? What techniques have helped us exist, continue to bear witness, learn to live with illness, grief, and pain? Is survival the continual interrogation of inequity and oppressive structures? What happens when we get tired of fighting?
Survival may very well be a composite of things; both a tending to one’s inner life and to the processing of life events, as well as the will to act, retrieve momentum. It is also a plurality/multiplicity of practices that serve to keep us well—as persons and with respect to our communities, the ongoing project of social justice/civil rights, which involves…
I write North Noir, detective fiction set in the Northeastern USA and Canada. I like mystery/detective stories told with descriptive flair, with clever twists and unforgettable protagonists. Why would you want to read my recommendations? I’ve read hundreds of mystery/detective novels, in all subgenres, from cozy to noir. I’ve been a book review editor, for all types of books. I don’t go for bent cops or over-the-top bloodbaths. If you like character-driven mystery/detective novels, try these five.
A Siege of Bitterns features an unusual protagonist: a reluctant detective. DI Domenic Jejeune is a Canadian transplanted to the UK, to premier birding country. Jejeune likes bird watching as much, if not more, than solving murders. He occasionally comes across as a tortured eccentric. One wonders how he can solve crimes. But he does. His odd individualism is reminiscent of famous fictional detectives like Sherlock Holmes or Hercule Poirot. A Siege of Bitterns features a tangled bird’s nest of false starts and red herrings. Burrows doesn’t shy away from descriptive prose and yet the novel doesn’t lose momentum. It stays focused on the prize: the whodunit.
Inspector Domenic Jejeune's success has made him a poster boy for the U.K. police service. The problem is Jejeune doesn't really want to be a detective at all; he much prefers watching birds. Recently reassigned to the small Norfolk town of Saltmarsh, located in the heart of Britain's premier birding country, Jejeune's two worlds collide when he investigates the grisly murder of a prominent ecological activist. His ambitious police superintendent foresees a blaze of welcome publicity, but she begins to have her doubts when Jejeune's most promising theory involves a feud over birdwatching lists. A second murder only complicates matters.…
