72 Books Like Nineteen Seventy Four

I tell everyone I know that if they want a book with incredible character development, read The Girl with a Dragon Tattoo.

This book is highly atmospheric. You can feel the biting cold, the fear, the pain. It also has characters with questionable ethics. It made me question how I feel about vengeance and retribution. Some of the content is very dark, yet it doesn’t feel sensationalized.

This is also a thriller with hints of a happy ending—at least, for some people—while also leaving some things uncertain or unresolved. I prefer a thriller to leave me hanging a little . . . 

Maureen O’Donnell’s married lover is found dead in her living room. Suspected of the killing, she decides to find the culprit herself. Along the way, we find out what happened to her and how badly let down she was by the system that should have protected her.

I found this a tough read, a woman’s perspective, casting a forensic eye on male behavior and its consequences.

I suspect one of the reasons I enjoy reading (and writing) about amateur detectives is that I’m instinctively drawn to stories of the dispossessed – those without a voice, forced to take matters into their own hands because the proper authorities won’t listen. Kirstin Innes’ debut novel, about a woman investigating the disappearance of her sex worker sister, is not for the fainthearted: a deep dive into a parallel world that foregrounds the voices of the women who inhabit it and challenges widely-held conceptions about them – namely that they’re all poor, pathetic victims in need of rescuing. Innes’ thorough research shines throughout, and the result is a compelling, informative, and thought-provoking novel that avoids the common tropes associated with the “dead hooker” subgenre of crime fiction.

Though easy to mock for their repetitive plots and outdated societal attitudes, children of all ages devoured Enid Blyton’s mystery stories ravenously, and I was no exception. Blyton was an absurdly prolific writer, and it’s tough to pick a favourite from her expansive catalogue, but if you twisted my arm, I’d have to go with 1945’s The Mystery of the Secret Room. I still remember my excitement as I followed the five intrepid “find-outers” (and dog!) on their quest to uncover the mystery behind a fully furnished room in a supposedly abandoned house, all the while outsmarting the dim-witted local policeman, Mr. Goon. An unusual choice, perhaps, but this book, and indeed Blyton’s entire oeuvre, were a formative influence on me and sparked a lifelong love of amateur detectives.

This book has great warmth and humour. The characters feel so real. It’s set in Yorkshire in the UK, which happens to be where I spent most of my life, so that made it extra enjoyable. I feel not enough people know about Jane Lovering and her books deserve more readers. This is not just another romance, but a romance with heart and depth. I defy anyone not to fall in love with Phinn.

This is the first book in George’s twenty-one book series featuring Scotland Yard Inspector Thomas Lynley, the eighth earl of Asherton, and Detective Sergeant Barbara Havers, a commoner.

When I read A Great Deliverance, I fell in love with George’s beautiful writing, found her two characters fascinating, and adored the cast of characters supporting the detectives. Plus, the book is unusual because the reader knows from the start who the killer is and the investigation focuses on why she killed him.

When I sat down to write my first ever fiction, Linley and Havers were the inspiration for my two detectives, NYPD Detectives Chiara Corelli and P.J. Parker. And I learned from George that the characters are as important, if not more important, than the plot. She inspired my writing.

When Peter Robinson passed away in 2022, he had written 28 novels in the Detective Chief Inspector Alan Banks series.

Robinson needs no introduction here, but I have included him on this list because he sets these novels in a fictional town in the Yorkshire Dales, close to where I grew up, and also because he was very encouraging to me personally when I wrote my first Joe Romano novel.

Whereas the books are very much mainstream crime novels, they also have a literary quality to them. He manages to achieve a fine balance between genre fiction and a more literary style. You often forget that you’re reading crime at all.

The series was also made into TV series (DCI Banks) starring Stephen Tompkinson, which ran for five series, and really captures the essence of the books.

My copy of this book is battered, dog-eared, and creased from the sheer number of times I’ve read and re-read it. It’s an absolutely glorious family saga, recounted by Ruby who narrates her own conception in the first chapter and takes us back through generations weaving together all the different stories that lead up to the events of her own life. It’s brilliantly funny and heartbreaking and it skewers the oddities and dysfunction of family relationships so perfectly. Characters wrestle with their grief, they deny it and suppress it and it rears up to overwhelm them but ultimately they find their way through. I’m with them every step of the way, unable to put the book down whenever I pick it up again…and again! 

As a writer I look to Crombie’s Constable Duncan Kincaid/Sergeant Gemma James series for guidance on how to have your characters grow professionally and personally, to age and experience the kind of changes people go through in real life. I recommend book one of the nineteen in the series, A Share in Death, because it sets up the relationship between the two detectives.

Another incredible rewriting of Wuthering Heights and one that’s as dark and Gothic as Emily’s momentous original. In Ill Will, Michael Stewart picks up Emily’s narrative at the point when Heathcliff, having heard Cathy declare that it would degrade her to marry him, departs the Heights. Stewart unravels the tale of where Heathcliff went during the three years that he was missing from Cathy’s world and imagines what happened to him to make him return in such a vengeful guise. Ill Will is also a rewriting that takes up the issue of race, for here, Heathcliff is a young black man and his departure from the Heights prompts him to trace Mr. Earnshaw’s walk to Liverpool in the hope of finding out who he is.