Here are 100 books that One for the Money fans have personally recommended if you like
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I received the Dungeons and Dragons Basic Red Box as a kid, and I have been hooked on all things fantasy fiction since. It has become a part of my life so much that each character takes on a special importance for me. Some characters exist in worlds full of swords and magic, while others live in realms that are dirty, bleak, and on the brink of utter ruin. As a writer, I enjoy seeing the different perspectives these characters bring to fantasy settings. It makes them unique, each in their own way. Some want to right the wrongs of the worlds they reside in, while others don’t care if it all burns down around them.
I never thought I’d cheer for a crippled torturer, but somehow Abercrombie makes me do it.
The characters in The Blade Itself feel raw and jagged, like real people rather than fantasy archetypes. What I loved most was how no one is truly heroic—everyone’s broken, desperate, or scheming, yet still magnetic. The dialogue crackles with wit, and the shifting perspectives kept me hooked.
It’s grimdark, yes, but never bleak for the sake of it. Instead, it reveals how ugly and fascinating people can be when survival and ambition collide.
Inquisitor Glokta, a crippled and increasingly bitter relic of the last war, former fencing champion turned torturer extraordinaire, is trapped in a twisted and broken body - not that he allows it to distract him from his daily routine of torturing smugglers.
Nobleman, dashing officer and would-be fencing champion Captain Jezal dan Luthar is living a life of ease by cheating his friends at cards. Vain, shallow, selfish and self-obsessed, the biggest blot on his horizon is having to get out of bed in the morning to train with obsessive and boring old men.
She sells books, eats well, and has a very large brain. Criminals fear her.
Meet Beatrice Valentine, a larger-than-life bookshop owner with a penchant for three things in abundance—delicious Italian food, vino, and murder. For decades, she has sold used and rare books from her stylish-but-cluttered domain on New York…
Around age thirteen I discovered Perry Mason and put Nancy Drew on a back shelf. By the time I discovered Raymond Chandler’s mean streets, I was hooked. A vastly over-protected child, I longed to explore places that would make my mother faint. To paraphrase Chandler, I wanted to read about the best woman of her world and a good enough woman for any world. The kind of woman (or yes, a man) who would never ever need to be rescued. And when I sat down to write, I wanted to write about men and women who could handle themselves on those mean streets without turning mean themselves.
I fell in love with Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Milhone in the first paragraph of this book. She’s learned to protect her heart from significant damage, and she’s got a toughness that makes her equal to any drug lord or cold-blooded killer in the streets of L.A. or anywhere else.
She’s hired by a woman who was convicted of killing her husband. She swears she didn’t do it. Of course, right? Kinsey is tasked with finding out who actually did it, and yes, she takes it with the proverbial grain of salt—until the bodies start piling up. Her investigation ranges from Beverly Hills to Las Vegas. Who says rich streets aren’t mean? Trust me, the lady can handle herself while keeping her ethics intact.
`My name is Kinsey Millhone. I'm a private investigator, licensed by the state of California. I'm thirty-two years old, twice divorced, no kids. The day before yesterday I killed someone and the fact weighs heavily on my mind . . .'
When Laurence Fife was murdered, few cared. A slick divorce attorney with a reputation for ruthlessness, Fife was also rumoured to be a slippery ladies' man. Plenty of people in the picturesque Southern California town of Santa Teresa had reason to want him dead. Including, thought the cops, his young and beautiful wife, Nikki. With motive, access and opportunity,…
Not a lot of guys would appreciate having their wives dump a stiff into the middle of a perfectly lovely lecture. My husband, the archivist, was a little nonplussed. But that’s what happens when you’re married to a mystery writer. And since I write historical mysteries, and the lecture was about the history of Los Angeles, that’s how The Old Los Angeles series happened. I also have the Freddie and Kathy series, set in the 1920s, and the Operation Quickline series, set in the 1980s. And being married to an archivist is not only a blast, it’s a big help.
The story may evoke the rip-roaring thrillers of yore in terms of probability, but dang, from the first lines, I was hooked. There is nothing like seeing 19th-century Egypt through the eyes of Amelia Peabody.
I could practically hear the calls of the crowded streets of Cairo, feel the warmth of the desert sand and the spookiness of a night in a canyon. It was not intentional, I promise, but Miss Peabody’s voice may have had the tiniest bit of influence on a certain Victorian lady that I write about–and this book is why.
Amelia Peabody is Elizabeth Peters' most brilliant and best-loved creation, a thoroughly Victorian feminist who takes the stuffy world of archaeology by storm with her shocking men's pants and no-nonsense attitude!
In this first adventure, our headstrong heroine decides to use her substantial inheritance to see the world. On her travels, she rescues a gentlewoman in distress - Evelyn Barton-Forbes - and the two become friends. The two companions continue to Egypt where they face mysteries, mummies and the redoubtable Radcliffe Emerson, an outspoken archaeologist, who doesn't need women to help him solve mysteries -- at least that's what he…
Mood swings and insomnia are one thing, hot flash-induced psychic visions are quite another. When Olivia Wilde realizes the visions she’s experiencing in the midst of hot flashes are actually premonitions, she must learn to understand and trust what she sees in order to help a friend, preserve a piece…
My greatest passion? Human nature and the endless cycles we repeat, different on the surface yet identical at their core. We build systems, cultures, and rules, destroy them, then rebuild everything in remarkably similar forms, as though we possessed no memory of the past. I have studied human nature throughout my life, but this passion took shape at university through cultural anthropology and comparative theology. Over thirty years, it has guided my work in developing human potential and talent, and has been refined further through working with thousands of people from more than 200 countries and territories. It is now the lens through which I write speculative fiction.
Science fiction can be hilarious without becoming merely ridiculous. It can bend the genre’s conventions without losing its way, and unleash its imagination while still taking sharp aim at human arrogance.
I read this book before it was widely recognized as a classic, and immediately loved its mixture of adventure, unforgettable characters, and jokes so brilliant that they became cultural touchstones around the world.
Most of all, I loved never being able to imagine what would happen on the next page. Few books offer the same combination of speed, adventure, unpredictability, and genuine laughter. Ever since I finished it, I have kept a small towel nearby, just in case the world ends.
This box set contains all five parts of the' trilogy of five' so you can listen to the complete tales of Arthur Dent, Ford Prefect, Zaphod Bebblebrox and Marvin the Paranoid Android! Travel through space, time and parallel universes with the only guide you'll ever need, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
Read by Stephen Fry, actor, director, author and popular audiobook reader, and Martin Freeman, who played Arthur Dent in film version of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. He is well known as Tim in The Office.
The set also includes a bonus DVD Life, the Universe and…
I am a writer of true crime, which makes me keenly aware of the credibility of police procedural books. I also write crime fiction and am drawn to series that provide an interesting and thought-provoking protagonist in the framework of excellent writing. I survived an attempted abduction as a child and have had an interest in crime books since then, starting with the Jane Withers mystery my dad brought home from Goodwill and, of course, the Nancy Drew series.
For starters, I was sucked into the story by the name of the protagonist, Hieronymus Bosch. I had long been drawn to the dark paintings of the artist and expected a lot from his namesake.
In this first book in this series, the body of a man who fought side-by-side with Bosch in a hellish battle in Vietnam was found in a drainpipe. To solve the case, Harry has to relive the horror of Nam and make the choice between justice and vengeance.
An LAPD homicide detective must choose between justice and vengeance as he teams up with the FBI in this "thrilling" novel filled with mystery and adventure (New York Times Book Review). For maverick LAPD homicide detective Harry Bosch, the body in the drainpipe at Mulholland Dam is more than another anonymous statistic. This one is personal . . . because the murdered man was a fellow Vietnam "tunnel rat" who had fought side by side with him in a hellish underground war. Now Bosch is about to relive the horror of Nam. From a dangerous maze of blind alleys…
As a great-great-great-great-grandchild of Irish immigrants, I come from a long, proud line of alcoholics, especially on my mother’s side. My childhood was a masterclass in chaos: family scream-fests, flung insults, and someone cracking a joke while dodging a punch. It was painful, yes, but also absurd and often hilarious. That’s where my dark wit comes from. Razor-sharp humor was how we made it out alive. It becomes a lens you’re trained to observe the world through since you were a wee lad. I’ve always been drawn to stories where grief and laughter sit at the same table, clinking pints. Satire and absurdity aren’t interests for me. They’re muscle memory.
I didn’t know whether to laugh or stage an intervention. This book introduced me to Ignatius J. Reilly, a character so insufferable and absurdly grandiose that I kept turning pages just to see how much worse he could get. I was horrified and hypnotized. I couldn’t look away.
What I love about this book is that it doesn’t ask you to like anyone. It asks you to witness the glorious wreckage of human delusion. It is chaotic, bloated, brilliant, and somehow still moving. Toole gave me a character I wanted to strangle, and a novel I wanted to reread. That kind of friction is rare, and I live for it.
'This is probably my favourite book of all time' Billy Connolly
A pithy, laugh-out-loud story following John Kennedy Toole's larger-than-life Ignatius J. Reilly, floundering his way through 1960s New Orleans, beautifully resigned with cover art by Gary Taxali _____________
'This city is famous for its gamblers, prostitutes, exhibitionists, anti-Christs, alcoholics, sodomites, drug addicts, fetishists, onanists, pornographers, frauds, jades, litterbugs, and lesbians . . . don't make the mistake of bothering me.'
Ignatius J. Reilly: fat, flatulent, eloquent and almost unemployable. By the standards of ordinary folk he is pretty much…
"In AIsRYourFriends, John J Jessop continues the hilarious adventures of the PI firm run by Dr. Jason and Chelsea Longfellow. The loving but dysfunctional couple this time wrestles with Florida gators who are killing corporate executives with their mistresses. Added to the mix are AI-run devices that are taking…
I’ve always been drawn to the quiet mystery behind ordinary lives, the sense that something sacred hides in the margins. As a caregiver, teacher, and author, I’ve seen how small moments carry enormous weight. That’s why I created this book list: each title touched me deeply and helped shape my own writing, especially Midrash Whispered By Stars. I write to honor forgotten souls, overlooked stories, and the quiet transformations that happen when no one’s watching. These books aren’t just favorites, they’re part of the emotional and spiritual DNA behind everything I create.
I recommend this book because it reminded me how deeply animals weave themselves into the quiet corners of our lives.
The story follows one soul through many lifetimes, and I loved how it captured loyalty, loss, and the small sacred moments that shape us. It’s perfect for readers who believe that love often arrives in humble forms and that companionship can change the direction of a life.
It fits my theme because it shows how meaning is often found in the fringes, in the overlooked places where devotion quietly lives. And it connects to my own writing because both honor the sacred weight carried inside ordinary lives.
This is the remarkable story of one endearing dog's search for his purpose over the course of several lives. More than just another charming dog story, "A Dog's Purpose" touches on the universal quest for an answer to life's most basic question: Why are we here? Surprised to find himself reborn as a rambunctious golden-haired puppy after a tragically short life as a stray mutt, Bailey's search for his new life's meaning leads him into the loving arms of 8-year-old Ethan. During their countless adventures Bailey joyously discovers how to be a good dog. But this life as a beloved…
I became fascinated with history when I moved to Gloucester in the nineties. The city is hugely historical from the early Roman settlers through to the industrial age of the nineteenth century. What is more fascinating is that many of the streets and buildings I write about still exist in the city today. I carried out extensive research when writing my first historical fiction novel to immerse myself in the medieval city as it would have been in 1497. When I came to write my second novel, listed below, the first book in the Hebraica Trilogy, I already had a good idea of the layout of the city.
I loved this book because it is another time-slip novel, but mostly because of the characters that Gabaldon has created. Claire is a strong woman both in the present time zone–post-war Britain–and the Scottish Highland time zone of the seventeenth century and the uprising. You sense immediately that she is in danger as the story is told from her point of view.
I loved learning about the lives of the Scottish highlanders, how the story moves from one-time zone to another, and how the characters overlap.
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The first book in Diana Gabaldon’s acclaimed Outlander saga, the basis for the Starz original series.
One of the top ten best-loved novels in America, as seen on PBS’s The Great American Read!
Unrivaled storytelling. Unforgettable characters. Rich historical detail. These are the hallmarks of Diana Gabaldon’s work. Her New York Times bestselling Outlander novels have earned the praise of critics and captured the hearts of millions of fans. Here is the story that started it all, introducing two remarkable characters, Claire Beauchamp Randall and Jamie Fraser, in a spellbinding novel of passion…
A year after taking an art history course in college, I visited the Impressionist Museum in Paris and felt I could recall all my professor’s lectures—word-for-word. It was as if the paintings were talking to me. Exhilarated by that experience of connection, I went on to get a master’s degree in art history and have since traveled the world in search of great art. As a timeless human expression, both stimulating and comforting, art gives me a profound sense of emotional satisfaction that I believe the books on my list beautifully explore.
I loved being immersed in the Middle Ages with characters so emotionally real I didn’t want to leave them. I’m fascinated by the complexity of Gothic architecture and agonized along with the builders as they struggled to complete their masterpiece.
I also loved how the cathedral’s slow, steady construction provided a solid framework for decades of interwoven stories, like a tall, straight tree growing from tangled roots. The author’s passion for the timeless magnificence of Gothic architecture made me feel as if I were standing before it, spellbound and transported.
The "extraordinary . . . monumental masterpiece" (Booklist) that changed the course of Ken Follett's already phenomenal career-and begins where its prequel, The Evening and the Morning, ended.
"Follett risks all and comes out a clear winner," extolled Publishers Weekly on the release of The Pillars of the Earth. A departure for the bestselling thriller writer, the historical epic stunned readers and critics alike with its ambitious scope and gripping humanity. Today, it stands as a testament to Follett's unassailable command of the written word and to his universal appeal.
Part romance/erotica and part family drama, but all heart.
Scarlett loved horses since she was a child, living amidst the chaos of a family ravaged by mental illness. Years later, as she rebuilds a relationship with her often-absent father, she wrangles with needy clients, a manipulative mother, a nosy uncle,…
I have been passionate about animals all my life. I was raised on and currently help operate the family farm near Petersburg, Tennessee. I have a doctorate in animal science and joined Middle Tennessee State University (MTSU) as a Professor of Animal Science and Department Chair on August 1, 2007, after retiring from a 25-year career with the Extension Service (University of Tennessee and University of Kentucky). I enjoy participating in community activities such as the Petersburg Community Cultural Coalition, Petersburg Lion’s Club, and serving as President of the University of Tennessee Institute of Agriculture Retiree’s Association. I have written two books, Cane Creek Days and Princess of Horses.
This is not a book about animals, but it is a great book in which animals play a critical role.
This is the seventh book in Hiassen’s Florida-based Skink series and possibly the best. One of the main characters, Angie Armstrong, is a wildlife wrangler with extraordinary skills which leads to hilarious consequences.
This book also manages intriguing social and political commentary including Kiki Pew Fitzsimmons’ efforts to support a fictional president whose behavior is similar and almost as wacky as our former leader who is apparently running again – I hope someone reads this book to him.
'One of the world's funniest novelists' SUNDAY TIMES
'Scabrous and unrelentingly hilarious . . . the Trump era is truly Carl Hiaasen's moment' WASHINGTON POST
From the highly acclaimed author of Bad Monkey and Razor Girl comes this hilarious new novel of social and political intrigue, set against the glittering backdrop of Florida's gold coast.
It's the height of the Palm Beach charity ball season: for every good cause, there's a reason for the local luminaries to eat (minimally), drink (maximally), and be seen. But when prominent high-society dowager Kiki Pew suddenly vanishes during a swanky gala, and is later…
