Here are 100 books that Out of the Easy fans have personally recommended if you like
Out of the Easy.
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I’m a BIG reader of mysteries and thrillers, but I hate it when you read a thriller and guess who did it on page 20, or it turns out it’s a character so obscure you could never have guessed it! But it’s easy to criticize! I’ve wanted to write a young adult thriller since I was young, and over the last few years, I found myself more able to try. For me, writing my book was like running a marathon…I wasn’t sure if I could do it, but now I’m really happy that I did!
This book by Barry Lyga absolutely captivated me with its intense, dark narrative.
The story centers around Jasper "Jazz" Dent, who grew up as the son of the country’s most notorious serial killer. (Talk about a family tree!) Having been exposed to gruesome lessons in murder from a very young age, Jazz is haunted by the fear that he might follow in his father’s footsteps.
It helps explore the terrifying notion of nature versus nurture. Jazz’s battle with his own potential for evil is chilling, and it makes the read not just a thriller but a deep dive into his fight for a normal life. As bodies start appearing in Jazz's small town, he recognizes patterns that match his father’s killings, and so he starts to help the police. The pacing is superb, intertwining Jazz’s personal demons with a gripping murder investigation.
What if the world's worst serial killer...was your dad? Jasper (Jazz) Dent is a likable teenager. A charmer, one might say. But he's also the son of the world's most infamous serial killer and for Dear Old Dad, Take Your Son to Work Day was year-round. Jazz has witnessed crime scenes the way cops wish they could - from the criminal's point of view. And now bodies are piling up in Lobo's Nod. In an effort to clear his name, Jazz joins the police in a hunt for a new serial killer but Jazz has a secret--could he be more…
I have always straddled between the worlds of fiction and poetry. I received my MFA in poetry in 2016, but during my time in the program, I was often told my poems were too narrative. Sometimes in my fiction workshops in undergrad, I was told my stories were too poetic. So when I finally jumped into the world of verse, I really fell in love with the intersection of poetry and story. Finally, there was a medium that felt “just right!” There are so many fantastic novels in verse out there—with so many more to come—but I hope you’ll enjoy these five favorites of mine!
Long Way Down does an incredible job of telling such a contained story, telling everything within the span of a single elevator ride.
Reynolds uses the elevator trip to make the protagonist encounter ghosts of multiple dead people in his community, all connected to his murdered brother, and question if vengeance is the right answer to his grief. This is a well-deserved classic, and a must-read for all novel-in-verse fans!
“An intense snapshot of the chain reaction caused by pulling a trigger.” —Booklist (starred review) “Astonishing.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review) “A tour de force.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
A Newbery Honor Book A Coretta Scott King Honor Book A Printz Honor Book A Time Best YA Book of All Time (2021) A Los Angeles Times Book Prize Winner for Young Adult Literature Longlisted for the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature Winner of the Walter Dean Myers Award An Edgar Award Winner for Best Young Adult Fiction Parents’ Choice Gold Award Winner An Entertainment Weekly Best YA Book…
I graduated from Lower Cape May Regional High School in the '80s. My classes revolved mostly around the culinary sciences and theater, with the occasional nap in Chemistry. I write culinary cozy mysteries from my Northern Virginia office while trying to keep my naughty cat off my keyboard. I was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease that prevents me from eating gluten without exploding. I now create gluten-free goodies at home and include the recipes in my Cape May-based Poppy McAllister series. Most of my hobbies revolve around eating and travel, and eating while traveling. My secret powers include finding my way to any coffee shop anywhere in the world, even while blindfolded.
Twenty-eight-year-old widow Ricki James leaves Los Angeles to start a new life in New Orleans after her showboating actor husband perishes doing a stupid internet stunt. The Big Easy is where she was born and adopted by the NICU nurse who cared for her after Ricki’s teen mother disappeared from the hospital.
Ricki’s dream comes true when she joins the quirky staff of Bon Vee Culinary House Museum, the spectacular former Garden District home of late bon vivant Genevieve “Vee” Charbonnet, the city’s legendary restauranteur. Ricki is excited about turning her avocation—collecting vintage cookbooks—into a vocation by launching the museum’s gift shop, Miss Vee’s Vintage Cookbooks and Kitchenware. Then she discovers that a box of donated vintage cookbooks contains the body of a cantankerous Bon Vee employee who was fired after being exposed as a book thief.
The skills Ricki has developed ferreting out hidden vintage treasures come in handy…
A fantastic new cozy mystery series with a vintage flair from USA Today bestselling and Agatha Award–winning author Ellen Byron.
Twenty-eight-year-old widow Ricki James leaves Los Angeles to start a new life in New Orleans after her showboating actor husband perishes doing a stupid internet stunt. The Big Easy is where she was born and adopted by the NICU nurse who cared for her after Ricki’s teen mother disappeared from the hospital.
Ricki’s dream comes true when she joins the quirky staff of Bon Vee Culinary House Museum, the spectacular former Garden District home of late bon vivant Genevieve…
"MacKenzie's Last Run is a highly recommended, emotionally compelling survival tale. It should be on the reading lists of readers ages 11 and up who look for stories of not just suspense, but revelation."
Winner of the 2022 Midwest Book Award for children's fiction, readers call it, "Heart-pounding, fast-paced, and…
My southern mama raised me to be honest; she always knew the truth and spoke the truth. I soon found out that being honest could clear my name—or get me in trouble. It could draw me closer to my friends—or hurt their feelings. Now that I’m grown and have children of my own, I understand and appreciate my mama’s emphasis on truth-telling from an entirely new angle. And as a writer, honest storytelling helps me write more authentic characters and connect more authentically with my readers. In my personal and professional life, my “honest” upbringing has helped me recognize other truth-tellers—and the not-so-truthful. (I’m eyeballing you, politicians!)
This is my go-to book when suggesting read-alouds for teachers and parents who want a charming and engaging story about honesty and compassion.
I love Libby (the main character) for many reasons. She embodies so much of what I was taught as a child about “telling the truth” and also experienced much of what I did before I learned the difference between hurtful and helpful words. My inner child can relate to the character’s missteps—as can my adult self—thus the reason I recommend it for all ages. (As a side note, and for all the right reasons, I also recommend Libby for President.)
From Coretta Scott King Award–winning author Patricia C. McKissack comes a humorous and poignant picture book about the right time to tell the truth.
“Tell the truth and shame the devil,” Libby’s mama has told her. So whatever is Libby doing wrong?
Ever since she started telling only the truth, the whole world seems to be mad at her. First, it’s her best friend, Ruthie Mae, who gets upset when Libby tells all their friends that Ruthie Mae has a hole in her sock. Then Willie gives her an ugly look when she tells the teacher he hasn’t done…
As a clinical psychologist, I listen to thoughts all the time. I’m also having my own, constantly. We rely on our thoughts to help us navigate the world. However, our thoughts can also be a source of suffering. At times, they're not such reliable guides or helpers. Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) is a way of thinking about thinking. ACT captured my imagination early in my clinical career. I trained with ACT’s originator, Steven Hayes, in the early 1990’s. I’ve come to believe that being more aware of our own thoughts, and our relationship to them is key to creating positive change and living a life grounded in our values.
This poetic book by a literary scholar looks at the way we think about and experience not only the lives we lead, but those alternative lives that we do not lead.
Our thoughts can lead us to obsessively regret our choices or focus on “the road not taken.” Miller looks at the sense of loss that can accrue as the potential transitions to the actual.
He describes our unled lives as “part of this world as shadows are part of things…”
A captivating book about the emotional and literary power of the lives we might have lived had our chances or choices been different.
We each live one life, formed by paths taken and untaken. Choosing a job, getting married, deciding on a place to live or whether to have children-every decision precludes another. But what if you'd gone the other way? It can be a seductive thought, even a haunting one.
Andrew H. Miller illuminates this theme of modern culture: the allure of the alternate self. From Robert Frost to Sharon Olds, Virginia Woolf to Ian McEwan, Jane Hirshfield to…
The world is an amazing, diverse place that needs stories that represent everyone. I identify as gender fluid and am part of my city’s LGBTQIA+ community. For kids, there aren’t enough stories that feature non-straight cis protagonists where that identity isn’t the focus. LGBTQIA+ kids exist. They are normal. Let a gay kid go into space. Let a teenage lesbian solve a mystery. Let a trans girl defeat a dragon. Let an ace teen be a witch. Everybody deserves their adventure.
Hazel Hill thinks she’s the only girl in the 7th grade who likes girls thatway, until Tyler tells her that Ella Quinn told him she likes Hazel.
But Ella Quinn is pretty and popular, and she’s Hazel’s biggest rival in the upcoming speech contest. They talk. Ella confesses she only told Tyler that to stop his sexual harassment. It turns out, Tyler has been harassing a lot of girls.
They tell the school, but the teachers won’t do anything about it, even blaming the girls and punishing them. It is not a coincidence that Tyler’s mom is the superintendent of schools. Determined not to let Tyler get away with it, Hazel comes up with a plan.
Girls in Hazel's school are being harassed by an anonymous person online, someone who seems to know all about their insecurities and dreams. With no one willing to stand up and face the bully, how will Hazel be able to prove her suspicions? Hazel Hill is Going to Win This One confronts bullying, both online and in person, to give children the power to stand up for themselves and speak out against harassment.
No one knew about the doorbell until the news story of the boys’ mysterious disappearance. If certain people couldn’t own the doorbell or if it rejected them, they wanted to destroy it and the boys behind it, calling it a hoax.
Ivor and Inge Borg have been tracking Astrid Sims,…
I’ve been obsessed by the story of Anne Bonny and Mary Read since I heard about them in an Adam Ant song "Five Guns West". I know more than is good for me about pirates and wanted to share some of the fantastic books that inspired me when I wrote the novel Bonny & Read. Eighty years before Pride and Prejudice was written there were women armed with cutlasses roaming the Caribbean looking for ships to plunder – I want to give everyone the opportunity to learn more about this incredible hidden history.
A pirate ship was a place where the whole crew got an equal share of plunder, and where every man (or woman) had a voice.
They tore up the rulebook and made a better one that served them better. These two truths form the foundation of a business movement – Be More Pirate – which uses the theme of ‘making good trouble’ as the basis for better work/life satisfaction and building successful businesses.
It also makes the case that Anne Bonny via Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the Masses is actually the model for The Statue of Liberty. How great is that?!
Whatever your ambitions, ideas and challenges, this book will revolutionize the way you live, think and work today, and tomorrow.
Pirates didn't just break the rules, they rewrote them. They didn't just reject society, they reinvented it. Pirates didn't just challenge the status-quo, they changed everyfuckingthing. Pirates faced a self-interested establishment, a broken system, industrial scale disruption and an uncertain future. Sound familiar?
Pirates stood for MISCHIEF, PURPOSE and POWER. And you can too.
In Be More Pirate, Sam Conniff Allende unveils the innovative strategies of Golden Age pirates, drawing parallels between the tactics and teachings of legends like Henry…
I am passionate about giving people the benefit of good intentions and my faith calls me to care and serve others. Today, I believe my purpose is to help inspire leaders to trust in the inherent good in people while caring and serving them in intentional ways that leads to high performance. I have been blessed immensely and want to give back to others so their journey can be one of significance. As former CEO of my company, I had no roadmap which made our journey even more difficult. Now, I have experienced the joy, the fulfillment, and the abundance of building a people-first culture. Together we can make a difference for so many people.
We are in an exponential world today and we grew up in an incremental world for businesses.
Daniel not only helps us understand how to anticipate more of the future, he teaches us how to anticipate which is one of the most important skills for business leaders today. After reading his book, I also worked through his anticipatory leader course.
By understanding the power of being anticipatory, I have used his techniques to lead our firm to bigger opportunities. In the future of work, anticipating what people will want and need, provides a distinctive advantage.
A rousing 7-step plan for living a life filled with hope and possibility from an inspirational speaker who survived a near-fatal fire at the age of nine and now runs a successful business inspiring people all around the world. When John O'Leary was nine years old, he was almost killed in a devastating house fire. With burns on one hundred percent of his body, O'Leary mustered an almost unimaginable amount of inner strength just to survive the ordeal. The insights he gained through this experience and the heroes who stepped into his life to help him through the journey, his…
Most drunks struggle to accept that they have a disease called “alcoholism” and feel shame, intertwined with fear, having to admit it. I, on the other hand, embraced it. Being alcoholic meant I wasn’t “crazy” after all like Grandma. At 21, I embraced the disease along with 12 Step recovery, thanking my lucky stars that there was something I could do about my chaotic hippied lifestyle. “Don’t pick up the first fix, pill, or drink and you can’t get drunk.” Could the solution be so simple? It is. From the moment I set down the drink and drugs, I knew I had to share this amazing revelation with others and my writing career began.
Full disclosure, I know Bill Hanlon and we exchanged books at one of several speaking engagements together.
I cherish this book and have a signed copy featured in my collection. It is a simple straightforward ingenious way to disrupt destructive patterns in all relationships. And it works! Being in the mental health field, I would make this wonderful book mandatory for all counselors to read, if I had that power.
Full of examples on how to modify micro-behaviors, results could not be more life-changing. I found that I had the power to alter destructive patterns in my life by reacting differently in any given situation! Bill’s book explains how to do it.
"If you do one thing different, read this book! It is filled with practical, creative, effective, down-to-earth solutions to life's challenging problems."-Michele Weiner-Davis, author of Divorce Busting
The 20th anniversary edition of a self-help classic, updated with a new preface: Tapping into widespread popular interest in highly effective, short-term therapeutic approaches to personal problems, author Bill O'Hanlon offers 10 Solution Keys to help you free yourself from "analysis paralysis" and quickly get unstuck from aggravating problems.
Tired of feeling stuck all the time when you're trying to solve a problem or are facing conflict? Do you get easily flustered or…
Winner of the 2027 Bronze Medal for Southern Fiction by the Independent Book Publishers Awards
A haunting and magical story of a family with hidden gifts and secrets. A young woman begins having memories that are not her own and must find her place in a lineage of women healers…
I have been passionate about continuous learning and understanding why people act the way they do. The books I recommend cover the topic of continuous growth across different states and areas of life.
I started following Guy Kawasaki because of some of his ideas on communication, work, writing, etc. Wise Guy is an easy-to-read book in which Guy Kawasaki shares some of the things he has learned across different areas of life (work, relationships, mentorship, etc.).
I really enjoy the personal stories shared in the book, which have led the author to grow both personally and professionally. It also made me reflect on my personal stories and how they have contributed to the person I am today.
Silicon Valley icon and bestselling author Guy Kawasaki shares the unlikely stories of his life and the lessons we can draw from them.
Guy Kawasaki has been a fixture in the tech world since he was part of Apple's original Macintosh team in the 1980s. He's widely respected as a source of wisdom about entrepreneurship, venture capital, marketing, and business evangelism, which he's shared in bestselling books such as The Art of the Start and Enchantment. But before all that, he was just a middle-class kid in Hawaii, a grandson of Japanese immigrants, who loved football and got a C+…
