Books like Skin Tight — picked by fans

It is a book that deep dives into a historical event, in this case, the 1893 World Columbian Exposition. Check. It is a nonfiction book that reads like a gripping thriller, in this case, the serial killer H.H. Holmes, who built a three-story building featuring secret rooms, torture chambers, and a crematorium. Check. Chicago leaps off the page. By the end of the book, I was able to envision the massive exposition, its hundreds of temporary buildings, all white colored, interlaced with ponds and canals.

Much like that exposition helped raise Chicago up from its Great Fire, so I could see a Chicago of the past, in a glorious triumph of industry and innovation. Oh, and yeah, a serial killer constructing a horrific murder building.

I loved the way Dostoevsky took me deep inside the head of a murderer and showed how his crime almost destroyed him long before he was caught.

Though I found the killings shocking and appalling, I couldn’t help but sympathise with the killer as he fell apart. I later read that many of the characters represented currents of thought that were influential in Dostoyevsky’s day. Much of that went above my head, but that was okay because the characters were well-drawn and came across as real people, not ciphers.

One thing that shocked me was the crushing nature of the poverty that so many supposedly upper-class characters faced, and how low they had to stoop to survive it.

Not everything that seems harmful does us harm, and not everything that seems good does us good.

I love books that make me reconsider the world I live in, and although Brave New World was published in 1932, its use of empty entertainment, sex, drugs, and medicated happiness as instruments of social control feels startlingly contemporary.

In dystopias built around punishment, power forces people to obey; here, pleasure makes them willing. The Romans already understood this through panem et circenses, and I see the same mechanism around us today. We fail to notice the cage because we are too busy seeking it out and locking ourselves inside.

This book broadened my perspective and taught me to look at apparent comforts with more suspicious eyes.

Blends psychological thriller, historical fiction, and detective mystery, set in New York City in 1896.

Journalist John Schuyler Moore and psychologist Dr. Laszlo Kreizler, aided by a young Theodore Roosevelt, investigate brutal murders that shock the city. Carr’s meticulous research brings Gilded Age New York vividly to life, from opulent drawing rooms to grim tenements.

The novel explores the roots of criminal profiling and human darkness, reflecting techniques I use in my own book's character’s investigations, including incorporating real historical figures for authenticity.

Pandemic includes my two favorite themes: molecular biology and viral infections. It introduces a problem I’ve seen discussed in a scientific journal. If a gene editing tool (CRISPR/Cas 9) is used to raise pigs whose hearts have important human proteins so they are recognized as “self” by a human’s immune system, the waiting lists for heart transplants would be a thing of the past. However, a virus, avirulent in the pig but fatal to people, could accidentally be carried along with those hearts. The ensuing coverups make things exponentially worse.

Gerritsen’s Life Support is a suspense-filled cliffhanger that makes use of spongiform encephalitis, a brain disease caused by prions. Remember Mad Cow Disease? It’s a type of problem that stretches the meaning of “infection.” The story is based on the fictional use of fetal pituitary cells from aborted fetuses to return youthful strength and vigor to elderly rich people. The group making millions from this obtains fetuses from a Mexican village where the cows are dying. A year later, several of their patients die of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, an extremely rare human type of spongiform encephalitis. Corpses accumulate and suspense builds during the coverup.

This witty and wryly humorous murder mystery features two amateur sleuths. Maggie, a reporter from up north, is vacationing on an island off the coast of Florida when a murder takes place. She investigates, is stumped, and convinces her irascible boss, editor C. B. Greenfield, to come down and help. Thereafter, she grouses about him as he puts his formidable intellect into solving the mystery.

Studies since the publication of the book have found it to be in error on a few minor points (e.g., the DNA encoding the Shiga-like toxin of E. coli O157:H7 is on a virus infecting the E. coli cells, not on a plasmid), but that doesn’t make the story outdated. The toxin is as nasty as it is portrayed, no matter how the E. coli acquired it, and the blame leveled at the meat-packing industry and the USDA for the contamination that causes the problem is spot on. The only reason the disease isn’t more common is that most fast-food restaurants deliberately overcook their hamburgers.

I love fiction and nonfiction and part of the reason I’ve included one of Krakauer’s books is because he’s an excellent author of nonfiction.

I feel like I needed to include a nonfiction book, and I’ve thought much about Krakauer’s book since reading it a decade ago.

This book has it all: a compelling story, murder, the history of a myth (the Mormon religion), the reasons for religious extremism, and more. It’s a great story, well told, within the kind of context you look for in a nonfiction book. And, like the other books on this list, it opened my eyes about many different perspectives. 

Do you like to root for the bad guy? Then George Jung, the central figure in this true crime classic about the Columbia-to-America cocaine snowstorm of the 1980s, might just be your man.

Author Porter weaves a brisk, vivid narrative about his anti-hero Jung, a likable goofball stoner who stumbles into the big-time international coke biz and isn’t smart enough to get out (and he had his chances, lord knows).

Johnny Depp did a memorable job of portraying Jung in the film version of Blow (released in 2001), but the Porter’s book takes the reader three or four levels deeper into the absurdities of Jung’s narcotics hellscape.