Here are 100 books that Swipe Right for Murder fans have personally recommended if you like
Swipe Right for Murder.
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I’ve loved stories with a horror/thriller focus ever since I can remember. Yes, I was that creepy kid who read all of Goosebumps, as well as checked out a copy of Draculafrom the library at the tender age of eleven, much to the chagrin of the elderly librarian. My own books are multi-genre, but tend to include a thriller or horror element—it’s such fun to write a page-turner that ends with a bang. I truly hope you enjoy these picks as much as I did. They are some of my very favorites!
In Wilder Girls, a bizarre, unprecedented plague called the Tox has infested an island home to an all-girls boarding school. The Tox causes those it infects to mutate in gruesome ways—growing gills, claws, an extra spine, et cetera. The schoolgirls and remaining sparse crew of staff members have developed a system of survival, but when one girl goes missing and her friend determines to find her, everything is thrown into chaos.
This book will grip you hard from the first sentence, sink its teeth into you, shake you around, then have you gasping for air on the floor by the time you hit the last page. Seriously, this is an insane, intense ride, perfect for any fan of weird fiction and body horror. (That’s me.)
"The perfect kind of story for our current era."—Hypable
Featured in Vulture’s "11 Books to Read If You Already Miss Yellowjackets"!
From the author of Burn Our Bodies Down, a feminist Lord of the Flies about three best friends living in quarantine at their island boarding school, and the lengths they go to uncover the truth of their confinement when one disappears. This fresh debut is a mind-bending novel unlike anything you've read before.
It's been eighteen months since the Raxter School for Girls was put under quarantine. Since the Tox hit and pulled…
Magical realism meets the magic of Christmas in this mix of Jewish, New Testament, and Santa stories–all reenacted in an urban psychiatric hospital!
On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argue…
I am and have always been fascinated with supernatural creatures, particularly if they have horns and dwell in the dark swamps of wooded hinterlands. I spent a greater part of my childhood in the African bush. A formative experience was the day an isangoma(witchdoctor) cast knuckle bones at me in a particularly energetic frenzy. Rather than being scared, I was fascinated by the power these little bones had to command spirits and creatures I had only seen in my nightmares. An obsession was born.
When I went into this book, I sensed that Amelinda would pull zero punches. I was so right it was glorious. Skye isfed up. Fed up of being responsible for her insufferable little sister, Dierdre. Fed up with the stories, with the games, with their endless childhood fantasies. Moving halfway across the country seems like the perfect chance to start over. Finally, in this new, isolated neighbourhood, Skye is managing to fit in. Not Dierdre, though. No, Dierdre seems to be slipping more and more into a world of her own. And then one day: Dierdre vanishes. When a creature unlike anything Skye has ever seen comes scratching at her door claiming to know who took Dierdre, Skye is going to have to suspend her disbelief and re-enter a childhood of warped imagination.
A bone-chilling read about creating monsters, sisterhood turned toxic, and secrets that won't stay buried, perfect for fans of The Night She Disappeared, Wilder Girls, and The Blair Witch Project. Sixteen-year-old Skye is done playing the knight in shining armor for her insufferable younger sister, Deirdre. And moving across the country seems like the perfect chance to start over as someone different. In their isolated new neighborhood, Skye manages to fit in, but Deirdre withdraws from everyone, becoming fixated on the swampy woods behind their house and building monstrous sculptures out of sticks and bones. Then Deirdre disappears. And when…
I was in fifth grade when I brought home my first paranormal thriller from the library. It was love at first read. Since then, I’ve broadened my reading horizons to many fiction genres, but fast-paced stories grounded in our world with a dash of magic continue to be my favorite. The same can be said of my viewing habits—give me shows like Severance or Black Mirror, and I’ll be glued to the screen all day long. It probably doesn’t surprise anyone that it is my favorite entertainment genre and writing genre. Many of the books on this list have served as inspiration—I hope you love them too!
Jack the Ripper? Check. Girl who sees dead people? Check. Boarding school? Check, check, check. I feel like Bill Hadar’s SNL character Stefon when I say that this book has everything, but I can’t help it.
As someone who loves books with ghosts, murder, and page-turning thrills, this book does indeed have everything.
Thrilling ghost-hunting teen mystery as modern-day London is plagued by a sudden outbreak of brutal murders that mimic the horrific crimes of Jack the Ripper.
"A gorgeously written, chilling, atmospheric thriller. The streets of London have never been so sinister or so romantic." Cassandra Clare, author of THE MORTAL INSTRUMENTS
Sixteen-year-old American girl Rory has just arrived at boarding school in London when a Jack the Ripper copycat-killer begins terrorising the city. All the hallmarks of his infamous murders are frighteningly present, but there are few clues to the killer's identity.
"Rippermania" grabs hold of modern-day London, and the police…
Trapped in our world, the fae are dying from drugs, contaminants, and hopelessness. Kicked out of the dark fae court for tainting his body and magic, Riasg only wants one thing: to die a bit faster. It’s already the end of his world, after all.
I’ve always had a soft spot for history—in particular, mysteries, myths, and legends. If it’s strange, unexplained, obscure, supernatural, or downright weird, I’m all in. And Celtic folklore, it turns out, excels at exploiting the dark intrigue of human antiquity. Backdropped by a landscape that makes literally anything seem impossible, these stories tell us as much about fairies, merfolk, and other mystical creatures as they do about ourselves. Like so many legends around the world, Celtic mythology is a mirror. One that exposes our deepest fantasies. Reflecting the dark, dangerous side of humanity’s desires back onto itself, and making us question who the real monsters really are.
Three sisters vanish as kids and mysteriously return with no memories of what happened and a lot of strange quirks… in other words, the perfect set-up for a modern story about changelings! Initially, I was skeptical about this one because—while I shamelessly loved Twilight back in the day—I’ve also been kinda burned out from all the froofy falling-in-love-with-magical-creatures/worlds books that surfaced in its aftermath. (And c’mon. That cover? It practically screams froofy tortured teen magic.)
But let’s just say the marketing team failed here because while this book was beautiful, it was also kinda rotten, incredibly atmospheric, and genuinely creepy in places. The perfect read for a dark, modern twist on a traditional myth.
'A gorgeous, grisly modern fairy tale.' - THE GUARDIAN
'Dark and delicious. House of Hollow hums with malice and mystery. I devoured it whole.' - KIRAN MILLWOOD HARGRAVE
** SHORTLISTED FOR THE YA BOOK PRIZE 2022 **
The Hollow sisters - Vivi, Grey and Iris - are as seductively glamorous as they are mysterious. They have black eyes and hair as white as milk. The Hollow sisters don't have friends - they don't need them. They move through the corridors like sharks, the other little fish parting around them, whispering behind their backs.
Between Blade Runner and The Terminator, I was hooked on Cyberpunk. Throw in some Ghost in the Shell and Black Mirror, and the obsession was complete. With the rise of Synthwave as a musical genre and as a retro-futuristic aesthetic, I had both the soundtrack and the visual cues to which I could write Cyberpunk. I also feel strongly about our increasing reliance on technology and the blurring lines between biology and technology. This is something I explore in my writing.
Vaz Anzai collects all five episodes from his Strange Tales from The City Of Dust series in this absolutely breathtaking omnibus that also includes bonus short stories, author notes, and exclusive artwork. With great, and varied, characters, fascinating technology, and gritty Cyberpunk settings, Dust: Omnibus is essential reading for all fans of the genre.
Strange Tales From The City Of Dust is the ultimate Omnibus for the complete Dust storyline. 5 episodic adventures along with 3 short stories and detailed author notes, commissioned artwork, and more!
CLOCKWORK DEUS: Episode 1 Alice, a "Tinkerer" for the Wonderlust brothel has discovered a Prostibot that has become self-aware. Together, they will uncover the secret behind a shadowy organization in Dust's abandoned zone, The Blooming Fields.
THE DARKEST PART: Episode 2 Laila, a mysterious Saudi Arabian woman, has escaped an event known as "The Opaque", a consuming void that destroyed her former city. Now in Dust, she must…
Peter Warren Singer is a strategist at New America, a Professor of Practice at Arizona State University, and a Principal at Useful Fiction LLC. No author, living or dead, has more books on the professional US military readings lists. August Cole is an author exploring the future of conflict through fiction and other forms of “FICINT” [Fictional Intelligence] storytelling. His talks, short stories, and workshops have taken him from speaking at the Nobel Institute in Oslo to presenting on future warfare at SXSW Interactive to lecturing at West Point.
William Gibson’s latest novel Agency is as prophetic as his establishment of cyberspace and cyberpunk culture in the 80s and 90s. His latest novel chronicles reality-busting skirmishes among gangsterish multi-generational families based in a glitzy post-apocalyptic 22nd century London. In this future, nano-machines conjure luxuries from nothing while sky-high scrubbers struggle to restore a ravaged atmosphere after the jackpot, a global environmental catastrophe. Agency tells a heist-type story about the emergence of Eunice, a sentient AI born in our stub out of American special operations research. Leading a cross-dimensional band of techies, publicists, hipsters, and hackers, ace software designer Verity fights to introduce Eunice to her world in order to save it. Yet Gibson is telling us about today's ecological and technological forces. He writes of pre-jackpot life in our era: “‘Did we ever come to terms with the sheer cluelessness of it?’
“ONE OF THE MOST VISIONARY, ORIGINAL, AND QUIETLY INFLUENTIAL WRITERS CURRENTLY WORKING”* returns with a sharply imagined follow-up to the New York Times bestselling The Peripheral.
William Gibson has trained his eye on the future for decades, ever since coining the term “cyberspace” and then popularizing it in his classic speculative novel Neuromancer in the early 1980s. Cory Doctorow raved that The Peripheral is “spectacular, a piece of trenchant, far-future speculation that features all the eyeball kicks of Neuromancer.” Now Gibson is back with Agency—a science fiction thriller heavily influenced by our most current…
Everyday Medical Miracles
by
Joseph S. Sanfilippo (editor),
Frontiers of Women from the healthcare perspective. A compilation of 60 true short stories written by an extensive array of healthcare providers, physicians, and advanced practice providers.
All designed to give you, the reader, a glimpse into the day-to-day activities of all of us who provide your health care. Come…
The theme of this list is so important to me as an independently published author. Ever since I was about 14 years old I knew I wanted to tell stories, and my way, so even then I was looking into indie publishing. The idea of offering my books up to the traditional publishing chopping block, to be edited and mulled into what’s most marketable, scared me so much! I didn’t want to tell my stories another person’s way. So here we are, and I’m giving you guys a list of indie recommendations whose authors feel very much the same way. We just want to tell our stories. And have control over how that’s done. ;)
I really love deep, living worlds. CE Clayton does such an amazing job of building you into her cyberpunk fantasy that you can easily believe you’re there. Add in the characters you can’t help but root for, and this book is a staple in my library. Ellinor, the protagonist, struggles with the very real emotions behind grief, loss, and the bitterness that comes with a life that feels entirely out of one’s control. Resistor has action, laughs, and again, a slow-burn romance that I simply inhaled.
Ellinor Rask has wanted one thing for the past eight years: vengeance. But when Ellinor is captured, she finds herself dragged back into the world she walked away from, entangled once more with friends she would rather forget.
As if that weren’t humiliating enough, Ellinor learns first hand that her magic can be stripped away by a piece of bio-tech—and her ex-boss is happy to leash her with the technology in order to get what he wants. If Ellinor behaves, the device will be removed. All she has to do is deliver a package. One containing a creature created from…
I fell in love with cyberpunk when I saw Ghost in the Shell for the first time. It quickly became my favorite genre, to read, watch and write. Meanwhile, I’m one of the most renowned cyberpunk indie authors. My series Behind Blue Eyes has quickly become a favorite among readers and bloggers and I’m planning to publish many more books in the series and the genre. Besides, I’m also one of the editors of the Neo Cyberpunk anthology series, a collection of short stories contributed by contemporary cyberpunk indie authors. I hope you enjoy my list and if you want more, check out the Cyberpunk Books group on Facebook!
Neon Helix is probably the most cyberpunk book of my recommendations, at least in a classical sense. It’s set in a mega-city of the future and features mega corporations, rogue AI, clones, and some really crazy scientists. It’s a fast-paced story told from multiple perspectives and the first book in a series.
"If you want an injection of cyberpunk high tech low life, this book will give it to you in spades."- Amazon Review.
Ex-Cop and Private Detective Xander Draven had resorted to protection work when he is visited by the synthetic replica of a murdered CEO's grieving widow who wants him to track down the killer.
Meanwhile, Julian Travitz, a hacker/reporter and his A.I. companion Quartzig, are searching for the next big story and become drawn into the dark past of technology megacorporation CyberBionics.
Along the way, they encounter clones, rogue A.I.'s, psychopaths, priests, and plans that could change the status…
I was ten. Every Sunday morning, I sat in front of the TV with a notepad to take notes while watching Carl Sagan’s Cosmos. As a teen, I devoured every of Kafka’s books. The wonder of science and the strangeness of our existence have co-habited within me since then. Today, I’m a professional physicist and theoretical chemist. But I’m also a fiction writer. My fiction allows me to spill my science background into topics that wouldn’t be welcome in technical writing. For instance, wondering how life could re-emerge in the far future after all stars burned.
Your older self writes a diary and sends it back in time to you. It reveals that between two pathways, you will take a right. You arrive at that crossroads, and no matter how willing you are to defy your unveiled fate, you can’t avoid choosing right again. I often find this type of super-deterministic scenario in science fiction, invariably raising philosophical questions about free will. Nevertheless, Egan is the only author to offer a satisfactory psychological solution to why the protagonist can’t change their fate. And this is just the first of the short stories in this collection. Axiomatic is hard SciFi stretching scientific concepts into their ethical and human limits.
"Wonderful, mind-expanding stuff, and well written too."-The Guardian
Axiomatic is a wonderful collection of eighteen short stories by Hugo Award-winning author Greg Egan. The stories in this collection have appeared in such science fiction magazines as Interzone and Asimov's between 1989 and 1992.
From junkies who drink at the time-stream to love affairs in time-reversed galaxies; from gene-altered dolphins that converse only in limericks to the program that allows you to design your own child; from the brain implants called axiomatics to the strange attractors that spin off new religions; from bioengineering to the new physics; and from cyberpunk to…
Karl's War is a coming-of-age-meets-thriller set in Germany on the eve of Hitler coming to power. Karl – a reluctant poster boy for the Nazis – meets Jewish Ben and his world is up-turned.
Ben and his family flee to France. Karl joins the German army but deserts and finds…
Growing up, I was exposed to the same influences as most other SF writers of my generation – Clarke, Heinlein, and Asimov. But I was also exposed to the more nuanced, more psychologically realistic work of writers like Harlan Ellison, Norman Spinrad, Ursula K. LeGuin, and J.G. Ballard, none of whom shared the unquestioning techno-utopianism of an earlier generation of writers. They taught me not to automatically respect power or authority, and to always question ideas that might otherwise be taken for granted. It’s an approach that’s carried over into my own writing ever since.
Pohl drew heavily on his experience as an advertising copywriter in this, perhaps his most famous novel co-written with C.M. Kornbluth. Although not directly set on a colonized world, it’s easily one of the darkest takes on the subject as the protagonist, a ‘star-class copysmith’ is given the job of selling people on the idea of emigrating to Venus…while carefully avoiding the reality of Venus being barely, if at all, habitable, with nothing to promise but a harsh existence and generations of toil before the planet can be fully terraformed.
In a vastly overpopulated near-future world, businesses have taken the place of governments and now hold all political power. States exist merely to ensure the survival of huge transnational corporations. Advertising has become hugely aggressive and boasts some of the world's most powerful executives.
Through advertising, the public is constantly deluded into thinking that all the products on the market improve the quality of life. However, the most basic elements are incredibly scarce, including water and fuel.
The planet Venus has just been visited and judged fit for human settlement, despite its inhospitable surface and climate; colonists would have to…
