Books like The Bottoms — picked by fans

The film adaptations make True Grit look like a Western. It is not.

It is an Arkansas book, and Mattie Ross is an Arkansas character: fourteen years old, tiny, and completely on board with the violence she knows avenging her father's murder will require. She has courage and goal-oriented ruthlessness.

Mattie’s fortitude underlines the gap between what my characters can see for themselves and what they can actually reach. That gap is at the heart of what my novella is about.

This remains one of the most haunting novels I have ever read. I cannot shake the character of Judge Holden, a formidable man both physically and intellectually, who deploys his insidious intellect to justify acts of abject violence seemingly only for the sake of violence itself. I was mesmerized by a world where “all covenants were brittle.” This was no straight-up Western as I had expected. It was something more.

McCarthy pushed the boundaries of the classic Western by challenging the notion that good will ultimately overcome evil and the hero will save the day. There was no hero here, and the day was truly lost to forces beyond the characters’ control, hallmarks of the Southern Gothic tradition. I was hooked on this curious blend of genres!

When I cracked the spine on Patrick deWitt’s book, I knew I was in for a treat. Contract killers, endless bloodshed, and belly laughs? How could you go wrong? The novel is technically a Western, but represents a revisionist and darkly comedic pivot in the genre, following two brothers, Eli and Charlie Sisters, from Oregon to San Francisco during the Gold Rush on their quest to murder a man called Hermann Kermit Warm, accused of stealing from their client.

One brother, Eli, questions his purpose in this world, while Charlie cannot satiate his blood lust, all with deadpan humor, which left me thinking hard about the nature of violence and man’s capacity for change, and a little worried about my own dark sense of humor.

I had the opportunity to listen to Karin Slaughter speak at the Bouchercon Conference in St. Pete, Florida and this was her new release.

The book sounded wonderful, and my signed copy is on my keeper shelf. Pieces of Her has a crazy, explosive opening and breakneck pace with questions that pile on questions, and we hold on for dear life. I was so enthralled by this story that I bought a second copy for a friend and put it in her hands saying, “You have to read this.” She loved it and so did Netflix because it is now a series. 

This was my first Freida McFadden book, and I was drawn in from the start and though I wasn’t sure how I felt about the narrator (the maid) or the husband and wife who hired her; I love a main character who makes me cringe and that she was the housekeeper privy to the owners’ secrets kept me guessing.

The prologue set me up for an ending that I never saw coming. Is she a housemaid or something else? I read this in one sitting!

I absolutely loved this book. Sarah Morgan was nothing if not faithful. I don’t know if I could have been. But high-powered attorneys don’t think the way I do. I kept turning pages and more pages. I could not put it down.

I am an avid reader but, until recently, had not read a lot of psychological thrillers. I didn’t know what I was missing. Part of me likes crawling into someone’s fictitious mind; part of me thinks I should stay out and just watch (read) the action. It’s that curiosity thing that keeps me up at night when I know I should be sleeping. 

I attended an author event at the coolest bookstore in Tampa in The Exchange building, and Lisa Unger was being interviewed by Colette Bancroft, the book editor for the Tampa Times.

Well, the book sounded wonderful, and it really is. The heroine in this story is smart, clever, and managed to keep one step ahead of the unusual, troubled boy she is hired to babysit. I loved this story and now have a signed copy on my keeper shelf.

I could not wipe the smile from my face for the entirety of Joel and Ethan Cohen’s collection of short stories, where the hard-scrabbled western frontier meets the supernatural meets Vaudeville.

The images of the bank robber who is hung twice and the miner who thinks he is digging for gold but soon discovers he has dug his own grave are but two examples of how the collection explores the myth of the American frontier and uncovers the darker and occasionally absurd aspects of human nature–hallmarks of the Western and Southern Gothic genres, respectively.

Locke does the thing I’m always chasing. 

She makes the law itself the source of suspense. Her Texas Ranger, Darren Mathews, carries a badge that protects him and endangers him in the same gesture, and every door he opens with it might be the one that gets him killed. I love that she refuses easy heroes. Everyone in that little town off Highway 59 is wired into the same old order, and justice has to be smuggled out past it. 

She taught me a murder mystery can be a way of asking who the system was built to serve, and that the quietest scene is often the most dangerous one.

This is another story bringing history to life, in this case, the famous Rajah Quilt, made by convict women in 1841 while being transported to Tasmania.

I’m not a patcher myself, but my mum was, and I know how patching brings disparate women together, though not as disparate as these "dangerous women" and their leader, the Quaker philanthropist Kezia Hayter.

Hope Adams takes a worthy story and turns it into a gripping whodunnit, beginning with a murder on page one. It is hard at times to keep track of all the characters, but well worth the effort because their unlikely friendships are fascinating and crucial to the solving of the mystery.