Books like The Brothers McKay

This is part of a series of books by the English Writer S J Bennet in which Queen Elizabeth at varying stages of her reign becomes involved in solving a murder. Earlier books take place in the latter years of her reign, this one takes place early on, in 1961. I adore these books because I loved the queen and Bennet so magically captures her personality in these books...that combination of the formality of the office and her delightful sense of humour. In this one she's heading off to Lancashire on the royal train, and a slightly unhinged and very drunk member of her party is certain she's seen someone throwing a body in a pit in a distant field from the window of the train as it is speeding through the countryside. Of course, no one believes her. But there is that friend of Tony Armstrong Jones, her brother… show more.

I think this is an excellent second book in the Nora Breen series that began with Murder at Gulls Nest, when Nora Breen, an ex nun and nurse in her fifties arrives at a seaside town called, wonderfully, Gore-on-Sea, ( a place fairly crying out for murders!) to consider her options in life. It's 1954, Nora is smart and creates agency in her own life by choosing to leave the nunnery and look for life on her own terms, which includes, for example, to dress in men's clothing because they are comfortable and she looks sharp, and to clearly be attracted to the local Detective Inspector Ridout, certainly intellectually, but possibly more. And not that she doesn't have another suiter...clever men like strong women. In Murder at Spirit Lodge, she and Ridout investigate the death of a medium in a story that goes back to the war, and hauntings by… show more.

When Tony Hillerman passed, I was crushed.

I waited years for new tribal mysteries by him, and then he was gone. I searched and searched, and then Craig Johnson came out with his Longmire books (which he is still writing!), and I couldn’t be happier! More tribal murder mysteries, only this time, the main character is a white County Sheriff who has a Native American best friend.

This first book hooked me in a new way, from a different perspective. I read them all and watched the TV series as well. I think it was Hillerman and Johnson that were the catalyst for my own tribal murder mystery books….

Here is another masterpiece.

It purports to be historical fiction set in the Old West, following one of the last great cattle drives. Yet within a few chapters, it begins to feel like a series of episodes from Grimm’s fairy tales.

I remember at UC Irvine, where I earned my Fiction MFA, several fellow writers were reading this novel alongside me. We kept stopping each other in the hall or at cocktail parties to relive this or that chapter, struggling to understand how it could be both so entertaining and so good.

The fact that it is long—a real doorstopper of a book—adds to its “too-big-for-one-genre” feel.

I believe this book is a must read because Jennifer Doudna’s CRISPR-Cas 9 gene editing invention will be the second major technology to threaten the existence of humanity.

Doudna won a Nobel Prize for her discovery. She said, “The idea that you would affect evolution is a very profound thing.” Will CRISPR be used to create a new super humanoid species, or used by AI to create a species that is more to their liking and easier to control than humans? Or will AI use it to create deadly viruses to rid the Earth of the pesky human species?

Understanding the power of this breakthrough technology is essential to our understanding the future. I found it fascinating that the technology is based on the method bacteria developed 3 billion years ago to protect them from viruses.

I was ashamed to be a white man after reading this account of Native American thoughts and feelings on watching their land, their way of life, slip away.

Just the account of what happened at Wounded Knee, where unarmed Native American men, women, and children were gunned down in the snow, left me sick to my stomach.

This is a non-fiction book that I read on my spiritual journey. I researched several of the accounts in this book because I couldn’t believe they were true. They were.

A reader friend recommended this book strongly, but I approached it a bit tentatively at first. Then the marsh swallowed me whole.

What dragged me in wasn't the murder trial, gripping as it was, it was Kya herself, this abandoned girl learning gulls and shells and loneliness the way other children learn arithmetic. I've grown up visiting forests with my naturalist father and still live in wild places so I was quite taken by the natural world written with such tenderness or a woman's solitude given such dignity.

And that ending was simply gasp-worthy. 

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 first encountered Harry Dresden, a professional wizard solving a double homicide in Chicago, I was instantly hooked by its noir, fantasy, and traditional mystery with dollops of humor. This novel—the first in The Dresden File series—kept me engaged the entire time with a fast-moving plot and interesting characters.

I could see in my mind’s eye Chicago’s skyscrapers and their reflection in Lake Michigan as Harry dug deeper into the crimes and the supernatural world. This was my first urban fantasy read, and Butcher’s ability to blend a private investigator story with the supernatural ensured it was not my last.

A big complex adventure in a in a big, complex, and believable (within itself) future, but told through the points of view of very human, interesting characters. This is a gritty, workaday, human world, not some mythic galactic empire.