Here are 86 books that The Distant Echo fans have personally recommended if you like
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I’ve always been a keen reader of crime fiction. A huge fan of both Agatha Christie and PD James in the Golden age of English crime fiction. I love American mystery writers too and have attended Bouchercon in New Orleans. Just after Driftnet was published and the Dr. Rhona MacLeod series launched, I was visiting a Crime Writers’ Association conference in Lincoln with my friend and fellow crime writer Alex Gray. That’s where the idea for a weekend promoting Scottish Crime writing began. When we launched it ten years ago, Ian Rankin said, "Scandinavia doesn’t have better crime writers than Scotland, it has better PR." That’s what we set out to change.
The Long Drop is a Scottish crime book like no other.
It features an imagined night featuring two key figures in the terrible world of one of Scotland’s most notorious murderers Peter Manuel.
In this long night of the soul Peter Manuel and William Watt wander through Glasgow and its underbelly as Manuel leads Watt on a journey of lies, drink, and trickery.
It is Tartan Noir at its most terrifying. A Jekyll and Hyde story of a night based on true events.
'A masterpiece by the woman who may be Britain's finest living crime novelist' Daily Telegraph
'Absorbing... this is a bravura performance, a true original' Ian Rankin
Glasgow, 1957. It is a December night and William Watt is desperate. His family has been murdered and he needs to find out who killed them.
He arrives at a bar to meet Peter Manuel, who claims he can get hold of the gun that was used. But Watt soon realises that this infamous criminal will not give up information easily.
Inspired by true events, The Long Drop follows Watt and Manuel along back…
Cal Lovett is obsessed with finding justice for the families of missing people. His true crime podcast is his way of helping others, even if he can't help himself.
His sister, Margot, disappeared when he was a child. Only one man seems to know something. But he's behind bars and…
These books aren't just the best in their field–they're the best at pinpointing the place I am from. Tartan Noir is a rich world, and I'm just about to join it. These books give a sense of place and people and sometimes bring a little laughter in the dark. To me, that's Scotland, in its magnificence, grandeur, and polar opposite of these things. Scotland is a country with two faces, as everyone from James Hogg onwards knew well... Let's see which side you prefer!
The seventies. The tough town. Laidlaw, Glasgow’s philosopher detective, is trying to find out who killed the lassie in the park. Arguably the template for Taggart, arguably the starting point for Tartan Noir.
I liked the way its bark was just as bad as its bite. It threatens to explode into violence all the way through, between most of its characters–then it does. Hard cases. And yet, at the very end, incredibly, compassion and sympathy.
First in “a crime trilogy so searing it will burn forever into your memory. McIlvanney is the original Scottish criminal mastermind” (Christopher Brookmyre, international bestselling author).
The Laidlaw novels, a groundbreaking trilogy that changed the face of Scottish fiction, are credited with being the founding books of the Tartan Noir movement that includes authors like Val McDermid, Denise Mina, and Ian Rankin. Says McDermid of William McIlvanney: “Patricia Highsmith had taken us inside the head of killers; Ruth Rendell tentatively explored sexuality; with No Mean City, Alexander McArthur had exposed Glasgow to the world; Raymond Chandler had dressed the…
These books aren't just the best in their field–they're the best at pinpointing the place I am from. Tartan Noir is a rich world, and I'm just about to join it. These books give a sense of place and people and sometimes bring a little laughter in the dark. To me, that's Scotland, in its magnificence, grandeur, and polar opposite of these things. Scotland is a country with two faces, as everyone from James Hogg onwards knew well... Let's see which side you prefer!
This is the starting point–when Inspector Rebus reaches the top tier. Rebus investigates a Bible John copycat–while under investigation over an assault in another case. The book is global in scope if that globe was Scotland. Edinburgh, Glasgow, Aberdeen, Shetland, with some commentary on the North Sea oil industry while we’re at it (one of many fantastic ways to start an argument north of the border).
It could have been weighty, overbearing, unwieldy, clumsy, and insensitive. Instead, it’s just brilliant. Not to be missed if you’re a crime fan.
Special edition of the award-winning Rebus novel from the No.1 bestselling author of A SONG FOR THE DARK TIMES - includes exclusive extra material.
'Britain's best crime novelist' DAILY EXPRESS
'Ian Rankin is a genius' Lee Child
In the 1960s, the infamous Bible John terrorised Scotland when he murdered three women, taking three souvenirs. Thirty years later, a copycat is at work, dubbed Johnny Bible.
DI John Rebus's unconventional methods have got him in trouble before - now he's taken away from the inquiry and sent to investigate the killing of an off-duty oilman. But when his case clashes head-on…
A decades-old secret. A missing woman. A private investigator with everything to prove.
Newly minted PI Paula Moore takes on her first case: find Marion Taylor, who vanished from Portsmouth, England, years ago. Paula’s search leads her across the ocean to San Francisco—only to discover Marion has changed her name,…
I’ve always been a keen reader of crime fiction. A huge fan of both Agatha Christie and PD James in the Golden age of English crime fiction. I love American mystery writers too and have attended Bouchercon in New Orleans. Just after Driftnet was published and the Dr. Rhona MacLeod series launched, I was visiting a Crime Writers’ Association conference in Lincoln with my friend and fellow crime writer Alex Gray. That’s where the idea for a weekend promoting Scottish Crime writing began. When we launched it ten years ago, Ian Rankin said, "Scandinavia doesn’t have better crime writers than Scotland, it has better PR." That’s what we set out to change.
I remember to the moment I opened this book. It was on a train to Inverness.
This was Chris’s first novel starring journalist Jack Parlabane and it had garnered great reviews. I couldn’t put it down, although I had to close it on occasions to recover myself from its hilarity and gruesomeness.
Dark irreverent Scottish humour, it began Chris’s fabulous career in crime and thriller writing which continues to this day.
Chris Brookmyer is a genius, and we at Bloody Scotland can all agree on that.
Yeah, yeah, the usual. A crime. A corpse. A killer. Heard it. Except this stiff happens to be a Ponsonby, scion of a venerable Edinburgh medical clan, and the manner of his death speaks of unspeakable things. Why is the body displayed like a slice of beef? How come his hands are digitally challenged? And if it's not the corpse, what is that awful smell? A post-Thatcherite nightmare of frightening plausibility, QUITE UGLY ONE MORNING is a wickedly entertaining and vivacious thriller, full of acerbic wit, cracking dialogue and villains both reputed and shell- suited.
Brian Conaghan has written seven Young Adult novels. When Mr. Dog Bites, was shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal. The Bombs That Brought Us Together, won the 2016 Costa Children’s Book Award. We Come Apart - a collaboration with Sarah Crossan - won the United Kingdom Literary Award. His novel, The Weight of a Thousand Feathers, won the 2018 An Post YA Irish Book of the Year. The M Word was shortlisted for the An Post YA and Teen Book of the Year. Cardboard Cowboys, to date, has been nominated for the Carnegie Medal. Brian lives and works in the Scottish town of Coatbridge.
A day in the life of two inseparable friends in an impoverished Scottish town where everything seems challenging. They learn what friendship truly means in the face of certain dangers. Dillon’s award-winning debut depicts the vitality and intensity of boyhood friendship, as well as painting a vivid picture of contemporary working-class Scotland.
A story of boyhood friendship and irrepressible vitality told with the speed of trains and the understanding of the awkwardness, significance and fragility of that time. This is a day in the life of two boys as told by one of them.
I’m an incurable nostalgist and, thanks to early exposure to a curly-haired, scarf-wearing eccentric who travels the universe in a battered old police box, gained an early and ongoing obsession with time travel stories, whether intricately-plotted and filled with brain-tangling paradoxes, or steeped in wistful yearning for days gone by. Young me would, I like to think, be delighted to learn that he would, one day, write a book bursting with both paradoxes AND yearning.
This book has a forbidding reputation, but I was lucky enough to come to it in my teens, not knowing I was supposed to be intimidated by it. Instead, I fell instantly and irretrievably in love with the mind-expanding potential of language and story.
It's about a city (Dublin), about a single day (June 16, 1904), and about a million other things besides. It’s a game, a challenge, a marvel, and I particularly love the way it uses time as a constant motif, as Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom weave their way through Dublin across the course of the day, their interior monologues wandering likewise between past, present and future.
James Joyce's masterpiece, Ulysses, tells of the diverse events which befall Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus in Dublin on one day in June 1904. It is considered to be one of the most important works of modernist literature and was hailed as a work of genius by W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot and Ernest Hemingway. Scandalously frank, wittily erudite, mercurially eloquent, resourcefully comic and generously humane, Ulysses offers the reader a life-changing experience
Shetland sailing sleuth Cass Lynch is definitely out of her comfort zone when she helps round up a prize-winning stallion escaped from the renowned Klaufister stud. She's even less impressed by its owner, Keith Arthurson, a returned city slicker who's already made enemies in his community.
Before he became a bestselling author with his debut novel, Before We Ever Spoke, Dan Largent spent the better part of two decades as a high school baseball coach. In 2010, he guided Olmsted Falls High School to its first-ever State Final Four and was subsequently named Greater Cleveland Division I Coach of the Year. Dan stepped away from his duties as a baseball coach in 2017 to spend more time with his wife, April, and their three children Brooke, Grace, and Luke. He has, however, remained close to the game he loves by turning doubles into singles as a member of Cleveland’s finest 35 and over baseball league.
Ted Williams is my favorite baseball player of all time, so naturally, I have read almost every book ever written about him. This book, however, isn’t just about the “Splendid Splinter”.
The Teammates takes place in the fall of 2001, as Ted Williams is dying and right around one of the most challenging times our country has endured. It revolves around the life-long friendship of 4 aging Red Sox teammates: Ted Williams, Dom DiMaggio, Johnny Pesky, and Bobby Doerr.
This is a book about four friends and teammates at the end of their time on this planet, and well-aware of that fact, who demonstrate that they will be there for each other all the way to the end. This is a short book and a fast read at only 218 pages (with pictures), but it is impactful far beyond its word count.
More than 6 years after his death David Halberstam remains one of this country's most respected journalists and revered authorities on American life and history in the years since WWII. A Pulitzer Prize-winner for his ground-breaking reporting on the Vietnam War, Halberstam wrote more than 20 books, almost all of them bestsellers. His work has stood the test of time and has become the standard by which all journalists measure themselves.
The Teammates is the profoundly moving story of four great baseball players who have made the passage from sports icons--when they were young and seemingly indestructible--to men dealing with…
I’m fascinated by men, the way they think and behave, the problems they have in their relationships. The very first gay romance I wrote was a cowboy story – Cowboys Down – and who doesn’t love cowboys? They’re enigmatic, strong, rugged, ultra-masculine. But what if they were also gay? I think it’s that challenge, to show another side of a role that has so predominantly been drawn in one particular way in western books and films. I think gay men must have to work even harder to be accepted as a cowboy than in many other industries and exploring that is enthralling.
I’m pretty sure this was the first story about gay guys that I ever read. I had a book of Annie Proulx’s short stories I’d been meaning to read and stumbled across this particular one by accident. I only saw the film a long time later and that bowled me over too. The story is beautifully written, though find it so sad to read (and watch). Individuals struggling to come to terms with the way they feel is the essence of so many romances and this opened the door to all those that followed. She’s a brilliant writer.
The inspiration behind 'Life of Pi' director Ang Lee's 'Brokeback Mountain' is one of the short stories to be found in this haunting collection of Wyoming tales.
'Brokeback Mountain' is set in the beautiful, wild landscape of Wyoming where cowboys live as they have done for generations. Hard, lonely lives in unforgiving country. Jack Twist and Ennis del Mar are two ranch hands, glad to have found each other's company where none had been expected. But companionship becomes something else on Brokeback Mountain, something not looked for - an intimacy neither can forget.
I’m intrigued by baseball. The passion and drama of the games and the way the sport is nearly always linked to a meaningful relationship with someone dear. That curiosity has only been fueled by the books I’ve read over the years and inspired me to write a baseball story of my own. The All-American is my ninth novel and I couldn’t feel more privileged to have been able to write it.
My friend and fellow novelist, Allison Pittman, recommended this one to me.
It’s a story told in letters written between a goofball kid named Joey and a New York Giants player named Charlie. I laughed and cried my way through this winner of a novel, rooting for both Joey and Charlie the entire time. It’s a story about the love of baseball, yes.
But it’s also a book about ambition and friendship, heartache and dreams, disappointments and hope. And with every page I read, I fell more and more in love with baseball. It’s one of the finest novels I’ve read.
A contemporary American classic—a poignant and hilarious tale of baseball, hero worship, eccentric behavior, and unlikely friendship
Last Days of Summer is the story of Joey Margolis, neighborhood punching bag, growing up goofy and mostly fatherless in Brooklyn in the early 1940s. A boy looking for a hero, Joey decides to latch on to Charlie Banks, the all-star third basemen for the New York Giants. But Joey's chosen champion doesn't exactly welcome the extreme attention of a persistent young fan with an overactive imagination. Then again, this strange, needy kid might be exactly what Banks needs.
I am an author, attorney, artist, and entrepreneur. My experience as a litigator for over forty years, as well as my experience as a painter and an investor, has inspired and influenced me to write the Chance Cormac legal thrillers series.
The southern lawyer, Penn Cage, the attorney who has returned home to Natchez, Mississippi, to practice law, is the protagonist of Iles’s legal thrillers.
When a prep school student is found murdered, Cage must defend his best friend. Iles skillfully weaves a story of blackmail, betrayal, and violence in a small Southern town.
When the body of Kate Townsend turns up near the Mississippi River and his close friend, physician Drew Elliott, admits to a love affair with the murdered girl, attorney Penn Cage once again tangles with the dark side of his hometown of Natchez, Mississippi, to investigate the secret world of an elite nearby high school, teenage sex, drugs, and violence. 250,000 first printing.
