Books like The Doorman — picked by fans

I'm a huge fan of Mick Herron's Slow Horses novels, so it was a joy to discover this earlier work. His writing is so wry and wonderful, and I love how he crafted his two female protagonists. There's lots of humor, but Herron doesn't shy away from the darkness either. The scene with the big reveal about what was really behind the cover-up was searing.

Absorbing read, giving me a stark insight into a whole different world. Pacey, vivid and sometimes quite shocking, but I was on the side of the lead character the whole time.

What an original, fascinating, unlikely hero, and what a compassionate lens the author writes with! The ending is something that will stay with me forever -- even now, many months since reading it, I could recite it word for word, it has so emblazoned itself on my soul.

I adore everything Bob Crais writes; he is a lovely human being in person, and it shines through all his writing, no matter how dark the subject matter. The Big Empty was especially bold; he took on some awfully dark topics, and wrote them with such poignant care and sensitivity. Powerful stuff.

What a find this is for an author looking for a good story. I would have run with this had I come across it. As would you. The story calls attention to itself and begs to be told.

Elmhirst gets into the bones of all the human personalities, as a complete aside to the astonishing survival story she tells. It basically reads like Life of Pi, but Richard Parker is a human husband.

There is only one minor flaw, that can easily be corrected, with no editing staff necessary: maps, please!

What's spectacular about this book is not the freakishly amazing research the author put in, or the dedication to inhabit the shoes of the dead, or the chiasmic way he tells the story - from both the beginning, middle, and end. No, what's spectacular is that he mostly likely - after a half century of the dead-in-the-water-ness of literally the coldest case ever, he actually, finally, at the end, most likely solves the case! He didn't know he'd do that going in! Then he re-paints the picture of what happened to put a final, super-convincing bow on it all, and the whole experience is rather satisfying - especially because he fools you, with some meandering, into thinking he won't get to the bottom of it all. There are few books out there with such a payoff, which is why this is such fantastic reading.

While this novel is a suspenseful psychological thriller in its own right, the story also tackles racial tensions and contemporary family dynamics. I admire the way Steph Cha explores grief, revenge, violence, racism, and justice over the course of Your House Will Pay’s fast-paced plot. This is absolutely a must-read.

This bighearted, heartbreaking story about the abortion wars is also paradoxically one of the funniest books I’ve ever read; there’s a page in the middle that I’ll reread again and again whenever I need a smile. The plot revolves around Claudia, a longtime employee of a Boston clinic that’s besieged by protesters who threaten the sort of political violence that’s become all too commonplace in polarized America, creating an insistent drumbeat of menace. But Mercy Street is not a polemic, and the antagonists are treated with deep empathy and humanity. Possibly my favorite novel of the past few years.

Richard Price’s propulsive plots revolve around crime, but the novels are always about something much bigger, and Lush Life merges many of his favorite themes into one masterpiece: ambition and compromise, race and class, gentrification and crime, the push-and-pull of a city’s progressive leanings against reactionary forces for law and order and property values. Price’s city is constructed on a bedrock of conflict between those who’ve come to New York struggling to create art, those who were born here struggling to get by, and the cops struggling to hold the middle, in a spectacular kaleidoscope of a downtown scene at the turn of the millennium, of hipsters and gangsters, housing projects and trendy restaurants, all these subcultures clashing in one microcosm of urban life.

It took me into the underbelly of Philadelpia, a city I was unfamiliar with, from the pov of a female police officer.