Here are 96 books that The Ghosts of Eden Park fans have personally recommended if you like
The Ghosts of Eden Park.
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As a child, finding reality both overwhelming and boring, I was drawn to movies. My father, a New York City disc jockey also at odds with reality, had contacts at a sixteen-millimeter movie rental company. He often brought films home, shown in a makeshift screening room he set up in our basement. Singin’ in the Rain, the classic musical, made a great impression there. Its funny first scene at a movie premiere featured a pompous star’s ennobling account of his early days, comically contradicted by the tacky, scrounging, painfully undignified truth. What lay behind Hollywood's glamor, smiles, and success soon became as interesting to me as what was on the screen.
An excellent nonfiction account of an actual Hollywood killing, this is a well-written and researched investigation of the (as yet) unsolved 1922 shooting of director William Desmond Taylor. The murder was committed right when scandals, including Fatty Arbuckle’s, besieged an ascendant Hollywood.
Also of interest: A Murder in Hollywood by Casey Sherman, which recaps the killing of Johnny Stompanato, Lana Turner’s gangster boyfriend, supposedly by her teenage daughter, Cheryl. This crime inspired entertainment from Harold Robbin’s potboiler, Where Love Has Gone, to Woody Allen’s self-serious movie, September.
New York Times Bestseller Edgar Award winner for Best Fact Crime The Day of the Locust meets The Devil in the White City and Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil in this juicy, untold Hollywood story: an addictive true tale of ambition, scandal, intrigue, murder, and the creation of the modern film industry. By 1920, the movies had suddenly become America's new favorite pastime, and one of the nation's largest industries. Never before had a medium possessed such power to influence. Yet Hollywood's glittering ascendency was threatened by a string of headline-grabbing tragedies-including the murder of William Desmond…
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
The author, editor, or ghostwriter of more than 100 book titles, GlennStout loves to mine microfilmed newspaper archives and specializes in deeply reported historical narrative non-fiction that brings the past to life. Many of his titles have intersected with the Roaring Twenties, including Young Woman and the Sea: How Trudy Ederle Conquered the English Channel and Changed the World, now in development for Disney+ as a major motion picture starring Daisy Ridley. A long-time aficionado of noir and true crime, Tiger Girl and the Candy Kid was the culmination of more than fifteen years of dogged research, a story The Wall Street Journal called “a hell of a yarn--worthy of an HBO hoodlum epic like Boardwalk Empire.”
In 1924 husband and wife team Celia and Ed Cooney, with a new baby on the way and not enough money, turned stick-up artists, with meek-looking, bobbed-hair Celia wielding the gun. The tabloids couldn’t get enough of the “flapper turned bad” storyline and for a time every bobbed-hair flapper and her swain in New York was under suspicion.
Illuminates the life and image of one of New York City's most fashionable criminals-Celia Cooney
Ripped straight from the headlines of the Jazz Age, The Bobbed Haired Bandit is a tale of flappers and fast cars, of sex and morality. In the spring of 1924, a poor, 19-year-old laundress from Brooklyn robbed a string of New York grocery stores with a "baby automatic," a fur coat, and a fashionable bobbed hairdo. Celia Cooney's crimes made national news, with the likes of Ring Lardner and Walter Lippman writing about her exploits for enthralled readers.
The Bobbed Haired Bandit brings to life…
One of the great job benefits of being a newspaper reporter is the wide array of interesting people I get to meet. Not only getto meet but in fact, get paid to meet and to tell their stories. Some of them are famous, and that’s fine. Much more interesting, I think, are the ordinary folk nobody knows who are doing something extraordinary. And then there is a third category that I find most interesting of all: The people who have something to hide. They are mysteries who don’t want to be cracked, and I find them irresistible.
Before Ponzi was a scheme, Ponzi was a man. His name was Charles Ponzi. He sailed to the US from Europe with nothing – after gambling away his nest egg during the trans-Atlantic crossing – and then made himself an ill-gotten fortune through a swindle so famous it is now named for him. I love learning history, but not through academic texts. I need to learn it through stories. And the critical ingredient that makes compelling narrative nonfiction are the details that enable me to see the characters and their world in my mind. Zuckoff’s book put me in Boston in 1920, with the sights, sounds, and odors to bring Ponzi and his victims to life.
It was a time when anything seemed possible–instant wealth, glittering fame, fabulous luxury–and for a run of magical weeks in the spring and summer of 1920, Charles Ponzi made it all come true. Promising to double investors’ money in three months, the dapper, charming Ponzi raised the “rob Peter to pay Paul” scam to an art form. At the peak of his success, Ponzi was raking in more than $2 million a week at his office in downtown Boston. Then his house of cards came crashing down–thanks in large part to the relentless investigative reporting of Richard Grozier’s Boston Post.…
A Duke with rigid opinions, a Lady whose beliefs conflict with his, a long disputed parcel of land, a conniving neighbour, a desperate collaboration, a failure of trust, a love found despite it all.
Alexander Cavendish, Duke of Ravensworth, returned from war to find that his father and brother had…
I picked up my first book about Jack the Ripper the summer after college and never looked back. Since then my collection of true crime has grown to overflow my office bookshelves and I’ve written a PhD dissertation and multiple books about true crime, focusing on serial killers. The genre is so much more than Bundy, Gacy, and Dahmer and I love talking with people about the less mainstream cases that interest them, and the newer victim-centered approaches that—fingers crossed—mark a change in how we talk about criminals and victims.
Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb set out to commit the perfect crime and ended up in newspapers as the perpetrators of “the crime of the century.” They kidnapped and murdered a teenage boy in Chicago in 1924, but both Leopold and Loeb were still considered boys themselves at the time. Clarence Darrow defended them at trial, arguing that they were guilty but that the situation had extenuating circumstances. Baatz’s book explores how two college students from good families ended up in prison for murder. Leopold’s family even came from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, near where I currently live, so even though the case is almost 100 years old, it’s not as distant as it might seem.
It was a crime that shocked the nation: the brutal murder in Chicago in 1924 of a child by two wealthy college students who killed solely for the thrill of the experience. Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb were intellectuals—too smart, they believed, for the police to catch them. When they were apprehended, state's attorney Robert Crowe was certain that no defense could save the ruthless killers from the gallows. But the families of the confessed murderers hired Clarence Darrow, entrusting the lives of their sons to the most famous lawyer in America in what would be one of the most…
For thirty-five years I spent my life in boardrooms, financing motion pictures with major Hollywood studios and learning the inside-out of law firms. I’ve also had a love for mysteries where I have to guess what’s going to happen next. My favorite authors keep me in suspense and stay a step ahead of me to the very end. I began my career as an author seven years ago. I added my own dose of modernized Shakespearean stories and the twists, turns, and suspense of life at the highest echelons of corporate America. I don’t aim to shock, but I do aim to surprise and keep you turning the pages. Obsessively.
This is the first of his seven novels all based in Toronto, which introduces a cast of characters who wind their way through the justice system: prosecutors, defense attorneys, politicians, detectives, police, and judges in a series which not only tracks a murderer, but provides an insight into issues that have become so problematic in society, whether it’s homelessness, schizophrenia, holocaust survival, or other current social issues.
There is a twist behind every turn and if you enjoy police procedurals this has been written by the ultimate insider, a Toronto practicing criminal lawyer who has seen it all and has a gift for story-telling.
'Robert Rotenberg does for Toronto what Ian Rankin does for Edinburgh' Jeffery Deaver
A talk-show host confesses to the brutal murder of his young wife.
The evidence is cast iron.
But when a determined detective, an ambitious rookie prosecutor and a defence lawyer keen to make her mark piece together the details of the case, nothing fits.
An intricately plotted web of lies, half-truths and hidden motives emerges - along with a secret no one could have suspected.
I've been hooked on the magic of storytelling since childhood, always eager to go wherever imagination can take me. I think that early fascination led me to become a costume designer – because costume design is about using clothing to help tell a story. I spent 27 years working on the costume design teams for films like Forrest Gump, Apollo 13, Angels & Demons, and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. When I decided to take what felt like a logical creative step, to write my own stories, I knew I wanted to write murder mysteries. And I thought the world behind the scenes of a movie would make the perfect setting.
Charlie Waldo, the reluctant hero of this debut novel by a former TV writer, lives in self-imposed exile in the San Jacinto Mountains with a flock of chickens and the one hundred things he allows himself to own – a conundrum he continually struggles with (is a pair of socks one thing or two?).
Waldo is doing penance for his former life as a hotshot LAPD detective when his aggressive tactics put an innocent man in prison for life.
But Charlie’s world is upended when his ex-girlfriend, private investigator Lorena Nascimento, embroils him in a murder investigation involving TV star Alastair Pinch who may or may not have killed his wife. Alastair, a blackout drunk, can’t remember.
Charlie is complicated, funny, empathetic, and (it turns out) still a dogged and skillful investigator. The story is entertaining and unexpected – well worth a read!
A razor-sharp, exquisitely paced, madly fun debut thriller that gleefully lampoons Hollywood culture and introduces the highly eccentric yet brilliant ex-detective gone rogue: Charlie Waldo
There are run-of-the-mill eccentric Californians, and then there's former detective Charlie Waldo.
Waldo, a onetime LAPD superstar, now lives in solitude deep in the woods, pathologically committed to owning no more than one hundred possessions. He has left behind his career and his girlfriend, Lorena, to pay self-imposed penance for an awful misstep on a pivotal murder case. But the old ghosts are about to come roaring back.
The Duke's Christmas Redemption
by
Arietta Richmond,
A Duke who has rejected love, a Lady who dreams of a love match, an arranged marriage, a house full of secrets, a most unneighborly neighbor, a plot to destroy reputations, an unexpected love that redeems it all.
Lady Charlotte Wyndham, given in an arranged marriage to a man she…
I write in my spare time, drawing inspiration from my frequent trips to Italy, dating back to my childhood summers. I am an indie writer of noir crime fiction with an interest in uncomfortable moments, especially those created by the main characters themselves. My list journeys across a vast array of genres, but they all have that tone of something happening in the shadows or underlying truths working to achieve an outcome or fight against adversity. I like unspoken dialogue and self-made conflicts, which are both elements included in all the stories I mention in this list.
I was drawn to the main character’s reaction to his own paranoia. Anything the man did, even something mundane as pouring a drink, he made himself appear more and more suspicious.
What really sparked my interest, though, were moments when, in conversation with another character, the man believed that underneath the surface of the discussion, the other was trying to imply or deliver a different message. Again, this prompts him to respond or react suspiciously, even to a person who would have no clue. He was making himself crazy all on his own.
It reminded me of the character from Dostoevsky’s Crime & Punishment. I love Highsmith’s work, especially the great cringe moments in many of her stories, including Strangers on the Train and the Tom Ripley series.
For two years, Walter Stackhouse has been a faithful and supportive husband to his wife, Clara. She is distant and neurotic, and Walter finds himself harboring gruesome fantasies about her demise. When Clara's dead body turns up at the bottom of a cliff in a manner uncannily resembling the recent death of a woman named Helen Kimmel who was murdered by her husband, Walter finds himself under intense scrutiny. He commits several blunders that claim his career and his reputation, cost him his friends, and eventually threaten his life. The Blunderer examines the dark obsessions that lie beneath the surface…
In case it isn’t obvious, I have a thing about graveyards. Maybe it’s being Irish-Catholic – it must be infused into my blood. It’s a rare family holiday that doesn’t involve a visit to the local cemetery. I think it’s the combination of gothic architecture with the sense of a social history collected. I have my own favourites (of course!) from Rock Cemetery in Nottingham to Pere Lachaise in Paris where the family spent an afternoon dodging the most unusual tour guide I have ever come across.
I loved BirdBox, but then I read Unbury Carol and discovered Josh Malerman had managed to peer directly into my brain and write a book just for me. I don’t know how he did it, and I don’t really want to know because it’s possibly more than a little freaky, but there you go.
This is not your typical horror novel. I’m not sure if it’s even horror, but who cares? It feels like a real olde-worlde adventure yarn where steampunk meets western and they have a scrap to decide who is best, and the only winner is the reader.
The New York Times bestselling author of Bird Box returns with a supernatural thriller of love, redemption, and murder.
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY NEWSWEEK
“This one haunts you for reasons you can’t quite put your finger on. . . . [Josh Malerman] defies categories and comparisons with other writers.”—Kirkus Reviews
Carol Evers is a woman with a dark secret. She has died many times . . . but her many deaths are not final: They are comas, a waking slumber indistinguishable from death, each lasting days.
I am the author of three novels (with two more set to release next year); Monarchs Under the Sassafras Tree; The Dead Rockstar Trilogy; and I'm happiest when straddling literary genres. I have published works of historical fiction, as well as southern gothic, horror, speculative fiction, dark fantasy, and literary fiction. My debut, Monarchs Under the Sassafras Tree was nominated for Georgia Author of the Year in 2020. In addition to writing, I am a genealogist and recently went back to school to obtain my history degree. My love of writing, history, and family all intersect to inform my writing and I always set my characters in good old Georgia.
Alice Walker is one of my all-time favorite authors and inspirations, and not just because she’s from Georgia, like me. The Third Life of Grange Copeland is my favorite novel of hers; in it, she captures beautifully the fraught relationship between a hardened old man and his granddaughter, who he is determined to do right by after a lifetime of doing wrong. It is a heartbreaking, stark, beautiful novel.
Alice Walker's first book recounts the lives of three generations growing up in Georgia, where the author herself grew up. Grange Copeland is a black tenant farmer who is forced to leave his land and family in search of a better future. He heads North but discovers that the racism and poverty he experienced in the South are, in fact, everywhere. When he returns to Georgia years later he finds that his son Brownfield has been imprisoned for the murder of his wife. But hope comes in the form of the third generation as the…
This book follows the journey of a writer in search of wisdom as he narrates encounters with 12 distinguished American men over 80, including Paul Volcker, the former head of the Federal Reserve, and Denton Cooley, the world’s most famous heart surgeon.
In these and other intimate conversations, the book…
William Heath has a Ph.D. in American Studies at Case Western Reserve University. He has taught American history and literature as well as creative writing at Kenyon, Transylvania, Vassar, the University of Seville, and Mount Saint Mary’s University, retiring as a professor emeritus. He has published two poetry books, The Walking Man and Steel Valley Elegy; two chapbooks, Night Moves in Ohio and Leaving Seville; three novels: The Children Bob Moses Led (winner of the Hackney Award), Devil Dancer, andBlacksnake’s Path;a work of history, William Wells and the Struggle for the Old Northwest(winner of two Spur Awards); and a collection of interviews, Conversations with Robert Stone.
Historians of the Midwest were deprived of one of their finest by the early death of Andrew Cayton. Frontier Indiana is the best of a series of books published by Ohio State University Press on the states of the Old Northwest. Combining chapters on various men and women, Little Turtle’s Miami resistance, and William Henry Harrison’s land-hungry settlers, Cayton’s impressive research and thoughtful writing go a long way toward illuminating the frontier of the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
"The research and scholarship that went into the work are excellent; so good, in fact, that the book should be on the required text list for all Transappalachian frontier courses." -History
Cayton's lively new history of the frontier period in Indiana puts the focus on people, on how they lived, how they viewed their world, and what motivated them. Here are the stories of Sieur de Vincennes, John Francis Hamtramck, Little Turtle, Anna Tuthill Symmes Harrison, Tenskwatawa, Calvin Fletcher-along with many more familiar (and not so familiar) early Hoosiers.
