Here are 67 books that The Masked City fans have personally recommended if you like
The Masked City.
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I’ve obviously read a lot of Holmes retellings. Part of the impetus behind my new novella was trying to figure out whyI was so attracted to them. Part of it, I realized, is the neurodivergence aspect: fundamental to the Holmes story is the idea of someone who thinks differently—and who finds a way to interact with the world that uses that as an asset. The other component I love is the Holmes-Watson dynamic. Whether it's romantic or not, the development of a relationship of affection between two people who think very differently is an emotional counterpoint to plot-driven mysteries. Those elements—along with stellar writing, gripping mysteries, and characters I love spending time with.
This is probably the strangest retelling on this list (rivaling Alexis Hall’s wonderful The Affair of the Mysterious Letter) and—perhaps because of that?—the one that follows the original stories most closely.
Indeed, the mysteries explored by Crow are beat-by-beat versions of Holmes’s, except where they deviate to puncture racism, xenophobia, and sexism or to reflect the dictates of the fascinating paranormal world Addison created.
The wary developing friendship between Watson and Crow, the bizarre half-glimpsed world they live in, and the urgency of the prose make it hugely readable.
This is not the story you think it is. These are not the characters you think they are. This is not the book you are expecting. London 1888. Angels inhabit every public building, and vampires and werewolves walk the streets with human beings in a well-regulated truce. A utopia, except for one thing: Angels can Fall, and that Fall is like a nuclear bomb in both the physical and metaphysical worlds. Dr J. H. Doyle returns to London having been wounded in Afghanistan by a Fallen, and finds himself lodging in Baker Street with the enigmatic angel Crow. But living…
I write fantasy novels, including A College of Magics, River Rats, and When the King Comes Home. With Patricia C. Wrede, I wrote half of the Kate and Cecy series: Sorcery and Cecelia, The Grand Tour, and The Mislaid Magician.
Agent of the Ministry of Alchemy, Enchantments, and Supernatural Entities, Fatma el-Sha'arawi is the spectacularly well-dressed protagonist tasked with saving the world (again) in an alternate 1912 Cairo. This award-winning novel awed me with its detail and invention. What I loved most was the way the world building relegated the British Empire to relative unimportance. Come to think of it, I loved the Ministry library almost as much.
Included in NPR’s Favorite Sci-Fi And Fantasy Books Of The Past Decade (2011-2021) A Nebula Award Winner A Ignyte Award Winner A Compton Crook Award for Best New Novel Winner A Locus First Novel Award Winner A RUSA Reading List: Fantasy Winner A Hugo Award Finalist A World Fantasy Award Finalist A NEIBA Book Award Finalist A Mythopoeic Award Finalist A Dragon Award Finalist A Best of 2021 Pick in SFF for Amazon A Best of 2021 Pick in SFF for Kobo
Nebula, Locus, and Alex Award-winner P. Djèlí Clark goes full-length for the first time in his dazzling debut…
I write fantasy novels, including A College of Magics, River Rats, and When the King Comes Home. With Patricia C. Wrede, I wrote half of the Kate and Cecy series: Sorcery and Cecelia, The Grand Tour, and The Mislaid Magician.
As brilliantly written as it is sometimes difficult to read, this fantasy novel set in the early 20th century travels from rural Georgia to Chicago, part of the Great Migration. Hairston says "I wrote Redwood and Wildfire to celebrate folks like my great-aunt and grandfather who faced impossible choices." In so doing, she has told stories history has all but forgotten. I began to read this book because I knew it contained a passage involving a visit to the 1893 Columbian Exposition—The White City—but my favorite parts of this novel involve the show folk and the Black film industry in Chicago. Hairston's characters don't just do magic. They aremagic.
At the turn of the 20th century, minstrel shows transform into vaudeville, which slides into moving pictures. Hunkering together in dark theatres, diverse audiences marvel at flickering images. This 'dreaming in public' becomes common culture and part of what transforms immigrants and 'native' born into Americans.
Redwood, an African American woman, and Aidan, a Seminole Irish man, journey from Georgia to Chicago, from haunted swampland to a 'city of the future.' They are gifted performers and hoodoo conjurors, struggling to call up the wondrous world they imagine, not just on stage and screen, but on city streets, in front parlors,…
I write fantasy novels, including A College of Magics, River Rats, and When the King Comes Home. With Patricia C. Wrede, I wrote half of the Kate and Cecy series: Sorcery and Cecelia, The Grand Tour, and The Mislaid Magician.
No airships here, but there is a hot-air balloon, as well as a dark conspiracy afoot. This classic children's book, first published in 1964, introduces Dido Twite, a character so vivid that she took over the series this is part of. Back in the Cretaceous period, when I read this book for the very first time, I didn't notice this nineteenth-century London is not the one Dickens wrote of. Now I revel in the sly details that Aiken gives us.
Simon is determined to become a painter when he grows up so he sets off to London to make his fortune. But the city is plagued by wolves and mysterious disappearances. The Twite household, where Simon is lodging, seems particularly shifty. Before he even gets a chance to open his glistening new paints Simon stumbles right into the centre of a plot to kill the King. And worse than that Simon is kidnapped and sent to sea! Luckily there are two friendly stowaways aboard - the feisty Dido Twite and the spoiled young…
As an amateur sleuth, I’m always intrigued by the structure of mysteries and the characters who solve them. Every remarkable story has a mystery at its core. Tales where the whodunnit drives the tension are my favorite, though. I’ve dissected countless stories from Sherlock Holmes to Phryne Fisher, breaking them down until the books have literally fallen apart. Thank goodness for e-readers! I’ve found that my favorites revolve around the magical, the witty, and the vivacious women who know how to distract with words while they pull prints off your cup. Those are the sleuths I want to write about often–and wish I could have a cocktail with!
I love libraries and books about books. What reader doesn’t? There are a lot of shenanigans and mysteries contained within this first in a series where librarians travel to other worlds to find books to add to the one true Library. There are werewolves, dragons, and the wittiest fae imaginable. And through them, all clever focused Irene consistently uses her smarts before she reacts to the conflict. Amid the chaos, she’s quick thinking which I love. You can’t trust just anyone to retrieve a good book and she makes it clear that a proper librarian is the universe's best option.
Collecting books can be a dangerous prospect in this fun, time-traveling, fantasy adventure—the first in the Invisible Library series!
One thing any Librarian will tell you: the truth is much stranger than fiction...
Irene is a professional spy for the mysterious Library, a shadowy organization that collects important works of fiction from all of the different realities. Most recently, she and her enigmatic assistant Kai have been sent to an alternative London. Their mission: Retrieve a particularly dangerous book. The problem: By the time they arrive, it's already been stolen.
London's underground factions are prepared to fight…
As I wrote in my author's note for Library on Wheels: "Growing up as a book-loving child in rural Utah in the 1960s and '70s, I developed a strong emotional connection to the bookmobile. My father died in a mining accident when I was five, leaving my mother with seven children to raise on her own. We didn't have much money or many opportunities, but every two weeks the bookmobile brought the universe to me." As a writer of children's books, I was immediately intrigued when I ran across an obscure reference to Mary Lemist Titcomb, credited with being the inventor of the bookmobile in America--and I knew at once that I had to write about her.
The spare lyricism of both the text and illustrations of That Book Woman tug at the heartstrings without being overly sentimental. Young Cal works hard with his Pap on their Appalachian farm. Unlike his sister, an avid reader, Cal thinks he was not “born / to sit so stoney-still / a-starin’ at some chicken scratch.” But his grudging admiration for “that book woman” who just keeps coming and coming, rain, snow, or shine, eventually leads him to a love of books.
I love the gentle way that That Book Woman pays homage to the WPA Pack Horse Librarians of the 1930s.
An exquisitely illustrated paean to everyone who struggles to learn how to read, and to everyone who won’t give up on them.
Cal is not the readin' type. Living way high up in the Appalachian Mountains, he'd rather help Pap plow or go out after wandering sheep than try some book learning. Nope. Cal does not want to sit stoney-still reading some chicken scratch. But that Book Woman keeps coming just the same. She comes in the rain. She comes in the snow. She comes right up the side of the mountain, and Cal knows that's not easy riding. And…
A Chicago writer, I've always been drawn to quirky books. My first novel, The Prospect of My Arrival, was a finalist in Amazon's novel contest and centers on a human embryo that is allowed to preview the world. My current work-in-progress is nonfiction. The Invention of Fireflies is a memoir of the magical and monstrous moments of my life. Varied day jobs have included being a professional cuddler, web designer, and caregiver. Affirmative Entertainment represents me for possible movie/TV projects. My work was selected for inclusion in the HBO New Writers Project, The Norton Introduction to Literature, many textbooks, and anthologies.
Murakami's world is magic realist by default. It's often infused with American pop culture, jazz, secret passageways, and curious cats. The Strange Library is a perfect introduction to the author's world and it makes a nice gift. The book is adorned with pop illustrations and highly saturated colors. In this short novel a lonely boy, a mysterious girl, and a tormented sheep/man plot their escape from a nightmarish library. I have read the author's 1Q84 opus of 1,000 pages but it is his short works -- his short stories and novellas -- that have stayed with me the most.
Fully illustrated and beautifully designed, this is a unique and wonderfully creepy tale that is sure to delight Murakami fans.
'All I did was go to the library to borrow some books'.
On his way home from school, the young narrator of The Strange Library finds himself wondering how taxes were collected in the Ottoman Empire. He pops into the local library to see if it has a book on the subject. This is his first mistake.
Led to a special 'reading room' in a maze under the library by a strange old man, he finds himself imprisoned with only…
I write the West Investigations series, a romantic thriller series, centered around the men and women running a private investigations firm. When I began the series I knew I wanted it to be set in an urban city, not just because I’m a city girl at heart, but because of the eclectic nature, diversity, and color that can be found in the big city. Each of the books I’ve recommended below features a big city PI that jumps off the page, grabs you, and doesn’t let go for 200+ pages.
Fair warning: I grew up in the Washington, D.C. area so I’m not impartial here, but I love this book.
Pelecanos really just dropped me into the D.C. of my youth. The plotting here is great as is the characterization. Every character feels like a real person that you might meet in a bar or some seedy back room.
The suspense, the tension, the character’s individual motivations for stepping into the quagmire Pelecanos puts them in, is spot on. And it all leads up to an ending that is both shocking and, in hindsight, inevitable.
Fought when radio was first introduced, the Press-Radio war was an attempt on the part of print journalists to block the emergence of radio news. For nearly a decade, the newspapers of America fought to keep broadcast journalism off the air, exerting various forms of economic, regulatory, and legal pressure against new competitors. This study traces the stages and forms of institutional self-defense utilized by the press. Far more than mere battles to protect profits, media wars are fights to preserve the institutional power that derives from controlling the channels of communication.
Since discovering the myths and legends of the world at college, I’ve fallen in love with these and the countries and cities where they originated. Teaching the literature that evolved from this for so many years deepened my fascination with the ancient/medieval worlds. I literally pounce on any books I come across, fiction and non-fiction. All of my novels draw from these worlds and are a thrill to write and read. However, life was extremely hard back then, and I wouldn’t want to have lived back then! I hope you join me in exploring these fascinating reads.
I have to admit that it’s the title that drew me to this book in the first place. As a retired English teacher, the word Librarians intrigued me. A true story, The Bad-Ass Librariansopened up a whole new world of manuscripts over 500 years that I never knew existed! The courage of the preservers of these works surprised and humbled me. But, it is also a historical history of smugglers and the heroic actions of the dedicated people of Timbuktu to preserve their heritage even if it meant their death. You won’t be able to put this down.
In the 1980s, a young adventurer and collector for a government library, Abdel Kader Haidara, journeyed across the Sahara Desert and along the Niger River, tracking down and salvaging tens of thousands of ancient Islamic and secular manuscripts that were crumbling in the trunks of desert shepherds. His goal: to preserve this crucial part of the world's patrimony in a gorgeous library. But then Al Qaeda showed up at the door. Joshua Hammer writes about how Haidara, a mild-mannered archivist from the legendary city of Timbuktu, became one of the world's greatest smugglers by saving the texts from sure destruction.…
The roots of my debut novel Charlesgate Confidentialare in the time I spent in Boston, most notably the three years I lived in the Charlesgate building when it was an Emerson College dormitory. I always wanted to find a way to write about that time, but it wasn’t until I immersed myself in the world of Boston crime—not only the novels of Higgins, Lehane, and company but nonfiction works like Black Massand movies like The Departedand The Town—that I hit on the way to tell my story. I’ll always be excited for new Boston-based crime fiction, and I’m happy to share these recommendations with you.
The newest book on this list is the first in the Hester Thursby series about a diminutive Harvard librarian turned sleuth. Those expecting a cozy mystery based on that character description should brace themselves because Hill’s debut has more in common with Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley novels than the typical “librarian investigates” yarn. I feel a personal connection to this one because it was published at the same time as my book and I did my first event for that book with Hill, but rest assured, Little Comfort and the rest of the Thursby series are tremendous reads.
In a brilliantly twisted debut set among Boston’s elite, Edwin Hill introduces unforgettable sleuth Hester Thursby—and a missing persons case that uncovers a trail of vicious murder . . .
Harvard librarian Hester Thursby knows that even in the digital age, people still need help finding things. Using her research skills, Hester runs a side business tracking down the lost. Usually, she’s hired to find long-ago prom dates or to reunite adopted children and birth parents. Her new case is finding the handsome and charismatic Sam Blaine.
