Books like The Neighbor — picked by fans

I’ve been a fan of Crais’s Elvis & Joe series for years, so I was delighted to see that he brought a dog into a new series as a main character. Another book with traumatized characters, this one demonstrates the redemptive power of canine love.

LAPD officer Scott James is recovering from an assault in which his partner was killed, and he almost lost his life. He’s barely fit to return to duty until he’s paired with his new partner Maggie, a bomb-sniffing German shepherd that lost her handler in Afghanistan. Their partnership offers healing for both, and I love this book and A Borrowing of Bones because they reflect redemption.

Even while pursuing the nastiest criminals Detective Lucas Davenport and his sardonic sense of humor make me laugh. A deranged man wants to punish the female psychiatrist who once put him in a mental hospital. When he kidnaps the woman and her two young daughters, Lucas focuses on who stands to benefit. The combative resentful husband she's divorcing, her business partner, and her elderly father's trophy wife who will inherit his fortune if his daughter dies. 

The kidnapper inflicts harsh punishment on the psychiatrist and plays mind games with Lucas. He telephones Lucas, taunts him and threatens to kill his captives. Lucas has no idea where they are, but he can play mind games too. An emotional roller-coaster ride until the last page of this gritty suspense thriller.

Picture Jack Reacher on an NYC subway car at 2 AM with a suicide bomber. Will she blow up the car and everyone in it? I love how Lee Child keeps us in suspense, not just for a page or two, for twenty-seven pages! Reacher finds out the woman had a dangerous secret, but everyone he talks to lies to him. Each chapter ends with a cliffhanger and more questions. 

But many people want Reacher to stop asking questions: a former Delta Force operative running for the US Senate, two Al Qaeda agents, NYC cops, and FBI agents. They want Reacher to get lost and forget the suicide bomber. Fat chance! The complex plot will intrigue you. The climactic ending will terrify you even more than the suicide bomber.

Half the fun of reading a Detective John Corey novel is his smartass humor and snarky dialogue. The other half is watching his dogged pursuit of the bad guys. In Radiant Angel, he's working for the Diplomatic Surveillance Group in New York City. His assignment? Keep tabs on a Russian diplomat who may be an enemy agent on a deadly mission. 

The threat? A nuclear bomb—aka radiant angel—small enough to fit in a suitcase, big enough to blow New York City to smithereens, with enough radioactive fallout to cripple the US for years. The bonus is experiencing the action from the Russian agent's perspective, including his fear of failing to complete his mission. And the clock is ticking so John Corey must figure out how to stop him pronto.

This book takes place in Boston during the broiling hot summer of ‘74. The protagonist of Lehane’s sublime novel is Mary Pat Fennessy, a hard-bitten mother from the Southie projects who took a look at this list of tough guys, chuckled, punched the #5 guy in the throat, and took over his spot.

Mary Pat’s teen daughter is missing, the Irish mob may know more about it than they’re letting on, and all the while, the desegregation of the public schools has turned the city into a violent racial hotbox. In Small Mercies, Mary Pat navigates searing issues of loyalty and justice. Race and grief, and as intense pressures converge on both her and the city, she responds the only way she knows how—by coming out swinging. 

Keyes was a journalist (she died in 1970), and her background informed every novel she wrote. 

Joy Street is set primarily in Boston in the 1930s and 1940s. At the time I read this book, I had never been to Boston. When I finally visited that city several years later, her descriptions of the area in and around Beacon Hill still were so vivid in my mind that I felt as though I already knew the neighbourhood intimately.

Keyes had an equally deft hand with character development and plot. Joy Street is a book populated with characters that seem real and a story that moves forward at a satisfying pace.

It is a joy to read.

Spenser is a hard-nosed private detective living and working in Boston. When his girlfriend Susan runs off to California with another man, Spenser feels betrayed but understands. She has her freedom. Then his best friend, Hawk, is falsely arrested and jailed in the new man’s town. This sets off a firestorm of murder and violence as Spenser first frees Hawk and then they both attempt to free Susan from an abusive, if consensual, relationship. And then the CIA gets involved. A Catskill Eagle is the twelfth of forty Spenser novels written by Parker.

This book reminds me of a spell in Boston, in my first job, and I acquired it then as I was eager to take the opportunity to explore its famous park system. This title was recommended to me as the main source of reference. I was immediately attracted to it because it was well-illustrated and with a direct, clear, and accessible text that explained the progress of the project.

To me, it provided a concise context and background for the park system that became prototypical as ‘the emerald necklace,’ not only in the USA but also internationally. I like the way it also addressed the theoretical development, the design process, down to the very detail of the project, in what remains one of the few such critical monographs of a single landscape concept.

This is another story that takes me back to my medical training days. A young member of the surgical team makes an impulsive decision that leads to an ethical dilemma and a web of deception.

This story is not only a thriller but addresses important issues related to the ethics of the transplant system. It’s a great read to get a look at the inner workings of the medical system. 

I love how this book asks big and fundamental questions about the relationship between work and education and grounds them in such careful and extensive historical research. It challenges some of the things we think we know about the relationship between the economy and education and makes a powerful case that we fall into a “trap” when we ask education to fix inequalities that are rooted in and best addressed in our economic system.

I love how this book looks broadly and deeply across sectors of the economy, public and private schools, higher education, and K-12 schools at a critical moment of transformation to ask important questions about the sources of inequality and the best ways to address it.