Books like The Players — picked by fans

Who doesn’t enjoy an escape room experience? I’m a sucker for games where you have to solve clues under pressure – but only a time pressure – not the life-or-death kind!

This story delves into the dark and twisted world of corporate greed and through a supposed team-building escape room challenge we are taken on a suspenseful journey with the trapped investment bankers as they realise it’s not your standard game. The stakes are high, and the tension is almost unbearable!

This novel features some truly unlikeable characters, but as they are forced to confront their own secrets and inner demons, I was completely entertained and enthralled by them.

With a creepy cover and an endorsement from Stephen King, this novel immediately grabbed my attention.

I’d say this was a psychological thriller with a crime element and a dose of horror and that mix really drew me into this book and kept me trapped within its pages. Together with the nostalgic 80s thread, this read is down as one of my all-time favourites.

The seemingly innocent chalk stick figures the kids leave for each other like a secret game only they can decode, begin to appear on their own with a more sinister message. A bone-chilling read!

Now, I’m not a fan of gory movies, so to begin with, when Eeny Meeny gave me Saw vibes I almost closed the book.

I’m glad I didn’t because not only did I enjoy the building tension, but I loved the character of DI Helen Grace in this, her first outing.

The victims in the sadistic game being played in this novel are pitted against each other in a ‘you’ or ‘me’ scenario, with their captor forcing them to make a decision. I’m intrigued with how people who are ultimately trying to survive a situation make morally tough choices, so this was a fascinating exploration and made me question: what would I do?

This story centres on four friends who met and forged their friendship at boarding school where they played a lying game – targeting others and gaining points for an elaborate lie successfully believed. These were sometimes harmless… but sometimes not. 

Years later, summoned by one of the friends, they reunite. A buried secret from their past now threatens to resurface. I thought this was an intense read with the tension slowly building and with some great revelations that kept me turning the pages. I love the way the author paints such a vivid, atmospheric picture so you can become fully immersed in the story.

Annika Bengtzon is another strong woman reporter working in a man’s world. She’s married to a man very involved in his own career. They have two children and Annika struggles to balance chasing after a story with looking after the kids and keeping house. Most women can relate to her very real pressures and will empathize with all that she goes through on the home front. I liked her tenacity and intelligence and almost reckless pursuit of a killer. Marklund is Swedish and I enjoy learning more about the country—another cold, northern setting. Her character develops over the series with gritty crimes at the centre of the stories.

This is a psychological thriller with a difference. This story appears to be one thing and is, in fact, something else. Following the path of a struggling working mother with post-natal depression, we see the world through her paranoid eyes.

What I really enjoyed about this book is the unexpected twists and turns. Is she really imagining this, or did she see that little girl on the platform? It makes you question everything, including the motives of those surrounding the main character (always a good thing!). It is a masterpiece of misdirection and an unreliable narrator.

I love a great mystery and I adore fantastic characters.

That’s why A Spoonful of Murder is so high on my list. It’s cozy crime with attitude. Having a detective story that doesn’t feature any actual detectives is the challenge for all cozy crime writers.

And J.M. Hall does this with such verve, vigour, and lightness of touch that you find it impossible not to fall in love with Liz, Pat, and Thelma.

There’s a wonderful fraternity amongst us cozy crime writers and I’m very lucky to count Mr. Hall as a friend. He makes me want to be a better author, just to keep up with him!

I couldn't get enough of the character, Rocco Schiavone, from the TV series Ice Cold Murders, so I decided to check out the original novels by Antonio Manzini. They are equally good—or better.  Rocco is a police inspector from Rome who gets transferred to Aosta, an alpine ski resort town. In Black Run, Rocco instructs his provincial team in big-city police techniques, including cutting corners and avoiding superiors. He contrives useless errands to get his two dumbest cops out of the office. And he introduces his classification of Things That Are a Pain in the Ass, with "sand in your clams" at Level Seven and "unsolved homicide" at Level 10. Black Run begins on the slopes, at Level 10, with the discovery of an unidentified corpse mangled by a snowcat.

Just about any of Leonard’s several dozen suspense novels could have a top spot in this reckoning, including the better known Get Shorty, Freaky Deaky, and Glitz. My vote for the best goes, however, to Killshot, his dark, deftly plotted, highly comedic 1989 thriller about two bumbling killers and a ballsy middle-aged married couple the killers mistake for easy marks. Armand Degas, a soulful Ojibway known as the Blackbird, has grown tired of being a hit man for the Detroit mob. He’s befriended by a moronic thug named Richie Nix, whose bucket list includes robbing a bank in every state. When they decide that Carmen, a real estate agent, and her steelworker husband Wayne Colson hold the keys to a fortune, they learn that, like the Bible says, the wages of sin is death.  

As the daughter of a mom who suffered a mental breakdown shortly after my birth, I have always been strongly interested in stories of mothers who experience emotional difficulties following the births of their children. In this book, a young woman abandons her infant in a hospital shortly after giving birth and disappears.

Her husband attributes her behavior to postpartum psychosis, a malady that she’s been monitored for throughout her pregnancy, given her own mother’s struggles with the disorder. But is that what really led to the mom’s sudden disappearance? Told in multiple viewpoints, it’s unclear who is telling the truth about what happened to the young mother. I found the plot twist at the end of this propulsive tale especially satisfying.