Books like The Seduction — picked by fans

Westlake is one of my favorite authors. His best-known works are his humorous John Dortmunder crime capers, but this book is a freestanding work with a brilliance all its own. Imagine an ordinary businessman sacked in corporate downsizing and desperate to land a new job…so desperate that he’ll literally kill the competition to get it.

I found it impossible to put down as I followed Burke Devore, someone not truly a “bad guy,” plan, prepare for, and carry out murder after murder. But what dazzled me most was how Westlake morphed a chilling crime spree into a grand metaphor for survival in the world of business.

Anne Hillerman is the daughter of Tony Hillerman, a well-known author of the Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee Navajo mysteries. Anne continued her father’s work, bringing to the fore Officer Bernadette Maneulito alongside Chee and Leaphorn.

I enjoy her style, which is a bit lighter than her father’s, the interactions between the main characters and their families, and, of course, the twisty plots that keep me guessing. I like mystery series that are as much about the characters as they are about the crimes, and this series has been continued through two generations of authors, so there’s a lot to love. Also, I’m an amateur astronomer, and the astronomy connection of Stargazer is fun.

Martha Grimes is one of my favorite authors. I love both her style and her penchant for pairing the twists and turns of murder investigations with hijinks to create a three-dimensional world. The twelfth book in Grimes’ Richard Jury series brings the Scotland Yard detective to America, where he’s confronted with killings in a Pennsylvania cabin and on the streets of Baltimore.

This book is named for a real-life saloon in Baltimore’s Fells Point neighborhood. I moved to the Baltimore suburbs not long after reading this book. When I first saw the establishment, its front windows were filled with copies of Grimes’ novel.

Agatha Christie isn’t called “the Queen of Crime” for nothing. She invented many of the tropes that have characterized the mystery genre since, plus contributed two of the best-known detectives of all time. But this book features neither of them. Instead, it drops Charles Hayward, fiancé of a murdered millionaire’s granddaughter, into the midst of a family that is happy on the outside and is anything but on the inside.

I put this book at the top of Christie’s many fine works because the mystery has such a chilling resolution. Very few mystery authors, I suspect, would go to the place she did with this work. 

I’m willing to bet that Dean Koontz would be the first to admit that, like many of his characters, he’s a little weird. But in a good way. Weird like those knowledgeable about quantum physics, synchronicity, and artificial intelligence. Weird like those into Edgar Allan Poe, T.S. Eliot, Werner Eisenberg, and Carl Jung. And weird like authors who use the last line of their stories to leave their readers with unsettling questions long after the reading is through. In my opinion, this very quality, this weirdness, applied to the art of fiction, results in tales that not only entertain but make a captivating read. The Big Dark Sky is an example of both, with its unforgettable characters, especially Jimmy Two Eyes and Artimis (the most intriguing—and scary—of them all), and the thought-provoking scientific, psychological, and philosophical concepts woven into the tale.

I picked up this book while doing my “trace of TR” trip out West with my brother in 2011. We rode through the Badlands on horseback and saw the site of Roosevelt’s Elkhorn Ranch, even the bar in Wibaux, where he knocked out a bully with a one-two combination.

Aadland, a Montana rancher, and TR aficionado decided to follow the paths of Roosevelt’s ranching days and hunting expeditions on foot and horseback, the way Roosevelt did himself in the 1880s. TR often credited his time in the Badlands for making him into the man who became a president.

What is there about this land that has such an impact? Having ridden there myself, I can understand a little, but Aadland’s experience as a modern rancher lends a context that really helps us understand this vital period of Roosevelt’s life.

I’ve always felt a desire to make the world make sense through data – that numbers and structure could help unlock hidden meanings. When I read this novel, I felt seen: it’s told from the perspective of T. S. Spivet – a 12-year-old boy who has the same urge. Spivet thoroughly documents the world around him, sketching an ant he sees in the grass, and drawing schematics and maps of the spaces he travels through on his quest to travel to the Smithsonian Institution. The book’s margin is lavishly illustrated with Spivet’s diagrams – in seeing the world through his eyes, it felt like how I see it through my own.

I found this book amazing in how it blends the story of a singular (historic) fire conflagration in 1910 with the formulation of land management practices and wildfire suppression policies that, in many ways, remain at the heart of the US Forest Service mission today.

I enjoyed this historian’s interweaving of those tales, including his take on the personal relationship between Gifford Pinchot, a wealthy conservationist and father of forestry in the United States, and President Teddy Roosevelt. I use the book as an assignment in one of my classes since it has plenty of narrative and action to keep college-level readers engaged while providing perspective on forest management and wildfire policy.  

The author, a history professor and Tennessee State Historian, provides an in-depth look into Montana history, region by region. The academic tone is nicely balanced by the people and events presented on the pages – plain folk to preachers and everything in between. A great companion to Jonathan Raban’s Badland.

The first time I finished reading this book, I felt ambushed. The description is breathtaking and the dialogue is hilarious.

So much of the book is surreal: The main character hunts for a runaway girlfriend who’s absconded with his electric razor (which is useless; it has no cord). A woman at a bar blows smoke rings without a cigarette. A guy known only as “airplane man” winds up nabbed, with a large plush bear, by the FBI—and the main character’s major epiphany is sparked by a horse fart. Then, suddenly, near the end, I cried so hard the words blurred. And the final scene is perfection.

Funny, heartbreaking, absurd, and poignant at once.