Here are 92 books that The Widows fans have personally recommended if you like
The Widows.
Book DNA is a community of 12,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.
I am an author, attorney, artist, and entrepreneur. My experience as a litigator for over forty years, as well as my experience as a painter and an investor, has inspired and influenced me to write the Chance Cormac legal thrillers series.
Connelly is the GOAT of the legal thriller genre. He is the creator of Mickey Haller and Hieronymus Bosch.
The Lincoln Lawyer introduces Mickey Haller, the LA lawyer whose office is his Lincoln Town Car. A criminal defense lawyer, Haller agrees to defend a prominent real estate agent who claims he is being framed for assault and attempted murder.
In Connelly’s novels, things are never what they seem. Connelly understands the challenges facing attorneys in investigating and trying difficult cases for difficult clients.
They're called Lincoln Lawyers: the bottom of the legal food chain, the criminal defence attorneys who operate out of the back of a Lincoln car, travelling between the courthouses of Los Angeles county to take whatever cases the system throws in their path.
Mickey Haller has been in the business a long time, and he knows just how to work it, how to grease the right wheels and palms, to keep the engine of justice working in his favour. When a Beverly Hills rich boy is arrested for brutally beating a woman, Haller has his first high-paying client in years.…
A moving story of love, betrayal, and the enduring power of hope in the face of darkness.
German pianist Hedda Schlagel's world collapsed when her fiancé, Fritz, vanished after being sent to an enemy alien camp in the United States during the Great War. Fifteen years later, in 1932, Hedda…
Around age thirteen I discovered Perry Mason and put Nancy Drew on a back shelf. By the time I discovered Raymond Chandler’s mean streets, I was hooked. A vastly over-protected child, I longed to explore places that would make my mother faint. To paraphrase Chandler, I wanted to read about the best woman of her world and a good enough woman for any world. The kind of woman (or yes, a man) who would never ever need to be rescued. And when I sat down to write, I wanted to write about men and women who could handle themselves on those mean streets without turning mean themselves.
I fell in love with Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Milhone in the first paragraph of this book. She’s learned to protect her heart from significant damage, and she’s got a toughness that makes her equal to any drug lord or cold-blooded killer in the streets of L.A. or anywhere else.
She’s hired by a woman who was convicted of killing her husband. She swears she didn’t do it. Of course, right? Kinsey is tasked with finding out who actually did it, and yes, she takes it with the proverbial grain of salt—until the bodies start piling up. Her investigation ranges from Beverly Hills to Las Vegas. Who says rich streets aren’t mean? Trust me, the lady can handle herself while keeping her ethics intact.
`My name is Kinsey Millhone. I'm a private investigator, licensed by the state of California. I'm thirty-two years old, twice divorced, no kids. The day before yesterday I killed someone and the fact weighs heavily on my mind . . .'
When Laurence Fife was murdered, few cared. A slick divorce attorney with a reputation for ruthlessness, Fife was also rumoured to be a slippery ladies' man. Plenty of people in the picturesque Southern California town of Santa Teresa had reason to want him dead. Including, thought the cops, his young and beautiful wife, Nikki. With motive, access and opportunity,…
Around age thirteen I discovered Perry Mason and put Nancy Drew on a back shelf. By the time I discovered Raymond Chandler’s mean streets, I was hooked. A vastly over-protected child, I longed to explore places that would make my mother faint. To paraphrase Chandler, I wanted to read about the best woman of her world and a good enough woman for any world. The kind of woman (or yes, a man) who would never ever need to be rescued. And when I sat down to write, I wanted to write about men and women who could handle themselves on those mean streets without turning mean themselves.
Doiron’s protagonist, Maine gamewarden Mike Bowditch, doesn’t spend much time on “mean streets” and isn’t looking to. He’s more apt to be in the woods looking for illegal hunting. But I loved that he could handle himself when he hit the streets, city, or village.
Bowditch is a hothead and makes some serious mistakes (don’t we all?). He’s an angry young man hoping to find his fugitive father before he’s arrested for murder. His childhood was more shattering than mine, which would crush most people, but Mike keeps fighting for answers and the truth.
Game warden Mike Bowditch returns home one evening to find an alarming voice from the past on his answering machine: his father, Jack, a hard-drinking womanizer who makes his living poaching illegal game. An even more frightening call comes the next morning from the police: They are searching for the man who killed a beloved local cop the night before - and his father is their prime suspect. Jack has escaped from police custody, and only Mike believes that his tormented father might not be guilty.
Coyote weather is the feral, hungry season, drought-stricken, and ready to catch fire. It’s 1967, and the American culture is violently remaking itself while the country is forcibly sending its young men to fight in a deeply unpopular war.
Jerry has stubbornly made no plans for the future because he…
Around age thirteen I discovered Perry Mason and put Nancy Drew on a back shelf. By the time I discovered Raymond Chandler’s mean streets, I was hooked. A vastly over-protected child, I longed to explore places that would make my mother faint. To paraphrase Chandler, I wanted to read about the best woman of her world and a good enough woman for any world. The kind of woman (or yes, a man) who would never ever need to be rescued. And when I sat down to write, I wanted to write about men and women who could handle themselves on those mean streets without turning mean themselves.
In recommending this book, I want to emphasize the word reluctant. Fenway Stevenson gets shanghaied into covering a friend’s butt by stepping in as coroner in a town in the California desert. She reminds me of Jason McCullough in Support Your Local Sheriff in that she constantly protests that the job is only temporary. She has every intention of going back to nursing school for her degree—right after she finds out what really happened to the body in her lab.
I couldn’t help rooting for her to discover her true vocation. Incidentally, for a male author writing a female protagonist, Ardoin does a fantastic job.
Blood is thicker than oil--until murder is involved. Fenway Stevenson doesn't want to return to the coastal town where her estranged father is practically king. But the death of her mother draws her back home--and the murder of the county coroner draws her into a deepening conspiracy. As the body count rises and all signs seem to point toward her father's oil company, will Fenway uncover the truth before family bonds become deadly?
Reading about antislavery constitutionalism literally changed my life. Lysander Spooner’s 1845 book, The Unconstitutionality of Slavery, which I discovered in the 1990s, exposed me to a version of “originalism” that would really work. This was also a version of originalism that was not just for political conservatives. This led me from being primarily a contract law professor to a constitutional originalist who would argue in the Supreme Court, develop the theory of originalism, and work to achieve an originalist majority of Supreme Court justices. By reading these five books, you, too, can become an expert on antislavery constitutionalism and our forgotten constitutional past.
The one political figure who tied all these developments together was Salmon P. Chase. The more I learned about Chase in my own research, the more of a personal hero of mine he became. And yet, he has been completely forgotten. With Stahr’s book, Chase finally has the biography he deserves.
Chase began his career representing fugitive slaves in court, earning him the nickname “The Attorney General of Fugitive Slaves.” When his legal challenges were rebuffed, he helped found and wrote the political platforms of the Liberty, Free Soil, and Republican parties. As a Free Soiler he became a U.S. Senator from Ohio, as a Republican, he became the governor of Ohio, Lincoln’s the Secretary of the Treasury, and Chief Justice of the United States.
His personal story weaves together all the elements described in the previous books.
From an acclaimed New York Times bestselling biographer, an “eloquently written, impeccably researched, and intensely moving” (The Wall Street Journal) reassessment of Abraham Lincoln’s indispensable Secretary of the Treasury: a leading proponent for black rights during his years in cabinet and later as Chief Justice of the United States.
Salmon P. Chase is best remembered as a rival of Lincoln’s for the Republican nomination in 1860—but there would not have been a national Republican Party, and Lincoln could not have won the presidency, were it not for the groundwork Chase laid over the…
I have a passion for the theme of building self-esteem and finding self-identity at middle and high school age because I taught secondary English for 30 years. So many of my students struggled with this issue; reading novels about kids with similar situations offers a way for readers to help themselves work out their own problems. I deliberately chose both recent and classic novels with a wide variety of protagonists, settings and plots, each with a unique author voice to show how universal the need to build self-esteem can be. My own novel, Eaglebait, is another strong novel with a similar theme.
Angie’s life is a mess. Her mother constantly taunts her as “Fat Angie.” High school classmates torment her as a “crazy, mad cow,” when she tries to slit her wrists in a high school assembly. Her heroic sister goes MIA during the Iraq War; her older brother treats her badly. Angie just wants to make it through each day until a beautiful new student arrives and befriends her, seeing the hidden beauty in Angie. I was revolted by Angie’s abusive family life and angry at the peer bullying. Where were school authorities? I was relieved when a warm friendship allowed Angie to become happy on her own. Though it seems extreme, I’ve occasionally observed similar situations among my students; the novel is horrifyingly realistic, but it moves in a positive fashion to its end.
Her sister was captured in Iraq, she’s the resident laughingstock at school, and her therapist tells her to count instead of eat. Can a daring new girl in her life really change anything?
Angie is broken — by her can’t-be-bothered mother, by her high-school tormenters, and by being the only one who thinks her varsity-athlete-turned-war-hero sister is still alive. Hiding under a mountain of junk food hasn’t kept the pain (or the shouts of “crazy mad cow!”) away. Having failed to kill herself — in front of a gym full of kids —…
Homeless following the death of his adoptive parents in a car crash and the subsequent loss of their farm tenancy, Seb decides to enrol as a residential student at the Asklepios Foundation, a College of Natural Medicine, boasting a sanctuary modelled on an ancient Greek healing temple. Spending a night…
I live in a small town in rural Maine. My land has a farm pond, big pine trees, fields, and a crabapple orchard that blooms every spring. The air smells wonderful, and the night sky is big and mysterious. It is also less than five miles from the biggest commercial landfill in Maine, owned by the largest waste management company in the world. This landfill takes garbage not only from Maine but from many other states. In 1989, it was the site of a catastrophic landfill collapse. This has made me appreciate books that address the complexities of environmental activism and that remind me how we are all living on this same fragile planet.
I felt Mayo Cornelius Higgins's connection to the land he and his family live on deep in my heart.
It's something I feel about the land I live on, and I recognize how the smells, sounds, sights, and history of a place can become part of your soul. It's a book I've reread many times, and I always see something new in it.
Discover this transcendent middle grade masterpiece about a young black boy whose quiet rural live in the Appalachian Mountains begins to change—winner of the Newbery Medal, the National Book Award, and the Boston Globe–Horn Book Award.
Mayo Cornelius Higgins sits on his gleaming, forty-foot steel pole, towering over his home on Sarah’s Mountain. Stretched before him are rolling hills and shady valleys. But behind him lie the wounds of strip mining, including a mountain of rubble that may one day fall and bury his home.
M.C. dreams of escape for himself and his family. And, one day, atop his…
I’m a historical novelist originally from Ohio. In Civil War lessons at school, we learned about battles and generals and read The Red Badge of Courage and other books centering on men’s experiences. With the exception of Florence Nightingale, women were largely absent from the discussions. I want to know about the women. As an adult, I lived in Roswell, Georgia, where I learned of the mill workers, mostly women and children, who, in 1864, were arrested and sent north by Federal forces for making Confederate cloth. Their fates largely remain a mystery, and I wrote my book in order to imagine what we may never know.
Set just prior to the Civil War, this novel is one I’ve often recommended since first reading it years ago. The novel’s four main characters, enslaved mistresses of Southern men, are well-rendered and complex and stayed with me long after I finished the book. I was drawn by the women’s distinct personalities and how they responded to the harsh realities of their lives.
The novel also introduced me to a piece of my home state’s history: Tawawa House was a summer resort in southwestern Ohio popular among southern planters who brought their enslaved mistresses despite Ohio being a free state. (The resort would later become the site of Wilberforce University, the nation’s oldest private, historically black university owned and operated by African Americans.)
Wench by Dolen Perkins-Valdez is startling and original fiction that raises provocative questions of power and freedom, love and dependence. An enchanting and unforgettable novel based on little-known fact, Wench combines the narrative allure of Cane River by Lalita Tademy and the moral complexities of Edward P. Jones’s The Known World as it tells the story of four black enslaved women in the years preceding the Civil War. A stunning debut novel, Wench marks author Perkins-Valdez—previously a finalist for the 2009 Robert Olen Butler Short Fiction Prize—as a writer destined for greatness.
I started keeping a daily journal when I received one for my ninth birthday, and, as they say, the rest is history. Into my twenties, there was nothing I loved more than sitting down to write and write`. It was a way to understand my feelings, and it was also a way to make sense of the world in all its beauty and bewilderment. There seemed to be magic and attempted connection everywhere! And so I became a lover of writing that focused on humans playing out their lives in a world at once surreal and real in an attempt to make sense of the extraordinary.
Entering this marvelous novel is like entering a luxury train and sitting down for a long, wild, and highly entertaining adventure. Yes, it is a very long novel, and yes, it is composed of a single sentence, but once I started reading, none of that mattered—I was ecstatically along for the ride.
What I love most about this novel is that we fully enter the thoughts and feelings of the middle-aged mother protagonist in a stream of consciousness, and she is, quite frankly, all of us with our neuroses, observations, frustrations, and loves. Incredibly, there is a definite form to this novel and a propulsive plot that gets downright harrowing at the end. A brilliant, brilliant read.
WINNER OF THE 2019 GOLDSMITHS PRIZE • SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2019 BOOKER PRIZE • A NEW YORKER BEST BOOK OF 2019 • A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF 2019 • A TIME MUST-READ BOOK OF 2019
"This book has its face pressed up against the pane of the present; its form mimics the way our minds move now toggling between tabs, between the needs of small children and aging parents, between news of ecological collapse and school shootings while somehow remembering to pay taxes and fold the laundry."―Parul Sehgal, New York Times
Marriage and Fatherhood in the Nazi SS
by
Amy Carney,
When I was writing this book, several of my friends jokingly called it the Nazi baby book, with one insisting it would make a great title. Nazi Babies – admittedly, that is a catchy title, but that’s not exactly what my book is about. SS babies would be slightly more…
I'm a New Yorker with a background in the performing arts. Though a lifelong reader and bookstore loiterer, my early writing career was focused on the stage as well as the pursuit of a career in screenwriting. This led to many years writing and producing theatre as well as working in film and TV both as a writer and in production. The books I've chosen, I feel influenced the American language in the last century, an influence reflected in the tone of the novels and films from that period described by scholars as “Between the Wars.” It's a period that fascinates me for it exists now only in books and movies and is therein preserved.
Dawn Powell is one of the most overlooked literary figures in America from this time. Her acid wit (and gender) immediately begs comparison to Dorothy Parker. A New Yorker transplanted from Ohio, she wrote many plays and novels from the 30s to the 60s. Wicked Pavilion was published in 1954 and is a delicious satire of a group of artists who frequent a small bistro near Washington Square Park – hard-drinking writers, poets, and painters. It features a hilarious subplot of a painter who stages his own death so the value of his paintings will increase. The antidote to Henry James, Dawn Powell writes like Edith Wharton on laughing gas.
The “Wicked Pavilion” of the title is the Café Julien, where everybody who is anybody goes to recover from failed love affairs and to pursue new ones, to cadge money, to hatch plots, and to puncture one another’s reputation. Dennis Orphen, the writer from Dawn Powell’s Turn, Magic Wheel, makes an appearance here, as does Andy Callingham, Powell’s thinly disguised Ernest Hemingway. The climax of this mercilessly funny novel comes with a party which, remarked Gore Vidal, “resembles Proust’s last roundup,” and where one of the partygoers observes, “There are some people here who have been dead twenty years.”
