Here are 93 books that The Widows fans have personally recommended if you like
The Widows.
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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.…
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
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.
Mia Lark is running out of options. There is only one way to change the score: the fantasy planet Revivium.
Armed with the powerful magic in the helm and the friendly AI, Hex that goes with it, Mia throws caution out the window. It’s time to find the main guildhall…
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?
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.
When I was little, I would draw for hours, captivated by the female experience. Art, film, and literature focused on women’s lives have always felt the most compelling to me. Whether it’s gazing at a woman painted centuries ago, watching a film about a woman navigating her time, or reading a book that delves into her inner world, I’m drawn to their stories. Their complexities and imperfections are often what I love most. This lifelong fascination has shaped my career. Whether illustrating fashion, designing book covers, or authoring my own books, the emotions and experiences of female characters inspire me, fuel my creativity, and remind me of the power and importance of their stories.
It’s devastating to reconcile a world that could treat anyone, especially children, the way Pecola Breedlove is treated in The Bluest Eye. The cruelty of racism and oppression, both historical and ongoing, feels unbearable to confront. The idea that worth, beauty, and love could be tied to a single, narrow ideal is profoundly heartbreaking. I want to reach through the pages, take Pecola in my arms, and tell her she is beautiful, that her self-worth is inherent, and free her from the horrors she endures.
Throughout the book, I yearn for someone in her world to lift her up, hold her, and tell her it will be okay. But they, too, are trapped in cycles of pain and suffering. Morrison’s writing is unflinchingly honest and achingly beautiful, taking me to a raw, vulnerable place where pain demands confrontation.
This book captures the depth of human experience, reminding me that…
Read the searing first novel from the celebrated author of Beloved, which immerses us in the tragic, torn lives of a poor black family in post-Depression 1940s Ohio.
Unlovely and unloved, Pecola prays each night for blue eyes like those of her privileged white schoolfellows. At once intimate and expansive, unsparing in its truth-telling, The Bluest Eye shows how the past savagely defines the present. A powerful examination of our obsession with beauty and conformity, Toni Morrison's virtuosic first novel asks powerful questions about race, class, and gender with the subtlety and grace that have always characterised her writing.
Winner of the 2024 New Mexico - Arizona Book Award.
In this deeply researched novel of America's most celebrated outlaw, Mark Warren sheds light on the human side of Billy the Kid and reveals the intimate stories of the lesser-known players in his legendary life of crime. Warren's fictional composer…
Lori Benton is an award-winning, multi-published author of historical novels set during the 18th century North America. Her literary passion is bringing little known historical events to life through the eyes of those who lived it, particularly those set along the Appalachian frontier, where European and Native American cultural and world views collided. Virginia Governor Lord Dunmore’s campaign against the Shawnee nation on the eve of the Revolutionary war, culminating in the Battle of Point Pleasant, is a fascinating, complex, and poignant example of the armies and individuals that planned, fought, and resisted the campaign.
A comprehensive examination of the Ohio Valley native nations during the decades leading up to Dunmore’s War. Though the covering of the actual campaign makes up a small portion of this book, any researcher desiring a balanced view of the conflict for land in the Ohio couldn’t ask for a better resource than A Country Between.
The Ohio Country in the eighteenth century was a zone of international strife, and the Delawares, Shawnees, Iroquois, and other natives who had taken refuge there were caught between the territorial ambitions of the French and British. A Country Between is unique in assuming the perspective of the Indians who struggled to maintain their autonomy in a geographical tinderbox.
Most people know the slowburn romance. A spark flickers at deliberate pace until finally passion ignites. But what about the slowburn mystery? As a reader and a writer, I’m drawn to mysteries that twine as a well-drawn character, usually an amateur sleuth, gets pulled into investigating some eerie event. These mysteries begin with a straightforward query, and as the sleuth digs, the mystery grows. The pace leaves room for well-developed subplots—often, in my favorites, a slowburn romance, too. I love a book where I can settle into the world while the story gathers steam. And in the end, when that slow flame finally blazes… Oh, it’s so worth the wait.
I’m drawn to sister stories, which is something I only realized when I started writing this list, and it occurred to me that a number of my recommendations use the slowburn mystery as a means to explore sisterhood (something my own book does, as well).
I have a sister (hi, Diana!) and we have an uncomplicated and happy relationship. So maybe I subconsciously craved more drama growing up? Kidding aside, there’s something innately compelling about the dynamics between two people who may be very different or very similar, who share blood and memories, and who are tied together, for better or worse, for life.
How to Live Without You is a sister story at its best, as Emmy is the only person who’s capable of following Rose’s breadcrumbs.
In this heart-wrenching coming-of-age story about family, grief, and second chances, seventeen-year-old Emmy returns home for the summer to uncover the truth behind her sister Rose's disappearance-only to learn that Rose had many secrets, ones that have Emmy questioning herself and the sister Emmy thought she knew.
When her sister Rose disappeared, seventeen-year-old Emmy lost a part of herself. Everyone else seems convinced she ran away and will reappear when she's ready, but Emmy isn't so sure. That doesn't make sense for the Rose she knew: effervescent, caring, and strong-willed. So Emmy returns to their Ohio hometown for a summer,…
My first memoir, Overlay, has been called “the very best teenage suicide prevention tool ever created” for which I am eternally grateful. I've been told that it's a miracle I survived my childhood at all, but I don't take credit or satisfaction in that statement. Instead, I've aspired to understand what it is that gives some of us the grit that allows us to power through the unfathomable. Voraciously reading similar stories from my fellow authors continues to inform me that we all have the power to push through the pain of a disadvantaged childhood. Whether it's an inner light, luck, fate, a higher power or some combination of some or all of the above, I don't know. I do know that the children like me who grew up to tell their story with the hope of helping others deserve a read. And sometimes, a good cry.
You think you had a tough childhood? Meet Tim Green. Born blue into an uneducated, poor, and incestuous family in 1950s Ohio, it's a wonder this child lived at all. However, grit and forces of luck arrived to meet Tim when he needed help. Luck involved the right policemen, care workers, social workers, and foster parents. Grit involved the resolve of Tim himself.
Like Frank McCourt, Tim Green learned early to look on the bright side of life. You'll read the most shocking things you can imagine in this book that will leave you shaking your head at the things people will do. But Tim maintained the idea that not only was he worth something, but so was everyone around him. He learned how to forgive, and that was his rocky path to the fabulous life he lives today. This book is LGBTQ positive.
"This is a book that should be read while alone, to your friends, to a congregation of survivors of abuse – in other words, it should be read by everyone. Sensitive and honest, gain a new perspective on being alive by infusing Tim’s words into your mind. Highly recommended." Hall of Fame Top 50 Reviewer, Grady Harp
ANOTHER HILL AND SOMETIMES A MOUNTAIN is the powerful testimony of Tim Green's determination to rise above his beginnings ... despite the sting of abandonment and the dark secrets surrounding his birth family. In his painful yet at times wry memoir, Green recounts…
Ramon Ramirez’s Dog is a collection of essays written over the years about the adventures and misadventures, mostly outside but occasionally inside the diplomatic career of a U.S. ambassador. Common threads weaving the stories together are a desire for a life well-lived, balancing career with family and friends, keeping physically…
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…
