45 Books Like Thirteen Hours

Why people lie is often as interesting as the lie itself for me. This book lays this out as Korede finds herself being a protective big sister to the beautiful Ayoola, a woman with an unfortunate hobby of bumping off men she dates. Despite the darkness of the subject matter, it’s a story full of humor as Korede finds herself telling lie after lie and getting in way over her head to cover up her sister’s murders.

I’ve got two sisters (none of us serial killers!), and it’s funny how much of this tale is relatable! It’s fresh and sharp, with a rich vein of humor that had me chuckling through much of it.

The sins and tragedies of the Cold War are resurrected in Le Carré’s late-career novel, A Legacy of Spies.

After retiring from MI6, Peter Guillam is summoned back to London by his former bosses, intent on clearing up a botched spy operation first described in The Spy Who Came in From the Cold. 

A Legacy of Spies shows that a story revolving around bureaucratic turf wars and incriminating paper trails can be just as suspenseful as any of James Bond’s implausible high-tech adventures.

George Smiley, among the 20th century’s most compelling fictional characters, makes a guest appearance, drawing us back into the Cold War’s darkest days, when men and women served as pawns in a geopolitical power game—and often paid the price for their role in these international dramas. 

This is only Patrick Hoffman’s second book, but it is a wonderful model of how to write a complex and controlled work without leaving loose ends, lingering too long in one phase, or letting the reader lose interest. The novel presents us with a drug cartel that stretches around the world like a giant organism. A single disturbance in one location causes violent and self-protective reactions in each of the other locations, like reflexes of the giant organism’s body. The novel is a brilliant study of cause and effect. Hoffman portrays a world that is dangerous and dark, but every bit of it makes sense.

This is a risky choice because the author is my old university colleague and later television writing partner, to whom I’ve been married for 41 years. I feel comfortable about it because of the number of fine British and American writers who have recommended this and her earlier books. I picked it because it’s the first novel I’ve read that makes a credible artistic attempt to grasp the experience of the current Pandemic. It’s a murder mystery that takes place during those first few months, when what was happening in the world seemed unthinkable, going out meant breaking a lockdown, and contact with anyone might be fatal. The amateur investigator, a young woman with an aimless and undisciplined past, takes a deep expedition into death, and it galvanizes her into taking charge and being really alive. 

The cold war holds a special spot for me. The USSR's internal conflicts are very similar to what Russians I knew escaped from before and during the buildup of the USSR talked about. I re-read this last year and found it still exudes the mysterious feel of Mother Russia. Maybe even more so now.

Arkady Renko, a Moscow homicide investigator, investigates a crime that isn’t possible because there are no murders in the Soviet Union. It must be the work of an insane person or infiltrator. Arkady struggles to do justice for the people he serves, and the bureaucrats are looking to sweep it all under the rug. Great twists make for great stories.  

I’ve always been fascinated by the “dreaming spires” of Oxford University and enjoy Gaudy Night because it immerses me in the world of a (fictional) women’s college set in 1930s Oxford.

As a former professor, I’m intrigued by the internecine political and personal battles in the Senior Common Room (SCR), or college faculty lounge, as well as the friction between those professors devoted entirely to an academic career versus those trying to maintain the challenging balance of work and family, the same issues women struggle with today, nearly one hundred years later.

Sayers weaves together these tensions with a mysterious “poltergeist” who torments the college with poison-pen letters, pranks, vandalism, and violence into a compelling mystery under the dreaming spires.

Nigeria is the largest country in Africa and is filled with conflicting and contrasting customs, rituals, and institutions that have tentacles that reach deep into its modern society. I find it hard to close a gripping psychological thriller. Still, in this book, even Philip Taiwo, the criminal psychologist sent to investigate the murders of three college students, has psychological problems of his own that have to be addressed. 

I love books that use the psychology of human behavior as the basis to unravel a crime. In this book, I glimpsed a sector of Nigerian society I didn’t know existed. Kayode’s book was filled with heart-thumping intrigue and so many twists and turns that I couldn’t stop listening.

Emma Djan is a policewoman turned private investigator in Ghana. Her assignment is to track down the missing American who came out to Ghana to meet a woman who is almost certainly the fictional creation of internet scammers—the sakawa boys. We love Emma Djan’s combination of commitment and naiveté as she takes on the scammers, and the way Quartey weaves the local culture—complete with fetish priests and celebrities—into an intriguing plot. If you like to travel, visit Ghana. Great lead character, great plot, great sense of place. What’s not to like? A worthy Shamus Award winner.

Sipho is a young man with nothing to lose. He drops out of high school and joins a car-stealing syndicate. The novel is part thriller and part coming-of-age tale, and the story takes the reader on an emotional journey as Sipho is sucked deeper and deeper into South African township crime. The author grew up in this township, and but for his other talents might have followed the same path as his protagonist. A remarkable look at the reality of township life and its effect on the youth.

Christine Falls is the first in a series of crime novels by Booker-winning author John Banville, writing as Benjamin Black. The novels are set in Ireland in the 1950s and they feature Quirke, a misanthropic, hard-drinking, depressive pathologist. All the novels in the series are master classes in how to manage setting, character, and language. All of them are great reads. I’ve chosen Christine Falls because it’s the first in the series. It starts with a presumed suicide and widens to feature corruption and betrayal by family, church, and state.