Here are 67 books that Victim Six fans have personally recommended if you like
Victim Six.
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I was able to read before I went to school and have never been without a book since; frequenly having several novels on the go at one time. I started with adventures and classics, moved on to fantasy and later discovered crime fiction. Having been educated at an all-girls school where we assumed we could do everything, it was a shock to enter the world of science and engineering in the 1970s and find that women were not considered as strong and powerful as men, and certainly not as good. Even though times have changed somewhat, I still love finding books (especially series) where crime solving and sisterhood go hand-in-hand.
This book made me realise that women’s role in fiction didn’t have to be the ‘little woman’ or the ‘love interest’.
It was published back in 2001 when female protagonists were a rarity, but James Patterson gives us not one, but four strong women who get together to solve crimes that the police alone cannot. I love the fact that these women are willing to break the rules in order to succeed in a man’s world. But at the same time, they are a club in the traditional sense: they eat, drink, and have fun together, while watching each other’s backs.
It was a wonderfully empowering experience to discover this book (and even more so when I realised there were a whole series of books about the same group of women).
As the only woman homicide inspector in San Francisco, Lindsay Boxer has to be tough. But nothing she has seen prepares her for the horror of the honeymoon murders, when a brutal maniac begins viciously slaughtering newly wed couples on their wedding nights. Lindsay is sickened by the deaths, but her determination to bring the murderer to justice is threatened by her own personal tragedy. So she turns to Claire, a leading coroner, Cindy, a journalist and Jill, a top attorney, for help with both her crises, and the Women's Murder Club is born.
He will stop at nothing to keep his secrets hidden.
Denise Tyler’s future in New Jersey with fiancé Jeremy Guerdon unravels when she stumbles upon a kill list, with her name on it. A chilling directive, “Leave the family memories of her, nothing else,” exposes a nightmare she never imagined.…
I have always had a passion for anything crime fiction—books, movies, podcasts, or TV shows. It didn’t matter. I loved it all. It was probably because I grew up in a family with six police officers that seldom talked about anything unrelated to policing. I was like a sponge and picked up some terminology and learned about different police procedures they would discuss. There was rarely a family gathering that didn’t have some type of story or anecdote being shared by each of them and I always found myself being drawn right in. For those reasons, I fell in love with trying to figure out the who’s, how’s and why’s of any story.
Kathy Mallory is a character unlike any other. Kathy was a child of the streets who had the good fortune of being adopted into the loving home of a police officer who saw her brilliance and resourcefulness even at a young age. Years later, Kathy has become an NYPD officer who brings justice to victims through her own sense of right and wrong. She is a street-hardened, lone wolf who doesn’t stop until she gets what she wants. I love the complexity of this tough-as-nails female officer who bends all the rules in her pursuit of justice. This book is so well written I immediately read every book I could find by this author.
Jonathan Kellerman says Mallory's Oracle is "a joy." Nelson DeMille and other advance readers have called it "truly amazing, " "a classic" with "immense appeal." It is all of that, and more: a stunning debut novel about a web of unsolved murders in New York's Gramercy Park and the singular woman who makes them her obsession.
At its center is Kathleen Mallory, an extraordinary wild child turned New York City policewoman. Adopted off the streets as a little girl by a police inspector and his wife, she is still not altogether civilized now that she is a sergeant in the…
It wasn’t until high school when I read Stephen King’s Night Shift that illuminated the genre for me—horror. My first short story was The Dark Shadow, and it fit me like a glove. My writing is inspired by the books I like to read, as I’m sure it is with all writers, and I write characters that I know and in settings I am familiar with for authenticity. The years of experience have honed my craft, and my books are a culmination of my favorite things—supernatural horror, suspense, heart, drama, westerns, and action.
When this book caused me to pull over, park, and listen to the last hour, making me late to my work appointment, I knew I was reading (listening) to the most intense, suspenseful, tightly written novel.
As much as I love horror and the supernatural, none of it thrills me unless it is accompanied by suspense, and no one cranks them out better than Koontz.
If you delight in the suspense of Stephen King and Harlan Coben, you'll love Intensity - a classic thriller by Sunday Times and New York Times bestselling author Dean Koontz.
Edgler Vess is a sociopath intent on murder. He lives for one purpose only: to satisfy all appetites as they arise, seeking ever more outrageous experience. To live with intensity.
When he attacks her friend, Laura, Chyna Shepherd is saved by the instincts developed during a dark and turbulent childhood. Not knowing Laura is already dead, Chyna follows, hoping to save her friend, as Vess carries her body to his…
The Village That Betrayed Its Children
by
Karen Elizabeth Lee,
This is the story of a shocking crime committed in the 50s and 60s in a small rural village, and a criminal who was never brought to justice. The Principal in our two-room school was a pedophile who molested nearly all of the young female students. He was protected by…
I have always had a passion for anything crime fiction—books, movies, podcasts, or TV shows. It didn’t matter. I loved it all. It was probably because I grew up in a family with six police officers that seldom talked about anything unrelated to policing. I was like a sponge and picked up some terminology and learned about different police procedures they would discuss. There was rarely a family gathering that didn’t have some type of story or anecdote being shared by each of them and I always found myself being drawn right in. For those reasons, I fell in love with trying to figure out the who’s, how’s and why’s of any story.
I recommend this book because it is a page-turner from the very beginning with a sick plot thanks to the warped mind of its featured killer. With no time to lose, veteran homicide detectives Sam Kovack and Nikki Liska aided by the FBI race to stop a serial killer who is brutalizing women. I love the strong relationships between partners, Kovack and Liska but also the level of tension between Kate Conlan and FBI Profiler, John Quinn. The characters are well-written and come to life before your eyes. I am personally drawn to the strength of the female crime fighters in this book. The gruesome crimes are thankfully overshadowed by the developed and relatable characters.
Kate Conlan, an ex-FBI agent turned advocate, finds herself protecting a teenage runaway who has witnessed the latest murder by the "Cremator" - a serial killer who burns women alive.
Kim Brown Seely was born and raised in Southern California and graduated from Stanford University. A Lowell Thomas Journalist of the Year, she has worked in publishing on both coasts, including as senior editor at Travel + Leisure magazine, contributing editor at National Geographic Adventure, and travel editor at Microsoft and Amazon. Her memoir Uncharted: A Couple’s Epic Empty-Nest Adventure Sailing from One Life to Another was named one of the best books about retirement by the Wall Street Journal and is also a Nautilus Award Winner. She has traveled to more than thirty countries for Virtuoso magazine, where she's a contributing writer and has won more than a dozen writing awards for her work.
I first read Passage to Juneau: A Sea and Its Meanings when I was the travel books editor at Amazon and took it home to review.
British-born Raban’s solo sailing journey from Seattle to Juneau, Alaska, is a riveting take on navigating the Inside Passage (the intricate waterway between Puget Sound and Alaska), weaving together history, science, literature, and intimate descriptions of his life at sea.
While Raban can be a prickly narrator, Passage to Juneau is extraordinary narrative nonfiction and was the initial inspiration for my own book and many seasons now spent boating (and reading) afloat.
With the same rigorous observation (natural and social), invigorating stylishness, and encyclopedic learning that he brought to his National Book Award-winning Bad Land, Jonathan Raban conducts readers along the Inside Passage from Seattle to Juneau. The physical distance is 1,000 miles of difficult-and often treacherous-water, which Raban navigates solo in a 35-foot sailboat.
But Passage to Juneau also traverses a gulf of centuries and cultures: the immeasurable divide between the Northwest's Indians and its first European explorers-- between its embattled fishermen and loggers and its pampered new class. Along the way, Raban offers captivating discourses on art, philosophy, and navigation…
My experience and expertise – I am not only a reader of horror, in particular extreme horror, but I am a published writer with several hundred writing credits. I have had hundreds of stories and articles published on many websites, magazines, and anthologies including a story in Year’s Best Hardcore Horror Volume 5. For eleven years I wrote articles on the bizarre and morbid for Girls and Corpses magazine. I have been consistently writing for 20 years, and have also helped write several independent horror films. I have written many reviews and interviews as well, most recently in Phantasmagoria Magazine.
Wrath is truly the king of extreme horror and this is his best book. The over the top sex and violence will leave you traumatized in this tale of a cannibalistic serial killer. At times erotic and at times disgusting, this book at no point bores the reader and is a good introduction to an amazing writer.
"This is a serial cannibalistic killer’s wet dream come true. The author Wrath James White had written something beyond dark, beyond morbid.” - John Rizo, HorrorNews.Net
"The Resurrectionist by Wrath James White the kind of novel that can unsettle even the most hardened gore fanatic. White writes the kind of horror that gets under your skin, and reading his brand of hardcore fiction may have the unintended side effect of making you feel...wrong. Seriously wrong." - I.E. Lester, Dark Scribe Magazine
Fifteen years ago Joseph Miles was abducted, tortured and almost killed by a serial killer with the taste for…
I’m a taxidermy-loving vegan who had a pet cemetery as a kid. So, I guess you could say I’m a bit of a Wednesday Adams. My airplane reading? Forensic pathology textbooks. When my first thrillers were published, a lot of people were surprised. “You seem so nice!” they said. “You’re so funny and happy!” Here’s a secret: thriller writers are some of the most jolly people I know. We get it all out on the page. We get to murder people for a living. So, if you cut me off in traffic or don’t RSVP to my Evite, it's no big deal. I won’t get upset. I’ll just kill you later...in a book.
Plot twist! It’s a graphic novel. Jeff is the son of Tom Jensen, who was literally the last detective on the Green River Killer Task Force. I grew up in the PNW, and the Green River Killer was at large from when I was ten to when I was thirty. This case inspired many aspects of my Archie Sheridan series—including the notion of spending a career looking for one killer and the obsession that might stem from that.
I know a lot about this case, but seeing it in graphic novel form and from the POV of the kid of a pivotal detective was such an eye-opener. It’s a chilling book and a reminder of the humanity at the periphery of these crimes.
The story of one of America's most notorious serial killers and the true detective who cracked the case is revealed in this true-crime graphic novel unlike any other! New introduction by Brian Michael Bendis.
Throughout the 1980s, the highest priority of Seattle-area police was the apprehension of the Green River Killer, the man responsible for the murders of dozens of women. In 1990, with the body count numbering at least forty-eight, the case was put in the hands of a single detective, Tom Jensen. After twenty years, when the killer was finally captured with the help of DNA technology, Jensen…
I believe my love of horror and mystery started young. My first favorite book was The Berenstain Bears and the Spooky Old Tree. I started writing my first mystery novel when I was in high school. It wasn’t very good, but I still have it. I have so many stories in my head that it’s hard to keep them straight. I also co-host a True Crime podcast, Nothing Happens in A Small Town.
If You Tell reads like a fiction mystery novel. I wasn’t paying attention when I started reading this, and I thought it was fiction. When I realized this book was based on a true story it bewildered me. You hear stories about people, how horrible they can be, but this mother had to be a fictional character – she’s not. She will give you nightmares.
A #1 Wall Street Journal, Amazon Charts, USA Today, and Washington Post bestseller.
#1 New York Times bestselling author Gregg Olsen's shocking and empowering true-crime story of three sisters determined to survive their mother's house of horrors.
After more than a decade, when sisters Nikki, Sami, and Tori Knotek hear the word mom, it claws like an eagle's talons, triggering memories that have been their secret since childhood. Until now.
For years, behind the closed doors of their farmhouse in Raymond, Washington, their sadistic mother, Shelly, subjected her girls to unimaginable abuse, degradation, torture, and psychic terrors. Through it all,…
As a writer of Psychological Horror who specializes in stories about serial killers, the first-person serial killer narrative stands out as a fascinating vehicle to explore the psyche of real human ‘monsters.’ Which is precisely what I did, using books from this list as subject material for my Master’s thesis. The research also informed Blood Related, my debut novel, a first-person serial killer narrative and the most controversial book I’ve written so far. Perhaps, gaining insight from fictional serial killers would be a failed enterprise if life didn’t imitate art, but the fact is that these types of narratives are mostly informed by their real-life counterparts. Be warned – read at your own discretion.
This book blew my mind when I first read it. In my opinion, it is one of the most visceral, scary, and under-rated serial killer novels of all time. Published in 1986 in the midst of America’s much-hyped real and fictional serial killer ‘epidemic,’ Killer on the Road stands out as a first-person serial-killer narrative, as well as putting forward a new kind of character (for the 1980s) – the homosexual serial murderer. In this novel, Ellroy delves into the phenomenon of motiveless serial murder from the perspective of the killer on a subversive journey through a hellish suburban America. From the prologue to the epilogue the reader is presented an interior world-view saturated with violence and nightmarish insights into the psychopathology of a disturbed killer.
Martin Michael Plunkett is a product of his times -- the possessor of a genius intellect, a pitiless soul of brushed steel, and a heart of blackest evil. With criminal tendencies forged in the fires of L.A.'s Charles Manson hysteria, he comes to the bay city of San Francisco -- and submits to savage and terrible impulses that reveal to him his true vocation as a pure and perfect murderer. And so begins his decade of discovery and terror, as he cuts a bloody swath across the full length of a land, ingeniously exploiting and feeding upon a society's obsessions.…
I believe my love of horror and mystery started young. My first favorite book was The Berenstain Bears and the Spooky Old Tree. I started writing my first mystery novel when I was in high school. It wasn’t very good, but I still have it. I have so many stories in my head that it’s hard to keep them straight. I also co-host a True Crime podcast, Nothing Happens in A Small Town.
This is a mystery within a mystery—an end-of-the-world survival story that slowly unfolds how the world's end happened. The mystery of a little girl found dead, but not from anything happening in the world. This book made me think about how I’d react in a similar situation. We all hope we’d be level-headed and survive. But as this book tells, you never know.
This propulsive post-apocalyptic thriller “in which Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None collides with Stephen King’s The Shining” (NPR) follows a group of survivors stranded at a hotel as the world descends into nuclear war and the body of a young girl is discovered in one of the hotel’s water tanks.
Jon thought he had all the time in the world to respond to his wife’s text message: I miss you so much. I feel bad about how we left it. Love you. But as he’s waiting in the lobby of the L’Hotel Sixieme in Switzerland after an academic…
