59 Books Like White Death

I love how weird and dark this book is. Carolyn and her siblings were raised by their abusive, adopted father, who trained them each in a single portfolio of magic.

When their father goes missing, Carolyn and her allies explore the truth of his disappearance. I was with Carolyn every step of the way of her journey to claw back her identity from her abusive past. And I can’t stop thinking about the explosive ending, even years after I first read the book.

Let me emphasize how gorgeous this book is. Imagine a Tim Burton world filled with bones and two skeletons having a heart-wrenchingly beautiful love story. That is the landscape of The Bone Valley by Candace Robinson. This book gets quite gory and dark but is absolutely my favorite of her books for its sheer originality and incredibly unique world. Not to mention the horrible villain who literally takes over the underworld just so she can torture people. Yeah, it’s dark. Robinson is known for her incredible balance of romance and horror nestled within a beautiful world, and this book is the epitome of that.

A dystopian novella that seems confusing at first but makes sense as you continue along. It requires piecing together broken memories, broken friendships, and flashes of emotion that are rarely understood. Each glimpse lasts only eight minutes and thirty-two seconds. It’s quite an incredible feat of storytelling. I read this in one sitting with the sun setting outside and me barely even noticing that time existed. I was fortunate enough to know and work alongside Salomon before his recent passing and this was a book I was privileged to provide a blurb for. I was blown away by the story that unraveled before me. I promise you will be too. 

Talk about intensive world-building, Lewis takes the cake with her impressive magic and gruesome villains in her novel, Lineage. Nicole Fontane, our protagonist, drew me in with her rage against corporate smoke and mirrors. Then came the incredible magical systems and magic users. And then on top of that, there are deities walking the very earth. Every time I thought it couldn’t get more intense, it did, and it’s a heck of a dangerous ride along the way.

I really enjoyed this book for so many reasons! The small-town coastal Maine setting was so atmospheric, and the author pulled you right into the setting. The mystery at the start of the book was very well done as to who Lorelei really is.

I absolutely adored the romance between her and Killian! Their chemistry was palpable, and they had healthy, mature communication with one another. I also loved how supportive Killian was toward her. I also really liked and related to Lorelei and her struggle to fit between two worlds and coming to accept who she is: a mermaid who craves flesh and blood—and I thought it was a great twist on traditional mermaid lore.

Burton has the finely tuned skill of pulling the reader into the story. I could practically taste, feel, see, smell, and hear the surroundings.

I love dogs and know them well. The author does too. In this installment, Jerry McNeal’s K9 companion, Gunter, a German Shepherd, enjoys a Halloween exploit. But it’s not all fun and games. From humor to white-knuckle tension, Burton weaves in authentic German Shepherd traits—loyalty, confidence, courage, dependability, intelligence, and agility—that kept me turning the pages to discover what came next.

For anyone who loves dogs, the paranormal, and a good mystery, this book’s for you.

Of all the eyewitness survivor accounts of the sinking of the Titanic, this is the most compelling and descriptive, as well as one of the first to be published. As the Titanic foundered, Gracie was swept into the sea by a giant wave, the undertow of the sinking liner sucking him deeper and deeper below the surface. So long was he underwater that by the time he surfaced, “I could see no Titanic in sight”.  He clung on to a wooden crate which kept him afloat long enough to find an overturned collapsible lifeboat.

Gracie never recovered from his ordeal. He died eight months later, most likely from organ failure caused by hypothermia. But, as a writer and historian, he put every day to good use, writing this gripping eye-witness account – not just of Titanic’s death throes but every moment from the collision with the iceberg to the loading… show more.

Another comparison with Carpenter’s The Thing here. A crew working on a derelict refinery platform moored in the Arctic Ocean are waiting for a relief ship to take them home when they discover that the rest of the world has been ravaged by a global pandemic. This is another book where the brilliance of the prose and the grotesqueness of the infection combine to devastating effect and deliver a hugely effective vision of the apocalypse. 

I am so happy I discovered Griffith’s Sam Rivers Mystery Series. While each book reads great as a standalone, I recommend starting with the first book in the series, Wolf Kill. Dead Catch, the fourth book, continues the story of U.S. Fish and Wildlife Special Agent Sam Rivers and his faithful four-legged sidekick Gray—a wolf-hybrid. I love that Griffith has a wolf-hybrid as his fictional K-9 character.

Griffith weaves environmental issues into each book. Dead Catch explores the world of poaching walleye, which I found fascinating. But adding to the mystery is the relationship between Sam and his childhood friend charged with murder. I appreciated the theme of giving those we love a second chance and reviving a friendship years after a tragedy. 

I was completely and totally captivated by this book. I read it in two sittings, and that’s only because I finally forced myself to go to sleep at 3 a.m. The only WWII book I’ve read that did not glamorize war. What these men went through was absolutely shocking. How Captain McVay was treated was abhorrent.

Anyone who is considering joining the US military should read this book; it will make you think twice, and not because of the sharks.