Book recommendations? (Thriller, murder mystery stuff - like Tess Gerritsen)

[hidinout]

Leaving on vaca Sat ., already have Tess's latest book Die Again . Looking for similiar great reads .

[UKMustangFan]

Not really murder mystery type, but a series I really enjoy is The Ryan Kealey series by Andrew Britton. More spy/espionage types, but definitely thrillers. There are 6 of them I believe.

[mcpapa]

Crime fiction rather than "espionage thrillers" for me. Harlan Coben, Lee Child, Robert Block, etc.

[broadcaster240]

If you like a little bit of current events mixed in, the Joel Rosenberg books are pretty good.

[kygirl]

I like Karen Slaughter-the Atlanta series starting with Triptych, Fractured, Criminal to name a few.

[Randy Parker]

I echo the Harlan Coben suggestion by Papa. His newest one, The Stranger, is excellent.

[se7ens]

Eight Million Ways to Die or A Walk Among the Tombstones by Lawrence Block

Shadow Creek or Heartstopper by Joy Fielding

[Colonels_Wear_Blue]

Devil In The White City - it's nonfiction, and I REALLY enjoyed it.

 

Amazon.com Review

 

Author Erik Larson imbues the incredible events surrounding the 1893 Chicago World's Fair with such drama that readers may find themselves checking the book's categorization to be sure that The Devil in the White City is not, in fact, a highly imaginative novel. Larson tells the stories of two men: Daniel H. Burnham, the architect responsible for the fair's construction, and H.H. Holmes, a serial killer masquerading as a charming doctor. Burnham's challenge was immense. In a short period of time, he was forced to overcome the death of his partner and numerous other obstacles to construct the famous "White City" around which the fair was built. His efforts to complete the project, and the fair's incredible success, are skillfully related along with entertaining appearances by such notables as Buffalo Bill Cody, Susan B. Anthony, and Thomas Edison. The activities of the sinister Dr. Holmes, who is believed to be responsible for scores of murders around the time of the fair, are equally remarkable. He devised and erected the World's Fair Hotel, complete with crematorium and gas chamber, near the fairgrounds and used the event as well as his own charismatic personality to lure victims. Combining the stories of an architect and a killer in one book, mostly in alternating chapters, seems like an odd choice but it works. The magical appeal and horrifying dark side of 19th-century Chicago are both revealed through Larson's skillful writing.

From Publishers Weekly

 

Not long after Jack the Ripper haunted the ill-lit streets of 1888 London, H.H. Holmes (born Herman Webster Mudgett) dispatched somewhere between 27 and 200 people, mostly single young women, in the churning new metropolis of Chicago; many of the murders occurred during (and exploited) the city's finest moment, the World's Fair of 1893. Larson's breathtaking new history is a novelistic yet wholly factual account of the fair and the mass murderer who lurked within it. Bestselling author Larson (Isaac's Storm) strikes a fine balance between the planning and execution of the vast fair and Holmes's relentless, ghastly activities. The passages about Holmes are compelling and aptly claustrophobic; readers will be glad for the frequent escapes to the relative sanity of Holmes's co-star, architect and fair overseer Daniel Hudson Burnham, who managed the thousands of workers and engineers who pulled the sprawling fair together 0n an astonishingly tight two-year schedule. A natural charlatan, Holmes exploited the inability of authorities to coordinate, creating a small commercial empire entirely on unpaid debts and constructing a personal cadaver-disposal system. This is, in effect, the nonfiction Alienist, or a sort of companion, which might be called Homicide, to Emile Durkheim's Suicide. However, rather than anomie, Larson is most interested in industriousness and the new opportunities for mayhem afforded by the advent of widespread public anonymity. This book is everything popular history should be, meticulously recreating a rich, pre-automobile America on the cusp of modernity, in which the sale of "articulated" corpses was a semi-respectable trade and serial killers could go well-nigh unnoticed.

[Beechwoodfan]

My favorite vacation books are from Carl Hiaasen. Murder mysteries, but always poking funk at what idiots some people are. His books usually take place in Florida.

[Clyde]

My favorite vacation books are from Carl Hiaasen. Murder mysteries, but always poking funk at what idiots some people are. His books usually take place in Florida.

 

I like his stuff but haven't ready any in a few years. @Oldbird turned me on to him a few years ago.

[hidinout]

Thanks BGP friends .

[All Tell]

The James Patterson NYPD Red books are good and so far only three of them. I also like The Women's Murder Club books.