When my family moved from sunny Florida to the cold, rugged mountains of Montana when I was in eighth grade, I thought I would hate it. Instead, I fell in love with Montana and its arresting landscape, especially Glacier National Park, which was only about a half-hour drive from our small town. When I began writing crime novels, I considered setting before plot or character because landscape was so central to me. I decided to place my stories in and around Glacier National Park where the backdrop is stunning, stark, and sometimes haunting. The following books allow you to luxuriate in atmosphere while being propelled by dynamic characters and interesting plots.
What was supposed to be a pleasant father-son camping trip beneath the rugged peaks and starlit skies of Glacier National Park turned into a full-fledged nightmare when Ted Systead’s father was attacked by a bear and dragged to his death. Now, twenty years later, Ted is a Special Agent for the Department of the Interior and has been called back to investigate a crime that mirrors the horror of that night —but this time, the victim was tied to a tree before being mauled. As Ted investigates, he realizes that the locals are wary of outsiders treading on their territory. The residents’ intimate connection to the wild forces them to confront nature, and their fellow man, with equal measures of reverence and ruthlessness.
I always know I’m reading a thought-provoking book with a strong sense of place when I marvel at the descriptions and say to myself, “I want to do that too!” In fact, I didn’t even really become a crime fiction fan until I was well into adulthood. Although I’d always wanted to write novels, it wasn’t until reading Lehane’s deeply compelling characters paired with an intriguing plot and terrific descriptions of a Boston neighborhood that I thought I’d try my hand at crime fiction. Not only is Mystic Rivera page-turner, but it’s also an exploration of the capacity for darkness in us all while maintaining a deep sense of empathy and humanity.
This New York Times bestseller from Dennis Lehane is a gripping, unnerving psychological thriller about the effects of a savage killing on three former friends in a tightly knit, blue-collar Boston neighborhood.
When they were children, Sean Devine, Jimmy Marcus, and Dave Boyle were friends. But then a strange car pulled up to their street. One boy got into the car, two did not, and something terrible happened—something that ended their friendship and changed all three boys forever.
Twenty-five years later, Sean is a homicide detective. Jimmy is an ex-con who owns a corner store. And Dave is trying to…
One might think a crime novel employing meth labs, pervasive poverty, and arcane backroad rules might succumb to cliché. However, Woodrell’s Winter’s Bonedoes anything but. His mesmerizing descriptions of the Ozark landscape and its people took my breath away. Although I deeply appreciate fiction that leaves me with little hope the way crime noir often does (a la Cormac McCarthy’s No Country For Old Men), I don’t usually rate these types of books as my top reads. Shallow or not, I like to be left with a sliver of hope. Winter’s Bone though is equal parts poetically luminescent and triumphantly ruthless, and by the time I turned the last page, I was touched. Through all its grit, it manages to hold onto an innocence that leaves you with some optimism and an appreciation for the raw beauty of the countryside and the strength of the folks who live there.
This is a fiercely original tale of love, heartbreak and resilience in the lonely wastes of the American Midwest. The last time Ree saw her father, he didn't bring food or money but promised he'd be back soon with a paper sack of cash and a truckload of delights. Since he left, she's had to look after her mother - sedated and losing her looks - and her two younger brothers. Ree hopes the boys won't turn out like the others in the Ozark mountains - hard and mean before they've learnt to shave. One cold winter's day, Ree discovers…
When I read a novel and certain images and incidents stay in my mind indefinitely, I know I’ve digested something akin to a five-course feast rather than a fast-food meal. Most of Donna Tartt’s novels are this way, but none more than The Secret History, a story that begins with a young man fulfilling his dream of getting away from a small California town and going off to college in New England. The tale, however, quickly spirals into psychological turmoil when the main character learns a terrifying secret shared by an elite group of Greek scholars. Tartt is a master of psychological and physical description, and the setting of the fictional school, Hampden College, acts as its own looming character. Years later, without even picking up the book, I still remember how the tops of the trees soughing in the wind sounded like the fizz of champagne and the land shone like velvet in the late autumn near the house in the country where one of the crimes ensued.
'Everything, somehow, fit together; some sly and benevolent Providence was revealing itself by degrees and I felt myself trembling on the brink of a fabulous discovery, as though any morning it was all going to come together---my future, my past, the whole of my life---and I was going to sit up in bed like a thunderbolt and say oh! oh! oh!'
Under the influence of a charismatic classics professor, a group of clever, eccentric misfits at a New England college discover a way of thought and life a world away from their banal contemporaries.…
Hemingway once said that a writer should “convey everything to the reader so that he remembers it not as a story he had read but something that happened to himself.” As a reader, I don’t always need to feel like the story has happened to me, but when a book is written in first-person narrative, I do enjoy feeling like it really happened to the narrator. I love it when the main character sounds authentic and the author fades to the background, making it seem like a memoir. Such a book is Faith, by Jennifer Haigh. AlthoughFaithisn’t categorized as crime-fiction, it involves an Irish Catholic family in Boston in 2002 during the height of the church’s pedophile scandals. As the narrator navigates her family dynamics after her half-brother is accused of sexual assault, she becomes a woman caught between faith and doubt, and she explores this limbo superbly. The story unfolds masterfully precisely because the fictional narrator seems so perceptive and so human, and all the emotional details along with descriptions of place, captivate. The narrator ends up offering shades of gray, and it is this nuanced area, of being suspended between believing in her half-brother and doubting him, that works so brilliantly.
One woman's search for the truth after scandal rocks her family, and the explosive family secrets she uncovers, in this complex, moving novel from award-winning author Jennifer Haigh.
In Faith, Jennifer Haigh explores the repercussions of one family's history of silence, when a priest's sex scandal forces his family's untold past to surface. Art, Sheila, and Mike are siblings in a large extended Irish-American family from the Boston suburbs. Though their father is a non-believer, their mother is lace curtain Irish-Catholic, having raised her children to keep family secrets just that - secret - in a home where most subjects…
This book is as much a young girl’s coming-of-age saga as it is a crime novel. Set on North Carolina’s coastline, its brilliant descriptions engage the reader’s full senses, totally engaging you in a child’s lonely, but captivating story of survival out on a stretch of marsh where her family has abandoned her. The author, Delia Owens, is a retired wildlife biologist who gives enchanting glimpses of the ecosystem while never boring the reader. The crime the protagonist becomes embroiled in as a young woman adds to the gripping descriptions, and by the end, we are left with a story involving two wonderful main characters: the girl and the marsh.
OVER 12 MILLION COPIES SOLD WORLDWIDE NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE A NUMBER ONE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
For years, rumours of the 'Marsh Girl' have haunted Barkley Cove, a quiet town on the North Carolina coast. So in late 1969, when handsome Chase Andrews is found dead, the locals immediately suspect Kya Clark, the so-called Marsh Girl. But Kya is not what they say. Sensitive and intelligent, she has survived for years alone in the marsh that she calls home, finding friends in the gulls and lessons in the sand. Then the time comes when she yearns to be…
I write historical crime fiction, and my latest novel is set in a hospital, a real place, now closed. The South London Hospital for Women and Children (1912–1985) was set up by pioneering suffragists and women surgeons Maud Chadburn and Eleanor Davies-Colley (the first woman admitted to the Royal College of Surgeons) and I recreate the now almost-forgotten hospital in my book. Events take place in 1946 when wartime trauma still impacts upon a society exhausted by conflict, and my book choices also reflect this.
A historical thriller set in south London just after World War II, as Britain returns to civilian life and the men return home from the fight, causing the women to leave their wartime roles. The South London Hospital for Women and Children is a hospital, (based on a real place) run by women for women and must make adjustments of its own. As austerity bites, the coldest Winter then on record makes life grim. Then a young nurse goes missing.
Days later, her body is found behind a locked door, and two women from the hospital, unimpressed by the police response, decide to investigate. Highly atmospheric and evocative of a distinct period and place.
One cold dark night, as a devastated London shivers through the transition to post-war life, a young nurse goes missing from the South London Hospital for Women & Children. Her body is discovered hours later behind a locked door.
Two women from the hospital join forces to investigate the case. Determined not to return to the futures laid out for them before the war, the unlikely sleuths must face their own demons and dilemmas as they pursue - The Midnight Man.
‘A mystery that evokes the period – and a recovering London – in…
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