100 books like Map of Bones

Nora Kelly, assistant professor at the Santa Fe Archaeological Institute, assembles an expedition to find the lost city of Quivira—Coronado’s City of Gold. Their footsteps are dogged by a pair of murderous, pelt-covered creatures. After unimaginable horrors, they at last discover the pueblo city and its treasure—but in an ironic twist, it isn’t gold at all.

I recommend every single one of Preston and Child’s thrillers. Superbly written and, though fantastic, they never lack a good grounding in science. Thunderhead is particularly alluring to me because of the descriptions of the sere landscape of the slot canyons and high desert of southwest Utah.

You don’t often find novels in which an Egyptian and an Israeli work compatibly together, but Sussman’s series featuring two detectives—one from Luxor and the other from Jerusalem—does just that. Teaming up to solve the murder of a journalist, they pursue the case to the site of a gargantuan treasure long buried in the sands of the Western desert. Having lived in Egypt, I would have read The Labyrinth of Osiris if only for the setting, but found it to be a beguiling mystery, with unusual, sympathetic sleuths, an unmatched setting, and, best of all, treasure.

I know it’s a bit of a cheat to have Sherlock Holmes here as he’s one of, if not the most famous detective in all of fiction.

However, he’s not an official cop so I’m claiming him for my list.

I remember being gifted a complete works of ACD when I was around 14 for a birthday. And I absolutely adored it from the off.

Like so many other crime and mystery writers, the Sherlock Holmes stories have been a constant, a mainstay throughout my career.

The Sign of Four is the second adventure with Holmes and Watson. And I recently re-read it for the Bloody Scotland Book Club.

It’s remarkable how well it’s aged, despite being over 100 years old. The tropes, style, and attention to forensic detail that ACD shows off are still used in crime fiction today. A truly wonderful masterpiece. 

In my book, the hero enlists his students in a treasure hunt using a book by Byron Preiss called The Secret as a guide. In 1982 Preiss traveled to twelve spots in North America, at each of which he buried a ceramic casque. Each casque contained a key that could be redeemed for a jewel. To find a casque, the seeker had to match one of twelve paintings to one of twelve poems. The hunt has lasted four decades and involves thousands of players. Only three of the twelve hiding places have been found. Be careful! The Secret has drawn in much more cynical readers than you.

For years I’ve been fascinated by the political history of the world that parallels the U.S. experience. Turns out that secret societies plotted a course for the world and did their best to affect the American Revolution. While they had little success in that, their influence has risen through the globalism of today and Melanson documents the foundations with incredible research.

This crucial book was originally published by Putnam’s, New York, in 1941. 

Riess admitted in his autobiography (which exists only in German) that the book was largely a compilation of material from various sources, much of it handed to him personally by Robert Vansittart, the head of British Intelligence at the time. Large portions of the book were in fact written by Heinrich Pfeifer, and supplied to British Intelligence, part of it on Pfeifer’s two trips to London, and part passed across via Vansittart’s agent Walker in Lucerne.

Riess was a Jewish refugee from Germany who was trusted by Vansittart to aid him in helping to persuade the American public to enter the War against Germany. The book is one of the most astonishing books of its kind ever written, full of breathtaking revelations. It deserves to be widely known and to be a classic text for historical studies.

Its… show more.

Wilhelm II, the last German emperor, has always been a subject of fascination to me. Often portrayed as a caricature of the archetypical Prussian and blamed single-handedly for the outbreak of the First World War, the man behind the historical figure has remained an enigma. Very little has been written about him in Germany itself. Christopher Clark, who is perhaps better known for his seminal work The Sleepwalkers and his excellent biography of Prussia, Iron Kingdom, has done a great job tackling this delicate subject. Neither tied down by the weight of German memory culture nor by the constraints of academic writing, Clark’s biography of Kaiser Wilhelm is readable, informative and well-balanced. I would highly recommend it to anyone who seeks to understand Germany before and during the First World War.

How do people react when a dictatorship forces them to make choices? To learn more, read this brilliant memoir by a journalist looking back on his life in 1930s Berlin. Happily focused on his legal training and circle of friends, Sebastian Haffner at first showed little interest in politics and rejected the Nazis out of instinct rather than principle. Disgusted but powerless, he was content to keep a low profile under the new regime. To his own lasting shame, however, he one day answered “yes” when an SA stormtrooper demanded to know if he was “Aryan.” But Haffner’s friendships and liaisons with Jews, and his belief in the rule of law, ultimately made him realize that he couldn’t live in Nazi Germany. His final choice? Exile in Britain.   

This book is an excellent summary of the WWII Eastern Front battles from July to November 1944 near Warsaw, Poland, through the lens of the Germans defending the front there, specifically the IV. SS-Panzerkorps, an armored (tank) corps consisting of two Waffen-SS Panzer Divisions (The Waffen-SS being the military arm of the Nazi Party in wartime Germany).

Author Douglas E. Nash’s analysis is excellent, and his experience as a retired US Army armored officer allows him to provides insights few others can regarding Eastern Front combat in 1944.

On top of this, his German language skills allowed him to carry out a higher degree of historical research than other books on the Eastern Front, utilizing primary German wartime documents to delve into events.

This book provides the reader with a clear understanding of how the June 1944 Russian Operation Bagration offensive was stopped by desperately fighting German units attempting to… show more.

This is an extraordinary story of a brave German woman whose diplomat father and Italian aristocrat husband decide to resist the Nazis.

When German troops enter Italy, Fey von Hassell finds herself trapped with her young children in a 12th-century villa in northern Italy while her husband joins the anti-fascist underground in Rome and her father decides to join the group that plots to kill Adolf Hitler. Nazi stormtroopers take over the villa and later arrest Fey.

Using archival materials and family letters, Caroline Bailey reconstructs Fey’s harrowing journey—moved from prison to prison and concentration camp to concentration camp. Her two young boys are taken away from her, and sent to a Nazi orphanage. Fey’s single-minded mission to find her children reads like a good thriller.