Excellent Fiction
Discover a curated list of excellent fiction books that captivate and inspire. Find your next great read with our top picks in literary masterpieces and must-read novels.
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City of Bones
by Michael Connelly
On New Year's Day, a dog finds a bone in the Hollywood Hills--and unearths a murder committed more than twenty years earlier. It's a cold case, but for Detective Harry Bosch, it stirs up memories of his childhood as an orphan. He can't let it go. As the investigation takes Bosch deeper into the past, a beautiful rookie cop brings him alive in the present. No official warning can break them apart--or prepare Bosch for the explosions when the case takes a few hard turns. Suddenly all of L.A. is in an uproar, and Bosch, fighting to keep control, is driven to the brink of an unimaginable decision.
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The Monkey's Raincoat
by Robert Crais
First published 1987. Elvis Cole mystery. Elvis is on the case when a client's estranged husband kidnaps their son.
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Man Down
by John E. Douglas
Now in paperback--the action-packed sequel to "Broken Wings." Hollywood Jake Donovan is on the trail of two missing persons--one of whom may have weapons secrets--and finds himself in the crosshairs of a terrorist group that will do anything to stop him.
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Free Fall
by Robert Crais
Elvis Cole investigates a case that erupts in gang violence in South Central Los Angeles.
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Digital Fortress
by Dan Brown
A former National Security Agency programmer threatens to release a mathematical formula that will allow organized crime and terrorism to skyrocket.
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Cryptonomicon
by Neal Stephenson
With this extraordinary first volume in what promises to be an epoch-making masterpiece, Neal Stephenson hacks into the secret histories of nations and the private obsessions of men, decrypting with dazzling virtuosity the forces that shaped this century. In 1942, Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse - mathematical genius and young Captain in the U.S. Navy - is assigned to detachment 2702. It is an outfit so secret that only a handful of people know it exists, and some of those people have names like Churchill and Roosevelt. The mission of Watrehouse and Detatchment 2702-commanded by Marine Raider Bobby Shaftoe-is to keep the Nazis ignorant of the fact that Allied Intelligence has cracked the enemy's fabled Enigma code. It is a game, a cryptographic chess match between Waterhouse and his German counterpart, translated into action by the gung-ho Shaftoe and his forces. Fast-forward to the present, where Waterhouse's crypto-hacker grandson, Randy, is attempting to create a "data haven" in Southeast Asia - a place where encrypted data can be stored and exchanged free of repression and scrutiny. As governments and multinationals attack the endeavor, Randy joins forces with Shaftoe's tough-as-nails grandaughter, Amy, to secretly salvage a sunken Nazi sumarine that holds the key to keeping the dream of a data haven afloat. But soon their scheme brings to light a massive conspiracy with its roots in Detachment 2702 linked to an unbreakable Nazi code called Arethusa. And it will represent the path to unimaginable riches and a future of personal and digital liberty...or to universal totalitarianism reborn. A breathtaking tour de force, and Neal Stephenson's most accomplished and affecting work to date, CRYPTONOMICON is profound and prophetic, hypnotic and hyper-driven, as it leaps forward and back between World War II and the World Wide Web, hinting all the while at a dark day-after-tomorrow. It is a work of great art, thought, and creative daring; the product of a truly icon
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Plum Island
by Nelson DeMille
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER CELEBRATING THE 20th ANNIVERSARY WITH A NEW FOREWORD BY THE AUTHOR Wounded in the line of duty, NYPD homicide detective John Corey convalesces in the Long Island township of Southold, home to farmers, fishermen -- and at least one killer. Tom and Judy Gordon, a young, attractive couple Corey knows, have been found on their patio, each with a bullet in the head. The local police chief, Sylvester Maxwell, wants Corey's big-city expertise, but Maxwell gets more than he bargained for. John Corey doesn't like mysteries, which is why he likes to solve them. His investigations lead him into the lore, legends, and ancient secrets of northern Long Island -- more deadly and more dangerous than he could ever have imagined. During his journey of discovery, he meets two remarkable women, Detective Beth Penrose and Mayflower descendant Emma Whitestone, both of whom change his life irrevocably. Ultimately, through his understanding of the murders, John Corey comes to understand himself. Fast-paced and atmospheric, marked by entrancing characters, incandescent storytelling, and brilliant comic touches, Plum Island is Nelson DeMille at his thrill-inducing best.
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Pale Horse Coming
by Stephen Hunter
Pale Horse Coming, featuring Stephen Hunter’s beloved sniper heroes Earl and Bob Lee Swagger, the first Swagger thriller from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author. The time is 1951. A smooth-talking Chicago lawyer comes to chat with Sam Vincent, the former prosecutor of Polk County, Arkansas, about a dangerous subject—a big prison for violent black convicts near Thebes, Mississippi, up the Yaxahatchee River from Pasagoula. Thebes seems to have dropped out of the Union—letters and phone calls go unanswered, and the lawyer has questions that need answers. Would Sam—an ex-lawman, a white man and a Southerner—agree to go up there and find out what he can? The ex-prosecutor takes on the job, but first he goes to see his old friend Earl Swagger, and tells him that if he isn’t back in a week, Earl is to come looking for him. When Sam vanishes into the mists and swamps around Thebes, Mississippi, Earl packs his gun, explains to a distraught Junie that duty is duty and a promise is a promise, and sets off for Thebes, Mississippi to track his friend down. Soon enough, Earl—who approaches Thebes and its sinister prison with the stealth of a good Marine on a recon mission—realizes that something very strange indeed is going on there, that the prison is more than just a place that chills the blood of even the most hardened convict, that in fact the whole town of Thebes is hiding a secret—and it’s a place where people disappear all too easily, particularly inquisitive strangers, for whom burial in the swamps follows torture.
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Prayer for the Dead
by David Wiltse
A gripping cat-and-mouse tale of wide-eyed terror concerning a diabolical psychopath who's found the will to kill and a detective who's lost the will to win. A chilling thriller in the tradition of Thomas Harris' The Silence of the Lambs.
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Still Life with Crows
by Douglas Preston
A small Kansas town has turned into a killing ground. Is it a serial killer, a man with the need to destroy? Or is it a darker force, a curse upon the land? Amid golden cornfields, FBI Special Agent Pendergast discovers evil in the blood of America's heartland. No one is safe.
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Absolute Zero
by Chuck Logan
In the icy jaws of an early winter, three big-city professionals joined Phil Broker on a canoe trip across Minnesota's remotest lake. Nature's unexpected fury battered and nearly killed them. But it was Man who left one of them worse than dead . . . Haunted ex-cop Phil Broker owes Hank Sommer his life -- and now the wealthy writer is in a coma, thanks to a “freak” mishap on a hospital operating table. Broker knows from hard experience that accidents are not always what they appear to be. He suspects foul play, and he's not about to let Sommer fade out of this world so easily. But the trail to answers is twisted and deadly, winding around the comatose man's beautiful wife -- a former exotic dancer -- and the ring of dangerous men still surrounding her. And Broker's determined search for justice and truth is taking him to a dark and terrifying place where he will be forced to fight for his very survival on the coldest night in Minnesota's history . . .
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Killing Floor
by Lee Child
A former military policeman, Jack Reacher is passing through Margrave, Georgia, on his way to nowhere in particular when four policemen arrive to arrest him for a murder he did not commit, in critically acclaimed suspense novel. Reprint. NYT.
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Master and Commander (Vol. Book 1) (Aubrey/Maturin Novels)
by Patrick O'Brian
The beginning of the sweeping Aubrey-Maturin series. "The best sea story I have ever read."—Sir Francis Chichester This, the first in the splendid series of Jack Aubrey novels, establishes the friendship between Captain Aubrey, R.N., and Stephen Maturin, ship's surgeon and intelligence agent, against a thrilling backdrop of the Napoleonic wars. Details of a life aboard a man-of-war in Nelson's navy are faultlessly rendered: the conversational idiom of the officers in the ward room and the men on the lower deck, the food, the floggings, the mysteries of the wind and the rigging, and the roar of broadsides as the great ships close in battle.
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Post Captain (Aubrey/Maturin Novels)
by Patrick O'Brian
"Master and Commander raised almost dangerously high expectations, Post Captain triumphantly surpasses them...a brilliant book." —Mary Renault "We've beat them before and we'll beat them again." In 1803 Napoleon smashes the Peace of Amiens, and Captain Jack Aubrey, R. N., taking refuge in France from his creditors, is interned. He escapes from France, from debtors' prison, and from a possible mutiny, and pursues his quarry straight into the mouth of a French-held harbor.
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Gates of Fire
by Steven Pressfield
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • “Steven Pressfield brings the battle of Thermopylae to brilliant life.”—Pat Conroy At Thermopylae, a rocky mountain pass in northern Greece, the feared and admired Spartan soldiers stood three hundred strong. Theirs was a suicide mission, to hold the pass against the invading millions of the mighty Persian army. Day after bloody day they withstood the terrible onslaught, buying time for the Greeks to rally their forces. Born into a cult of spiritual courage, physical endurance, and unmatched battle skill, the Spartans would be remembered for the greatest military stand in history—one that would not end until the rocks were awash with blood, leaving only one gravely injured Spartan squire to tell the tale. . . .
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The Alienist
by Caleb Carr
In 1896 New York, psychologist--or in period terminology, an alienist--Laszlo Kreizler joins forces with journalist John Schuyler Moore to track a vicious serial killer.
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Snow Crash
by Neal Stephenson
The “brilliantly realized” (The New York Times Book Review) breakthrough novel from visionary author Neal Stephenson, a modern classic that predicted the metaverse and inspired generations of Silicon Valley innovators Hiro lives in a Los Angeles where franchises line the freeway as far as the eye can see. The only relief from the sea of logos is within the autonomous city-states, where law-abiding citizens don’t dare leave their mansions. Hiro delivers pizza to the mansions for a living, defending his pies from marauders when necessary with a matched set of samurai swords. His home is a shared 20 X 30 U-Stor-It. He spends most of his time goggled in to the Metaverse, where his avatar is legendary. But in the club known as The Black Sun, his fellow hackers are being felled by a weird new drug called Snow Crash that reduces them to nothing more than a jittering cloud of bad digital karma (and IRL, a vegetative state). Investigating the Infocalypse leads Hiro all the way back to the beginning of language itself, with roots in an ancient Sumerian priesthood. He’ll be joined by Y.T., a fearless teenaged skateboard courier. Together, they must race to stop a shadowy virtual villain hell-bent on world domination.