Book picks similar to
At End of Day by George V. Higgins
fiction
crime
crime-fiction
mystery
Serious as a Heart Attack
Louisa Luna - 2004
After getting fired from her job at a calendar company for botching Daylight Savings, she is informally hired by a wealthy acquaintance to track down his girlfriend, a stripper named Trigger Happy. But Queenie's seemingly good luck turns hard when she finds Trigger dead in her apartment.Now Queenie's daily routine of being a drunk smart-ass is put on hold as she becomes both a suspect for the murder and the target for an unknown predator. Hopping from bar to bar, from Coney Island clam stands to the Waldorf-Astoria, she inadvertently lands on the trail of Trigger's killer and puts herself in the line of fire.Along the way she meets Rey, a private eye with a soft spot for tough-talking ladies; Detective Olds, the stuttering cop who thinks Queenie's the culprit; and a dozen New York denizens, among them a cult recruiter, a hit man, a thief, and even Rip Torn -- some strange, some sad, some sweet, and some deadly, every one dropping in and out of Queenie's life as she searches for each fragile piece of the puzzle that may eventually lead her to the truth.With danger closing in on her, Queenie can't help but realize the precariousness of her own mortality. As she stares out of the window at an old lady on the corner, she thinks, "There is nothing separating you from that old lady right now -- maybe something, maybe time is all, but that's really nothing when you think about it." After all, thinks Queenie, it's just days. But unless she can find the killer before the killer finds her, Queenie's days are seriously numbered.
Eleven
Carolyn Arnold - 2011
Ten Bodies. One Empty Grave.In this international bestseller, rookie FBI Agent Brandon Fisher takes on his first case with the Behavioral Analysis Unit, but will he survive long enough to catch the killer? Eleven is a fast-paced, spine-tingling thriller that will have you gasping for breath at every twist... When Brandon Fisher joined the FBI Behavioral Analysis Unit, he knew he'd come up against psychopaths, sociopaths, pathological liars, and more. But when his first case takes him and the team to Salt Lick, Kentucky, to hunt down a ritualistic serial killer, he learns what nightmares are truly made of. Beneath a residential property, local law enforcement discovered an underground bunker with circular graves that house the remains of ten victims. But that's not all: there's an empty eleventh grave, just waiting for a corpse. The killing clearly hasn't come to an end yet, and with the property owner already behind bars, Brandon is certain there's an apprentice who roams free. As the FBI follows the evidence across the United States, Brandon starts to struggle with the deranged nature of his job description. And if the case itself isn't going to be enough to push Brandon over the edge, he's working in the shadow of Supervisory Special Agent Jack Harper, who expects nothing short of perfection from his team. To make matters even worse, it seems Brandon has become the target of a psychotic serial killer who wants to make him--or his wife--victim number eleven.
Fell of Dark
Reginald Hill - 1971
Then two girls are found murdered in the high fells, and suddenly there's no doubt about it. He's running. Set in his native Cumberland, this was Reginald Hill's very first novel and its cleverly interwoven strands of detective story, psychological thriller and Buchanesque adventure prefigure much that in the intervening decades has taken him into the topmost ranks of British crime fiction.
It Ends with Her
Brianna Labuskes - 2018
She’ll end it.FBI special agent Clarke Sinclair doesn’t give up easily. She’s spent years tracking serial killer Simon Cross, forced to follow his twisted clues and photographs across the country. Clarke knows that Cross selects only redheaded women and that he doesn’t target another victim until Clarke discovers the previous one.He’s never broken pattern…until now.A girl has already gone missing in upstate New York when a second one is kidnapped—a blonde. The killer’s MO has changed, sending Clarke back to the drawing board. The closer she gets to the truth, the deeper she’s drawn into an inescapable trap made just for Clarke. Whatever Cross’s ultimate game is, it ends with her.
Sight Unseen
Robert Goddard - 2005
Her seven-year-old sister Miranda was knocked down and killed by the abductor’s van. The girls were in the care of their nanny, Sally Wilkinson.One of the witnesses to this tragic event was David Umber, a Ph.D student who was waiting at the village pub to keep an appointment with a man called Griffith who claimed he could help Umber with his researches into the letters of “Junius,” the pseudonymous eighteenth century polemicist who was his Ph.D subject. But Griffin failed to show up, and Umber never heard from him again. The two-year-old, Tamsin Hall, was never seen again either. The Hall family fell apart under the strain. Sally Wilkinson, the nanny, wound up living with Umber, whom she had met at the inquiry. But she never recovered from the incident, suffered increasingly from depression, and eventually committed suicide.In the spring of 2004, retired Chief Inspector George Sharp receives a letter signed “Junius” reproaching him for botching the 1981 investigation. Sharp confronts Umber, whose explanation for being at the scene of the tragedy has always seemed dubious. Obliged to accept Umber’s denial of authorship of the letter, he nonetheless forces him to join in a search for the real culprit — and hence the long-concealed truth about what happened 23 years previously. It is a quest that both will later regret having embarked upon. Too late they come to understand that some mysteries are better left unsolved.
The Long Firm
Jake Arnott - 1999
This swinging sixties novel reveals the seedier side of London where the low life met the high life in the city's dark underbelly.
A Suspension of Mercy
Patricia Highsmith - 1965
Of course he has; he's a mystery-script writer. But when Alicia takes a long, unannounced vacation, Sydney seizes the opportunity to perfect his artistic method.With her characteristic precision and unrivaled sensitivity to the inner tremblings of human character, Patricia Highsmith shockingly portrays Sydney's descent into the treacherous world of his own fictions. Once again Highsmith proves herself to be a master at depicting the unsettling forces that boil beneath the surface of everyday life.
Tigerlily's Orchids
Ruth Rendell - 2010
The party will be one everyone remembers. But not for the right reasons....Living opposite, in reclusive isolation, is a young, beautiful Asian woman, christened Tigerlily by Stuart. As though from some strange urban fairytale, she emerges to exert a terrible spell on the occupants of Lichfield House.
Havana Best Friends
José Latour - 2002
Elena Miranda and her brother, Pablo, have lived in the same spacious Havana apartment since they were children, not knowing that a $10-million treasure in diamonds is hidden behind a tile in their bathroom. Now the son of the man who buried them there wants them, and he knows the ideal person for the job: his ruthless former comrade-in-arms during the Vietnam War. Equipped with a Spanish-speaking “wife” and Canadian passports, the vet flies to Cuba to sweet-talk his way into Elena and Pablo’s lives and get his hands on the diamonds. But Cuba has a way of confusing even the best-laid plans, and soon the treasure hunters find themselves being hunted.A complex, hard-boiled novel of betrayal, deceit, and cunning, Havana Best Friends takes place in a Cuba that tourists rarely see. Stunning plot twists rocket the story forward, but not once does the action overpower the story’s heart — the emotional lives of the people whose worlds are changed forever by these so-called best friends.
The Dante Club
Matthew Pearl - 2003
Oliver Wendell Holmes, and James Russell Lowell, along with publisher J. T. Fields—are finishing America's first translation of The Divine Comedy and preparing to unveil Dante's remarkable visions to the New World. The powerful Boston Brahmins at Harvard College are fighting to keep Dante in obscurity, believing that the infiltration of foreign superstitions into American minds will prove as corrupting as the immigrants arriving at Boston Harbor.The members of the Dante Club fight to keep a sacred literary cause alive, but their plans fall apart when a series of murders erupts through Boston and Cambridge. Only this small group of scholars realizes that the gruesome killings are modeled on the descriptions of Hell's punishments from Dante's Inferno. With the lives of the Boston elite and Dante's literary future in America at stake, the Dante Club members must find the killer before the authorities discover their secret.Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes and an outcast police officer named Nicholas Rey, the first black member of the Boston police department, must place their careers on the line to end the terror. Together, they discover that the source of the murders lies closer to home than they ever could have imagined.The Dante Club is a magnificent blend of fact and fiction, a brilliantly realized paean to Dante's continued grip on our imagination, and a captivating thriller that will surprise readers from beginning to end.
Hope's Peak
Tony Healey - 2017
He’ll make her a princess like the others…Detective Jane Harper can’t shake the image of the young woman discovered in a field—eyes closed, a crown of woven vines on her head. She expects macabre murders like this in her native San Francisco, not here. Jane and her partner, Stu, vow to catch the killer, but in this town, that’s easier said than done. The police department is in the grips of a wide-reaching scandal that could topple the entire force, and Jane and Stu face a series of dead ends. Until they meet Ida Lane.Ida knows too well the evil that lurks in the cornfields. Tortured by her mother’s murder years before, Ida is paralyzed by the fear that she could be next. As the killer grows bolder, Jane must persuade Ida to use her remarkable gifts to help in the investigation. It’s a decision that brings them closer to the killer…maybe too close.
Hostage
Robert Crais - 2001
Hotly pursued by the police, they crash into the suburban home of an accountant and take the family hostage. Soon the mafia are on the scene.
The Bad Daughter
Joy Fielding - 2018
But when her father's new family is attacked in their house, with her father, his wife, and young daughter in critical condition in the hospital, she returns home to await their fate and hopefully mend fences. It looks like a random robbery gone awry, but as Robin spends more time with her family members, she learns they all had their secrets -- and one of those secrets may have put them all in horrible danger.
Biker
Mike Baron - 2013
Ginger Munz, a woman dying of cancer hires him to find the son she lost as a baby. The child’s father is a sadistic sociopath named Moon who has vowed to kill her and Josh’s girlfriend Cass, for ratting him out. The trail leads to the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally and west into no-man’s land where Josh learns the monstrous fate of the stolen child.Josh is the BIKER, caught up in a race for survival against a human monster on the road between heaven and hell at the end of which lies either salvation or damnation.
Baron spins a tale of unrelenting suspense and horror that moves across his narrative landscape like the roar of a chopper’s engine.