Book picks similar to
The Mastermind by David Unger
fiction
historical-fiction
latin-america
crime
You Will Be Safe Here
Damian Barr - 2019
I left this book bruised yet somehow better for it.” – Tayari Jones.“Brutal, haunting, redemptive and...beautiful.” – Jojo Moyes. This extraordinary debut set in South Africa reveals legacies of abuse and redemption exploring the extraordinary strength of the human spirit - from the Boer War in 1901 to brutal camps for teenage boys now. There is always darkness but there is always light in it if we just look.South Africa, 1901 - the height of the second Boer War. Sarah van der Watt and her six-year-old son Fred are forced from their home on Mulberry Farm by British troops. As the polite invaders welcome them to Bloemfontein Concentration Camp they promise Sarah and Fred that they will be safe there.2010. Sixteen-year-old Willem is an outsider. Hoping he will become the man she wants him to be, his Ma and her boyfriend send Willem away to the New Dawn Safari Training Camp where they are proud to 'make men out of boys'. They promise Willem he will be safe there.You Will Be Safe Here is a powerful and urgent novel of two connected South African stories with universal relevance. Inspired by real events, it uncovers a hidden colonial history, reveals a dark contemporary secret, and explores the legacy of violence and our drive to survive and to love. An Observer, Guardian, Financial Times, Irish Times, Irish Independent and Big Issue Pick of the Year
Mirrorland
Carole Johnstone - 2021
As girls, they invented Mirrorland, a dark, imaginary place under the pantry stairs full of pirates, witches, and clowns. These days Cat rarely thinks about their childhood home, or the fact that El now lives there with her husband Ross.But when El mysteriously disappears after going out on her sailboat, Cat is forced to return to 36 Westeryk Road, which has scarcely changed in twenty years. The grand old house is still full of shadowy corners, and at every turn Cat finds herself stumbling on long-held secrets and terrifying ghosts from the past. Because someone—El?—has left Cat clues in almost every room: a treasure hunt that leads right back to Mirrorland, where she knows the truth lies crouched and waiting...A twisty, dark, and brilliantly crafted thriller about love and betrayal, redemption and revenge, Mirrorland is a propulsive, page-turning debut about the power of imagination and the price of freedom.
The Violet Hour
Daniel Judson - 2009
A natural problem-solver, he earns good money as an off-the-books auto mechanic, working side-by-side with his friend Lebell in a Bridgehampton garage owned by a wealthy businessman named Eric Carver. But Cal’s idyllic existence is turned upside down when dark forces target the pregnant friend he is sheltering. And when his two closest friends are revealed to be more than what they claim, Cal’s innate survival skills are put to the test. Forced to do battle with a sudden onslaught of enemies that include a brutal thug, an abusive and powerful ex-husband, and a well-funded female assassin seeking her own personal redemption, Cal’s only hope is the darkness that has always dwelled within him—a darkness he must now unleash if he is to save the one life he has sworn to protect. Set over the course of three days—Mischief Night, Halloween, and the Day of the Dead—The Violet Hour is a powerful and unrelenting thriller in the tradition of such classics as The Postman Always Rings Twice and Marathon Man.
Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line
Deepa Anappara - 2020
From his doorway, he can spot the glittering lights of the city’s fancy high-rises, and though his mother works as a maid in one, to him they seem a thousand miles away.Jai drools outside sweet shops, watches too many reality police shows, and considers himself to be smarter than his friends Pari (though she gets the best grades) and Faiz (though Faiz has an actual job). When a classmate goes missing, Jai decides to use the crime-solving skills he has picked up from TV to find him. He asks Pari and Faiz to be his assistants, and together they draw up lists of people to interview and places to visit.But what begins as a game turns sinister as other children start disappearing from their neighborhood. Jai, Pari, and Faiz have to confront terrified parents, an indifferent police force, and rumors of soul-snatching djinns. As the disappearances edge ever closer to home, the lives of Jai and his friends will never be the same again.Drawing on real incidents and a spate of disappearances in metropolitan India.
The Alienist
Caleb Carr - 1994
This modern classic continues to be a touchstone of historical suspense fiction for readers everywhere.The year is 1896. The city is New York. Newspaper reporter John Schuyler Moore is summoned by his friend Dr. Laszlo Kreizler—a psychologist, or “alienist”—to view the horribly mutilated body of an adolescent boy abandoned on the unfinished Williamsburg Bridge. From there the two embark on a revolutionary effort in criminology: creating a psychological profile of the perpetrator based on the details of his crimes. Their dangerous quest takes them into the tortured past and twisted mind of a murderer who will kill again before their hunt is over.Fast-paced and riveting, infused with historical detail, The Alienist conjures up Gilded Age New York, with its tenements and mansions, corrupt cops and flamboyant gangsters, shining opera houses and seamy gin mills. It is an age in which questioning society’s belief that all killers are born, not made, could have unexpected and fatal consequences.
The Stranger Behind You
Carol GoodmanCarol Goodman - 2021
It’s taken Joan Lurie three years to write her article exposing a famous newspaper tycoon as a sexual predator. On the eve of its publication, she celebrates at a party thrown in her honor and is riding high…only to be brutally attacked as she is returning home late that night. Traumatized and suffering the effects of a concussion, she moves to a highly secure new apartment building in northern Manhattan called the Refuge. Safely sequestered away, she tries to begin writing a book that expands her much-lauded exposé.At the Refuge, Joan encounters a frail 96-year-old woman who has been living in the building since the 1940s when it was a Magdalen Laundry and Refuge for Fallen Women. When Lillian first arrived, she was hiding out from the infamous Murder, Inc mobsters. As Lillian relates her story about the long-ago incriminating incident she witnessed that forced her into hiding, Joan recalls certain details of her own investigation.The more Joan learns about Lillian and the fabled story of the Refuge, the more she realizes they may be linked to the book she is writing—and to her attacker that fateful night. As Joan starts to connect the clues and unravel decades worth of history, she must stay one step ahead of those who are desperate to make sure Joan never uncovers the final truth.
Traitor's Gate
Charlie Newton - 2015
The skies, not the trenches, will decide the survivors. Rich men marshal their resources as all sides race to acquire 100-octane aviation gasoline, an unproven, unstable witches’ brew that could fuel the fastest attack aircraft. In a brutal maze of corporate treason, personal blackmail, and imperfect heroism, a young, brilliant petroleum engineer battling the Dust Bowl in Oklahoma may hold the key.Eight years ago in Jerusalem, schoolgirl Saba Hassouneh survived the murder of her family. Sentenced to the barbaric refugee camps, Saba is freed by a legendary Bedouin freedom-fighter. She embraces his life of a bandit/rebel, evolving into a fearsome Arab nationalist femme de guerre hunted by the colonial powers and religious mullahs. Saba has one mission: free her people.An epic historical thriller from acclaimed author Charlie Newton, Traitor’s Gate races toward the first shot of WWII. As the world’s true rulers vie for dominion, two unlikely lovers collide. Their attraction is immediate, their goals opposite.
Libra
Don DeLillo - 1988
Kennedy, Don DeLillo chronicles Lee Harvey Oswald's odyssey from troubled teenager to a man of precarious stability who imagines himself an agent of history. When "history" presents itself in the form of two disgruntled CIA operatives who decide that an unsuccessful attempt on the life of the president will galvanize the nation against communism, the scales are irrevocably tipped.A gripping, masterful blend of fact and fiction, alive with meticulously portrayed characters both real and created, Libra is a grave, haunting, and brilliant examination of an event that has become an indelible part of the American psyche.
The Bottoms
Joe R. Lansdale - 2000
In 1933, the year that forms the centerpiece of the narrative, Harry is 11 years old and living with his mother, father, and younger sister on a farm outside of Marvel Creek, Texas, near the Sabine River bottoms. Harry's world changes forever when he discovers the corpse of a young black woman tied to a tree in the forest near his home. The woman, who is eventually identified as a local prostitute, has been murdered, molested, and sexually mutilated. She is also, as Harry will soon discover, the first in a series of similar corpses, all of them the victims of a new, unprecedented sort of monster: a traveling serial killer.From his privileged position as the son of constable (and farmer and part-time barber) Jacob Collins, Harry watches as the distinctly amateur investigation unfolds. As more bodies -- not all of them "colored" -- surface, the mood of the local residents darkens. Racial tensions -- never far from the surface, even in the best of times -- gradually kindle. When circumstantial evidence implicates an ancient, innocent black man named Mose, the Ku Klux Klan mobilizes, initiating a chilling, graphically described lynching that will occupy a permanent place in Harry Collins's memories. With Mose dead and the threat to local white women presumably put to rest, the residents of Marvel Creek resume their normal lives, only to find that the actual killer remains at large and continues to threaten the safety and stability of the town.Lansdale uses this protracted murder investigation to open up a window on an insular, poverty-stricken, racially divided community. With humor, precision, and great narrative economy, he evokes the society of Marvel Creek in all its alternating tawdriness and nobility, offering us a varied, absolutely convincing portrait of a world that has receded into history. At the same time, he offers us a richly detailed re-creation of the vibrant, dangerous physical landscapes that were part of that world and have since been buried under the concrete and cement of the industrialized juggernaut of the late 20th century. In Lansdale's hands, the gritty realities of Depression-era Texas are as authentic -- and memorable -- as anything in recent American fiction.
The Mad Trapper
Rudy Wiebe - 1980
When it ended, he was the most notorious criminal in North America, the object of the largest manhunt in RCMP history.This is the story of Albert Johnson, the Mad Trapper, a silent man of superhuman strength and endurance, who defied capture for fifty days in the bitter cold of winter, north of the Arctic Circle. He was a man who crossed hundreds of miles of frozen tundra on foot, who survived dynamite blasts and the pursuit of police, trappers and the army, and who became the first man to cross the Richardson Mountains in a blizzard.
No Hiding in Boise
Kim Hooper - 2021
The officer tells her that her husband was involved in a shooting at a local bar, but how can that be possible when her husband is sleeping right next to her? Except when she turns to wake him, he isn’t there.Tessa is the twenty-three-year-old bartender who escapes to a backroom storage closet during the shooting. When it comes to light that five people were killed, she is burdened with the question of why she survived.Joyce wakes up to a knock at her front door, a knock she assumes is her wayward son, Jed, who must have lost his keys. It’s not Jed, though. Two police officers tell her that Jed is dead, shot at the bar. Then they deliver even worse news: “We have reason to believe your son was the shooter.”So begins the story of three women tied together by tragic fate.
Beijing Coma
Ma Jian - 2008
A medical student and a pro-democracy protestor in Tiananmen Square in June 1989, he was struck by a soldier’s bullet and fell into a deep coma. As soon as the hospital authorities discovered that he had been an activist, his mother was forced to take him home. She allowed pharmacists access to his body and sold his urine and his left kidney to fund special treatment from Master Yao, a member of the outlawed Falun Gong sect. But during a government crackdown, the Master was arrested, and Dai Wai’s mother—who had fallen in love with him—lost her mind. As the millennium draws near, a sparrow flies through the window and lands on Dai Wei’s naked chest, a sign that he must emerge from his coma. But China has also undergone a massive transformation while Dai Wei lay unconscious. As he prepares to take leave of his old metal bed, Dai Wei realizes that the rich, imaginative world afforded to him as a coma patient is a startling contrast with the death-in-life of the world outside. At once a powerful allegory of a rising China, racked by contradictions, and a seminal examination of the Tiananmen Square protests, Beijing Coma is Ma Jian’s masterpiece. Spiked with dark wit, poetic beauty, and deep rage, this extraordinary novel confirms his place as one of the world’s most significant living writers.
The Mirage
Matt Ruff - 2012
They fly two into the Tigris & Euphrates World Trade Towers in Baghdad, and a third into the Arab Defense Ministry in Riyadh. The fourth plane, believed to be bound for Mecca, is brought down by its passengers.The United Arab States declares a War on Terror. Arabian and Persian troops invade the Eastern Seaboard and establish a Green Zone in Washington, D.C. . . .Summer, 2009: Arab Homeland Security agent Mustafa al Baghdadi interrogates a captured suicide bomber. The prisoner claims that the world they are living in is a mirage--in the real world, America is a superpower, and the Arab states are just a collection of "backward third-world countries." A search of the bomber's apartment turns up a copy of "The New York Times," dated September 12, 2001, that appears to support his claim. Other captured terrorists have been telling the same story. The president wants answers, but Mustafa soon discovers he's not the only interested party.The gangster Saddam Hussein is conducting his own investigation. And the head of the Senate Intelligence Committee--a war hero named Osama bin Laden--will stop at nothing to hide the truth. As Mustafa and his colleagues venture deeper into the unsettling world of terrorism, politics, and espionage, they are confronted with questions without any rational answers, and the terrifying possibility that their world is not what it seems.Acclaimed novelist Matt Ruff has created a shadow world that is eerily recognizable but, at the same time, almost unimaginable. Gripping, subversive, and unexpectedly moving, "The Mirage" probes our deepest convictions and most arresting fears.
Find You First
Linwood Barclay - 2021
He has recently been diagnosed with a terminal illness, and there is a fifty percent chance that it can be passed on to the next generation. For Miles, this means taking a long hard look at his past . . .Two decades ago, a young, struggling Miles was a sperm donor. Somewhere out there, he has kids—nine of them. And they might be about to inherit both the good and the bad from him—maybe his fortune, or maybe something much worse.As Miles begins to search for the children he’s never known, aspiring film documentarian Chloe Swanson embarks on a quest to find her biological father, armed with the knowledge that twenty-two years ago, her mother used a New York sperm bank to become pregnant.When Miles and Chloe eventually connect, their excitement at finding each other is overshadowed by a series of mysterious and terrifying events. One by one, Miles’s other potential heirs are vanishing—every trace of them wiped, like they never existed at all.Who is the vicious killer—another heir methodically erasing rivals? Or is something even more sinister going on?It’s a deadly race against time . . .
Cold Skin
Albert Sánchez Piñol - 2002
When he arrives, the predecessor he is meant to replace is missing and a deeply disturbed stranger is barricaded in a heavily fortified lighthouse. At first adversaries, the two find that their tenuous partnership may be the only way they survive the unspeakably horrific reptilian creatures that ravage the island at night, attacking the lighthouse in their organized effort to find warm-blooded food. Armed with a battery of ammunition and explosives, the weather official and his new ally must confront their increasingly murderous mentality, and, when the possibility of a kind of truce presents itself, decide what kind of island they will inhabit. Equal parts Stephen King, a phantasmagorical Robinson Crusoe, and Lord of the Flies, Cold Skin is literary horror that deals with the basest forms of human behavior imaginable, while exploring why we so vehemently fear the Other.