(Part 2) Reddit mentions: The best crime & adventure books

AHHH these are AMAZING questions! I love them! Don't stop if you have more, seriously, I love answering these kinds!

1. I do not. I know many authors set a word count goal daily or weekly, but I have found I do my best work when I am "in the zone" and really focused on what I'm writing. However, that might be because I'm trying to get this trilogy out this year (all three books). I know in the future, when I'm not swamped with writing Grim, maintaining social media and website presence, trying to write the RPG, planning release parties, going to conventions around the country to sell it, etc, I will end up with more time to sit down and write and do workshops and whatnot. Until then, though, Grim is my life!
   
   
2. So funny you mention Punisher, because he'd be my top choice! Since this is a world full of people who are either criminals or are "heroes" that think killing the criminals they fight is the right answer, Punisher would fit right in! However, it would be really funny to see either Spiderman or Flash show up.
   
   
3. I do love me some Stephen King! Let's see, my favorite has got to be Desperation, followed closely by It and Carrie.
   
   
4. YES A MILLION TIMES YES. hahaha. I would only require that I still have some creative control and can have say in changes in the script/casting. Or at least get to be there for it all and give my input. But so much yes to this!
   
   
5. Actually, I am doing that! I have Grim Inception out, which is the short story prequel to the first book in the trilogy, and just released Grim Misfortune which is in between books 1 and 2. However, both are able to be read as a stand alone; you don't even have to have read any of the Grim series before to understand and enjoy them! I will be releasing a third .5 to the series in a little while, and on top of that all, I'm working on a Grim Origin series, which are shorter books than the ones in the trilogies but longer than the shorts, and they focus on the origin of those with powers (origin being mostly when they either realize their power or begin to use it for good or bad). Whew!
   
   
6. I am! And I LOVE Telltale! I played all the way through the first Walking Dead and LOVED it so much. Cried like a baby more than once. Then I played through their Game of Thrones one and enjoyed it thoroughly. My favorite one of theirs, however, is The Wolf Among Us. I couldn't get enough of that world, and now that I finished it, I am actually trying to get a couple of people together to all play through it again. I really hope they make a second one with Bigby and the Fables! And it would be so, so amazing if they could make the Grim game! I'd be so happy!
   
   
7. Luminescence ... Love how it sounds!
   
   
8. There are a TON. First off, we have the abusive relationship Emma is in during Grim Ambition. There will be another later on in the series between two others. I was in a very damaging one before, and knew that I wanted to include my emotions and frustrations I felt during and after it in my work. It was amazing therapy, I'll tell you what! I also pour other emotions into my novels: my goofy side, my sense of humor, my anger, my romantic side, my fears...all of these make appearances in different characters, albeit subtlety. I've been told because of this, readers can feel the emotion that I put in as they go along, which in turn attaches them to the characters even more! Another thing is: is it better to kill the criminal or turn them over to the law and risk them getting away? The judgment is heavy in these books, and many people are at fault for the consequences throughout the series. Taking credit for your mistakes and trying to right them is important to me, but so is forgiveness.
   
   If you have more, feel free to ask away! I may be busy, but I always, always make time for stuff like this! And if you do end up reading any of the books, one of my favorite things is when readers chat with me about them and how they felt reading them! :D

The oldschoolest of oldschool spy novels is The Riddle of the Sands, by Erskine Childers, which more or less invented the genre. From there, you can move on to John Buchan's Richard Hannay novels, starting with The Thirty-Nine Steps. Then there's Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent -- a classic of the genre, but even as a fan of both Conrad and spy novels, I couldn't get into it. While we're at it, I'll throw in Geoffrey Household's Rogue Male, which is not exactly a spy novel, but it does have the feel of, say, one of the Bourne books, and is a classic genre novel in its own right. Now we're getting into more modern territory -- there are, of course, Ian Fleming's James Bond novels. These tend to be faintly ridiculous, but that has its own appeal. I'm exactly halfway through the 14-book series, and the best I've read so far are Casino Royale (the first) and From Russia, With Love (the fifth). Far better superior to just about everything I've listed so far are Eric Ambler's international suspense novels. The Light of Day is a good place to start; Coffin for Dimitrios is considered his classic; but, for obvious reasons, Epitaph for a Spy might be more in line with your request. John le Carre, whom you asked about in another comment, is great, but you'll probably appreciate him more if you read some earlier spy novels first. He's one of the authors who shifted the genre away from the flashier action and suspense tropes, and moved it towards realism and a sense of gravity and maturity.

I think this mickey mouse clock is so freaking cool!! It tells you time and gives you your daily fix of Disney :)

Not technically Prime-eligible (since it's an e-book) but within $3 :)

Thanks for the contest! I hope you find something awesome to add to your cart :)

Pure worldbuilding and minimal narrative describes pretty well Expedition and Barlowe's Inferno by Wayne Douglas Barlowe.
Granted, these are books where the framing story (a person exploring the setting in question) is there to provide context for Barlowe's paintings, but you can do pretty much the same thing with words as he does with illustrations- take an explorer, an archaeologist, a historian, or some other sort of researcher, and follow them as they acquire knowledge about the setting. The story will thus focus on their discoveries, rendering exposition and story one and the same.
The SCP Foundation's various exploration logs are the best examples of this that I can name at present, as the characters involved in the framing story are generally anonymous redshirts whose only significance is the strange phenomena they encounter. As far as novels go, I also see the general formula in Jeff Fahy's Fragment.

Another example of an approach that works is the SCP-Foundation. There are traditional narratives on the site, but the main attraction for most of the Foundation's existence has been the collection of fictional documents describing various paranormal phenomena.

A fictional document or fictional documentary strikes me as a perfect method of doing what you seek. You can have an in-universe history book, an in-universe encyclopedia, some other sort of reference work like the Zombie Survival Guide, etc. You could call some of these "stories" by some definition of the word, I guess, but the bottom line is the format and content are quite different from what you typically see in things described as stories.

Dune by Frank Herbert.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series by Douglas Adams. You have probably read it, but if you haven't, it's superbly funny sci-fi comedy.

The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco. A book that I re-read once every few years, and every time I find something new in it.

Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets by David Simon. A gripping, heartbreaking non-fiction book about police detectives. It inspired the acclaimed TV series "Homicide: Life on the Street." Simon would go on to create "The Wire."

The Big Nowhere by James Ellroy. Noir-ish procedural crime fiction. If you enjoy "Homicide," you may well like this.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera, "a philosophical novel about two men, two women, a dog and their lives in the Prague Spring of the Czechoslovak Communist period in 1968," according to Wikipedia. One of my favorite books.

Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Haruki Murakami. Detective novel meets sci-fi in one mind-bending existential work. If you watch "Fringe," well, this book is Fringe-y... and more.

To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis. Time travel. Victorian England. A tea cozy mystery of sorts.

Graphic novels! Asterios Polyp by David Mazzucchelli. Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi. Maus: A Survivor's Tale by Art Spiegelman. Love And Rockets by The Hernandez brothers. The Sandman by Neil Gaiman. Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind by Hayao Miyazaki. Elektra: Assassin by Frank Miller and Bill Sienkiewicz. And of course, Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. To discover yet more great comic books, check out the Comics College series.

Do you know the old free short stories by Tom Dowd? Available on Ancient Files .

I’m just reading an old Torg novel by Nigel Findley called Out of Nippon which is almost Shadowrun imo.


Aside from that there’s always the fan fiction. Some of which by fans who turned freelancers/contributors later

Robyn Rat King’s novels from http://www.magespace.net for example.

Or Russel Zimmermann’s fan fiction on the forums: Rook , Angels , snipped fiction from Dirty Tricks: Castling ...( I believe there are more)

Russ also has a Patreon where he offers some more fiction.

The fan fiction forum also has a few excellent gems by people who didn’t break into SR, like for example Pananagutan by user The Wyrm Ouroboros.

Or CanRay’s excellent fan fiction on DeviantArt Just A Simple Run, and more...

Or the quasi SR books like Derek Canyon’s Dead Dwarves Don’t Dance

Check out some Dan Brown books.

My friend rarely read books, like maybe 10 or 15 in his whole life time but once he got turned onto The Da Vinci Code he would talk about it all the time. It's a pretty straight forward thriller with some easy to enjoy writting.

If you've already seen the movie then you might pick something like: Angels and Demons, The Lost symbol or The inferno

I agree, everyone seems to suggest the same series of books by the same authors. But that's the echo chamber effect.

My favorite series that I never see represented is by Peter F. Hamiltion. The Commonwealth saga of books:

• Pandora's Star
  
• Set a few hundred years in the future, humanity has traveled the galaxy via wormholes, but some astronomers led by a far reaching conspiracy unlock a star that ancient aliens walled up to protect the universe from the narrowminded aliens that inhabit it. Naturally, humans open it and unleash MorningLightMountain onto the greater Commonwealth and cause billions of deaths.
  
• Judas Unchained
  
• The 2nd part of humanity's battle with MorningLightMountain, picks up right where things left off and ties everything together.
  
• The Dreaming Void
  
• Set in the same universe, but over 1,000 years later, humanity has traveled around the galaxy now and opened up a few more mysteries, but one remains - what is inside the black hole at the center of the galaxy? One human dreamed of paradise in there, and now trillions of humans want to go in.
  
• The Tempral Void
  
• Continues the tale of people trying to get into The Void, and the issues it's causing
  
• The Evolutionary Void
  
• The final chapter of The Void trilogy, does everything work out?
  
• The Abyss Beyond Dreams
  
• Set between Judas & The Void Trilogy, this is about another set of humans trying to get into the black hole at the center of the universe
  
• A Night Without Stars
  
• Not released yet, but finishes up the story of the humans who tried to get into the void.
  
  The entire series of books is very fast paced, but it's a space opera. He often spends 50 or so pages introducing a character not to be seen again until the next book. It's worth it though, Hamilton is great at tying up all those loose ends in ways you wouldn't think possible.
  
  Hamilton is often recommended for his other trilogy - Night's Dawn. Personally, I felt that was very poorly done. For instance, the 2nd book has no outcome on the end events whatsoever. Plus, it's very much more typical for a space opera zombie book series. Not my cup of tea, so to speak.

Misleading title. The expedition split into general groups during that time. One went south to the pole (southern party consisting of Scott, Wilson, Oates, Bowers and Edgar Evans), one group stayed at the hut at Cape Royds, and one got stranded on inexpressible island. No one in the southern party (the group that went to the south pole) survived, but the rest of the expedition members did, including the northern party (which is a really amazing story) and the Ponting, the photographer, which is why this photo exists. I don't know for sure who is in the photo, but I think one of them may be Griffith Taylor, one of the geologists on the trip.

Wiki story: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_Nova_Expedition

A good book that i'm currently reading about the trip: https://www.amazon.com/Scott-Silver-Lining-Classic-Reprint/dp/1333859058

sort my priorities


This is something I need. I went to Cuba 1 week ago and so everything we took to wear and use we left to our family. Not much however they need and enjoy what we bring. I left my sandals to my aunt who asked for them. I now have to sandals :( I am a bit picky too because all the ones sold in stores have a fat thing for in between the toes that hurts me so I always get them online with the soft fabric instead.

This book is actually not even out yet but it is the highest on priorities for me :) Simply because this series is the best in the world to me. I can't wait till it comes out!


Nice contest!

I am currently chowing down on Polaris

I love books with a sci-fi setting and an archaeological theme. This author has two similar series that fit that. One is more archaeology based - The Academy Series, and the other is more contemporary and detective like - the Alex Benedict Series, while still being sci-fi.

I highly recommend both. And they are strong on female protagonists, if that is your thing.

I'm reading Suspect by Robert Crais I thought it was from the Joe pike series but Its not. Its about a dog wounded at war, and a police man wounded on the job, who becomes a k9 unit. Just started it yesterday and love it so far. it actually has point of view from the dog in some spots. I'm a huge dog lover so i am loving it. The first chapter is a huge tear jerker though

Excellent idea, thanks for that!

And right here for thread reference. WooHoo, I'm ranked #1,508,924th on Amazon! :D

Some of my favorites:

Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer (non-fiction)

Last of the Breed by Louis L'Amour (fiction)

The Purification Ceremony by Mark Sullivan (fiction)

Those Who Wish Me Dead by Michael Koryta (fiction)

The first two recommendations focus more on the survival aspect than the last two, but I loved all of them.

Marine Sniper. This is a classic book about Carlos Hathcock, a Marine who served in Vietnam and for many years (1967 to 2002) held the world record longest confirmed sniper kill. There are several famous encounters, including a multi-day stalk through exposed terrain to kill a Vietnamese general, the time he and his spotter pinned down an entire NVA battalion, the time he was being hunted by a counter-sniper and shot the guy through his scope (probably inspiring the similar scene in Saving Private Ryan), and the record-breaking long range shot itself with a .50 cal M2 machine gun modified for single shot and using a scope mounting system of his own design.

For a more modern take, I recently read Sniper One and thought it was pretty good. It's by British Army Sgt Dan Mills, about his tour in Iraq in 2004. I thought it was interesting to see the perspective of a modern sniper in a completely different environment.

And for what I think is the best fictional book I've read about sniping, check out Point of Impact by Stephen Hunter. Don't confuse it with the movie "Shooter" staring Marky Mark; the book is actually quite good. The descriptions of long range shooting are excellent, and have matched up well to my own (admittedly limited, strictly at the shooting range) experiences.

J'ai trouvé l'équivalent littéraire du nanar grâce à De la main de l'homme

Ce livre nous raconte les aventures d'une famille qui tente de survivre dans un futur post-apocalyptique. Suite à une maladie, 99% de l'humanité est morte et il n'y a plus que 3 types de survivants:

• Les nomades qui vivent heureux et joyeux en harmonie avec la nature (les gentils)
  
  
• Les charognards, drogués alcooliques et consanguins qui vivent dans les ruines des villes (les méchants)
  
  
• Les habitants de la mégalopole, héritiers des riches et des puissants, qui restent enfermés dans leur tour d'ivoire mais envoient leurs sbires tuer et kidnapper les gentils pour leurs voler leurs organes (les très méchants).
  
  Le livre commence plutôt bien mais très vite le manichéisme remplacent toute trace de subtilité. Plus on avance dans l'ouvrage plus on accumule des clichés qui nous laissent penser que l'auteur est l'enfant spirituel de José Bové et JL Mélenchon:
  
  
• Une multinationale fabriquant OGM et pesticides s’appelle... Montbatar. Et c'est Montbatar, donc, qui a conspiré avec les riches de l'ancien monde pour régler le problème de surpopulation mondiale, mais les hommes n'auraient pas du jouer a Dieu et la machination leur échappe etc...
  
  
• Les riches sont des méchants qui exploitent et tuent les pauvres, parfois par nécessité mais souvent pour les lulz (pasque c'est des méchants).
  
  
• La nature c'est mieux, pourquoi qu'on s'est embêté avec l'industrie? La nature est amour et partage. L'industrie c'est égoïsme et destruction.
  
  
• Les militaires sont des débiles.
  
  
  Il m'en reste 1/3 à lire, c'est nul mais je n'arrive pas a poser le livre.
  

Here are all the local Amazon links I could find:


amazon.co.uk

amazon.ca

amazon.com.au

amazon.in

amazon.com.mx

amazon.de

amazon.it

amazon.es

amazon.com.br

Beep bloop. I'm a bot to convert Amazon ebook links to local Amazon sites.
I currently look here: amazon.com, amazon.co.uk, amazon.ca, amazon.com.au, amazon.in, amazon.com.mx, amazon.de, amazon.it, amazon.es, amazon.com.br, if you would like your local version of Amazon adding please contact my creator.

David Morrell's Brotherhood of the Rose and its sequel Fraternity of the Stone are both quite good.

Have you read any of Ken Follet's stuff? Eye of the Needle was great. Haven't read any of his other books, though.

If you liked that, you're certain to love this.

Removed due to cluttered link: please resubmit only as https://www.amazon.com/Durante-Devils-Playground-Miles-Overland-ebook/dp/B073CDFH9H/

Take Away their Bliss. Replace it with suffering. And even saints will turn to sinners. Welcome to the city of Durante. There's no God here.

Durante: The Devil's Playground is an adult action crime thriller. $4.99 on Amazon

A desperate man pushed to the edge becomes a vigilante in the crime-ridden city of Durante. With a revolver in hand and his all-consuming Devil persona, he is on a crusade to kill every last dirtbag criminal in Durante. Even if that means saving a bullet for himself.

A young detective torn between saving the city from the vigilante or letting loose the Devil to save it's citizens. All the while hiding his dirty past from his partner and the rest of the police force. Will he resist the temptation from the vigilante to find out if his late father was really a corrupt detective and what will it cost him to find out?