Favorite Authors

Authors

 

View my Top Twenty List of Fiction

Books to Avoid

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Andrew Klavan

Klavan is the author of four great books.

Don't Say A Word is a thriller about a kidnapping and ransom. It was recently made into a movie starring Michael Douglas. "I'll never tell..." (By the way, the actress who plays the mental patient is named Brittany Murphy. She was in the movies Clueless and The Prophecy 2. And more importantly, she was scantily clad in FHM magazine.)

The Animal Hour is about a girl who goes to work one morning and nobody recognizes her. If anyone has read 7 Steps to Midnight by Richard Matheson, you'll see the beginning has a similar concept. However, the Matheson book turns into a sort of spy novel. Klavan's book becomes a Gothic thriller and is set at Halloween.

True Crime is a novel about a reporter trying to clear a convict on death row. It might sound like a familiar plot but it turns out to be pretty original. Clint Eastwood directed and starred in the movie version.

Hunting Down Amanda is about a little girl who can heal people.

You should pass on Corruption and The Uncanny unless you're a really big Klavan fan already.

Klavan is also the author of a cool mystery featuring John Wells called The Rain. It was written under the pseudonym Keith Peterson.

Christopher Fahy

Fahy's novel The Lyssa Syndrome makes my Top Twenty. It's about a town infected with a new strain of rabies. If you can find a copy somehow, read it. (It recently reappeard on Amazon.com A secondhand copy is much cheaper.)

Nightflyer is another great novel.

Eternal Bliss was pretty good. It's about the kidnapping of a teenage model by his obsessed fan.

Dream House is also good, but not one of my favorites.

Chris Fahy has written a new novel, Fever 42. I'm trying to get some info on it, including it's publication date. Barnes & Noble has a listing for it, but no copies. The pub date was supposedly November of 2001.

Dan Simmons

Probably has almost as many awards as books. Among my favorites: "Carrion Comfort", "Hyperion", and "Children of the Night".

He's a great author but stay away from "Phases of Gravity" and "The Hollow Man" unless you're already a big Simmons fan. I don't think they're among his best books.

David Lozell Martin

David Martin has at least 4 really good books. Lie to Me and Cul-de-Sac are really sharp thrillers featuring the same main character.

Tap, Tap is a creepy novel about a man and his childhood friend who claims to be a vampire. It has some good twists and interesting riffs on the vampire myth.

Bring Me Children is a thriller about a reporter trying to solve cases of murder and baby snatching. Don't let the title put you off. This is not Friday the 13th crap. This book has a neat on-the-edge-of-supernatural feel like Dean Koontz's Whispers and Andrew Klavan's The Animal Hour.

Pelikan is a crime novel about a man who is blackmailed into committing a robbery with the help of his uncle, a hooker, a clown, and three nuns. The subtitle is Love, Redemption, and Felony Theft. It's set in New Orleans, in the French Quarter.

Jeffery Deaver

I've read many great novels by Jeffery Deaver. Deaver is the master of the kicker. I can guarantee one major neck-snapping twist, one Atomic Bomb of a surprise, in almost every novel.

Praying for Sleep is about an escaped schizophrenic trying to reach the woman he met at a murder scene some years before and the attempt to catch him.

In A Maiden's Grave, a group of robbers hijacks a schoolbus full of students and barricades themselves in an abandoned slaughterhouse.

The Bone Collector is about a paralyzed forensics expert and the female cop he recruits to be his eyes and hands in the hunt for a mass murderer. This is the first book in a series. The movie starred Denzel Washington and Angelina Jolie. They play Lincoln Rhyme and Amelia Sachs.

The next books in the series are The Coffin Dancer and The Empty Chair. The Empty Chair is fantastic, maybe the best of the series. The Coffin Dancer isn't as good as the others.

I read 16 Deaver novels. Three were published under the pseudonym "William Jefferies": Shallow Graves, Bloody River Blues, and Hell's Kitchen. All three are part of a series featuring location scout John Pellam. Bloody River Blues is my favorite.

Three of Deaver's novels are part of a series featuring a woman in her 20's nicknamed Rune: Manhattan Is My Beat, Death of a Blue Movie Star, and Hard News. My favorite is probably Death of a Blue Movie Star. My least favorite is Hard News.

John Varley

John Varley is an extremely original writer. His stories are funny, wild and original. Steel Beach is a good way to introduce yourselves to his novels. His Gaean Trilogy is also excellent. It's set on a Ringworld like space station. In order, the books in the trilogy are Titan, Wizard, and Demon. I think the series gets better as you go along.

If you're new to sci-fi, you might want to try one of his short stories before diving into a novel. "The Phantom of Kansas" is a good place to start. "The Pusher" is another good short story.

His story "The Persistence of Vision" won a Nebula Award, but I didn't like it that much.

I was also disappointed by his novels Millennium and The Ophiuchi Hotline.

Michael Connelly

Author of the Harry Bosch mysteries. I've read The Black Echo, The Concrete Blond, The Last Coyote, and Trunk Music.. The Poet featuring the character Sean McEvoy is also very good.

Michael Kimball

Michael Kimball's first suspense novel, Undone, was fantastic. It starts out with a man trying to fake his own death, but things go wrong....

I also enjoyed his next novel, Mouth to Mouth.

I read the beginning of his first novel, a comedy called Firewater Pond, but I abandoned it. It wasn't terrible. I just got sidetracked.

Stephen King

His books are major page-turners. Not only do I gulp down his books, but they get me on a roll of reading again after a slump. Among my faves: "Salem's Lot", "Desperation", "The Stand", "Pet Sematary" [sic.], "Insomnia", "The Green Mile" and "The Waste Lands" (the third Dark Tower book).

Really the only novels that I finished and didn't like are The Dark Half and Gerald's Game. And I abandoned "The Tommyknockers" twice.

King's tandem of "Desperation" & "The Regulators" and the serial novel "The Green Mile" show that he's also an innovator, tying stories together in unique ways or publishing in different formats.

My favorite King movie adaptations are "The Dead Zone", "Pet Sematary", and "The Shawshank Redemption." "The Dead Zone" is the only movie version that I liked better than the book.

Kubrick's version of "The Shining" and Brett Leonard's movie of "The Lawnmower Man" were also pretty good, although they didn't resemble the source material very much. (Mick Garris' "Shining" miniseries and "Sleepwalkers" were terrible.)

Steve Perry

Author of the bestselling Star Wars novel Shadows of the Empire. It's set between The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. Ties in well with both movies.

Gamers may recognize the title from a popular game for the Playstation and PC.

He also co-wrote a very good novel based on the films "Alien" and "Predator" called Alien Vs Predator: Prey

Someone should have asked this man to write a Batman movie. His episodes of the Batman cartoon were better than most of the movies! :-)

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