18 books like When We Were Orphans
The Thief
On the ocean liner Mauritania, two European scientists with a dramatic new invention are barely rescued from abduction by the Van Dorn Detective Agency's intrepid chief investigator, Isaac Bell. Unfortunately, they are not so lucky the second time. The thugs attack again-and this time one of the scientists dies. What are they holding that is so precious? Only something that will revolutionize…
Shares: Detectives, Private investigators
A heartbreaking work of staggering genius
From Wikipedia: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (ISBN 0-330-48455-9) is a memoir by Dave Eggers released in 2000. It chronicles his stewardship of younger brother Christopher "Toph" Eggers following the cancer-related deaths of his parents.
The book was an enormous commercial and critical success, reaching number one on The New York Times bestseller list and being nominated as a…
Shares: Parents, Psychological aspects, Death
Moonlight Mile
Amanda McCready was four years old when she vanished from a Boston neighborhood twelve years ago. Desperate pleas for help from the child's aunt led investigators Kenzie and Gennaro to take on the case. The pair risked everything to find the young girl, only to orchestrate her return to a neglectful mother and a broken home. Now Amanda is sixteen and gone again. A stellar student, brilliant but…
Shares: Detectives, Missing persons, Private investigators
Sex, Lies & Serious Money
"Stone Barrington takes on a client who gives him a run for his money in the newest heart-stopping thriller from the #1 New York Times-bestselling author. Fresh off the runway at Teterboro, Stone Barrington arrives home to find an unexpected new client on his doorstep, anxiously soliciting his help. But everything is not as it seems, when the client reveals the true nature--and value--of his…
Shares: Detectives, Private investigators
Private
The police can't help you
Former CIA agent Jack Morgan runs Private, a renowned investigation company with branches around the globe. It is where you go when you need maximum force and maximum discretion. The secrets of the most influential men and women on the planet come to Jack daily--and his staff of investigators uses the world's most advanced forensic tools to make and break their…
Shares: Detectives, Private investigators, Mystery
Time bomb
The cheerful chaos of a California schoolyard is shattered one autumn day by gunfire. No children are hurt, but a sniper is shot down -- and psychologist Dr Alex Delaware is called in to help the kids cope with the trauma. Then comes another stunning surprise: the identity of the sniper. Delaware is intrigued by the chance to explore intimately the forces that created such a twisted personality.…
Shares: Detectives, Psychological fiction, Mystery
The Seven Dials Mystery
Brings back several characters from an earlier novel, The Secret of Chimneys, in a story that can best be described as a John Buchan thriller told by P.G. Wodehouse. (https://agathachristie.fandom.com/wiki/The_Seven_Dials_Mystery)
Consummate young silly ass Gerry Wade is the despair of hosts and hostesses across the land, with his inability to make it to breakfast before the eggs are congealed,…
Shares: Detectives, Private investigators, Mystery
In the Woods
A gorgeously written novel that marks the debut of an astonishing new voice in psychological suspenseAs dusk approaches a small Dublin suburb in the summer of 1984, mothers begin to call their children home. But on this warm evening, three children do not return from the dark and silent woods. When the police arrive, they find only one of the children gripping a tree trunk in terror, wearing…
Shares: Detectives, Psychological fiction, Mystery
Herr der Diebe
Escaping the aunt who wants to adopt only one of them, two orphaned brothers run away from Hamburg to Venice, finding shelter with a gang of street children and their leader, the thirteen-year-old "Thief Lord," while also eluding the detective hired to return them to Germany.
Shares: Detectives, Orphans, Private investigators, Mystery
The Yard
As Jack the Ripper’s reign of terror in London comes to an end, a new era of depravity sets the stage for the first gripping mystery featuring the detectives of Scotland Yard’s Murder Squad.“If Charles Dickens isn’t somewhere clapping his hands for this one, Wilkie Collins surely is.”—The New York Times Book Review Victorian London—a violent cesspool of squalid sin. The twelve detectives of…
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Knave of Diamonds
Mary Russell’s allegiances are tested by the reappearance of her long-lost uncle—and a tantalizing case not even Sherlock Holmes could solve.When Mary Russell was a child, she adored her black sheep Uncle Jake. But she hasn’t heard from him in many years, and she assumed that his ne’er-do-well ways had brought him to a bad end somewhere—until he presents himself at her Sussex door. Yes, Jake is…
Shares: Detectives, Private investigators, Mystery
Parents Who Kill
Why would two young boys abduct, torture and kill a toddler? What makes a teenage girl plot with her classmates to kill her own father? Society regards children as harmless - but for some the age of innocence is shortlived, messy and ultimately murderous.Mary Bell, Robert Thompson and Jon Venables are infamous for their crimes against other children, but many of the less familiar studies here are…
Shares: Parents, Psychology
Gone, Baby, Gone
PI Patrick Kenzie is hired to find a four-year-old girl, abducted while the mother was out drinking. The search takes Kenzie through Boston's underworld of drug dealers, kidnapers and pedophiles.
Shares: Detectives, Private investigators, Mystery
The Painted Veil
A story of the beautiful but love-starve Kitty Fane who is forced to accompany her husband to the heart of a cholera epidemic. She is compelled by her awakening conscience to reassess her life and learn how to love.
Shares: British, Psychological fiction
The Wrong Case
Milo once had a thriving divorce-case business in the small town of Meriwether, in the pacific Northwest, but because of liberal new divorce laws has taken to drinking and staring out the window. He's up to his third drink of the morning when an attractive young woman walks into his office and asks him to find her brother. he takes on what seems a routine missing-person case in hopes of getting…
Shares: Missing persons, Private investigators
The Mexican Tree Duck
C.W. Sughrue is at it again, and this time he's looking for a beautiful, kidnapped woman named Sarita Cisneros Pines. No one can find her -- not her well-connected Republican husband, not the FBI, not even a group of violent guys with South American accents. And when Sughrue starts searching, working his way from Montana to the Mexican border, he comes up empty too.
Shares: Missing persons, Private investigators
Peril at End House
Hercule Poirot is vacationing on the Cornish coast when he meets Nick Buckley. Nick is the young and reckless mistress of End House, an imposing structure perched on the rocky cliffs of St. Loo.
Poirot quickly takes a particular interest in the young woman. Recently, she has narrowly escaped a series of life-threatening accidents. Something tells the Belgian sleuth that these so-called accidents…
Shares: Detectives, Private investigators, Mystery
The Denial of Death
The Denial of Death is a 1973 book by American cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker which discusses the psychological and philosophical implications of how people and cultures have reacted to the concept of death. The author argues most human action is taken to ignore or avoid the inevitability of death.
Shares: Psychological aspects, Death, Psychology