Best crime thriller books according to redditors
We found 411 Reddit comments discussing the best crime thriller books. We ranked the 84 resulting products by number of redditors who mentioned them. Here are the top 20.
We found 411 Reddit comments discussing the best crime thriller books. We ranked the 84 resulting products by number of redditors who mentioned them. Here are the top 20.
I'm already writing three. But if you want to read one I've finished already, check this out
The only two I haven't seen listed already are:
The City and the City by China Mieville. Link.
Detective story set in a fictional Eastern European city. More than that I don't know beyond having enjoyed the first two chapters when I read them in the bookstore and having had it recommended over and over again to me.
Kiln People, by David Brin
It's got a film noir feel to it.... I enjoyed the hell out of it.
Not bad :).
I think you need a better, thicker, more futuristic font. Serif fonts work better on works more related to older periods. Sans-serif fonts work better for sci-fi.
The red numerals look a bit out of place (and they make me think of Cixin Liu's Three Body Problem, which used a similar device in its plot). I think the skyscraper image is more arresting without them. However, if you want the concept, maybe get an artist to do you an image that doesn't look photoshopped.
Finally, I think you may want to look at slightly duller colours. The blue almost feels too cheerful and the sinister effect of the numbers is lost. It looks like a giant alarm clock, not a menacing countdown.
Here are a few ideas from professional cover art:
Altered Carbon
Crashing Heaven
The Wind-Up Girl
The Immortality Game
I like those generally because they say 'serious, gritty, futuristic sci-fi'. The subdued colours and more alien skyline bring out a sense of conflict much better. The skyscraper image is fine, but you need a filter or overlay to give it a rougher edge.
The officially licensed books are all standalone, so you can read them in any order you like.
If you're looking for recommendations, my top three are:
Anyway, hopefully those little blurbs help you prioritize your reading list.
China Mieville's The City and The City.
Once I managed to wrap my head around the concept, I couldn't put it down.
Crossing the Line, by Ellen Wolfson Valladares is a quick read, and is a beautiful story that combines musings on the afterlife with young adult type drama. Check out a review of it here
David Brin wrote a great novel that explores this somewhat called Kiln People. It's a fun and pretty easy read, and directly deals with those questions! It's a murder mystery involving temporary human avatars made from a kind of recyclable slurry that people upload consciousness to.
So, it was a fun book, but I found more than a few aspects of it to be a bit unbelievable and aggravating.
-----
[Spoiler](/s "The nominal concept of the setting is that everybody alive has a high capacity digital storage device embedded in the base of their skull/neck that keeps track of everything they do/say/learn/experience. As such humans are basically software... you can put any consciousness in any body. Bodies can be grown, or confiscated, or traded. Any event that kills a person but doesn't destroy the storage device doesn't kill the person permanently... he/she just downloads into a new body... possibly one that was a clone of the old body, or possibly an upgrade or downgrade depending upon finances. In fact, there is no need to even go back into a body as one can run one's consciousness entirely inside a virtual environment... and at a much faster rate than a human brain would support. This is not a concept in the background... the story revolves around this idea. ")
[Spoiler](/s "If you find that to be a believable idea, then you'll love the book. I don't. I think that too much of how we think is intrinsic to the mechanism of how our brains work. You couldn't put a genius mind into the body of mentally disabled person... you'd end up with a mentally disabled person with vague memories of being a genius. Personally, I don't think it could work even in less extreme cases than that: I strongly suspect that information and meaning as it is experienced in a human is encoded symbolically into neurons in a way that is utterly different and incompatible with the way similar or even identical information is encoded into the neurons of any other human... that is the way any individual thinks is essentially encrypted relative to the way any other individual thinks... and that this is a property that is physically encoded in the shape and genetics of individual neurons in the brain such that it could never be separated from the brain. (This is consistent with what we know about how brains work from fMRI studies... when you look at a picture, or do a task such as multiplication, the same general regions of the brain light up for you as anyone else, but the pattern of activation isn't exactly the same... ever). ")
[Spoiler](/s "But lets say we choose to ignore the fact that the premise is more than a little incompatible with what we know of neurobiology. The premise is also self contradictory in ways that are annoyingly implausible but convenient for the plot. Without getting into spoilers, Altered Carbon takes place in a society that has the ability to copy and digitize the consciousness of a human, create functional independent AIs, run simulations of humans so realistic that the simulations don't know that they are simulations or that the environment that they are in is simulated, move such software-human-identities between bodies, and yet still treats human consciousness as a black box! You want to extract a particular fact from a stored mind? You have to actually boot that mind up into a body or software simulated environment, and ASK IT with language! I mean, if the author wants to explore the consequences of human identity as software that's great, but GO ALL THE WAY! Extracting information from a stored consciousness, given all the other things this civilization can do, should be child's play... as simple as typing in search terms in a search engine... the fact that the consciousness is not running should only make it easier. ")
[Spoiler](/s "All in all, a fun light reading, but not as intriguing as it could have been. In many ways, Kiln People by Brin explored much the same subject matter, and did so in a more intellectually rigorous manner. Oddly, the fact that the mind-copying technology is much less believable in Brin's book (and analogue rather than digital in nature) makes the over all story much more believable because it lets the story focus more upon the metaphysical, social, and moral implications.")
Jack Glass by Adam Roberts has a good-guy serial killer in SF variations of classic crime fiction scenarios (the locked room, etc.).
Sorry it's actually, "The City and The City". The author is China Mieville.
http://www.amazon.com/City-China-Mieville/dp/0345497511
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_City_%26_the_City
I found China Mieville's "The City & The City" to be quite an interesting book.
Thank you! If it needs the full Amazon URL it's https://www.amazon.com/Vigilante-Angels-Book-I-Priest-ebook/dp/B071LN91PV
Thriller. Here is the link:
https://www.amazon.com/South-Evil-Brian-Dunford-ebook/dp/B07MXW3H9N
As Schopenhauer might have said had he been alive today, "That Biff Thuringer motherfucker really knows what time it is. If you don't read '#Wasted: A Story of Love Gone Toxic,' you will have lived and died in vain: Oh, wait, you probably have anyway ..." https://amazon.com/Wasted-Story-Love-Gone-Toxic-ebook/dp/B07J1Y7QYR/
OK I tried to do a spoiler alert with formatting but I am not with it enough to do so at this hour.
So - try out Kiln People for size.
www.amazon.com/Kiln-People-Books-David-Brin/dp/0765342618/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=kiln+people&qid=1572919327&s=books&sr=1-1
Qotd: What kind of clone? Like in Kiln People? if it was like that, I'd say, do my photo editing that I'm behind on, another to do all the flyer hanging I need to get done (and travel for), and a 3rd to tackle my to-do lists. My original self will stay here and pet cats.
​
Here are all the local Amazon links I could find:
amazon.com
amazon.ca
amazon.com.au
amazon.in
amazon.com.mx
amazon.de
amazon.it
amazon.es
amazon.com.br
amazon.nl
amazon.co.jp
amazon.fr
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, amazon.nl, amazon.co.jp, amazon.fr, if you would like your local version of Amazon adding please contact my creator.
jack glass by adam roberts - cover
On amazon for as low as $12. Hardcover only until October 1 unfortunately.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0575127643/ref=s9_simh_co_p14_d0_i1?pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=left-1&pf_rd_r=1942M6V9ER83TB701RKM&pf_rd_t=3201&pf_rd_p=1280661682&pf_rd_i=typ01
Yes, just like a transporter on Star Trek, they would just be clones, each probably with their own consciousness. Unless you destroy the others, you'll just have lots of copies. Kiln People by David Brin deals with this exact issue where people could transfer their consciousness into a clone who would run and around and do stuff and then sync back at the end of the day. And there were different grades of clones, so you could use a cheap clone just to do the shopping and maybe an expensive one to do your programming job. The work of Peter Hamilton or Alastair Reynolds also deal with this issue of consciousness and multiple bodies.
Or it could be that we already exist in this other substrate and are controlling our actual physical existence remotely. Kinda like in Avatar - you are entirely intact even though your physical manifestation isn't. In fact, come to think of it, God literally did this when he created his human Avatar, Jesus! How else could Jesus be wholly man and wholly God at the same time?
And if you play video games, particularly RTSes or RPGs you should be familiar with controlling another entity of limited intelligence and capability; even multiple ones at the same time. So there are plenty of real-word examples to draw from that would make God & our existence here and after death plausible.
Every bit of advertising for ED is aimed at convincing potential customers they have a rich and immersive game world to play in. Of course it's a quality they are trying to push.
Simulations are about immersion. You can easily find hundreds of posts from players who speak specifically about 'immersion' -- you're trying to dissect the word it when it's meant to be applied generically in the sense of how rich the game universe feels.
It also drives design decisions that developers make. Finding the balance is tricky, as evidenced by this entire ship transfer debate. Every person does have different ideas/feelings about what they find immersive, but collectively most people can agree on where some boundaries should be. There likely is not a market for a hard sci-fi simulation game; I don't dispute that our time as players is a precious resource. I will not be upset if they offer instant ship transfer.
The lore accommodates FTL via the ED novels.
That was actually a writing prompt over in /r/writingprompts and the writer eventually wrote a whole book. It's a pretty good read.
I'm finishing The City and The City, by China Mieville. It's becoming one of my favorite books, but it takes some work to get into it. It's a mystery novel about a detective investigating the death of a young woman. He lives in a city which shares the same physical space with another city, but both ignore each other's presence. Because of his investigation he is forced to travel to the other city and question the way things are set up.
I'm a lawyer, so I don't know any books about nursing. Florence Nightingale was awesome, maybe a book on her? Also, it seems like every one of my friends who went into a health related field read The Physician, but I don't know much about it.
The Immortality Game has an AI that 'lives' on the web and tries not to let anyone know it exists, and at the same time it cleverly sabotages any other code that anyone tries to put on the web that could become another AI.
Ian McDonald, River of Gods series. Adam Roberts, Jack Glass. Christopher Priest, The Islanders. Nick Harkaway, Angelmaker.
Hey! I'm in your second preferences, but I'm getting some initial good feedback on my medical thriller:
Link
I can gift you a copy on Smashwords if you want.
If you have an amazon.com account you can read a preview in your browser here:
https://read.amazon.com/?asin=B071LN91PV
Or on other devices here:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B071LN91PV/
Here is the mobile version of your link
Don't know why someone downvoted you...
Kiln People is a fantastic book. Great sci-fi with an interesting premise.