blog Archives - Page 2 of 9 - Mike Donohue Books

Michael Connelly: Reading Order, Bosch, Ballard & Beyond

I get a lot of questions about Michael Connelly. Reading order. The Bosch and Ballard universe. TV shows. What to read next. Whether Bosch and Haller are really related.

People know I’m a thriller writer and prolific mystery reader, so it goes with the territory. I like having those conversations but I wanted to put the answers in one place so I could also point people to something for later.

If You Like Michael Connelly’s Bosch and Ballard Books, Try These 10 Crime Series

It’s a holiday weekend and I find myself staying up late reading Ironwood, the latest Michael Connelly Catalina mystery. But that feeling of dread is creeping up on me as the pages left continue to shrink. That particular mix of satisfaction and dread that every seasoned Connelly reader knows. The satisfaction of a great book, of course, but also the dread of realizing you have nothing queued up that is going to scratch that same itch.

10 Forgotten Thriller Books That Deserve a Second Look (2005–2015)

Something happened in June 2012 that rearranged the crime fiction shelves for good. Gone Girl landed, sold everywhere, and gave publishers a new template. Within a year, domestic suspense was the only genre conversation anyone wanted to have.

The result? A full decade of forgotten thriller books disappeared under the wave of imitations that followed.

In fact, these were not minor novels. They were Edgar winners, #1 New York Times bestsellers, and book-club sensations that together sold millions of copies. Moreover, they built the tropes that dominate the shelves right now. And yet most readers who devoured The Housemaid or All the Colors of the Dark have never encountered them.

Here are ten that deserve a serious second look.

How to Build Suspense: Nine Lessons from Today’s Best Thriller Authors

Every writer who wants to know how to build suspense eventually makes the same mistake. They reach for more action. More chase scenes. More violence. And the strange thing is, it almost never works.

Before we go any further, here is a question I want you to hold onto while you read. What is the single word that connects every suspense technique used by today’s bestselling thriller writers? One word. It shows up in Lee Child’s New York Times essay, in Karin Slaughter’s interviews, in Gillian Flynn’s approach to narrators, and in the way Don Winslow literally stands back from his computer screen to look at the shape of the page. I will give you the answer at the very end. Not yet. See what I did there…

Beyond the Debut: The 10 Best Crime and Thriller Sequels Ever Written

The first book in a great series makes a promise. The second book decides whether that promise was worth making. And I think the very best crime fiction sequels do something even harder: they prove the whole enterprise was worth starting and continuing.

I’ve been turning this over in my mind a lot lately, partly because I’m deep in the Max Strong series and I know from personal experience how brutal the sophomore test can be. The debut has the luxury of surprise. Nobody knows your detective yet. Nobody knows your city, your prose rhythms, the moves you favor under pressure. But by the time readers pick up book two, they’ve formed opinions. They’ve fallen for specific things. And now you have to honor all of that while somehow still managing to surprise them.

Most series don’t pass that test cleanly. The best crime fiction sequels are rarer than people think.

Reacher-Like Thriller Series: 5 New Series That Deliver the Goods

There is a specific itch that Jack Reacher scratches. You know the one. A man walks into a town he has never seen before, carrying nothing but the clothes on his back and a moral code sharp enough to cut glass. Somebody in that town is getting hurt. And before long, somebody very bad is getting hurt a lot worse. Lee Child cracked a formula so potent that readers have been chasing it for nearly thirty years, and no amount of binge-reading will fully satisfy the hunger once it takes hold. Take my word for it. I have been down that road.

The good news is that a genuinely exciting new wave of Reacher-like thriller series has arrived, and these five protagonists are bringing everything you love about Reacher while adding something distinctly their own. Each one qualifies as a Reacher-like thriller series in its own right, but none of them is simply copying the template. They are building on it.

Beyond Reacher: 5 Lone Wolf Thriller Series for the True Knight Errant Fan

So I’ve been doing that thing again. You know the one. Staying up way too late, completely unable to put a book down, Dash snuffling at my feet while I tell myself “just one more chapter” for the fourth time in a row. This week’s culprit was Dark Times, the ninth Peter Ash novel by Nick Petrie. And finishing it sent me straight into that familiar post-book fog, that hollow ache where a great character has moved on and you’re standing in your kitchen at midnight hunting for thrillers like Jack Reacher or Peter Ash that actually deliver the goods.

The Evolution of Film Noir: Classic Era to Neon-Noir

My dog Dash was named after Dashiell Hammett. Every morning he flops down in a puddle of sunlight streaming through the window and the shadow stripes across his face in narrow bands of light and dark. I swear he was born for this genre.

Scouring the library DVD shelves recently and filling in some gaps in my Hitchcock, I ended up spending a long time reading and thinking about the history and evolution of film noir. I don’t think anyone set out to create it. The filmmakers who built the tradition in the 1940s had no idea they were doing anything remarkable. French critics applied the name retroactively after the war, when Parisian cinemas finally screened what Hollywood had been producing while Europe was busy surviving. What those critics saw stopped them cold.

12 Hidden Gem Mystery Thrillers Most Crime Readers Haven’t Discovered Yet

There’s a moment every serious crime fiction reader eventually hits. You’ve read through Tana French. Bosch is done. Lee Child retired. You’re still waiting for the next Gillian Flynn. And now you’re standing in front of your bookshelf, or more likely scrolling Amazon at midnight, wondering what’s next.

Every “best thrillers” list you find points you toward books you’ve already read. Every recommendation from a well-meaning friend lands on the same ten titles. And you start to think, maybe a little sadly, that the genre has run out of surprises.

It hasn’t. The world of hidden gem mystery thrillers is enormous, and most readers never find their way into it.

6 Missed Thriller Books of 2025 (Your Paperback Watch List)

Some books just don’t get their moment. Trust me, I know. It’s not because they’re not good enough, all of these are flat-out exceptional, but because the publishing machine has limited bandwidth and the spotlight moves fast. These are the missed thriller books of 2025: six titles that flew under the radar and absolutely shouldn’t have.

Category: blog