I’m a big Dresden fan as well.
If you plan to read both series (Adversary Cycle and Repairman Jack) then the Adversary Cycle is the place to start, I take it?
I would say yes. Others might not agree.
I grabbed “The Tomb” on audible not seeing the recommendations here to read “The Keep” first. Handful of chapters in but enjoying it so far.
The Keep is very unnecessary to The Tomb, they weren’t written as related to each other, it’s a much later retcon that puts them in the same universe. You’re officially starting Repairman Jack at the beginning, if the supernatural meta grabs you as you proceed then The Keep will be necessary, along with several other one-offs.
A couple of similar authors not mentioned, mostly because they branch out.
Robert Ferrigno and Aric Davis.
Finished the first Repairman Jack book and really enjoyed it. Definitely scratched a similar itch to Reacher.
I read one Repairman Jack book and couldn’t get over how dumb one part of it was. There’s a guy in a house that is haunted who goes into the basement and the entire basement turns into a raging whirlpool and he almost gets sucked down into the hole that goes who knows where – that whole thing is goofy enough. Anyway, Jack and others save him and then they are like, whew, that was close. Let’s get out of here and have dinner somewhere.
Whirlpool victim says that sounds great, but you guys go ahead. I need to take a shower first. Leave me all alone in the house that just tried to kill me with this incredible haunting that turned a basement floor into a whirlpool. They all think this is a good idea so off they go and whirlpool guy gets killed by the ghost when alone in the house while taking a shower.
At least that’s how I remember it. I’m very forgiving of genre fiction, but that was too much. I was one and done with Repairman Jack after that.
Ironically, considering I started this thread, I almost gave up on the Reacher books with the first one as well, because of what was the most ridiculous coincidence I’ve ever seen in fiction:
So, as becomes usual, Reacher is in some random town he comes upon in his travels. He gets involved in trying to investigate the murder of an unknown man.
He eventually finds out that the dead guy is his brother.
Luckily, I stuck with the series, which I still enjoy a lot, but still…
I read one Reacher book and it was ok, but it wasn’t anything special enough to make me want to read more. Seems like there are thousands of genre books out there with kick ass hard asses in them.
I also read a random Bosch novel years ago, Trunk Music, and it seemed like standard hardboiled fare and didn’t impress me enough to read more, and then the Prime series came along and now I’ve read another two or three of them.
With the Repairman Jack book I thought the nuts and bolts writing at the sentence level was very mediocre, so that was a hindrance. I like to admire an author as a bit of a wordsmith and I couldn’t with Repairman Jack. Bosch and Reacher were better though.
The Reacher books can be uneven in quality but I like them because the character is neat.
Michael Connelly is uniformly excellent.
I actually didn’t buy Titus Welliver as Bosch at first, thought he was way too tall to play in a Vietnam tunnel rat, but he has really made the role his own.
I started watching Bosch years after I read Trunk Music, and I didn’t know he was a tunnel rat. Welliver is fantastic in that role. I know the next season is the last, but they should do some Bosch movies.
Or maybe Welliver should play in some Raymond Chandler movies?
I don’t think TV Bosch was a tunnel rat - he was Iraq/Afghanistan era Special Forces, whereas book Bosch was a Vietnam era tunnel rat. There are a number of differences, although the overall themes and concepts still apply. The TV show is a true adaptation of the source material, not a mere reskinning with pixels.
That said, I have burned out a bit on the Bosch and Jack Reacher books just due to the length of the series.
I also got some mileage out of the John Sanford books (Lucas Davenport Prey series and Virgil Flowers series) but Davenport has gotten repetitive also IMO. The freshest of this whole group of series is the Virgil Flowers stuff IMO but even that, the most recent ones weren’t as good.
Maybe a I need a completely new spin on this concept to freshen things up. Female protagonist maybe?
Tracking this thread now. Some great recommendations in here.
The Lisa Gardner D.D Warren books are excellent. Detective series with a female lead.
Yes, I didn’t realize they would retcon Bosch into a different war, when I didn’t think that Welliver was physically suited to the character…
In the more recent books, Bosch is retired but teamed up secretly with a female detective.
Since you opened it up beyond Reacher-likes, two of my favorites are the Elvis Cole series and the Doc Ford series. Oh, and Myron Bolitar, that’s as good if not better. These are all slightly less serious than your aforementioned, but still real-world detective shenanigans.
All 3 of those series are excellent, I was a early adopter for each.
I still have a first edition of The Monkey’s Raincoat around somewhere.
Come to think of it, Joe Pike is a bit of a Reacher-like…
I read the first Repairman Jack book and liked it, although the supernatural stuff was a bit hokey. I am working through Legacies and feel kinda meh about it.
I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned them in this thread, because I discovered the series much later, but I just had the most recent Peter Ash novel delivered by Amazon.
He is definitely a Reacher-like, a drifter, at least at first, combat veteran who despite being an absolute badass, suffers from PTSD related claustrophobia.
Interesting character. Even the dust jacket quotes compares him to Reacher about 4 times.
So this is a bit of an aside, but I remember back in the 1980s going to a garage sale at a house where an elderly person had died. He had been an avid reader of spy and action novels.
Now I had managed an independant bookstore for about 18 months before it was sold and the new owner bounced the entire staff, so I had good idea of the stuff availabe in the early '80s. This guy had a cool collection of hundreds of mass market paperbacks of spy and action thrillers that had come into print in the '50’s and '60’s and then gone out of print, only to be forgotten. I looked at these books and there were no John D. McDonald Travis Archer books or no Ross McDonald books, just writers I had never heard of.
These were the Repairman Jack books of their day, perhaps the Jack Reacher books even. They got published, sold what they sold, went out of print, and disappeared from the eyes of newer readers. There were so many of them, and I remember being delighted as I looked at a few of them one by one and thumbed through a few pages. It was the joy of pure pulp fiction, replete with cool covers and sexy blurbs hoping to coax a wallet open at the cash register.
That was a time when money was tight for us and I had a bunch of young kids, so a stop at a garage sale was mostly out of curiousity and the hope that maybe I’d find that one thing I didn’t know I needed to have but knew I did indeed need to have once it was revealed to me on a folding table in the driveway. Better yet, this vital item in my life would only be $3! The allure of garage sales.
If I could go back in time I’d buy the entire set of books. They were beautiful. I’d never read most of them, but I’d love owning them and displaying them in several nice bookcases. Shakespeare may be forever, but mass market pulp with its ever renewing books and authors is also forever.