I’m wanting to compile a list of titles from the 20th Century and in the next few month’s I will be posting what I selected to eventually read. Check out these titles and let me know if you have read any of them and your thoughts! -Stephanie M. Hopkins
The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett
Sam Spade is hired by the fragrant Miss Wonderley to track down her sister, who has eloped with a louse called Floyd Thursby. But Miss Wonderley is in fact the beautiful and treacherous Brigid O’Shaughnessy, and when Spade’s partner Miles Archer is shot while on Thursby’s trail, Spade finds himself both hunter and hunted: can he track down the jewel-encrusted bird, a treasure worth killing for, before the Fat Man finds him?
The Eight by Katherine Neville
Computer expert Cat Velis is heading for a job to Algeria. Before she goes, a mysterious fortune teller warns her of danger, and an antique dealer asks her to search for pieces to a valuable chess set that has been missing for years…In the South of France in 1790 two convent girls hide valuable pieces of a chess set all over the world, because the game that can be played with them is too powerful…
The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
“Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid…He is the hero; he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man.
This is the Code of the Private Eye as defined by Raymond Chandler in his 1944 essay ‘The Simple Act of Murder.’ Such a man was Philip Marlowe, private eye, an educated, heroic, streetwise, rugged individualist and the hero of Chandler’s first novel, The Big Sleep. This work established Chandler as the master of the ‘hard-boiled’ detective novel, and his articulate and literary style of writing won him a large audience, which ranged from the man in the street to the most sophisticated intellectual.
Marlowe subsequently appeared in a series of extremely popular novels, among them The Lady in the Lake, The Long Goodbye, and Farewell, My Lovely.” ~ Elizabeth Diefendorf, editor, The New York Public Library’s Books of the Century, p. 112.
Selected as one of Time Magazine’s All-Time 100 Novels, with the following review: “‘I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn’t care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be.’ This sentence, from the first paragraph of The Big Sleep, marks the last time you can be fully confident that you know what’s going on.
The Boys from Brazil by Ira Levin
The classic thriller of Dr. Josef Mengele’s nightmarish plot to restore the Third Reich.
Alive and hiding in South America, the fiendish Nazi Dr. Josef Mengele gathers a group of former colleagues for a horrifying project—the creation of the Fourth Reich. Barry Kohler, a young investigative journalist, gets wind of the project and informs famed Nazi hunter Ezra Lieberman, but before he can relay the evidence, Kohler is killed.
Thus Ira Levin opens one of the strangest and most masterful novels of his career. Why has Mengele marked a number of harmless aging men for murder? What is the hidden link that binds them? What interest can they possibly hold for their killers: six former SS men dispatched from South America by the most wanted Nazi still alive, the notorious “Angel of Death“? One man alone must answer these questions and stop the killings—Lieberman, himself aging and thought by some to be losing his grip on reality.
The Postman Always Rings Twice by James M. Cain
Cain’s first novel – the subject of an obscenity trial in Boston and the inspiration for Camus’s The Stranger – is the fever-pitched tale of a drifter who stumbles into a job, into an erotic obsession, and into a murder.
My Wish-List posted in February
Check out these other wish-list by my amazing fellow book bloggers!
Holly at 2 Kids and Tired
Heather at The Maiden’s Court
Erin at Flashlight Commentary
Magdalena at A Bookish Swede
The Good Daughter (The Good Daughter #1)
I’ll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman’s Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer
About the book:
UNCHARTED
Mr. Dickens and His Carol by Samantha Silva
This evening I am hanging out with Madison Liberman and Caleb Trovato. At least this is how I roll with Cold Feet by Branda Novak. This story is character driven and the plot is really interesting. I am about half way in and I’m seeing that not everything is what it appears to be, though I do have my suspicions. Am I feeling the attraction between Madison and Caleb. I don’t know…maybe it’s because I want him for myself. Ha. Stay tune. More to come! 
About the book:
Layered Pages 