TBR Pile SOS

As the red flashing light denotes – this is serious stuff. My TBR pile *gulps* is under 10 books!! To be specific there are only 8 books left in the pile. Single figures *shudders*. Fellow readers will of course understand my desperate plight. Such a TBR pile is not in full health, a shadow of its former self (which is usually 20-30 books big). Whilst I’ve never gone in for TBR pile obesity, the other extreme is not great either. So I am calling on my dear kind readers to help me out. But before you panic, I’m not asking for free books, only for some insightful suggestions for what books I should be going for.

Aside from the woeful state of my TBR pile, I also thought a post like this would be a really great idea, as it means I could have tonnes of recommendations in one easy to find place. I do, after all, have a bit of a confession to make – I am bad at remembering the books I get recommended. Often it’s because these suggestions are made on various posts on my own blog and others, so I easily lose track of where they are and equally another big reason is that I’ve usually forgotten to write the titles/authors down or even worse written them down and then lost or accidentally deleted the list.

I have a few titles I have my eyes on already; the rare suggestions I have actually managed to remember, namely: Death of a Favourite Girl by Michael Gilbert, Incident at the Corner by Charlotte Armstrong and The Bellamy Trial by Frances Noyes Hart. Of course 3 books won’t keep me going long so more suggestions the better really.

So what sort of books recommendations am I looking for? Well in the main I prefer vintage crime fiction, as modern day bleak police procedurals and gore don’t really work for me. But I have enjoyed writers such as Ian Sansom, L. C. Tyler, Boris Akunin, Hans Olav Lahlum, Martin Edwards and Anthony Horowitz. As to my taste in older crime fiction you can probably get a sense of what I’ve enjoyed the most from my blog posts, but in a nutshell I’ve read a fair amount of the more well-known writers, so would be looking for more obscure authors, which (and this is the tricky part), don’t require a bank loan to purchase. There’s nothing to stop you suggesting expensive titles of course, but my likelihood of buying them are fairly slim. Equally regular readers of my blog will know that I am no friend of Freeman Wills Crofts and his cohorts. I like a good puzzle but characterisation, humour and writing style are probably more influential factors for me.

There you have it, your mission. I do hope you’ll accept it, as my hands are already getting nervous at the thought of not having a new book to read, (I kid you not when I had to go a week without a new book my hands did start to feel empty). I’m sure you won’t let me down!