Blood In The Water 
North of Boston
Girls I Know
The Saturday Evening Girls Club
The Book of SANA’A (A City In Short Fiction)
Ten Great Books set in Boston
9th October 2023
Boston is the latest place for us to visit in our ‘Great books set in…’ series. Ten Great Books set in Boston.
‘There is about Boston a certain reminiscent and classical tone, suggesting an authenticity and piety which few other American cities possess’ – E B White
‘Boston is large enough to learn your independence and small enough to make your own’ – Henry Winkler
Blood In The Water by Jack Flynn
Homeland Security agent, Kit Steel, is committed to avenge terrorism. And she’s after the blood of her nemesis, one of world’s most ruthless and dangerous criminals, Vincente Carpio. He has the blood of her husband and young son on his hands, and Kit is unwavering in her determination to see him kept behind bars forever. Clever, calculating, and manipulative, Carpio has aid and influence on the outside, and he’s waiting for the perfect moment when the final pieces of the jigsaw fall into place.
Harbour Union chief, Cormack McConnell, has lived his life close to the wire above and below the law, and he controls everything that happens on Boston’s waterfront. Someone wants him out of the way, fast. After he narrowly survives a brutal attack on his bar, The Mariner, complications arise when Cormack believes he’s been betrayed by one of his crew – a young man, Buddy Cavanaugh, who he’s shocked to discover is the love of his precious nineteen-year-old daughter, Diamond.
Everyone has a game to play until it becomes apparent that there are much darker, far-reaching forces of evil at work which look to be preparing for the international stage. What follows is a gripping race against time, a rollercoaster action-packed story with international terrorism at its core and family at its heart.
North of Boston by Elisabeth Elo
Dennis Lehane meets Smilla’s Sense of Snow: a big discovery in the world of female suspense, about an edgy young woman with the rare ability to withstand extreme conditions
Elisabeth Elo’s debut novel introduces Pirio Kasparov, a Boston-bred tough-talking girl with an acerbic wit and a moral compass that points due north.
When the fishing boat Pirio is on is rammed by a freighter, she finds herself abandoned in the North Atlantic. Somehow, she survives nearly four hours in the water before being rescued by the Coast Guard. But the boat’s owner and her professional fisherman friend, Ned, is not so lucky.
Compelled to look after Noah, the son of the late Ned and her alcoholic prep school friend, Thomasina, Pirio can’t shake the lurking suspicion that the boat’s sinking—and Ned’s death—was no accident. It’s a suspicion seconded by her deeply cynical, autocratic Russian father, who tells her that nothing is ever what it seems. Then the navy reaches out to her to participate in research on human survival in dangerously cold temperatures.
With the help of a curious journalist named Russell Parnell, Pirio begins unraveling a lethal plot involving the glacial whaling grounds off Baffin Island. In a narrow inlet in the arctic tundra, Pirio confronts her ultimate challenge: to trust herself.
A gripping literary thriller, North of Boston combines the atmospheric chills of Jussi Adler-Olsen with the gritty mystery of Laura Lippman. And Pirio Kasparov is a gutsy, compellingly damaged heroine with many adventures ahead.
The Given Day by Dennis Lehane
This book is set primarily in Boston, post WW1.
It tells the epic story of two families, one white, one black, both trying to find their way through a new order, interweaving in real life people and events. A powerful cast of characters populate this superb story.
Girls I Know by Douglas Trevor
In the winter of 2001, 29-year-old Walt Steadman survives a shooting in his favourite Boston café that leaves four people dead. In the aftermath, Walt forms two new relationships : one with Ginger Newton, a privileged, reckless, Harvard undergraduate who is interviewing women about their lives for a book called Girls I Know, and the other with 11-year-old Mercedes Bittles, whose parent were killed in the restaurant.
Wounded but resilient, all three must deal with loss and grief and the consequences that come when their lives change in unexpected ways.
The Saturday Evening Girls Club by Jane Healey
In Boston’s North End, four immigrant women leave childhood behind—but never one another.
For four young immigrant women living in Boston’s North End in the early 1900s, escaping tradition doesn’t come easy. But at least they have one another and the Saturday Evening Girls Club, a social pottery-making group offering respite from their hectic home lives—and hope for a better future.
Ambitious Caprice dreams of opening her own hat shop, which clashes with the expectations of her Sicilian-born parents. Brilliant Ada secretly takes college classes despite the disapproval of her Russian Jewish father. Stunning Maria could marry anyone yet guards her heart to avoid the fate of her Italian Catholic mother, broken down by an alcoholic husband. And shy Thea is torn between asserting herself and embracing an antiquated Jewish tradition.
The friends face family clashes and romantic entanglements, career struggles and cultural prejudice. But through their unfailing bond, forged through their weekly gathering, they’ll draw strength—and the courage to transform their immigrant stories into the American lives of their dreams.
Terminal Value by Thomas Waite
“Be careful what you wish for.” That’s a warning Dylan Johnson should have listened to. When his mobile computing firm is bought out by Mantric Technology, a red-hot company about to go public, it seems like a dream come true for the young entrepreneur and his partners. But the closer they get to payout, the more uncertain Dylan becomes. Something doesn’t feel right. When his colleague is found dead on what should have been their night of triumph, Dylan is determined to find out what happened. But asking questions plunges him into a digital web of deceit and betrayal that will shake everything he thought he knew…
Brighton by Michael Harvey
Brighton, suburb of Boston, 1975: a Boston neighbourhood where racial tensions run high and gangs jostle for dominance in the trades that matter – drugrunning, book-keeping and theft. Fifteen-year-old Kevin Pearce knows his best hope is to get the hell out before its bloody streets get a grip on his dreams. Bitterness and brutality stalk the hard-drinking generations of his Irish immigrant family. But when an act of violence tears their home apart, Kevin is forced to leave for New York, changing the course of his life forever.
Twenty-seven years later, in 2002, Kevin wins the Pulitzer Prize for an investigative article on the wrongful conviction and death of a man from Brighton, and decides to visit his old neighbourhood for the first time in decades. But his past has long shadows – shadows which have taken on a life of their own. And when Kevin’s prosecutor girlfriend Lisa asks his advice on a murder case, he is plunged into a web of deception and bloodshed that will test his loyalties to the limit and place the life he has built at risk.
Grittily realistic, razor-sharp and darkly compelling, Brighton is about the meaning of family, the price of friendship, and survival in a world where one misstep can cost everything.
Boston Cream by Howard Shrier
David Fine is not the kind of guy to go missing. Or so his father tells PI Jonah Geller. A brilliant young surgeon-in-training, devout, devoted to his parents–last seen 2 weeks ago leaving the Boston hospital where he worked. Still recovering from a concussion, Jonah and partner Jenn Raudsepp soon find out that David fled for his life after a vicious Irish crime boss tried to abduct him. And that he’s more likely dead than alive. Then Jenn joins the ranks of the missing, and Jonah needs help from former hit man Dante Ryan and two local wise guys as he races the clock to save her life, one step ahead of the Boston law.
Dear Catastrophe Waitress by Brendan Halpin
Mark thinks he has found The One in college. When Raquel abruptly takes off for Los Angeles to become a rock star, Mark tries to be happy for her-until ROCK-L’s first single sweeps the airwaves-a song about Mark’s stamina entitled “Two Minute Man.” And Mark’s life is never the same again.
Philippa doesn’t really think twice about cheating on her punk rocker boyfriend, Trevor. After all, she’s going to break up with him anyway. He mooches off her, treats her badly, and writes stupid songs about her breasts. Then Trevor’s band makes a splash with its one and only song sensation, “Philippa Cheats.” And suddenly Philippa is the most infamous ex-girlfriend in all of London.
Thus Philippa and Mark find themselves adrift, both single and living in Boston, still reeling from the impact that three minutes of music had on their lives. When these two minor-key souls meet and form a major chord, they will have to overcome the sneaking suspicion that each will betray the other . . . possibly with a song.
The Art Forger by B A Shapiro
Almost twenty-five years after the infamous art heist at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum—still the largest unsolved art theft in history—one of the stolen Degas paintings is delivered to the Boston studio of a young artist. Claire Roth has entered into a Faustian bargain with a powerful gallery owner by agreeing to forge the Degas in exchange for a one-woman show in his renowned gallery. But as she begins her work, she starts to suspect that this long-missing masterpiece—the very one that had been hanging at the Gardner for one hundred years—may itself be a forgery. The Art Forger is a thrilling novel about seeing—and not seeing—the secrets that lie beneath the canvas.
Enjoy your Ten Great Books set in Boston!
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