Well-known as an international bestseller and award-winning film, The French Lieutenant's Woman by John Fowles is magnificent entertainment.  Fowles' intricate portrait of Victorian relationships and love, brought to life by Irons' artistry, will haunt you long after the story ends.

Lieutenant at Eighteen

These books are all you could hope for: breathlessly optimistic stories of train wrecks, steamboat explosions, an escape from Libby Prison, secret codes deciphered, blockade runners foiled, slaveholders defied, betrayals and reverses, etc. etc.  You also get Oliver Optic’s weirdly amiable and funny narrative voice—“weird” in the context of the subject matter.  The books were written at the end of the Civil War, while the artillery barrels were still cooling and the bodies being shipped home from the battlefields for burial. 

Holiday in Death by J.D. Robb

With a vicious serial killer preying on the employees of an elite New York City escort service, NYPD Lieutenant Eve Dallas goes undercover to stop the ritualistic murders.

The Sinister Pig by Tony Hillerman

Sergeant Jim Chee of the Navajo Tribal Police is troubled by the nameless corpse discovered just inside his jurisdiction, at the edge of the Jicarilla Apache natural gas field. More troubling still is the FBI's insistence that the Bureau take over the case, calling the unidentifiedvictim's death a "hunting accident." But if a hunter was involved, Chee knows the prey was intentionally human.