"Humor is not just for comedies. In my prior life, as a writer for the original Law & Order, I was known in-house as the guy who wrote the funny episodes. The show, of course, was a serious drama tackling serious issues (as were my episodes), but I’d always found that the best dramas (both on the screen and on the page) include some dry and often understated wit that does not diminish the drama but enhances it. So that’s what I attempted in my debut thriller novel, Wealth Management (not that I could help myself anyway). These other novels have it at a level to which I can only aspire." —Edward Zuckerman
Save Edward's collection to your library.
"In the mid-20th century, Rex Stout was considered a titan of crime fiction on the level of Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie. His popularity has since waned, but his novels chronicling the cases of Nero Wolfe, the 300-pound detective who will not leave his house, as recounted by Archie Goodwin, his faithful assistant, are full of Archie’s timeless wry observations. The audiobook narrator, Michael Prichard, is spot-on."
"The first of Herron’s Slough House series about a forlorn group of failed and disgraced British spies, Slow Horses, like the others, is an unlikely but successful combination of spy-thriller tension and laugh-out-loud character humor, occasionally to the point of slapstick. Jackson Lamb, the bumbling spies’ acerbic boss, is one of the great characters of modern fiction. His insults make Don Rickles seem like Mother Teresa."
"Nothing is more preposterous than the plots of Lee Child’s Jack Reacher books—our gigantic taciturn hero arrives in a random town, discovers an evil conspiracy terrorizing the local population, confronts the bad guys, kills them all, then leaves on the next bus. But Lee Child can write. The vanquishing of evil is almost too satisfying, and there is fun in the prose."
"One of a series of books starring Miami lawyer Jake Lassiter, 'a brew and burger guy in the paté and Chardonnay world,' Cheater’s Game is set against the real-life college admissions scandal. Paul Levine has the chops to write pure comedy if he so chose. Fortunately, he employs his wit in twisty legal thrillers with a strong dose of action."
