I’ve always been fascinated by the sea. I grew up near the gentle waters of England’s Kent coast, then went to St Andrews University, surrounded by the treacherous North Sea. Finally, I discovered the Devon shores, which inspired Agatha Christie. In island thrillers like hers, the power of the sea becomes overwhelming. It holds suspects at bay, becomes a murder weapon, and constrains both innocent and guilty until justice is done.

For me, this is the ‘locked room’ mystery in its purest form: an isolated location and a limited number of suspects–causing unlimited amounts of tension. I hope you love these stories as much as I do.

I’ve been writing crime stories since I was a child. They entertained me and helped me cope with a lot of family strife. My first novel was published in college and sold to the movies, which got me into screenwriting, leading to writing hundreds of hours of TV and fifty novels to date.

The one thing all of my stories share is humor because I believe it’s an essential part of life–and of memorable story-telling. Humor makes characters come alive, revealing shades of personality and depths of emotion you wouldn’t otherwise see. Here are five books that taught me that it’s true and that continue to influence me as a writer. 

As a NASA Flight Controller and crewman on the high-altitude research aircraft, I met many pilots, including those who flew X-planes. I became passionate about extreme and experimental flying.

I have experienced supersonic flight and have flown to 70,000 feet. These experiences motivated me to write three books about X-planes. 

Escapism is my drug of choice. As a child, I was angry that my existence was confined to this reality, and I did everything I could to find a way out. Stories made it bearable. Whether it was Thor’s Bifrost, the wardrobe of Narnia, or the mirror in Stephen R. Donaldson’s Mordant’s Need duology, I was hooked.

Now, I tell my own stories of escape. I create and invite others to find solace, adventure, love, and passion in fantasy realms, outer space, and reinvented parallel realities. This door is always open. 

Until recently, my lovely in-laws kept a home in southern France near where my father-in-law grew up. Their hilltop village was everything my summer-in-France fantasies could imagine: red-tile roofs, overflowing flower boxes, croissants on every corner (or at least four), bustling markets, and palm trees framing a snowcapped peak.

Downsizing in their eighties meant selling the house, but some of my fondest memories will always reside there. This summer most of my travels will take place from my garden in Colorado. I plan to trek the world through books. These are some of my favorite reads for an armchair trip to France through romance, mysteries, exploration, and cooking.  

Ever since I picked up an old copy of Richard Halliburton’s Book of Wonders as a child, I’ve known that exploring other cultures and countries is something I wanted to experience for the rest of my life. From then on, I’ve traveled, taken cross-cultural studies, and managed international teams as a tech marketer–and my passion for new people and places hasn’t ceased.

I love reading (and writing) about the liminal spaces in history–the times and places that aren’t easy to define and don’t make it into standard history books. This list reflects my interests, and I hope it broadens the horizons of other readers. 

Assassins are always compelling characters. They fit within that archetype of the gunslinger and the private eye and the ronin samurai, highly-skilled characters with a strict moral code who take the law into their own hands to deliver justice in an unjust world. But more than that, they’re fantastic vehicles for exploring the moral gray areas of the world.

As a concept, it’s pretty straightforward: kill someone and collect a paycheck. But I’m always looking for books that do something new and special with the genre. 

I’m fascinated by the question of where people get their values, particularly in our secular age. If you have a religion, the question is easy to answer: just point to your church or faith. For the unchurched like me, however, it’s tricky. We feel there’s something we should be able to point to, but what? 

As a professor of politics and philosophy, I’ve been exploring this question for more than a decade. My latest book argues that liberalism has become a comprehensive worldview and may be the key to who you and I are deep down.

I've been a lawyer for 30 years, 20 of them as an elected district attorney, and writing relieves stress for me. Real crime is messy and irrational; crime fiction restores order.

But literary fiction is too slow—a novel must compel the reader to turn the page. Good thrillers tackle major issues, revealing themes that deepen our understanding of humanity. I've witnessed courage during grief and stress, but I'd never betray that trust by writing nonfiction accounts. I deliberately jumbled character traits and real events and combined them with my understanding of modern police techniques like geofencing and DNA.

I remember the first time I stepped onto a sailing ship and that was the full-size replica of the Cutty Sark at Greenwich, London. The younger me descended below decks and started to imagine the enormity of risking everything on an expedition into the unknown. Since that time, I’ve become an eighteenth-century scholar, able to channel my wonder at the age of sail into researching, teaching, writing, and broadcasting about many aspects of the period.

I hope the books on this list help you journey all over the globe with a sense of what it was like to trust your life to a self-contained floating world heading into unchartered waters.