Addictive Books

Thrillers Children's Books Science Other Non-fiction About

About

My name is Gerhard K. Heilig. Over 70 years ago, I was born in Munich, Germany. However, I have spent much of my adult life in Austria. For several years, I also lived in the United States of America. Currently, I find myself back in Vienna, Austria, relishing retirement with my family. I like to develop websites, love reading (or listening to) crime fiction books, and sometimes I make clay sculptures in an attempt to nurture my artistic ambitions. Mostly, however, I am assisting my wife in running a small food manufacturing business.
I've been an avid reader of crime fiction books for more than six decades, starting around the age of 12 as a young boy. Although I cannot be entirely certain, it's highly likely that my initial detective novel was authored by Agatha Christie. If my memory serves me right, it was her renowned work, 'And Then There Were None,' translated into German. This was a bygone era, a time long before the Internet or even personal computers. Book recommendations were exchanged within bookstores, through word of mouth, or published in newspapers and specialized journals.
Evidently, I am not a native English speaker. Nonetheless, a significant portion of my proficiency in this language was acquired through books, mostly crime fiction and thrillers. After having learned some English in high school, I swiftly found out that translated thrillers often failed to capture the essence of their English-language originals. Since than, I have only read crime fiction in English.

AddictiveBooks.com

Many years - and many hundreds of crime fiction books later - I developed a book review website in 2006, which I registered as www.addictivebooks.com. At that time, it was one of very few private websites covering short reviews and recommendations of thrillers and crime fiction books. Below are a few screen-shots of this website. It was actually quite successful (for my modest ambitions) and generated a small income from Amazon.com
AddictiveBooks.com has been up and running for more than 17 years - but for quite some time its layout and functionality could no longer compete with more modern sites. I had also neglected to update the content - as I was quite bussy in my professional career. Eventually, it was time to update the whole site.
What you see here is the first implementation of a completely refurbished AddictiveBooks website. It now runs on php against a mySQL database and I have included much more information for each book than was available in the old version (currently, you see only a fraction of what I will - hopefully - be able to publish in the future). Currently people can search for crime fiction not only by genre and author, but also find stories that are set in a particular location or country. Soon visitors will also be able to find crime fiction by keywords and the names of main protagonists.

Policy

My policy for including or excluding books in this website is quite simple: I include what I like, and I do not include what I don't like (or don't know). I have a strong preference for unusual crime fiction books, which are set in exotic or distant locations, feature unusual kinds of characters or develop totally unpredictable plots. I am not a great fan of serials - in which you follow a protagonist through 20 or 30 books. In particular, I hate serials where episodes are just added one after the other - without the leading character getting older or developing as a person. These "assembly-line" crime fiction books - quite often by highly successful bestseller authors - are starting to dominate the publishing world and as a reader I am certainly not happy about it.
Unfortunately, much of the crime fiction published today is full of stereotypes and pre-assembled plot twists. Therefore I am yearning for books based on truly original ideas that are not copy-pasted from a "how to write a crime fiction book" manual.
Since I am now a grandfather, I have also broadened my interest to children's books. I try to select classics that I want my grandchildren to read. Finally, I have also included a section on outstanding non-fiction books that I believe everyone should read.

Screenshots from the "old" AddictiveBooks.com: 2006 - 2021

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