Can you recommend some good, intense, fast-paced books that allow for an escape from reality?

If you haven’t read them yet, try Stieg Larsson’s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and its two sequels. Once I got into the books, they were hard to put down.

Oh yes, I have!! I could not put them down once I started reading lol

Thanks for the suggestion, though :)

Desperation by Stephen King

Pretty much anything by Dean Koontz, especially his Odd Thomas series.

The Bishop Series by Kay Hooper is fantastically thrilling. (I think there are twelve of them)

Glad you liked them! Yeah, that’s the problem with these types of questions… never know what people have already read.

If you like historical fiction, try Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove and its sequels. They’re long books (The first one is somewhere around 800 or 900 pages, I think, and the following three were all well over 500), but they’re worth reading.

The Dark Tower Series by Stephen King. It’s not exactly horror but more of a post first apocalypse, middle of the second apocolypse story. The main character is a man trying to find himself again after losing everything, and slowly finding it on his way to the Dark Tower, the nexus of creation itself.

I would say Cryptonomicon.

The Aloysius Pendergast series by Preston & Child; the first book is Relic.

If you like science, I’ll recommend a little-known book that I loved. It’s called Knockout Mouse, by James Calder.

Frank Herbert’s Dune – the Book is a sci-fi masterpiece bar none. If anyone claims otherwise I’ll challenge them to a crysknife fight any day ;-) If you like it your life will never be the same again.

Other notable entries include:

Isaac Asimov’s Foundation (series) – intriguing sci-fi
Tom Clancy’s NetForce – good, fast action
Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls – slow at times, but well worth the read
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – no explanation required

Thank you all for your suggestions thus far!!! I’m going to add all of them to my Amazon wish list!! :)