If what hooked you was Joe trailing the elusive "Mike Longshott" through the pulp paperbacks of Osama bin Laden: Vigilante until the fiction began to bleed into his world, The Separation doubles down on that game. Priest layers false documents, memoirs, and contested accounts about twin brothers in an alternate World War II, so each new chapter feels like Joe turning another dog‑eared paperback and finding the world rewritten. It captures that same intoxicating slippage between text and reality that drove Joe from Vientiane’s back streets to London’s smoky offices.

You followed Joe’s gumshoe trail across borders in a world where terrorism exists only in pulp—and where every smoky bar and bureaucratic corridor felt twisted by a different history. In The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, Detective Meyer Landsman works a murder in a temporary Jewish settlement in Alaska, a what‑if America that’s as textured and persuasive as the alternate present Joe navigates. If you liked the way Joe’s case tangled with shadowy officials and geopolitical echoes, Landsman’s investigation will scratch that same itch—hardboiled voice, political pressure, and a map of the world redrawn under his feet.

Joe’s search for Longshott forced him to parse a reality that didn’t quite add up—men in black tailing him, borders that felt porous, and a crime that seemed to exist on two planes at once. In The City & the City, Inspector Borlú investigates a killing across twin cities that occupy the same space but must be "unseen" by their citizens. If the way Joe’s case bent the rules of the world thrilled you, Borlú’s step‑by‑step breach of an impossible jurisdiction will feel like coming home to another beautifully warped precinct.

When Joe hops from Vientiane to Paris to London and the seams of his world begin to show—paperback vigilantes, disappearing witnesses, and a truth that won’t stay put—you’re in classic reality‑meltdown territory. Ubik amplifies that vibe: after an attack, a team of psychics and anti‑psychics encounter time that runs backward, messages from the margins, and a product that might be salvation or scam. If you loved how Osama made every new chapter feel like a clue that destabilized everything before it, Ubik will keep you deliciously off‑balance.

If part of Osama’s pull was sensing that Joe—the nameless PI with a past that won’t quite focus—might not be telling you everything, Tidhar’s A Man Lies Dreaming goes even bolder. A failed pulp writer imagines a down‑and‑out private eye named "Wolf" stalking a fascist London, and the line between the dreamer’s brutal reality and his lurid noir fantasy erodes. The way Joe’s case hinged on a vanished author and a world conjured by paperbacks finds an eerie echo here—only this time the narrator’s own need to reshape history is the most dangerous plot twist.