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Originally Posted by DiapDealer
But why? Especially when Self-Contained is equally accurate (and happily accounts for the shared millieu). If the books have tendrils that connect them, then the author considers them pieces of a greater whole. If not, they wouldn't have reused some of the fictional components.
I'm not saying true stand-alone books are better, or anything like that. I'm merely saying that I need there to be a distinction. If stand-alone gets to be used for multiple books by the same author that share fictional components, then what term do I get to use to ask for recommendations for books that don't contain fictional characters and/or settings that are used in multiple books?
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Linwood Barclay uses the setting and denizens of a fictional town called Promise Falls in all or almost all of this thrillers. He even generally uses the same detective. However, the POV character changes with each book, and the references to previous events are vague--e.g., one book might focus a wife's murder, and a later book might mention in passing that the guy's wife died.
But then Barclay went and wrote a "Promise Falls" trilogy--in which each book was basically self-contained but part of a larger story arc. These are different from the other books that merely use the same town and people. It feels inaccurate and misleading to categorize the trilogy in the same way as the other books that are only loosely connected.