The Edge is high on my list of favorite Dick Francis books! So is To The Hilt. Also honorable mentions are the Kit Fielding duology (Break In and Bolt) and Comeback. I can give further details about any of them if you like!
I went on a Brother Cadfael kick this fall, and I think that could well count as competence porn, though certainly the historical research porn gets equal billing there.
Laurie R. King's Mary Russell books are somewhat divisive depending on various factors including (but not limited to) one's liking for her interpretation of the Sherlock Holmes characters and one's liking for the central romance of the books (absent from the first book but present thereafter). But they're definitely competence porn! I can't speak to the later books in the series, and haven't reread the earlier ones in some while, but I've been meaning to, because I have a lot of fondness for them.
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I went on a Brother Cadfael kick this fall, and I think that could well count as competence porn, though certainly the historical research porn gets equal billing there.
Laurie R. King's Mary Russell books are somewhat divisive depending on various factors including (but not limited to) one's liking for her interpretation of the Sherlock Holmes characters and one's liking for the central romance of the books (absent from the first book but present thereafter). But they're definitely competence porn! I can't speak to the later books in the series, and haven't reread the earlier ones in some while, but I've been meaning to, because I have a lot of fondness for them.
Diane Duane's Star Trek novels, too.
And Watership Down, in its way.