Help with finding books

Feel free to use this thread to ask for help, if you want to find a certain kind of book. Maybe a subset of a subset of a subset, something obscure.

Specifically, I'm looking for a book that I read about years ago. What I know is, that it is a sort-of sci-fi book from before 2000, probably before the 90s. It's about aliens that landed on Earth, but can't leave (or maybe want?) and are forced to live as second-rate citizens. The protagonist is a detective, so I guess it's about murder?

Not much to go on here, but maybe someone has heard about / read the book.

Weird, that ROUGHLY sounds a lot like the 80s/90s movie/TV series Alien Nation. I think it was first a movie, then a TV show, and finally some books were written. Maybe you read something that inspired it, or was similar.

Ooh, these kinds of thread are always fun. Nice idea, Felix!

There's one book I've asked about in multiple fora, but not tracked down yet. Maybe some Tyrant will recognize it:

Publication was probably 1980s. A chance it was 1990s, but I think it was earlier.

It was a picture book. There were snippets of text, but mostly the story was told through big (I want to say landscape orientation, or possibly two-page spread) full-color illustrations.

It was a sort of puzzle book. You could flip through and just appreciate the illustrations, sure. But you were encouraged to take a sleuthy attitude toward them, studying them to fill in gaps in the narrative. There may have been some overarching question you could answer by your investigations, maybe the location of a missing person?

It had an Indiana Jones-esque globetrotting pulp archaeology feel. Lots of jungles and ruins and such.

Images I remember:

A table or desk strewn with the souvenirs of adventures. Journals? maps? travel tickets? a compass, I think. Some sort of crystal? Various historical artifacts. This was very close to the front of the book, possibly the first illustrated page. It wasn't a "hidden object" book per se but I think you could spot some of the artifacts' origins in the later pages.

A crew of explorers on a thin bridge over a ravine or valley. They may have been wearing pith helmets, stereotypical khaki safari gear? They were under attack by indigenous people; I can't imagine the depiction was anything but problematic. At least one person was in the process of falling to their doom.

At least one page, or possibly scattered throughout, featured torn pieces of a journal or letter--not part of the scene, but overlaid on top as if the scene were a photo with the paper resting on it. I am certain the intent was that you photocopy or trace over these pieces, cut them out, and reassemble them to complete a page of text.

Once I finish school I basically want to jump headfirst into recreational reading because I miss it so damn much. Problem is I barely know where to start.

Goodreads I'm having issues with because I told it I liked the Wee Free Men as one of the better Discworld books and now it thinks I have a boner for YA fiction, that's damn near all I get recommendations for.

SabreCat said:

Publication was probably 1980s. A chance it was 1990s, but I think it was earlier.

It was a picture book. There were snippets of text, but mostly the story was told through big (I want to say landscape orientation, or possibly two-page spread) full-color illustrations.

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This is ringing some very distant, very dusty bells. I'll think on it. This seems very much like something you'd find at a book fair. I wonder if there are catalogs on archive.org you could skim through for clues?

ThornGhost said:

I wonder if there are catalogs on archive.org you could skim through for clues?

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I've never tried that, I'll have a look!