Is that saintly Andy Griffith, beloved by Americans as Sheriff Andy Taylor, ogling and grabbing a blonde woman dancing in a Mexican bar? And is that Andy – good ol’ Andy – later trying to rape the woman and kill her boyfriend? Toto, I have a feeling we’re not in Mayberry anymore. … | Continue reading
Ireland is the cadaver on the dissection table in these murder mysteries by five women writers. Their books are forensic examinations of the country’s social dysfunction; the pasts they probe are wounds that never properly heal. Witnesses and suspects gaze through soft rains with … | Continue reading
April brings new releases from some of the most prominent names in crime writing, alongside plenty of rising voices and several hotly anticipated series installments. Below, you’ll find picks for every reader, whether they seek historical or horror, traditional or thriller, and b … | Continue reading
There’s no shortage of canons and vicars scattered throughout Christie’s delightful classic mystery novels, but observant readers may also note that Christie also peppers her tales with characters, anecdotes and musings about various world religions—not to mention the occult. And … | Continue reading
I pledged my allegiance to patriarchy long before I knew its name. As a born and raised Mormon girl, I was steeped in patriarchal institutions of power––only we called it the “priesthood.” I stood in the pews and sang “We thank thee O God for a prophet,” my heart pounding with lo … | Continue reading
Last night I took a photo of my television screen—because maybe, just maybe, the guy on Wheel of Fortune could be a model for a new character I’m envisioning in my next novel, a follow up to Away To Me. That morning, I mentally took note of an older guy at a breakfast joint. His … | Continue reading
Anyone who’s ever been around a group of writers knows that we’d rather talk about craft than almost anything—more than gossip, more than movie deals, more than complaining about the publishing industry. That’s why, when the novelist Hannah Morrissey described hanging out with th … | Continue reading
It feels weird to admit that of my novels, my cannibal weight-loss horror is by far my most autobiographical. Sure, I’ve done a lot of questionable things to lose weight, but the Human Meat Diet isn’t one of them. Like my three-hundred-something-pound protagonist, Emmett Truesdal … | Continue reading
When it comes to TV and film, music makes everything better. Years ago, when I worked as a writer and producer in the Dallas Cowboys’ media department, I enjoyed watching a video’s transformation when the editor slapped a stirring track over routine football footage. Suddenly, a … | Continue reading
Writing obsession, for me, was about magnifying small things. I believe we all have tiny obsessive tendencies, and I also believe that the world we live in today sanctions them. We exist in an age of instant gratification: next-day delivery; bingeing series late into the night; l … | Continue reading
Medellín, Colombia’s second largest city after Bogata and known around the world, unfortunately as it’s a beautiful city, for the drug cartels. And the city has recently been starring (as a cartel city I’m afraid) in season two of The Night Manager, based partly on characters cre … | Continue reading
Tea has a long history—not simply because of the flavor and use of it, but because of the emotions and purpose that seem to accompany it. Starting with the ordinary, my background with tea began when I was a child. Colds found my mom brewing tea. She not only brewed tea and broug … | Continue reading
Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. Tana French, The Keeper (Viking) “The patron saint of moody, literary crime is closing out her wildly popular Cal Hooper trilogy, and we aren’t quite ready to say goodbye. . . . Nobody writes communal p … | Continue reading
When I’m asked to speak about interesting research for my novels, one of the items I frequently share is the story of J.H. Barnstead. I find it incredibly fascinating that a standard forensic practice still used today originated here, in a small city in Nova Scotia, in the early … | Continue reading
Prologue, 2022 A box truck with Massachusetts plates trundled down a winding country road lined with scarred pines and exhaust-blackened snowbanks. Morning mist blanketed the desolate hillscape in a grey haze, as if a disdainful God had blown a lungful of cigarette smoke on it, u … | Continue reading
This month’s debuts are as varied as the genre itself, featuring a noir coming-of-age story set in late 20th century Scotland, a cat-and-mouse thriller with supernatural elements, a missing persons mystery revolving around the podcast industry, two satirical take-downs of romanti … | Continue reading
A mystery lover’s guide to what’s new to streaming this weekend. ___________________________________ New and Returning Mystery and Thriller Series ___________________________________ Jo Nesbõ’s Detective Hole (Netflix) If Nordic Noir is your bag (and I’ll admit, it is very much n … | Continue reading
In the public imagination, the story of a serial killer tends to begin and end with the killer himself. Headlines will often center on the brutality of the crimes and the psychology of the perpetrator, while the lives of those caught in the periphery fade silently into the backgr … | Continue reading
Have you heard the word? It is a current term for knitting, crochet, needlepoint, quilting, embroidery, rug-hooking, weaving, and all those sorts of handcrafts. Suddenly they’re all the rage. Social media is filled with posts devoted to them, craft stores are being swamped with n … | Continue reading
He’s brought into the visitation area just like you see in the movies. She dreamed about this long before it was a reality. She always wondered what it would be like to see him powerless and unkempt. A surge of nausea rolls through her stomach as a strange and familiar fear takes … | Continue reading
Kaira Rouda was at a romance writers conference in Cincinnati when she realized she didn’t belong there. She’d decided she was not quite a fit with the romance genre and wanted to turn to something darker. So, she tried to cancel her conference pitch session with Harper Collins E … | Continue reading
The following is an excerpt from The Most Wonderful Terrible Person: A Memoir of Murder in the Golden State. Author Debra Miller provides a personal account of California’s infamous murder trial of her mother, Lucille Miller—and the decades of emotional wreckage it left in its wa … | Continue reading
Why was Anne Boleyn executed? This was a question I asked myself when writing my debut novel, The Beheading Game, in which Anne Boleyn wakes up after her own execution, escapes from her grave in the Tower of London, sews her head back on, and goes on a revenge quest to kill Henry … | Continue reading
You are holding in your hands an almost forgotten classic of the mystery genre. But while its contemporaries—like Father Brown and Hercule Poirot among them—have become household names, this might be the first you’ve heard of The Baffle Book. And yet, it’s possible one of the mos … | Continue reading
I first met Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills at the Vancouver Art Gallery on a drizzly fall evening. Sherman started making this suite of seventy black-and-white photographs in 1977, in imitation of the publicity stills for noir and arthouse films from earlier decades. I was … | Continue reading
There is no denying that mother-daughter relationships are powerful. According to the Journal of Neuroscience, the mother-daughter relationship is the strongest of all parent-child bonds. This is a connection that should provide support, warmth, and reassurance, and influence the … | Continue reading
I’m in love with the new novel from Bethany C. Morrow, who won my gothic heart with her very weird Cherish, Farrah, an instant cult fave. In The Body, religious trauma manifests in increasingly disturbing ways for a woman in a troubled marriage. Morrow’s protagonist is desperate … | Continue reading
Just sit right back And you’ll hear a tale A tale of a fateful trip… Okay, so I won’t sing the entire theme song for Gilligan’s Island, but I could, even though I haven’t seen the show in decades. But who would have known the show would help inspire my 12th novel, Dig, forty-som … | Continue reading
In our view, a true trilogy is one story with the same characters, who increase their appeal in each installment, told over three novels. They’re not easy to find! The trilogies we love have an overarching plot that weaves and grows through all the novels. Each suspense novel has … | Continue reading
In 2007, I spent a chunk of the summer in the glorious Canadian Rockies, a land of towering, snowy peaks and sapphire and emerald lakes glistening like hidden jewels in the mountain valleys. Teal rivers wind along sweeping valley floors, vistas almost too beautiful to believe. Wh … | Continue reading
My new Mercury Carter thriller, The Delivery (Mysterious Press, March 24), finds Carter in Providence, Rhode Island, where the freelance mailman’s latest delivery hits (of course) unexpected complications. Fleshing out more of Carter’s personality during the novel’s writing, I wa … | Continue reading
Lauren Reding Develop your setting! It’s a cardinal rule of fiction, and we see setting work wonders in S.A. Crosby’s Blacktop Wasteland or Louise Penny’s Three Pines series. But for those of us writing domestic suspense, where our characters are often confined literally or metap … | Continue reading
The original pitch for The Survivor—a guy on the subway gets a text message from a killer, letting him know who their next victim is—never specified on which subway it took place, but there was never any doubt in my mind that it would be set in New York. A big part of it was […] | Continue reading
When I first started publishing books, my biggest challenge was the lack of agency in my female characters. Specifically, the lack of feminist agency. I clearly remember my editor’s words: The plot is happening to her. What is she doing to move it forward? As it turned out, nothi … | Continue reading
Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. Olesya Salnikova Gilmore, The Fortune Tellers of Rue Daru (Berkley) “Gilmore’s latest historical horror will be another crowd-pleaser. For fans of menacing supernatural tales of family secrets, ghosts, … | Continue reading
When I thought of the idea of a hold-out hospital fighting against our future AI overlords, the ingredients for a medical thriller that pays homage to the late and great Michael Crichton were already there: AI, medicine, and the race to find a cure. But these elements mean nothin … | Continue reading
In 1992, at twenty-two, I sat in a spacious meditation hall in a Catskills ashram. It was my first time visiting a spiritual retreat center and I had not a clue that I would eventually move in. The hall was grand with plush aqua carpeting and little lights on the aisle so people … | Continue reading
If this article may seem like a shitpost entirely inspired by the worm girlfriend meme (my partner has repeatedly assured me that he would indeed love me as a worm)…that is, indeed, why I wrote it; however, we are also blessed with a year of many, many worms in fiction. There wer … | Continue reading
A mystery lover’s guide to what’s new to streaming this weekend. ___________________________________ New and Returning Mystery and Thriller Series ___________________________________ Imperfect Women (Apple TV+) This adaptation of the Araminta Hall thriller has a stellar cast: Eli … | Continue reading
Every couple of years the crime genre gets a rebrand, a makeover and a fancy new nametag to go with it. The Girl With A Dragron Tattoo, in part, created the ever popular “Nordic Noir”, which travelled in the suitcases of Jane Harper, Chris Hammer and Sarah Bailey down past the eq … | Continue reading
“Only when I’m on a beach at night, watching the rods, and looking out into all that darkness, I feel at home. Right here amongst the awfulness, and the bursts of life and light and color, are breakdowns and breakthroughs. Hunger and total fullness. Hope and loss. Life and death … | Continue reading
I visited in the winter of 2024, when the Manhattan streets were sickly gray. The front door glittered, glass sprayed with a youthful logo: Virtual Reality Center. I’d heard of VR centers before, but never visited one. I was in the early stages of writing my debut young adult nov … | Continue reading
I visited in the winter of 2024, when the Manhattan streets were sickly gray. The front door glittered, glass sprayed with a youthful logo: Virtual Reality Center. I’d heard of VR centers before, but never visited one. I was in the early stages of writing my debut young adult nov … | Continue reading
14 new and upcoming true crime books from the first months of the year, featuring dogged modern investigations, horrifying real-life mysteries, shocking miscarriages of justice, and sweeping histories of organized crime. * Shelley Puhak, The Blood Countess: Murder, Betrayal, and … | Continue reading
Donald Westlake, using the pseudonym Richard Stark, published 24 books starring Parker, a master thief who plows through trouble with the steely efficiency of a bandsaw. A handful of those novels were adapted into movies, all of them starring different actors as Parker—with wildl … | Continue reading
My hometown, Chicago, is a city that rewards attention. I decided to become a criminal trial lawyer at the age of ten, when The Defenders, a television show about a father-son criminal defense team in New York was broadcast on CBS. Only I became a criminal prosecutor rather than … | Continue reading
Law and Order: what is it with me and Law and Order? I’d never been one for crime shows, but I can still remembering seeing it for the first time, when it was showing in reruns on A&E, and thinking to myself, so this is how you make crime interesting! With the exception of SVU, … | Continue reading
You won’t find John Grisham among the tens of thousands of fans migrating south this month for spring training as they warm up to the idea of Opening Day. Once one of baseball’s biggest fans, one of the world’s top selling novelists has lost interest in the game. Yet back in the … | Continue reading