At the highly impressionable age of eleven, I moved with my mother from the smallholding that had shaped my young life and nascent imagination to a wonderful bungalow in the suburbs of Bulawayo. All the houses looked the same—modest single-story abodes tucked away on acres of lan … | Continue reading
I always think about a particular scene from Her, Spike Jonze’s somewhat-prescient tech romance from 2013. Our protagonist Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix) has fallen in love with his new Siri-like operating system “Samantha,” breathily voiced by Scarlett Johansson. She suggest … | Continue reading
There’s a passage from Robb White’s novel Death Watch that has been burned in my memory since I read the book as a boy. It describes the fate of a family whose car breaks down in the desert. They go looking for help, “leaving five or six gallons of dirty but drinkable water in th … | Continue reading
Few characters are as beloved in the hearts and minds of audiences as Murder, She Wrote’s Jessica (J.B.) Fletcher. As portrayed by the iconic Angela Lansbury, Jessica Fletcher—a widowed English teacher turned unwitting mystery novelist and amateur sleuth—was first introduced to t … | Continue reading
A wide-ranging conversation between authors Eric Rickstad and Don Winslow. Eric Rickstad is the New York Times, USA Today, Daily Globe, and international bestselling author of nine novels, published in numerous languages. His novels have been awarded a New York Times Best Thrille … | Continue reading
All predators have preferred environments. Murky ocean water for the great white. The Serengeti and its plains for the lion. For whatever reason, California has been a favorite for serial killers, coming in second only to New York for the most known cases. Since 1900, it is belie … | Continue reading
“I can’t sleep,” said the man who is now my husband, turning to me in the hotel room where we were staying. It was our first trip away together as a couple. We were in Vienna, and it was a moment that should have been filled with all the sweetness and romance of nascent love. […] | Continue reading
Ahoy! I am always excited when I hear there’s a new Wes Anderson movie about to hit theaters. I love Anderson’s visually and thematically meticulous, intricate films. It’s been posited, on this site, that all of Anderson’s movies borrow elements from crime movies, and I agree. Bu … | Continue reading
There are a lot of ways to drive into Cleveland, Ohio, but my favorite was always coming up from the south, from Akron. At one point on that drive there’s a bunch of big buildings with big smokestacks (I think they’re steel mills but to be honest I enjoyed them for the vibes, not … | Continue reading
Now that Americans have finally achieved a post-racial, post-gender, post-discrimination society, where hierarchy is based exclusively on merit and our genitals are fully formed at conception, you might think it’s kinda silly to write a craft essay arguing for the creation of cha … | Continue reading
In The Impossible Thing, English author Belinda Bauer weaves an original tale of obsession and greed, inspired by a true crime that has remained unsolved for over a century. Set in alternating timelines in 1920s Yorkshire and modern-day Wales, the novel’s central mystery hinges o … | Continue reading
I primarily process my discomfort with humor. The problem is that my entire family does the same thing, so funerals are… a challenge. My characters share this macabre tendency, so when I started writing my first proper murder mystery, A Proposal to Die For, I knew—no matter how l … | Continue reading
I find there’s something fascinating about haunted houses—the way they hold secrets in their walls, twist reality, and become entities of their own… Most of the time, living and breathing monsters. These books take you through eerie hallways, creepy atmospheres, and ghostly encou … | Continue reading
I’ve always been drawn to American crime fiction. My gateway drug was Thomas Harris’s sublime Red Dragon. I read it as a young boy, and it opened my eyes to the sort of stories fiction could tell. I struggled to fully let it go; a part of it, I think, remains lodged in my brain, … | Continue reading
Matthew Barr was in the crosshairs. Finally. Finn Garrett watched him lock the battered old Focus and sling a backpack over one shoulder. There was a woman with him – young, and with her mousy hair tied back. Barr didn’t have a wife or a girlfriend at home, so he must have stoppe … | Continue reading
On March 29th, we lost one of our brightest lights in the crime genre—a man who earned his way into the pantheon through crafting the darkest crime fiction. Ken Bruen passed away in his native Galway, Ireland, a city he often wrote about, especially in his Jack Taylor series. To … | Continue reading
(Spoiler alert: If you haven’t read Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express, look away now.) A universal motive “All of you on this train, ladies and gentlemen…, in one way or another, each of you participated in the murder. Each of you struck a blow to achieve justice.” — … | Continue reading
Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Louise Hegarty, Fair Play (Harper) “Brilliant . . . . Readers, especially fans of Richard Osman, will happily go along with the plot’s many reversals and take heart in its surprisingly tender conclusi … | Continue reading
Just because you think you know your characters doesn’t mean they can’t still surprise you. David Handler will tell you as much. A former journalist and television scribe, he’s been writing about dapper if somewhat downtrodden celebrity ghostwriter and occasional PI Stewart Hoag— … | Continue reading
Dracula is the most powerful adaptation fad in recent times. He’s sprung alive in incarnation after incarnation for approximately a century, without totally dying out. The Guinness Book of World Records counts Dracula as the most-played character of all time. The Internet Movie D … | Continue reading
Christie’s portrayals of denizens of various parts of the world (as many of her British characters bluntly put it, “foreigners!”) take a wide variety of formats from over-the-top satire and stereotypes to relatively nuanced and neutral. One particular categorization that crops on … | Continue reading
If I walked up to you and whispered, “Weasels Ripped My Flesh,” would you think: I was referring to the 1970 album of that name by Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention? I desperately needed medical assistance of some kind? I was referring to the classic men’s adventure magazi … | Continue reading
From the introduction to the essay: Grady Hendrix began his career as a horror novelist leaning into parody and humor, but over the years, while he has found ways to continue to incorporate humor, his novels have gotten progressively more serious and darker. Hendrix’s stories fea … | Continue reading
While many of us may never be welcomed in another nation again once this administration is done, we can always travel in our minds! And in our fiction, much of which is oddly spaced out this year, so I’ve combined forces‚ and voila, now have enough titles to bother making a list. … | Continue reading
Now, more than ever, it’s crucial to read queer voices, and what better way than with a page-turning thriller, an ingenious mystery, an engrossing psychological suspense, or a charming quozy? Queer Crime Writers* has curated a winter-to-spring roundup, showcasing the genre’s vibr … | Continue reading
Stories about mothers and daughters are everywhere, but the endless nuances of this intense relationship are fertile ground for thriller writers. Many of my novels address different dynamics of this relationship, but in my new thriller When She Was Gone I look at the tricky role … | Continue reading
I have high standards for vacation reads. I’ve never been one of those people who saw a trip to the beach as an excuse to read something that only required half my attention. Even if I’m reading on a plane or by the pool, I need a smart, well-written page-turner, and a couple of … | Continue reading
Season 2 of Poker Face is coming to Peacock on May 8th! And we have more good news: we now have a clip from one of the episodes… and not just an episode, but the episode in which Cynthia Erivo plays sextuplets (or quintuplets… I’m not yet clear). The episode is titled “The Game i … | Continue reading
Sharon Derrick drove an hour north on Interstate 45 through the Houston suburban sprawl and the piney woods of Sam Houston National Forest to a prison in a rural county north of Huntsville. On the way, she found herself tuning her audio system to a 1970s channel on Sirius XM. In … | Continue reading
Twenty-one years ago, National Hockey League forward Todd Bertuzzi got into an on-ice altercation with an opponent named Steve Moore. The encounter grew exceptionally violent. Moore suffered injuries that ended his NHL career. Bertuzzi went through civil and criminal litigation h … | Continue reading
Power lies at the heart of all fantasy, written or imagined. To craft a novel of the genre is to visualize an expression of power and assign it to factions that will then weave and warp over the course of the story. Yet, our ability to conjure is naturally shackled by the limits … | Continue reading
Someone was inside his home. This has nothing to do with strange coincidences. Facts present themselves as evidence, which are then catalogued and filed away for the case file labeled: Henry Richmond Pendel. He has lived in this Greenwich Village apartment for seven of the 12 yea … | Continue reading
In Deanna Raybourn’s Killers of a Certain Age, four friends — and lethal assassins — need to outsmart the team now hunting them. Now, they’re back, out of retirement, in Kills Well with Others. This time, they’re tasked with rooting out a mole threatening to expose their identiti … | Continue reading
Every summer my family goes camping at Sandbanks Provincial Park on the sandy shores of Lake Ontario. There is nothing we look forward to more than those hot summer days spent swimming, playing beach volleyball, hiking wooded trails, and playing charades by the campfire. We disco … | Continue reading
Novelists don’t need all the facts. We’re illusionists, after all. A little misdirection, a little sleight of hand, and suddenly the trick becomes real. Reporters don’t have that luxury. They deal in facts—or at least, that’s what they want you to think. I should know. I fall for … | Continue reading
Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Robert Jackson Bennett, A Drop of Corruption (Del Rey) “Wonderfully clever and compulsively readable . . . another winning blend of fantasy and classic detection.” –Publishers Weekly Julia Bartz, The … | Continue reading
I’ve long been fascinated by darkly feminist novels, books that keep me riveted by—and sometimes rooting for—complicated characters who embrace moral grayness and revenge, or who simply do what must be done in impossible situation. Whether you see these characters as anti-heroine … | Continue reading
I began writing about books for the New York Times in late 2023 and officially began my tenure as the horror fiction columnist for the New York Times Book Review in January on 2024. I love that gig with all my heart, but it often makes me miss something else I love with all my he … | Continue reading
Welcome to “Wait, What?,” a recurring column in which we examine confusing or incoherent details in crime movies. I was watching the bank heist scene of The Dark Knight in preparation for writing this ranking of bank heists and I was struck by something. See, the Joker has a memb … | Continue reading
As the great Jim Thompson said, “There is only one plot – things are not as they seem.” And it still holds as true today as it did for Jim, and even well before him. So who’s Jim Thompson? I hear some of you ask. (Hopefully not too many of you, because if that’s the […] | Continue reading
We asked Kevin Wade, the author of the new novel, Johnny Careless, and longtime screenwriter (Working Girl, Meet Joe Black) and showrunner (Blue Bloods), to tell us about some crime novels and movies that have been important to him along his writing journey. _____________________ … | Continue reading
In her latest novel, national bestselling author Ashley Winstead dives into the very online world of amateur sleuths. This Book Will Bury Me depicts a motley group’s investigation of gruesome slayings at a university, loosely inspired by the real “Moscow Murders” of 2022 at the U … | Continue reading
We all know her. Let’s call her Claire. She appears in many books: a woman in her late 20s or early 30s; sometimes a parent, sometimes not. She’s usually cishet and white, embroiled in a mystery or scandal. And she has a drinking problem. Sometimes her drinking is used as a plot … | Continue reading
First of all, friends, before I dive into this essay, I think we all deserve a big hug. In the past decade (?), century (?), millennium (?), we’ve watched democracy drunk drive itself into a wall, we’ve sand-walked, Dune-style, our way through a pandemic, and we’ve witnessed bill … | Continue reading
Robbing a bank is bad. It’s bad. Don’t do it. But I won’t deny that the movies make it look kind of cool. Well, not the robbery part, but the part where the robbers storm into the bank in coordinated disguises. You can’t deny it either! It is a truth universally acknowledged that … | Continue reading
These are dire times. Human rights, and especially the rights of trans folks, are under attack. And thankfully, some of the crime fiction community has come together to fight back. For the next week, leading up to the March 31st Day of Trans Visibility, over 100 crime writers are … | Continue reading
Chris Offutt has long been a “writer’s writer” acclaimed for his short story collections, memoir and novels. And though he spent his earlier career raising children and working occasionally in Hollywood, in recent years he’s been busier and more prolific than ever. Offutt’s new n … | Continue reading
Tess Gerritsen may not have been trained in the art of spy craft, but she knows a thing or two about flying under the radar. As a woman of a certain age, no matter how accomplished (30+ books published in forty countries with sales in excess of forty million copies), Gerritsen ha … | Continue reading