One night in the rainy summer of 1816, at Lord Byron’s summer estate, Villa Diodati, in Cologny, near Geneva, Switzerland, Byron, and his friends Percy and Mary Shelley passed the time by telling ghost stories. The stories they created would lay the groundwork for future, publish … | Continue reading
For a long time, if someone would have asked me how I decide which parts of my life and work to share on the internet, I would have responded with a shrug. I don’t think about it too much, I might have said, or maybe: I just try to be honest. I genuinely thought I […] | Continue reading
I was sitting in the back of an auditorium two years ago, listening to S.A. Cosby ruminate on the beginnings of his since gone thermonuclear writing career, when he mentioned a magazine that had escaped my mind for too long. Cosby was heaping praise on one of the first places he … | Continue reading
When I started writing The Wilderness of Girls—a young adult novel about a pack of feral girls thrust into civilization and the troubled teenager who rescues them—I told myself this book isn’t going to include sexual assault. I knew in my gut, my feral girls wouldn’t have to deal … | Continue reading
Batman: Mask of the Phantasm is the best movie about Batman. That’s not because it has the most villains with the most memorable superpowers, or the flashiest gadgets, or the most extravagant vehicles. Instead, it is the best one about Batman because it is the one which makes the … | Continue reading
There’s only one truly new novel in this month’s crop of international crime fiction—the others are all reissues, some translated for the first time, and others back in print for the first time in decades. Any translated novel takes a village to produce, but a translated and reis … | Continue reading
Boosters of the CIA like to talk up its American ancestry, pointing out that spies helped win the Republic’s founding struggle against the British Empire as well as all its subsequent victories in major wars. But this is not the whole story. The CIA was, after all, a foreign inte … | Continue reading
I was barely out of college when I packed my bags and moved to the other side of the planet for the first time. I was young, of course, and madly in love, and as I boarded that plane, life felt like one great adventure. It still does, actually. Those early travels set the tone [… … | Continue reading
We find ourselves (again) the middle of the week; I ask you, how does this keep happening? We must stop meeting this way. It’s time for something fun, to move the time along. Like the quiz that came before it, this one is part quiz, part trivia. Under “questions” I have listed ma … | Continue reading
“The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness.” -John Muir With a twelve-gauge slung over his shoulder and a walking stick in hand, my father cut a proud figure as he marched boldly into the eighty acres of untamed Washington wilderness that bordered our fami … | Continue reading
The jailhouse confessional is a form that has always intrigued me—an accused recounting his crimes, after the fact—seemingly to atone, but more often to rationalize, to elide, to recast themselves as the victim. The jailhouse confessional implicates the reader, putting them in th … | Continue reading
In 1983 a man named Oleg Gordievsky saved the world. Gordievsky, a disillusioned officer in the KGB, had in 1968 offered himself to Britain’s foreign intelligence service, MI6, as a double agent. Fifteen years later Gordievsky found himself posted at the Soviet Embassy in London. … | Continue reading
The work of James Lee Burke functions as a searchlight, exposing and illuminating the contradictions of the American experience. Full of grand beauty and haunting brutality, Burke’s novels and stories, like the country in which they take place, map a collision course between hero … | Continue reading
A traditional mystery or whodunit offers a recognizable milieu with social and physical limitations, whether it’s a small village or a city apartment building. The inciting incident is a crime, often a murder, that ruptures its peaceful status quo. To restore order, the transgres … | Continue reading
In a world that wants us to shrink, what if we took up space? That’s the question at the heart of many of the recent thrillers that delve into body shaming. It’s almost impossible to exist as a woman today without experiencing the persistent drip of Diet Culture. From well-meanin … | Continue reading
Mark was once the world’s deadliest assassin, working for a clandestine group called the Agency. His alias, the Pale Horse, struck fear into the heart of anyone who heard it and knew what it meant: that death was both imminent and guaranteed. But then something happened, and Mark … | Continue reading
The easiest type of reality TV contestant it is to be is a forgotten one. This sounds a little counterintuitive, when we consider the promise of social media fame that franchises like The Bachelor have historically provided, but if we look at it as a numbers game, this is absolut … | Continue reading
Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * James Lee Burke, Clete (Atlantic Monthly) “Burke returns to Louisiana’s New Iberia Parish and the late 1990s for a tangled tale that confronts private eye Clete Purcel with monsters in the present and … | Continue reading
Best-selling British author Ruth Ware is back with another gripping tale, this time whisking us to a tropical Indonesian paradise that quickly turns nightmare in her latest, One Perfect Couple (Scout Press, 5/21). Facing the uncertain future of her research career, scientist Lyla … | Continue reading
When I was a kid I was obsessed with horror films and horror stories. I’ve written about that before for CrimeReads. But I was also a little freaked out by them, particularly the illustrations that accompanied horror tales published in the 1960s and early 1970s. Not gonna lie, so … | Continue reading
There’s no one quite like Joe R. Lansdale. It’s hard to think of a writer who has taken so many chances in his writing career, or who’s had so much fun. He’s written not only mysteries and suspense but also horror, science fiction, and Westerns, as well as screenplays and comic b … | Continue reading
It’s summertime! And, as everyone knows, summertime is for meta horror movies and books about meta horror movies. I don’t make the rules! My friend and colleague Molly and I were talking about how there are SO many books coming out that play on horror movie tropes. So we rounded … | Continue reading
Summer isn’t my favorite season. Don’t get me wrong, I love the beach, barbecues, and the warm sun, especially after a seemingly endless winter in the mountains where I live, but once the temperature barrels past eighty degrees I start yearning for turning leaves and chilly autum … | Continue reading
Miami is a crime writer’s paradise. This city has seen it all, and her denizens have definitely done it all, so there’s no shortage of inspiration to fuel the imagination. The Magic City often feels more like a fictional metropolis than an actual, real-life place. Our history is … | Continue reading
One of the first questions we get upon meeting other writers or discussing our profession among new friends is how do you write together? The answer is rote to us by now, though the process is anything but. As married co-authors, we answer with jokes about how much we fight over … | Continue reading
There’s always a certain distance to eulogizing an artist you didn’t know personally. Without the firsthand connection, what you’re really mourning is the loss of future art, which can feel like a fairly callous reaction to a human being’s death. In some cases, though, with art t … | Continue reading
When I think of the thrillers that have stuck with me the most over the years, they are always the books that align closest with reality. They’re the stories with events that could be taken straight out of a newspaper or police report. Something about exploring those realistic fe … | Continue reading
In 2014, two 12-year-old girls lured their friend into the Wisconsin woods and stabbed her 19 times, as a tribute to the fictional entity Slender Man. The case captured the public’s imagination and sparked a debate about the effect of the internet on young minds—one that it feels … | Continue reading
“The bigger the issue, the smaller you write.” Richard Price said that. His advice, which I think of often, was top-of-mind when Marilyn Monroe came tapping on my computer screen and wanting to step into my latest novel. To write about a person who is arguably the world’s greates … | Continue reading
All right, people. It’s the middle of the week, so I think we can all use something fun. Like a quiz! I like quizzes. If you’ve clicked on this, perhaps you do too. This is part quiz, part trivia. Under “questions” I have included a description of a famous detective or sleuth fro … | Continue reading
For years, I tried to find a book that would impress my grandmother, one of the most voracious readers I’ve ever known. Nothing would stick with her, especially considering she said that our wants in literature were opposed by nature: she was old, and tired of reading for anythin … | Continue reading
One of my favorite narrative tricks is when a story coalesces around an absent character, someone the reader might never even meet but who nonetheless casts a long shadow. I think this might be what our drive toward storytelling is all about—how else do we reckon with loss? Most … | Continue reading
· Alvin Ridley, a one-time TV repairman who had run a TV shop in downtown Ringgold, Georgia, was not someone I felt I would ever be associated with. I knew who he was—he had gone to school with my sister, and my father loved to do business with outsiders like Alvin. I remember th … | Continue reading
Peripatetic Anglo-American mystery writers from the Golden Age of detective fiction did their share of sailing over deep waters, not merely metaphorically but in fact, so it is no surprise that in the years between the first and second World Wars that shipboard mysteries, like th … | Continue reading
JAKE IN THE CASE OF THE MISSING PENCIL Jake was the toughest kid at her school, Sacred Kidney. She had been the toughest kid at her previous school, too, until she was kicked out due to the circumstances surrounding an event referred to only as “the Pizza Day Disaster.” Jake swor … | Continue reading
In my novel, Holy City, Will Seems returns from living “in exile” in Richmond, to his family home in Southside, Virginia, to face the two great tragedies of his past which have laden him with a guilt that both drives and suffocates him. He is incapable of living in exile any long … | Continue reading
Maine is an unusual state, with a distinct identity and, in rural areas, a culture that remains distinctly pre-industrial. It borders more Canadian provinces than it does states; it is the only mainland state with just one interstate highway; it is the only state crossed by the n … | Continue reading
In the early morning of September 9, 2015, Owen Hanson opened his Louis Vuitton bag and stuffed it with bundles of cash and three cell phones. The money was for gambling during the round of golf he was scheduled to have that day with a business associate. The phones were for orch … | Continue reading
Hana comes out of the restroom in search of mooring, her gait made unsteady by a tumult of memories. It is Amina’s hand, of all things, that finds its way through the muddle, the way Hana held it on that darkest of nights so long ago—and again later, on the brightest of days when … | Continue reading
Crazy it’s now three decades after the publication of Violent Spring featuring my PI Ivan Monk. In those days of the early ‘90s, changes were happening in the mystery field. In 1988 my friend Gar Anthony Haywood had published Fear of the Dark. It was not the first novel to featur … | Continue reading
Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Walter Mosley, Farewell, Amythestine (Mulholland) A prelude to a potentially fresh—and dangerous—chapter in Rawlins’ life. Things are never simple for Easy Rawlins. But his creator remains a master of … | Continue reading
In “Soprano Home Movies” from season six of The Sopranos, Tony and Carmella are vacationing in upstate New York at the cottage of Tony’s brother-in-law and caporegime, Bobby Baccalieri. Bobby reveals that his family immigrated from Italy via Canada rather than through Ellis Islan … | Continue reading
Frank Figliuzzi’s new book contains one of the more alarming pieces of crime data you’ll read this year. Over the last two decades, he writes in Long Haul: Hunting the Highway Serial Killers, the FBI’s Highway Serial Killings Initiative has “compiled a list of an astonishing 850 … | Continue reading
Crime fiction authors are often asked about the inspirational alchemy that sparked the idea for their central characters and where they see them going in subsequent books. Because, let’s face it, popular series—I’m looking at you Bosch, Rebus and Reacher—are wins for writers, rea … | Continue reading
I’ve been thinking, lately, about the theme of “American presidents who commit felonies.” I don’t know why; it’s just been on my mind recently for some reason. Obviously, through Wednesday, May 29th, 2024, no former United States President had ever been convicted of a felony. But … | Continue reading
A look at the month’s best reviewed books in crime. * Abir Mukherjee, Hunted (Mulholland Books) “A welcome alternative to the typical cops-and-robbers tale … Plot twists are largely presented without the strain of incredulity, the suspense is always weighted with emotion, surpris … | Continue reading
I’ve lived a dual existence for most of my adult life, and that’s given me a lot of pleasure. On the one hand, I’m a journalist who chronicles the “adventures” of companies that are in the always-evolving media and entertainment business. On the other, my soul is never happy unle … | Continue reading
Acid has had a long and colorful—way too colorful!—relationship with crime fiction. LSD or lysergic acid diethylamide was first synthesized by Swiss chemist Albert Hoffman in the pre-fabulous year of 1938, but almost as soon as Sandoz Labs introduced the stuff as a psychiatric to … | Continue reading