The characters boarding the SS Varuna, the location of the opulent locked-room mystery universe conjured in Death and Other Details by writers, executive producers, and showrunners Heidi Cole McAdams and Mike Weiss, have a lot of baggage—literal, figurative and emotional—to unpac … | Continue reading
When I began this series for CrimeReads, I imagined myself reading a lot of Raymond Chandler, Dorothy Sayers, and Chester Himes. That was fine with me; other than a brief Agatha Christie phase in middle school, I’d never spent much time on the classics of crime fiction, and I loo … | Continue reading
This month’s best psychological thrillers have a wide variety of settings and a focus on characterization. There’s also several on this list concerned with upending and evolving tropes in the genre, a valuable goal as the psychological thriller’s heyday continues. Shubnum Khan, T … | Continue reading
Tracy Clark is the two-time Sue Grafton Memorial Award-winning author of the highly acclaimed Chicago Mystery Series featuring ex-homicide cop turned PI Cassandra Raines. The protagonist is a hard-driving, Black private investigator who works the streets of the Windy City while d … | Continue reading
The Mystery Writers of America has announced the nominees for the 2024 Edgar Allan Poe Awards, honoring the best in mystery fiction, non-fiction and television published or produced in 2023. The 78th Annual Edgar® Awards, which also celebrates the 215th anniversary of the birth o … | Continue reading
Science fiction and fantasy are often full of epic space battles and sprawling quests. But to me, they’re best at their most intimate and personal. Even with mystical abilities or cybernetic enhancements, people are still messy and complex and deeply flawed. Fantastical elements … | Continue reading
If I had to describe The Nice Guys (2016) in one word, it would be “underrated.” Though it achieved instant critical acclaim, its modest performance at the box office prevented it from achieving both a mass audience and fulfilling its potential as a franchise. But the concept of … | Continue reading
Growing up in a middle-class family in Mumbai, I wasn’t surrounded by luxuries, but there was one thing our home was never short of – books. My love of mysteries began with the first Famous Five novel my dad brought home and immediately, I was hooked. As an adult, thrillers and m … | Continue reading
Another year has dawned, and it’s time for another list purporting to be the sum of all Most Anticipated Titles in our beloved genre. I have been asked to keep the number of titles on the list to 50, for my own sanity. But who needs sanity when you have books?!? And what a year [ … | Continue reading
The Silence in Her Eyes is a book I wasn’t supposed to write. The first time I told my editor that I was thinking about writing a psychological thriller, she was taken aback. She responded with a groan: “Why do all my authors suddenly want to write thrillers?” If my historical no … | Continue reading
On January 19, 1919, 34-year-old identical twin sisters Gladys and Dorothea Cromwell boarded the ocean liner La Lorraine at Bordeaux, France, headed back home to New York City. For the previous two years, the twins—descendants of the English statesman Oliver Cromwell and heirs to … | Continue reading
Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Thomas Perry, Hero (Mysterious Press) “A tour de force…should be required reading for thrill-seekers.” –Booklist Lea Carpenter, Ilium (Knopf) “Refreshingly cerebral, literary, and cunningly cinematic … | Continue reading
It had to be the worst decision of his life. Heinrich Friedrich Albert was sitting comfortably and reading as he traveled uptown on the Sixth Avenue elevated train in New York on the afternoon of July 24, 1915. When he looked up and realized the train was at the 50th Street stati … | Continue reading
“I loved books and wanted my whole life to be around books.” Such were the words of Richard Marek, an acclaimed editor, author, ghostwriter, and longtime Dutton president and publisher who died in 2020. In his half-century in book publishing, Marek helped bring over 300 books int … | Continue reading
“The first thing we do,” announces Dick the Butcher in Act IV, Scene II of William Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part II, “is kill all the lawyers.” Approximately four hundred years after Shakespeare’s death, this pithy phrase has become one of his most famous witticisms, appropriated … | Continue reading
Our Crime and the City columnist and international correspondent Paul French looks back at some of 2023’s best crime series from around the globe. * Ganglands (Braqueurs) series 2 (Netflix France) – Julian Leclercq and Hamid Hlioua’s trademark fast paced revenge drama brings back … | Continue reading
Detective series or thrillers about murders demand from the reader a level of intellectual curiosity, as well as nerves of steel and a strong stomach. When well written, they are gripping page turners that, more often than not, leave the reader with a sense of satisfaction that … | Continue reading
It was at the tender age of twenty-one years old that I was first exposed to the untethered brilliance that is Sam Shepard. While studying screenwriting at Loyola Marymount University’s School of Film & Television, I was simultaneously dabbling in acting, going on auditions scatt … | Continue reading
Rod Serling’s “The Twilight Zone” is the gold standard for anthology TV shows, science-fiction and fantasy TV series and, some might argue, TV shows period. The series, which ran for 156 episodes from 1959 to 1964, has some rivals for those accolades, for certain. “The Outer Limi … | Continue reading
“How do you get your ideas?” Novelists are asked that question all the time. Answering it is a little like trying to explain how you got your personality or why you keep having that dream about showing up for a book signing completely naked. This year marks the thirtieth annive … | Continue reading
The term Cascadia conjures images of thick green forests, lush ferns that could swallow a small car, creeping pea-soup fog, windswept bluffs with crashing ocean waves far below, and buckets upon buckets of rain. Those forest are filled with wild animals, some of them of the folkl … | Continue reading
When I was eight, I read a book that would dictate the course of my life. That book was Harriet the Spy. As a kid in suburban California, I was endlessly curious. About ancient Egypt, about animals, and about my neighbors. Suburbia, as we’ve read in countless domestic thrillers, … | Continue reading
Despite a backdrop of earthquakes and volcanic eruptions threatening travel plans to Iceland, I was able to catch up with Louise Penny, author of the popular Three Pines traditional mysteries starring Inspector Gamache. We talked over breakfast at the Hotel Saga in Reykjavik one … | Continue reading
Our goal with all of our books is always to write something fun and fast-paced, but it also must touch on certain themes like privilege, racism and the inequality of our justice system because that’s the reality of the world we live in. That’s our experience and there’s no way to … | Continue reading
It never dawned on me how much I use ‘friends as family’ as a trope in what I write. Hindsight is a funny thing. From that first book I wrote thirty novels ago to Death at a Scottish Wedding (Lucy Connelly), coming out in January, friends play an essential role in developing my m … | Continue reading
There is a magnificent bit in a Sherlock Holmes story, which—subconsciously in the beginning, I guess – gave me the inspiration for my first detective novel, Death Under a Little Sky. Holmes and Watson, that charming odd couple of nineteenth century fiction, are on a train, chewi … | Continue reading
The beauty of being asked to interview Chris McGinley about his new book Once These Hills was I knew I was going to read it anyway and knew I was going to read it as soon as it hit my hands. Chris is a writer of very specific passions—classic Appalachian literature and crime fict … | Continue reading
You hold in your hands one of Otto Penzler’s American Mystery Classics, a series that resurrects out-of-print gems in handsomely designed new editions. I owe this series a great debt because it introduced me to the work of one of my favorite mystery authors, John Dickson Carr. Ca … | Continue reading
Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * James Grippando, Goodbye Girl (Harper) “This is the eighteenth Swyteck novel since The Pardon (1994), and it’s just as good as the rest. Grippando keeps coming up with complex and timely cases, and th … | Continue reading
Kinshasa – capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Formerly Léopoldville under the bad days of Belgian colonialism, now one of the fastest growing megacities in the world with 16 million citizens and rising quickly – the most populous city in Africa, ahead of Lagos and … | Continue reading
Reissued for the first time this century, John Dickson Carr’s The Problem of the Wire Cage is an atmospheric and amusing Golden Age mystery with a memorable puzzle at its center. Dickson Carr is famous for his puzzling “impossible crime” plots in which corpses are discovered in s … | Continue reading
When I first came up with the idea for Five Bad Deeds, I didn’t imagine telling the story from so many different points of view. I had my main character, Ellen Walsh, all fleshed out, and Five Bad Deeds was supposed to be very much her story. However, best laid plans often go aw … | Continue reading
My last book about the mafia, Mob Rules: What the Mafia Can Teach the Legitimate Businessman, was an international bestseller translated into 20 languages. Because of the book’s global appeal, I was invited by the German media conglomerate Axel Springer to speak at their annual r … | Continue reading
Cornell Woolrich published Black Alibi in 1942. His tenth book overall, it was the third in his series of “Black” novels. The Bride Wore Black (1940), later adapted into a film by Francois Truffaut, led the sequence off, succeeded by The Black Curtain (1941), The Black Angel (194 … | Continue reading
I’m often asked, “Where do you get your ideas?” My answer always varies, as each book is different. But for my latest, Mister Lullaby, the idea was sparked by a luridly creepy picture of the Petite Ceinture, a once-thriving and now abandoned railway looping around the center of P … | Continue reading
Here in Avalon was never supposed to be about fairies. I’d envisioned the novel—a literary thriller about two sisters, one of whom, Cecilia, goes missing after getting involved with a mysterious interactive theatre troupe—as a straightforwardly Gothic cult story: complete with pl … | Continue reading
I’m a city girl, but I really enjoy reading stories set in state parks and forests and islands and other areas where there is less population, and the environment is as much of a character as the people. And the wildlife? Oh, yes, I want to meet them too. I write stories mostly s … | Continue reading
Who doesn’t love a superbly executed plot twist? One that completely takes you by surprise and turns the story on its head. One that makes you gasp out loud because you truly did not see it coming. There have been times when I have been totally blindsided by a twist and every tim … | Continue reading
You’ve seen the Amish culture in books, movies and even in exaggerated “reality shows.” Without electricity, automobiles, TV, radio or other modern conveniences, the Amish drive horse drawn buggies, use kerosene and candle light, and generally live a rural farming lifestyle. It’s … | Continue reading
The woods have been a popular setting in literature for centuries, from the Grimm Brothers to today’s bestsellers, but what makes a forest such a seductive setting for fiction? When I started putting together ideas for my second novel, What Waits in the Woods, I turned to this in … | Continue reading
If you are going to write a sensational, news-worthy crime story into your fiction, you have a few models for how to proceed. First, there is the Gone Girl model. Use a real-life crime as your inspiration—in Flynn’s case, the disappearance of Laci Peterson—and take liberties. Cha … | Continue reading
Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Vanessa Chan, The Storm We Made (Marysue Ricci/S&S) “An intricate puzzle in which [Chan] deftly moves narrative pieces in time and among viewpoints.” –Booklist Kate Brody, Rabbit Hole (Soho) “A gritty … | Continue reading
Will robots dream of us in the same way that we dream about them? They say that AI can “hallucinate”, right? Hadn’t Philip K. Dick warned us about all this many years ago? Maybe we weren’t paying enough attention then. Maybe we aren’t paying enough attention now. What a strange w … | Continue reading
For me, there are few things more enjoyable than a good, old-fashioned whodunnit. Or a good, new-fashioned whodunnit. I say it a lot on this website, but, to me, the best thing that can happen in a book or a movie is someone crying out: “someone in this house is a murderer!” Or, … | Continue reading
This year’s offering of scifi and fantasy crime fiction leans heavily towards alternative history and near-future imaginings, but with plenty of bizarre and magical detours into the just plain weird. Speculative fiction can be a catch-all phrase in literary circles for anything t … | Continue reading
The Christmas Egg, first published in 1958, is an unconventional Christmas crime novel by an unconventional writer. Mary Kelly was one of the most talented British novelists to write crime fiction in the post-war era, coming to the fore just before P.D. James and Ruth Rendell app … | Continue reading
Good and bad. Good. There were many good things in Daniel Kennicott’s life right now. He was entering his seventh year as a homicide detective and had advanced in record time to be one of the top officers on the Toronto homicide squad. After too many years of failed and near-miss … | Continue reading
This year’s top horror novels distinguished themselves not only through quality but with their use of metaphor to approach societal ills obliquely. Through the lens of horror, and the examination of monstrosity, we see the many ways that hatred, prejudice, and and the enforcement … | Continue reading