Over the course of seventeen Jack Taylor novels, Ken Bruen’s most celebrated creation has endured the following (small sample size, too): extreme hangovers, numerous beatings, the deaths of close friends, and those not so close, numerous children, including his own, and myriad ot … | Continue reading
What’s a puzzle plot mystery? In a “fair play” puzzle plot mystery, the author provides the reader with all the clues, allowing the reader to match wits with the detective. All the pieces of the puzzle are hidden in plain sight. The genre was at its height in the Golden Age of de … | Continue reading
Two historical fiction authors meet up for a cyber “cuppa” and imaginary scones with clotted cream to celebrate Women’s History Month and chat about the pleasures and pitfalls of writing historical fiction based on real life characters. The topics range from catching ghosts to re … | Continue reading
You ever watch a TV show or a movie and the characters are watching something that only exists in that universe? Like Rochelle, Rochelle in Seinfeld or M.I.L.F Island from 30 Rock or The Alan Brady Show in The Dick Van Dyke Show or Mock Trial with Judge Reinhold from Arrested Dev … | Continue reading
There is a flea-market in Oldsmar Florida – “Largest in the South” it claims – that I visit when I am in the area. At the end of one of the many outdoor aisles of the flea-market is a used bookstore. I have been to the flea-market, and this bookstore, often enough that the owner … | Continue reading
‘A traumatised person does not remember the trauma, but experiences it over and over again,’ writes the author and psychologist Paul Verhaege. The past is alive, and it takes its toll. Many years ago, we paid a visit to Jim Swire and his wife in their lovely, rambling house, whic … | Continue reading
I often wonder, what is it about a haunted house that truly scares us? Is it the sounds of tapping against window frames, a creaking door, or shadows that seem to dance along the periphery of our eyesight? These are just sounds, aren’t they? These are just sights, right? A noise … | Continue reading
There were no queer people in history. At least, that could be a reasonable take-away from pursuing one-star reviews of some of the best historical fiction novels out there. Perhaps the—very—slight uptick in LGBTQ+ representation in everything from World War II novels to Regency … | Continue reading
Jason De León’s second book is the result of an exemplary commitment to what he and fellow anthropologists call “deep hanging out.” In Soldiers and Kings: Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling, the UCLA professor and MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant recipient spend … | Continue reading
With crime readers ever worshipping at the stacks of dark academia (myself among them), is it any wonder that the category’s wicked pen has bled onto neighboring shelves? Its fatal quill planting itself into the backs of unwitting genres? In fact, if we wander just beyond dark ac … | Continue reading
Every writer likes to think they’re a psychologist. Inventing a character means having at least a cursory sense of their backstory, motivations, past traumas—the history that makes them unlike every other person in this world. By definition, writers are observers and people-watch … | Continue reading
Any study of Aphra Behn is really a study of shifting disguises and political guesswork. She is remembered in history as the first woman to make a living by writing in English, all the way back in the seventeenth century. Few know that she became a writer while exploring her firs … | Continue reading
Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Steve Cavanagh, Kill for Me Kill For You (Atria) “Explosive, game-changing reveals that, combined with an uncommon attunement to the central characters’ emotional arcs, make for a wild, deliciously sa … | Continue reading
If Chris Bohjalian were to write a memoir—or a manifesto on craft—it could be called: I was a teenage magician. It’s a history that has served him well. A master of misdirection, Bohjalian—the #1 New York Times bestselling author of more than twenty books including The Lioness an … | Continue reading
Who is a lady going to call if she’s been wronged by an insufferable rake in Victorian England? If the lady is the main character in a historical romance, a lady’s reputation—and the reader’s favorite tropes—call for the FPI. The Fictional Private Investigator. Unlike PIs in cont … | Continue reading
In The Hunter, her ninth novel, Irish-American author Tana French takes us back to the small West Ireland village that she introduced in The Searcher. Retired detective Cal Hooper has made a home in Ardnakelty at the foot of the mountain, away from police cases and the city bustl … | Continue reading
Remember Pizzagate? In 2016, a conspiracy theory that high-ranking Democrats were running a pedophile ring out of a D.C. pizzeria compelled a man to open fire inside the restaurant in an attempt to rescue the imprisoned children, who didn’t exist. The story dominated headlines fo … | Continue reading
As a writer of narratives, I’m leery of them. Especially historical ones. I’m not skeptical of events; I’m skeptical of wording and connective tissue. Of the clean causality. Take the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. (Seven men murdered in a garage, no one was ever convicted). Becau … | Continue reading
Here are some of the trickiest pitfalls to sidestep while crafting your novel. Remember, in each pitfall to be avoided is also an opportunity to be seized. Don’t set the stakes too low. Something vital has to be at risk. Anything from one person’s life to the survival of all huma … | Continue reading
At the turn of the twentieth century, American crime fiction was at a shallow ebb. Anna Katharine Green, who had achieved great success with The Leavenworth Case in 1887, continued to produce popular novels (and would do so until 1923), but the tastes of American readers of myste … | Continue reading
CrimeReads editors make their selections for the month’s best debut novels in crime, mystery, and thrillers. Andrew Boryga, Victim (Doubleday) In Boryga’s debut novel, Victim, a young hustler on the rise learns to manipulate the currency of identity as he bends the truth about hi … | Continue reading
In a late episode of Better Call Saul, Saul Goodman beseeches his wife Kim Wexler, “What’s done can be undone.” Caught up in a web of lies and deaths, and questioning what she has become along the way, Kim has relinquished her law license, and Saul implores her to undo her decisi … | Continue reading
Sometimes novels inadvertently reflect some aspect of the current zeitgeist, and Irish writer Claire Coughlan’s first one is this kind of story. Set in 1968 during the Christmas season, Where They Lie is a complex tale with a large cast—both living and dead—about the mysterious d … | Continue reading
I joined my first cult when I was…just kidding. Mostly. When I was born in the early 80s, my parents were part of a church in Virginia Beach, an area influenced by the likes of Pat Robertson and his Christian Broadcasting Network as well as Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker. These are t … | Continue reading
I don’t think of myself as a reader or writer of crime novels, and yet (knocking on my own skull to see if anyone’s inside) almost all of my novels do have a crime—or a strange disappearance or a person concealing their identity or a similar mystery. My latest novel, Discipline, … | Continue reading
“They had gold and my baby was sick.” —Mahin Qadiri About ninety-five miles northwest of the Iranian capital Tehran is the city of Qazvin. Located on the foothills of the Alborz Mountains, it has a population of more than four hundred thousand people. It’s a place rich in cultura … | Continue reading
Anyone who knows me, or has read my second book, or has stood too close to me at a bookstore knows I despise the concept of genre. I despise the tweed coat that genre wears when it decides what is literary and what is not. I despise the lab coat genre wears when it separates […] | Continue reading
I was 25 years old and had a novel written when someone named the feeling that has chased me my entire life. Survivor’s guilt. I sat on a Zoom call with someone I didn’t know, but who’d read my debut novel and used these two words to describe it like it was nothing more than […] | Continue reading
I’d been told to wait at the airport for an official car to arrive. There were always detailed, specific instructions in case the car was late or didn’t show up at all. Under no circumstance was I, a single, unescorted woman, to get into a “taxi.” That would be “provocative” beha … | Continue reading
In the labyrinthine world of crime fiction, few elements stir the plot’s pot as effectively as sibling bonds. The mercurial relationships between sisters and brothers carry lifetimes of camaraderie, shorthand, grudges, tiny triumphs, and shared histories. They can be crucibles fo … | Continue reading
When people first meet authors, they always ask the same question—how did you get started in this business? I’m a bit a rarity. Wrote my first novel at seventeen, sold it at twenty, hit the bestseller lists at twenty-eight. Trust me, if you’d told my 12-year old bookworm self, ar … | Continue reading
I am a pony. But not just any pony. I am a pony who is bent on revenge. I am the Iago of ponies, a furry Fury. I am both adorable and devious, and, until I get what I want, I’m going to make every human I meet pay for your collective crimes. I am […] | Continue reading
Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Lisa Gardner, Still See You Everywhere (Grand Central) “Gardner skillfully weaves threats into this pitch-perfect variation of the locked-room mystery, pitting ‘missing person finder’ Frankie Elkin ag … | Continue reading
Mention the word “thriller” in the same sentence as Washington, D.C., and most people conjure up fast-paced tales of spies, political intrigue, and military operations. Mystery and thriller writers like David Baldacci, Margaret Truman, Julie Hyzy, and Tom Clancy, to name just a f … | Continue reading
Seems things can be fun in Tijuana, Mexico – TJ to the initiated – but things can also go very, very wrong. Of course a popular destination being right on the US-Mexico border, with two million people, a population seriously swelled by sojourning day trippers and US college stude … | Continue reading
I loved Love Lies Bleeding, the otherworldly, lesbian body-horror drifter-thriller from director Rose Glass. As suggested by that long epithet, there is a lot going on in this movie, the volume of which makes the film’s thematic and even narrative succinctness all the more impres … | Continue reading
There ought to be a word for the particular form of melancholy you feel, upon finishing a book you’ve been enjoying so much you never wanted it to end. If there is such a word, in some language or other—I’m looking at you, German—then I experienced the extreme form late last ye … | Continue reading
If you’ve written a few chapters and are struggling to finish your book, I know exactly how you feel. Writing is tough work. You’re constantly stretching your imagination to spark ideas and put words on the page. The whole process is stressful, tiring, and makes you feel as if yo … | Continue reading
When an author begins a new novel, the blank computer screen presents a terrifying challenge and a few inevitable questions rise to the surface: How will zero words become one hundred thousand? How can one possibly create a riveting story out of thin air that will surprise and de … | Continue reading
I am a sucker for a murder ballad, so much so that I wrote an entire novel (The Last Verse) around my love of the form. I can remember the first time I heard Reba McEntire sing “the night the lights went out in Georgia” my skin broke out in goosebumps at the end of […] | Continue reading
As D-Day approached, German soldiers, sailors, and airmen who liked to smoke self-rolled cigarettes would have felt themselves most fortunate to pick up a free pack of Efka cigarette papers, with their familiar drawings of palm trees and pyramids, that someone had left behind on … | Continue reading
When you think of Gothic fiction, the image of a woman in a diaphanous nightgown, running from a sinister house might come to mind. A classic feature of paperback novels from the ‘60s, ‘70s, and ‘80s, these iconic covers convey several things at a glance: fear, sensuality, myster … | Continue reading
I’ve always liked my women a little bad. Give me the imperfect, the wrathful, the vindictive. In my opinion, those are the women who have the most fun. In my debut, Women of Good Fortune, three women decide to dismiss societal expectations and make their own fortunes. Reluctant b … | Continue reading
If your last name was Farto, would you want people nicknaming you Bum? Evidently Joseph “Bum” Farto didn’t mind it a bit, and that alone probably hints at his being a person of interest. Born in 1919 across the street from the Key West Fire Department, Bum Farto hired on as a f … | Continue reading
A town of seemingly perfect housewives. A severed ear in a patch of green grass. The last man alive hiding from his monstrous neighbors. A family ostracized from the community after their sugar bowl is poisoned. From Ira Levin’s The Stepford Wives and David Lynch’s Blue Velvet to … | Continue reading
Clothes are a storyteller’s dream when it comes to showing, not telling. In Patricia Highsmith’s 1950s novel, The Price of Salt, Therese Belivet describes what Carol is wearing even before she mentions her future lover’s eyes, or mouth, or languorous walk. (“She was tall and fair … | Continue reading
“The trial of Polly Bodine will take place at Richmond, on Monday next, and will, no doubt, excite much interest,” wrote Edgar Allan Poe on June 18, 1844, for the Columbia Spy. Poe had recently moved to New York where, he declared, “I intend living for the future.” He got a tempo … | Continue reading
One time my brother almost saw a ghost. He was in New Orleans, in an ancient bar, during a bachelor party weekend, I think. To be honest, I can’t quite remember all the details because this story was very long and he clearly didn’t have an ending in mind when he began telling a r … | Continue reading