As we’ve long been proclaiming on this website, we are in a Whodunnit Renaissance. Smart, clever mystery series are popping up left and right, and they are giving us the opportunity to see many delightful actors in the role of “detective.” I’m not an actor, but even I know that p … | Continue reading
What really happened? That question lies at the heart of so many crime novels, and yet the answer, that very truth, can often depend on who’s telling the story and the truth they believe. Authors employ various story structures to dole out information in a way that keeps the ques … | Continue reading
Recently, one of my favorite authors—who I am also lucky to call a friend—published her first work of crime fiction for adults after putting out seven young adult mysteries and thrillers. I devoured Kara Thomas’s Out of the Ashes last spring, and with the upcoming release of my o … | Continue reading
I didn’t realize I’d written a crime novel until after I’d signed a book deal. How does that happen, you might ask? Surely a writer has his or her genre well and truly mapped out before they pick up the pen, right? In my case, not so much. It was only once I began whipping […] | Continue reading
The weather had turned dark and cold; no snow, but a pelting of quick-freezing rain that made roads impassable. Schools everywhere cancelled and I—at fifteen—was tasked with keeping the woodfire burning as our only means of heating the underground house we called home. Living in … | Continue reading
Those of us who write series novels generally spend a lot of time thinking about our characters’ background—where do they come from, what is their education, their taste in food and music, what jobs have they held? Some writers work out entire biographies of the characters, fille … | Continue reading
Having traveled fairly extensively in my life, I’ve garnered quite a slew of past tristes with destinations. Some I ditched after the first date—cutting a trip short as soon as I realized we weren’t compatible—others turned into more long-term connections, even prompting me to mo … | Continue reading
I first saw Sliding Doors on VHS in 1999, the year after it released in theaters. I was eighteen and seeking my way back from my first real heartbreak. Mere days after an amicable split with my boyfriend, a slow drifting apart that was more bittersweet than painfully acute, he ha … | Continue reading
This month’s psychological thrillers are divided between white-knuckle tension and laugh-out-loud social commentary. Some are close to horror in their high stakes and visceral violence; others use murder as a jumping off point to explore ordinary emotions in a dramatic environmen … | Continue reading
May 1932 Charlie Chaplin was visiting Japan with a group that included his brother Sydney Chaplin, and Chaplin’s Japanese personal secretary, Toraichi Kono. Chaplin had been to Japan a decade earlier for work, when he and Fatty Arbuckle performed in a silent comedy show. This tim … | Continue reading
I was fifteen when I was introduced to my first serial killer. It was 1991 and I was sneaking into the cinema to watch The Silence of the Lambs. I was already obsessed with all things FBI, having binged on cult classic, Twin Peaks, but it wasn’t until I was watching Harris’s terr … | Continue reading
Mickey Cohen walked under the drooping fronds of a large palm tree toward the Clover Club at 8477 Sunset Boulevard with a shotgun tucked under his coat. The place was owned by restaurateur Eddie Nealis, and its management catered to film studio executives and Hollywood’s top star … | Continue reading
Aya de Leon interviews Breanne McIvor about her debut novel, The God of Good Looks, which has recently been nominated for an NAACP Image Award. The God of Good Looks features a rivals-to-lovers romance between two beauty influencers against the backdrop of shenanigans and high-ji … | Continue reading
Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Sarah Ochs, The Resort (Sourcebooks) “An escapist up-all-night thriller that holds you under and doesn’t let you surface for air.” –Lucy Clarke Brandy Schillace, The Framed Women of Ardemore House (Ha … | Continue reading
This isn’t exactly the hottest take you’ll come across today…but crime is bad. Even experiencing a minor crime is pretty terrible. But that doesn’t mean you can’t have fun with it! No wait, I said that wrong. That sucks. Sorry. Let me start over. So much of crime fiction can be a … | Continue reading
Imagine yourself stepping back in time a hundred years, traveling to London. North of the Thames, the wealth lived amid the beautiful gardens, fancy department stores, and night clubs. South of the winding waterway that divides London in two, the neighborhoods weren’t so posh. La … | Continue reading
Mary Shelley did not grow up with a mother; she grew up with a dead mother. Her mother, the eighteenth-century writer Mary Wollstonecraft, had died giving birth to her in August 1797. Her father, the writer William Godwin, was so brokenhearted that he found it hard to be around y … | Continue reading
When it finally happens, they’re too nervous to enjoy the upcoming crash. This is what they wanted, the onset of symptoms. It’s like meeting someone new. There’s fear there, folding into every action. They worry and they wonder what might happen. Olivia wakes up around 7 in the m … | Continue reading
This year’s crop of excellent upcoming horror novels includes folk horror, wilderness thrillers, slashers in space, serial killers in the city, and a wide variety of supernatural entities. There’s plenty of queer romance and some well-earned queer vengeance. The gothic continues … | Continue reading
Research is an important part of the writer’s life — especially for writers like me who haven’t worked in any of my characters professions. My general rule-of-thumb is if a fact is plot critical, I will strive to get that detail right. Such as, if a body is discovered in the wood … | Continue reading
Writing a long-running series is a challenging undertaking. With each new book, the goal is to stretch the boundaries, to keep expanding the possibilities for the characters – and do that without breaking the rules of the series. Because every series has rules. Some of them a … | Continue reading
Relaunching a famous series is always a dicey proposition, especially if a new set of creatives are taking over for the original author. Think of all the writers tasked with writing new James Bond or Jason Bourne novels—it’s easy to replicate a prose style, harder to capture the … | Continue reading
I hadn’t planned to go anywhere that night. Tara made mac and cheese on the stove and I watched Octonauts with Mason until she called us in for dinner. It was just the three of us: me, my son, and his grandma. Mason’s dad, Roman, was in the city, and Tara’s fiancé, John, was work … | Continue reading
I Mr. and Mrs. Smith (2024) opens almost exactly the same way Mr. and Mrs. Smith (2005) closes, with two cornered spies and lovers deciding to quit running and fight the world together. There is one difference: in Donald Glover and Francesca Sloane’s reimagining of Doug Liman’s f … | Continue reading
Thirty years ago, the first Mary Russell book (do not call it a Sherlock Holmes book, or, for heaven’s sake, a pastiche), was published. It was a cause for celebration then, and a cause for celebration now, especially with the 18th book, The Lantern’s Dance, now on our doorstep. … | Continue reading
I don’t want to kill again. It’s just too stressful. My first major kill was of a family: father and two daughters drowned in a flash flood. I got a lot of flack for that from friends and family members with small children, all of whom seemed to take it personally. Next, there wa … | Continue reading
I grew up reading a combination of crime (both true and fictional), horror, and satisfyingly dense, meaty literary fiction about families by the likes of Dickens, Jonathan Franzen and Elizabeth Jane Howard. In some ways, though stylistically divergent, I feel that all these genre … | Continue reading
Three East 236th Street is a trim little house on the eastern border of the park, just north of where the old Mosholu Parkway once emerged from the woods. In the winter of 1931, a middle-aged man named Emanuel Kamna lived there with his wife, in-laws, and two daughters. He had en … | Continue reading
The Athenian General Alcibiades, a former student of Socrates, determines that he should reopen the road to the Temple of Eleusis and guard the sacred procession. The Spartans, however, still occupy the road, blocking the way from Athens to the temple of Eleusis… This endeavor to … | Continue reading
I once heard a joke that went something like: A man tells God, “I think my role should be to protect my family.” God says, “Great! Since infection is one of the most common risks to children, that means you’ll sanitize your kids’ bottles, change their diapers, find a pediatrician … | Continue reading
Authenticity is a big issue in literature. Who wants to read a fake? Nadie. Nobody! Now, when discussing English texts, the topic of authenticity tends to focus on how to express in this language events or dialogues that happen in another. My previous piece, “Writing with an Acce … | Continue reading
William Randolph Hearst was among the most important American titans Churchill hoped to add to his network. His twenty-eight newspapers reached 10 percent of the American population on weekdays, 20 percent on Sundays, and dominated West Coast markets, giving him an enormous influ … | Continue reading
For more than three decades I have worked in prisons, in secure units in hospitals, and in the community, acting in both assessment and treatment roles and working with female and male patients. I initially trained in clinical psychology, using treatment models including cognitiv … | Continue reading
When the fine folks of Boston think about organized crime in their fair city, if they think about the subject at all, they think of Whitey Bulger. Or maybe Johnny Depp playing Whitey Bulger. They think of the Patriarca crime family, also called the Boston Mafia, most of whose mem … | Continue reading
Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Hank Phillippi Ryan, One Wrong Word (Forge) “Smart, propulsive, and unique…One Wrong Word grabbed me on the first page and didn’t let go. Ryan never fails to amaze me.” –Mary Kubica Nick Petrie, The P … | Continue reading
The megalopolis of Chennai Formerly known as Madras, and capital of Tamil-Nadu, the most southerly state of India on the Coromandel Coast. India’s sixth biggest city with over 12 million people. Home to terrific hot curries, and also known as India’s healthiest and safest city – … | Continue reading
Lately, I’ve been in the mood to watch Throne of Blood, the Japanese jidaigeki film directed by Akira Kurosawa. Maybe it’s the wind or the chill in the air or the mysterious fog enveloping Manhattan, but I’ve been longing to be transported, eerily transfixed in the way that Thron … | Continue reading
I first met Katie Gutierrez at the Edgar Awards ceremony in the spring of 2023. I was impressed by her honesty and her kindness. I didn’t know much about her work at that point. I had no clue her debut novel, More Than You’ll Ever Know, had been selected as a Good Morning Americ … | Continue reading
In an early scene in the first episode of “Slow Horses,” the British spy thriller series streaming on Apple TV+, a stack of newspapers is delivered to the run-down Slough House office of MI5, the British intelligence agency. The print papers seem as obsolete as the cast-off, scre … | Continue reading
“Whatever happens, don’t be a hero.” Trance’s opening close-up is of a Rembrandt: not only the artist’s painting Storm on the Sea of Galilee but, as the narrator alleges, a cameo the painter included of himself within its pastels. Ostensibly at the stern of the beleaguered vessel … | Continue reading
In fiction, architecture has the ability to both contrive a novel’s setting and to participate as a character. When I began work on my novel A Brutal Design, it was Brutalism—a fitfully popular architectural style born in the 1950s and characterized by hulking, exposed concrete—t … | Continue reading
When asked what it was like to publish her first novel, bestselling author Lisa Gardner immediately replies, “Which time?” After all, Gardner started her career at seventeen, writing category romances before breaking out big ten years later with her first thriller—the career her … | Continue reading
Crime fiction sometimes seems like a solo sport: one man or woman coming up against the forces of confusion and chaos and fighting through them to identify a solution. We start in disorder and end in (some version of) order. At least that was my assumption, before I read Chester … | Continue reading
Bess I lost him. I let go of his hand to retie my laces and I lost him. My foot was loose in my shoe, I wasn’t about to waste time taking it off, and I couldn’t be falling over now. Damn laces. I could have sworn I’d tied a double knot before leaving. […] | Continue reading
Which of us didn’t wish, as a child, that we might be invisible for the day? What fun we might have had: eavesdropping on the adults, sneaking into rooms where we weren’t usually welcome, standing behind teachers as they wrote questions for the next day’s test. I never did get to … | Continue reading
The first time I heard the gorgeous swoon that is the song “Sea of Love” was in 1984 when former Led Zeppelin vocalist Robert Plant formed the throwback band The Honeydrippers (a one-off group that included guitarist/co-producer Nile Rogers, keyboardist Paul Shaffer, bassist Wayn … | Continue reading
When the initial idea for These Deadly Prophecies was born, I had no idea how to go about penning a murder mystery. This was a tad bit of a problem, since These Deadly Prophecies is, at its core, a whodunnit. A particularly bloody one, even! And here I was, its author, utterly un … | Continue reading
A look at the month’s best reviewed books in crime, mystery, and thrillers. * Lea Carpenter, Ilium (Knopf) “While Carpenter knows how to dish out the dread that a spy story needs, what makes Ilium intriguing are the characters … This is the sort of moral ambiguity that seems to f … | Continue reading