Patrick Winn’s Narcotopia: In Search of the Asian Drug Cartel that Survived the CIA tells an epic story that almost nobody knows. An American reporter living in Southeast Asia, Winn introduces readers to Wa State, which has spent a half-century building a thriving economy centere … | Continue reading
Haven’t we all felt a little murderous when we’ve missed our train? Crime novelists certainly do. There’s a legacy of murder mysteries taking place on various forms of transport – from classics such as Agatha Christie’s train-set Murder on the Orient Express to new blockbusters l … | Continue reading
The bad guys of 1970s fashion were as practiced at slaughtering reputations with a few casual sentences as any gunslinger armed with a pistol in a Main Street showdown. For instance, here are some pearls of questionable wisdom from John Fairchild, the editor-in-chief and publishe … | Continue reading
As the world gets worse, the speculative fiction gets ever better (and maybe that’s just because we’ve finally acknowledged that we’re already living in a dystopia). The novels in this list lean heavily towards the speculative future but there’s plenty of high-concept fantasy, st … | Continue reading
Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Lorenzo Carcaterra, Nonna Maria and the Case of the Stolen Necklace (Bantam) “A streetwise Italian Miss Marple is a shrewd amateur sleuth in this atmospheric series installment.” –Library Journal Ande … | Continue reading
Galveston, Texas – named after an 18th-century Spanish military leader, port of the one-time Texas Navy, an entry point for African slaves and European immigrants. Known as the “Queen City of the Gulf” until 1900 when a hurricane all but destroyed the entire place, one of the dea … | Continue reading
Nature can be a harsh partner for the novelist. Trying to integrate it into a passage or entire plot is a daunting effort that doesn’t always succeed. I don’t refer to snapshots of snow-capped mountains or purple sunsets tacked onto a scene for casual color, but rather the more a … | Continue reading
After the greed of studio bosses led to what The Simpsons would call a “scary couple of hours,” crime and mystery TV is back this year in a big way, from a chilly new season of True Detective to Clive Owen as a retired Sam Spade to Sofia Vergara as legendary cocaine queenpin Gris … | Continue reading
Once a place of movie-making fantasy, a decaying movie set became the starting point for vengeance on Hollywood. Known as “Spahn Ranch,” this crumbling and deserted Western soundstage was the ramshackle home and headquarters for what eventually became known as “The Family.” The m … | Continue reading
In the world of crime fiction (and fact) Adam Plantinga is an authority figure. A twenty-two-year veteran of law enforcement, he began his career with the Milwaukee Police Department in 2001 and has spent the last fifteen years with the San Francisco PD, where he is a sergeant as … | Continue reading
You can tell me anything. When you’re in this room, and we’re sitting across from each other, and your mind is reeling with all the bad things you’ve done to people, and all the bad things they’ve done to you, you can let it all out into the air between us. All the weird sex […] | Continue reading
When I was writing The Djinn Waits a Hundred Years, a novel of haunting love and loss set in an Indian community on the east coast of South Africa, it didn’t immediately occur to me that it was a gothic novel. Looking back, it seems obvious—it had all the conventional genre trope … | Continue reading
People sometimes ask me why I write cozy mysteries. It’s not a hard question to answer. At least I didn’t think so the first time I was asked. My response was I wrote cozies because that’s what I read. Yet that’s only partially true. I also read other types of crime fiction. But … | Continue reading
So, you got locked up? No wonder you look like shit,” said Paul. “I better fix that,” said Bimbo. “Don’t want folks thinking I’m related to you.” The crew was back together, and so was the banter. We were sitting under some red paper lights and an AC vent that had been collecting … | Continue reading
Hercule Poirot hasn’t been brought to the screen as many times as Sherlock Holmes has, but he’s certainly had his fair share of portrayals, throughout the years. He’s been everywhere, from radio to the big screen to the small screen to the stage. The rules: as usual, with these t … | Continue reading
A look at the month’s best debuts in crime fiction, mystery, and thriller. * Vanessa Chan, The Storm We Made (S&S/Marysue Ricci Books) In one of the best espionage novels I’ve ever come across, a bored Malaya housewife lets a Japanese spy charm her into giving up the secrets nece … | Continue reading
Most people know that Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is a result of trauma, but unless you’ve lived with it, it’s hard to really understand what it’s like. Everyday experiences and objects become terrifying. Having PTSD is like living in a haunted house, but the ghosts are … | Continue reading
For a character whose screen adventures always end with, “James Bond will return,” it’s interesting how much of a struggle it has been to try to make the literary character undertake a new adventure on the page. In many ways, the fact that Bond ever graced the page again after th … | Continue reading
In 2015 I decided to write a magical realism western despite knowing nothing about magical realism or westerns. I wanted to fictionalize the story of my great-grandfather, Antonio Gonzalez, who was a bandido in the late 1800s, was shot in the face by the Texas Rangers and left fo … | Continue reading
Spade had no original. He is a dream man in the sense that he is what most of the private detectives I worked with would like to have been and what quite a few of them in their cockier moments thought they approached. For your private detective does not – or did not ten years […] | Continue reading
As it does for many, my obsession with Agatha Christie started young. I was ten or so when I picked up my first Christie, fresh off a self-prescribed course of Greek mythology. Had someone asked me then to explain why reading a murder mystery from the heart of the twentieth centu … | Continue reading
The dark months call for dark stories. There’s nothing more delicious than to curl up under a blanket with a hot cocoa (or hot toddy!) and read a fast-paced thriller, twisty mystery, or creepy psychological thriller. If this Queer Crime Writers* round-up is any indicator, 2024 is … | Continue reading
Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Janice Hallett, The Mysterious Case of the Alperton Angels (Atria) “[M]any-layered, highly complex, and imaginative… Hallett shocks readers with satisfying twists and a dark, unpredictable ending… Tru … | Continue reading
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