In February 1891, hoping to help his brothers find steady work, Bill Dalton wrote a letter to the superintendent of the nearby Muller and Lux Ranch, having heard it was hiring. After that was confirmed, Bill borrowed a horse and saddle from one of his hired men for Grat and two s … | Continue reading
My new book, The Proof of the Pudding, is the 17th in the series featuring Lady Georgiana, 35th in line to the throne in the nineteen thirties. When I started this series in 2006 I couldn’t have imagined that it would still be going strong and have readers around the world in 9 l … | Continue reading
For more than a century we’ve been addicted to a particular flavor of murder mystery story. A group of wealthy, upper-class people are gathered together in a country house. There’s a butler, people dress for dinner and talk about fox-hunting or how frightfully vulgar Lady Stuffin … | Continue reading
I teach creative writing at a public arts high school in Chicago. If you’re picturing Fame, with students breaking into song and dance in the hallways, you’re not far off. But for all the joy they bring to the classroom, my students often want to write about characters who have b … | Continue reading
Hold, friend. I only have fifteen hundred words to save your life. You and I are bound in a bargain spanning hundreds of years, across dozens of types of media and thousands of artists. There’s a monster hiding in these words, ripping through the sentences and syllables, trying t … | Continue reading
He glances at his watch, then takes off the janitor uniform and changes into a suit. Gets in the taxi, drives back to the airport. He’ll ride the train from there. Should be quicker. By the time he arrives at the front gate of the school, his watch shows ten minutes past two. Mad … | Continue reading
When I was dreaming up the plot of my latest young adult thriller, The Revenge Game, I posed the following research question to my social media followers: “It’s hard to phrase, but did you ever experience kids at school/camp participating in, like, sexual conquest competitions? E … | Continue reading
Hotels are an excellent setting for mystery novels. With so many people arriving from all different walks of life, it’s an ample backdrop to provide a variety of suspects and motives. My first two books (The Socialite’s Guide to Murder and The Socialite’s Guide to Death & Dating) … | Continue reading
Talk to anyone who has edited an anthology, planned a Noir at the Bar, or even just tried to figure out where to go for dinner, and you’ll get the same sentiment—where writers are concerned, organizing anything is like herding cats. Except it really isn’t true. I mean, it is true … | Continue reading
I’m what you might call a mini-adventurer. I’ve climbed rockfaces, rafted rivers, backpacked into the wilderness and once slithered through a cave tunnel so tight that the only way through was to lie flat, turn my head sideways and push with my toes. I’ve never done anything as d … | Continue reading
I’ve always loved crime novels and westerns. I’ve written dozens of crime novels, but not any westerns. Or so I thought. A few years ago, at a book signing event for one of my “Eve Ronin” series of police procedurals, a reader told me I was her favorite western author, which I … | Continue reading
Walter Schellenberg had few redeeming personal attributes and could easily be characterized as just another career Nazi. He owed his lofty position as head of German intelligence to the patronage of Heinrich Himmler, and he remained personally loyal to the Reichsführer until the … | Continue reading
How could there not be a lot of crime in Monaco – a tightly packed nest of wealth, sex and power all in the sunshine of the Riviera. Officially the Principality of Monaco, with its main conurbation being Monte Carlo, set between France and Italy on the Mediterranean. Roughly 40,0 … | Continue reading
Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Raquel V. Reyes, Barbacoa, Bomba, and Betrayal (Crooked Lane) “Crime and cuisine really do mix.” –Kirkus Reviews Ausma Zehanat Khan, Blood Betrayal (Minotaur) “Richly drawn characters and nuanced depi … | Continue reading
I am a book pusher. Think Tina Fey in Mean Girls at her desk chomping a chocolate doughnut and explaining, “Because I’m a pusher. I push people.” For me, it’s toward books I love, and especially, books I love by authors of underrepresented groups telling their stories their way. … | Continue reading
Halloween season has always been steeped in sisterly magic. Think of the Sanderson sisters in Hocus Pocus or the Owens sisters in Practical Magic. They set the stage for powerful supernatural stories in the 90s, and we adored them. That’s because there is magic in stories about s … | Continue reading
In 1990, Jens Soering and Elizabeth Haysom were found guilty of the murders of Haysom’s parents. Haysom, who testified against Soering, claimed that he had committed the crime alone, but at her urging. Soering initially confessed to this, but then quickly recanted his confession: … | Continue reading
The weather has been exceptionally mild of late but in this Christmas season every party demands a good blaze and good cheer. What with the fire and the punch bowl and mounting excitement, they are all already too warm; the children pink-cheeked, the ladies, both young and older, … | Continue reading
It wasn’t a surprise to those who knew me as a child that when I start telling stories for a living, they were centered around the forensic and crime investigation world. I started my forensic training almost at birth. My father was a medical examiner for three counties in north … | Continue reading
For decades American novelist and playwright Edna Sherry, author between 1948 and 1965 of nine crime novels, has essentially been viewed as a one-work writer, based on the terrific success of her nail-biting 1948 crime novel Sudden Fear, or more truly its hair-raising 1952 film a … | Continue reading
Vanessa Lillie says she’s “an impatient reader,” a trait that influences her writing: “I really like to create characters who are aggressively seeking justice, even when it puts their lives in danger.” This is a dead-on description of Syd Walker, the courageous protagonist of Lil … | Continue reading
I missed my chance to be in a cult. In my twenties, a guy on the street handed me a pamphlet to join a “communal farm”—an obvious cult. Nevertheless, I was intrigued: maybe I could enjoy this farm’s bucolic vibes and free love, while shrewdly avoiding any mass suicide, or baby-ea … | Continue reading
Sudden Death is a dirty business. It touches you, and there’s no rubbing it off. Scrub until you bleed. No dice—it remains. Maybe that’s why I keep writing about it. A Southern California summer in ‘93. I remember blades of grass on the bottoms of my feet. Morning dew between my … | Continue reading
There are a number of authors who perilously straddle the line between the crime genre and literary fiction. They avoid easy genre definition and are often read more by contemporary fiction fans than diehard crime readers. It’s often simply a matter of bookshop shelving where the … | Continue reading
When I first picked up crime thrillers as a teenager, I remember being fascinated by how many plots begin with the discovery of a dead girl. What was it exactly that I found so intriguing about these novels, considering I was often in the same age demographic as many of their vic … | Continue reading
I’m hardly the first author to call herself a perfectionist. In fact, I’m sure many of us were once described as “a pleasure to have in class”—which, for me, meant straight As, crippling social anxiety, and a paralyzing fear of getting in trouble. My literary role models were Nan … | Continue reading
My parents moved to Paris in France for work when I was only three years old. As a result, not only did I become bilingual (and was once capable of writing in both languages) but I spent much of my first two decades navigating between France and England as a result. In my early t … | Continue reading
I wish so badly that I could have seen The Invisible Man in 1933 when it premiered in theaters. The film is a carnival of early special effects, a parade of parlor tricks and stage magic and photographic tricks. To see it for the first time, unburdened by the knowledge of a centu … | Continue reading
A look at the month’s best reviewed new novels in crime, mystery, and thrillers. From Bookmarks. * Elizabeth Hand, A Haunting on the Hill (Mulholland Books) “An exciting and risky venture … Fans of Elizabeth Hand…will want to hear her particular voice, and her uncanny ability to … | Continue reading
Believe it or not, the first time many young queers feel seen in media isn’t in some sweet romcom, it’s in horror. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a queer character in the horror story who makes them feel comforted, or empowered, or even validated. It’s the final girl. It’s the … | Continue reading
At Halloween, fear is an emotion that is universally celebrated, but for me, terror has been an ever-present source of inspiration for fiction. My fears are vast, ever-encroaching, sensual. Claustrophobia, subterranean cities, the idea of being buried alive. Falling from a great … | Continue reading
OC Scoop Attention, Kingsley fans: your favorite family is back in the limelight! That’s right—hot off the presses in this month’s issue of Vanity Fair is a four-page spread featuring the fabulous new president of Kingsley Global Enterprises, the OC’s very own Paige Kingsley. We … | Continue reading
In his foreword to Adam Nayman’s “David Fincher: Mind Games,” director Bong Joon-ho explains his personal dichotomy for classifying films, dividing them into “curvilinear” (like those of Federico Fellini and Emir Kusturica) and “linear” (like those of Stanley Kubrick and David Fi … | Continue reading
When we worked together in the fundraising office of a third-rate law school in San Diego, my friend Melissa and I used to joke that we should write a sitcom about the uniquely terrible world of working for nonprofits. Imagine The Office, but instead of sales meetings and cute in … | Continue reading
Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Adriana Chartrand, An Ordinary Violence (House of Anansi) “Creepy and unsettling, this assured debut addresses the ways violence, grief, and unprocessed trauma reverberate over years, keeping fracture … | Continue reading
‘People believe what they want to believe,’ wrote David to one of his lovers. ‘ALWAYS.’ he was referring to the ‘revelation’ that Graham Greene had continued working for British intelligence into his seventies. ‘No good me telling them that GG was far too drunk to remember anythi … | Continue reading
Despite all that Mimi Jackson knew, the chicken fajitas still looked good. Smelled good, too. She watched the dark-haired waiter balance three plates on one arm as he hustled past her table and the five other women she’d invited to La Huerta. They were wives of Detmer Foods plant … | Continue reading
Adapting a property like Goosebumps, R.L. Stine’s beloved series of children’s horror novels, for the big (or small) screen in 2023 is a tricky proposition. Each of the sixty-two books in the original run, apart from a handful of sequels, stands alone, so an anthology format, lik … | Continue reading
Jane Austen died on July 18, 1817, at the ridiculously premature age of forty-one, in the ancient royal and ecclesiastic city of Winchester, where she had gone in a desperate attempt to treat and survive what medical historians suspect was either Addison’s Disease or pancreatic c … | Continue reading
FRIDAY, JULY 15 NEWPORT BEACH, CALIFORNIA Paige My heart fills with a sinking feeling, a weight I can’t shake. That’s the only way I can describe it to my husband, Ted. He’s driving and I’m trying to be calm. It’s not working. “I suppose that’s apropos of something, sweetie, give … | Continue reading
The CrimeReads editors select their favorite debut novels this month. * Raul Palma, A Haunting in Hialeah Gardens (Dutton) Palma’s debut is a sparkling gem of a novel, a world-weary portrait of cynicism and despair upended and upended again. A recent widower in Miami with an inde … | Continue reading
1Why makes a spooky novella so satisfying? You might as well ask why a raven is like a writing desk. (The answer, of course, is that all three things remind me of my own mortality.) All riddles aside, the novella is, at best, a slippery beast. The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writ … | Continue reading
–Originally delivered as the Annual Speech (28 June 2023) for the Dorothy L. Sayers Society, edited. Exactly a hundred years ago this October, Dorothy L Sayers published Whose Body? It launched her career as an illustrious author of eleven novels featuring Lord Peter Wimsey that … | Continue reading
While mysteries can usually be trusted to compel the reader within the first chapter or even the first few pages, it’s rare for them to hook us from the first paragraph. But West Heart Kill, Dann McDorman’s clever debut, achieves this with intriguing tongue-in-cheek confidence. T … | Continue reading
John le Carré (born David Cornwell) hated giving interviews. “First you invent yourself, then you believe the invention”, he wrote in his autobiography The Pigeon Tunnel. Despite these reservations, Le Carré/Cornwell ended up participating in a documentary about his life. Surpris … | Continue reading
Filmmaker Alan Rudolph has been working in the movie business for most of his life. Coming from a Hollywood family where his dad Oscar was also a director, Rudolph began his career as an assistant director on various projects including the Jim Brown/Gene Hackman flick Riot (1969) … | Continue reading
It’s hard to think of a $21 million dollar motion picture as a “cult movie” but that’s what Brian DePalma’s 1983 Scarface almost became until it was saved by an audience that the filmmakers never had in mind. A cult movie is nothing to be ashamed of; The Rocky Horror Picture Show … | Continue reading
Two things jumped out at me back when I started watching the first season of Lupin, Netflix’s wildly successful show about a ‘gentleman thief’ in Paris who spends his days plotting heists and piecing together a scheme for righteous revenge. One, the show had some far-fetched mome … | Continue reading