Let me be very obvious at the start and say: a murder victim can’t tell you who the killer is. Locked-room mysteries are puzzling because the only person you’re sure was in the room is the one person you can’t ask for testimony. That’s also what makes locked-room plots such chall … | Continue reading
We’ve always been fascinated by the blurry boundary between what we call sanity and what we call madness. We think about it in our books and we think about it in our lives. All of us need sadness in our lives. It’s part of what makes us human. In Keats’ great poem on melancholy, … | Continue reading
Bunny Simpson picked a shirt off the floor and stuffed it into his bag. His boss at the cigarette store had just warned him that a pair of Denver police detectives had been looking for him. They had his DMV photo printed out and everything. “Plainclothes,” she said like the lack … | Continue reading
I first came to know you when I read your book, Sisters & Lovers, nearly 30 years ago(!!!) and I have been a fan ever since. When I heard you were now delving into romantic suspense, I thought it was a perfect co-mingling of genres for you. And now that I have read this terrific … | Continue reading
Mystery fans love ingenious misdirection in their plots, and novels can be even more mysterious when the setting itself adds layers of intrigue. Creepy old buildings have a long history in mystery fiction, and the novels I’m diving into today use architecture as a key part of the … | Continue reading
I arrived at an open gate, which invited me down a long driveway. It concluded in a dramatic semi-circle, crowned by a Tudor-style mansion. A lake gleamed behind it. There was a pergola for guests’ cars. I wondered if I should park there—was I a guest?—or at the edge of the circl … | Continue reading
When you think about a heart-pounding book, you might look for a murder mystery or for a romance. Both, after all, will make your heart beat faster… just in different ways. So, why not combine the two genres? I did exactly that in my new book, but I’m certainly not the first one … | Continue reading
Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Patrick Hoffman, Friends Helping Friends |(Atlantic) “Hoffman brings shades of Elmore Leonard to this charming caper, with a comedic touch that enlivens the proceedings from start to finish. It’s a ri … | Continue reading
Imagine yourself in a world lit only by gas street lamps, a world buried in smog and patrolled by pickpockets and violent criminals. In this world, it can seem like justice and fairness are imaginary concepts; the police force is still a relatively new (and untrusted) concept, fo … | Continue reading
As a society, we rely on our government and those in power to keep us safe. What happens when the people we’ve entrusted to care for us fail in their responsibilities, or worse, actively cause us harm? It’s a question that warrants our attention and also one that can make for gri … | Continue reading
Criminals, real and celluloid, don’t seem to take off holidays. In real life, holidays provide great cover for crime; and in movies, they add an additional layer to the story. Whatever the reason, crime and holidays often go together. Easter seems to be particularly popular among … | Continue reading
Johann Christian Bach would bear no excuses, accept no remonstrance. He would send his carriage to fetch me as the sun went down, I would be bundled up and cared for and returned safe and sound and victorious to Thrift Street after dinner with the Earl of Thanet and his wife at D … | Continue reading
Lethal Weapon is fine! It’s good! But it could be so much more. There’s a lot going on in the movie and some of it’s too much and some of it’s not enough. But its nucleus is pretty perfect; at its core, Lethal Weapon is an undeniable Yin-Yang buddy-cop story featuring two leads w … | Continue reading
There’s nothing more delicious than getting to the end of a mystery only to have the author expertly pull the rug out from under. Done well, an ending that reframes the entire book and turns everything we think we just learned on its head is both dizzying and invigorating, sendin … | Continue reading
Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote, “Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.” There’s a unique power to a story that lies close to reality; a “just tomorrow” scenario that can prompt us to wonder how much of this tale might unfold in our own lifetime, and more importantly, why. … | Continue reading
Gary Larson’s The Far Side comic strip (if you can call it a strip… it was always single-panel) ran in syndication throughout American newspapers from December 31, 1979, to January 1, 1995. I was too young to read it in the paper, but I read every single cartoon in the giant, two … | Continue reading
Your monthly dose of thrills, chills, and necessary distractions has arrived! Here are five riveting psychological thrillers that will keep you reading late into the night. Susan Meissner, The Map to Paradise (Berkley) A blacklisted actress with too much time on her hands teams u … | Continue reading
The crime was a shapeshifter from the start. But in the early hours of March 13, 1964, its parameters seemed clear enough. A rape and murder. Harrowing, but not outside the purview of our darkest imaginings. A young woman, Kitty Genovese, coming home from work at 2:30 a.m. after … | Continue reading
In my debut novel, Creep, the protagonist, Alice, ruminates on the significance of three: “Third time’s a charm, I am told: there are always triples in stories of old: bears, billy goats, blind mice, benevolent fairies – three acts.” It’s appropriate, perhaps that, at thirty-five … | Continue reading
This year marks the twenty-sixth anniversary of Law and Order: SVU, which has aired continuously since September 20, 1999. The hour-long drama features the Special Victims Unit of the New York Police Department, who are charged with investigating sensitive, “especially heinous” c … | Continue reading
The protagonist of Search Party, a ruminative yet rudderless young woman named Dory who jilts her staid hipster existence to try to solve the mystery of an acquaintance’s sudden disappearance, has frequently been referred to by critics as a sort of “millennial Nancy Drew” (which, … | Continue reading
I wrote my first novel that was published during grad school. Here I was thinking I was writing the ultimate love story, but it turns out it was a horror novel. The protagonist Michael’s wife and kid are dead, but still living with him. I was exploring a space of grief, not letti … | Continue reading
It can be hard to pick where a novel begins. Both in the sense of remembering the spark that made you want to tell the story in the first place, and in terms of deciding on the moment that starts the book – the scene that is going to usher readers into the tale you […] | Continue reading
“Good Americans, when they die, go to Paris.” —Oscar Wilde Fiction, like dreams, is truth in an acceptable disguise. And mysteries are all about disguises, particularly about disguising the truth itself. Mysteries satisfy us in so many ways, partly because, like dreams, they can … | Continue reading
In the early years of the 1980s, the East Village, a neighborhood on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, had a population of roughly sixty thousand. But the worlds of art, music, and literature operating east of the Bowery and Third, south of Fourteenth, and north of Houston felt far sm … | Continue reading
In another lifetime, I interviewed celebrities for glossy luxury magazines and a few newspapers. This was before the Great Recession, the rise of internet advertising (and influencers), and venture capitalists cored out much of print publishing as an industry; thanks to full-page … | Continue reading
Monday, March 27, 1871 “At ten minutes to ten o’clock, the Bailiff of the Court entered the door and flung wide both its leaves. A figure entered, dressed in black and thickly veiled, leaning upon the arm of Dr. Trask. It was Mrs. Fair, and behind her walked her mother and little … | Continue reading
Even compared to Mississippi and Connecticut, Albuquerque, New Mexico is by far the most infuriatingly difficult city name to spell in the United States of America – no wonder they often opt for just ABQ. Apparently the 556,000 people from Albuquerque are known as “Burqueño” or “ … | Continue reading
On May 31, 1959 – four years after Senator McCarthy’s televised anti-communist hearings—the fresh-faced heartthrob Bobby Darin debuted his latest single on the Ed Sullivan show. The song—about a ruthless murderer and gangster—had originally been composed to critique the inherent … | Continue reading
It’s for good reason that one of the earliest lines from the 1990 movie Pretty Woman is this one: “This is Hollywood, land of dreams.” The city is notorious for being a place where hopes of fame and success are as common as palm trees and fancy cars. It’s a place where dreams bot … | Continue reading
Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Sarah Harman, All the Other Mothers Hate Me (Putnam) “Journalist Harman debuts with a funny, fast-paced blend of domestic thriller and social satire . . . Harman’s winning protagonist, page-turning pl … | Continue reading
You read that right. According to Emma Kantor at Publishers Weekly, the estate of Ellen Raskin, the Newbury Award-winning author of The Westing Game who died in 1984 at age 56, has been acquired by the group International Literary Properties. The organization has confirmed that t … | Continue reading
In the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, reports of crimes attributed to ghosts abounded in mainstream newspapers. But few of these stories garnered fervent attention like the mystery of a farmhouse just outside Antigonish, Nova Scotia. Headlines such as “Fairies and Imps … | Continue reading
To catch a serial killer often requires a highly skilled collection of professional teams across multiple agencies. Their expertise often ranges in areas of forensics, behavioral analysis, profiling, violent crimes, to even technical skills related to the location where the crime … | Continue reading
The novelist and screenwriter Michael McDowell (1950-1999) published his debut novel The Amulet, a horror novel set in his native Alabama, in 1978. He wrote 32 more books, and Stephen King once called McDowell “the finest writer of paperback originals in America today.” Today, he … | Continue reading
On January 22nd, 2025 journalist/essayist/ screenwriter Barry Michael Cooper died suddenly at the age of 66. He was a friend as well as a fellow Baltimore-dwelling expat who hailed from Harlem. I ran into him often on the street, and we would stop to chat, sometimes for a couple … | Continue reading
Do love and danger go together? They sure do in my world! A romantic plot, even a small one, adds depth and layers to any story, and suspense is no exception. In fact I’d argue it gives the reader space to breathe and more to care about when someone the protagonist loves is in da … | Continue reading
In Argentine writer Agustina Bazterrica’s Tender is the Flesh—a 2017 dystopian novel that won a major award in her country—“mass hysteria” ensues when a deadly virus seems to leap from animals to humans. In its broad strokes, the story presaged the spread of Covid in 2020. Her la … | Continue reading
Here’s the set-up for my new novel: in the aftermath of a bloody shootout at a Chinese theater, Archana (Archie) Morley, a woman journalist from India, investigates the gang boss, Mock Duck. Barely out his twenties, Mock is already a legend who strikes fear in New Yorkers’ hearts … | Continue reading
When you take a deep, dark dive into a domestic thriller, there, in those murky waters, you just might see a fragment of yourself staring back. It’s that stark moment of reflection, laying bare the truth that hides beneath our carefully crafted facades. Rooted in the gothic thril … | Continue reading
Noir is a form I came to love when I began living in New York City, but it’s a feeling I first felt in Sacramento. I grew up in the suburbs east of Sacramento in the 1980s and my father worked downtown. We’d take the bus into the city, so fragrant with its million trees, […] | Continue reading
There’s a powerful scene in the 1987 Alan Parker film, Angel Heart, where Mickey Rourke’s character, Harry Angel, is staring at a broken mirror, his eyes red-ringed, his expression broken. He mutters the same five words—“I know who I am”—over and over again, but each time the dec … | Continue reading
I was through hiding myself. It was pointless. The motorcycle taxis would tell me hello and the ginger juice vendors called me by name. The neighborhood thought I was a new maid. The old one had disappeared the night before my crime, taking with her the pc and 5,000 dollars that … | Continue reading
A look at some recent releases. * William Boyle, Saint of the Narrow Street (Soho Crime) William Boyle delivered a superb debut more than a decade ago with Gravesend. Since then, he has only gotten better. Luckily for readers, three things have stayed the same between that auspic … | Continue reading
No. 10 Doyers Street is the new historical mystery novel from Radha Vatsal. Radha lives in New York City, and like her previous two books, this one is set in New York. But it is a New York City we don’t see that often in fiction. Set in 1907, her book focuses on the very […] | Continue reading
Miss Rachel Murdock loves movies. The septuagenarian sleuth in this novel by Dolores Hitchens, writing as D.B. Olsen, is keeping an eye on a “bandy-legged man,” who in turn is keeping watch on the Sutter Street, Los Angeles, house next door. Miss Rachel immediately tells her lady … | Continue reading
Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Alice Henderson, The Vanishing Kind (William Morrow) “Suspenseful….Henderson’s evident passion for and expertise in animal science enlivens the clever mystery plot.” –Publishers Weekly Deanna Raybourn … | Continue reading
You never know. Maybe the success of the Edward Berger movie Conclave will spur a revival in the Vatican thriller? Ralph Fiennes and Stanley Tucci done up as cardinals with a big decision to make has certainly sold a fair few cinema tickets this winter. The inner sanctums of the … | Continue reading