I am sad to report that we lost author Tim Dorsey at the end of November. He died at his home in Islamorada in the Florida Keys at age 62 – far too young, if you ask me. Tim, a bear-sized guy who frequently wore colorful tropical shirts, was the rare writer who was as […] | Continue reading
Wow, this was a hard list to compile–I don’t know that I’ve ever seen as many great new psychological thrillers come out in a single year. I had to physically restrain myself from adding at least ten more titles, or getting bogged down in crafting a notable list, because I wanted … | Continue reading
“There was no call for him to be as unkind as he was,” says famed author Patricia Cornwell, who single handedly created the forensic science crime fiction genre. Robert Merritt, the theater and arts critic for the Richmond Times-Dispatch in 1989, trashed his fellow Richmonder’s f … | Continue reading
The young adult mystery continues to thrive, along with plenty of YA horror thrillers, and this year was distinguished by quality storytelling, careful constructions, and social justice elements placed front and center. Whether you want to defeat the monsters or be the monster, s … | Continue reading
I’ve always been passionate about American history, especially the Revolution and founding of the United States. When I think of what immigrants endured just to travel to our shores, it gives me chills and waves of gratitude at the same time. When I was about 13, the John Jakes B … | Continue reading
Every story has to start somewhere. And be somewhere. Take Dennis Lehane’s 2003 novel, Mystic River. Its setting is so pivotal to the plot that you can find it right there in the title. As it happens, Mystic River is a real river in Massachusetts, coursing seven miles through the … | Continue reading
“It seems fairly evident that the selection of such simple terms must to a certain extent depend upon the chief interests of a people; and where it is necessary to distinguish a certain phenomenon in many aspects, which in the life of the people play each an entirely independent … | Continue reading
Conflict lies at the heart of all mystery and suspense, and what could be more conflicting than taking a trip to paradise only to get caught up in the dark and deadly underbelly you didn’t know was there? Imagine your favorite or most desired vacation mecca, somewhere beautiful, … | Continue reading
Back when I was a newspaper reporter, I was hanging around our local prosecutor’s office when an investigator for the prosecutor was fondly recalling his days as a police officer and how cops would interrogate someone by holding their head underwater in the toilet in a police hol … | Continue reading
The CrimeReads editors make their selections for the year’s best debut novels in crime, mystery, and thrillers. Paz Pardo, The Shamshine Blind (Atria) Paz Pardo’s The Shamshine Blind is a heady mix of high-concept speculative fiction, alternative history, and hardboiled detective … | Continue reading
Hello everyone. It’s been a hell of a year. I’m exhausted, you’re exhausted. I bet you just want to curl up on your couch and watch TV under a blanket until you gently fall asleep. Well, the good news is, CrimeReads can at least help with that. There were a lot of new crime shows … | Continue reading
I never met my paternal grandmother. She died before I was born, but from a few family photos, I formed a picture of a smartly turned-out woman with warm brown eyes, a wavy, blunt-cut bob and a weakness for silk scarves. Deeply respected in her small north-eastern England mining … | Continue reading
Have you read Dan Simmons’s The Terror – and are you looking for more reads which combine gruesome survival horror with a creepy supernatural element? Have you been binge-watching Yellowjackets, and looking for something to tide you over until the next season? Well, this just so … | Continue reading
If you’re anything like me, you’ll find the winter evenings perfect for immersing yourself in a little dark academia. Whether you enjoy the prestigious school settings, the thrown-together friendships that shouldn’t work but do, or simply the higher education of it all, there is … | Continue reading
The CrimeReads editors make their picks for the year’s best fiction. * Jessica Knoll, Bright Young Women (Simon & Schuster) Jessica Knoll’s brilliant, blistering third novel is a tart new addition to the growing oeuvre of novels critiquing our fetishization of serial killers and … | Continue reading
In the late 70s my family emigrated to Toronto and stayed for two years. In those days, downtown was notorious for its Sin Strip. Four blocks concentrated on Yonge between Gerrard and Dundas. They were loaded with strip joints, adult bookstores, rub ‘n’ tugs and movie theatres wh … | Continue reading
The Penguin contract with the army for the Forces Book Club was a coup Allen Lane plotted with long-time crony Bill Williams, now comfortably installed at the Army Bureau of Current Affairs: it brought with it a precious allocation of paper from the government reserve. The news o … | Continue reading
People love to share vacation photos on social media. Some try to act nonchalant about their expensive getaways. Others aim to impress. The more remote the location, the better. Wait, you’ve never been to New Caledonia? You should go. It’s beautiful this time of year. That’s a … | Continue reading
There has long been a discussion of whether or not a reliable narrator in fiction is something that truly exists. Since humans are prone to biases and judgment, a purely reliable narrator just isn’t possible. Rather, degrees of reliability in literature might be a more realistic … | Continue reading
In 2023, two new novels, and one older title, were published in a niche of the detective/thriller genre concerning, to coin a term of art, “sinister films:” films—often lost, frequently silent, and usually scary—that have proven deleterious to their cast and crew during and after p … | Continue reading
“Thou shalt not kill,” commands the King James Bible— without, as opponents of capital punishment like to point out, riders or qualifiers. Curiously, this translation of an injunction in the ancient Hebrew Torah did not lead the list of Yahweh’s rules; it arrives after other warn … | Continue reading
The sudden arrival of a horseman on a Friday afternoon electrified New Haven. Israel Bissell leapt from his saddle and shouted for the village selectmen. His eyes bulged with news. Citizens came rushing to the green at the center of the prosperous Connecticut seaport. Bissell, hi … | Continue reading
Cats and cozies go together like Romeo and Juliet. Mac and cheese. Ernie and Bert. The term cozies was coined in the 1990’s for mysteries that take place in a small town setting where everyone knows everybody and the murders, which occur offsite, are solved by an amateur sleuth. … | Continue reading
Excerpt begins: With everyone gone into the yard, or upstairs, the Shadow Man enters the house. He glides into the kitchen, quickly spotting the large knife set on top of the cutting board and wielding it as his own. The figure lurks in the back hallway leading to the garage for … | Continue reading
When things seem to be going badly in a society, people sympathize with characters who distrust or operate outside of that society’s governing systems…In eras tinged with chaos in the popular imagination, noir thrives.” –Megan Abbott One of my handful of jobs–because I can’t spen … | Continue reading
In the summer of 1787, as the Constitutional Convention took place in Philadelphia, General James Wilkinson journeyed to New Orleans to visit Spanish Governor Esteban Miró, ostensibly about obtaining a monopoly on trade down the Mississippi River from Kentucky. Wilkinson brought … | Continue reading
I’ve always struggled with some of the prevailing definitions of ‘gothic’ fiction. Tradition dictates there should be elements of fear, threat, woe, that hauntings should occur and vile things must transpire. Gloominess and atmosphere are everything: crumbling castles (gothic arc … | Continue reading
Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Stephen Spotswood, Murder Crossed Her Mind (Doubleday) “Faithful column readers know how much I adore Stephen Spotswood’s Pentecost and Parker series, and sometimes I feel . . . like a broken record r … | Continue reading
Portsmouth – known to the locals as “Pompey” – is, and has been for centuries, England’s largest Royal Navy base, 75 miles south of London in the country of Hampshire. Home to two-thirds of the UK’s surface naval fleet and with a reputation you might expect of a town filled to th … | Continue reading
The Mysterious Mr. Badman is a long-forgotten but entertaining crime novel, its light-heartedness all the more unexpected given the author’s reputation as a master of the macabre. The teasing tone is set right from the start, in the opening sentence: “When at two o’clock on a sul … | Continue reading
Teenagers don’t have it easy. On top of navigating a microculture rife with veiled rules and unspoken expectations—also known as high school—they often get a bad rap. Adults tend to view them through the lens of popular culture, assigning labels born of books and screen: rebel, c … | Continue reading
This November, FX released the fifth and possibly final season of the popular anthology series Fargo. Based on the 1996 film by Joel and Ethan Coen, and set in that film’s extended universe (every property needs one these days), Fargo the series has been some ride thus far. Since … | Continue reading
–Adapted from a Center For Fiction conversation between Joseph Kanon and Paul Vidich, November 9, 2023 The Spy Who Came in From the Cold was published in September 1963 in London under the name of a little-known writer, John le Carré, and several months later the novel came to Am … | Continue reading
I cut my teeth on Larry Brown. If you’ve never heard of Larry before, let me introduce you by way of Michael Farris Smith. Both are Mississippi authors who aren’t afraid to stare straight into the hard stuff. Both write prose so clean it sings. Larry was gone by the time I starte … | Continue reading
Anna Pitoniak, The Helsinki Affair (Simon and Schuster) “Atmospheric, well-researched and packed with tradecraft, conspiracies, murder and, best of all, two fascinating women … Pitoniak has something unexpected up her sleeve. For Amanda and Kath, the novel’s conclusion also feels … | Continue reading
On January 24, 2014, Miriam Rodriguez received a call at 4 a.m. from her eldest daughter Azalea—a call that would change her and her family’s lives forever. Miriam’s younger daughter, Karen, had been kidnapped by the Zeta drug cartel and was being held for $77,000 in ransom. Thou … | Continue reading
From Book Marks, a look at November’s best reviewed new releases. * Anna Pitoniak, The Helsinki Affair (Simon and Schuster) “Atmospheric, well-researched and packed with tradecraft, conspiracies, murder and, best of all, two fascinating women … Pitoniak has something unexpected u … | Continue reading
The source of the great Burgundy deception was the shortage of wine caused by the destructive force of phylloxera. It made its first appearance in France in the vineyards of the Rhône in 1863; Burgundians held out for more than a decade hoping that somehow they would not be touch … | Continue reading
Not too long ago I found myself nearly alone in the Maritime wing of the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem. The Peabody Essex was formed from the gradual merging of the Essex Institute, once the historical society for Essex County in Massachusetts, and the Peabody Museum, a descendan … | Continue reading
Parties are terrible at the best of times. So much hope and anticipation is heaped onto them, they can never live up to the pressure, collapsing into tears and piles of vomit. Not only the teenage ones, either… The preparation is the best part, when hope still springs eternal as … | Continue reading
There are so many reasons to love fall, from the splendor of the changing leaves to settling back into a comfortable routine after a hectic summer. Cooler temperatures and fewer insect pests encourage us to spend more time in nature which has been proven to have numerous mental h … | Continue reading
Late in July 1976, the Coppolas returned to the Philippines. Sofia was enrolled in first grade at a Chinese school where no one spoke English (“Francis said it would be a terrific experience for her,” Eleanor recalled), and, the day before production was to resume, Eleanor dreamt … | Continue reading
On the day Agatha Christie died in 1976, London theaters dimmed their lights for an hour in a show of esteem for her. While best known as the top-selling novelist of all time, Christie also set a record for the longest running stage production. The play she predicted would last 8 … | Continue reading
For a bibliophile, there’s nothing better than curling up with a good book. The last place most booklovers want to be is stuck in the middle of a crowd. However, nothing can draw an introverted booklover into a crowd better than a book event. Book clubs, book conventions, book fe … | Continue reading
In 1958, America was at the peak of the post-WWII boom. The country had emerged from the war as the strongest economic and military power in the world. Prosperity abounded. Returning soldiers went to college on the G.I. Bill, which also offered longer-term loans to allow the purc … | Continue reading
The White Priory Murders is an “impossible crime” novel by the master of the locked-room mystery, John Dickson Carr, masquerading as Carter Dickson, the name associated with his stories featuring Sir Henry Merrivale. Originally published in 1934, this was Merrivale’s second recor … | Continue reading
Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Nita Prose, The Mystery Guest (Ballantine) “Solving a crime has never been more delightful. Molly Gray is a gift to the world, and this is a book to hug when you finish it.” –Nina de Gramont Laura Ann … | Continue reading
A closed circle of dubious personalities gather in one house at the invitation of a mysterious host. They hide tragic secrets, financial disasters, and desperate ulterior motives as they compete to get their target alone. This is the premise for several Agatha Christie novels, an … | Continue reading