No one (well, maybe one person) runs for president without accepting the inevitability that they’ll be accused of ugly things. It’s almost impossible for a president to sue for libel or slander, not just because of their status as the ultimate public figure but also because of th … | Continue reading
Sorry, folks—we got a little behind with the column, but there’s been so many wonderful new novels in translation coming out this fall, I had to do at least one more new release roundup before the end of the year. Below, you’ll find an eclectic melange of mystery, thriller, and h … | Continue reading
It’s 1986, and I’m lost in the forest. I’m ten years old, huddled at the base of a Ponderosa pine at the far reaches of Silver Lake, California, one of innumerous small, high Alpine lakes strewn across the Sierra Nevada mountains like blue-green jewels in a tangled necklace. It’s … | Continue reading
Everyone who has ever tried to write crime fiction understands the importance of pacing. It’s not enough to have a plot that sounds exciting on the jacket copy—getting the plot to move in a way that keeps the reader breathlessly turning pages is another matter altogether. When I … | Continue reading
It’s about to be the start of the holiday season, and with everyone gearing up to spend as much (or as little) time with family as possible, it’s also the perfect time to pick up a psychological thriller and and wonder if Tolstoy would have enjoyed the era of domestic suspense wh … | Continue reading
There’s a wonderful world where all you desire And everything you’ve longed for is at your fingertips Where the bittersweet taste of life is at your lips Where aisles and aisles of dreams await you –Queen of the Supermarket, Bruce Springsteen, 2009 Last year crime writer Duane Sw … | Continue reading
Several years ago, I was sitting in a café with a group of fellow New Zealand writers, discussing books we’d recently read. With several of us, me included, working on thriller or suspense projects, we meandered onto the subject of thrillers and mysteries set in Iceland, as well … | Continue reading
I didn’t intend to write a book about an angry woman. After all, furious, embittered characters—despite much progress—often remained the province of men. To write an angry woman was to risk her becoming Unlikeable, a nebulous state of being still somehow able to deliver the killi … | Continue reading
Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Femi Kayode, Gaslight (Mulholland) “Kayode delivers another ensnaring, vividly realized, suspenseful, and witty tale of a reluctant yet gifted investigator who susses out the truth about people trappe … | Continue reading
Hello everyone! It’s the Holiday season (the big long holiday season from Halloween to New Year’s that starts around the 4th of July). As always, I am charge of putting together this year’s CrimeReads Holiday Gift Guide, and I am positively chuffed. Shopping for cute mystery-ish … | Continue reading
The following is an excerpt from Deanne Stillman’s new book, American Confidential: Uncovering the Bizarre Relationship Between Lee Harvey Oswald and his Mother. The book explores Lee Harvey Oswald and his mother Marguerite, and how their strange relationship factored into the JF … | Continue reading
“You can’t be serious.” Twice in my life, academic colleagues and friends have had that reaction when I’ve told them what I was planning to do. The first time was in the early 1990s, when I decided to teach a course on LGBT politics at the University of California, San Diego, one … | Continue reading
When it comes to romance in cozy mysteries, readers range in their preferences from, “I’m more about the mystery,” to “Gimme all the romance.” While writing my cozy mystery, A Nutcracker Nightmare, I toyed with how much romance to include. In the end, I kept it on the lighter sid … | Continue reading
Halfway through Among the Bros: A Fraternity Crime Story, investigative reporter Max Marshall recounts his meeting with a man who used to sell illegally sourced prescription drugs to fellow College of Charleston students. Describing a typical Saturday on campus, the former dealer … | Continue reading
Recently, I saw an article that claimed that 1999 was the best year in Hollywood history. Then another claimed it was…1971? I beg to disagree. It is my belief that the greatest single year in Hollywood was 1987. Here’s my thinking. To me, a classic film is basically one that you … | Continue reading
Joe Finder must have thought he knew the secrets to selling a book. His first, a work of nonfiction, Red Carpet: The Connection Between the Kremlin and America’s Most Powerful Businessmen, had a hardcover run of 10,000. It sold out. Sounds like an early and smooth ride into the … | Continue reading
It’s a perennial question at readings and signings: Where do you get the ideas for your books? I usually mumble something that amounts to (phrased politely), “I pull them out of thin air.” But when it comes to Best Be Prepared (Severn House), my most recent in a series featuring … | Continue reading
A man with his back to the world waits for two impossible and perfect eggs. He follows an officer to the transport as a dream-generated locomotive leaves the story. He dreams of a holiday in Egypt and wakes up in the gnarls of memory’s black and white world; his famous face is sh … | Continue reading
A good villain is essential to a good mystery. He or she is the author of the crime, the driver of the plot, and the key to solving the ensuing investigation. Often, the more cunning and deceitful the villain, the more satisfying their unmasking and capture. This is one reason fo … | Continue reading
Oh, the Horror! It doesn’t often come up but when it does, people are often surprised when I tell them I never set out to be a horror writer. Sure, I’m a die-hard, lifelong fan of the genre, and it was reading Stephen King’s The Shining at thirteen that opened my mind and imagina … | Continue reading
Before Mandy Matney was the award-winning host of the #1 Murdaugh Murders Podcast, she was a local Hilton Head reporter practiced in viral stories about sharks and tornados. Was she up to the task of reporting on the crimes surrounding a powerful South Carolina family with genera … | Continue reading
5:44 PM Rain smacks my windshield. The wipers fight a losing battle. The Elantra’s on its last legs, and there’s so much water I can barely see the nearly one thousand feet of causeway ahead of me. Waves pound either side of this narrow link between the mainland and Ketchum Islan … | Continue reading
The movie was a spur-of-the-moment idea. The prime minister had had a stressful week. Seeing a comedy with his wife and son and his son’s girlfriend was just the tonic that Olof Palme needed. Bodyguards? It would have been cruel to call them back to work on a Friday night. Beside … | Continue reading
In January 2020, I drove down from Orlando to the easternmost edge of the Everglades and booked a room in the neon-dazzled Miccosukee Casino & Resort, a hotel in the no-man’s-land between the glitz of Miami and the seemingly endless wilderness of the glades. That night, I looked … | Continue reading
As a kid, I broke what I like to think was a normal amount of rules. There was the time in kindergarten when we were sitting on the rug for storytime, and the boy in front of me kept leaning back against my legs, even when I asked him to stop, and eventually I got […] | Continue reading
I try to be good but fail every day. My natural state is lazy, self-indulgent, resentful, and dangerously avoidant. The damage I’ve done in life has mainly come from not-getting-around-to something I ought to do. If you’re still waiting for my thank you card or RSVP or post-retir … | Continue reading
I’d wager a box of my favorite tea that you’ve heard of Bridgerton by now. Maybe even that it’s that occasionally spicy period drama based upon author Julia Quinn’s romance series of the same name. And, most likely, that it’s set during the Regency period and features lots of bal … | Continue reading
April 2020 Detective Chief Inspector Karen Pirie tucked her hands into the pockets of her down jacket. Even silk-lined leather gloves weren’t enough to keep out a night wind that was whipping straight across from the Urals to this Edinburgh rooftop. It had been three weeks since … | Continue reading
Late at night on July 13th, 1972, an unknown person entered the University of Manchester’s Library and violently smashed the plate glass top of an exhibition case, stealing the contents. Inside was one of the most famous, most valuable books in existence: the library’s near-perfe … | Continue reading
Like many fans of dark fiction, I’ve had a long-standing fascination and love affair with twisted tales of cannibalism. The horror genre is the perfect playground for exploring visceral emotions, and hunger is one of the most primal and readily relatable. That ravenous, monstrous … | Continue reading
Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Anna Pitoniak, The Helsinki Affair (Simon & Schuster) “[An] ambitious espionage thriller … [with a] startling finale … Pitoniak continues to show strong instincts for the art of cloak-and-dagger.” –Pu … | Continue reading
For all of recorded history, poisons have been a means of death, both deliberate and accidental. Greek philosophers, kings, emperors, actresses, scientists, mathematicians, and more were felled by lethal doses of chemicals. Arsenic, cyanide and strychnine were popular instruments … | Continue reading
This interview has been edited for clarity and concision. A Haunting on the Hill is now available from Mulholland Books. Olivia Rutigliano: I’m so excited because this is the first continuation of The Haunting of Hill House that has been sanctioned by the Shirley Jackson estate. … | Continue reading
Of all the correspondents I’ve had in my life, Sam Israel has been among the most consistent. Sam was serving a twenty-two-year sentence in federal prison for fraud when we met. He’d been running a Ponzi scheme out of a hedge fund that began with him stealing hundreds of millions … | Continue reading
From the very first sentence…we are into the realm of nightmare. Miracles gather and explode. A dead man returns—or does not return. A flying ghost, apparently, swoops down and attacks. No angels, but goblins and wizards seem to dance on a pin. “Rim of the Pit” is a beauty. –John … | Continue reading
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