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
We’re in the kitchen, my mother and I. My mother is crying, as I try to comfort her. My father, still at the dining room table, the outburst having left him spent and, I suspect, embarrassed, is trying to figure out what has happened. And perhaps more to the point: why it has hap … | Continue reading
Most people are surprised when a doctor writes a novel. I was surprised that more of us do not. After all, doctors are trained to be pretty good storytellers. Just think about it for a moment. Every time we see a new patient it is the start of a new story which we narrate. We […] | Continue reading
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: “it’s not easy playing second fiddle.” For most of the twentieth and twenty-first century Dr. Watson has been one of the most sidelined, written-off, turned-into-a-joke characters in all of Western literature. There are exceptions that p … | Continue reading
It’s hard to believe that my first novel was published fifteen years ago this coming June. Over fifty published novels later, I have found my place in publishing writing both contemporary and historical mysteries. I wrote exclusively contemporary mysteries for over ten years but … | Continue reading
Behold, the best psychological thrillers out this February! Here are seven novels full of twists, turns, and shocking reversals; descents into madness, spiraling suspicions, and dark secrets abound, along with plenty of family drama. Thanks, as always, for reading the column. Emm … | Continue reading
In 2018, I spent a lot of time in the dusty cafeteria of the Winnebago Mental Health Institute in rural Wisconsin. I can still picture the forest mural that dominated one wall—its strange, unsettling scene of grinning squirrels with hollow black eyes, clumsily sponge-painted onto … | Continue reading
In the preface to his Collected Stories, the writer John Cheever says that reading the work of a young writer is like watching a child: in their early work, “a writer can be seen clumsily learning to walk, to tie his necktie, to make love, and to eat his peas off a fork.” Even no … | Continue reading
To this day, the idea of it is flabbergasting: Jerry Lewis directing and starring in a film about a former circus clown entertaining children in Nazi death camps – and even leading them into the gas chamber. It was an equally bizarre notion, maybe even more so, in the early 1970s … | Continue reading
I was at a crime book festival in the UK a couple of years ago, when I first became aware of something odd in the thriller world. The author on stage was talking about the main protagonists of her new book: forty-something, two kids. I couldn’t help feeling a hot wave of irritati … | Continue reading
Wicked might be the most familiar sister-skeptical story right now, but crime fiction about whether your sister has got your back, or is carefully plunging a knife in it, has been with us for a long time. Saying that sisters are important in crime fiction is about as groundbreaki … | Continue reading
Yes, that’s right, Cale-Heads! Poker Face is back! As you probably already know, this project is a collaboration between director Rian Johnson and actress/producer Natasha Lyonne, who plays Charlie Cale, a sort-of-PI on the lam who can intuitively tell when people are lying. Seas … | Continue reading
Every professional setting imaginable has been a venue for murder most foul. In the Golden Age alone, there was the Church: Agatha Christie’s Murder at the Vicarage. The ad agency: Dorothy L. Sayers’s Murder Must Advertise. The hospital: Christianna Brand’s Green for Danger. Acad … | Continue reading
The summer of 1977 was distinctly cool and wet, particularly compared to the heatwave of the previous year. In August there were violent storms and heavy rainfall over much of the south east of England, leading to hot, clammy days under skies which sagged with rain. At the beginn … | Continue reading
I can’t enjoy my vacations largely because I have to take myself with me. For those of you who know me, this shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. I have a dark and twisted imagination, continuously spinning out the worst-case scenarios in even (and especially) the most beautiful … | Continue reading
A new trend in fiction, film and TV seems to be emerging where women are placed at the centre of traditionally male action thrillers. Anna Kendrick’s directional debut, Woman Of The Hour, takes the serial killer trope and turns it on its head, focussing on the true story behind t … | Continue reading
As a historical crime writer, there’s one trope I love more than almost anything, and that’s an old-timey thief with an elaborate scheme. If we had all day, I’d take you on a tour of all my favorite robbers and scoundrels, both real and fictional. Take Jeanne de la Motte, the Fre … | Continue reading
In novels, the good guys usually win because that’s what most of us want both in real life and in fiction. We want to see the bad guys punished. We want justice and decency to triumph. But I’ve noticed lately that in many novels tied to politics that the good guys don’t always wi … | Continue reading
The thing about spy shows is you can’t do anything else while you’re watching; to miss a micro-expression is to miss the plot. Such is the case with 1979’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy miniseries based on the le Carré book of the same name, which I recently watched in full. As in th … | Continue reading
At the heart of every movie heist is a thing or things that a gang wants to steal and someone else wants to keep. Not infrequently that thing is a diamond. If the audience is lucky, the gem is portrayed with detail and authenticity that imbue it with emotion. In other words, we c … | Continue reading
Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Allison Epstein, Fagin the Thief (Doubleday) “Magnificent . . . Epstein’s Fagin, rarely admirable but surprisingly sympathetic, is an unforgettable creation, and her vibrant secondary characters and d … | Continue reading
Khartoum – the sprawling capital of Sudan with a population of six and a half million people. On the Nile (the city where the two Niles – the white and the blue – meet), by Lake Victoria. Famously a British colony, though always restive and always seeking independence. More fight … | Continue reading
Sit up, whodunnit fans! There’s a new murder mystery series coming to Netflix. It’s called The Residence. And it’s got a lot going on. It’s a “screwball” “whodunnit” set in the “White House.” I said that in the title. But there’s more! Like, it’s set among the staff of the White … | Continue reading
The sound of gunfire echoed out just as the speaker had finished welcoming his audience with the traditional Muslim greeting “Assalamu alaikum” (“Peace be upon you”). Seconds later, Malcolm X lay dying on the stage of Manhattan’s Audubon Ballroom, his body filled with eight shotg … | Continue reading
Horror royalty Osgood Perkins was on board to adapt Stephen King’s short story “The Monkey” before his 2024 serial killer thriller “Longlegs” became a runaway hit, but that can’t have exactly lowered the stakes. King’s short stories have been adapted to film going back almost as … | Continue reading
I am OBSESSED with Kat Dunn’s debut, the delectably carnal and unabashedly queer vampire novel Hungerstone, and not just because of that gorgeous cover design. Hungerstone is a re-envisioning of the vampire classic Carmilla, in which a Victorian wife’s meticulously ordered world … | Continue reading
The office was in a tenement building next to a bodega on St. Marks. I stepped around a grunge punk who was using the dirty window of the door as a shaving mirror, scraping the scalp on either side of his spiky Mohawk with a dry razor. Three sharp rings to the buzzer, per instruc … | Continue reading
There are people out there who can’t enjoy a book without someone virtuous to root for. There are also people who only go to restaurants that serve chicken fingers. In each case, you would hope those people are all children, but they aren’t. If you like your heroes anti, and you … | Continue reading
In many novels and films, plotlines concerning mature women having relationships with teenage boys are prevalent. Many of these stories (my favorite being the 1995 Gus Van Sant crime flick, To Die For) tell the tale of steamy, forbidden love filled with passion, but in the real w … | Continue reading
Join Lit Hub at Film Forum on Friday, February 21st, at 7:10 p.m. ET, where we’ll be co-presenting a screening of the new film ART SPIEGELMAN: DISASTER IS MY MUSE, an exploration of the famous artist’s life and oeuvre. Our editor Olivia Rutigliano will moderate a Q&A with filmmak … | Continue reading
A few weeks back, filmmaker Paul Schrader dropped his latest masterpiece—and no, I’m not talking about Oh, Canada, his feature adaptation of Russell Banks’s novel, Foregone. I’m referring to his Facebook post endorsing AI as an adequate replacement for most filmmakers: This arriv … | Continue reading