A look at the month’s best reviewed crime, mystery, and thriller books, from Book Marks. Richard Osman, We Solve Murders (Pamela Dorman/Viking) “A more ambitious series … Not that Osman has deviated entirely from his winning formula. While offering more in scale and scope, the Br … | Continue reading
Ghosts at their definition are an aftermath. They have always represented the unresolved, be it grief, guilt, unfulfillment, or injustice. They represent something that came before; as a result, ghosts are such powerful sites for conversations about loss: we all carry once-wases … | Continue reading
Hello, my name is Michelle, and I’m a recovering child-of-a-flower-child. To be clear, I wasn’t conceived until well after the Summer of Love; in fact, I missed the 1960’s entirely. But my mother watched the happenings in San Francisco from the other side of the country with a lo … | Continue reading
“A woman who doesn’t lie,” wrote Agatha Christie, “is a woman without imagination and without sympathy.” I’ve thought often of this passage while writing my new nonfiction book, Eden Undone. Told largely through the perspectives of two female protagonists, Eden Undone is the true … | Continue reading
Political violence is defined as acts perpetrated to achieve political goals, and can include war, military coups, genocide, state repression, terrorism, guerilla warfare, and assassinations, as well as the violence associated with racism and sexism. Revolution in 35mm: Political … | Continue reading
This month’s best psychologicals range from emotionally devastating to shockingly funny (just as human experience is wont to do). While each represents a different twist on the genre, all of these kept me reading late into the evening, which is one of the many reasons I’m writing … | Continue reading
Lilliam Rivera’s debut novel, Tiny Threads, features a young Latinx executive at a high-end couture house who slowly begins to understand the extent to which her new bosses exploit their workers and poison the earth. In Delilah S. Dawson’s most recent novel, Guillotine, a working … | Continue reading
I think everyone is on the same page—which is to say, angry. The internet is angry, my friends are angry, and I am angry, and here’s why (though if you are reading this website, you probably already know this news): Emerald Fennell, the writer-director of Promising Young Woman an … | Continue reading
Introduction: Game of Bones The sudden death in Hollywood, where he was working on the script for what was then termed RKO’s “gorilla picture” (aka King Kong), of English crime writer Edgar Wallace at the age of fifty-six on February 10, 1932 was an epochal event within the world … | Continue reading
As Elyse Graham recounts in her new book Book and Dagger: How Scholars and Librarians Became the Unlikely Spies of World War II, with the Nazis gaining ground across Europe in the early years of the Second World War, the United States and United Kingdom drew on an unlikely reserv … | Continue reading
In June 1943, Patricia Highsmith tagged along with a friend on a social call to the Greenwich Village apartment of Stanley Edgar Hyman and his wife, Shirley Jackson. Highsmith’s interest was mostly in Hyman, whose employer, the New Yorker, had a frustrating habit of rejecting her … | Continue reading
So, we’ve all read The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger, right? Maybe it was an assigned reading in high school or college, or a voluntary read to see what the fuss was all about. Perhaps you were drawn to the theme of youthful alienation and the rejection of the phoniness of … | Continue reading
One of the pleasures of crime fiction is its realism in sticking so closely to life as most of us know it, which includes the pleasures of the table. Sherlock Holmes enjoyed his oysters with a bottle of white burgundy, and in The Clocks Hercule Poirot says: “A claret or a burgund … | Continue reading
In the foreword to Stephen King’s short story “1408” from his collection Everything’s Eventual: 14 Dark Tales, King writes, “Hotel rooms are just naturally creepy places, don’t you think? I mean, how many people have slept in that bed before you? How many of them were sick? How m … | Continue reading
I am a bad boy. I have spread mustard on a sandwich as much as ten days after its use-by date. I have loitered where signs are posted that forbid loitering, not because I wanted to loiter; I was in a hurry to be elsewhere, but I wasn’t going to let anyone tell me where […] | Continue reading
Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Stephanie Wrobel, Hitchcock Hotel (Berkley) “[T]his locked-room mystery contains masterful pacing, with suspense built around the identity of the victim and then the discovery of the killer. Wrobel’s … | Continue reading
Embarking on the task of selecting my favourite works by Agatha Christie – a writer whose plays, books and short stories have captivated me since my childhood – has been a journey filled with both nostalgia and admiration. I still vividly recall the first time I visited her world … | Continue reading
During my training as a clinical psychologist, I grew to understand that we humans are always affected by our history. Our families shape our stories with their presence or absence, their quirks and patterns, their healthy traits and unhealthy, and sometimes their serious trauma. … | Continue reading
I wrote Hope’s Boy sixteen years ago. In that memoir, I shared my life with my mom, Hope. I wrote about our lives together while she developed paranoid schizophrenia and apart while I grew up in foster care. I was six when Los Angeles County took me from her and decided to place … | Continue reading
Look, sometimes you just get a feeling. You can’t explain it! You just know what you have to do. And in this case, it’s watch the 1988 John Cleese-co-authored, Charles Crichton-directed British caper film A Fish Called Wanda. Is it a seasonal thing? I don’t think so? It’s not str … | Continue reading
I have a confession. Long before I became a cozy mystery author, I had a dream publishing job as a Nancy Drew editor. But to be honest, I didn’t always love the famous girl detective. Not as much as her legions of fans, anyway. To me, her character was too…perfect. I’m not a Nanc … | Continue reading
First of all, I’d like to go on record as stating that I have never killed—or tried to kill!—anyone*. Even those who deserved it. Secondly, I still fantasize about it all the time. Even this morning, when a woman in a large brown SUV cut me off and drove dramatically slowly in fr … | Continue reading
Supernatural and detective fiction have long been linked: let’s not forget that Bram Stoker’s “Dracula” (published in 1897) has Dr. Abraham Van Helsing and his crew of fearless vampire hunters sleuthing through London to find the titular bloodsucker. That merger has extended from … | Continue reading
This is a transcript of a talk that was given, by Dr. Olivia Rutigliano, at the Salmagundi Club in New York City, on September 13th, 2024. The Salmagundi Club is New York’s oldest arts club, founded in 1871. Since 1917, the Club has been located at 47 Fifth Avenue, the last stand … | Continue reading
After a brief hiatus, the international fiction column is back! Recommending fiction in translation is my favorite part of this job, as both a disruptor of cultural assumptions and a method of finding common ground. This month brings a particularly diverse array of new releases, … | Continue reading
Possibly apocryphal, the story goes that when Alfred Hitchcock once telephoned Georges Simenon, his assistant answered and promptly informed the legendary director that Georges was otherwise engaged – he had just sat down to write his new novel. Undeterred, Hitchcothe invck repli … | Continue reading
What do Minneapolis and Los Angeles have in common? Not much. I don’t mean that in a perjorative way. Different isn’t bad, it’s just…well, different. The zeitgeist, intensity level, culture, and lifestyle are about as bipolar as you can get. Minnesota is tribal and deeply rooted … | Continue reading
Horror is embedded in our everyday lives, even if it looks different from Michael Myers chasing someone down the street. Even seemingly mundane things can spark fear and terror, especially in the hearts of parents, like a favorite stuffed animal gone missing or being asked to vol … | Continue reading
There are words that we hesitate to use when describing women writers. Nice is certainly one, and approachable might be even more questionable. (Who exactly is approaching, and what are their intentions?) Still, these are the words that inevitably come to mind when I think of the … | Continue reading
In a summer when white supremacists have marched through the streets of Nashville, about three hours from me, it’s safe to say that a noir movie from 73 years ago is in some ways as relevant as when it was released. “Storm Warning,” from January 1951, is a movie that was never on … | Continue reading
I like obscure pieces of information. I can sing the theme songs to Bonanza and The Big Bang Theory. I know what time the local landfill closes. I can quote Dylan Thomas, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Shakespeare. But there are many, many things I don’t know and that’s where librar … | Continue reading
For those who weren’t there, who didn’t live through the transition, it may be impossible to understand what it was like. Even for those who were, enough time has passed that perhaps the memory has dimmed under the successive tides of Sherlockian enthusiasm. But the fact is that … | Continue reading
I’m surrounded by cursed objects. Not literally—I’m not one of those famous paranormal investigators/collectors that lock notable cursed objects in their basement to keep the outside world safe and then must warn their children’s friends that coming over to play might expose them … | Continue reading
Crime novel fans know that a killer’s favorite tactic for getting away with murder is hiding the body. But bodies have a pesky habit of not staying hidden. In my thriller, What You Made Me Do, the murder takes place on a fictional Dutch island in the Wadden Sea, inspired by the r … | Continue reading
In crime novels, the most famous narrator is probably the private eye. As Raymond Chandler famously described it: “down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. He is the hero; he is everything.” Through this single perspectiv … | Continue reading
Two ideas exist simultaneously. 1) A nation is not conquered until the hearts of its women are on the ground. (Cheyenne); and 2) There is, and has been, a target on Native women’s backs for the past 500 years. Both are true in Indian country. For women in the western world this t … | Continue reading
Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Richard Osman, We Solve Murders (Pamela Dorman) “Bestseller Osman (the Thursday Murder Club mysteries) launches a promising new series with this sprightly tale . . . Osman pulls off the tricky task of … | Continue reading
You never forget your first… Great Illustrated Classics. For me, it was Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea—a thick (or so it seemed to a seven-year-old), white-spined hardback with a slick blue cover, large print on rough cream paper and pen-and-ink illustrations that took me … | Continue reading
While cozy mysteries have their share of thieves, con artists, and the occasional murderer, they abound with likable, often colorful characters who reside in a picturesque village where–except for the occasional murder–friendships prevail, pets are popular and romance blossoms. R … | Continue reading
There is so much babble about the impact AI is going to have on our lives. There is no doubt the impacts will be great. I wrote the story of the ethical AI I want to exist. She may be ethical but she has no tolerance for criminals. While AIs are nowhere near the independent […] | Continue reading
There aren’t many crime writers of old I’d like to hang out with. I say this out of respect; sometimes, when you appreciate a work of art, meeting the artist is the worst thing you can do about it! I don’t know if Dorothy L. Sayers is one of the crime writers I’d like to […] | Continue reading
Maybe it’s just because I got started late on this preview, but the following list leans HEAVILY towards horror. That doesn’t mean that fans of detective fiction will find themselves lacking in recommendations, however, especially if they are willing to go historical. Those inter … | Continue reading
During the early 1930s, Hollywood grew a large and ugly underbelly. Frank Nitti, the Chicago mobster, had his evil eye on Hollywood, with its drug addicts and homosexuals and rampant promiscuity, and he saw the potential for all kinds of extortion. “The goose is in the oven just … | Continue reading
Editor’s Note THE PRESENT WORK was discovered in an old abandoned house in Devonshire, long after the last of the Braithwhite children had passed on. The author, Lucy Braithwhite, was a person of great intelligence and kindness, known for her work in medical charities during the … | Continue reading
Old Wounds is not a ghost story, although I may have described it as such on more than one occasion. You see, ghosts are able to make themselves known, either as nonverbal poltergeists or as tangible spectors. They’re emotional creatures with personalities and histories. Put simp … | Continue reading
At its core, Zetas Till We Die is a story that ignites once a group of sorority sisters get back together for a ten-year reunion, only to find out that time hasn’t buried secrets they thought they’d left in the past. If you love this trope, here’s a few of our top picks for simil … | Continue reading
When I was first hired to write a book featuring Robert B. Parker’s savvy, sarcastic Sunny Randall, I couldn’t wait to start. As much as I’ve always loved classic tough-guy PIs like Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe and Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade, as well as their more modern i … | Continue reading
If one were to say to any British historian the term ‘Hellfire Club’ they would recognise it instantly, for it was a term synonymous with aristocratic bad-boys (or girls, in some more particular cases!) in the eighteenth-century, all out to indulge in a bit of illicit fun away fr … | Continue reading