“What’s a cult?” It’s everybody’s favorite question when it comes to religion and true crime. I guess because it seems so unanswerable. Except that it’s very answerable. It’s just a boring answer. A cult is an unsuccessful religion. One too young and not big enough to absorb crim … | Continue reading
You’ve probably heard of the “write what you know” theory, or the “know what you write” rebuttal, which has probably lead to a precipitous rise in both memoirs and cursory internet research. But a lesser-known strategy is the handy “write about what you did when you were drunk,” … | Continue reading
Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Anne Rasche, The Stone Witch of Florence (Park Row 0“The Stone Witch of Florence sparkles with suspense and the magical power of women. An engaging and entrancing debut.” –Laurie Lico Albanese Sarah S … | 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
You’ve reached the end of the Reacher universe, at least until the next book comes out. There are no more small towns left to explore. The villains have all been defeated, and Jack’s toothbrush is safely stowed away. What do you read next if you need a fix from the land of well-c … | Continue reading
It’s autumn in New York, which means that I am inevitably, thinking about school. I haven’t taken classes in years, and I haven’t taught in years, but I attended one formal school or another in one capacity or another for every year of my life, from pre-school through the end of … | Continue reading
This first appeared in Lit Hub’s Craft of Writing newsletter—sign up here. Dreams are one of those things professors and editors and more seasoned writers all tell you not to write about. It’s a day-one “don’t,” right up there with adverbs and any speaker tag other than “said.” I … | Continue reading
When we think of fall, the imagery of pumpkins, the changing color of the leaves, and cozy sweater weather always seem to be at the top of most people’s minds. For myself, fall always brings to mind the “Back to School” commercials on television, lists of new school uniform requi … | Continue reading
Every October 5th, millions of people around the world mix up a martini, throw on a bowtie, or practice some deplorable puns in a Scottish accent, all while spinning some John Barry records. For diehard fans of precisely made drinks and glamorous action adventure, Global James Bo … | Continue reading
The yakuza have always been pretty good at reading the room, or as they say in Japan, “reading the air”. When Japan finally decided to slam the door on their more traditional lines of work back in 2011 with a wave of laws that made it tricky to extort, traffic, or gamble without … | Continue reading
Welcome to my latest labor of love: a list of true crime in translation, because as far as I can tell, no one else has bothered before. There isn’t much translated nonfiction, full stop—the following list has been assembled from the past 6 years, when I first started tracking the … | Continue reading
Our memories make us who we are. In his novella Story of Your Life (basis for the film Arrival), science fiction writer Ted Chiang describes memories forming in the narrator’s mind “like a column of cigarette ash, laid down by the infinitesmal sliver of combustion that was my con … | Continue reading
When we read about a crime in the newspaper, we can usually guess the offender’s motive. Murder is often committed in a fit of rage, while robbery is driven by greed. But some crimes leave us scratching our heads in puzzlement. That was my reaction upon learning that customs offi … | Continue reading
Everyone knows Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic 1886 novella, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. It’s the story of a respectable, wealthy doctor who transforms into a murderous alter-ego and commits terrible crimes around London. Stevenson’s life offers many possible insp … | Continue reading
I grew up reading horror. Okay, as a kid “horror” was pretty much Scooby-Doo and some children’s ghost stories, but I still devoured everything I could find, and as soon as I got my adult library card at thirteen, I headed straight for the horror section. My favorite trope is the … | Continue reading
ALACHUA, FLORIDA APRIL 1, 2015 “This is our guy,” the FBI SWAT team commander said, indicating me to the hundred officers dressed in camo fatigues before him. “He’s one of us. Don’t shoot him.” We were assembled at 4:00 a.m. in the Alachua Police Department parking lot, the early … | Continue reading
There’s always been something about a story that’s set in a desolate and beautiful place, where the wind moans just right and the paint peels and there’s a sickly sweet scent that carries so much memory that it goes straight to your metaphorical head. At least that’s been true fo … | Continue reading
Hot girl summer is over; get ready for bog witch fall. Actually, get ready for bog witch decade. From Copenhagen Fashion Week to the 2024 Met Gala, from the cover art for Hozier’s Unreal Unearth to Kasey Musgraves’ Deeper Well, imagery redolent of wet earth, green moss, brackish … | Continue reading
Beyond the ivied brick, cloisters, and towers, they walk in twos and threes. The humanities students with their leather-bound books who debate Nietzsche by candlelight. Dressed in navy and forest green, they gather in their dorm rooms and societies, glass of wine in hand, as they … | Continue reading
There’s a reason we say, “Books are magic.” We enjoy stories, but we experience books. Even avowed non-readers have touchstones in their lives. The very first book they can remember puzzling over as a child (mine was Scuffy the Tugboat). A book their parent read aloud, every sing … | Continue reading
When I started writing the eighth installment in my private eye series, on Aug. 27, 2019, not in my wildest dreams did I think more than five years would pass before publication, or that I’d have a global pandemic to blame for the delay. Nor could I have envisioned that something … | Continue reading
Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Andrew Nette and Samm Deighan (eds), Revolution in 35mm: Political Violence and Resistance in Cinema (PM Press) “Andrew Nette, Samm Deighan, and their boisterous band of noteworthy collaborators serve … | Continue reading
In the weeks after having my first child, I found myself dipping in and out of a very dark place. Around six o’clock every evening, I’d cry—my body heaving—thinking about the long night ahead. The midnight spell when I would feel more alone than I’d ever felt in my entire life. S … | Continue reading
Most avid mystery fans have heard of The Lodger. After all, it’s been used as the basis for at least five films, a stage play, numerous television episodes, several radio plays, and even an opera. The first known work to fictionalize the tale of Jack the Ripper, it was originally … | Continue reading
Dump the body in a bog. Pin it to the mucky bottom with willow branches so the corpse does not float to the surface, and eventually the decaying moss and vegetation will pickle the victim. The skin will darken, and the hair turn red from the biochemical stew. As the bog dries out … | Continue reading
Dame Maggie Smith, the consummate English actress who immortalized such characters as Jean Brodie (The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie), Diana Barrie (California Suite), Granny Wendy (Hook), Professor Minerva McGonagall (the Harry Potter films), and Dowager Countess Violet Crawley (Dow … | Continue reading
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