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Friends, you read that right. A new film is coming to theaters in January that is… Hamlet staged in the Grand Theft Auto video game. Yes, Hamlet acted out by video game avatars, shot in-frame, and edited into its own film. Before you wonder if something is rotten in the stage of filmmaking, or that the rest is violence, consider this… Directed and written by Sam Crane and Pinny Grylls, and co-starring Crane and his friend Mark Oosterveen, the film, which is called Grand Theft Hamlet, is part digital narrative, part documentary. The film’s frame narrative features Crane and Oosterveen, two out-of-work actors sheltering-in-place during the COVID pandemic in January 2021, who discover that their video game pastime seems capable of not only bringing them together (and giving them a project) during isolation, but also allowing them to engage with a foundational text and their beloved craft. The actors speak Shakespeare’s lines over the staging, in the modern, hyper-brutal world of GTA‘s Los Santos; underscoring the ways that Shakespeare’s words contain a kind of timelessness or malleability. According to critics, what ends up happening is not an attempt to make this as straight a Shakespeare production as possible, but to play with the text and the meaning of Hamlet in ways that only this new setting can unlock. Peter Bradshaw wrote, in The Guardian: “…as one of the lead players says, this is Shakespeare on a billion dollar budget, or Shakespeare as Elon Musk could afford to produce it. Crane and Oosterveen, with Pinny Grylls (who directs along with Crane), reflect absorbingly on the endless, bleak violence of the game, how close it is to the violence of Shakespeare’s world and how depressed they are due to the stasis of lockdown; it adds up to a new dreamlike insight into Hamlet’s melancholy. …The result is wild, like Baz Luhrmann’s gangbanger Romeo + Juliet or Tom Stoppard’s play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, in which actors roam the land performing their show but suspect that no one is out there watching.” Suffice to say, I’m intrigued. There have been many, many, many Hamlets out there, but this one feels genuinely innovative. Let’s ride. Grand Theft Hamlet is in select theaters on January 17th, 2025. View the full article

2025 has barely begun, but it’s already shaping up to be a terrible year, full of incredible books. As per usual, we’ve assembled a great big list of all the crime, mystery, horror, and thriller titles to keep an eye out for in the coming months; trends I have already spotted and will of course be highlighting in future list articles include: cannibalism! heists! capers! class warfare! swapped identities! serial killers! social climbers! psychotic fame hounds! Georgian England! Thanks to my colleagues over at Lit Hub for allowing me to use a few of their blurbs from the Lit Hub Most Anticipated to fill out our humble list. With the dissolution of social media ethics and the degeneration of the internet, paired with the rise of AI, we need gritty novels exploring the realistic implications of our modern discontents more than ever. *gets off of high horse* God speed, and good reading. ___________________________________ JANUARY ___________________________________ Alison Gaylin, We Are Watching (William Morrow) I’m hoping this book takes Alison Gaylin from fan favorite to household name—I know I say this with each of her books, but We Are Watching is her best yet. It also feels both deeply personal & extraordinarily timely, with a plot straight out of the news cycle (and my nightmares). The set-up? Gaylin’s heroine, owner of a family-oriented book­store in a small town in upstate New York, finds herself targeted by a terrifying group of conspiracy theorists convinced that she and her rockstar father made a pact with the devil to destroy the world. Now, they’re after her entire family, convinced they must be murdered on camera in order to prevent a Satanic apocalypse. I stayed up the entire night racing to the conclusion, then lying awake haunted by my own thoughts. –MO Paraic O’Donnell, The Naming of the Birds (Tin House) A serial killer with immaculate tendencies haunts the local populace, beginning with a retired civil servant, in O’Donnell’s new mystery, which is tinged with notes of Victorian gothic. –Dwyer Murphy, CrimeReads Editor-in-Chief AJ West, The Betrayal of Thomas True (Orenda) The Betrayal of Thomas True has an incredible setting: the Molly Houses of Georgian England, spaces for male sex workers to safely ply their trade and host to the queer luminaries of London and their spectacular salons and performances. A bouncer for the most famed Molly House is tasked with solving a series of murders threatening their community, as he falls deeply in love with a newcomer to the city. Historical crime fiction perfection! –Molly Odintz, CrimeReads Managing Editor Grady Hendrix, Witchcraft for Wayward Girls (Berkley) You tell me that this book doesn’t sound like a hell of a good time, exactly the sort of thing to curl up with during the January doldrums! It takes place at a home for pregnant, single young girls—an institution where they can secretly have their babies, outside of public scrutiny. But then one of them gets an occult book… and things ramp up from there. –Olivia Rutigliano, Lit Hub and CrimeReads Editor Bradford Morrow, The Forger’s Requiem (Atlantic Monthly Press) The newest installment is this sophisticated mystery series continues the intrigues of rival forgers, this time with an emphasis on a daughter’s revenge and an intricate puzzle built from forged Mary Shelley letters. –DM Layne Fargo, The Favorites (Random House) Layne Fargo’s third novel has a simple premise, executed perfectly: Wuthering Heights, but make it Olympic figure skaters! And let me tell you, I like this story a lot more than the original inspiration—I’ll take an ice rink over the heather and moors any day of the week. In The Favorites, two skaters with incredible chemistry and terrible luck struggle to succeed in the cut-throat world of high-level ice dancing, where competitors embrace ever-more-vicious strategies to take down the golden couple and destroy their passionate romance. So effing good. –MO Trisha Tobias, Honeysuckle & Bone (Zando) This is the first release from Zando’’s new Sweet July imprint, run by the beloved Ayesha Curry, and Honeysuckle & Bone is a perfect pick for their launch—dark, romantic, and compelling. The set up is simple, but thrilling: a young woman has escaped turmoil at home by taking a job as a nanny for a wealthy and powerful Jamaican family. All she has to do is keep them from finding out she’s there under false pretenses, and under an assumed identity. And avoid romantic entanglements, which will be difficult given the many thirst traps introduced in the first few pages *fans self*. –MO Eric Dezenhall, Wiseguys and the White House: Gangsters, Presidents, and the Deals They Made (Harper Books) Organized crime surrounding the Presidency is nothing new, and Dezenhall lays out a rollicking, if disturbing history of various mobs working in and around the nation’s highest office. –DM Thomas Perry, Pro Bono (Mysterious Press) An attorney with a skill for recovering assets takes a new case to help a recent widow and soon finds himself shot at, followed, and generally tangled up in a dangerous mess. Perry, a master storyteller, unspools the mystery at breakneck speed and the financial crime at the heart of Pro Bono makes for genuinely compelling suspense. –DM Trisha Sakhlecha, The Inheritance (Pamela Dorman) At last, a psychological thriller that mentions the Highland Clearances! Trisha Sakhlecha’s propulsive debut reads a bit like Succession, if it was a locked room mystery set on a terrifyingly remote island. When a wealthy Indian family reunites to celebrate their patriarch’s retirement, the younger generation plans to spend their vacation squabbling over finances, but a shocking tragedy soon threatens to dismantle their empire entirely. –MO Alex Hay, The Queen of Fives (Graydon House) Perhaps 2025 is the year of the heist, especially given the IRL increase in property crimes against the uberwealthy (excuse me while I go in search of the world’s tiniest violin, which would probably be locked up in a billionaire’s art collection or a Swiss warehouse). Alex Hay already won me over with the impeccably crafted Housekeepers, and The Queen of Fives should cement Hay’s reputation as the underworld king of Victorian capers, featuring a long con for the ages, a queer-coded marriage plot, and plenty of outfit changes. –MO Dennis Mahoney, Our Winter Monster (Hell’s Hundred) A couple on a road trip to fix their marriage instead find themselves stranded in a snowstorm and facing a supernatural threat of epic proportions. This one has the same vibes as cult classic I’m Thinking of Ending Things, but with a snowstorm ratcheting the tension waaay up. –MO Matthew Pearl, Save Our Souls: The True Story of a Castaway Family, Treachery, and Murder (Harper Books) From the editor of Truly*Adventurous, Save Our Souls comes a staggering account of a family castaway on a deserted island and confronted by a mysterious man who first appears to be their salvation, before a more difficult truth emerges. Pearl works in the vein of David Grann and consistently produces first-rate nonfiction. –DM Makana Yamamoto, Hammagang Luck (Harper Voyager) Hawaiians in space, planning a heist—what’s not to love? In this queer anti-capitalist caper, former outlaw Edie is determined to abide by the law after 8 years in prison, but their loved ones are in need of more money than a regular job can provide—so Edie reluctantly get agree to one last job, organized by Angel, their femme-fatale-will-they-or-won’t-they former partner in crime, and the source of much unresolved sexual tension with the novel’s handsome enby lead. Angel’s got a plan to rob the richest man in the galaxy, and she’s assembled a team that might just pull off the toughest heist in galactic history. –MO Kate Winkler Dawson, The Sinners All Bow: Two Authors, One Murder, and the Real Hester Prynne (Putnam) This new nonfiction study from Kate Winkler Dawson reexamines the notorious early American murder of Sarah Maria Cornell, alongside a Victorian era account from true crime sensation Catharine Read Arnold Williams. –DM Susan Barker, Old Soul (Putnam) This book IS THE MOOD, and the mood is dark. Old soul feels like Thomas Pynchon’s V was a Georgia O ‘Keefe painting. At the start of Barker’s latest, two strangers who miss their flight discover a strange supernatural mystery in common: each lost a loved one suddenly and iinexplicably, and each of their objects of grief had encountered an unsettling woman just before their untimely demise: a woman who appears never to age and who insists on taking photographs of her chosen victims. What follows is an epic chase around the world to track down evidence of a malevolent killer in hopes of eventually finding the woman herself. –MO Alafair Burke, The Note (Knopf) In Burke’s tense new thriller, three friends with a shared secret reunite for a few days in the Hamptons and soon find themselves caught up in a troubling police investigation. Burke is a mater of suspense and the twists in this one will genuinely shock readers. –DM Sarah Sligar, Vantage Point (MCD) I highly enjoyed Sligar’s twisty debut, Take Me Apart, and have been extremely excited for her follow-up, a tale of the younger generation of an old-money New England family who must reckon with a supposed curse placed on their family tree. But the fascinating thing (and unsurprising from Sligar, who knits together themes of “the modern” and “legacy” skillfully) is that the curse, wrought this round on millennials, takes the form of digital hauntings! –OR Robert Littell, Bronshtein in the Bronx (Soho Press) For those who enjoyed Yuri Hererra’s account of Mexican hero Benito Juarez’s time in New Orleans, here’s another tale of revolutionary exile: Trotsky in NYC! Robert Littel is the perfect person to take on this daunting task without sacrificing story, and I’m psyched to dive into Leon’s days in the city I once called home. –MO Scott Turow, Presumed Guilty (Grand Central) A new installment in the life and times of Rusty Sabich arrives just in time for recent converts coming over from the splashy adaptation of Presumed Innocent. Turow is still at the top of his game and writes a first-class legal thriller. –DM Cynthia Weiner, A Gorgeous Excitement (Crown Publishing Group) This book will haunt me for a long time. Cynthia Weiner is intimately familiar with the 1980s NYC preppy scene: close enough to recall its details, and distant enough to critique it intelligently. In this riff on the story of the notorious Preppy Killer and his much-maligned victim, Cynthia Weiner condemns the callous attitudes and conspicuous consumption of an entire strata of society ready to believe the worst of an outsider while refusing to see the truth of one of their own. –MO Clay McLeod Chapman, Wake Up and Open Your Eyes (Quirk) Clay McLeod Chapman’s upcoming horror novel is the perfect post-Election read: namely, in that it features demonic forces taking possession of their viewers through the TV network Fax News (Just the Fax!) The ways in which the story evolves take the plot in directions that make all of us understand our complicity in the toxicity of today. –MO Andrew Welsh-Huggins, The Mailman (Mysterious Press) The delivery of a very special package and a kidnapping precipitate a cross-country road trip in Welsh-Huggins’ new thriller, which brings readers a memorable protagonist and a high-octane plot. –DM Charmaine Wilkerson, Good Dirt (Ballantine) Charmaine Wilkerson’s follow-up to Black Cake, her breakout debut, looks to be just as thrilling and emotionally resonant. This multigenerational epic features the wealthy but cursed Freeman family, one of the only Black families in their wealthy enclave of New England and victims of an unsolved crime that, decades later, continues to fuel the public’s curiosity; when a new disaster befalls them, they must delve deep into the family’s past for the key to saving their futures from ruin and exploitation. Perfect reading for gothic season! –MO Jakob Kerr, Dead Money (Bantam) A Silicon Valley fixer features in Kerr’s new financial thriller, a fast-paced dissection of modern tech culture and a genuinely thrilling page-turner. –DM Fiona Davis, The Stolen Queen (Dutton) An ancient curse! A missing artifact! The Met Gala! This book is so much fun! Fiona Davis’s scintillating, twisty new novel toggles back between Egypt in 1936 and New York City in 1978, as we follow two timelines of the same mystery, and two bold heroines who meet at the Met to solve a decades-old… and maybe centuries-old mystery. –OR ___________________________________ FEBRUARY ___________________________________ Gillian McAllister, Famous Last Words (William Morrow) Gillian McAllister’s latest should be a strong contender for most suspenseful thriller of the year—truly nailbiting levels of tension. As Famous Last Words begins, McAllister’s heroine has just returned to her work as a literary agent after almost a year of maternity leave, but in the worst First Day Back ever, is immediately called away again by her husband’s bizarre actions. He’s taken several people hostage, and no one has any clue as to why, with a jarring note left on the counter this wife’s only clue to interpreting his actions (the titular famous last words). –MO Megan Collins, Cross My Heart (Atria) Maybe it’s just the fact that I finally watched Baby Reindeer, but stories about female stalkers are having a moment. In one of the most unhinged set-ups yet, Cross My Heart features a woman who, after getting a successful heart transplant, falls for the bereaved widower of her organ donor. Honestly this novel proves that psychological thrillers are the only antidote to romcom creepiness (remember that Minnie Driver and David Duchovny heart transplant movie?). –MO William Boyle, Saint of the Narrows Street (Soho) Boyle continues filling out the Gravesend neighborhood of Brooklyn with powerful, emotionally complex crime stories. In Saint of the Narrows Street, two sisters arrange for a terrible secret to be hidden, reverberating across the generations. Boyle’s work is always traced with melancholy and never shies away from the tough moral predicaments his characters face. –DM Deon Meyer, Leo (Atlantic Monthly Press) Meyer delivers another top-notch thriller out of South Africa, this one finding Detectives Benny Griessel and Vaughn Cupido in exile from Cape Town, working a murder out of a university town, when another killing across the country reverberates with their investigation and opens the possibility of a broader conspiracy. –DM Kat Dunn, Hungerstone (Zando) Before the very gay Dracula was ever conceived, there was the much gayer Carmilla—a queer-coded novella of female desire and insatiable hunger. Kat Dunn has taken that original inspiration and made it much stranger (and hotter), as we follow the journey of an unhappy aristocratic wife slowly coming to embrace her unholy appetites, under the guidance of an extremely sexy vampire/chaos queen. *fans self* –MO Patrick Modiano, tr. Mark Polizzotti, Ballerina (Yale University Press) Yale University Press brings American readers another gift this year: a new translation of the Nobel-prize winning Modiano’s rich, evocative Ballerina, set in the world of dance (and oblique existential mysteries) in 1960s Paris. –DM Allison Epstein, Fagin the Thief (Doubleday) I’ve longed for a retelling of Fagin’s life, and Allison Epstein, in possession of a deep knowledge of history and a rare talent for characterization, is the perfect one to take on this story. –MO Baalu Girma, Oromay Translated by David Degusta and Mesfin Felleke Yirgu (Soho) Baalu Girma worked as a journalist during the conflict between Ethiopia and Eritrea and wrote this novel just before he vanished, presumed murdered. In his magnum opus, translated into English for the first time, a cynical journalist helms a vast propaganda effort aimed at converting Eritrea’s rebel forces to capitulate, while struggling to contain his growing disillusionment. Despite its heavy subject matter, Oromay is full of dark humor and heartfelt sentiment, and to read it is to gain a sense of the dynamism and livelyness of its author, making his fate all the more tragic to contemplate. –MO Cornell Woolrich, The Black Curtain (American Mystery Classics) An introduction from George Pelecanos is one of the many delights of this re-issue of the classic Woolrich amnesia mystery. It’s the latest gem in the ample offerings from American Mystery Classics. –DM Heather Levy, This Violent Heart (Montlake) I adored Hurt For Me, Heather Levy’s sultry tale of kink and vengeance, and This Violent Heart should be just as compelling. In This Violent Heart, a woman returns to the conservative small town she blames for her childhood best friend’s suicide. She’s not happy to be back, but finds herself with a new sense of purpose when she learns her friend’s death may have actually been a murder. –MO Ricardo Silva Romero, Rio Muerto Translated by Victor Meadowcroft (World Editions) A murdered man’s ghost tells the story of his widow’s quest to confront the men who murdered him in this new novel from renowned Colombian author Ricardo Silva Romero. –DM Mike Lawson, Untouchable (Atlantic Monthly) Joe DeMarco is back! When spoiled billionaire playboy Brendan Cartwright is found dead, it seems pretty likely that his death is the result of one of the many powerful, soulless people he partied with constantly. But then former Speaker of the House John Mahoney learns that there’s a chance the sitting President of the United States might have been involved with Cartwright’s death, he sends his fixer DeMarco to investigate. And boy does he! –OR TJ Klune, The Bones Beneath My Skin (Tor Books) Klune has crafted a moving story of found family in this X-Files-influenced thriller perfect for fans of Paul Tremblay’s The Cabin at the End of the World. The Bones Beneath My Skin follows Nate, a journalist at loose ends, who finds a mysterious girl and her hunky bodyguard hiding out in his family’s summer cabin. He soon joins them in their dangerous quest to reunite her with her family, as her former captors follow in hot pursuit. As fast-paced as it is warm-hearted! –MO Virginia Feito, Victorian Psycho (Liveright) Victorian Psycho is buckets of macabre fun, the story of a young governess stuck in the home of a twisted, wealthy family—and how she attempts to keep her violent fantasies of revenge, retribution, and good, old-fashioned cruelty at bay. That is, of course, until Christmas, when she’ll finally be able to give her employers the gifts that they so dearly deserve. It’s a real… “sleigh ride.” I’m so sorry. But not for telling you to go read it. –OR Isa Arsén, The Unbecoming of Margaret Wolf (Putnam) Arsén’s sophomore effort is equal parts sultry and cultured, featuring two Shakespearian actors in a unusual but emotionally fulfilling marriage of convenience who find themselves in a sticky situation. They’ve been hired for a rather strange gig: an eccentric criminal has built a replica globe in the middle of the desert, and he’s ready to bring Shakespeare to life for his audience of one. At first, Margaret is merely there to tag along while her husband enjoys a leading role in Titus Andronicus; she’s recovering from a mental breakdown from the last time she starred in the Scottish Play. When she bonds with their benefactor, however, she finds herself reluctantly agreeing to give the lady one more try. When her marriage is threatened, she turns to her character to find the strength to do what needs to be done, in a perfectly-plotted denouement. –MO Neena Viel, Listen to Your Sister (St. Martin’s Griffin) Neena Viel’s well-titled debut takes us into a loving but dysfunctional group of siblings at moment of crisis, then turns the tension up to the max. Mid-twenties Calla Williams is burdened by her role as her youngest brother’s guardian, and resentful of the middle child for his ability to get out of care-giving, but she’s also so terrified of losing her closest family that she’s tortured each night by visions of her siblings dying. When her teenage charge gets in trouble for actions at a protest, she takes the three of them on the road to a rented cabin to let the air clear—bringing along her nightmares, and the potential to destroy not only the tight-knit family, but reality itself. –MO Sara Gran, Little Mysteries (Dreamland Books) Gran has rightly had a bit of a renaissance in the last few years, as Come Closer has found a new hungry group of readers. I’ve always been a fan of Gran’s Claire DeWitt mysteries—existential, elliptic, frustratingly human [positive]—and this new collection of short DeWitt stories (or DeWitt-adjacent stories) is like water in the desert. There’s a lot of play afoot here (including a cootie catcher story!) and that makes me all the more excited for Gran’s return to fiction after a few quiet years. –Drew Broussard, Lit Hub Podcasts Editor Emily J. Smith, Nothing Serious (William Morrow) In what reads as a referendum against the role of “female best friend for straight male narcissist”, a tech worker finds herself torn between loyalty and morality when her bestie dude bro is accused of murder, and she’s recruited as a character witness to prove how he’s actually, like, totally feminist. Nothing Serious is brutal, complex, and necessary, and joins the growing number of novels in which Silicon Valley is not an object of admiration, but of disgust. –MO ___________________________________ MARCH ___________________________________ Ashley Winstead, This Book Will Bury Me (Sourcebooks) Ashley Winstead has quickly become one of my favorite voices in the genre—there’s a polish to her characters that belies their hardened interiors and wounded pasts, their favored delusions and worst decisions. Her latest may feature her most interesting and complex heroine yet: an internet sleuth, mourning the loss of her father, throws herself into investigating the high profile murders of several sorority girls, and in the process does something terribly wrong. Many authors have taken at stab at capturing the complex and exploitative ins and outs of the true crime industry and its many cold case warriors, but Winstead’s is my favorite take yet. –MO Patrick Hoffman, Friends Helping Friends (Atlantic Monthly Press) An everyman with a sideline dealing steroids gets pressed into undercover service to avoid jail time and soon finds himself plunged into a world of racism, violence, and toxic masculinity in Patrick Hoffman’s latest crime saga. Hoffman is one of the best writers at work today in crime, and here, with his sights trained squarely on the rise of white nationalist movements, he’s providing readers with an absolutely startling experience. –DM Silvia Park, Luminous (Simon and Schuster) A United Korea in the nearish future is the setting for Silvia Park’s deeply human take on artificial life. The estranged children of a robotics pioneer are reunited by the search for a missing, and rare, robot unit, one who may lead them to their sorely missed, and entirely artificial, brother. –MO Erika T. Wurth, The Haunting of Room 904 (Flatiron) Erika T. Wurth, who wrote 2022’s splendid White Horse, is back with a wonderful, wholly inventive new horror novel, about a young woman who (following the death of her clairvoyant sister), finds herself able to commune with spirits—and is called to investigate a phenomenon in a Denver Hotel, where, every few years, a girl is found dead in the same hotel room, no matter what room she checked into. (I love this premise.) What follows is a simmering, sinister, and transportive journey through a kaleidoscopic, metaphysical and memorial world. –OR Elon Green, The Man Nobody Killed: Life, Death, and Art in Michael Stewart’s New York (Celadon) Elon Green is a sensitive chronicler of the suffering of New Yorkers and their attempts to seek justice from an imperfect, and often actively corrupt, system, and his new book is no exception. The Man Nobody Killed explores the artistic underground of 980s NYC at a shocking moment in which one of their own—a Black graffiti artist who ran in the same circles as Basquiat and Madonna—was brutally murdered by police while out tagging. The crime was immediately recognizable to the community as racially motivated, sparking a sea of protest against police violence and radicalizing many of the witnesses to the brutal attack. –MO Stephen Graham Jones, The Buffalo Hunter Hunter (S&S/Saga Press) Sit up, everyone: Stephen Graham Jones has a new novel! It’s about the discovery of a diary written by a white Lutheran pastor in 1912—a diary which chronicles, over several visits, an interview with a Blackfeet vampire named Good Stab in which he explains his lifelong quest for revenge. –OR Hallie Rubenhold, Story of a Murder: The Wives, the Mistress, and Dr. Crippen (Dutton) Hallie Rubenhold writes some of the most engaging nonfiction around; her works display an incredible mastery of the rhythms of the past and the quirks of history’s denizens. Here, she explores a shocking murder in turn-of-the-century New York’s glittering demimonde–when a popular chanteuse goes missing, suspicion quickly falls upon her doctor husband, whose reputation for quackery hides far more sinister intentions. –MO Jean Echenoz, Command Performance Translated by Mark Polizotti (NYRB) This book is very French, by which I mean, a bizarre melange of genre tropes, literary tangents, and surreal cynicism. Perhaps the best way to describe this book is as the kind of existential detective novel that would have made a great indie film in the mid-aughts (Jason Schwartzman, are you reading this?). In Command Performance, a former flight attendant takes a turn as a PI; his gross ineptitude and a series of strange coincidences then lead him to a new career in politics, and eventually, a mission to assassinate the head of his own party. –MO Ron Currie,The Savage, Noble Death of Babs Dionne (Putnam) Ron Currie doing a big family crime novel seems like a ticket to a great time to me. It features a iron-willed Franco-American matriarch (the titular Babs) defending her territory (a small town in Maine) and her family from enemies foreign and domestic. I have the feeling it’s going to come together in a big messy blast, as all good crime denouements should do. –DB Deanna Raybourn, Kills Well with Others (Berkley) Deanna Raybourn’s charming sequel to Killers of a Certain Age is finally here! Our four favorite senior lady assassins Billie, Helen, Mary Alice, and Natalie are back. They are laying low but growing restless… but then they learn of the perfect job and swing back into action. I cannot even tell you how much of a vacation these books are. –OR ___________________________________ APRIL ___________________________________ Rav Grewal-Kök, The Snares (Random House) The Snares may be the most cynical take on government actions I’ve ever come across. In Rav Grewal-Kök brilliant and tragic sendoff of the post-9/11 world, a bored bureaucrat is recruited to approve suggested targets for the nascent drone program, and instead finds himself set up as the patsy for a deeply racist and bloodthirsty initiative. If Graham Greene had written a Shakespearian tragedy, it would read something like this. –MO Nat Cassidy, When the Wolf Comes Home (Tor Nightfire) When FDR said “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” he could never have imagined someone would take that thought to so logical—and extreme—conclusion as this, and yet Cassidy’s latest works well on every level. Cassidy’s protagonist is a struggling improv comedian working graveyard shifts at the local diner and wondering how she’ll make rent. Within the first few pages, she’s transformed into the protector of a lost little boy with terrifying enemies & even more terrifying powers. The conclusion feels shattering, inevitable, and completely of our time—by which I mean, very bleak indeed. –MO Maha Khan Phillips, The Museum Detective (Soho) This book is so cool! As the Museum Detective begins, an archaeologist gets a call from the police to identify a body—specifically, a mummy preserved in a highly unusual sarcophagus that just about everyone would like to get their hands on, for profit or for politics. –MO Liann Zhang, Julie Chan Is Dead (Atria) Julie Chan was separated from her twin sister Chloe after a horrendous car crash left them orphaned; Chloe’s adoption by a wealthy white family gave her the in to become a hugely successful influencer, while Julie, raised by a cantankerous and cruel aunt, has a terrible job and few prospects for the future. That is, until she finds her sister’s corpse and decides to take over Chloe’s life with the glitterati. Julie is, of course, signing up for something much darker—hilariously so, in a way that would transfer quite well to the big (or small) screen. Perfect inspiration for a social media cleanse! –MO Yigit Turhan, Their Monstrous Hearts (MIRA) Butterfly horror!! In the English-language debut from Turkish-Italian writer Yigit Turhan, a young novelist beset by mounting bills and stymied by writer’s block heads to Milan, where he has inherited his grandmother’s luxurious estate. When he finds a notebook hidden in the walls purporting to tell his grandmother’s life story, he begins to understand the shifter implications of her meteoric rise, and strong demise. A well-crafted and rather moving parable about dark bargains and cruel sacrifices. And butterflies. –MO Austin Kelley, The Fact Checker (Atlantic Monthly Press) From a former New Yorker fact checker comes this debut novel about a magazine fact checker and a missing woman. The novel follows an odyssey through New York and strikes a perfect balance of mystery, humor, and literary ingenuity. –DM Abigail Dean, The Death of Us (Viking) Abigail Dean has already proven to be a skilled observer of ordinary humans in extraordinary circumstances, and her latest is her most affecting study yet. A once-happy couple reunites after decades of estrangement when the man who once broke into their home and tortured them finally goes to trial. The love they shared wasn’t enough to keep them together after their ordeal, but perhaps the act of seeing their tormentor brought to justice will finally bring the two of them back together. –MO Lauren Haddad, Fireweed (Astra) Set in Prince George in Canada’s version of the rust belt, Fireweed follows a stifled housewife as she searches for her missing neighbor, a widowed mother of two and the only indigenous woman in the neighborhood. What follows is a complex examination of injustice, performativity, and intersectionality. –MO Elizabeth Kaufman, Ruth Run (Penguin Press) Kaufman’s heroine is a clever digital thief who’s managed to steal millions from banks across the nation and stashed her winnings across the world. When one of her transfers trips an alarm, she grabs her blond wig and her bundles of cash and goes on the run. Can she escape the men following her? And do they want to recover the stolen money, or are they more interested in the thief herself? Elizabeth Kaufman uses her time in the tech industry and deep knowledge of information networks to inform the plot without detracting from the relentless forward motion of her story. –MO Robert Jackson Bennett, A Drop of Corruption (Del Rey) Robert Jackson Bennett’s immersive world-building, engaging characterizations, and intricate mysteries are once again on display in this second mystery to feature the Watson-and-Sherlock duo of Ana Dolabra and Dinios Kol, investigators for a vast empire full of cruel masters and strange magicks. This book was so fucking creepy and good. Y’all all need to read it so we can all talk about the shroud. –MO Lindy Ryan, Another Fine Mess (Minotaur) Lindy Ryan’s Bless Your Heart first introduced her vampire-slaying funeral-parlor-owning small-town-Texas heroines, and now the Evans women return for another installment of burying the dead and fighting the undead, but this time around they’re not just dealing with the supernatural. Reads like if your favorite aunt was Buffy’s watcher. –MO ___________________________________ MAY ___________________________________ Maud Ventura, Make Me Famous Translated by Gretchen Schmid (HarperVia) In this gripping saga of a pop star’s grueling rise to the top, fame is not for the faint-hearted. Maud Ventura blew me away with My Husband (especially that last page!) and Make Me Famous, a Highsmith-esque thriller following a singer’s brutal, callous efforts to become pop star royalty, should be just as viciously delightful. –MO Daniel Kehlmann, The Director Translated by Ross Benjamin (Simon and Schuster / Summit Books) The new novel from the internationally renowned Kehlmann centers on the turbulent life and art of G.W. Pabst, the Austrian screenwriter and director. Kehlmann’s novel traces Pabst’s journey fleeing from Nazi Germany, through the Hollywood doldrums, and back to Austria, where he’s soon recruited by Joseph Goebbels to produce propaganda films for the Reich. –DM Adam Oyebanji, Esperance (DAW) Adam Oyebanji has crafted another brilliant melange of science fiction and murder mystery, with a heady dose of Afrofuturism thrown into the mix. In a seemingly impossible crime, a number of bodies are found drowned in seawater, and far from the ocean. Meanwhile, a woman with strange talents and even stranger technologies seeks information related to a singular 18th-century voyage marked by disaster and cruelty. The Esperance does something very tricky, and does it quite well indeed. –MO Paul Vidich, The Poet’s Game (Pegasus) Vidich, one of today’s premier spy novelists, is back with a sophisticated new thriller about the former head of Moscow Station, now called back to duty for the proverbial one more job. Vidich paints a vivid portrait of the lives caught up in the inter-agency scheming and masterfully raises the stakes at every turn. For smart espionage fiction with a human touch, Vidich is in a class of his own. –DM Brendan Slocumb, The Dark Maestro (Doubleday) Slocumb once again combines a deep knowledge of classical performance with a tightly executed crime story. In this latest, a cello player forced to go into witness protection must devise a want to use his talents to take down his family’s enemies, or face a future of never performing again. Erudite and exciting! –MO David Demchuk and Corinne Leigh Clark, The Butcher’s Daughter (Hell’s Hundred) While 2025 is simply flooded with cannibals in fiction,there’s only one featuring the maker of meat pies herself: Mrs. Lovett. How ever did the mysterious matron of Sweeney Todd get her gruesome start in the world? Perhaps it began with her happy childhood in a butcher shop, a happiness ending abruptly upon the death of her father and the newly dangerous circum­stances of her life—first as a maid to a dangerous master, and later as a prisoner in a convent determined to tell her sorry tale to any and all sympathetic listeners. –MO Matt Serafini, Feeders (Gallery) One of several books out this year that interrogates how far people are willing to go in the name of social media views, but by far the most graphically disturbing (yes, the dog does die). When a wannabe influencer gains access to an exclusive new social media site, she soon discovers that to go viral with viewers, she needs to go extreme with her content. Truly vicious and not for the faint of heart—just like the social media metrics that inspired it. –MO Christina Li, The Manor of Dreams (Avid Reader/Simon & Schuster) Christina Lee’s debut is a lushly crafted haunted house gothic, full of family secrets and forbidden romance and grounded in Hollywood’s long history of racism & patriarchy. When the first Asian-American woman to win an Oscar dies after a lengthy estrangement from her daughters, she leaves her crumbling estate to the child of her former employees. Her own daughters refuse to accept the will’s startling stipulations without a fight, and as the families complete biltong over the manor, supernatural forces work to reveal hidden truths and enact violent revenge for past injustices. Lee has a talent for understanding the human impulses behind villainous destruction—everyone is understood,but none shall be forgiven. Added to this adage is a sincere belief in the power of love, and an emphasis on the need for honesty in bearing the weight of history. –MO Lila Cain, The Blackbirds of St Giles (Dafina) A Black soldier who served with the British during the American Revolution heads to England with his sister to claim his inheritance after a surprise windfall. Instead, the two siblings find themselves robbed and stranded in the poorest section of 18th century London, a slum known as the “rookery”, and fall under the tyrannical sway of the local crime boss. Cain’s novel paints a fascinating and immersive portrait of London’s substantial Black community in the Georgian Era, full of compelling characters, rich detail, and lush set-pieces. Also Lila Cain is in fact two people—Kate Griffin and Marcia Hutchinson—and I love to recommend a good collaboration! –MO Caitlin Starling, The Starving Saints (Harper Voyager) A castle under siege and about to run out of food is the setting for Starling’s latest. When mysterious strangers arrive promising victory and sustenance, the defenders let them in, but at what cost? And what bargains must be struck to be rid of them? This book was messed up (in the best way). –MO Laura Leffler, Tell Them You Lied (Hyperion Avenue) This book looks like “Bad Art Friend” on steroids and I cannot WAIT to dive in. Laura Leffler’s novel examines the intense artistic and personal competition between two strivers in New York City, one of whom is suspected of foul play after the other goes missing in the chaos of 9/11. –MO Andrea Bartz, The Last Ferry Out (Ballantine) Andrea Bartz is at the top of her game in this moody thriller set on remote Mexican island full of secretive vacationers. Bartz’s narrator isn’t on vacation, though—she’s there to find out more about her fiancee’s last days, and learn if there’s a wider story behind her partner’s shocking death from food allergens. –MOƒ ___________________________________ JUNE AND BEYOND ___________________________________ Maggie Stiefvater, The Listeners (Viking) The Listeners has all the glorious backdrops and sinister undertones of Remains of the Day or Rules of the Game (there’s even a lovelorn flying ace). I’m serious—almost every page of this novel made me think of the “Anticipation” speech from the end of Gosford Park. In a West Virginia resort famed for its luxurious standards and healing mineral waters, the sturdy general manager has guided her hotel and start through the Great Depression, only to find herself facing an enormous new challenge as war breaks out. The hotel has been ordered to host Axis “internees”—mostly German, Italian, and Japanese diplomats—in pampered confinement, and under the watchful eyes of toughened G-men, until they can be repatriated to their homelands. The hotel workers find themselves recruited to spy on their reluctant new guests in an uneasy dynamic further complicated by the demands of the draft and the start of wartime rationing. Stiefvater bases her novel in real history, featuring plenty of anecdotes that are far too strange to be fictional, while immersing the reader in the wild beauty of her mountain setting. –MO Megan Abbott, El Dorado Drive (Putnam) In Megan Abbott’s provocative new thriller, a group of women committed to helping one another financially takes a dark turn and puts the lives of two sisters in jeopardy. Abbott is among the most gifted stylists at work in crime fiction today, and she brings a poetic appreciation for flawed humanity to her new novel, which is as atmospheric and compelling as any of her best books. –DM Erin Dunn, He’s To Die For (Minotaur) I’m about halfway through this one and I am shipping those leads. Billed as “Brooklyn-99 but make it queer romance”, He’s To Die For features a debonair detective who’s falling head over heels for a rock star—one who just happens to be suspected of murder. And if they don’t get together, I may be forced to *sigh* write some fan fiction. –MO Dwyer Murphy, The House on Buzzards Bay (Viking) You can always count on CrimeReads Editor-in-Chief Dwyer Murphy for atmospheric, clever, and thoroughly engrossing novels, and I have no doubt that his latest—though the galley has not yet graced my desk—will be as good as I’ve come to expect. It concerns a group of middle-aged friends, brought back together for a reunion in the titular house on Buzzards Bay, all fun and games until one of them (the writer, of course) disappears. Then there are the mysterious break-ins in the town, the odd happenings in the house, the stranger at the door—yep, it’s a Dwyer Murphy novel, and I can’t wait to get my hands on it. –Emily Temple, Lit Hub Managing Editor Ruth Ware, The Woman in Cabin 10 (Gallery/Scout) I’m very much looking forward to reading The Woman in Suite 11, Ruth Ware’s highly anticipated sequel to The Woman In Cabin 10. Lo Blacklock, the unlucky heroine of Ware’s cruise ship thriller, is back to work as a journalist after half a decade spent raising her young children. She’s been invited to a very special hotel opening in Geneva, Switzerland, which will, we assume, go disastrously wrong. –MO Lucas Schaefer, The Slip (Simon & Schuster) “For readers of Jonathan Franzen and Nathan Hill comes a haymaker of an American novel about a missing teenage boy, cases of fluid and mistaken identity, and the transformative power of boxing.” Intrigued? Of course you are, and you should be. Lucas Schaefer’s big, bold, raunchy, tender, comic, philosophical, Austin-set boxing novel is also an unflinching examination of race and sex in America. It’s absolutely bursting with memorable characters and outrageous scenes, and the sentence level writing is nothing short of superb. Truly one of the most impressive debuts I’ve read in years, The Slip is a knockout. –Dan Sheehan, BookMarks Editor-in-Chief Ivy Pochoda, Ecstasy (G.P. Putnam’s Sons) In Pochoda’s new novel, a wealthy woman trapped in a stifling marriage soon becomes a widow, only to find herself again trapped, this time by her controlling son. But a trip to a new development, and the nearby call of a group of women living on the beach, soon stir something in her soul, unleashing an uncanny series of events. Pochoda’s turn into horror and mythology will bring ample rewards to her readers. –DM Joe Pan, Florida Palms (Simon & Schuster) In this debut novel, a group of friends in need of work move into the orbit of a biker gang and start running designer drugs up and down the East Coast. It’s a dark coming-of-age novel with ambitious scope and a compelling set of characters. –DM Silvia Moreno-Garcia, The Bewitching (Del Rey) In Moreno-Garcia’s chilling new novel, a graduate student researching a horror novelist delves into a life-altering mystery and the strange forces surrounding a certain manuscript that ties it all together. Witchcraft and the power of narrative intersect to yield this evocative, powerful tale. –DM Melissa Pace, The Once and Future Me (Henry Holt) This book will blow your mind!!!! It kind of felt like a Marvel movie, but like, one that’s actually good! Pace’s amnesiac heroine, locked up in a mental institution and subjected to strange experimental procedures, must escape her padded prison and find out what exactly she’s forgotten, and what role her husband has played in all this, well, madness. I cannot tell you more without spoilers, but even as someone who reads 150+ books a year, I was genuinely surprised. –MO Eli Cranor, Mississippi Blue 42 (Soho) Cranor’s new novel channels Elmore Leonard through the world of dark money college football, as a newly minted FBI agent is assigned to track down a shadowy cabal in central Mississippi pouring dirty money into a football-obsessed community. Cranor’s prose has never been sharper and he knows this world inside and out. This is quite likely the most fun you’ll have with a crime book all year. –DM View the full article

At ten years old, I wrote my first song. I remember it vividly because I performed it at my fourth grade talent show. It was called “Be You” and told the story about someone telling their friend to be themselves because they were beautiful just as they were. I didn’t know it then, but it was advice I needed to hear, too. As I’ve grown older, it’s funny how much I realized the things I wrote were often things I needed in disguise. That’s something that’s still true to this day. After that talent show, I started learning guitar and would often retire to my room after school to write songs. I wrote them everywhere. In journals and notebooks, in the notes app of my mom’s iPad, in the notes app of my iPod Touch, and eventually on numerous notes apps across numerous phones. There were also a lot I didn’t write down, and I still regret that. At its heart, songwriting is like any other act of creative expression: it’s storytelling. And sometimes, those stories are made up. It would bother me greatly when people would point at Taylor Swift and say things like, “To write all those songs, she must have dated soooooo many boys.” The take felt so unimaginative, as if to say we can only craft good and believable stories around things we’ve personally experienced. And so what if she did date all those boys? That’s besides the point. The truth is, for a long time, I only wrote songs because it felt like all I knew how to do. But the songs kept getting longer and the backstories more complex. Suddenly I had all these songs, all these pages and pages of journals filled up, but I still felt like I had so much to say. It wasn’t enough anymore to get lost in a song. I wanted to get lost in a world. In seventh grade, I started writing my first book. There were certainly other stories before that, but the memory of sitting in the back of my religion class, notebook flipped to a random blank page and pencil in hand, is as vivid as the talent show. Now, I know why both have stuck with me for so long. Because they were the precipice of me finding my thing. You know. The thing that lights you up inside and makes you think you’re doing exactly what you were meant to do. The problem is, at the time, I didn’t know one could have more than one thing. There are no rules to it, actually. But I didn’t know that, so songwriting still took precedence over everything else, and writing my very first book – a portal fantasy – was reserved for sneaky sprints during class. I still silently thank that teacher all the time for not disciplining me over it, because she would have been totally right to. It wasn’t until my freshman year of college that tragedy struck – for the better. I was planning to let my songwriting carry me through a Music Business degree and to Los Angeles or Nashville post-graduation, where I would be on my way to becoming a songwriting star. But fate stepped in and I got denied from my “dream” program – twice. It was so embarrassing. I thought my life was over at the ripe age of 18. My one thing, and I’m not actually even good at it? But in truth, it wasn’t my one thing, and getting turned down from the program freed up time for me to get back to that book I started but never finished. I finally completed the first draft in college, then went on to write two more books in the same series. That trilogy didn’t get me an agent or get published (for the better, honestly), but it did teach me that my one thing mentality was kind of BS. However, none of it was a waste. Songwriting laid the foundation for me to know how to tell stories. I started honing my ability to craft engaging narratives and palpable emotions before I knew they were fundamental parts of storytelling. The hard part of songwriting for me was making everything I wanted to say fit into a three minute song. Suddenly, the field was wide open. I had thousands and thousands of words to play with. Of course, I quickly learned that books have their constraints, too. Word counts and genre expectations and age audience parameters. And that doesn’t even begin to encapsulate publishing. How there are different types, like traditional and indie, and that for traditional, you usually need a literary agent. They’re the ones who actually pitch the book to editors, but they also serve as liaisons between you and publishers. In my experience, they’re also mentors of a sort and help guide your career. I had to learn about story structure and plot beats. Save the Cat! Writes a Novel by Jessica Brody became my Obi Wan. It was all so new and exciting and a little overwhelming. For so long, it was just my songs and me. After my fourth grade debut, I rarely sang my own stuff in front of people outside of my family. I was heading down a similar path with books. I could write them all day long, but surely I couldn’t actually publish them. Well, I could and I did! I pushed past my comfort zone and put all my research to the test. I edited my book. I queried literary agents. I failed and did it again, until I was successful. We went on submission to editors. The book didn’t sell and we tried again. That next book turned into The Rosewood Hunt, my debut, which was a two-book deal. The Wilde Trials followed. I look at my songwriting background now with nothing but pride. It’s been years since I’ve written a new song, though I still think about it often and want to get back to it. But for now, I’m buzzing with book ideas begging to be written. The creativity never left me, it just took a new shape. I expect it will again and again and again throughout my life. All I can do is keep giving it the space to grow and continue to nurture all the things (plural!) that make me me. *** View the full article

In my dream, I was trapped. Locked in a cell, deep underwater, where no one could hear my cries. There was no way to escape; I could only run from side to side in the little room, scrabbling at the locked door with my nails, tearing back the orange nylon curtains to find no window behind—just a blank plastic panel, cruelly mocking. Desperately, I cast around for something, anything, to help me break out of my prison—a piece of wood to pry open the door, something heavy to batter the lock. But there was nothing—only a metal bunk bolted to the wall and a rubber tray on the floor. The door was fitted and flush, with no friendly crack I could get my fingers into, no gap at the bottom I could peer beneath or shout into. And as I scratched at the unforgiving plastic with broken, bloody nails, I realized: There was no way out. I was utterly and completely trapped. And the knowledge threatened to overwhelm me. When I woke up, it was with a huge wash of relief. I lay there, my eyes closed, feeling my heart pounding and the blood singing in my ears. It was just a dream—the bad old dream I’d had more times than I could count. Just a stupid recurring nightmare—memory of a horror I had long since escaped. I was safe at home, where no one could hurt me. Except . . . was I? Even before I opened my eyes, I could tell something was wrong. I wasn’t in my comfortable bed at home, Judah lying beside me, a pair of little toddler feet jammed into my stomach. I was alone, lying on a thin, hard mattress, with pain in my back and hips. And the sounds were wrong too—there was no friendly rattle from our old air–conditioning unit, no honking of horns or wail of sirens in the New York night. No, here there was only the clang of doors, the sound of footsteps, the shout of male voices raised in anger. “If you don’t calm down—” I heard, and then something I couldn’t make out. My heartbeat began to quicken again, and I sat up, opening my eyes with a feeling of dread as the events of the day before came flooding back. There was no fake window, no beige panel behind nylon curtains. And the door wasn’t plastic. But there was a door. It was metal and barred. And it was very much locked. My dream hadn’t been just a dream. I was trapped. I was locked in a cell. And I had no idea how I was going to get out. *** When I walked into the bedroom, I sucked in my breath. The room looked like a bomb had hit it. Overturned drawers, duvet and pillows tumbled on the floor, a little side table upside down on the bed, and chairs strewn around like someone had been bowling with them, knocking them over like ninepins. There were clothes everywhere—on the carpet, on the bedside table, hanging off the window blind; I could barely even see the rug for the mess. In the middle of all of it was Delilah, my elderly tabby cat, washing herself placidly on top of a tumbled pile of what had been clean and folded laundry a couple of hours ago. There were only two possible explanations: One, I’d been burgled in the night by someone searching for something with a frightening level of determination. Or two, Judah had let the boys dress themselves for kindergarten and this was the result. And I was pretty sure I knew which one it was. Sighing, I picked up the chairs, retrieved Teddy’s sippy cup from under his toddler bed, and shooed Delilah off the crumpled pile of washing. Then I began stuffing Eli’s clothes back in his chest of drawers. You’re Rawrsome! said a little hoodie lying across the rug, complete with an appliqué dinosaur roaring. Why didn’t adult clothes have affirmations like that? There were days when I felt like I needed the boost of a smiley T. rex saying he believed in me—and today was one. *** “How was the interview?” Judah pulled off his headphones and looked up from his laptop as I set the sippy cup down on the kitchen counter. I never fail to get a lift walking into the main room of our apartment—it was what sold us in the first place. It’s long, almost the whole length of the old tenement, with a dark polished wood floor and tall windows overlooking the neighbors’ rooftops, and today it was full of low autumn sunshine and sparkling dust motes. When we bought the place, it had two bedrooms, and we’d used one for ourselves and kept the other for an office/guest room. But then I got pregnant, and the office had become first a nursery and then the bedroom of two little boys. Now we worked—well, Judah worked, mostly from the kitchen table, which was in a little alcove off the side of the main living space. He’d been deep in a Zoom call when I got back, but now he had the air of someone very willing to be distracted. I put the sippy cup down on the counter and shook my head. “Okay, but I don’t think I’ll get it. The girl who interviewed me was really nice, but she told me I was overqualified. Twice.” “Translation: They don’t think they can afford you,” Judah said with a shrug. He pushed his reading glasses up his forehead. “I told you—you should be aiming higher.” “It’s all very well to say that, but I’ve been out of the game a long time.” I was trying not to let the irritation spill over into my voice, but I wasn’t sure I was succeeding. It was easy for Judah to talk—he’d walked into a cushy staff post at the New York Times, of all places, right before the pandemic hit. He’d won the journalistic equivalent of the lottery—and the fact that he knew it didn’t make it any easier for me to stop comparing our career trajectories. “Staff jobs aren’t easy to come by, Jude, especially not for someone with a five-year gap on her CV.” “I know,” Judah said. He stood up and came across to me, holding me in his arms. “I know, I’m sorry, I’m not trying to make out like the jobs are there just waiting for you to pull them off the tree. I just think . . . you don’t value yourself high enough sometimes.” “I value myself fine, trust me. But I’ve barely worked since Eli was born—and that’s a big red flag for a lot of people.” Eli had been, not a pandemic baby exactly, but born right before it hit. I’d been riding high on the success of my one and only book, Dark Waters, about my nightmare experience on board a cruise ship called the Aurora in the Norwegian fjords. Judah had just been hired as permanent staff at the New York Times. We’d bought an apartment in the trendy Manhattan neighborhood of Tribeca on the strength of my book advance and his newly minted salary. The next step—surely it had to be trying for a baby? For some reason, maybe the uncertainty of that verb, trying, I had assumed the process would take months, if not a couple of years. In reality, Eli had come along faster than either of us had expected, and parenting a newborn had hit both of us like the proverbial ton of bricks. It seemed impossible that such a tiny person could wreak such devastation on two orderly lives, and for me, three and a half thousand miles away from my home country and my mum, it had hit particularly hard. For a while things had got a little rocky—I had felt my mental health sliding back into a very dark place, my old medications no longer really working, the new ones fraught with unexpected side effects and dosage complications. But between us, we’d got things back on track. The hormonal tsunami retreated. Eli fell into a routine. Judah and I made things work, and I found a cocktail of antidepressants that put me back on an even keel. And then, just as I’d been thinking about hiring a childminder (or a sitter, as they called them here) and going back to work, the pandemic hit. In a way, a way I’d never admit out loud, I’d been glad. Of course it had been tough—the isolation, the worry about my mother, far away in what the Guardian was calling “Plague Island.” But it had also let me off the hook—the school and nursery closures had given me two glorious years at home with Eli with no real possibility of looking for full-time work, and then, when Teddy came along, the clock had reset and I’d been back in babyland again, albeit with tweaked medication and a better handle on how everything worked. But now, somehow, we were six years on. Eli was in kindergarten. Teddy had just started pre-K. The book advance had disappeared into everyday living expenses. And both Judah and I agreed, it was time for me to get back on the horse. Only the horse was proving hard to catch. I’d done a fair amount of freelancing—some here in the States, some for old bosses and contacts back in the UK. But what I wanted was a staff job with a pension and health insurance. At least I was a US citizen now, which gave me some measure of security. One of the things I had dreamed about obsessively, sweaty nightmares, back in the dark days of postnatal anxiety, had been my green card expiring and ICE coming to batter down the door. The idea had haunted me, no matter how many times Judah told me it wasn’t going to happen—that as the wife of a US citizen and the mother of two, I wasn’t going to get deported. But even with that precious US passport, I was still aware that if anything happened to Judah, I would be pretty screwed. Our life here, our health insurance, our mortgage payments—they all rested on his job. And I didn’t want that. And not just for me—I didn’t want it for Judah either. I didn’t want the whole burden of keeping our little family afloat to rest on his shoulders. I tightened my arms around him, resting my forehead for a moment on his broad chest, and then straightened up and smiled. “You know what, it’ll be fine. Something will turn up—it’s just a matter of knocking on enough doors, right?” “Absolutely.” Judah smoothed the hair back from my face and smiled down at me. “I mean, the Times position seemed like pie in the sky for me until it wasn’t. You’re an amazing writer with some seriously impressive credits on your CV. Something will come along for you. And in the meantime, keep your hand in, keep writing freelance stuff. And the right door will open, I know it.” “I love you, Judah Lewis,” I said. And I meant it. With my whole being. “I love you, Laura Blacklock,” he said back, smiling his lopsided smile that always tugged at my heart. We gazed into each other’s eyes for a long minute, and I thought again, as I had a thousand times before, how lucky I was to have ended up here—with this man I loved, who still quickened my pulse after ten years and two kids, in this beautiful apartment that neither of us could have dreamed of affording a decade ago. My life could have ended in a watery grave in Norway. It very nearly had. Every day since was a gift—and one I never stopped being grateful for. The ping of Judah’s work computer made us break apart, still smiling at each other. “Sorry,” he said. “That’s my calendar reminder. I’ve got a team call at half past.” “Gotta earn that crust,” I said. And then, seeing the pile of mail on the table, “Oh, by the way, I brought the mail up. There’s a couple of parcels for you. I think one’s those shirts you ordered.” Judah nodded and began leafing through the mix of junk mail, online shopping and bills, before stopping with a groan at a thick embossed envelope. He tossed it to me. “Yet another wedding, I assume. I’m amazed you’ve got any single friends left. Who is it this time?” I looked down at the envelope, frowning. It did look a lot like a wedding invitation—stiff card, expensive cream paper. And it had a European stamp, but not UK. I wasn’t sure what country, in fact. The text on the stamp said Helvetia, which sounded vaguely Scandinavian but wasn’t any country or currency I could put my finger on. It was hand-addressed to Mme Laura Blacklock in thick black ink and beautiful calligraphy. Only one way to find out. I ripped open the top, wincing a little as I cut myself on the stiff edge of the envelope, and then pulled out the card and sucked the blood off my finger as I read it. Marcus Leidmann and the Leidmann Group cordially invites Mme Laura Blacklock to attend the press opening of Le Grand Hotel du Lac St-Cergue les Bains Lake Geneva Switzerland Monday 4th—Thursday 7th November RSVP press@theleidmanngroup.ch On the reverse was the same text in French, and below both sets of text was a discreet QR code labeled more information / plus d’informations. Judah must have seen something, I don’t know what, in my face, because as I finished reading, he looked up, curiously. “Not a wedding invitation?” “No. A press thing, actually.” I handed him the card and he read it over, then tapped the name at the top. “I’ve heard of him. Marcus Leidmann. He’s the CEO of the Leidmann Group. Do you know it?” I shook my head. “Are they a travel firm?” “They’re kind of everything—they’re a bit like a smaller version of Tata Steel, you know, started off with heavy manufacturing then diversified into everything from railways to communications—but I didn’t know they were into hotels. That must be new.” I shrugged. “Probably a good time to move into travel. I mean, a lot of places went bust in the pandemic, so I guess a canny investor gets in at the bottom. Well, nice opportunity for someone to get wined and dined at this Marcus guy’s expense.” I was about to toss the card in the bin when Judah stopped me, his hand over mine. “What d’you mean? Nice opportunity for you, if you want it.” I laughed. “I can’t go to Switzerland, Judah! Who’d take the boys to school? Who’d pick them up?” “Uh… me?” Judah said. He looked a little offended. “Like I did this morning when you were at your interview, if you remember. We all survived.” I opened my mouth to retort that the boys’ bedroom had looked like a war zone and that was just one morning but then shut it again. I didn’t want to be one of those women who nitpicked every time their husbands did something slightly differently to the way they would have done it. And it probably was good for the boys to be asked to take a bit more responsibility for getting themselves ready in the morning—it was just a shame they’d destroyed their room in the process. “But what’s the point?” I said instead, changing tack. “I don’t have a commission to write about it. I mean, a free holiday is nice, but I’m not even sure if it is free. I’d probably have to pay for my own flights.” “One,” Judah said, ticking the items off on his fingers, “you’ve been saying you want to see your mom for, like, two years. Even if you have to self-fund your flights, this’d be a tax-deductible trip to Europe, which isn’t nothing. Two, the place’ll probably be lousy with travel-magazine staffers and editors, so great chance to do a bit of networking. You might even catch up with some old faces. Three, Lo, you’ve been stuck at home with the kids for six fuckin’ years. If anyone deserves a free holiday, it’s you. This is the universe telling you to get back on the horse. And, hey, it’s pretty flattering they thought of you, isn’t it?” I looked down at the card I was holding, now slightly smeared with blood from the paper cut on my finger. The thought of catching up with old acquaintances wasn’t exactly enticing in some cases, but Judah’s other points were valid. There was the lure of seeing my mum, which I’d been putting off for far too long, and that last remark . . . I couldn’t deny that one had hit home. It was pretty flattering someone had thought of me. For a while, after the publication of Dark Waters, I’d been a minor celebrity on the travel-writing circuit with a steady flow of invitations to attend the openings of everything from new resorts to luxury train routes. During the pandemic, that flow had slowed to a trickle and then dried up completely, and somehow it had never resumed. But it was nice to think that my name was still out there, still on people’s Rolodexes—if anyone still used Rolodexes anymore. Yes, it was pretty flattering that someone had thought of me. And it was a reminder that however I’d felt this morning walking home after the interview, I wasn’t a nobody. Maybe I was a bit more rawrsome than I realized. And maybe…maybe Judah was right. Maybe this was the universe telling me so. __________________________________ From THE WOMAN IN SUITE 11, forthcoming in July. Used with the permission of the publisher, GALLERY/SCOUT. Copyright © 2025 by RUTH WARE. All rights reserved. View the full article

In the 1950s Anjette Lyles owned and operated the most popular restaurant in Macon, Georgia. She was an attractive blonde, drove a flashy Cadillac, and hugged every single customer who came into her establishment. She spoke lovingly at every table, dressed in her blue satin dress with the puffy crinoline petticoat. “Hey Betty Anne, gimme some sugar. And Paul, don’t you look just as handsome as you wanna be?” People came into her place as much for her as for the food. “Everybody loves Anjette.” That’s why the whole town was shocked when she was arrested for murder in May of 1958. She’d come by Anjette’s through hard work and tough times. Her first husband, Benjamin Lyles, was the original owner of the place, then called Lyles’s Restaurant. It had been a family business for thirty years when Ben married Anjette in October of 1947. They had a daughter, Marcia, the following July and a second daughter, Carla, in 1951. But Ben was a heavy drinker, and Anjette ran the place, with a little help from her mother-in-law Julia. Then, in May of 1951, Ben sold the restaurant very suddenly for only $2,500—without telling anyone. Anjette did not say a word, but by December, Ben began bleeding from his nose and mouth. Then he became delirious and convulsive. He died in January of 1952. The doctors said it was encephalitis. Anjette, a widow with two children, worked her fingers to the bone and was able to buy back the restaurant in 1955 for $12,000. It reopened as Anjette’s the same year that another Macon resident, James Brown, recorded his first single Please, Please, Please. Things were moving forward in Macon, Georgia. When people came into the new place, they would tell Anjette how much they admired her perseverance. She would say, “Lord, I had to do everything myself. I only thank God that my drunkard husband had some kind of insurance.” The place served good old-fashioned southern food. Her most popular recipe was bacon balls served with lemonade. “Make a dressing of breadcrumbs and chopped onions,” she told anyone who wanted to know, “add an egg, salt, and pepper. Mix that with milk, then spread out your strips of bacon and add a thin layer of dressing mixture. Roll it all up and stick it with toothpick and fry it in hot grease until it’s brown. It’s good!” Deep fried bacon. The same year she opened her eponymous eatery, she met Buddy Gabbert, an airline pilot and a military veteran. It was love at first flight: she flew to Texas to visit with him in his home. And on June 24th, only months after they’d met, they woke up a Justice of the Peace in New Mexico and got hitched. It was heaven for around six months. Buddy died in December. First he developed a rash, then he couldn’t eat, then his arms and legs swelled up. He was in such misery he actually said to people, “Let me die.” When he did, Anjette didn’t grieve. She was the very model of a strong southern woman. But she was heard to say, “Thank God Buddy had him a little bit of insurance money!” Not long after Buddy died, Anjette began to pester her mother-in-law Julia. She was often heard to ask, “Julia, why don’t you have me in your will?” Julia’s mumbled answer was that Anjette was a witch who had murdered both of her husbands. Anjette would laugh and slap her thighs. But she wouldn’t deny the accusations. Still, the restaurant grew in popularity. Anjette was quick to say that her experiments in the supernatural were responsible for her success. The diner even became something of a destination for visitors from as far away as Atlanta. Then, in August of 1957, Anjette’s mother-in-law Julia began to complain of chills and fever. Not long after that, she turned noticeably purple, her arms and legs began to swell, and she was hospitalized. She died in September. Anjette was reverential. “Do you know that sweet woman included me in her will?” Everyone began to say that tragedy seemed to follow their beloved hostess. Such a shame. Especially when her daughter Marcia developed a hacking cough and a fever of 106 degrees. “She’ll soon be going home to her father and her grandmother,” Anjette was heard to say. And Marcia did die, in April of 1958. “I’m just glad my little girl was insured,” Anjette told one of the attending nurses at the hospital. It was at this point that one of the restaurant employees had seen enough and sent an anonymous letter to the coroner. It suggested that he look for a whole lot of poison over at Anjette’s house, poison that might have had something to do with Anjette’s misfortunes. The coroner instantly tested Marcia’s body and found massive amounts of arsenic. Still, everyone in town was stunned when Anjette was indicted for Marcia’s murder. And worse: the prosecution was allowed to introduce evidence related to the other three deaths. The trial began the following October, and everyone in town gossiped about it. Because it was a show. Restaurant employees told tales in open court: they often heard Anjette screaming at her daughter, “I’ll kill you one day, Marcia!” Hospital employees had their say, too. Anjette would bring food to her victims in their rooms, but before she gave it to them, she’d go into the bathroom for a while. And she would take the food and her purse. Julia’s will was found to be a forgery. And it was presented that two weeks before Marcia died, when the doctors were telling Anjette that her daughter might recover, Anjette laughed out loud—and ordered a little coffin. The town turned against her after hearing all that testimony. There were actually signs held outside the courtroom that read, “Burn the Witch!” In the end, Anjette was convicted by overwhelming evidence. The trial only lasted a week. The jury took less than an hour to find her guilty. The judge only needed three minutes to sentence Anjette to death in the electric chair. But the city fathers were agreed that Macon would not go down in history as the first United States town to execute a Caucasian woman for murder. So in 1958 Anjette was found “criminally insane” and committed, for the rest of her life, to the state mental hospital in Milledgeville, Georgia, with the caveat that if she ever “recovered” she would be put to death. In the hospital, Anjette amused the other patients by telling fortunes and explaining, at length, the finer points of witchcraft. She told some of her closest friends in the facility, “They think I’m crazy as hell and I’m gonna let them keep thinking it. Because if they don’t, they’re gonna fry my ass!” Anjette Lyles spent twenty years in the State Hospital at Milledgeville. She died there on December 4th of 1977. ** View the full article

Have you ever wanted to contribute to Algonkian Writers Connect? Dreamed of writing reviews about your favorite science fiction and fantasy books? Longed to share your thoughts on writing? Wished you could conduct interviews with publishers, editors, and agents? Now's your chance! Unicorn Mech Suit is looking for up to two new contributing writers. While the position is not paid, those selected will receive free editorial critiques on short stories, novel pitches, novel chapters, and more. (Critique services are limited to 4,500 words per approved and published article.) They will also receive 20% off all Algonkian editorial services and conferences. Email info@oliviafrias.com with at least three one-sentence pitches for article ideas to be considered.

Leos Carax’s 1991 film The Lovers on the Bridge (titled Les Amants du Pont-Neuf in French) is not a crime movie. But it has the same framework as one: for most of the time, it is a gritty, heartbreaking story about the lives of two young homeless Parisian artists, that knowingly props their story up against the pageantry of the Paris’s bicentennial celebration of 1989; were it not for the camera capturing their story, their struggles would be lost, buried amid the rubble of the city’s self-congratulatory pomp. In this way, the film reminds me of Brian de Palma’s Blow Out (1981), in which a killer (hired by a corrupt political official) stalks the overwhelmingly ostentatious, city-wide festivities of Philadelphia’s “Liberty Day,” to tie up loose ends of a cover-up murder he had previously committed. The Lovers on the Bridge feels like a crime movie, mostly because it is about how society churns on, ignoring its most vulnerable citizens. It is a tight love story of two young, homeless artists who turn Pont Neuf into their home while it is under reconstruction in preparation for the bicentennial festivities. It moves along, increasingly tragically and desperately, suggesting the kinds of plot pathways that might turn a narrative from a romantic drama into a crime story. The eponymous lovers are Alex (Denis Lavant, a street performer and fire eater who suffers from alcohol addiction, and Michèle (Juliette Binoche), a painter suffering from a degenerative disease causing her to lose her eyesight. They discover one another one night, only after Alex collapses in a drug-addled stupor onto the pavement, and gets hit by a fancy car speeding through the streets. Michèle helps him on a bus that parks near them. The bus is part of a network that transports homeless individuals to a shelter where they can bathe, eat, and sleep in peace. It is a coincidence that this pus pulls up after the accident, but the attendant’s cry of “It’s Alex again,” about the unconscious and bleeding addict on the asphalt reinforces that such experiences are commonplace. Alex is then taken to the shelter, along with many of the unhoused and ill men and women of Paris, and thus, the film opens up a kind of melancholy secret world of the city. It is a world that, say, the couple driving in the speeding car does not know exists, a world that the merry celebrators of Paris do not know exists. But Paris, itself, knows. Like Carol Reed’s The Third Man (1949), or the aforementioned Blow Out, The Lovers on the Bridge undertakes one of the great themes of crime cinema: the relationship between the city and the subject, chronicling the figures who know the tunnels and alleyways and crowds and other nooks and crooks of its architecture and infrastructure, who can slip in and out of its shadows. But Lovers on the Bridge asks a kid of reality of that framework, rather than a mystery. The people slipping in and out of the consciousness of the city are not thieves or murders, but ordinary people that the rest of the citizenry would prefer to forget. The film constantly reinforces that Paris has historically, and quite literally, been built on and cannot be regarded without its poorer citizens, and turns one of the most central and famous spots in Paris into a peripheral space, precisely facilitating the alienation of such marginalized individuals from the culture they live in as equally as everyone else. The film simmers in a sense of despair and fruitlessness, from there. Real Paris, the film argues, cannot be truly seen without a movement past the architectural grandeur into the grim, heartbreaking social skeleton. When Alex arrives at the shelter, the diegetic noise of layers and layers of voices (some groaning and some talking loudly) gives an endless, and powerful, quality to the homeless population, reinforcing that this place is in fact made up of thousands of voices (hinting too, at the thousands of more who don’t happen to be present at this particular clinic). The transfer of bodies from the dark light of the bus to the bright lights of the clinic (and the close-up shots during the bus to either the extreme close-up shots or the perfectly framed medium shots taken in the clinic itself) allows for a kind of double-take; the dark cinematography on the ride over, which allows arms and legs to be visible, but obscured, provides a kind of shroud over these peoples; the intrusive, exposing light of the clinic, under which many of the homeless men and women strip down for their showers, is an intense verification that not only are the horrible sights on the bus real, but worse than originally indicated. The goals of the film are established in this very scene: the problem of marginalization of people in a city that belongs to everyone, equally. Why are these unhoused people forced to pay for taking up space in a city of space? These shots are cramped and documentary-style, captured by a quivering camera—and show people lying in a shower basin or squeezed into a seat. These performers are not actors, but people who genuinely live in these conditions, paid by the film to provide verisimilitude and truth. Additionally, the shots of the homeless individuals both on the dark bus and in the grainy light of the shelter are long close-ups concentrated on body parts: limbs and spines supporting bodies that are decaying, breaking, bandaged, or deformed from exposure to the elements for so long (as is the Pont-Neuf bridge, on which Alex, and eventually Michèle, make their home). These shots not only dismember Paris’s homeless (dehumanizing these most urban inhabitants), but contribute to the argument that these are the arms and legs of Paris—having built it, and currently standing it up. Paris is a city build on the bones of its citizens; a walk through the Catacombes, the macabre Roman tunnels under the city which were repurposed after the French Revolution as decorative mass graves for those who perished in political skirmishes or who died in hospitals… as well as bones removed from the overflowing outdoor urban graveyards from centuries before. Molière’s bones are somewhere in the Catacombes, scattered apart, side by side with those of other now-nameless individuals of all classes, educations, ages, and races. Through its editing, The Lovers on the Bridge offers a similar intervention. But Paris is also known for the splendor of its buildings and the beautiful, grid-like organization of its buildings (the result of an 1860’s dream of renovation by Georges Haussmann, which involved the forced renovation of numerous districts, destruction of poorer buildings, and, notably, the creation of homelessness for many individuals who had homes that interfered with his vision). Michèle, elegant and from a well-to-do family who is desperate to locate her, is a painter. Paris, historically and rather stereotypically, welcomes painters. [SPOILERS AHEAD] Alex, on the other hand, is a fire-breather, a street performer; his artistic trade is unknown to the historic grandeur of the city, and while this shows how the city has grown from within itself to create new things, the juxtaposition of Alex’s ending (which involves reformation due to time in jail) with Michèle’s, which involves her restoration to a well-to-do status and potential marriage to a wealthy and educated surgeon, indicates how Paris has automatically accepted her back. She is a representation of wayward traditionalism, and Alex represents an inherent blight of unconventionality that the city seeks to correct in order to improve its image. The film might careen into a crime plot now, but it holds itself back; concentrates instead on the tragedy inherent in the ordinary, rather than extending it to violent metaphor. As a result, The Lovers on the Bridge hits as hard as any noir. View the full article

The line between justice and vengeance is often as thin as it is subjective. It’s this murky idea that serves as the underpinning of Tracy Clark’s third Detective Harriet (“Harri”) Foster thriller, Echo (December 3, 2024; Thomas & Mercer). On a cold winter’s morning, Harri is called to the scene of a suspicious death near prestigious Belverton College. Legacy student Brice Collier has been found unresponsive in a field outside his family-owned home, Hardwicke House. The son of billionaire Sebastian Collier—one of the school’s alumni donors, whose name graces several buildings around campus—Brice’s untimely passing mirrors a similar death from thirty years ago. But power and privilege threaten to derail the investigation before past and present can come into focus. Meanwhile, Harri—whose teenage son was the victim of an act of gun violence—is still reeling from the recent death of her partner, who is said to have committed suicide in a moment of desperation that Harri simply can’t fathom. Her suspicions are further heightened by continuing harassment from a man known only as “the voice,” whose taunting communications hint at a more sinister truth. Despite having provided evidence, albeit scant, to the Chicago PD’s Internal Affairs Division, she is told to stand down by her sergeant when they decline to pursue the matter. Yet turning a blind eye to malfeasance simply isn’t in Harri’s nature, consequences be damned. This complex, character driven narrative is just the kind of story Clark—a native Chicagoan who works as an editor in the newspaper business by day—likes to explore, where her imagination is only tempered by the realities of the criminal justice system, which remains formidable if inherently flawed. John B. Valeri: Echo is your third Det. Harriet Foster thriller – which can be a place of great promise or peril in a continuing series. What was your approach to balancing a standalone storyline with backstory now that you’ve established a canvas and begun expanding it? Tracy Clark: It’s always a delicate balance in a series, isn’t it, to give readers the characters they look forward to revisiting, but then adding enough forward momentum to keep the series going? We’re all a sum of our past experiences, and the same holds for book people. For my team of homicide cops, the focus for each book is the case at hand. The remnants of the previous case, however, or the human toll from whatever I’ve put my characters through in the book before still linger. Characters were changed in some way the last time out, and that change has to be reflected in the new story. Lightly, though, like a ghost standing just over their shoulders. That way readers can dive into the series at any point and not feel as though they’re out of the loop or can’t catch up, if they choose to. JBV: Here, “Harri” finds herself investigating the murder of a wealthy legacy student Brice Collier – a scenario that poses some unique complications. Tell us about the ways in which power and privilege threaten to derail justice. How does the insular setting of academia play into this? TC: Lady Justice stands resolute with her scales and sword, a symbol of our judicial system, offering the promise and pledge of fairness, objectivity, equality under the law. Her blindfold has come to signify the impartiality of judgments, an assurance that laws and judicial decisions will be evenly applied regardless of race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, culture, et al. That’s the ideal, the promise. That is not the reality. Echo looks at justice when wealth and power tip the scales, when Lady Justice peeks beneath the blindfold. It asks the question, what IS justice? What looks like justice for you might not be the same as others see it. What is vengeance? What I might consider vengeance might look an awful lot like justice to someone else. So, in Echo, I’ve tipped the scales of justice and then set the book on an elite college campus where money talks and the Collier family sets the rules; then, I let the characters go. JBV: Harri has suffered some profound losses, including her son and her (work) partner. How does this grief imbue her character with shades of strength and vulnerability – and in what ways can this depth of feeling be both a help and a hindrance in her work? TC: Harri has a lot to come to terms with. When we met her in Hide, the first book in the series, she had lost the life and the world she had before everything hit. She’s lost her only child to gun violence, she’s lost her longtime partner to a suspected suicide. She’s lost a marriage and her sense of equilibrium. Many of us will at some time find ourselves in this situation or one close to it. We will all lose people and things and have to find a way to pick ourselves up and move forward. That’s life. That’s what being human requires. We meet Harri at a crossroads. She has to make a decision to dig herself out of the hole she’s in. Oh, she’s brilliant on the job; she knows how to be a cop, off the job she’s living only a half-life. She pushes people away. She keeps herself to herself. No emotional entanglements, please. Harri has lost her light, but her heart still beats. Is this a strength or a hinderance? I guess it can be both. What it does is make for a complex, multilayered, interesting character to write. Harri has to move, she has to regain herself. She has to accept her losses and deal with grief and guilt. SHE has to do that, no one can do that for her. Meanwhile, she’s got a job to do and murderers to catch. Her vulnerabilities and inertia won’t work out on the streets. Compartmentalization. That’s how Harri does it. JBV: While Harri is now partnered with Det. Vera Li, we also get to see her in action and engagement with other members of the Chicago PD who represent attitudes and experiences that differ from her own. What does this show about the inherent clash between progressiveness and tradition – and how is the “blue wall of silence” a further source of conflict for Harri? TC: Harriet and Vera work in a department not set up for them, and so, in essence, it does not work with their interests or issues in mind. I looked it up before starting the series, I wanted to know how female sworn officers in the Chicago Police Department stacked up. There are about 12,000 sworn officers in the CPD. Twenty three percent are female officers, only 21 percent are African American. Det. Vera Li is Asian, Asian officers make up only 3 percent of the CPD sworn officer population. So, I’ve partnered two outsiders in a department not set up for them, and then compounded their “outsiderness” by teaming them with old-timers, white guys, old-schoolers who are not that comfortable with all the newness walking through the doors. I like the conflict and the tension that gives me. I like the constant clash of age and outlook. I like that there are old-timers who still refer to Harri and Vera as lady cops or girl cops. Conflict is story fuel. Neither Harri or Vera are shrinking violets, either, so they give as good as they get, and I like that too. The blue wall of silence is interesting, complicated. From the outside looking in, I get the impression that there are expectations that are written down and those that are not. I believe cops rely on trust and respect and teamwork. They need to know the person who has their back HAS their back. But I’m also thinking, for most, for good police, that expectation stops at tarnishing their badge and their integrity and that the blue line of silence stops at the threshold of illegality. But playing with the line, pushing it this way or that, putting your characters in a position where they might have to decide what kind of cop they are and what kind they are not, is a fun exercise. Harri and Vera cannot abide dirty cops. They’re in the job for the right reasons. How they face opposing forces, however, is a compelling road to skip down. JBV: In addition to the story’s singular villain(s), Harri is also up against a recurring nemesis known as “the voice.” What are the challenges of maintaining an overarching thread that satisfies from story to story despite remaining unresolved? Also, how much of the eventual resolution do you need to know before continuing such a storyline forward? TC: It’s like juggling balls or spinning plates in the circus. You’ve got to keep pulling the threads through so that you don’t lose sight of where your characters are going or where your story’s going. “The Voice” poses a pretty explicit threat to Harri in Hide, book one; that threat becomes more ominous in book two, Fall. When I pick things up in Echo, Harri gets the answers she’s been seeking, but the story then ends with a mystery. That mystery is resolved in Edge, book four, but Harri will find that the resolution is unsatisfying and ultimately does not change her situation. SHE will have to change her situation. Still, each book raises the stakes, each one resolves a question and then poses another. Everything has to move, change, challenge. Characters who don’t move don’t impress. I need the emotional churn. I don’t know anything beforehand. I don’t write by outline, I just write. I know what I know when I know it, and that works for me. JBV: You are a lifelong Chicagoan, and your books are set in the city. How do you see place and plot working together to elevate narrative – and in what ways does Echo’s wintery backdrop reflect the story’s themes? TC: Chicago is definitely a character in this series. The city has a distinctive vibe and feel that adds a lot of propulsion to the stories and the characters. Setting Echo in the middle of a Chicago winter (which builds character, if you can survive it) adds a little more vigor. Harri and Vera have a tough enough job, but I make it tougher by having them do it in snow and sleet and cold. Chicago weather is just another hurdle and irritant, just another element to add tension and obstruction. You’ve always got to confound your characters, give them something to work against. There’s nothing more brutal than a Chicago winter. I don’t consciously write themes. I don’t even think about them. I write characters. I put characters on the page and see where they take me. I write the city of Chicago as it is, warts and all. It’s a vibrant city, a large city, an urban city, it’s also a dangerous city, a corrupt city, and a harsh city. Melding the two Chicagos together is fun. JBV: In addition to writing novels, you work as an editor in the newspaper business (talk about two notoriously volatile industries!). How does that background inform the critical eye you bring to your own work – and the spirit in which you receive feedback from your own editors? TC: For one thing, I edit as I go along. You’re not supposed to, according to the prevailing wisdom, but I can’t help myself. This means, that when I get to the end of that first draft there aren’t a lot of dangling bits left in my wake to have to clean up. As a result, I write very slowly, deliberately. I worry scenes to death, and really drill down on characters. Everything has to make sense, it has to be plausible, characters have to resonate and above all else they have to be human. I don’t stop writing or revising until all that’s taken care of. I’m an editor by profession, so I know firsthand that no editor can catch everything. I have no problem getting feedback from my editors. They will invariably catch something that I’ve missed. I’d rather catch all the bugaboos before the book is published than after. Story edits are a bit different. Sometimes you have to sit on those a bit. If you trust your editor, and I do, then I go back over my story and see if the suggested edit works for me. If it does, if my editor saw something I failed to see, then I make the change. If I go back over it and the edit doesn’t sit well, then we have a little back and forth. There’s always a compromise to be made, one where the story and the characters don’t suffer. You can’t be too precious with the words you’ve written. You ultimately have to serve the story and the characters, not yourself. JBV: Leave us with a teaser: What comes next? TC: I’m working on the next Det. Harriet book. Entitled Edge, it’s due to my publishers on the Ides of March. In this outing, Harri, Vera and the team are up against a tainted party drug that has hit the streets and is taking people out. With the clock ticking, they must find the source and cut it off before more bodies fall. Who’s the killer? Lips are sealed. PD James said once that there were only four motivations for murder — love, lust, lucre and loathing. I think she’s right on that. I hit at least a couple of those Ls in Edge. I might even hit all four by the end. Time will tell, I’m still writing it. View the full article

Researching my historical mystery novel The Betrayal of Thomas True required me to go to some very murky places, and there are few places in Georgian London so very dark as a stretch of scrubland to the East of London. Tyburn was no stranger to the cries of a baying mob, being home to the executioner’s gallows for generations, but on May 9th, 1726, there was more than just the usual cartload of criminals being trundled there in shackles. The sight of a murderess, her hands bound, preparing for the agony of being burned at the stake for killing her husband was promising, as was the hanging of her two male accomplices who’d chopped up their victim’s body with an axe. But the biggest draw at Tyburn, where the gallows’ beams were worn smooth by the rubbing of ropes from the dangling dead, was the execution of three men for the diabolical ‘sin’ of sodomy. They were soon to entertain the crowd with their death throes, known—with typical gallows humor—as ‘a Tyburn jig’. I sat in the silence of the London Library, surrounded by leatherbound books and walnut bookcases, feeling a cold stone settle in my stomach as I read accounts of what happened next. What those men went through was lost to the distant past and yet, to me, it felt immediate and no less disturbing than if I’d been one of their friends, come to Tyburn to bid them farewell. I had been writing my mystery for two years and the characters in my book were like friends to me. I didn’t want them to hang, but I knew it wasn’t my choice. History, and my characters, were in charge now, and all I could do as an author was follow them. I’m fortunate to count the novelist and matchless historical and contemporary researcher Patricia Cornwell as a mentor and she explained to me once: ‘You have to sit in front of your characters and ask them what they’re going to do next. Listen and they’ll tell you; ignore them, and they won’t bring your book to life.’ Thomas True and Gabriel Griffin are my beloved main characters, caught in a race against time to unmask a murderous traitor before they are caught and forced to hang. Following Thomas and Gabriel through their breathless adventure has been an honor and they most certainly brought the world of the mollies to life. And yet, now the real-life men who inspired them were facing a terrible death… The titillation of the packed crowd was palpable on that Spring day, some three centuries ago. Many of the mob were drunk and shouting, flinging punches at each other to secure the best view. The wealthiest onlookers had paid good money to be crammed in on a looming collar of raked pews reaching up into the sky, like the benches of a theatre. The three condemned men who were to have their agonies applauded all the way to Hell were Gabriel Lawrence, a 43-year-old milkman and single father, William Griffin, a 43-year-old upholsterer fallen on hard times, and Thomas Wright, a 32-year-old wool-comber. Each of them had been found guilty of—to quote court records—‘the heinous and detestable Sin of Sodomy, not to be named among Christians’. They were arrested in a raid one Sunday night in the February of that same year at a secret meeting place for gay men named Mother Clap’s Molly House. A squadron of constables had descended on Field Lane in Holborn, a street which would achieve notoriety some hundred years later when Charles Dickens set Fagin’s lair from Oliver Twist in the very same slum. In burst the Society constables, discovering a set of rooms tucked away between an archway and the Bunch O’Grapes tavern, their associates blocking the passageways around the house to prevent the startled men from escaping. By the early hours of the following morning, some forty unfortunate ‘sinners’ were locked up in the fearsome Newgate Prison, awaiting trial. Thanks to the archives and historians who have studied the often muddled and redacted records, I was able to build a time machine, returning to catch a glimpse of this defiant underworld. Most of those arrested were let off after their imprisonment for lack of evidence, but the arrest, trial and execution of three of them—thanks to the testimony of masked traitors—formed the inspiration for my latest mystery thriller novel The Betrayal of Thomas True. The raid on Mother Clap’s was part of an orchestrated attack on gay subculture, inspired and supported by an organisation known as The Society for the Reformation of Manners. This self-appointed religious group of moral fanatics was responsible for a network of paid informants and enforcers with tentacles stretching deep into the city’s underworld, ostensibly suppressing profanity, immorality and other lewd activities by force. Led by the clergy, business leaders, the gentry, the judiciary and politicians, the Society enlisted men and women from all walks of life to join their ranks. They bribed homosexual men to turn traitor, while some of their agents posed as mollies themselves to get a firsthand peek into the secret meeting places. What did they see inside Mother Clap’s? The Society had been carrying out surveillance since at least the previous November, and one of the Society’s agents, a man named Samuel Stevens, had inveigled himself inside, disguised as a molly. Homosexuals at the time were commonly called all sorts of names. ‘He-whores,’ was one, ‘buggerantoes,’ another, while the pious liked to refer to them as ‘notorious sodomites’. The most common term, however, was ‘molly’. Mister Stevens says he went to Field Lane and discovered: ‘…between forty and fifty men making love to one another, as they call’d it.’ He goes on to recount a convivial scene in an open room with a fiddler playing music, the space packed with men kissing and ‘using their hands’. He then gives us an all-too-rare taste of what eighteenth century mollies might actually have sounded like and this, when I first read it, was like an explosion of inspiration. ‘They would get up, dance and make curtsies,’ he recounts, ‘and mimick (sic) the voices of women.’ Stevens goes on to describe the men retiring to other bedchambers, cheekily known as ‘chapels’, where they would either close the door, or leave it wide open for the titillation of the spectators. Mother Clap was present throughout, apart from when she was dashing next door to replenish the liquor. Stevens’s testimony feels simultaneously alien and familiar. Any gay man reading this article might recognize the barbed compliments, the sexual innuendo and the flamboyant mimicry of bawdy female alter-egos, but the surrounding culture, daily routines and societal mores were a barrier, preventing me from stepping back in time. It was also far too easy to make assumptions and judgments about the people appearing in the archives. Any crime novelist requires good characters and evil characters of course, and I had an abundance of inspiration for both. Mother Clap, owner of the establishment of the same name, showed considerable bravery in her lifetime, putting her neck on the line more than once in court to give false testimony for mollies facing the noose, while apparently making little to no financial profit from her house of ill-repute. Meanwhile, the blackmailing hounds of the Society repulsed and angered me with their hypocrisy and lack of humanity. Still, I was too quick, I think, to cast the mollies as angels and the Society agents as devils. Of course, executing gay men was—and is—irretrievably stupid, pointless and evil, but this was a time when homosexuality was misunderstood, not as a natural attraction to the same sex, but as a willful perversion, a form of demonic, bestial misogyny. In a world where gay men are seen as such, it’s perhaps easier to understand—without sympathy—why mollies were feared and loathed by the hyper-religious society of the time. After all, we needn’t go back in time to see evidence of the very same attitude, we need only travel to countries around the world today where gay men are demonized in the name of religious piety or claims of poisonous immorality. Another false assumption I made was that women sex-workers might automatically have been allies, sharing the yoke of oppression and abuse. In actual fact, female prostitutes were some of the most violent and vitriolic attendees when mollies were publicly punished. Meanwhile, some of the mollies themselves were guilty of questionable acts. One named Mark Partridge appears to have turned traitor for bribes or to save his own neck after falling out with a friend who was indiscreet about his sexuality. Taking Society agents on a tour of molly houses, he is surely responsible for the ruination of a great many of his supposed friends. It’s a truth universal that I wanted to reflect in my book, that evil comes in all forms and being part of an oppressed minority doesn’t necessarily make someone kind or honest. As my lead character Gabriel Griffin says in The Betrayal of Thomas True: injustice does not make a man kind. Meanwhile, there can be good people, even in the cruelest of institutions. We return then to Tyburn, where our three mollies perch at the rear of a cart, their ropes slung over the beams above their bowed heads. Gabriel Laurance could be forgiven for thinking himself particularly unfortunate. Though sodomy was of course very much a capital offence, none of the condemned men had been caught in the act, the jury choosing to believe the questionable testimony of a traitor. Executions were sporadic and rare in the 1700s and in Gabriel’s case, a number of people had testified for him in court, not least his father-in-law who spoke fondly about Gabriel’s 13-year-old child who was to be orphaned. And then there was his friend of eighteen years, Henry Yoxan, a cow-keeper who told the jury: ‘I have been with him at the Oxfordshire-Feast, where we have both got drunk, and then come Home together in a Coach, and yet he never offered any such Indecencies to me.’ Laurence even had two dukes and an earl petitioning the King for his life, pointing out that the evidence was tarnished because it was based on that dastardly molly-turned-informant, Mark Partidge. They successfully obtained a reprieve for the condemned man at the last moment but alas, members of the clergy stepped in—including the Bishop of London and the Archbishop of Canterbury—insisting that he was hanged. They got their way. And so, to the almighty roar of the crowd, the cart rolled forwards and the three convicted men were hanged, nobody pulling on their legs to lessen their agonies. When I wrote about them in my novel, sitting in the London Library, I shed more than a few tears thinking of the terror and deep sadness those poor men must have felt that May afternoon, leaving a cruel and violent world behind to the sound of cheering. Ah, but the real-life story behind my novel doesn’t quite finish there. While the convicts bade farewell to the world, bouncing on their ropes, the raked viewing platform behind them began to crack and splinter and in an explosion of nails and wood, the whole structure collapsed, maiming many and killing sixteen of the spectators in an instant. It’s only my speculation of course, but perhaps God wasn’t quite so supportive of the executions as the Society for the Reformation of Manners assumed. It is just one of so many mysteries woven through the true story of Mother Clap’s molly house. The Betrayal of Thomas True borrows from them all, wrapping them all around one central puzzle. Just like in the history books, there is a traitorous Rat giving the mollies’ names away to a pair of murderous justices and Gabriel and Thomas must unmask him before before they’re forced to dance the Tyburn jig. In the world of the mollies, betrayal is the only sin and time is running out… *** View the full article

It started with a Sunday morning phone call to Kate White, editor-in-chief of Redbook magazine. Her boss at the Hearst Corporation asked her to come to the office immediately. Kate had never been invited to a Sunday meeting and worried the news wasn’t good. She was at her weekend home in Pennsylvania, so she had no work clothes with her. She arrived at the office dressed casually, wearing white sneakers when she was asked to be the next editor in chief of Cosmopolitan magazine. That’s right, Cosmo––at the time Hearst’s most recognized monthly pub, as in famed women-like-sex-too Editor Helen Gurley Brown. Under Brown’s thirty-two-year reign, it had become the biggest ship navigating what was then the bottomless ocean of women’s magazines. Kate would become the second editor to succeed Brown following a two-year stint by Bonnie Fuller. Kate edited Cosmopolitan from 1998 to 2012. “Damn, there goes the novel,” Kate told herself when she accepted the job. She’d managed to crank out four chapters of a murder mystery during the previous six months. “It’s one thing to be editor in chief of Redbook and write a suspense novel, but I didn’t know how I would do it handling a brand as big as Cosmo.” She started her new job in August 1998 and didn’t look at her unfinished novel until the holidays. “I pulled out the four chapters and saw that I’d written that the nanny died on a copy of Cosmo—but I hadn’t remembered that. I took that as a sign from the universe to give it a try even with my current job.” Kate was already a published author of the New York Times bestselling non-fiction book, Why Good Girls Don’t Get Ahead but Gutsy Girls Do. Her agent for that book also represented fiction, so Kate asked her about her unfinished suspense novel. At first, her agent, Sandra Dijkstra, was reluctant, but then encouraged her. Kate, after all, now had a platform as big as they get as editor of Cosmo. “Let’s see if we can sell it without the whole book,” her agent told Kate. It sold on only four chapters. “We didn’t think my publisher would want it, but they did,” Kate says. “I spent a lot of time polishing those four chapters about Bailey Weggins, a magazine writer turned amateur sleuth. I went in there with something as close to ready as I could possibly make it.” Write what you know. Morning television personality Kelly Rippa chose the finished product as her first Reading with Rippa book club pick, and in a matter of weeks If Looks Could Kill, White’s first of eight Bailey Weggins mysteries, became a New York Times bestseller, moving more than 100,000 copies. “In hindsight, I leveraged things as well as I could with that.” Use the tools available. White’s magazine career began when she was a Glamour magazine “Top Ten College Women Contest” winner and subsequent cover girl. Within a few months she was working as an editorial assistant at the magazine. From there, she worked her way up to feature writer and columnist. Her first story was a first-person account of being a clown in the Ringling Brothers, Barnum & Bailey Circus. That lead to more first-person essays, mainly about being single and the New York City dating scene. She once had drinks with the New York State governor’s advance man, George Humphries. And while her dating story subjects were never identified in print, Kate’s description was so close that Humphries’ ex-wife called him from the beauty parlor and told him, “That’s got to be you.” “George thought it was funny, but I learned a lesson.” She made sure no one could identify her future dates. She went on to Mademoiselle, as an executive editor, then became editor in chief of Child, Working Woman, McCall’s, and Redbook. During her 14-year tenure at Cosmopolitan, White increased its monthly circulation by more than 700,000 readers, peaking at more than three million by the end of her tenure. “It was wonderful to be in magazines in the golden era,” she says. “And Cosmo was the most fun job I ever had in my life.” While working in the magazine industry, she completed that non-fiction book, Why Good Girls Don’t Get Ahead but Gutsy Girls Do. She asked her book editor about agents and contacted two. One was disagreeable off the bat, and the other’s assistant asked for a few extra days to answer because her boss was on a cruise. The assistant FedExed the manuscript to the cruise ship. “I immediately thought wow, that’s who I want to be with,” White says. And she was right. The book sold in a bidding war and netted her a $500,000 advance. And yet she still had the urge to write fiction. In second grade her teacher had given everyone a small writing assignment, but when she was returning them, “I was the only who didn’t get mine back,” says Kate. “I thought I was in trouble because I’d written a story about my grandfather, not the assignment. Then the teacher called me up front and made we read it to the entire class. She then hung it up on purple construction paper on the wall for everyone to see.” As a girl, Kate devoured Nancy Drew books, like so many of her contemporaries, and fantasized about being a female detective. When she realized she was too wimpy for that role, she dreamed of writing about a female private detective. “I loved writing almost anything back then—poems, plays, essays for my high school newspaper. I also put out my own magazine. Eventually I came to understand if I wanted a successful writing career, I would need to pick a lane, and I chose magazines.” Kate was in the first class that accepted women at Union College in Schenectady, N.Y. But that meant no female alumni, no mentors for the first class to brainstorm with. So, she took the open door that Glamour offered to get into the magazine business. Still, the fiction bug had her around the neck. She first tried writing a “women’s novel” on weekends during her twenties, but procrastination was a big issue, and she never made any headway. “I finally realized what I really wanted was to write a mystery, but by then I was in my forties and running out of time. So, I decided to try again. I was bummed that Sue Grafton had already written a brilliant series about a female private eye, so I made my protagonist a true crime reporter for a magazine. That turned out to be a bonus for me. It meant I didn’t have to do as much research, because we covered true crime at Cosmo. And no one else had a protagonist like that.” And how did she deal with the procrastination issue? She tried what she called her “sliced salami” method. She started by writing the thinnest slice she thought she could handle––fifteen minutes a day. It worked and eventually she could go for longer stretches. More Bailey Weggins books followed, which was a challenge with her magazine position. “I couldn’t take my eye off the ball because it was such a big job,” Kate says. So, she wrote at night after the kids went to bed. And she wrote every day, which she swears by. “Some of the things I see with friends who want to write a novel is they don’t discipline themselves to write every day…Even if I could write for only half an hour, I would keep the momentum, sometimes producing only a half page.” Some may argue she had all the advantages: a high-profile position in media in New York, acquaintances in the right places at the right time. But that discounts all she did to get there. “I got my foot in the door by writing my non-fiction book,” she says. “I also studied everything I could about not only writing a mystery but marketing it, and I was very open to input. When aspiring authors ask me for advice, they often reply, ‘Yes, but…’ and ignore any wisdom, thinking their gut is a better guide –– even though they have no experience in publishing. I think part of my success is attributable to not believing everything I think and being receptive to advice.” Nothing was handed to her, and she used her connections, as every writer does, to position herself for success. And when opportunity came, like most successful people, she was ready for it. “I did have some luck because of my job, but I really threw myself into the process.” ___________________________________ If Looks Could Kill ___________________________________ Start to Finish: 2.5 years I want to be a writer: Second grade when her teacher celebrated her first story Experience: Women’s magazine writer, editor, columnist and editor in chief. Agents Contacted: Two Agent Responses: Two Time to Sell Novel: Agent submitted to Warner Books, Kate’s nonfiction publisher, out of courtesy. Shocked when they accepted it. First Novel Agent: Sandra Dijkstra (Sandra Dijkstra Literary Agency) First Novel Editor: Sara Ann Freed First Novel Publisher: Warner Books (later became Hachette) InspiratioWebsite: Website: KateWhite.com Like this? Read the chapters on Lee Child, Michael Connelly, Tess Gerritsen, Steve Berry, David Morrell, Gayle Lynds, Scott Turow, Lawrence Block, Randy Wayne White, Walter Mosley, Tom Straw. Michael Koryta, Harlan Coben, Jenny Milchman, James Grady, David Corbett. Robert Dugoni, David Baldacci, Steven James, Laura Lippman, Karen Dionne, Jon Land, S.A. Cosby, Diana Gabaldon, Tosca Lee, D.P. Lyle, James Patterson, Jeneva Rose, Jeffery Deaver, Joseph Finder, Patricia Cornwell, Lisa Gardner, Mary Kubica, Hank Phillippi Ryan, I.S. Berry, Heather Graham, and John Gilstrap, and J.D. Barker. View the full article

(Ed. note: In Alafair Burke’s new book, The Note, three women have struggled to maintain their privacy due to the internet, so we asked Burke how she feels about her own use of social media.) Social media isn’t the real world. We know this. It spews out disinformation. It’s rife with scammers. The carefully curated images posted there create a distorted perception that everyone is richer, happier, and more beautiful than any actual person can be. My latest novel highlights the toxicity of online culture, so harmful that Australia recently banned social media use by children under 16. Despite all that, I credit my own initial ventures into the online universe with helping me learn how to be my true self in the real world. Prior to my leap into social media, I had more personalities that Sybil. Compared to most, our family moved a lot, then I went to college where I knew no one, and same again for law school. Southern Florida, Wichita, the Pacific Northwest, Silicon Valley, Buffalo, Manhattan. Professionally, I was a shape shifter as well. I clerked for a liberal judge then went directly to a prosecutor’s office and eventually to the hallowed halls of legal academia, from which I began to write…crime novels. By the time MySpace users were beginning to migrate to something called Facebook, I was spending my days in a classroom and my nights as a brand new New Yorker, checking out boujee bars I’d seen on Sex and the City. Somewhere along the way, I got used to adapting. I’d talk theory with my professor friends. Cases with the practitioners. Pop culture and industry stuff with fellow authors. I’d frump myself up for school, saving my fashion-victim wardrobe experiments for the later hours in SoHo. I unconsciously tailored my outward persona as I believed the context required. And then my publisher pushed me to go online. Social media was the new book tour, I was told. I worried. A lot. I wanted the books to be out there in the world, but not me. My peers would see what I posted. My students would see. OMG, as we were just beginning to say. I began with trepidation, not wanting to share myself with an audience I could not control. I started by posting only about books. But then similarly-pressured writer friends found me, striking up public conversations about vacation spots, favorite restaurants, and the very best online content—our dogs! Then came the long-lost high school friends posting photos that could have remained lost longer. There were also the academics, even a couple whose Kingsfieldian personas were so well honed I never would have imagined they watched Arrested Development or read mystery novels. Suddenly all my audiences were in one place, getting to know the parts of me I had unknowingly kept from them. In the wise words of George Costanza, “Worlds are colliding!” When an esteemed professor messaged me on Facebook about a blog post I’d written about The Shield (did I mention this was a long time ago?), I realized I had lost all control over my professorial image, but, amazingly, nothing happened. They didn’t revoke my faculty ID card. My students didn’t demand a tuition refund. My law review articles still got published. Readers still followed me even after learning about my nerdy obsession with puzzles and Venn diagrams, weakness for yacht rock, and apparently sacrilegious aversion to dark chocolate. I gradually noticed the different sections of my closet beginning to meld as even my outfits required less code-switching. I was still the same person, and yet, at almost forty years old, I felt for the first time like I had finally found my personality—all my prior identities at last integrated into one woman, love her or hate her. Fifteen years later, I can still say that, ironically, I found the real me online. *** View the full article

I grew up reading Agatha Christie novels as well as the Little House on the Prairie books, so it’s no surprise that my historical fiction novels come with a touch of mystery. There’s nothing better than a burning, unresolved question threaded through the plot to raise the tension, and it’s especially satisfying when the whodunit reveal is successful: both surprising yet inevitable. Below are five historical fiction novels that incorporate Christie’s signature moves and will keep you on the edge for the entire ride, and don’t be surprised if the grand dame herself doesn’t show up in one or two. Fingersmith by Sarah Waters Fingersmith is a gripping historical crime novel set in Victorian England, about two young women, Sue Trinder and Maud Lilly, whose lives become entangled in a web of deceit, betrayal, and manipulation. At first glance, it appears that Sue, raised by criminals, has the upper hand in a devious plot to con Maud, a wealthy orphan. However, as the story unfolds, both women find themselves drawn into a labyrinth of twists that challenge their loyalties and question the nature of truth and deception, and the novel offers additional echoes of Agatha Christie in its use of misdirection and unreliable narrators. Ultimately, Fingersmith keeps readers on edge with its carefully constructed, suspenseful narrative and surprises that reframe everything that has come before. The Queens of Crime by Marie Benedict Agatha Christie is a character in this excellent historical mystery, set in London in the 1930s. After a young woman is found strangled in a park, five real-life female writers—Dorothy L. Sayers, Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, Margery Allingham and Baroness Emma Orczy—team up to solve the crime as a way of proving their worth to a snooty all-male writer’s club that refuses them membership. Like the best of Christie’s work, The Queen of Crime explores the themes around morality and justice while offering up a careful balance of clues and red herrings, and much like Miss Marple and Ariadne Oliver, the five writers are strong, resourceful characters who offer a unique female perspective of the world of violence and crime. The Briar Club by Kate Quinn Quinn’s latest, about the residents of a Washington, DC women’s boarding house during the McCarthy era, put me in mind of Christie’s The Orient Express. Any one of the characters—some charming, others manipulative, and one or two quite villainous—might have a possible motive for murder, but which one committed the terrible act of violence alluded to on page one? The Briar Club thrives on the tension between seemingly respectable individuals whose dark secrets gradually unravel. Quinn, much like Christie, excels in creating a web of intrigue, where every character has something to hide, and each point of view is written with a keen psychological insight. The Christie Affair by Nina de Gramont The obsession with the eleven days that Agatha Christie went missing in 1926 is imaginatively fleshed out in de Gramont’s intriguing novel from the perspective of Christie’s husband’s mistress, Nan, a woman with a complex past and a personal connection to the family. Just as Christie’s novels reflect the class dynamics of the time—whether on a steamship on the Nile or in a country manor—de Gramont similarly explores the social nuances of the day. She also emulates Christie’s crisp, economical prose, avoiding overly ornate descriptions and maintaining a sharp focus on the narrative. It’s a thrilling story, well told. The Author’s Guide to Murder by Karen White, Lauren Willig, and Beatriz Williams The Three W’s, as they’re known, provide a fresh take on the infamous Christie closed-circle mystery in their latest collaboration. At first glance, it appears that a trio of nutty American female writers have shown up for a writer’s retreat at a Scottish castle just in time to find their host quite dead. But as the keen-eyed local detective (another Christie trope), dives deeper, the women’s characters—and their motives—turn out to be far more complex than they first appear, and the hunt for the killer becomes a matter of life and death. The novel is chock full of Easter eggs about the publishing world, and a masterful ode to the Queen of Mystery herself. *** View the full article