All Activity

Plot hacks, keep 'em coming Paula!

More sex.

Story Statement My book is a dual-timeline historical novel with two main protagonists: Liliana Perez Cohen (1970s) and Kate Gardner (2000s). Liliana is on a quest to break free from the restraints of her upper-class upbringing, explore her Cuban heritage, and find out who she is and where she belongs in the world by escaping to California, a hotbed of political activism in the 1970s. Kate is struggling with writer’s block and needs to publish her seminal law review article by next year to earn tenure. Her husband is ready to start a family, but she is concerned about juggling her career and parenthood, in addition to the challenges of raising a biracial child. Antagonistic Forces Both protagonists are fighting against the oppressive forces of a patriarchal society with prescribed roles for women. In Liliana’s life, this oppression is first embodied in her father, a successful businessman who wants her to fit the mold of upper-class society ladies and disowns her when she deviates from that path. Later in the story, her major antagonist is the historical character Jim Jones, who draws her into Jonestown, traps her there, and rapes her before she narrowly escapes before the massacre. For Grace, the antagonists are less clearly evil, but they are oppositional forces to her desire to be successful on her own terms. The Dean of her law school expects her to devote all her energy to the job and publishing in prestigious law reviews. Her husband wants her to put motherhood first, even if it means sacrificing her career. Titles Chasing the Seventies The Pendulum Swings From Good Girl to Feminist Comps Looking for Jane: A Novel by Heather Marshall, “follows three women who are bound together by a long-lost letter, a mother’s love, and a secret network of women fighting for the right to choose—inspired by true stories.” Spans the same time period (1970s – 2017) with a similar theme (women’s activism about the Jane Network and women’s right to choose in the 1970s). All You Have to Do by Autumn Allen: “In ALL YOU HAVE TO DO, two Black young men attend prestigious schools nearly thirty years apart, and yet both navigate similar forms of insidious racism.” Spans the time period from 1968 campus protests to 1995, with both protagonists engaged in the struggle for racial equality. Both comps involve the intersection of protagonists from different generations facing the same challenges around race, gender, and equality, illustrating the premise that “the more things change, the more they remain the same.” Hook Line Kate Gardner grew up believing that women could have it all, but as a tenure-track professor with writer’s block, she faces the reality that equality for women has not lived up to its promise as she wrestles with the tension between earning tenure and starting a family. Liliana Perez Cohen has never felt at home in her upper-class Westchester County boarding school, but her quest for her mother’s Cuban roots and a sense of belonging leads her to confront the harsh realities of a woman pursuing her own path in the 1970s. Inner Conflict Kate’s husband Kendrick has earned partnership in his civil rights law firm and thinks the time is right to start a family. But Kate is not sure the time is right, with an important tenure decision coming up that could decide the future of her career. Liliana rebels against her upper-class upbringing but is not sure where she belongs in the world. After dabbling with feminist socialism, she confronts the consequences of freedom when she is raped by her spiritual mentor, Jim Jones in Guyana. Secondary Conflict Kate want to be a mother, but she fears bringing a biracial child into the world in the wake of police brutality against young men of color. She also knows that despite formal equality, women shoulder the majority of homemaking and child care responsibilities in America. Liliana discovers that she is attracted to women and slowly grows to accept that she is a lesbian, but knows that her parents will never accept her if she confesses who she really is. Setting Liliana’s story takes her from the upper class community of Westchester County NY to the hotbeds of activism on the West Coast – Berkeley, San Diego, and Los Angeles during an era of student protests over civil rights, racial equality, and the Vietnam War. Later, she follows charismatic leader Jim Jones to Guyana, and barely escapes to Cuba before the Jonestown Massacre. Her story ends in Florida, where she finds a partner and raises the daughter fathered by Jim Jones in Little Cuba, Miami. Kate grows up on the tony suburb of Newton, MA and doesn’t stray far from her New England roots, but her work at Bay View Law School exposes her to a colorful band of faculty members and students who expand her horizons and support her budding feminism.

So you want to write a book with a big twist? Of course you do! Who doesn’t love a massive blindside? It’s an incredibly fun thing to pull off but it also takes skill from the writer. Consider all of the masters you are trying to please: –You want your readers to be shocked and entertained. –Yet, you can’t have them so dumbfounded that they get annoyed because there were zero clues leading up to it. –You want your reader to say, “Ohhhh! How clever…” and realize they missed clues hidden in plain sight. –But your hidden clues can’t give too much away or it’s all just way too obvious and the “twist” will feel rote. –You also need to decide how many twists you will have. Sometimes one is not enough. A twist upon a twist (upon a twist?!) can be especially fun for a reader but then all twists need to apply the same rules above. How do you do it? Here are a few ideas for how to pull off a really good distortion. #1 The unreliable narrator. In other words, your narrator is telling your reader things but not ALL of the things. Example: Your protagonist is packing for a getaway with friends. “I can’t wait for this weekend. The things I have planned, oh my, it’s going to be a trip none of us will ever forget…” might lead a reader to believe the characters are going to be drinking and partying when really your protagonist is going to pull off an elaborate murder. #2 A strong backstory. In the above example our protagonist needs to have some sort of experience with murder and a motivation to do it. They can’t just say, “Hey, I think I want to kill all of my friends this weekend.” Your reader needs to understand that this person has done something awful– or at least strongly considered it– before, and has a reason to do so now. Readers do not like it when a protagonist does something wildly out of character. It feels cheap to them, like the writer did it just for shock value rather than putting in the time to properly build the story. #3 Clues. Is your character packing a murder weapon but the reader doesn’t realize it’s one? You could set up that the whole gang was going to bake bread together this weekend so when our protagonist packs a knife the reader assumes it’s for that; or you write that the protagonist has been bothered by itchy, red eyes so putting Visine in the bag seems perfectly natural until the reader learns later that this will be the poison slipped into a drink. You don’t want to be so on-point that it’s obvious: “I packed my knife– I hoped it wouldn’t get too bloody– and my Visine wasn’t going to be for my eyes…” That takes away the “a-ha” moment later. #4 Speaking of clues… One way to hide them in plain sight is to slip them in and around other things. I wrote a book where something in a fish tank was going to play a prominent role later in the book but I slipped it into a long descriptor: “The accouterments that Ken had insisted on in the aquarium gave me a smile. Seaweed and fake plants and coral of all colors, a small treasure chest speckled with jewels, a replica of a scuba diver’s helmet, and a sunken ship with portholes so large the little fish could dart in and out of it.” This way the one big thing (which was the treasure chest) seems like just a detail in a series of descriptions and the reader might breeze past it on first read. Another way to hide clues is to have something massive happen right after your clue that takes the reader’s attention away. “I was packing my overnight bag and put one large bottle of Visine in, then another. The sharp ring of the doorbell startled me. It was my friend, an hour early. Why was she here now? Something had to be wrong.” Now the reader is focused on the friend’s premature arrival rather than the fact that the protagonist packed an unusually high amount of Visine for a weekend. #5 Make it believable. An alien can’t just drop into your world if you have not set this up as sci-fi. Think of things that are shocking to the reader but not so unrealistic that they lose trust in you as an author and never pick up your work again. #6 A few final tips. Make sure your puzzle comes together in the end with absolutely no loose ends. Readers want to feel 100% satisfied when closing your book, not think ‘But what about that giant knife she packed? It was never mentioned again.” Remember too that not all of your clues may come to you in the first draft. In every book I have written I have gone back and layered in more clues. I have also taken characters who I thought were minor at first and given them a more prominent role because I suddenly thought of a new way they could play into the twist of the story. I encourage you to give yourself permission to drop in fresh easter eggs or change trajectories as you go. The bottom line: try a few things and have fun getting bendy and turny. It’s like organizing a giant party game or an escape room for your readers and it’s a blast. *** View the full article

Welcome to “Scene of the Crime,” a recurring column in which we examine single memorable scenes from crime movies. Scene: Quinlan’s Death Film: Touch of Evil (1958) The foggy climax of Touch of Evil takes place just over the border in Mexico, up and down an oil rig, and eventually a garbage dump in a river, as a drunken and slimy Hank Quinlan (Orson Welles), who is suspected of a number of crimes by Mike Vargas (Charlton Heston) including murder and falsifying evidence, is being questioned by his best friend, Police Sergeant Menzies (Joseph Calleia), who is wearing a wire. As Quinlan hobbles across the bridges over the garbage dump, his limp is apparent, and highly symbolic. Scholar John C. Stubbs has written, “Welles makes Quinlan a limping figure… Presumably this was done to give a visual emphasis to Quinlan’s moral twistedness, as Hawthorne did with Rodger Chillingworth and Shakespeare with Richard III.” It also reveals a kind of “psychological deterioration”: a physical manifestation that something is disjointed or unhinged about Quinlan. Stubbs argues that Quinlan has deteriorated already (his mind, much like his eventual death in the waters of the dump, is soggy), and, as evidenced by the fact that he groggily washes his hands in the muddy water in an equally Shakespearean manner, could have been driven to insanity. He walks with the cane sometimes, and abandons it at others; having Quinlan lose his cane occasionally hints the degree to which he has lost his mind. Stubbs argues, “The cane is discovered by Menzies after Quinlan leaves it behind in the hotel room where he strangled Uncle Joe. Welles sets up Pete’s discovery in advance by having Quinlan forget the cane once earlier. (He will forget it twice earlier in the movie.) We may see Quinlan’s act of forgetting his cane at the murder scene as another example of habitual forgetfulness or as a Freudian slip by a man who wishes finally to be caught.” Quinlan continues to behave in the manner of madman, as well. After confessing to Menzies, Quinlan grows suspicious, shoots his friend, and hurries down from the bridge to where he had been standing (captured by a canted frame, similarly to show the crookedness of what has just occurred) and collapses, belly-up, into a pile of soggy trash only to point his gun at Vargas. Here, Quinlan places an emphasis on the importance and integrity of the “front,” calling out to the retreating Vargas, “I don’t want to shoot you in the back,” and informing him that “this” (meaning Mexico, Vargas’s homeland and jurisdiction) “is where you’re gonna die.” He is wrong on both counts—he is the one shot in the gut, and in Mexico. Quinlan staggers about the trash for a few moments, before collapsing backwards once more, into the river. Quinlan is defined by his front—his gigantic, flabby stomach—and, in the film the “back” of things, in this film refers to concealment; with his death, and Vargas’s recording, the underbelly of Quinlan’s corrupt network is overturned when Quinlan dies belly-up. The “body” is an important aspect of Quinlan’s existence, not only because his body is a metaphor, itself, as giant and slimy as his own sub-governmental law enforcement body, rank with corruption, but also because, by trade, he deals in bodies—and, sometimes, body parts. According to scholar Eric M. Krueger “Quinlan mentions that an old lady found a shoe with a foot in it: the explosion blew Rudi and his girlfriend into rubble—human entrails to be scattered to the wind like piles of litter.” As a detective, it is his job to solve terrible occurrences such as this, and squash the pent-up tension and corruption in the town that causes such things, but he, a manipulator of people, and a dirty cop who plants evidence instead of digging it up, only piles up the rubble and missing pieces from his cases to aid him in his climb to relative power and respected position. Pieces of the trash he does not unearth are human remains—he can no longer tell the difference between the organic and the artificial, what is human and what is filth. He, himself, has grown too filthy, too big, too powerful for the heaps of trash he has created, and, “after thirty years of dirt,” he botches up and finally gets caught; “In the accusation scene where Vargas presents the evidence linking Quinlan to a frame-up in Sanchez, Quinlan makes a mess of himself by squashing an egg in his hand. This is, one can add, symbolic of what he’s done and is doing to his life.” Not only does this moment express that Quinlan has lost touch with the delicateness of life—or even artifacts that once held life—but, his own dehumanization (brought on by the accumulation of inhuman, or once-human debris), but it reveals that both of Quinlan’s bodies—corporal and administrative—are no longer subtle. Quinlan, though, has also polluted the environment with his personal corruption. “Welles,” claims Krueger, “by placing his story in the border-town cosmos, gives us the mad compliment to his theme. All that lies repressed in the mother country thrives on the surface in the border of humanity. It is a place, where anything can happen—where the underside of humanity is exposed.” As such, Quinlan finds his comeuppance, dying on his back in piles of garbage symbolic of the ones he, himself, has created. Not only has he created it himself, though, he has built it around himself—and trapped himself there. Unbeknownst to Quinlan, Vargas chases him up and down oil rigs and all through a garbage dump, recording his guilty testimony on a radio, but Quinlan has nowhere to run—he is trapped in that he has been set up by Vargas and Menzies (his best friend), but he is also actually unable to escape the from the mounds of garbage and putrid water of the garbage dump. This, argues scholar Susan P. Mains, is symbolic of what Quinlan has done to the Mexican side of the border—and the town of Tijuana. “The setting is not simply a backdrop, but rather reflects the entrapment of the characters: Quinlan cannot survive without being involved in cross-border crimes and investigations in order to overcome feeling responsible for his wife’s death. At this point in the film, he is a pig caught inside a pen he built himself, dying belly up, finally exposed. This final scene generally reinforces an “undoing” of Quinlan’s whole identity, exposing him for the vile creature he really is. After he shoots Mendies, and runs down to the river, the aforementioned overhead shot captures Quinlan kneeling over and washing his bloody hand in the dirty water. His body curled, he resembles a caterpillar. In his death scene, collapsing among garbage, he smells, he salivates, he sweats, and—his eyes popping out of his fleshy face, resembles a slug. His death among piles of garbage, and dirty water, and oilrigs reduces him to a waterbug or some other sort of a large, junkyard insect—an association he unwittingly articulates screaming at Menzies as he realized he is being both “bugged” and “tailed” by Vargas. Over the border, his true nature is revealed: he is filth, vermin. View the full article

I used to be a stalker. In college, I chose my study spots on the campus green so I’d have a direct line of sight to my crush’s dorm. A few years later, I pored over my work crush’s Facebook page, analyzing whether the woman he held close in a photo looked more like a sister or significant other. And sometimes, when that crush was in the break room, I made excuses to linger there too, washing out my mug so long my fingers nearly pruned—all to keep myself in his line of sight. This might be why it wasn’t a huge leap for me in my latest novel, Cross My Heart, to write a female character who engages in some stalking of her own—though, unlike my protagonist, Rosie, I’ve never stood outside a crush’s house at night, tracking him as he moves through the rooms. In fact, Rosie crosses all sorts of lines I never did, because her crush just happens to be the husband of her heart donor, a man she feels fated to meet, to fall in love with—no matter what she discovers as she scrutinizes his past and present. I’m certainly not the first to center a book around a female stalker. In the riveting Just One Look by Lindsay Cameron, a woman gains access to her coworker’s emails, obsesses over his seemingly perfect marriage—and becomes determined to take his wife’s place. Sarah Zachrich Jeng’s When I’m Her, a STEMinist delight best described as “Freaky Friday but make it a thriller,” features a protagonist who watches and memorizes every aspect of her former best friend’s life so she can literally switch bodies with her. And in the voicey and addictive Looker by Laura Sims, a woman begins to lose her grip on reality when she stalks a famous actress—who’s also her neighbor. These obsessive female characters have been popping up more and more in recent years, and one reason might just be the relatability factor. In fact, the reason I was so willing to write about my own instances of stalking at the beginning of this piece is because I’m confident I’m not the only woman who’s engaged in such behavior. Still, for most of us, keeping our eyes peeled for any sight of our crush, or investigating them on social media, is as far as we’ll go—which is why it’s so thrilling to follow a character who pushes the boundaries, who leans toward the extremes, who allows herself to act in ways we’d never let ourselves. “It’s like getting a peek into what might happen if we gave in to our most intrusive thoughts and desires,” says bookstagrammer Kayla of @kayreadwhat. “It’s a way to understand those raw, unfiltered impulses that drive us all.” At the risk of sounding a bit too unfiltered myself, there’s something almost aspirational about a stalker character. Briana of @brianas_best_reads says she loves “characters who are bold enough to take matters into their own hands—for better or worse. They’re compelling because they exude a level of confidence I can only imagine having.” In Cross My Heart, Rosie isn’t exactly confident; she’s frequently anxious about being perceived as “too much”—a phrase that more than one ex-boyfriend has ascribed to her—but every time she tries to put a lid on her enthusiasm, the intensity of her emotions boils over anyway. In short, she’s a mess, and in our society, messiness is not a characteristic to be celebrated in a woman. But when we read stalker-ish characters like Rosie, we get to watch women stray outside the lines, muck things up—in their own lives and others’—which can often scratch an itch for female readers that, in real life, they’ve been conditioned to ignore. Then there’s the power of it all. In crime fiction, there’s no shortage of female victims, whether they’re murdered, abducted, or forced to endure some other act of violence. This, of course, reflects the stark dangers that exist for women off the page, especially at the hands of men, and it’s important to shed light on those realities. But it’s just as important for readers to see that power dynamic flipped, to watch the woman become the danger instead of the endangered, to see the default male gaze swapped out for, in the case of stalkers, a literal female gaze. Sure, she’s got her eyes on someone who has no idea they’re being watched—her actions aren’t exactly ethical—but these days, our newsfeeds are clogged with stories of men behaving unethically, often with little to no consequences. While the #MeToo movement was a public reckoning that saw serial abusers like Harvey Weinstein finally held accountable, it was only four years after he was tried for his crimes that Weinstein saw his conviction overturned—not because of new evidence exonerating him, but because of a technicality: during the trial, the judge had allowed the testimony of women whose experiences with Weinstein predated the charges. In other words, there had been too much evidence of his crimes. Coming on the heels of the overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022, this felt like another devastating blow to the decades of progress women have made, causing them to be more attuned than ever to the erosion of their rights and agency, and to the male-dominated groups making decisions about their lives and bodies. It’s understandable, then, that readers would find satisfaction in stories where female characters do exactly what they want, consequences and controversies be damned—just like so many men. For Gare of @gareindeedreads, it’s precisely the power-abusing men that make a female stalker character so irresistible. “You may not agree with her actions and behavior,” he says, but often it’s clear: “if it weren’t for the actions of a man, none of this would’ve happened.” Plus, he adds, “Women are smarter than men,” and what better way to showcase that than with a character who’s at her most calculated and cunning? Ultimately, though, whether you’re in it for the vicarious thrill or the feminist slant of it all, crime novels featuring female stalkers are just plain fun. Of course, it’s no surprise I would say that, having written one and having been a benign stalker myself, so don’t take it from me. Take it from Kendall of @sunflower_book_lover, who’s read plenty of books that use this trope: “These stories are wild and unhinged and oh so good. I’m obsessed with and addicted to the crazy ride!” *** View the full article

When my kids were little, I knew a momfluencer who rescheduled her kindergartener’s birthday party because the light wasn’t right for photos. I laughed, but underneath was jealous, because she clearly had the world’s most easygoing child. Mine would freak if I rescheduled a trip to the park, let alone a birthday party. I always knew that society judges mothers, but it wasn’t until I had children that I realized how much moms judge each other, and how much social media amps up the stress. Modern motherhood is struggle enough, and when you throw in the mommy-judging—which gets inside your head—well, the pressure can make a woman crack up. No wonder so many psychological thrillers, including my novel Clever Little Thing, feature a mother doing just that. Personally, I don’t pay much attention to momfluencers, and I have no interest in looking pretty for a photo while making sourdough pancakes in a prairie dress. But when I look in the mirror and worry that I look tired, or feel guilty for giving my kids boxed cereal for breakfast, who’s to say that these women haven’t wormed themselves into my brain anyway? It’s far worse if you take momfluencers seriously, as shown in Chelsea Bieker’s brilliant novel, Madwoman. Mother-of-two Clove obsesses about attaining the life of the perfect crunchy Instagram mom. She gets trapped in what Sara Petersen, author of the nonfiction book, Momfluenced, calls: a vicious cycle of aspiration, consumption, and self-loathing.” Clove compulsively shops for organic infant skin cream that costs $19 an ounce and performs #unplugged motherhood on Instagram with pictures of “my kids from the back skipping down narrow dirt paths.” But none of it makes her feel better until she realizes that what she needs to do isn’t to make motherhood look good, but to feel good, and she can only do this by resolving her relationship with her own mom. The second wave of momfluencers rebelled against curated perfection, and proclaimed their #authenticity. In Ellery Lloyd’s People Like Her, Emmy Jackson, aka @MamaBare, posts about endless bottom-wiping and splotches of spaghetti sauce on her shirt, and wants to start “a more authentic discussion about parenting.” But as long as a momfluencer is producing sponsored content, her life must be aspirational. When Emmy preps her home for a photo shoot, she makes sure the artful mess suggests #familyfun, including craft supplies and staging “a collapsed cushion fort.” Of course, truly authentic motherhood can’t be shown in #mamahoodinsquares, because the real thing is often too consuming and exhausting to document. In Clever Little Thing, my protagonist Charlotte watches videos other parents have posted of their kids’ meltdowns, hoping to feel solidarity about her daughter’s epic freakouts, but instead she feels alienated. “If you can take a step back and film it, it’s not that bad.” Chasing after the ideal #momlife is not only futile, but can interfere with actually being a mom. In novels, some desperate momfluencers put content first and kids second. In You Will Never Be Me, Aspen forces her young daughters to pretend to wake up and recite their lines ad nauseam until she has the perfect “morning routine” video. And in Erin Quinn-Kong’s Hate Follow, when her husband dies, momfluencer Whitney posts a shot of her eleven-year-old daughter, face contorted in grief, standing over his open coffin. When Mia later protests, Whitney doesn’t want to take it down, because the picture down, because it engages her fans emotionally. Mia eventually sues Whitney for violation of privacy. You can bet that other people judge Whitney and she judges herself. A mother internalizes the critical voices around her, whether she wants to or not. What mom hasn’t stressed about the right weaning food or sleep-training method and wondered if she’s doing it right? And when a child undergoes a mysterious and abrupt change—as Stella does in my novel—then the judgmental voices in her head can drive a woman mad. Charlotte’s task as a mother is to decide whether to listen to what everyone else is telling her is going on with her daughter, or to listen to her gut. And that isn’t easy, because when moms let momfluencers tell them what to do, they risk disconnecting from their own maternal instinct Motherhood today is overwhelming, thanks to the lack of traditional support networks, affordable childcare and neighborhood play. I’ve come to understand that judging others is a small way to get some power back when you feel powerless. In my novel, Charlotte judges other moms, but not because she’s a horrible person. She has no extended family support, everyone around her is telling her how to parent, and she gets no school support for her daughter’s neurodivergence. Judging others is her way of making herself feel a little better. I try not to judge other moms these days, even when their kid is seventeen years old and still only eats buttered pasta. I remind myself that nobody except the parents knows what it takes to take care of that particular kid, and that some of my parenting decisions doubtless seem eccentric to others too. This helps me to be more compassionate toward myself too, to blame myself less when my kids struggle. I don’t look at momfluencers on social media, because they test my resolve not to judge too much (as when @BallerinaFarm competed in a Mrs. World pageant days after giving birth). As for the momfluencer who rescheduled her kid’s birthday party, she made her way into my novel, as Charlotte’s friend Emmy, who always wears a chic, stripy ensemble, whose daughter Lulu sports Insta-worthy braids. Charlotte and Emmy judge each other. But over the course of the novel, they find that the one thing that can make you feel better than judging other moms is finding solidarity with them. I wish I could say that I made friends with the real-life momfluencer. I tried. I thought that despite her oversized sunglasses and invariably stripy sundress, despite her three well-behaved daughters in matching outfits, underneath she was surely just a mess like every other mom I knew. But I never got her to admit it. So I made friends with the women like me, whose idea of chic was a shirt that the kids had not wiped their noses on. Women who admitted they were cracking up under the pressure of motherhood. And these are the women I love to read about. It disturbs me to look the feed of a mom who seems to have it all figured out. But it’s strangely comforting to read a thriller about a mom who loses it. *** View the full article

When I read technology news these days, I feel impressed and excited—and mostly terrified. We’re advancing so quickly, with so many pitfalls. Self-driving cars that crash, Bitcoin scams that deplete retirement savings, deepfake videos that can change election outcomes, algorithms that redirect children to step-by-step instructions for self-harm. It’s sometimes hard to know how to talk about the risks of technologies that seemed implausible until about five minutes ago. Enter tech thrillers, which peel back the ethical layers of our relationship to technology, entertaining us while also forcing us to confront the consequences of constant innovation. The term “thriller” is notoriously vague. Some people think a thriller must have spies or gunfights. Others expect a marital cat-and-mouse. To me, a thriller is simply a novel that’s fast-paced and exciting (a subjective assessment, to be sure), with a dark tone and life-or-death consequences. In tech thrillers, that darkness is rooted in the ever-mounting tensions between technology and human nature. These novels usually involve some speculative element, exaggerating an existing technology to throw its dangers into relief. Robots become fully sentient. Virtual reality becomes completely immersive. Devices begin actively surveilling humans. Lately, these fictional scenarios tend to focus on artificial intelligence—not surprising, given the increasingly urgent public conversations about AI. When reading these novels, it can sometimes be hard to tell where the real technology ends and the speculative technology starts. With artificial intelligence and biotech evolving minute-to-minute, some readers might incorrectly identify some very real threats as imaginary. This is the challenge and the risk of writing about technology. In the years it takes to write a book (or even in the twelve months it takes to go from copyedits to bookshelves), the world can evolve to make the novel’s contents obsolete—or all too real. Some deepfake horrors that I added to my latest novel, Vantage Point, seemed speculative when I started writing it, and are now accepted parts of reality. Colin Winnette, whose recent novel Users offers a damning look inside a near-future virtual-reality company, had a similar experience: “I wrote what I thought was a kind of exaggeration of reality, and then over the course of the book’s publication, reality quickly caught up with that exaggeration and everything in the book seemed suddenly more possible in a way I hadn’t really anticipated. It was kind of thrilling, but also terrifying.” The best tech thrillers embrace this risk. The books on this list are living on the blade edge of progress, using fiction’s vast possibilities to imagine what comes next, for tech and for the people who use it. In a world where tech companies pursue innovation for innovation’s sake, these novels redirect our focus to the human element, trying to anticipate the potential social costs of these advances. And they do it in a way that keeps you on the edge of your seat the whole time. Michael Crichton, Prey You can’t talk about techno-thrillers without talking about Michael Crichton, and it’s almost impossible to choose a best novel from his famous body of work. But while Crichton is probably best remembered for his treatment of biological technology in The Andromeda Strain and Jurassic Park (for which I will always have a soft spot, having spent most of my childhood wearing out the VHS tapes of the movie adaptations), the book that best captures the potential horror inherent in artificial intelligence is his 2002 novel Prey, in which scientists develop a type of nanobots that become sentient and murderous, capable of infesting and devouring humans. As the killer swarms begin infecting the scientists who created them, a computer programmer must act quickly to destroy the swarms before they kill his loved ones. One section in which nanobots create perfect replicas of characters resonates with contemporary conversations about deepfakes, and the novel overall speaks to rising fears about artificial intelligence becoming autonomous. Samanta Schweblin, Little Eyes Have you ever had a conversation with a friend about an ocean-themed costume party and then gotten an Instagram ad for shark onesies a few hours later? Have you ever wondered how much our devices truly see into our lives? If so, you might empathize with the characters in Samanta Schweblin’s Little Eyes, translated into English by Megan McDowell. In the universe Schweblin imagines, the world has become enchanted with kentukis, an electronic pet equipped with a camera that allows people thousands of miles away to observe your every move. Through short chapters spanning the globe, Schweblin tracks the allure and danger of these Tamagotchis-on-steroids, exploring how far people will go in search of connection. The novel’s structure is more fragmented and experimental than your typical thriller, but the foreboding tone and pervasive violence can go head-to-head with the darkest crime fiction. Sierra Greer, Annie Bot Sierra Greer took the book world by storm last spring with Annie Bot, a novel narrated by a sex robot who gains sentience at her owner’s request, then starts to dream of a life beyond him. This novel is a clever twist on the classic domestic thriller, using the intimate environment of a home to broach broader societal conversations about freedom and artificial intelligence. After all, “sex and lies” has a whole new meaning when one party was invented for sex and has only learned how to lie. Greer executes the concept beautifully: Annie’s voice is the perfect blend of robotic and human. I loved seeing Annie gradually come into her autonomy, learning to fend for herself and protect others, even as her thwarted owner becomes increasingly violent and vengeful. In most of the other novels on this list, technological developments are the source of danger. In Annie Bot, the tech itself is the protagonist. This reversal creates a psychological thrill ride that also delivers a powerful commentary on power, identity, and humanity. Ken Liu, The Hidden Girl and Other Stories I learned about Ken Liu’s work from one of my students, Luis Ferrer, who wrote his senior thesis on Liu this fall. This collection pulls together eighteen stories and a novel excerpt, some of which take place in fantasy worlds or distant futures. But the collection also features other stories that speak to more specific present fears. There’s a series of several linked stories beginning with “The Gods Will Not Be Chained”—the series Luis focused on, and which was also the inspiration for the TV show Pantheon—set in a world where it has become possible to upload individuals’ brains to computers, turning them into digital consciousnesses and effectively allowing their minds to “live” forever. In another story, “Byzantine Empathy,” cryptocurrency-literate nonprofits begin turning real atrocities into violent VR experiences to shock users into donating. The story that hit me a little too close to home was “Real Artists,” in which an aspiring filmmaker learns that the films she loves are secretly made by artificial intelligence. An advanced algorithm called “Big Semi” tracks audiences’ real-time responses and creates countless story iterations until it reaches the “exact emotional curve guaranteed to make them laugh and cry in the right places”—then uses this information to make “perfect films.” When Big Semi’s film studio offers the protagonist a job, she discovers that in this world (as in our own), AI’s success depends on the exploitation of human creative expertise. *** View the full article

Imagine waking up one morning and deciding to become William Shakespeare. You have fantasized about it for years and now you’re taking the fateful step. Overcome by a heady mixture of zeal, naivete, and hubris, you’re freed from feelings of shame or guilt. Although you live in the late eighteenth rather than the early seventeenth century, time won’t be an impediment for you because you’re gifted, studious, and even visionary in a deranged sort of way. Your father is a renowned collector of the original Shakespeare’s works, an authority in the field, so this transition is in your blood. Most importantly, when you present him with your handiwork he will finally come to love you. You acquire some period paper, mix the correct tone of iron gall ink, sharpen your quill. Then, in secret, you write a love letter to your wife “Anne Hatherrewaye” and attach to it a lock of his—well, your—hair bound elegantly with pink and white silk thread you find in your mother’s sewing basket. Next, you scribe some hitherto unknown poems for Anne and, emboldened, fabricate passages of the original manuscripts of Hamlet and King Lear. You produce missives to Queen Elizabeth I. Careful not to create anachronisms, you autograph and annotate the margins of books printed before the original Shakespeare’s death in 1616. Out of fear that one of the Elizabethan playwright’s legitimate descendants might step forward to lay claim to the growing sheaf of valuable artifacts you’ve so expertly forged, you counterfeit a genealogy that proves the trove is rightfully yours. To this end, you prepare a legal document in which your alter ego—grateful for having been rescued by one of your imaginary ancestors from going to a watery grave in the River Thames—gifts him this archive in 1613. You even manufacture a coat of arms that combines your family’s with his. ___________________________________ William Henry Ireland’s elaborately forged love letter with hair locket from Shakespeare to Ann Hathaway. (Collection of the Massachusetts Historical Society.) ___________________________________ Your distinguished father is so proud of you for discovering these miraculous long-lost treasures that he publishes a book to memorialize your achievement. To your anxious delight, Miscellaneous Papers and Legal Instruments under the Hand and Seal of William Shakspeare [sic] becomes a bestselling cause célèbre in 1796, the same year Matthew Gregory Lewis’s The Monk appears, a lurid Gothic novel that also relies upon deceits and masked identities. It isn’t long before your worst fears come true, and your reputation is annihilated by the eagle-eyed critic Edmund Malone, who accuses you of fraud that same fraught year. Soon enough, you are forced to confess. Your real name is William Henry Ireland and you are destined to become one of the more notorious con men in the history of literary forgery. And you are far from alone in your criminal endeavor. * Literary forgery is as old as literature itself. “As soon as man set foot on the slopes of Parnassus,” wrote E. K. Chambers in his fascinating 1891 treatise The History and Motives of Literary Forgeries, “the shadow of the forger fell on the path behind him. The first historian records the first literary fraud.” Chambers here refers to Herodotus—heralded by Cicero as the “Father of History” and later excoriated as the “Father of Lies” by Plutarch since he played fast and loose with historical facts, concocting events in his Histories whenever he didn’t have first-hand knowledge and it suited his purposes. The faker of history, however, told the truth when he fingered its first forger. To wit, an Athenian scholar named Onomacritus (circa 530–480 BC), who was tasked with compiling and editing the oracles of poet-polymath Musaeus. For reasons we can only guess, based on the motivations of later forgers, this devious scribe, or chresmologue, started inventing his own prophecies and verses, interleaving them with Musaeus’s originals. Herodotus accurately states that when Onomacritus was inevitably caught—one Lasus of Hermione, a lyric poet, snitched—he was exiled to Persia where he simply continued his faux-oracular shenanigans, even urging Xerxes the Great to invade Greece. Which he did. These days when people think of forgers, Lee Israel comes to mind, in no small part because of Melissa McCarthy’s riveting performance in Can You Ever Forgive Me?. But compared to Onomacritus and William Henry Ireland and other high-stakes forgers of the past who manipulated the historic record in far more technically sophisticated, intellectually cunning, and ethically diabolical ways, Israel is a minor figure in an illustrious if corrupt pantheon of literary scammers. Just as Ireland the forger was the son of Ireland the pundit, many accomplished forgers—most of them men—have been the children not of finaglers and fraudsters but of upstanding literary citizens in their day (or else absent fathers). The son of the now pretty-much forgotten poet Eugene Field, genial nineteenth-century author of children’s verse like “Wynken, Blynken, and Nod” and “Little Boy Blue,” would himself be entirely forgotten were it not for his being a prolific forger. And because Eugene Field, Jr. specialized in faking Abraham Lincoln documents, forging the president’s ownership autograph in books from his uncle’s library, today is he part of a large rogues’ gallery of Lincoln forgers. After the president’s assassination in 1865 and well into the next century, members of this cohort of Lincoln “specialists” were busy reinventing honest Abe’s life and work. Their backstories are often so freakish as to seem unreal. Take Mario Terenzio Enrico Casalengo, an Italian immigrant who changed his name to Henry Woodhouse after being released from prison for manslaughter in upstate New York. Unbowed, he reinvented himself as a credible scientist, aeronautics expert, economist, historian. And forger. Woodhouse—or Colonel Woodhouse, or Dr. Woodhouse, as he styled himself while ascending into higher echelons of society—produced fake Lincoln documents as well as missives by the signers of the Declaration of Independence. He even forged letters by his newfound friends Teddy Roosevelt, Amelia Earhart, and Alexander Graham Bell, to name a few. At some point Woodhouse decided to position his creations side by side with authentic materials—not unlike his ancient predecessor, Onomacritus—though he did so in order to sell them at Gimbels Department Store in Manhattan, not archive them in the repositories of the tyrant Pisistratus in Athens. And while he served time for killing a fellow cook (yes, he was a professional cook, too) and his illicit expertise was sometimes called into question, the good doctor Woodhouse was, astonishingly, never exposed as a forger during his lifetime. ___________________________________ Two Lincoln letters, one by Lincoln and one by the notorious Joseph Cosey, both dated 1863. (Alfred Whital Stern Collection of Lincolniana, Rare Book and Special Collections Division, The Library of Congress.) ___________________________________ If Abraham Lincoln has the unhappy distinction of being among the most forged of historical figures—maybe the most frequently forged of all—at least he attracted the best of the worst. Others famous for their first-rate simulacra of Lincoln documents are Harry D. Sickles (Field Jr.’s partner-in-crime), John Laffite (or Laflin—names are fluid in the forgers’ subculture), and the masterly if careless Charles Weisberg, who died in Lewisburg Prison in Pennsylvania, serving one of several sentences after being convicted on fraud charges. The ink he used in supposed Civil War documents was wrong for the era. He wrote lengthy Lincoln letters though Lincoln himself tended toward brevity. His last gaffe was to write an authorial inscription in Katherine Mansfield’s posthumously published The Dove’s Nest. You can, as a wise man once said, always get it right most of the time. Arguably, the greatest of them all was Joseph Cosey. Born Martin Coneely in 1887, he ran away from home and led a solitary, shady existence as a small-time crook, living hand to mouth as he developed a taste for alcohol and phony Lincoln letters. Under the alias “Cosey,” he produced with legendary ease many thousands of unsurpassed forgeries of Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and Edgar Allan Poe. If you bought him a drink at a bar, he would knock out a masterful forgery for you on the spot; buy him another, get another. An unknown but likely considerable number of his forgeries remain unidentified to this day, reposing in private collections and temperature-controlled archives of institutions around the country, indeed the world. Some of them have even been unwittingly cited in biographies of Poe and others, perverting our knowledge of influential writers and historical figures, revising American history itself. The mere mention of Cosey can provoke an apoplectic response from otherwise refined, mannerly collectors of 19th-century Americana. I’ve seen this fury first-hand and appreciate the exasperation of being deceived by Cosey even decades after his mysterious disappearance and probable death in 1950. To buy unknowingly an immaculate fake for the same money that an original fetches, only to learn later that it’s by Cosey, not Jefferson or Twain, is a vexing and expensive misstep. The most seasoned collector has at some point or another been duped, at least temporarily, by forgers nowhere near as sophisticated as Cosey. Myself included, details to follow. ** Equal in skill to Cosey, but with an antithetical lifestyle and approach to forgery, was Thomas J. Wise (1859-1937), the well-liked, esteemed dean of book collecting in his day as well as an illustrious bibliographer—president of the Bibliographical Society, no less. His Ashley Library was among England’s finest in private hands, subsidized by his shrewd dealings as a behind-the-scenes bookseller. He also covertly printed severely limited editions of pamphlets by the likes of Tennyson, Kipling, Rossetti, and Swinburne, editing them together from genuine published texts, then falsely dating them earlier than their first editions. Any serious, completist collector of one of his counterfeited writers really had to add these manufactured rarities to their holdings. Given Wise’s impeccable reputation in London and abroad, together with the fact that he catalogued his fakes alongside genuine first editions in his erudite, elegant bibliographies, the scheme was, for a long time, failsafe. When Wise personally offered a “newly discovered” Browning or Shelley or Ruskin to a prospective buyer, money usually passed hands and all involved were satisfied with the transaction. The British Museum was happy to pay the then-strong price of three guineas for a copy of his George Eliot pamphlet, Brother and Sister Sonnets by Marian Lewes. This fall I visited Washington University in St. Louis to speak at the centenary celebration of writer William H. Gass. While touring the library I noticed there was an exhibit of forgeries on display. In one glass case I saw a pamphlet that looked for all the world to be Wise’s Brother and Sister Sonnets. But here was a fake of a fake—strange as some two-headed calf, I remember thinking as I peered at it through the glass. Amazingly, I’d encountered a later fabrication of Thomas J. Wise’s original forgery from 1888 (which Wise had backdated to 1869 on the cover and title page, designating it “For Private Circulation Only”). Surely Wise might never have guessed that, years later, some obscure American forger would decide to counterfeit his counterfeit. They look—as good piracies are supposed to look—alike. The only way to tell the difference, as the curator of rare books, Cassie Brand, noted while touring me through her selection, is that the later “creation. . .used a fleuron on the corners of the cover and left out the horizontal line at the end of the text.” Without that devilment of a detail, none would be the— Wise was run to ground in 1934 by an intrepid pair of young rare book dealers, John W. Carter and Henry Graham Pollard, who published their shocking landmark bibliographic investigation, An Enquiry into the Nature of Certain Nineteenth Century Pamphlets, three years before Wise died. While the authors never explicitly accused him of wrongdoing, controversy swirled around him and he went to his grave denying any involvement. *** Given what a precision craft forgery is, it’s intriguing that pride, precociousness, diffidence, depression, alcoholism, and a tendency to suicide feature in the lives of many of its finest practitioners. While some are gregarious, like Wise, and others reclusive, like Cosey, most major forgers possessed the intellect, creativity, and energy to have pursued legitimate careers as historians, poets, professors, and the like, socially negotiable but for one countermanding trait. In some way or another, all forgers—even those who create fakes to make ends meet—share a compulsion to outwit experts and outmaneuver authorities. The elite among them try to transcend accepted reality, nudge their bizarre way into the known, be a player in history from a skewed and illegal angle. The genius of an authentic writer dovetails with, and is temporarily subsumed by, the forger’s own genius. With a defiant, willful, and full flowering of hubris, they aspire briefly to become the very person they forge. It is an intoxicating enterprise, this fusion of imagination and chicanery. A white collar (or ruff, as the case may be) crime as sophisticated as it is deplorable. It is also, largely, doomed. Just as most deceits eventually unravel, most forgeries sooner or later are identified and exposed. Examples abound. In one recent case, a Galileo document dating from 1610, with historically groundbreaking sketches and notes depicting the orbits of Jupiter’s moons, resided at the University of Michigan Library for a century before being outed in August 2022 as the work of the infamous 20th-century Italian forger Tobia Nicotra. Following extensive research into the document, focusing on a telltale watermark of the paper used by Nicotra, the library announced that their once-priceless “jewel” was a fake and, as a result, the revisionist history of Galileo prompted by this manuscript required yet another revision. While one might reasonably assume that all such proven forgeries would instantly lose their value, be relegated to the category of worthless curiosities, this is not always the case. Indeed, some counterfeits and forgeries are collectible in themselves and even boast values similar to the originals. In the Sotheby’s October 18, 2024 sale of books from the magnificent Renaissance library of T. Kimball Brooker, an authentic 1502 copy of Dante’s Le terze rime—the Divine Comedy—one of eight known copies printed on vellum in Venice at the Aldine press, beautifully illuminated, brought $165,100. Several lots later, the Gabiano-Trot forgery of the same book printed on vellum just a year or so after in Lyon, France—the first edition of Dante ever printed outside Italy—was hammered down at a competitive $158,750. The intrigue behind Lyonese Aldine counterfeits is the stuff of legend, and in the history of intellectual property theft it is hardly surpassable for prowess, guts, and mendacity. **** Were there a Forgers Hall of Fame—or, Infamy—influential sleight-of-handwriting artists would certainly include the precocious, deeply troubled Thomas Chatterton (1752-1770), who committed suicide in London by overdosing on alcohol at age 17, but not before brilliantly forging the spurious, inspired “Rowley” poems that would have a major impact on the Romantic poets Coleridge, Wordsworth, Keats, and Shelley. Scottish poet, politician, and collector James MacPherson (1736-1796) claimed to have discovered and translated a Scottish/Gaelic epic from the third century by a Bard named Ossian. Though the subject of withering attacks of critics like Samuel Johnson who claimed the “Ossian cycle” was a fraud, MacPherson’s forgery proved popular and is credited, for worse or better, with helping to fashion Scotland’s national self-image. The list is long. Denis Vrain-Lucas forged and sold over 25,000 documents beginning in 1854, including “original” letters from Cleopatra, Isaac Newton, Attila the Hun, Mary Magdalene, Pontius Pilate, and even the resurrected Lazarus—all in French. Alexander “Antique” Smith, a Scottish law office clerk turned forger in the 1880s, cranked out a vast number of “unpublished” letters and poems by Burns, Scott, and Thackeray. Robert Spring migrated from England to America, erased his past, and set up an antiquarian bookshop in Philadelphia where he commenced forging payment orders and letters by George Washington and others. He was arrested, fled to Canada, returned to America, leaving a trail of fake documents in his wake until he was apprehended again, confessed, and died in prison. Like Cosey and Wise, Spring now has the distinction of being collected in his own right as an upmarket forger whose work, whether or not identified as fake, is no doubt held in the archives of prestigious collections. It is safe to say that most university or public libraries of any size could mount a similar exhibit of literary forgeries as compelling as the one in St. Louis. Even my own book collection includes a problematic copy of the 1919 first English edition of Joseph Conrad’s The Arrow of Gold, with an elaborate armorial bookplate of Baron Leverhulme of Bolton-le-Moors, whose engraved insignia of a cock and rampant elephants lends it an impressive air of authenticity. Laid in is a clipping from an early bookseller’s catalogue offering this copy as having “Conrad’s autograph signature below his printed name on the title page.” Yet despite its persuasive provenance and expert assurances, despite its signature appearing to be contemporary and confident in its execution, my signed Conrad is surely a forgery. Many details of the autograph seem wrong, beginning with the shapes of the initial letters of his name along with an overall studied appearance—overly careful, deliberate, antiseptic, and simply misshapen. Fortunately, when I acquired it at auction, the lot included another first edition of Arrow in superlative condition, which was the one I actually wanted. To their credit, the auction house listed the signed copy as possibly spurious. ___________________________________ The authoritative provenance and early bookseller’s assurance of authenticity (left) and the sad truth (right). (Author’s collection.) ___________________________________ Some years later, two Cormac McCarthy rarities I acquired from a highly respected auction house in London were so cleverly wrought that they fooled both the firm’s seasoned cataloguer and me, an experienced collector and sometime dealer. I had never before seen proof copies of the British editions of McCarthy’s early novels Outer Dark and Child of God, so I went for broke and outbid others anxious to get them. They arrived, clearly uncirculated and pristine, and after cataloguing them, I gingerly put them on my shelf with other McCarthy firsts. Alas, several months later I received an email from my friend at the house, apologizing as he told me they were forgeries. The design layout, the covers, the text itself were cleverly cobbled together. Even though it came out of a prominent collection belonging to one McCarthy’s own friends, it was wrong as rain. ***** Picasso once remarked that “Good artists copy. Great artists steal.” Forgers do both. And whether we think of them as twisted imitators, diabolical artificers, antiauthoritarian heroes, or whatever else, it is reasonable to believe that they will continue to cast shadows where legitimate writers tread. As E. K. Chambers long ago suggested, those of us who value originals over fakes will ever owe gratitude to the Lasus of Hermiones, Edmund Malones, Carter and Pollards of the world for revealing the truth. After all, the history of literary forgery is still actively being made. More than one bookseller friend of mine is even now involved in exposing brazen forgeries of iconic modern writers. Veteran rare book dealer Ken Lopez, just for instance, was asked by a client to authenticate Cormac McCarthy’s signature in a previously unrecorded proof copy of Outer Dark. With the help of his assistant, photographer Brendan Devlin, they caught “telltale inkjet color spots” on the proof and through a combination of technical scrutiny and decades of expertise, both proof and autograph were declared fakes. As Lopez wrote to me, with typical modesty, “It was just a matter of looking and paying attention.” What followed was the discovery of a massive cascade of far-flung forgeries meant to alter both McCarthy’s bibliography and biography. An impressive “Illustrated Edition” of Blood Meridian was even in the works. Thanks to Lopez’s “paying attention,” a collaborative pair of ambitious McCarthy forgers, whose methods were akin to Wise’s, was exposed. ___________________________________ Sophisticated McCarthy forgeries of British proof copy and illustrated Blood Meridian. (Photographs by by Brendan Devlin. Courtesy of Ken Lopez.) ___________________________________ This kind of ongoing work represents just the kind of erudite, diligent, passionate investigation that will bring forgers to heel at least most of the time. For, as long as writers write and forgers forge, there will be astute, idealistic book sleuths—often book dealers, auction houses, and librarians—shining true light into devious shadows. Indeed, on the very day I finished writing this piece, I attended online an auction taking place in Texas, where the first edition of H. P. Lovecraft’s ultra-rare first book, The Shunned House, was listed in the sumptuous print catalog of the William A. Strutz sale. But when the auction went live, I noticed the internet listing had been revised: “*Note: This description has been amended, and the references used have been updated. The present copy is the 1965 forgery as described by Joshi.” Unbeknown to one of the great collectors of his generation, The Shunned House had resided in a place of honor, shelved between Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Amy Lowell, for decades before a sophisticated auction cataloger flushed it out as a fake. Even at that, however, it was hammered down at well over a thousand dollars. And so it goes. ****** Note. The author is grateful to Janet E. Gomez whose essay in Fakes, Lies, and Forgeries (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 2014) was crucial to my research on Henry Ireland. Thanks also to Selby Kiffer and Fenella Theis at Sotheby’s, Cassie Brand at Washington University Library, Hannah Elder at Massachusetts Historical Society, Michael North at Library of Congress, and Ken Lopez, for their time and expertise. View the full article

When it comes to our understanding of crime and criminals, lawyers and novelists—and lawyers-turned-novelists—might offer the same caution: presume nothing. At the forefront of this elite group of storytellers is attorney Scott Turow, who redefined the legal thriller with 1986’s Presumed Innocent. A breakout bestseller now largely considered a contemporary classic, the book inspired a feature film starring Harrison Ford and a more recent streaming adaptation for Apple TV with Jake Gyllenhaal. Turow has now published thirteen novels and two works of non-fiction, which have been translated into more than forty languages and sold in excess of 30 million copies worldwide. His newest, Presumed Guilty (Grand Central Publishing; January 14, 2025), is his third to feature former prosecutor and retired judge Rusty Sabich. Sabich—twice tried for murder (in Presumed Innocent and its sequel), and twice acquitted—is living a quiet life in the Midwest, where he’s engaged to be married to school principal Bea Housley. They share a lakefront home with her and her 22-year-old son, Aaron, whom she adopted at birth. Aaron—a Black man raised in White America—is on probation for a drug offense and faces reincarceration after violating the terms to go camping with his on-again, off-again girlfriend, Mae. But things go from bad to worse when Aaron returns alone and Mae is later found dead, the victim of an apparent homicide. Aaron is soon charged with first-degree murder, and Bea implores Rusty to represent him. Doing so would be a personal and professional quagmire, and yet Rusty— failing to find a suitable alternative, and knowing full well how hard it would be for Aaron to get a fair trial—reluctantly agrees. With Aaron’s freedom at stake, not to mention his future contentment with Bea, Rusty must put it all on the line in the hopes of winning a case that has torn the community apart—and that will have consequences regardless of the outcome. Now, Scott Turow discusses the rules of law (and writing), race, and revisiting Rusty Sabich … John B. Valeri: As a title, Presumed Guilty isn’t simply a callback to Presumed Innocent but an acknowledgement that perceptions can beget judgments regardless of the actual truth. Please expand on this notion and how it relates to these two stories. Also, what compelled you to revisit Rusty Sabich at this moment in time — and did you find it a calculated risk to do so given how (and when) things were left in Innocent? Scott Turow: So many fruitful questions. Yes, perceptions are reality—until they’re not. Because my novels are more internal than some in this genre, my protagonists’ inner life often leads him/her astray. It often amazes me how frequently we blunder through life, living with wrong assumptions. But suspending judgment, reaching no conclusions at all about what is going on in the life of others, seems vaguely immoral—we need to try to understand what is transpiring outside the boundaries of our own skins. Fiction itself depends on that. As for why I went back to Rusty, I had suspected when I finished Innocent that Rusty and I were destined to spend intimate time once more. His life was so shattered at the end of Innocent that I felt he might have deserved better. As for what he’d been through, everybody in their later years has endured some stuff. Surviving cancer, loss of loved ones, time in war. Rusty has a little more unusual list to trot out on a first date—time in prison, tried twice for murder—but as he recognizes, he has an easier path than some, since it’s broadly accepted that he was framed—twice, in fact, by a vengeful prosecutor. This is yet another misperception, in some ways, the who if not the what, but he has condemned the real facts, as he understands them, to a tomb of silence. JBV: Aaron is a Black man who was adopted into a white family immediately after birth. In what ways does his race color (some) people’s attitudes and impressions of him, no matter how subtly, and might this impact his ability to get a fair trial? ST: I doubt that any white person in our country—certainly not this white person—can fully understand the lived experience of African Americans, as it occurs day by day, even though I am always cautious about any stereotype. I doubt racism affects all Black people equally. For some it’s a bitter fact most moments of everyday; for others, I suspect, it’s like bad weather, regrettable but something to be accepted in the category of things they can’t change. But as Aaron points out, growing up black in a white family is a special case, because the racial divide is less stark. Aaron came of age loving and being loved by his white family, which makes the prejudgments of other white people about him often more surprising and embittering. But he understands from the start that in a place like Marenago County, where most residents have had next to no exposure to African Americans, the racial prejudice, where it exists, will be strong. JBV: How did you approach capturing the essential truth of his experience despite not having lived it yourself? ST: First, I don’t accept that a white author could never fully recreate the experience of being black. But it’s a very steep hill to climb, starting with the number of readers who’d say to start that it can’t be done. At any rate, I was quite conscious that what I was relating, to a very large extent, were Rusty’s perceptions, not Aaron’s. Rusty knows what he’s seen—and as he says to Bea, no one in the U.S. is really well-adjusted about matters of race—but he accepts as a starting point that he has not lived with the same realities as Aaron. The last scene with Aaron in the jail delves deeply into these differences—but they are always acknowledged. And of course, I solicited the views of a reader who’d grown up in similar circumstances. She had some minor corrections but generally approved of what I’d done. JBV: Rusty – both very much the man for the job and very much not – is understandably conflicted about defending Aaron. Tell us about the factors he must weigh in making his decision. ST: You could not have put that better—Rusty is very much the man for the job and very much not. As a general matter, representing family members is not recommended for lawyers, because of the enormous challenges to objectivity. Can you really dispassionately judge the credibility of the client relative, who will never leave your life? In this case, Rusty has a thin veneer of protection because he and Bea are not yet married, so he has no legal relationship to Aaron. But it’s far from an ideal situation. On the other hand, in the unusual circumstances of this case, he comes with two pluses: first, as he puts it, he will work cheap, meaning he will not leave Aaron and his parents broke as a consequence of paying an enormous fee to another lawyer to conduct the trial. Second, he is far more experienced in first-degree murders trials than any other lawyer who is available in a rural area—and it’s very much the case that any attorney with a ‘city shine’ would be regarded with suspicion by a rural jury. Talk about prejudices! JBV: Also, what are the potential consequences of this decision, and how are they inordinately heightened by his personal involvement with both Aaron’s and the victim’s families? ST: The sharp irony is that in the end, it’s the factor that makes this a bad idea that moves Rusty to do it. He is desperate to preserve his relationship with Bea, and Bea is desperate to see Rusty take the case. He believes he has no way out. If he says no and Aaron is convicted, she will always believe he could have done better than whoever represented Aaron in the end and blame Rusty for the result. JBV: The victim, Mae, had a history of drug abuse and erratic behavior that could be relevant to her death and who may have caused it. But bringing out those things in court opens the door to the perception (there’s that word again!) of victim blaming and/or shaming, which can be off-putting. What was your intent in presenting her character, proverbial warts, and all – and how does this speak to the broader, real-life issue of attorneys towing the line between truth and tarnish? ST: Well, victim blaming may be looked down upon as a cultural matter, but in the courtroom it’s tried and true—and I would argue, for good reason. It is certainly the case, as Mae’s parents believe, that it seems like bringing out Mae’s problems diminish the crime, seeming to suggest that her life was ‘worth’ less. But her erratic behavior, which hardly started the day she died, also goes to explain some of the damning circumstances of the crime, like why Aaron left her behind in a sparsely inhabited area. JBV: While conventional storytelling wisdom extols the virtues of showing the reader something rather than telling them, trials are very much about telling in order to show (and many of this book’s most dramatic moments come from what is said in court). Can you talk about this seeming conflict and how you balance the two in your writing? ST: Well, clearly a lot gets said in court. And in terms of the circumstances of the crime, as the prosecutor perceives them, and as the defense reveals them to be, there are a lot of outright surprises (or so I hope) but as for Rusty’s emotional state, the strategy is more typical, shown more than told. JBV: Further, tell us how Rusty’s age and reflective state of mind play into how he narrates this particular book. ST: Rusty has never been anything other than self-conscious, a determined observer. Knowing that he is participating in a criminal trial for the last time, after a lifelong career centered in this forum, there is a lot to say—accumulated wisdom and knowledge of the shortcomings of the process. With so much at stake emotionally, his perceptions are to some extent a buffer for his feelings. He observes, rather than succumb to his dread of the outcome and the wreckage that might be his life in the aftermath. JBV: While trials are inherently dramatic, the proceedings can also be tedious. What liberties do you allow yourself to take for the sake of story – and, using that as a point of reference, what advice would you offer to others when considering creative license with the overall integrity of a piece? ST: Of course, when you are the lawyer trying a case every moment is dramatic, even the legal rulings that seem trivial or unintelligible to lay observers, because something is happening that you feel is important for your side—otherwise, there’d be no argument. That becomes the advantage of telling the story from the trial lawyer’s perspective, because he so often understands the stakes in moments outsiders might find boring—whether to move for a mistrial, for example, or a judge’s attitude toward an objection. I have no quarrel with the short handing of trials that is often necessary, especially in time-limited media like film. but I’ve never gone for changing the rules, maybe because I know that if I was in the audience it would totally disrupt my suspension of disbelief. I don’t go through the jury instructions conference in Presumed Guilty. but I’d never pretend that the judge doesn’t give the jury instructions. JBV: As a former practicing lawyer, you know better than most that justice isn’t always done. What satisfaction, or wish fulfillment, does fiction allow you that real-life sometimes doesn’t? ST: When I wrote the first draft of Presumed Innocent, I didn’t say who’d committed the crime. My excuse to myself was that was like what happens in court, where, after an acquittal especially, we don’t know who’s really guilty or how the crime occurred. That provoked a long heart to heart with myself, which took place over many months, in which I ultimately accepted that the premise of the mystery is that we can always know whodunnit and why. JBV: Since retirement, have you found that your relationship with the work has changed? If so, how? ST: I’m still not fully retired. I have one remaining pro bono case, which keeps me pretty engaged with the law at times. But I doubt surrendering the reins entirely will do much to change my perspectives. Being a trial lawyer is such an intense experience, that it is more or less burned into your soul like a brand. The one difference is that with less law to practice I’ve been able to write faster, which is a good outcome as you’re getting older when there still seems to be a lot to say JBV: Leave us with a teaser: What comes next? ST: I’m in the cogitative stage. But I believe the next book will start with a very old lawyer who consults the obituaries, as he does every day, and finds a death notice for a man he was certain had been murdered nearly fifty years before by a central figure in the old lawyer’s life. View the full article

I’m a TV writer by profession, and when I’m not staffing a show, I develop TV series adaptations with the goal of selling one to a buyer. My favorite novel genres to adapt are mysteries and thrillers because I love suspenseful, propulsive storytelling and because thrillers make damn good TV. TV shows demand action and surprises that compel a viewer to keep watching, and since suspense novels are built around twists, with chapters that end on cliffhangers, they lend well to adaptation. In the Age of Streaming, where thousands of TV shows across 400 networks compete for attention, it’s incredibly difficult for a series to gain traction, but a delicious thriller can quickly amass an audience. If I spark to a novel, I develop my “take”—a 20-minute pitch on how I would adapt the book into an on-going series. When pitching a series, the most important question I need to answer is Why Now? A thriller novel with a strong hook and a juicy twist is great, but one that has something to say, that sparks discussion around a timely, compelling theme, is undeniable. Think Big Little Lies, with its examination of domestic violence among the elites, or Codename Villanelle (the source material for Killing Eve), with its rare depiction of female obsession. The other important question I need to answer when pitching a series is Why You? I need to convince a potential buyer that I am the perfect person to adapt the novel, and I need to demonstrate how I will expand the world of the book into a series that could run for multiple seasons. After studying and deconstructing many thrillers, I decided to try my hand at writing my own. My debut novel, The Ends of Things, is a psychological suspense about a solo female traveler who disappears from a beach resort. My heroine, a fellow vacationer, becomes obsessed with the missing woman and embroiled in the police investigation that unfolds. At first, I didn’t set out to write a novel. I thought my idea would make a great movie, so I wrote an outline for a feature script. But then I realized all my favorite parts were scene descriptions and stage directions—none of which would make it from page to screen. I’ve always loved mysteries that feature protagonists who aren’t so much unreliable narrators as they are unaware that they’re unreliable narrators, like Rachel in The Girl on the Train. I wanted to explore a character who was her own worst enemy, and since my protagonist is a catastrophizer, it was crucial that I have access to her private thoughts. My problem was that interiority is notoriously difficult to express in a screenplay unless you use a trope like voiceover, which is generally considered to be a narrative crutch. (There are exceptions, of course. Some of the voiceover in the TV series You, for example, is lifted from the pages of the novel on which it is based and is used cleverly to endear the viewers to Joe, even though he’s a creepy stalker with homicidal tendencies.) Typically, though, a screenwriter needs to demonstrate character through action. What your character does or doesn’t do reveals who they are. Novels, however, allow you to express your character’s thoughts and feelings better than any other medium. That’s how I knew my story needed to be a book. I had never written a novel before, and I had no idea how to approach a project that was so, well, long. On a craft level, screenwriting and novel writing seemed completely different. But over the eighteen-month journey that followed, from conception to completed manuscript, I came to discover that for all the differences, the processes had some surprising similarities. My first hurdle was “breaking” the story. Television is typically written in a group setting, specifically in a Writers Room, so-called because it’s a (sometimes windowless) room where ten or so writers spend all day every day for months on end pitching storylines, brainstorming ideas, eating snacks, and breaking the Season together. The writers are then assigned scripts, which they write on their own and bring back to the room for feedback and dialogue punch up. The great thing about working in a Writers Room is that you can use the brain trust to help you solve your story problems. Discovered a plot hole while outlining? Take your beats back to the room. Spinning your wheels on a weak cliffhanger? Ask the room to brainstorm alternatives. The room is paid to solve problems, so you can see how an entire season of television can be conceived and written relatively quickly, in about six months or so, with a group of writers working collaboratively before the cameras start rolling, and then doing rewrites through production. Novel writing, though, is a solitary pursuit. If you’re lucky, you have one or two trusted readers to help you solve your story problems. But mostly you’re on your own. When I started, all I had was a long, unwieldy Word document full of stream of consciousness musings and fragmented observations, along with some ideas for plot twists. My next hurdle: How do you structure a novel? The only frame of reference I had was breaking story in a Writers Room. When you get hired to join a room, you typically spend the first few weeks discussing the Season as a whole, as well as delineating or “arcing” the emotional journeys of the characters. You do this by writing story beats on index cards and mounting them on a cork board or white board. Once the shape of the Season comes into focus, and once you have a general sense of where the characters are headed emotionally, you begin tackling individual episodes, ensuring that each one progresses the Season Arc, and that each episode fits, like a puzzle piece, within the larger serialized framework of the Season. Since I didn’t know how else to do it, I broke the structure of my novel the same way. I pulled out a giant stack of multi-colored index cards, and using Sharpies, the writing implement de rigueur of a Writers Room, I transposed every story beat from my Word document onto the cards. My story takes place in two timelines, so I color coded the cards: White for “present-day” action and purple for “flashbacks.” Then, I mounted the cards on a cork board. In a Writers Room, each column of cards on a Season Arc board corresponds to an episode. Thirteen columns = Thirteen episodes. In my case, every column corresponded to a chapter. Thirteen columns = Thirteen chapters. And because I was writing a suspense novel, I wanted each chapter to end on a cliffhanger, to compel the reader to turn the page. Once I had the structure figured out, it came time to sit down and actually write, and here’s where I found the mediums vastly different. When writing a screenplay, you write with blocking in mind—describing what your characters are physically doing and where they are in relation to their location and each other. (If you don’t properly block a scene on the page, your actors will definitely accost you on set with their notes, and this can be very embarrassing.) With novel writing, though, I found that my heroine could think thoughts for pages on end without having to physically move. It was liberating to explore her musings without having to worry about what she was doing with her hands! Another major difference had to do with time management. In the TV world, it’s common to develop multiple projects at the same time. When you get stuck on one script, you can move to another, in a constant rotation. I’ve found this can help when you get blocked: delving into one creative world sometimes helps unlock story problems in another. But what surprised me about writing my novel was how all-consuming the process was. Sustaining my book’s fictional world in all its granular detail demanded my undivided attention. All I did for eighteen months straight was eat, sleep, and breathe my characters. When you wrap a season of television, if you’re lucky, you’ve made a handful of lifelong friends. After being in the trenches for months on end, trauma bonding from tight deadlines and harsh network notes, and going feral from lack of sleep and daylight, you can’t help but feel a strong sense of camaraderie. You celebrate together, go to karaoke, buy each other wrap gifts, and group-watch the season premiere. Sometimes, the room’s group text keeps going for years after the show has been canceled. Finishing a novel, though, hits different. When I printed out my completed manuscript and spread the pages across my bedroom floor, I was overwhelmed by a deeply personal and very private sense of accomplishment I had never felt before. I had managed to write this big thing all by myself. And when my ARCs arrived in the mail, it felt incredible to hold my book in my hands. But this feeling of triumph was followed by vulnerability because unlike a TV show, my novel has only one name on the cover, and it’s mine. As proud as I felt, I couldn’t also help but feel a bit exposed. There’s a troubling new trend in Hollywood, where streamers are deleting entire seasons of television from their digital libraries to avoid paying creatives residual fees. This means that along with losing revenue, writers are losing access to their work. A book, though, is forever. It feels good knowing that no matter what happens, my novel will always have a place on my bookshelf. Now that pub day is approaching, my TV agents have asked me to put together my take for a potential series adaptation. Talk about a full circle moment. It’s a bit surreal crafting a pitch for why I am the perfect person to adapt my own book. But that’s Hollywood, for you. *** View the full article

In 2013, Tim Kreider achieved true Internet meme stardom when he concluded his New York Times essay, “I Know What You Think of Me,” with the line, “if we want the rewards of being loved we have to submit to the mortifying ordeal of being known.” The meme-ification of this statement proves just how perfectly it encapsulates the human experiences. It taps into our deepest insecurities—that if someone truly loves us, then it means that they have seen us, all of us. And it is an active submission, to be loved. Just as it is an active acceptance, to love someone. As a thriller writer, I am often asked the ever-dreaded and ever-fascinating question, “Where do your ideas come from?” I tend to answer, quite honestly, “I write what frightens me.” Because this is the thrill that all crime readers seek. Crime novels make our fears real. Just as romance novels stoke our fantasies and assure us there is love and tenderness in this world, crime novels allow us to explore our deepest fears in a safe environment. And what are our deepest fears? For my first novel, Shutter, I used to joke that what frightened me most was, to put it bluntly, men. But if I tease this apart, if I look closer at the story, the answer is, more specifically, powerful men. More specifically still, falling in love with (or being manipulated by) a man. More specifically still, falling in love with a man, and thus giving him power over you. For my upcoming novel, The Lost House, I was preoccupied with a question: What if the world believed that the person who raised you was a murderer? And what if the person who raised you, who loved you most, actually was a murderer? If I continue to tease that line of questioning apart, what it actually comes down to is something similar to the mortifying ordeal of being known. It comes down to the inherent vulnerability of loving someone and being loved in return. Both novels reveal a preoccupation with the power structures within a loving relationship, whether it is romantic or familial, and a fear of being vulnerable, being hurt. For Agnes, the main character in The Lost House, the man in question is her grandfather. When she hears that a true crime podcaster will be recording a series about her grandfather’s infamous case (the murder of his wife and daughter, a crime that was never prosecuted except in the court of public opinion), Agnes travels to Iceland to clear her grandfather’s name. What I came to realize as I wrote this novel was that, for Agnes, the fear was not just that her grandfather couldn’t be a murderer because he was a good man. It was something far more subtle, and much more human: In her mind, her grandfather couldn’t have been a murderer, because he would have told her. The potential lie is a bigger betrayal than the grander moral implications of his history. She is more hurt by the lie because it betrays the intimacy of their relationship. It forces her to question everything. If it is true that he murdered his wife and daughter, what does it mean that he showed his granddaughter such tenderness? Who was he? Who, really, did she love? A murderer? A good man? A lie? I should say, very quickly, I’m not spoiling The Lost House for you. This is simply the fear I was exploring in the novel, the fear of vulnerability. Of intimacy. Of what it means to love the entirety of someone, which must include their potential for violence. It is the truth, both terrible and precious to our human experience, that the ones who are closest to us are the most dangerous. They have the greatest capacity to hurt us, because they know us and we know them. Because we have both supposedly submitted to that mortifying ordeal of being known. Because it is the most vicious betrayal to learn that the person you thought you knew, inside and out, is a stranger. And not just a stranger, but someone who has actively hidden their true self from you. In a thriller, this fear is made manifest into their extremes, our loved ones becoming murderers and serial killers and victims. I once read, but am unable to find again, an essay that covers this topic in comparison between two early-2000 coming of age horror movies, The Craft and Scream. Please forgive me, unknown writer, for paraphrasing, but the conclusion has stuck with me: In these two very different horror movies, the most dangerous threat to their young female protagonists isn’t a channeler of dark magic or some random serial killer, but their own boyfriends. Coincidentally both played by Skeet Ulrich. It is the horrible accusation that gets thrown around, after someone hurts us: You should have known better. It is the question we ask ourselves, after we have been hurt: Can I trust my own instincts? It is the fear of even letting someone get close to us, because once we submit to that ordeal, they have the potential to hurt us. Here are five novels that embody this fear, that make the mortifying ordeal of being known a reality: The Tommyknockers by Stephen King Though the competition is fierce, this is my favorite King novel, because of the relationship between the two main characters, because of the intimacy and heartbreak and love explored in this terrifying story. Bobbie Anderson, a young writer living alone, stumbles over a piece of metal on her land in Maine and becomes convinced that it is a long-buried UFO. She struggles to uncover this massive spacecraft, and let’s just say that it starts to affect her negatively. Meanwhile, her best friend and once lover, Jim Gardner, miles away has reached his own rock bottom after a bender. He stands on the precipice of committing suicide when he’s overcome with a deep certainty: Bobbie needs his help. Determined to help, he joins her in the struggle, and then it’s he who needs rescuing. The Sea of Lost Girls by Carol Goodman There are so many of Goodman’s novels to choose from that explore this particular topic, but this is the one that I return to again and again. A teacher at a remote private school, Tess, wakes in the middle of the night to a text from her troubled teenaged son, asking her for help. She finds him by the shore, alone, drenched, covered in what looks like blood, and unwilling to explain. Hours later, she receives a call from the school administration informing her that her son’s girlfriend has been found dead on that same shore. A mother’s fierce love is put to the test in this absolutely stunning, atmospheric novel. The Quiet Tenant by Clémence Michallon I can’t write about our beloved family members being murderers without mentioning The Quiet Tenant. Aidan Thomas is an upstanding citizen in his Upstate New York town, beloved by all, especially his teenage daughter, Cecilia. There’s just the matter of his locked shed in the backyard, where he’s imprisoned a young woman, Rachel, for the past five years. When Aidan’s wife dies, he’s forced to move and forced to bring Rachel out of the shed and into his home. I’ll say no more, except that there is an image at the end of this novel that still gives me goosebumps to this day. The Dry by Jane Harper This list is actually just an excuse to recommend all of my favorite thrillers! In a small farming town in Australia, a terrible tragedy has occurred: A well-respected man has supposedly killed his wife and son and then himself, leaving only his infant daughter alive. His estranged childhood best friend, Aaron Falk, comes home for the funeral and finds himself haunted by the question: Was his best friend really a murderer? If he killed his wife and son, was he responsible for the unsolved death of their childhood friend years ago? Blood Sisters by Vanessa Lillie Fifteen years ago, Syd Walker witnessed her best friend’s murder and barely escaped with her own and her sister’s life. Now, working far out of state as an archaeologist for the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Syd is called home by a threat: A skull placed near the scene of the crime, with her ID badge held in its teeth. Reluctantly, Syd returns to uncover old wounds and new horrors alike. Her sister, troubled and far too involved in the dark threads that hold their hometown together, has gone missing. I read this one so fast I was almost out of breath, both from the pace and the terrors within. *** View the full article

FIRST ASSIGNMENT: write your story statement. A father’s death forces his son to choose between good and evil. SECOND ASSIGNMENT: in 200 words or less, sketch the antagonist or antagonistic force in your story. Keep in mind their goals, their background, and the ways they react to the world about them. The reader is provided with competing narratives. First, after the death of his father Jacob Johnson developed a maniacal drive to provide for and protect his mother. That drive made his choice between morality and personal advancement complicated. In junior high Jacob was humiliated by the school bully, Mikey. After the beating, Jacob found sexually explicit information, that if exposed, would destroy Mikey’s tough guy reputation. Jacob struggled with whether or not to disclose the information. In college Jacob discovered his roommate assaulting a girl. The roommate, who was wealthy, told Jacob not to pursue the matter and if he did, he would implicate him. Jacob reluctantly agreed. Later, Jacob was to be named CEO of Carrington Enterprises. He was confronted by someone, from his past, who discovered Jacob had used deception and omission to attain success. Jacob’s choice was to give up the power he spent his life acquiring or return to the values he learned as a child. The second option, Bacchus, formerly enslaved, and murdered for escaping, it was said, visited young men without parents. His voice was accompanied by pain in the tongue during critical decisions. Jacob heard a voice and experienced pain during every critical decision. Create a breakout title (list several options, not more than three, and revisit to edit as needed). The Death of Jacob Johnson: The day Jacob Johnson’s father died his life’s trajectory altered. The boy who learned his father died in church changed through being bullied in junior high school, the love he found in college, and his ascension to CEO of Carrington Enterprises. His death was not a natural one, but one of mind, body, and spirit. Dreams: Jacob is visited by his father shortly after his death and is told to only trust Deacon Rose. This is central to the book in that it opens the door to the supernatural. Jacob is also visited two additional times in his dreams to preview events to come. Metaphorically, most of the characters in the book have aspirational dreams. Jacob dreams of protecting and providing for his mother. Deacon Rose dreams of helping Jacob deal with this voice, Eleanor Barber dreams of one last adventure before she retires, and Katie, his mother, dreams of her son going to college and becoming a businessperson. Jacob’s Voice: After Jacob is bullied in junior high, he hears a voice that makes his tongue feel pain. This voice appears during crucial decision points in the novel. It is that same voice that encourages him to make decisions that while in his best interest conflict with what he knows is morally acceptable. Develop two smart comparables for your novel. Who compares to you? And why? Trust by Hernan Diaz: Both books deal with the essence of truth. Trust is concerned with the accuracy of perceptions, power, and who tells the story. The Death of Jacob Johnson is concerned with perceptions, power, and belief. Most characters believe in God but have trouble believing in a more sinister power at work in their lives. The narrative itself, like Trust, offers the reader options on what version of the truth is accurate. Pet Cemetery by Stephen King: In this book, the author used the third person omniscient to build suspense and set a sense of dread for the reader. The Death of Jacob Johnson is told from the third-person omniscient point of view as well as from other character's points of view. Finally, the horror elements are present in both novels. Write your own hook line (logline) with conflict and core wound. A young boy’s father died shortly before his tenth birthday, in the aftermath, the boy propelled himself to a successful life which culminated in him becoming CEO of Carrington Enterprises, or is his ascension the result of Bacchus, a demon formerly enslaved who spoke to children without parents, who guided his steps, leaving everyone in his path homeless, hurt, or dead. Sketch out the conditions for the inner conflict your protagonist will have. Why will they feel in turmoil? Conflicted? Anxious? Sketch out one hypothetical scenario in the story wherein this would be the case--consider the trigger and the reaction. Before the inciting incident, Jacob’s life was filled with the love of his parents and his church family. He was taught the biblical principles of morality and to choose good over evil. His father’s death altered this trajectory. Without a father, Jacob sought the comfort of father figures. His want to take care of and provide for his mother became the driving force of his life which complicated his decision-making ability. His major decisions had an added layer of complexity due to the sharp pain he felt in his tongue and a voice that encouraged him to make the wrong choices. Would he choose the decision that was morally, right? Or would he choose the decision that allowed him to attain higher status and higher advancement to meet his goals? For example, Jacob attended the prestigious Hilderbrant University. Graduating from Hilderbrant meant connections, a great career, and lifelong friendships as long as one was able to maintain those relationships. While there, Jacob attended the most exclusive fraternity party on campus. Jacob was invited as his girlfriend’s (Megan) plus one. His roommate Dan also attended. Later that night Jacob found Dan sexually assaulting a female attendee. Jacob physically restrained Dan and called the police. The cops instructed Jacob to leave. The next few scenes Jacob grappled with what he had seen. He decided not to tell his girlfriend, but instead, he would confront Dan. The next day Jacob told Dan to turn himself in. He expressed how disgusted he was with him and that if Dan didn’t turn himself in Jacob would do it for him. Dan realized Jacob was serious and offered him a choice. First, to forget what he saw. His second choice was more of a threat. Dan insinuated that because Jacob was black it would be more believable that he assaulted the girl. He informed Jacob of his parent’s wealth, resources, and deep relationships with the campus police. Jacob, who had devoted much of his early life to position himself so that he could attend a college like Hilderbrant felt pain in his tongue and heard a voice as he weighed the pros and cons. Next, likewise sketch a hypothetical scenario for the "secondary conflict" involving the social environment. Will this involve family? Friends? Associates? What is the nature of it? Ricky Johnson, Jacob’s father, visited him in a dream the night of his death. He told Jacob to only trust Deacon Rose because something was coming after him. Jacob told this to Deacon Rose, who at first had a hard time believing that he could be of help, but as time progressed Deacon Rose believed he could be of use. Jacob explained to Deacon Rose that he heard a voice, and his tongue hurt during certain situations. Deacon Rose told the boy to pray, but he also went to the library to research ghost narratives. While there, he interacted with an old friend Eleanor Barber, who is also a friend of the Johnson family. She informed him that Franklin Roosevelt’s administration led a project to memorialize the ghost narratives of all living formerly enslaved people. Eleanor sent for all of the volumes for Bobby to read through. During his research, he found the name Bacchus, an enslaved person who was murdered for trying to escape with his daughter. The text stated “Reports reveal their tongues would turn black-during the episodes. Interviewees stated the only way to rid oneself of the presence was to—”, someone had deliberately removed the page from the book. Eleanor Barber stated, “It looks like the volume has been tampered with.” Bobby, a World War II veteran, who walked with a wobble and lost an eye during the war became determined to find out what happened. He needed to determine what the missing page said so that he could fulfill what Ricky Johnson told Jacob in the dream. Deacon Rose wanted to protect Jacob from whatever or whoever it was talking to him. Sketch out your setting in detail. What makes it interesting enough, scene by scene, to allow for uniqueness and cinema in your narrative and story? The book is divided into three acts and each act has a distinctive setting. Act I took place in Charlotte, NC from the years 1986-1994. The set pieces include Trinity Resurrection Baptist Church where Jacob learns of his father’s passing, the Johnson home, where friends and family congregate, and Englehart Junior High School where Mikey, the school bully intimidates Jacob. One of the key settings is Deacon Rose’s front yard. This is where he teaches Jacob how to play chess, where Jacob reveals that he hears a voice, and where Deacon Rose decides that he will help him. The final set piece is a small library off of Beattis Ford Rd where Deacon Rose and Eleanor Barber do their research. Act II was more expansive as the setting of Hilderbrant University came into focus. Jacob spent time at his girlfriend Megan’s apartment and then at a fraternity house he was warned in a dream not to attend. The setting then shifts briefly from Charlotte to Cape Cod as Jacob and Megan introduce each other to their families. While in Charlotte Jacob is confronted by Mikey, who bullied him during junior high. A mysterious place called The Fortress is introduced where Mr. Carrington, head of Carrington Enterprises, is a member of a secretive organization. Jacob and Megan move to Charlotte so he can take a job at Carrington Enterprises. They have an apartment together that is a place of love until Jacob’s drive for success in the name of taking care of his mother is too much for Megan to take. Act III took place where the story began, in Charlotte, NC. The story has narrowed. This time Jacob’s perspective of the city is different. Deacon Rose has died, and Jacob has purchased a lavish home on Lake Norman. The library Elanor Barber once loved now was a shell of itself. She decided to retire and at that retirement party, she received a call that set her off for one last adventure. Back at Jacob’s lakeside home, he built a guest house for his mother to live in. He outfitted the room in her favorite color, pink, and had so many roses sent to the house that it was scented with citrus and mint. Embedded in each act is a dream sequence. Jacob was visited three times. The setting of the dreams took on aspects of the real world which frightened Jacob. For instance, in his first dream, the setting foreshadowed a home Deacon Rose visited where he learned about the spirit Bacchus. Each set piece showed Jacob’s transformation. His world narrowed as his stature increased. As a young man, he was surrounded by loved ones and an older mentor. In college he created a network of friends and found love, but as his thirst for power and success increased his world narrowed. By the time he bought the lake home Megan was gone. He had no friends. His only mentor was Mr. Carrington who does not seem to have his best interests at heart.

As a hopeless romantic who writes mysteries, I’ve yet to write a mystery that doesn’t include a love story. In my latest novel, Missing Mom, Noelle is not only dealing with the disappearance of her mother, but with her growing romantic feelings for her closest friend and fellow dancer Ravi. Mystery romances are also definitely among my favorite reads. Below is a diverse assortment of five compelling mystery romances that I found thoroughly enjoyable. Bright Objects by Ruby Todd It’s been more than two years since Sylvia Knight lost her husband in a horrific hit-and-run car accident, and she remains determined to identify his killer and bring him to justice. Still lost in a haze of grief, she meets the enigmatic Theo St. John, the discoverer of a rare comet that’s about to become visible to the public. The attraction between the two is immediate, but Sylvia feels horribly guilty that she is betraying her dead husband by embracing a new love, and Theo’s reticence about his past puzzles her. Meantime, Sylvia’s concerned about her mother-in-law who seems dangerously caught up in the cult-like following of a local meditation teacher, Joseph Evans. The charismatic Evans turns out to be even more dangerous than Sylvia could have imagined. The shocking twist at the end of this tale speaks to the power of forgiveness and the healing renewal of love. If your reading tastes run more toward the literary, you’ll be swept up into Ruby Todd’s exquisite prose in her debut novel. A Lady’s Guide to Mischief and Mayhem by Amanda Collins Never mind that in 1865 London, proper ladies are not supposed to concern themselves with anything other than cookery and household matters. Newspaper columnist Lady Katherine Bascomb is keenly interested in crime. Having inherited her late husband’s newspaper, she insists on doing her own sleuthing and reporting her findings. When she discovers a key witness to the latest victim of a serial killer that Scotland Yard’s Detective Inspector Andrew Eversham’s team has overlooked, Eversham is pulled off the case and nearly loses his job. To make matters worse, he’s convinced they’ve arrested the wrong man based on her reporting. And when another victim shows up, discovered by Lady Katherine no less, the two are thrown together yet again. Understandably, Eversham detests the woman who nearly ruined his career. But what began as mutual distrust gradually morphs into a spirited romance and a partnership in solving the murders. The delectable sparring between these two characters makes this a thoroughly engaging read perfect for readers of historical romance. The Body In the Backyard by Lucy Score The latest entry in the Riley Thorn mystery series features a madcap cast of characters. Riley’s over-the-top narcissistic ex-husband, Griffin Gentry, unexpectedly shows up begging for help tracking down the person who’s trying to kill him. Not surprisingly, Riley’s sexy private investigator boyfriend, Nick Santiago, refuses to take the case. But he’s overruled by Mrs. Penny, his eighty-year-old business partner, who points out their nearly empty bank account. Their client’s selfish behavior and endless betrayals have enraged a bunch of people, so even with Riley’s psychic abilities and Nick’s skills as a detective, sorting through all the potential suspects is no easy task. There’s even a support group for women who hate the impossibly self-absorbed Griffin! Meantime, the roof of the mansion next door has collapsed, and Riley and Nick’s elderly neighbors move in. Nick longs for some alone time with Riley for romance and a marriage proposal, but finding time alone proves to be almost as difficult as identifying Griffin’s would-be murderer. For readers partial to romantic comedy capers and snappy dialogue, seasoned with a touch of the paranormal, this is a thoroughly entertaining read. Flashback by Iris Johansen and Roy Johansen The venerable mother-daughter writing team, Iris Johansen and Roy Johansen, offer another mystery romance/thriller, Flashback, their latest Kendra Michaels novel. Kendra is approached by retired detective Paula Chase who asks for her help in finding two missing sisters, Chloe and Sloane Morgan. Fifteen years ago, the girls’ mother was a victim of the Bayside Strangler, and the two girls have never stopped investigating the crime. Just as it appears they may have stumbled on to a lead, the two sisters vanish and after years of silence, the strangler has begun killing again. No sooner does Kendra take on the case than she barely escapes a brutal attack in her garage. Soon, her lover, government agent-for-hire Adam Lynch, returns home to protect Kendra and help her with her investigation. They make a strong team. Having spent the first two decades of her life sightless, Kendra’s other senses are unusually sharp, and she often notices clues other investigators have missed. But Kendra and Adam’s relationship is complicated. Kendra is fiercely independent and resists any intimation that she needs taking care of. And Adam is such a forceful personality used to taking charge that she’s not fully comfortable with making a commitment to him. Full of page-turning suspense as well as the ongoing tension between two strong characters desperately in love with one another, this is an exciting and pleasurable read. Plain Jane by Fern Michaels In high school and college, Jane Lewis was plump and plain, a source of embarrassment to her looks-conscious, vain mother. Jane envied Connie Bryan, the beautiful homecoming queen who was about to be married to a popular football player following their college graduation. But the night before their final exams, Jane and Connie are walking home from the library when a group of guys brutally rapes Connie, while two of their buddies hold Jane down and prevent her from helping her friend. Despite Jane’s pleas to Connie to report the rape, Connie refuses. Soon, Connie’s relationship with her fiancé collapses, and tragically. she commits suicide. Jane has never fully forgiven herself for not pushing her friend harder to report the rape. She has now blossomed into an attractive, successful psychiatrist with a thriving practice, her own radio talk show, and a gorgeous New Orleans mansion, complete with a resident friendly ghost who wants her help in “crossing to the other side.” Complicating matters is a male patient whose reported difficulties connecting to his wife after she’s been raped are eerily reminiscent of Connie’s story. Jane becomes determined to investigate Connie’s cold case, despite the reservations of fellow psychiatrist Michael Sorenson, someone she’d long had a crush on dating back to their college days. Jane and Michael encounter lots of challenges as they fall in love, while Jane draws closer to revealing the person who orchestrated the long-ago attack on Connie. Along the way, she’s also sorting out a new career path for herself. The fun twists and turns of the romance, Jane’s career, and her investigation make this a richly layered and delightful read. *** View the full article

Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Bradford Morrow, The Forger’s Requiem (Atlantic Monthly Press) “Spellbinding . . . a brilliantly constructed story of revenge, redemption, deception, and betrayal . . . Spectacularly well written and fiendishly clever, this is both a terrific conclusion to a trilogy and a wonderfully satisfying standalone.” –Booklist Leah Konen, The Last Room on the Left (Putnam) “Tipping her literary cap to Stephen King’s The Shining, Konen serves up a superbly crafted novel of suspense that will thrill and delight fans of Lucy Foley, Alice Feeney, and Sarah Pearse.” –Library Journal Scott Turow, Presumed Guilty (Grand Central) “Turow keeps readers guessing… This easily ranks among Turow’s best.” –Publishers Weekly Melissa Larsen, The Lost House (Minotaur) “This atmospheric, slow-paced suspense from Larsen will appeal to readers who enjoy descriptive crime novels set in isolated Nordic countries.” –Library Journal Jonathan Ames, Karma Doll (Mulholland) “Idiosyncratic PI Happy Doll returns for another violent, darkly funny adventure in Ames’s outstanding sequel to The Wheel of Doll…Ames delivers lurid action, sterling prose, and a top-shelf cliff-hanger in one deliriously entertaining package. The next installment can’t come soon enough.” –Publishers Weekly Robert Crais, The Big Empty (G.P. Putnam’s Sons) “Crais masters compelling crime fiction by blending humor, terrific main characters, and suspense into a phenomenal package. Empty might be in the title, but this story is far from it.” –First Clue Thomas Perry, Pro Bono (Mysterious Press) “Gasp-inducing. . . . Fascinating financial crimes information, delivered by an extremely likable, resourceful hero, enhances this crafty game of cat and mouse.” –Booklist James Grippando, Grave Danger (Harper) “Spectacular. . . . Swyteck continues to be one of the more compelling legal-thriller protagonists, and Grippando continues to be one of the genre’s best craftsmen. Another winner in this consistently excellent series.” –Booklist Michael Cannell, Blood and the Badge (Minotaur) “Disturbing… jaw dropping… Cannell paces the proceedings like a thriller.” –Publishers Weekly Eric Dezenhall, Wiseguys and the White House (Harper) “Entertaining history in which mobsters often come off better than presidents.” –Kirkus Reviews Matthew Pearl, Save Our Souls (Harper) “This dramatic story of good and evil pits the power of teamwork and family against ruthless ambition and selfishness. An illuminating chronicle of perseverance and survival on a barren island, Save Our Souls brings history to life.” –Booklist View the full article

Queer authors have been writing great mysteries and thrillers since the 19th century, often living outwardly queer lives and featuring openly queer characters in their work. With four of the ten crime fiction authors on The New York Times Best Of list being queer, this is a pivotal moment for queer crime fiction—but it’s important to remember that queer crime writers have always been here, crafting compelling stories and paving the way for today’s diverse voices. This list could not possibly include all the amazing talent in our genre, but we’ve tried to include the legends and some of the “firsts.” While celebrating the contributions of these talented authors, it’s also necessary to acknowledge historical gaps, particularly the lack of representation of trans authors in queer crime fiction as well as the erasure of the bi community. We hope to see this change as the genre continues to evolve. If you haven’t heard of or read these trailblazing authors, now is the perfect time to explore the incredible variety of mysteries they’ve created. To learn about even more authors, visit queercrimewriters.com. Click to view slideshow. Nathan Aldyne Nathan Aldyne was actually a pseudonym for two men who wrote four books in a hilarious mystery series, each named after a color. The books feature Daniel Lovelace and Clarisse Starling, longtime friends who always get into trouble. With booze and wit, they are reminiscent of Nick and Nora Charles. The settings are realistic and evocative of the gay male community in the early 1980s, before the HIV/AIDS crisis. In Vermilion, the first book in the series, a gay hustler is killed and ends up on the front lawn of a homophobic politician. When the police come to Valentine’s bar, he and Clarisse must get involved. Sadly, both authors passed away after contracting HIV. Find Nathan Aldyne on Bookshop.org. Click to view slideshow. Nikki Baker Nikki Baker, the pen name of Jennifer Dowdell, published her first mystery novel, In the Game, in 1991 through Naiad Press. She became the first African American lesbian mystery author. Her character, Virginia Kelly, was also the first African American lesbian sleuth. Baker, who held an MBA in finance, drew from her own background as Kelly was a financial analyst. In her debut novel, Virginia meets a friend who reveals that her partner is cheating. The partner is found murdered the next day in the same bar where Virginia had met her friend. Baker was reclusive and divulged little about her personal life. She adeptly wove themes of intersectionality into her works. Baker wrote four novels and two novellas in the series before ending it without explanation. Two of the novels in the series were nominated for Lambda Literary Awards. Find Nikki Baker on bookshop.org. Mary F. Beal Mary F. Beal was part of the New York literati of the 1960s and 1970s. She wrote fewer than a handful of literary works. Angel Dance, published in 1977, is credited as the first lesbian mystery. Its main character, Maria Katerina Lorca Guerrera Alcazar, is a proud Chicana living in Manhattan. She takes on the Marine Corps and the CIA to protect the life of the woman she loves, author Angel Stone. Find Mary F. Beal on abebooks.com. Click to view slideshow. Katherine V. Forrest Katherine V. Forrest is known as the mother of lesbian mystery. Her widely read works, especially her Kate Delafield series, began with Amateur City in 1984. In this first outing, Delafield and her police partner investigate the murder of a CEO—while Kate struggles to keep her mind off one of the suspects. Forrest has won five Lambda Literary Awards and been nominated for twelve. Beyond her writing, she has blazed a trail in lesbian publishing, editing at Naiad Press for ten years. Find Katherine V. Forrest on bookshop.org. Click to view slideshow. Joseph Hansen Joseph Hansen, the father of the gay male mystery, was born in South Dakota but later moved to Minnesota and eventually California. Hansen began writing poetry as a teen before transitioning to mystery fiction. His protagonist, David Brandstetter, is an insurance investigator—a role chosen because sodomy laws prevented him from being a policeman or private detective. In Fadeout, Brandstetter investigates the death of a nationally known radio personality who harbors secrets. Hansen’s gritty style was often compared to Hammett, Chandler, and MacDonald. Over two decades, he wrote eleven more books about Brandstetter. Hansen received a Lambda Literary Award for his final Brandstetter novel and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Private Eye Writers of America in 1992. Find Joseph Hansen on bookshop.org. Fergus Hume Fergus Hume, born in England, moved to New Zealand as a child, then to Australia in the late 1880s, and finally back to England in the early 1900s. He published over 130 novels and roughly a dozen plays. Most of his novels were mysteries, beginning with The Mystery of the Hansom Cab in 1886, which inspired Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet. Hume’s A Black Carnation is considered one of the first novels with a gay main character. Lubore Press is republishing his works to make them widely accessible. Find Fergus Hume on bookshop.org. Val McDermid Val McDermid is a prolific mystery author known for her five series, including those featuring Tony Hill and Karen Pirie. Her debut series, featuring freelance reporter Lindsay Gordon, began with Report for Murder in 1987, the first of seven books that continued until 2003. McDermid’s journalistic background informs her detailed and gripping mysteries. Today, her works, including standalones, have sold over 19 million copies. McDermid has also authored a book on forensics and crime. Find Val McDermid on bookshop.org. Michael Nava Michael Nava is the author of the award-winning series featuring Henry Rios, a gay Latino lawyer. A Stanford Law graduate, Nava began the series with The Little Death (revised and reissued as Lay Your Sleeping Head) where Rios meets and falls for an addict, Hugh Paris. Paris works to get clean but is tragically found dead. Nava wrote five Lambda Literary Award-winning novels in the series. In 2021, he returned with Lies with Man, a new Henry Rios novel. Find Michael Nava on bookshop.org. Richard Stevenson Richard Stevenson, the pen name of Richard Lipez, was the first Hispanic author of gay mysteries. His series featured Donald Strachey, an Albany private investigator. In Death Trick, Strachey investigates the disappearance of a wealthy family’s heir, a prominent community activist. Four of the books were adapted into films starring Chad Allen. Stevenson won a Lambda Literary Award in 2012 and passed away in 2022 at 83. Find Richard Stevenson on Bookshop.org. View the full article

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