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Yes!!!!!! The sequel to Knives Out’s sequel Glass Onion has a title and a rough release window. The film will be called Wake Up Dead Man and it will make its premiere sometime in 2025. While the plot of the film is currently unknown, we do know that it finds Daniel Craig’s gentleman sleuth Benoit Blanc on his most dangerous case yet. Are there any other clues? Not many. The font of the title is a Medieval-y Blackadder-style font, so perhaps this mystery will have a historical component, like it’s set in a drafty old castle or there’s a centuries-old ghost story on top of the murder mystery at hand. The title is also keeping with the previous installment’s borrowing of a title from a classic rock song. “Wake Up Dead Man” is a 1997 U2 song. I don’t know what that means! I hope, personally, that this movie will pit Benoit Blanc up against a foe, a Moriarty-style villain. He needs a nemesis, I think. But whatever Rian Johnson cooks up will doubtlessly be wonderful. I also hope Rian Johnson is allowed to keep making these movies forever. Stay tuned for more of our Knives Out series coverage! View the full article

The Planet of the Apes series, which has just released its tenth installment with Wes Ball’s new film Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, is for my money one of the most consistent franchises in cinema history. Every entry has at minimum something worthwhile about it (even the maligned 2001 Tim Burton-directed reboot features stunning makeup and Paul Giamatti as an unscrupulous orangutan merchant). But at their best, the Planet of the Apes films pose profound questions about the nature of civilization, sentience, and man- (or ape-) kind’s capacity for war. As of this year, the series is fifty-six years old. The first five films, beginning with the original in 1968 (and continuing with 1970’s Beneath the Planet of the Apes, 1971’s Escape from the Planet of the Apes, 1972’s Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, and 1973’s Battle for the Planet of the Apes), form their own distinct continuity, beginning with Charlton Heston’s Taylor, an astronaut, crash-landing on the titular planet. This original run of films tells the story of the birth and death of the planet of the apes in a complex causal loop involving both space and time travel. Then of course there is the aforementioned reboot, the first attempt to reset the series’ knotty continuity. But Planet of the Apes hit new heights with the second attempt to reset continuity, the new reboot trilogy (confusing, I know) that began with 2011’s Rise of the Planet of the Apes, directed by Rupert Wyatt, and continued with 2014’s Dawn of the Planet of the Apes and 2017’s War for the Planet of the Apes, both directed by Matt Reeves. The trilogy, which ignored the other movies for the most part (save for a few Easter Eggs), focused on Caesar, a hyper-intelligent chimpanzee, played by Andy Serkis in one of the most breathtaking motion-capture performances ever committed to film. Caesar learns about the brutal and inhumane conditions his fellow apes are forced to endure (including medical testing and imprisonment in zoos), and becomes radicalized and leads apekind in a revolution, which dovetails with a global pandemic that wipes out most of the human population and leaves the few remaining cognitively diminished and mute (much like they are in the original film). Over the course of three films, Caesar tries to live up to his moral code and achieve peace in the face of hostile humans and apes who understandably cannot forgive their oppressors. All this is to say, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, the fourth film in this new sub-series within the larger franchise, has a rich, complex, and powerful legacy to live up to, but I am thrilled to report that it does so with gusto, reckoning with said legacy while at the same time staking out new exciting territory for the franchise. Set “many generations” after War (but in the same continuity), Kingdom centers on Noa, played by Owen Teague, a young chimp who lives with the secluded Eagle Clan (so named for their tradition of raising eagles from hatchlings). The Eagle Clan knows nothing of Caesar or the larger world—young Noa and the rest of his friends are forbidden from venturing beyond the valley at the edge of their village for fear of encountering “Echoes” (their term for the human remnants). Noa’s concerns are parochial and all-too-human—his father, the Master of Birds and leader of their clan, cuts an imposing figure, and Noa clearly lives in his shadow, wrestling with the weight of making his father proud and the responsibility of being heir to the village elder. But Noa’s world is upended with the sudden intrusion of a human woman (Freya Allan), who brings in her wake a raiding party of apes in service of Proximus Caesar (Kevin Durand). The invaders ruthlessly destroy Noa’s village and capture most of his clan, leaving him for dead. A harrowing sequence even for new viewers, it is especially troubling for long-time fans to hear a group of murderous apes shout “For Caesar!” as they lay waste to a peaceful village. Proximus, as we will come to learn, has corrupted Caesar’s memory, using it to bolster his own reign. But when Noa sets out on his own to try to find his family and friends, he meets Raka (Peter Macon), a wise orangutan who has also suffered due to Proximus’ raiders, and who has dedicated himself to collecting books and preaching the good word of Caesar and his philosophy of ape solidarity. Raka also tells Noa that Caesar tried to make peace with humans, and so, despite Noa’s mistrust, they allow Freya Allan’s human character, whom they call Nova in a nod to previous movies, to join them as they traverse this strange planet in search of Noa’s lost villagers. Ball’s film is tremendously exciting, with several extremely tense sequences, but I found myself most struck by the patience and stillness in this early stretch of the film (which also must be credited to the script by Josh Friedman). There is a serenity and decency to Noa’s life in the Eagle Clan (we learn that while it is tradition for the young apes to take eggs from eagles’ nests, it is equally important for them to always leave one behind in each nest for the mother bird), and these scenes have real warmth, taking the time to establish just what Noa is fighting for. And once Noa, Raka, and their human companion begin their journey, the film gives itself the space to luxuriate in simple acts of bonding and character development amidst the gorgeous location photography. I was frequently reminded of James Cameron’s 2022 film Avatar: The Way of Water (which Josh Friedman also has a story credit on)), and how that film allowed its characters (and by extension the audience) to vibe out for long stretches of the narrative; while Kingdom is the longest film in the Apes series at 145 minutes, I could have easily watched another hour of our three heroes simply getting to know each other over the course of their travels. Much has been said already of legendary visual effects house Wētā FX and its work in bringing the ape characters in these recent reboot films to life, but Kingdom features possibly their best work yet. Again I was reminded of The Way of Water, the last blockbuster feature that felt like a real breakthrough moment in visual effects. At this point, the line between reality and CGI in these films has become paper-thin—I fully think of the ape characters as living, breathing beings (one shot in particular, a close-up in which Noa looks into the eyepiece of an abandoned high-powered telescope, had me gasping in the theater). But of course, it must be said that this is not just the work of incredibly talented visual effects artists, but also incredibly talented actors. This franchise has always showcased actors performing through some sort of intermediate medium, whether that was Roddy McDowall and Kim Hunter emoting through heavy prosthetics or Andy Serkis through motion-capture, and in all cases the heart and humanity (for lack of a better term) has always shined through. Kingdom adds to the impressive roster of actors who have convinced me that they are indeed apes. Teague is an engaging and heartfelt lead, who really makes you feel and relate to Noa’s inner conflict, and Durand finds the depth and vulnerability underneath Proximus’ villainy. But a particular standout is Peter Macon as the lovable Raka. Viewers of the reboot trilogy know that secretly the best characters are usually the orangutans, with Karin Konoval’s Maurice, the right-hand to Caesar, being a fan-favorite, and Raka is no exception (seriously, I never thought of orangutans as one of my favorite animals, but these movies have convinced me that that is indeed the case). If you ever have the opportunity, you should watch footage of Planet of the Apes actors without the effects laid over them to see just how transportive their performances are (Wes Ball has stated that he wants to include a entire cut of the film featuring the actors in their mo-cap suits in the special features of the eventual physical release, to which I say: I will pre-ordering the 4K steelbook as soon as possible, thank you very much). However, this focus on the apes is not to say that the film’s human characters are lacking—Freya Allan’s Nova is compellingly mysterious, with shifting motivations that Allan navigates through wonderfully. Where Ball’s new film differentiates itself most from the rest of the series is its thematic concerns. In the waves of discourse and analysis surrounding the franchise, much attention is paid to the twist ending of the original film, in which (spoiler alert) it is revealed that the titular planet of the apes is Earth after a presumably human-caused cataclysm (implied to be nuclear warfare, due to the anxieties of the time)—thus proving that mankind’s inevitable fate is self-destruction. But to me, the real tragedy of the planet of the apes is that the apes have failed to create a better, more humane (again, for lack of a better term) society, instead replicating our violence, our prejudices, and our rigid and oppressive class system. The apes are frequently the heroes in the movies set before the time of the first movie, but we know from the beginning of the series that they are doomed to repeat our mistakes and become villains themselves. Kingdom is dramatizing that shift in the apes’ civilization in a profound way. Proximus Caesar is fascinated with Roman history and has modeled his leadership style based on what he has learned about humans. The aspects of humanity he admires the most are particularly telling—he explains to Noa that, among other things, they were capable of “leveling mountains.” He specifically wants to emulate their destructive nature. We have seen apes be villainous before, but in Proximus, we start to understand how they will become more human. Kingdom is additionally fascinating in its exploration of the intersection between mythology and history. By situating the events of the series we know so well in the distant past of this new film, we have the clearest perspective on how this world has been shaped by those events, in ways that the characters themselves don’t even fully understand. Recent trends in franchise filmmaking involve validating the audience’s fandom by imbuing the original entries with an overwhelming mythological weight, but Kingdom is in conversation with Rise/Dawn/War in a productive and interesting way, allowing Proximus and Raka to represent two contradictory interpretations of that history, with Raka in particular demonstrating how a little bit of history can be corrupted and weaponized for nefarious purposes. And for a long-time fan, it makes those previous movies feel important in a way that does not feel overblown. While it stands on its own as a thrilling, emotional narrative, Kingdom is clearly setting up a new ongoing story within the larger series, ending on several tantalizing questions (Ball has stated that they have plans for at least two more chapters). I can say that based on this installment, I am excited to see where the filmmakers take things going forward. I claimed at the beginning of this review that Planet of the Apes is one of the most consistent franchises in cinema history, and that title has not been lost. This venerable saga is in good hands. View the full article

You could call it Chekhov’s swimming pool: catch sight of a pristine , turquoise pool in the first act of a noir or crime film, and you’re likely to find a corpse floating in it by the third. Noir has long had a special relationship to water. As Chinatown makes abundantly clear, whoever controls the water supply controls a city. But unlike the free-flowing ocean or even the trickle of the Los Angeles river, pools are stagnant, claustrophobic. They’re a status symbol. They summon images of luxury, and class, and wealth, and Alain Delon in tight-fitting swim trunks. But pools are also a trap. There’s nowhere for all that water, or those swimmers, to go. There is no escape. As the summer heats up and we head into pool season, I thought it might be a worthwhile dive into noir film to explore some of the most memorable and deadly pools the genre has to offer—not unlike an online article version of Burt Lancaster in The Swimmer darting from pool to pool to pool, only with slightly fewer Speedos and definitely more dead bodies. Let’s start with an American classic. While The Great Gatsby is not technically a noir novel according to most high school English teachers, it certainly flirts with the genre, particularly in its last third. Gatsby’s wealth and status do not protect him from closing the novel murdered in a pool. All that wealth, all his striving, and still: he’s facedown in the American Dream. The only thing Fitzgerald could’ve done to hit the nail a little harder on the head would’ve been to throw some of those cool, crisp, money shirts into the pool with him. Jay Gatsby dead in his little-used swimming pool may have been the original man dead in a puddle of the American Dream, but he was far from the last. Arguably the most famous pool in noir cinematic history—maybe all of cinematic history—is Joe Gillis narrating the start of the story of his own demise in the opening shots of Sunset Boulevard (1951). “The poor dope…always wanted a pool,” Gillis says of himself in a voiceover monologue opening the film. “Well, in the end, he got himself a pool—only the price turned out to be a little high.” The pool is both the end and the beginning of the story here. By the 1960’s and 1970’s, swimming pool as dark metaphor were popping up all over the movie theater. There’s Dustin Hoffman, slowly sinking his future in chlorine in The Graduate (definitely not a noir, although the dramatic irony of its famous end shot makes you think…maybe?), Burt Lancaster in The Swimmer, and of course, The Drowning Pool, where Paul Newman, as Harper the private investigator, tries to keep his head above literal water in the adaptation of the Ross MacDonald novel. But perhaps the most influential cinematic swimming pool of this era comes from France: La Piscine, the 1968 psychological thriller directed by Jacques Deray, and starring Alain Delon, Romy Schneider, Maurice Ronet, and Jane Birkin. In La Piscine, the swimming pool represents the erotic lull of summer, so steamy you may feel compelled to wipe your screen off a few times while watching. It’s also the site of a murder—initially passed off as an accident. The Guardian’s 2011 review of the film noted: “Something in the very lineaments of the pool itself creates their own awful destiny: it is a primordial swamp of desire, a space in which there is nothing to do but laze around, furtively looking at semi-naked bodies.” (In a twist of the “life is stranger than art” variety, Delon’s friend and bodyguard, Stevan Markovic, was found murdered during the course of filming. If you’re unfamiliar, the Markovic Affair, as it became known, makes for fascinating reading: there’s gangsters, alleged kompromat of the First Lady of France, and a still-unsolved murder.) La Piscine’s sultry mix of psychosexual drama and murder set a template that inspired at least two other films that center around a swimming pool: Swimming Pool, the trippy 2003 film from Francois Ozon and starring Charlotte Rampling and Ludivine Sagnier. Rampling plays Sarah, a crime writer, whose creative retreat to the South of France villa owned by her publisher (and sometime-lover) is interrupted by Sagnier, the publisher’s daughter (or is she?), a sexually voracious young woman whose character was definitely written by a man (or was she?). Once again, the eponymous pool—where Sagnier frequently swims in the nude, which Sarah first encounters as cluttered with debris, perhaps a metaphor for her own writer-blocked state—is also the site of violent death. Also inspired by La Piscine, perhaps even more directly, was the 2015 film, A Bigger Splash, directed by Luca Guadagnino and starring Tilda Swinton, Ralph Fiennes, Matthias Schoenaerts, and Dakota Johnson. The setting is shifted to Italy, but much of the film’s plot mirrors La Piscine. And to double down on the noir swimming pool motif, the film draws its title from one of David Hockney’s (arguably one of the most noir-coopted artists of the midcentury) famous pools. By the release of Wild Things in 1998, the swimming pool, where Neve Campbell and Denise Richards tussle and make out (undoubtedly the most famous scene in the film), had become erotic camp. Roger Ebert accurately described the film as “like a three-way collision between a softcore sex film, a soap opera, and a B-grade noir” but I think there’s more to it than that. By this point, the pool in a crime thriller had become shorthand for sexy sleazy summer fare. Like all the best soapy thrillers, Wild Things knows this, and isn’t afraid to take the point to the extreme. This pool isn’t high art; it is almost literally a cesspool. Sexy Beast, Jonathan Glazer’s 2000 directorial debut starring Ray Winstone and Sir Ben Kingsley, opens with a retired gangster absolutely roasting poolside. The pool is very clearly gangster “Gal” Dove’s retirement treat, a supposed symbol of the luxury he’s now attained, having gotten out of the game. Except if you know anything about noir pools—well, and movies—you know that retirement is about to come to an end. The pool is never, ever a symbol of happily ever after; it’s a destination only for corpses. This turn is perfectly signaled by the film by the introduction of an enormous, immovable boulder crashing into the pool. Gal’s days of danger are, in fact, not over. Finally, let’s not overlook the great noir pools of television. By the 2000s, several memorable swimming pools would connect premium crime television to the best of the genre. It’s with the ducks in his pool that we open the story of Tony Soprano and his therapy sessions. Despite all of his wealth and power and status, for which the swimming pool is a stand-in, Tony still can’t keep the family of ducks from flying away. Breaking Bad, too, is full of contaminated pools, standing in for the guilt Walter White is suppressing over his drug kingpin life. In particular, the singed pink teddy bear that falls into Walt’s pool and recurs as a motif throughout season two elegantly showcases Walt’s submerged guilt over the human cost of his actions. Walt’s inability to reckon with how much damage he’s caused eventually begins to drown his family, with his wife Skylar, now Walt’s accomplice, fully walking into the pool in season five. Splashing around in a pool is one of the high points of summer, if you can swing it. But never forget: murder may smell like honeysuckle, but it tastes like chlorine. View the full article

I now own two editions of Frankenstein whose cover illustrations prominently feature icebergs. The first one I acquired, a Broadview Edition, I bought for an undergraduate class. Its cover design is a full-page, blue-tinted, grainy photograph of a gigantic, pyramidal spike of ice, with the title of the book and other relevant information in a neat, white text box in the center. The second is a Norton Critical Edition I purchased for a grad school course. Its iceberg is different—the focal point of an eerie 1824 painting then called “The Polar Sea” by Caspar David Friedrich (now it is called “Sea of Ice”). Glacial images, though, do not seem to be the most popular choice for Frankenstein covers (based on a cursory internet search, at least), with many of the book’s manifold editions visually acknowledging its most famous character—the Monster—and with many of these, in turn, associating the book and its Monster with an image from the relevant pop culture horror pantheon, often the famous Boris Karloff visage, complete with neck bolts and an enhanced supraorbital ridge. With their covers, the Broadview and Norton editions are emphasizing an aspect of the Frankenstein story that gets left out of movies—the epistolary framing narrative written by the lonely, Arctic-immured Captain Walton, who hears the story of the mad scientist and his monster-creation straight from the Modern Prometheus, himself, after finding Frankenstein dying on one of the floes in a failed, final pursuit of his creature. The Norton Edition’s iceberg, though, does more than establish the story’s actual setting, and emphasize that many of the novel’s main themes run through the multi-layered framing device that is Captain Walton’s frozen ship (such as ambition to know and control the natural world, or the desire for friendship/companionship); Freiderich’s painting, with its towering, jagged spires, depicts, off to the side, the wreckage of a wooden ship, dwarfed when juxtaposed with and easily splintered by the giant crystals of ice—and is notable for its stressing the breathtaking prettiness and dangerous mortality of the scene, elements which correspond to the concepts of the Sublime and the Beautiful as developed by Edmund Burke, among others. Indeed, Frankenstein teems with sublime imagery, and it is used, along with references to weather and climate patterns, race-creating metaphors and allusions to parental Biblical activity, and a theme of powerlessness against stronger forces, to build a criticism against human beings believing that they can know and master all. The word “sublime” is used seven times in the text, and, in many scenes, humans marvel at the magnificence, scale, and powerfulness of nature. Young Frankenstein is even impelled to learn more about science and electricity (which many movies represent as the jolt that animates the Monster’s corpse, though in the book, Frankenstein’s life-giving scientific process is kept obscure) after watching a tree get smote by lightening. He is excited by the power he sees in nature, and desires to master it by creating human life from dead matter. He ends up enlivening his gigantic, superhuman monster “on a dreary night in November” while it is raining. Here, the reference to the darkness and the weather on the night the Monster was born mirrors the fabled circumstances from which the book Frankenstein was created; according to the preface Percy Shelley wrote for his wife, her story Frankenstein was incepted at night, during a rainy season. Frankenstein’s ability to destroy, though, is more powerful than his ability to create The Monster was born during harsh weather conditions, and, in the novel, his coming is usually preceded by harsh weather, and natural conditions which constitute the Sublime. When Robert Walton sees him on the dogsled, out on the ice, the Monster is barely visible through curtains of fog and sheets of ice. During a violent storm after he has returned home (after William’s murder), Frankenstein sees the Monster by the light of a lightening flash, for the first time since abandoning the laboratory. When the Monster confronts Frankenstein, it is raining and they are atop a mountain peak (where Frankenstein has craved to go, because “the sight of the awful and majestic in nature had indeed always the effect of solemnizing my mind and causing me to forget the cares of life.” It is raining powerfully when the Monster strangles Elizabeth on her wedding night. The power, scale, and august danger of the Monster matches that of nature, so much so that nature foreshadows, and becomes a proscenium for, the Monster. The Monster is both a person, and a force of nature (which is what Frankenstein has rather longed to be). Though Frankenstein has been fascinated by science since childhood, his desire to become a scientist is confirmed when he meets Waldman, his future university teacher and mentor. Waldman expounds, during a lecture, “…but these philosophers, whose hands seem only made to dabble in dirt, and their eyes to pore over the microscope or crucible, have indeed performed miracles. They penetrate into the recesses of nature and show how she works in her hiding-places. They ascend into the heavens; they have discovered how the blood circulates, and the nature of the air we breathe. They have acquired new and almost unlimited powers; they can command the thunders of heaven, mimic the earthquake, and even mock the invisible world with its own shadows.” Frankenstein is moved, and then has this same ambition: to “unfold to the world the deepest mysteries of creation.” Indeed, his ambitions surpass science and skirt metaphysics—he plays with creation, desires to form his own race of people, longs to master nature; he builds his creature, which he refers to as a new Adam, even more powerful than himself. He longs to be like God as a creator, but fails at being God as a father/parent, abandoning his progeny in fear. He has, in attempting to play God, created something he cannot, or will not be able to, control. He doesn’t even own up to this until the Monster has killed nearly everyone about which he cares—after Elizabeth is murdered, Frankenstein devotes his life to destroying the Monster he once produced, with an ambition that almost mimics his prior ambition—to harness that which cannot be harnessed. Frankenstein believes he has failed, when he creates the Monster, and so abandons him—he does not realize that he still has it within his power to make his experiment succeed, by giving the Monster the father, friend, or creator he will come to crave. While finally hunting for the Monster, he is weakened by the Arctic weather conditions and would almost die on the ice if Walton didn’t find him. The natural world which he has built his monster to weather has ultimately weathered him—in a sad cycle, Frankenstein calls himself the “blasted tree” that had inspired him to harness nature, to begin with. Frankenstein becomes the ruins of nature, while the Monster IS nature, in all its might—while hunting him, Frankenstein hears the Monster laugh at him, and this great laugh is echoed by the nearby mountains. Nature and the Monster ultimately become one, here—both untamable and undaunted at the prospect of someone even attempting to do just that. Just as the Monster, in his power, is impervious to the Arctic conditions, Frankenstein is not, and he is destroyed by the very scale, and powerfulness he was once able to create. Frankenstein’s ability to destroy, though, is more powerful than his ability to create… and ultimately prevents larger destruction. The two times in the novel when Monster appears to a narrator when it is not raining, take place at night, and both feature the destruction of something by Frankenstein—the first is when he watches Frankenstein create the female Monster (and then destroy her, and the second is when the Monster appears to Frankenstein’s corpse on Walton’s ship. The first is an active decision, and the second is passive—but they are both accompanied by a giant moon and clear skies. Nothing is sublime, in these two scenes—Frankenstein is grounded and longs to protect instead of produce. His abilities to curb his actions, or ultimate inabilities to carry on with something dangerous or powerful (by refusing not to build a monster, or by not being able to carry on their fight), end problems before they begin. While these actions cannot stop nature, or undo more powerful forces, they can prevent problems from escalating. Frankenstein tells Walton as much, before he dies—that pursuing the Arctic campaign is not worth the sacrifice, and will only add to unfortunate events. Walton can be seen as a combination of the Monster and Frankenstein—he is self-taught, friendless, and longs to beat the harsh weather and climate conditions that he faces. Frankenstein’s death not only ends the feud with the Monster, but saves the ship and all of its crewmen from a terrible fate. He saves their families from suffering. Frankensetin’s own destruction, then, is possibly the most powerful thing that he has ever done. View the full article

I am a writer driven by rape. My first foray into fiction featured a girl charged with murder for killing her rapist in self-defense. It was about silence and the many ways society revictimizes people. It was about surviving. My debut mystery series stars a vigilante baker who kills bad men with good pies. It’s about reclaiming power and righting the wrongs that the system won’t. It’s about thriving. But it’s also about rape. It has to be. # It’s difficult to discuss Suzie Miller’s ‘Prima Facie’ without sounding hyperbolic. The ample praise the play and subsequent novelization have received is both well-earned and somehow not nearly enough. Because it’s not a stretch, even a year later, to call it life-changing. Prior to arriving at the Golden for one of the early preview performances, I had never set foot inside a theater – I have no business commenting on Broadway. I know that. But perhaps the most powerful thing this story does is steal your ability to stay silent and unseen. I went in expecting to be riveted, challenged, and yes, entertained. It was, after all, Jodie Comer. What I did not expect was the physical reality of the experience. Reviewers love to use ‘edge-of-your-seat’ to describe particularly gripping thrillers, but ‘Prima Facie’ did the opposite. From the first insistent heartbeat of the soundtrack as the curtain rises, I was slammed back in my seat, body braced for an impact I couldn’t predict. I couldn’t move. I could barely breathe. Even when the breakneck pulse of that opening scene gave way, I couldn’t relax. I knew what was coming, I just didn’t know the details, the when, or the how. The animal part of me knew to stay ready though. It kept me rigid, alert. It wouldn’t be caught off guard. Not again. # For years I have tried to find myself in stories, reading everything on offer for sexual assault and then writing it. But it took sitting in the audience of that packed Wednesday matinee to finally see myself. Like me, Tessa is assaulted by someone she trusted. Like me, she snuck out while he slept. Like me, she went barefoot. (Why do we do that, the leaving of shoes?) Like me, her hands became claws to gouge her own flesh. Unlike me, she called it what it was. # The power of ‘Prima Facie’ is that it is a mirror as much as a manifesto. One in three women will experience sexual assault in their lifetime and in an age where women and marginalized people are being increasingly oppressed, this story allows victims to both see and be seen, sometimes for the first time ever. For many, this will be the single most validating piece of media we ever consume and that is no small thing. But it’s more than that. By keeping the focus solely on the Tessa, ‘Prima Facie’ opens a window to a part of the story that is so often skipped. Entertainment is rife with rape plots, but all too many leave the victim behind. This is especially true of procedurals, where detectives abandon the victim at the point of attack, following instead the path of the perpetrator. He becomes the focus, the one that matters. We delve into his psychology, his motive, his methods. The victim exists only as a conduit to his story. Not here. The one-woman nature of the performance has a very literal effect of shifting the lens away from the attacker. He’s there, of course. As an audience, we both feel and fear his presence, but the spotlight remains unwaveringly where it belongs – on Tessa. Further, by specifically choosing to center date rape, the narrative forces a reckoning with modern rape culture. In 2005, my single attempt to discuss my assault was met with enough vitriol that I never tried again. I was told I “was spitting in the face of real victims”, the ones who “have strangers come through their windows with knives” and it was my own fault for even being there. In a post-#MeToo world, such a response almost sounds exaggerated, but it seared into my brain with such force that I have been unable to personally classify anything short of literal knife-point violence as trauma. Until ‘Prima Facie’. The unfortunate truth is that kind of victim-blaming remains appallingly common. People still ask what victims were wearing, how much they drank, if maybe they just changed their minds. The responsibility for a rapist’s actions constantly falls to the victim – especially when he’s someone they know. The impact of ‘Prima Facie’ in the portrayal of this all-too-common kind of rape. There are people who understand that sexual assault comes in many guises, that the nightmare often wears familiar faces, and for us, the play is cathartic, a chance to nod along and say yes, that. Exactly that. But for the others – those without firsthand knowledge and all the men who might convince themselves that it isn’t really rape if she’s drunk/there/‘asking for it’ – the play exposes the visceral reality of sexual assault. It puts a human face on the aftermath of suffering and in a society where so many men admit to only caring about women they’re related to, that’s vital. We live in a country that elects presidents and appoints Supreme Court justices regardless of their histories of sexual assault simply because sexual violence isn’t a deal breaker here. Men watch their friends commit heinous acts of aggression and call it banter because it’s easier than calling them out. Even when the victims are the media’s favorite type – conventionally attractive cis het white women – men will worry more about the implication of charging her attacker than the effect his actions had on her life. This is all so normalized that many people don’t even think to question it. Those are the people for whom this story can truly change the conversation, because they need to see exactly why we’re having it. ‘Prima Facie’ doesn’t sanitize things. There’s nowhere to hide. It drags the audience through the hellish aftermath of assault, humanizing a part of the process that is so often hidden away. And it ends exactly the way every victim knows it will. # I’m not religious, but there’s a moment at the end of the play when the house lights come up and Tessa addresses the audience directly that felt like being called. In an echo of an earlier moment she says: Look to your left. Look to your right. It’s one of us and the urge to speak, to stand, to self-identify was so overwhelming I had to sit on my hands to keep from drawing attention. But it didn’t matter. I was seen. Finally. In that moment, in that theater, I felt more understood than I ever thought possible. And that matters. That is the power of stories. Publishing likes to talk about the importance of representation and this is why. The bigots and book banners want to bury stories because they know that seeing yourself reflected on a page or a screen or a stage can be life-changing. It can be powerful. And it cannot be silenced. *** View the full article

Assignment 1. Story Statement: A scientist must choose between protecting her daughter or stopping the disease destroying America’s food supply. Assignment 2. Antagonists: Primary protagonist Tracy Hart’s antagonist. Senator Ransom Stone (primary antagonist) has an undiagnosed form of Derealization Disorder where he takes on the personality of characters from novels—the condition brought on by a radical, unlicensed addiction cure used on him by the CIA. Rather than a hinderance, the ability to be whoever he wants or needs to be, helps him become wealthy and get elected to the Senate. Using information from his days in the CIA and his position on the Senate Intel Committee, he has his private bioresearch company illegally resurrect a cancelled government program to develop a fungus genetically engineered to attack coca (cocaine) plants. He releases the fugus into the South American fields intending to extort the cartels for the cure which the protagonist, Dr. Tracy Hart—who is completely unaware of the disease’s origin or Stone’s plans—has developed. But someone has altered the disease. No longer susceptible to Tracy’s cure, it is spreading to food crops. The cartels learn the disease was lab created, and believing Tracy does have a cure, send their most lethal killer (secondary antagonist) Rojas Gordillo after her. Needing to satisfy his cartel overlords, Gordillo kills everyone who worked on creating the fungus, then kidnaps Tracy’s daughter to force Tracy to cooperate and provide the cure. With his plans falling apart, Stone covers up his connection to the lab and sends his own hitman, Earl Tinmen (another secondary antagonists) to eliminate anyone left, including Tracy. Secondary protagonist Michael LaCroix’s antagonist. Earl Tinmen—Michael’s handler when he worked as a government field agent—is one of Ransom Stone’s operatives. Unknown to Michael, acting on Stone’s orders Tinmen was responsible for the death of his daughter, the distraction intended to cause Michael to fail on a mission Stone wanted ended. But when the cartels begin killing people at the lab, Stone tasks Tinmen with finding Tracy Hart a bodyguard who won’t—or can’t—ask questions. Tinmen approaches Michael and threatens to destroy the lives if Michael’s friends if he doesn’t take the job. When Stone decides to bury his connection to the lab, it is Tinmen who takes on the job of eliminating both Tracy and Michael. Assignment 3. Titles: White Plague Open Wound The Meaning of Anything Assignment 4. Comparable Thrillers: Whiteout, Ken Follett Contagion, Robbin Cook Bloodstream, Tess Gerritsen The Andromeda Strain, Michael Crichton Clear and Present Danger, Tom Clancy Assignment 5. Hook Line/Conflict and Core Wound: A scientist who lost her military husband because she chose the career she loves over moving when he was transferred must now choose again, this time between protecting her daughter or staying on the job to stop a disease destroying America’s food supply. Assignment 6. Inner and Secondary Conflict: Inner Conflicts. Mycologist Tracy Hart (primary protagonist) has spent her life working to reach the top of her field, overcoming prejudice about women in science from nearly everyone, even her mother. Determined to keep her dream job, her last conversation with her military husband before he was killed is an argument because she chose to stay in Seattle with their daughter rather move when he is transferred. But now her lab is ground zero for stopping an unknown disease destroying America’s food supply and she must again choose. Stay on the job at which she excels or leave it to protect her daughter from the danger posed by killers hunting her research team. Tracy’s internal wounds and struggles are shown in scenes with her laboratory boss, her daughter, Michael, and flashback memories of conversations and arguments with her mother and husband. Former government agent Michael LaCroix’s (secondary protagonist) inability to save his daughter drove him to give up violence for life as a jazz musician. But when his former handler, Earl Tinmen forces him back into the field as Tracy Hart’s bodyguard, Michael must decide how deeply to immerse himself in the world of brutality he renounced. He is forced to ask himself what he is capable of to protect Tracy and her daughter, Melisa—who reminds him of his own child—and what will it cost him if he fails. Michael’s inner struggles are shown in scenes with Tinmen, Tracy and Melisa, a flashback, and a climax confrontation with the primary antagonist, Stone. Secondary/Social Conflict. Tracy and Michael struggle to work together. Their old wounds and prejudices line up to ignite each other’s hot button issues. Tracy doesn’t like taking direction and is appalled by Michael’s underlying anger and automatic recourse to violence at the slightest hint of danger. For his part, Michael is frustrated by Tracy’s inability to comprehend that the people after her—the same kind of people who killed his daughter—are far more violent than anything she can imagine. When Malisa is kidnapped, they struggle to find a way to work together if they are going to save her. Assignment 7. Setting: Primary setting: Seattle and Western Washington, Christmas time, the cold dark skies and rain contrasting with the holiday lights. Specific Washington Settings: Two Seattle craftsman style homes, Tracy’s with a ‘lived in” look, Michael’s immaculate, with pristine restoration details, the difference between the houses a metaphor for the inherent conflict arising from their disparate personalities and lifestyles while hinting at where on a deeper level they overlap. Research Lab on a university campus/Tracy’s safe place, until it isn’t. Downtown Seattle jazz club/Michael’s safe place, until it isn’t. Hurricane Ridge, Olympic National Park Friday Harbor, San Juan Island Various locations around the city, including ferry docks, music venues, a sleazy motel, an apartment, and the airport. Secondary Settings: Ransom Stone’s private/isolated Minnesota lake mansion White House and Camp David Mexico City and South American coca fields

Summer is here! Or, at least, pool season is officially starting (it’s been summer already for many of us working remotely). There are, of course, a gazillion good books coming out over the summer, and to attempt to highlight them all is a quixotic and never-ending quest. Thanks to all the readers who make the quest always feel worth it! And may we all be blessed with a goal that can never end, for that way, we will never be bored. ___________________________________ JUNE ___________________________________ Flynn Berry, Trust Her (Viking) Sisters Tessa and Marian Daly continue to reckon with their pasts in Trust Her, from Northern Spy author Flynn Berry. Having relocated to Dublin, the women try to start their lives over, but the IRA soon catches up and presses them into a risky job with a former handler from MI5. It’s another heady tale of family and espionage. –DM Monika Kim, The Eyes are the Best Part (Erewhon Books) In this darkly funny psychological horror, a college student must protect her mother and her sister from her mother’s creepy new boyfriend. Like all the other men in their lives, he’s trying to reduce their humanness into stereotypes about doll-like, submissive Asian women, and Kim’s protagonist is certainly not going to let him get away with it. She’s also spending a lot of time having intense dreams about eating bright blue eyes, standing over her sleeping enemies and fantasizing their demise, and generally losing touch with reality in a way that pays plenty of dividends by the novel’s end. –MO Rex Stout, How Like a God (Hard Case Crime) I never thought I’d say this in the year of our lord 2024 but there’s a Rex Stout novel coming out! Unpublished for fifty years, this is a psychological thriller from Stout’s early career. But it has the traces of Stout’s beloved Nero Wolfe series: it begins in a NYC brownstone, with a man climbing the staircase, holding a gun. –OR Tasha Coryell, Love Letters to a Serial Killer (Berkley) Would you strike up a romance with a potential murderer if he took your book recommendations? In this knowing critique of true crime culture and modern love, a woman begins a romance with a suspected serial killer and becomes obsessed with finding out the truth about her new paramour. I sped through this novel and related to many of its uncomfortable truths about the misogyny within ordinary relationships that makes dating a man accused of horrible crimes who treats you well seem…justifiable? Or at least, rather understandable…–MO Joseph Kanon, Shanghai (Scribner) Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Europe settle in Shanghai in Kanon’s latest novel, a deeply engrossing tale of corruption, violence, and doomed love. The story begins on the first class decks of an ocean liner but soon runs headlong into the city’s warring gambling operations. Kanon always situates his political clashes and spy games in a fully realized human drama. Shanghai proves one of his most powerful stories to date. –DM Freddie Kölsch, Now, Conjurers (Union Square) New voice Freddie Kolsch has written a queer horror novel for the ages, in which a charismatic quarterback’s failed quest for absolution is the catalyst for an epic confrontation between his coven and his killer. Not to be a pest, but you must read this book. No excuses. Now you must be wondering, why does every sentence in this blurb begin with an “n”? No cheating—you’ll have to pick up the book to find out yourself. –MO Paul Tremblay, Horror Movie (William Morrow) The “books about cursed productions” trend continues, as horror maestro Paul Tremblay takes us onto the set of the shot-for-remake of a legendary cult classic that never made it to the screen. Horror Movie is narrated by the actor who played the monstrous object of derision known as “The Thin Kid” in the first production, and has agreed to reprise the role in the remake. We’re not sure if we can trust his recollections, but his disturbing account provides plenty of fodder to condemn both the original film and the remake. –MO Peter Swanson, A Talent for Murder (William Morrow) Swanson always delivers perfectly calibrated suspense alongside the thrills of a truly clever mystery. In his newest, A Talent for Murder, an archival librarian begins to suspect the man she married may be carrying out a series of murders around the country. Her unique skills, along with some help from an old grad school friend, soon throw her deep into an investigation. Swanson drives the story to a smart conclusion that will keep readers guessing to the end. –DM Riley Sager, Middle of the Night (Dutton) I love Riley Sager, but everybody loves Riley Sager. And why not!? The man knows how to write a thriller! And this one is the electric, terrifying story about a man who decides to investigate what happened the night his best friend Billy vanished during a sleepover in his backyard, thirty years before. Goosebumps! I have goosebumps! –OR Susie Orman Schnall, Anna Bright Is Hiding Something (Sparkpress) In this Silicon Valley-set thriller, Anna Bright is about to achieve her wildest dreams of success—as long as no one finds out that the biotech she’s shilling doesn’t exactly work as advertised. She just needs to outwit the board, tamp down internal dissension, and keep the journalists printing whatever she tells them. The story is obviously based on Elizabeth Holmes’ Theranos, but there’s a wider aim to Schnall’s vision, as she spins her inspiration into a visceral takedown of misogyny and double standards in the tech industry. –MO Alejandro Nodarse, Blood in the Cut (Flatiron) In Nodarse’s assured debut, a young man at a crossroads tries to save his family’s butcher shop against pressures from all sides. Nodarse conjures up a captivating vision of life in Miami, with shady operators around every corner and family legacies in peril. Nodarse is a writer of great promise, and readers will be clamoring for a follow-up.–DM Leslie Stephens, You’re Safe Here (Gallery/Scout Press) In this futuristic wellness thriller, a secretive Silicon Valley company has just launched the first wave of wellness “pods”—self-sustaining bubbles in which the wealthy and privileged can find inner peace while drifting along an ocean belt known for its stable weather and lack of storms. The pods are rumored to have major design flaws, and the two powerful figures at the center of the company are in a contest of will to determine who bears the blame for any disasters. One of the company’s best workers is drawn into the intrigue brewing between founders as she desperately races to save her fiancee, encased in one of the pods, from a looming storm threatening the pod’s integrity. Chockfull of warnings about tech gone awry (and also lots of tech that I would frankly love to have in my life). –MO John Copenhaver, Hall of Mirrors (Pegasus) In the midst of the Lavender Scare, a mystery novelist is murdered, killed in an arson attack on the apartment he shared with his lover and writing partner. The grieving writer is hell-bent on finding the cause of his partner’s death, but Copenhaver’s teenage sleuths-turned-lovers from The Savage Kind are alternately helping and hindering in the investigation, as they continue to pursue their old nemesis, now wreaking havoc in the State Department. An excellent continuation of Copenhaver’s series, richly detailed and with convincingly realized characterizations. –MO Maxim Loskutoff, Old King (W.W. Norton) Maxim Loskutoff’s Old King is as majestic and foreboding as the old growth forest featured so heavily in its pages. The setting is Lincoln, Montana, where, in the wake of America’s bicentennial, an angry recluse named Ted Kazinski (the Unabomber) is preparing to spread chaos through the US mail system, convinced that his acts of random violence will spark an uprising against the era of the machines. Loskutoff spends only small sections of the book immersed in Kazinski’s disturbing perspective, peopling the rest of his pages with a well-sketched cast of characters strongly divided on a host of questions: do they protect the forest or exploit it? Is modernity an evil? Is it inevitable? And can it be stopped? –MO L.S. Stratton, Do What Godmother Says (Union Square) L.S. Stratton’s new gothic thriller is divided between the Harlem Renaissance past and a writer in D.C.’s present. In the past, a young painter is taken under the wing of a mysterious socialite; her new hopes for the security to pursue artistic freedom are quickly dashed as she learns how controlling her new patron can be. In the present, a journalist comes into possession of a valuable painting, only to find herself beset by collectors who seem ready to engage in unscrupulous methods in order to get their hands on the piece of art. Do What Godmother Says is both a prescient critique of artistic appropriation and a darn good mystery—in short, an immensely satisfying read. –MO Lori Brand, Bodies to Die For (Blackstone) I devoured this novel faster than the winner of a body-building contest drinks water after their win (a joke you’ll totally get if you dive into this searing critique of diet culture and the pressures of professional body-building). Lori Brand has had a long career in fitness that has led to her embracing strength, not weight-loss, and I’m pretty sure this book is the most physically—and emotionally—healthy thriller I’ve read in some time. I may even sign up for a boxing class now… –MO Ellery Lloyd, The Final Act of Juliette Willoughby (Harper) Ellery Lloyd is the pen name of a married duo who’ve been cowriting some of the most vicious and insightful critiques of modern living I’ve ever read. Now, they’ve turned to historical fiction to explore class, colonialism, and misogyny in the pre-war art world. Two art students come across a lost masterpiece of surrealism, but twists and turns abound when the painting disappears, only to resurface decades later in connection with a violent killing. –MO Briony Cameron, The Ballad of Jacquotte Delahaye (Atria) This is a fascinating take on a rumored real-life figure, the swashbuckling Jacquotte Delahaye, but one which takes plenty of narrative license to fill out the gaps in her amazing tale. Jacquotte begins the novel as a shipbuilder, but through no fault of her own, soon becomes an outlaw, and must take to the high seas to preserve her own life and those of her companions. She quickly grows her crew through enlisting some nontraditional sailors, and finds herself on a path towards safety and autonomy—if she can keep herself from a showdown with her nemesis, of course. –MO Gretchen Felker-Martin, Cuckoo (Tor Nightfire) Gretchen Felker-Martin forever won my heart with her splattterpunk horror novel Manhunt, and now she’s done it again with a queer conversion camp thriller that is truly terrifying to read. Felker-Martin writes with sensitivity and righteous fury about the many torments the teenage characters are forced to endure in the name of heteronormativity, and the stakes are ever higher as the kids begin to realize that even those who leave the camp are no longer themselves—and many will not leave at all. Felker-Martin excels at creeping out readers with her off-kilter descriptions and gory details, and I wouldn’t open this one up while eating. Also quick shoutout to one of the only authors out there with consistently sympathetic fat characters who also get to have sex. Thank you, Gretchen! –MO E. K. Sathue, Youthjuice (Hell’s Hundred) In the first release from Hell’s Hundred, the new horror imprint from Soho Press, E. K. Sathue’s main character earns all the press release’s comparisons to Patrick Bateman. Just a run-of-the-mill sociopath at first, the narrator soon gets sucked into the murderous enterprise of a wellness company with an incredibly suspicious number of missing former interns and a CEO who appears to bathe in blood. This book makes me glad that I interned at an archive…Although I did go on a serum buying spree about half-way through reading it. –MO Wanda Morris, What You Leave Behind (William Morrow) Wanda Morris is back with an intricate real-estate thriller informed by real life events. What You Leave Behind follows a lawyer who’s recently returned to her childhood home in Georgia to heal after heartbreak. Instead, she finds herself trying to discover the truth behind a Black landlord’s disappearance and the menacing new buyers of the property he’d long refused to sell. I’m a huge fan of Morris and the novel’s subject—land grabs—is one that’s perfect for her to demystify. –MO ___________________________________ JULY ___________________________________ Chuck Tingle, Bury Your Gays (Tor Nightfire) Chuck Tingle may have made his name in steamy-yet-absurdist erotica, but Bury Your Gays, along with last year’s Camp Damascus, cements Tingle’s place as one of the best new novelists around, horror or otherwise. Showrunner Misha is giving a harsh directive from his studio overlords: either kill off his queer characters, or make them straight. When he refuses to do either, monstrous beings from Misha’s previous cinematic endeavors start confronting him in the flesh, and even worse: they’re threatening his loved ones. This is quite possibly the best spoof of Hollywood since Get Smart. And three cheers for a book with ace representation! –MO Tom Mead, Cabaret Macabre (Mysterious Press) If you’re not reading Tom Mead, what are you doing with your life? His delightful puzzle-mysteries and riddling locked-room plots are some of the best today. This delightful novel brings back his ingenious sleuth, the retired stage magician Joseph Spector. Someone is trying to kill Victor Silvius, a man from a wealthy family—now inmate at a private santorum in the English countryside. But that’s not all. While Spector is looking into Silvius’s case, he finds two mysterious cases: a body is found in the middle of a frozen lake, and a rifle has been fired from behind a closed window, killing the man on the other side without breaking the glass. Lock me up, because I’m going insane with anticipation.–OR Donyae Coles, Midnight Rooms (Amistad) Never. Eat. What. The. Fairies. Give. You. Especially if it’s as disgusting as what’s consumed at the wedding feast in this atmospheric gothic (complete with strong folk horror elements). Donyae Coles’ plucky heroine is surprised to receive a later-in-life proposal from a mysterious gentleman. Their connection is genuine, but his family is off-putting, his manor house is crumbling, and for some reason, he keeps getting her drunk on honey wine while feeding her bloody meat and little cakes. What does he want, and what will she have to sacrifice to give it to him? –MO Delia Pitts, Trouble in Queenstown (Minotaur) Delia Pitts has a new series!!! And it’s awesome. Evander “Vandy” Myrick is an ex-cop-turned-PI who is trying to rebuild her life in her Jersey hometown after a series of personal and professional disasters. Her new case threatens her search for peace, after what seemed like a simple assignment to find out if a spouse is cheating becomes a murder investigation. –MO Clare Pollard, The Modern Fairies (Avid Reader Press) While debatably gothic, this novel set in 17th century ancien regime France is most certainly suited to the damp—after all, it was an era long before dehumidifiers (of which I now possess four). The Modern Fairies features the great historical salons of Paris, in which literary luminaries mingled with the demimonde and mixed witty repartee with inventive storytelling. Pollard’s characters are reinventing their nation’s traditional stories and creating the modern fairy tale, even as the details of their lives show the the rot of French society before the Revolution. –MO Liz Moore, The God of the Woods (Riverhead) Liz Moore’s The God of the Woods reminds me a bit of Picnic at Hanging Rock in the best way; it’s the story of a teenager who vanishes from her Adirondack summer camp in August 1975, and the frantic and foreboding search that follows. See, he girl who disappears, Barbara Ban Laar, isn’t simply a camper; she’s the daughter of the owners of the camp. And she’s the second person in her family to disappear in this fashion. –OR Jenna Satterthwaite, Made For You (Mira) Jenna Satterthwaite’s novel is a cutting and creative take on reality television and artificial personhood. Her heroine is the first “synth” to compete on a reality dating show, and only the third to exist publicly in the world. Her romance is fairy-tale perfection, but her marriage is decidedly less so, and when the husband she worked so hard to win goes missing, suspicion falls immediately on his robotic partner. Will she be able to prove her own innocence, and will the world finally accept her autonomy and sense of self? –MO Sarah Brooks, The Cautious Traveller’s Guide to the Wastelands (Flatiron) This book is steampunk perfection! The Cautious Traveller’s Guide to the Wastelands takes place on an enormous train barreling through a landscape known as the “Wastelands” on its way from Beijing to Moscow at the turn of the 20th century. Outside the train, strange creatures with knowing eyes and too many mouths regard the iron beast and its fearful passengers. Inside the train, a powerful company tries to preserve order and cover up past mistakes as various travelers try to discover the truth behind what happened on the disastrous previous journey. Brooks brings a Mieville-esque mentality to her novel, with some terrifying creepy-crawlies and an even more terrifying capitalist conglomerate. –MO Kate Quinn, The Briar Club (William Morrow) Kate Quinn is the reigning queen of historical fiction, and her latest continues to uphold her reputation for grasping the complexities, nuances, and dynamism of the past. In The Briar Club, set in 1950s-era DC, an unorthodox community develops in a women’s boardinghouse when a glamorous and mysterious new resident brings everyone together. This book is what I wish Amelie had been. Also there are recipes. Really, this book is perfect.–MO John Fram, No Road Home (Atria) A wealthy preacher’s compound is the setting for this gothic parable from the author of The Bright Lands. The narrator of No Road Home, newly wedded to the beautiful scion of a megachurch pastor, is visiting his wife’s family for the first time when a storm closes them off from the rest of the world just as their patriarch is found dead. Even before the disturbing demise, Fram’s hero is already having second thoughts about the marriage: her relatives keep making snide remarks about his gender nonconforming son, it turns out his wife only married him to unlock her own inheritance, every family member appears to be keeping secrets, and someone’s been painting threatening messages warning of vengeance to come. Oh, and there’s also a ghost and some very disturbing paintings… –MO Joelle Wellington, The Blonde Dies First (S&S) I loved Joelle Wellington’s debut thriller with its epic party gone terribly wrong, and she continues to wreak gleeful havoc with traditional tropes in her new thriller. This one features an epic summer party interrupted by a demon hell-bent on picking off guests. –MO Eli Cranor, Broiler (Soho) Cranor’s latest thriller examines intersecting lives at an Arkansas chicken plant, where an unwarranted firing sends violent ripples out into the world, bringing families to their knees. Cranor paints a vivid, devastating portrait of the cruelty surrounding an imbalanced system, all while maintaining a wicked level of tension that drives this powerful story forward. He is a writer at the top of his game. –DM Mateo Askaripour, This Great Hemisphere (Dutton) In a world divided between the visible dominant population and the invisibles who serve them, a young invisible woman is shocked to discover her brother is not only alive, but now accused of murder. She has the skills to save him and the impulse to track down the real killer, but will the world around her listen to the truth or subvert reality to their own hierarchically based needs? I cannot wait to dive into this one and emerge blinking, hours later, questioning the notion of existence itself…–MO Bret Anthony Johnston, We Burn Daylight (Random House) That setting tells you straightaway what this one’s going to be about: the Branch Davidians, the Waco siege, and the ordinary lives caught up in a flash-point moment that will reverberate for a generation to come. We Burn Daylight uses the perspectives of two star-crossed lovers—the sheriff’s son and the unbelieving daughter of a cult member—to navigate the complexities of the showdown, for a moving and epic tale. I would expect no less from Johnston.–MO Eliza Jane Brazier, It Had To Be You (Berkley) Eliza Jane Brazier is quickly becoming a favorite, and the newest title from her has a perfect premise: two contract killers, one hired to kill the other, instead fall deeply in love. Who could resist? –MO Emily Dunlay, Teddy (Harper) In this madcap tale of espionage and adventure, a Dallas debutante marries a foreign service worker and heads to mid-1960s Italy, determined to put her wild days behind her and finally Behave. Events conspire to foil her goals of proper deportment, and soon enough, she’s involved in a blackmail scheme, embassy hijinks, and the most daunting task of all: finding a couture dress that can fit her without needing to be tailored. Teddy is not just a fabulous historical novel—it’s a manifesto against the patriarchy, and a liberating experience of watching a woman free herself. –MO Carinn Jade, The Astrology House Carinn Jade takes on the locked-room mystery and makes it her own in this psychological-thriller-cum-comedy-of-manners. A wealthy group of friends decamps to a remote house for an astrology-oriented getaway only to find their host has her own agenda for the weekend. This book will have you wondering about your own charts—and whether that house in Mercury Retrograde just might make you a murderer. –MO ___________________________________ AUGUST ___________________________________ Jessa Maxwell, I Need You To Read This (Atria) The new advice columnist for a major paper is psyched to have the job of her dreams, even if her predecessor was murdered, but she soon finds out she’s got more on her plate than solving the humdrum problems of the populace. She also needs to find out who’s been sending threatening letters to her office, and if they have anything to do with the previous columnist’s death—or her own dark past. Maxwell embodies the empathy of the advice giver well, while also crafting a propulsive narrative with plenty of twists and turns. –MO Nicholas Meyer, Sherlock Holmes and the Telegram From Hell (Mysterious Press) As an ardent fan of Meyer’s groundbreaking original Sherlock Holmes novel The Seven-per-Cent Solution, I am so excited for this new one. It takes place during World War I, with Watson back to working as a doctor, tending wounded soldiers when his old friend Sherlock Holmes arrives and asks for his help carrying out a mission straight from the British secret service, sending them to American, tracking a mysterious coded telegram sent from Berlin to Mexico. Jolly good fun! –OR Rachel Koller Craft, We Love the Nightlife (Berkley) What’s better than a psychological thriller about vampires? A psychological thriller about disco vampires! In Rachel Koller Craft’s sophomore novel, Nicola and Amber have been vampirical companions since Nicola first spotted Amber on the dance floor. Decades later, Amber wants to move on, and Nicola tries to keep her interested by proposing that the two open a new club together. Koller Craft is at her sly, sardonic best in this suspenseful tale of friendships gone sour. –MO Calla Henkel, Scrap (Overlook) Scrap here refers to scrapbooking—Henkel’s narrator is a failed artist who’s just been dumped and needs a new job fast, so she feels lucky when a wealthy art patron hires her to take decades worth of mementos and turn them into high-brow scrapbooks. When her employer dies suddenly before the books can be completed, she’s thrust into a web of intrigue and vengeance that will either reward her enormously or crush her completely. –MO Scott Phillips, The Devil Raises His Own (Soho Crime) This novel is so damn charming, in spite of (or perhaps because of) its salacious historical setting—early Hollywood’s burgeoning scene of blue movies. In The Devil Raises His Own, the denizens of Los Angeles just before WWI intersect and part ways in a thousand different combinations for a kaleidoscopic portrait of an entire city at the precipice of extraordinary cultural significance. Phillips has crafted a picaresque tale of winners and losers, lovers and cheaters, suckers and con artists, rising starlets and drunken has-beens, dirty old men and even dirtier married women: in short, a truly American novel of epic proportions. –MO Jesse Q. Sutanto, You Will Never Be Me (Berkley) Everything that Jesse Q. Sutanto turns her hand to is gold, and You Will Never Be Me is no exception. In this vicious psychological thriller, two influencers face off against one another in a battle for the ages. Meredith and Aspen are friends-turned-bitter rivals, their laundry list of resentments eclipsing their once-powerful bond. When one goes missing, the other falls under suspicion, but there’s plenty of twists and turns before we find out what’s really going on. –MO William Kent Krueger, Spirit Crossing (Atria Books) In the newest Cork O’Connor mystery, the investigation into a politician’s missing daughter and the death of a young Ojibwe woman intersect, throwing Cork together with the Lake Ojibwe Tribal Police in a story that exposes some of the region’s starkest divides and injustices. Krueger deals in powerful narratives with great skill. –DM ___________________________________ SEPTEMBER AND BEYOND ___________________________________ Kate Atkinson, Death at the Sign of the Rook (Doubleday) Yorkshire’s best ex-detective is finally back in this hotly-anticipated continuation of Kate Atkinson’s Jackson Brodie series. This time, he’s bored, with nothing but an art theft to work on… but it leads him down a dark and twisty path to Burton Makepeace, a dilapidated former estate that now hosts murder mystery weekends. Delightful! –OR Attica Locke, Guide Me Home (Mulholland) In the final chapter of the Darren Matthews saga, the Texas Ranger is drawn into the investigation of a Black woman’s disappearance, with her white sorority sisters claiming she isn’t missing at all. As with all the installments of this powerful series, history and family legacies and class divisions get all tangled up to produce something distinctly and disturbingly American. Locke has produced a fitting conclusion for one of the era’s defining mystery characters. –DM Richard Osman, We Solve Murders (Pamela Dorman) Am I said that Richard Osman is not publishing a fifth Thursday Murder Club this fall? Yes. Am so incredibly over the moon that he’s bringing us another indelible, incomparable sleuthing team? Yes. And they are former-investigator-cum-retiree Steve Wheeler and his private-security-working daughter-in-law Amy. I can’t wait to meet them. –OR Del Sandeen, This Cursed House (Berkley) Jemma Barker is broke and newly single when a strange offer comes in: a lucrative position has opened up with a wealthy family on their Louisiana plantation, and Jemma needs to get out of Chicago, fast. It’s 1962 and the world is changing, but for the family on the plantation, things appear to be frozen in time, as the family is still stuck in the colorism that allows them to feel superior to the darker-skinned Jemma. Sandeen’s heroine soon learns that the family has summoned her for a very particular purpose: they are cursed, and they believe her to be the only one who can save them from future calamity.–MO M.L. Rio, Graveyard Shift (Flatiron) M.L. Rio’s Graveyard Shift is a wonderfully eerie novella, reminiscent of the spooky, gothic tales of M.R. James. The premise is so good you’ll shiver: every night, the same five people walk by one another as they head home from their late shifts at their jobs, walking through the old cemetery in their old college town. But one night, they are shocked to stumble upon a freshly dug grave. And before they can continue on home, the gravedigger reappears. You shivering? I TOLD YOU! Jordan Harper, The Last King of California (Mulholland) Readers in the US will finally get a chance to read Harper’s sunburnt tragedy, which arrived first in Britain. In The Last King of California, Harper channels the best of Kem Nunn and delivers a story of family rivalries and warring bikers, all set deep in the California desert. Harper’s pacing is pitch perfect, and his noir sensibilities infuse the novel with dark poetry. –DM Gigi Griffis, We Are the Beasts (Delacorte) Gigi Griffis breathes new life and intrigue into the historical tale of the Beast of Gévaudan, the mythical monster blamed for a rural murder spree in Ancien Regime France, as two teen girls take advantage of the chaos to fake the deaths of their nearest and dearest and thus save them from more human terrors. Griffis has an eye for historical detail and a deft hand when it comes to plotting.–MO View the full article

Hit Man, the new film from director Richard Linklater, isn’t really about a hit man. It’s about the myth of the hit man, or at least “the hitman-for-hire.” Yes, occasionally, mafias and shady corporations and dictatorships do seem to have assassins to sic on their enemies. But the idea that any random person can track down and hire a local hit man to do their dirty work? Fiction. Hit Man is about that fiction, that myth, that understanding. Glen Powell plays Gary Johnson, an uncool philosophy professor at a New Orleans university who moonlights, for extra cash, helping the local police department with tech for their sting operations. If it weren’t for this side gig, he’d be back home petting his cats, grading papers, and bird-watching. (He doesn’t really have a lot going on.) But one day, Gary finds himself out of the surveillance van and inside a sting; he’s a plant, pretending to be a hit man for a man who has tried to hire one. His job is simply to seem legit enough that the suspect ends up incriminating himself. But, it turns out, he’s really, really good at pretending to be a killer. “Pretending” is the operative word here. It’s not the “killer” part that Gary latches onto, it’s the performative aspect. Soon, he develops different hitmen characters, each tailored to the specific personalities of the suspects looking for a killer. “Who’s your hitman?” he asks himself, of suspects he researches in advance. He busts out costumes, wigs, makeup, and all manner of accessories, and experiments with accents and attitudes. At its essence, Hit Man is about a man who is given a stage and an audience and falls in love with the act of performance. Not that anyone should care, but I wrote a doctoral dissertation on the theatricality and performativity of “detection and surveillance” (in 19th century literature entertainment, but still), so I was personally delighted by the questions and ideas that Hit Man plays around with. The plot takes off when Gary finds himself both unable to fully commit to his character’s mission but also finds himself wishing to turn into that character for real; playing a sexy, badass, Aviators-and-cowboy-boots-wearing killer named Ron, Gary meets and falls for a young woman named Madison (Adria Arjona), who would like to put a hit out on her abusive husband. As Gary attempts to wrangle what he has created, his character compartmentalization begins to unspool, dangerously blending Gary and Ron’s personalities, asking, ultimately, who our hero really is, inside. The script amusingly braids in Gary’s lectures on Freud and Nietzsche with shots of his transformations. Co-written by Powell and Linklater, Hit Man is loosely based on a Texas Monthly article by Skip Hollandsworth about the life of real fake hitman Gary Johnson. The film has many merits, with the first one undeniably being its function as a gallery for Powell’s acting talents. Powell has been working steadily in the movies for a decade, and although he’s memorable in all his projects, it’s taken him a long time to attain the leading man status he deserves. In hit Man, he shows off not only his comic chops (with which many of us are long familiar), but also his ability to act as a film’s emotional center. It also allows him to showcase all of the weird little things he can do; there’s a part of the film where Gary shuffles through lots of hit man characters that I called, in my notes, The Glen Powell Show. There aren’t many amazing movies where the conceit is “one actor has to play a lot of different versions of the same vague figure without turning the whole affair goofy”; think Alec Guinness in Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949) or even Peter Sellers in Dr. Strangelove (1964). I think Powell is right up there with his performance(s) as the posse of strange hired guns. The cast of Hit Man is small, but other major characters include Austin Amelio as a slimy cop who is determined to make trouble for Gary, and Evan Holtzman as Madison’s toxic husband Ray—both played with believable odiousness. The delightful comedienne Retta also has a small role, as Gary’s supervisor at the police station, and she provides Gary’s behavior with some necessary, and hilarious commentary. And Arjona is charming and compelling as the sweet Madison; while her character does reveal emotional nuance, I did find myself wishing that her character had a little more shading. Normally Linklater’s female characters are complex and interesting, but here, we learn little about her besides her fear of her husband and her attraction to “Ron.” We do, I suppose, briefly observe that she has one hobby, but I do wish we got more about that, about anything, especially since the guy opposite her has personality (cough… personalities) to spare. Still, Hit Man is a successful, endearing, creative comedy with a fun and entertaining premise, bolstered by excellent performances and clever direction. One sequence that is particularly charming, and bears the stamp of Linklater’s own pop-culture-scholarship, is a montage of classic hitman movies that plays while Gary explains that hit men aren’t real. But Hit Man is real, and I’m very, very glad it is. The film has a very limited theatrical release, and this is an enormous flub on the part of its distributors (if we can even call them that). Bought by Netflix for a $20 million deal after a run in a few film festival last year, Hit Man is only playing in select theaters for about a week before it debuts on Netflix (in the U.S., the U.K. and a few other countries) on June 7th. You should see this movie, but you should see it in theaters if you can. The mid-budget, action-y, rom-com is dying and it’s welcome and delightful entrants like this which are pumping it back to life! So, you know, go see Hit Man and prevent streaming from killing the movies. View the full article

Sometimes authors mine their own hallowed grounds, looking to the past in search of today’s treasures. In that spirit, #1 New York Times bestselling wordsmith Harlan Coben presents the long-awaited return of one of his most beloved characters in Think Twice (May 14, 2024; Grand Central). Former sports agent turned lawyer Myron Bolitar—who investigates crimes with his billionaire best friend, Windsor Horne Lockwood III (better known as “Win”)—hasn’t graced the pages of a book since 2016. With the series currently in development for television, it would seem an opportune moment for his revival. But the truth isn’t nearly as calculated as the timing might suggest. “I just kind of missed Myron,” Coben—who usually abides by the notion that premise precedes player—says. “I usually start with an idea … and then I ask myself: ‘Who tells the story?’” While such musings once resulted in the character’s creation in the first place (in 1995’s Deal Breaker), they also led to his being sidelined when a diversionary hook took hold of the author: What if a grieving husband received an email containing a hyperlink to a video feed that shows his wife walking by a webcam eight years after her supposed murder? “I loved the idea!” Coben remembers. “But of course Myron didn’t have a wife who died … so Myron couldn’t tell that story.” Instead, Dr. David Beck headlined 2001’s Tell No One, which was nominated for the Anthony, Macavity, Edgar, and Barry Awards and turned into an award-winning French film, Ne le Dis à Personne—America’s top box office foreign-language draw the year of its domestic release. “And from there I was free of Myron for the next six or seven books,” Coben says. Instead, he penned a series of standalone novels—including Gone for Good, No Second Chance, Just One Look, and The Innocent—that have found new life on the small screen. Bolitar, Win & Co. would eventually return in 2006’s Promise Me. Coben has since made a habit of alternating series and singular titles, even introducing Myron’s nephew, Mickey Bolitar, as the protagonist of a YA franchise (which currently includes three books and the Amazon Prime series Shelter). Still, it’s been eight long years since Myron appeared in Home, seemingly finding closure through marriage at book’s end. And while the author has gotten increasingly busy with the creation and development of multiple streaming projects for Netflix (in addition to maintaining a book a year publishing schedule), the comfort of familiarity proved irresistible. “The world is not in a great place right now and I thought, wouldn’t it be kind of fun to go back and try to write those books that combine a character you love with a gripping mystery?” Coben recalls. “And so I just thought the marriage of both during this time would be something fun to try.” While Myron’s resurrection doesn’t test the laws of mortality, the same can’t necessarily be said for his former basketball and romantic rival turned frenemy, Greg Downing. Long thought dead—Myron eulogized him, after all—Downing’s DNA turns up at a recent crime scene, leading the FBI to suspect he’s very much alive and somehow connected to a string of “solved” murders that now appear to be linked. “That was part of the challenge. How could someone get away with it?” Coben says, acknowledging that technology and surveillance have made it increasingly difficult to avoid detection. “One of the things that got this novel off the ground was that I had read an article [stating] that there are actually fewer serial killers now than ever before because it’s so hard not to get caught.” Enter the “Setup Serial Killer”—a person, or persons, unknown, whose work has gone largely unnoticed by virtue of their ability to frame others for their crimes so convincingly that subsequent arrests and convictions are pretty much a given. It’s a premise as chilling as it is contemporary, and one that took the author out of his comfort zone. “I often pride myself on writing what I swear I’d never write,” Coben admits. “One of the things I’ve always said … is that I don’t write serial killer books. I’m not a serial killer guy. I don’t like serial killer books particularly.” So when the idea of just such a killer took hold, Coben found himself pondering some oft repeated advice: Write the book you’d want to read. “How could I write one that I would like?” he asked himself, knowing the task would be made more difficult by modernity. “It’s always a question of how do I use this new technology … to make an interesting story? How can I use that as a challenge rather than a detriment?” Then, the answer came: a comingling of elements—the new with the old, technology with tradition, fresh circumstances for familiar characters. It was a solution fitting of the series’ continued evolution, in which the books are as much about the players’ lives as the cases they investigate. “For Myron, the stakes are almost always personal,” Coben says. “It’s never mired in solving a crime for somebody else the way a cop or even a private detective would. It always affects his personal life. And this one in particular takes on a whole new direction.” Indeed, in Think Twice, the knowledge that Greg Downing—who was once married to Myron’s first love, and raised the illegitimate son that Myron fathered as his own—may not only be alive but somehow implicated in a double homicide leads Myron on a cross country search for truth, the consequences of which hit uncomfortably close to home. “At the end of the day, the one overriding thing I try to do with these novels … is relationships,” Coben offers, in reminder that home is often where the heart—and hurt—is. “If somebody asked me what the Myron and Win series is really about …it’s about friendship,” While Myron and Win’s bromance gives the saga its beating heart, they’re bolstered by a colorful cast of co-workers, lovers, friends, and family; loving depictions of the latter stem from Coben’s adoration and reverence for his parents, who both died young. “I never got to see my parents age … so this is actually a sort of imagined alternate universe,” he confesses, noting that the dynamic has resonated with readers. “What Myron goes through with his parents is often what I imagined I would be going through had my parents survived.” Now retired to Florida (where else?), the Bolitars enjoy regaling Myron with stories of their sexual escapades, which have been enhanced by the use of edibles. These long-distance phone calls add some comic relief —though the physical distance also exposes unexpected vulnerabilities. “I think the most harrowing scene in this book, without giving anything away, involves Myron and his parents,” Coben says. “And that’s because hopefully you care about these people, and you care about their relationships.” The author—heralded as “the modern master of the hook and twist” by Dan Brown (The Da Vinci Code)—draws on this sense of connectedness to maximize tensions and devise closings that often manage to shock readers while also delivering a more sustaining satisfaction. “More important for me—as I get older, especially—is that I want the ending to not only surprise you in terms of whodunit, but I need the emotional impact,” he says. “It’s one thing to stir your mind and your pulse, but if [the twist] doesn’t stir your heart … then you’re not going to feel it.” It’s telling, then, that thirty-five years (and as many books) into a blockbuster career, Harlan Coben considers Think Twice’s “nobody’s gonna see it coming” ending one of his very best. “If you think of all the great movies you’ve seen, or all the great books you’ve read … there was always an emotional component to them,” he says. “I think that’s where the gold lies.” Which is why readers continue to sift through his stories in eager anticipation of the riches they’ll find there. View the full article

“The author should die once he has finished writing,” wrote Umberto Eco. “So as not to trouble the path of the text.” I’m a fan of this open approach to art and write in a way that seeks to expand rather than narrow what a book can mean to the reader. Once it’s finished, it’s your book not mine. That said, certain ignition energies inevitably come from the author’s own life. In The Man Who Saw Seconds, my new thriller about a man who can see five seconds into the future, both the emotional energy and some of the thematic questions are shaped by my own past. Not the answers, I hope. Just the questions. The emotional fuel behind Preble Jefferson’s relentless fight to save his family was my son’s week-long abduction when he was very young. It all turned out well, and that’s one of the best things about being a writer. Ten years later you can be grateful for events that melt your teeth with stress when they’re happening, because they give you a story and a fire. Give me ten more and I’ll write a novel where the monster is cancer. My beautiful wife, Tania Xenis, died of colon cancer while I was finalizing this one. A number of reviewers picked up on this core drive for a man to protect, or try to protect, his family. Andrew Case, author of The Big Fear, wrote, “And for all its adventure, at its heart [The Man Who Saw Seconds] is a story of a father’s love for his wife and child, for whom he will do anything.” And Martin Ott, author of Dream State, said, “No novel in recent memory answers the question as convincingly: ‘Will I risk destroying the world to save the people I love?’” We all understand the urge to protect those we love. When it comes to ideas, however—especially ideas that approach politics—writing is trickier. When I read a novel, I don’t want to be told what to think, not even if I agree. But individual characters can have complex political backstories. In Seconds, the most fun is probably Preble’s best friend, Fish. A Hungarian defector during the Cold War turned anarchist law professor, Fish’s full name is the unpronounceable Robert Legmegbetegedettebbeknek (yes, that’s a real word, meaning “the sickest.”) While Fish isn’t me, he does grow out of a slice of my past. If Preble is my emotional self during my son’s abduction, Fish is my intellectual youth. I was seven when we defected from communist Czechoslovakia—an old-school, sneak-across-the-Iron-Curtain type of defection, complete with my parents throwing me and my one-year-old brother from one heaving boat to another off the coast of Yugoslavia when our boat’s engine died during a storm in the Adriatic Sea. I had my eighth birthday in the Traiskirchen refugee camp in Austria, where we spent six months hoping for a country. Canada took us in and gave us a home, something I remained permanently grateful for even as I moved and lived all over the world, including various cities in the U.S. My dad had been in the Czechoslovak special forces, and he was determined to put an ocean between us and Russia, certain Russia would never stop invading neighbors—decades later he revealed to me that he still remembered every street in Brussels and Amsterdam, as every man in his unit had had to memorize two West European cities. Those two were his. People today forget how oppressive, gray and all-consuming Soviet Block communism was. The expression in Slovak for the system was “the totality.” People referred to living “under the totality,” which conveys what life was like more accurately than the abstract adjective “totalitarian.” It was a system that wanted total control over everything, every detail of life down to the most personal—an impulse that seems to repeat wherever there is a concentration of power, in direction if not in degree. That may be why the main antagonist in Seconds, Thaddeus Bigman, works for the NSA’s Total Information Bureau and why Fish, like a lot of East European émigrés, has a fear of the security organs that’s so bone deep it’s almost genetic. Fish isn’t a libertarian. He’s skeptical of all institutions, corporations and collective entities above a certain size. I read a lot of anarchist philosophy in my twenties as a reaction to the “stories from the totality” that I’d grown up with. It’s probably why I went to law school: know thy enemy. But Fish is an old man, not a twenty-year-old, and his anarchism has been distilled to a narrower, more-mature insight—a core belief in the concept of counterproductivity as described by the philosopher Ivan Illich. Illich’s formulation was dry: “Once it reaches a certain threshold, the process of institutionalization becomes counterproductive.” In Seconds, Fish rephrases that as “Every institution ends up working against the purpose for which it was created.” While ministries of defense that start wars are an obvious example, Illich applies this to a wide range of modern life, from schools that make people stupid to hospitals that make them sick to “motorized vehicles that create the remoteness which they alone can shrink.” It works for any new technology that first brings social benefits but ends by forcing society to adapt to the technology. It certainly applied to the utopia of Soviet communism. And it can even apply to a man whose single-minded fight against monsters inevitably turns him into one. There’s an inherent absurdity to this sort of counterproductivity, which may be why a sense of the absurd is threaded through so much of Eastern European literature. It’s not South American style magical realism. People don’t start levitating. Instead, it’s just a touch, a light balancing act between real and surreal, between conviction and satire. The decision-cycles in The Man Who Saw Seconds become absurd only gradually, and different readers disagree on when that threshold is crossed. But the spiral also reflects how these soulless, all-consuming system-machines really do work—humanity that’s been institutionalized, mechanized, almost mineralized, to paraphrase Ortega y Gasset. The book is first and foremost a fast-paced thriller, not dependent on this subtext. I wanted to ensure a reader could enjoy it as a Jason Bourne-style Hollywood movie without any of these thematic or satirical elements. But they’re there for those who want to read them, within character motivations and the general madness of the constant escalation—which becomes counterproductive for everyone. Fish’s anarchic distrust of institutions is rooted in my own distrust of the sort of control that suffocated the human spirit under the totality. But I do understand the other side. I appreciate how dangerous the mass loss of trust in institutions is to our democracies—even if some of that loss is justified. I’m a recovering attorney, but still a member of the California bar. I spent time as a speechwriter for the Civilian Complaint Review Board, which investigated bad members of the NYPD. I’m an instructor in Brazilian jiu-jitsu, and over the decades my sparring partners have included dozens of cops, SWAT team operators, and even friends who formerly served as bodyguards for prime ministers in Canada and Israel. I write first for the love of a good story, and all these past lives help add texture to how well I can tell it. But second, I write to clash ideas against each other. (How cool that my publisher is CLASH Books!) With Seconds, I feel like I finally learned how to integrate those two drives seamlessly, something I was less successful with in my previous novel, The Ugly. It’s this clash that causes the story to keep escalating and it’s why I insist on making my antagonists as formidable as possible—steelmen rather than strawmen. I never want my hero to win because someone makes a mistake, like a James Bond villain who talks too long, and I never want to offer easy answers. Preble’s slim superpower is just barely enough to give him a fighting chance, maybe. Mark Powell, author of The Late Rebellion, described Seconds as, “part thriller, part gunfight (hell of a gunfight), part intellectual examination of what we mean when we say ‘freedom’ and all heart. Absurd, hilarious, and deadly serious, this is the rare novel that is both compulsively readable and philosophically deft.” I don’t have an answer for what we mean when we say “freedom,” but I do know that my own conception of it was deeply shaped by being born in a country with none. For me, freedom is tied to openness—and that includes the interpretations of anything I’ve written. I like to think of the emotional and intellectual themes in my writing as the two wings of a story. They provide the lift, but they shouldn’t be tied down to my own past. If my personal background adds possibilities to how you read the book, then that makes me happy. If not, kill me and enjoy The Man Who Saw Seconds. *** View the full article

Here at CrimeReads, we love a heist, genre of crime that’s definitely a lot cooler and easier to pull off in movies. But there are heists in real life. They’re way less glamorous, but hey, so is everything. For this list, we thought we’d spotlight some of the more random and strange robberies that have been executed in recent memory. Kinder Surprise Eggs and Nutella I’ve witnessed firsthand the popularity of both Kinder Surprise Eggs and Nutella in Germany, but even I was shocked to learn that, in August 2017, in Neustadt Germany, a group of thieves made off with about 20 tons of Nutella and Kinder eggs. The goods were held in a refrigerated truck, and were worth, together, upwards of $80,000. German law enforcement put out the following announcement: “Anyone offered large quantities [of chocolate] via unconventional channels should report it to the police immediately.” Also, Kinder Surprise Eggs are illegal in the United States, apparently? They contain tiny toys in their shell, and since 1938, the U.S. has prohibited the sale of food items with inedible components. (I am guessing because of this ban, Kinder sells a product called the “Kinder Joy Egg” in America, which complies with US law.) Parmesan Cheese Apparently, in Italy, more than $3 million of Parmesan cheese is stolen every year. I find this both outrageous and very believable. Britain’s Center for Retail Research has noted that cheese, in general, is the most stolen food in the world. But Parmigiano-Reggiano is one of the most coveted. According to the Consorzio del Formaggio Parmigiano Reggiano (the Consortium of Parmesan Cheese), the organization which oversees authentic Parmesan production and culture, Parmesan is a highly particular and historic cheese made authentically in only five Italian provinces (“Parma, Reggio Emilia, Modena, Bologna to the left of the river Reno and Mantua to the right of the river Po”) and has received Protected Designations of Origin (or PDO) status from Italy, a stamp to certify authenticity, since there are many counterfeit Italian cheeses on the market. Evidently. Cut to Emilia-Romagna, Modena, in 2015, when a group of eleven gang members were arrested for a series of armed robberies spanning eleven years in which they stole total of 2,039 wheels of parmesan, totaling €785,000 at the time of the theft (equivalent to $875,000). Says one Italian police officer, “‘Cheese is a bit like gold here, the price is so high.'” Normally I don’t fantasize about committing robberies, but I’ve also never known about cheese heists, before. Interesting. Desert Hairy Scorpion, Domino Cockroach, Six-Eyed Sand Spider, etc. Yes, this next heist story is not about food!! Not!!! Food!!!! In August of 2018, the Philadelphia Insectarium and Butterfly Pavilion was robbed, with thieves taking about 7,000 live animals (making up about 80 to 90 percent of the collection). There were some lizards in the haul, but it was largely composed of insects. Police suspected an inside job and were able to locate a few of the animals. According to The New York Times, “Security cameras around the pavilion recorded several people creeping out of the museum… with plastic containers holding giant African mantises, bumblebee millipedes, warty glowspot roaches, tarantulas, dwarf and tiger hissers, and leopard geckos.” Removing animals from controlled environments and exhibits is extremely dangerous for humans and the animals themselves, who have special food and climate requirements. The animals were likely headed for the exotic animal black market, which again, is a very bad thing. The thieves also stole the logs from the exhibits, making it more difficult for the scientists and curators to track which species had in fact been stolen. The total estimated value of the stolen animals is $40,000. And, not to be glib here (because again, this theft risks animal cruelty), but I’d need to be earning a LOT more than $40,000k to even go near one “warty glowspot roach” or “Mexican fireleg tarantula.” Black Truffle Well, we’re back to talking about food now. Cool, cool, cool. I’m definitely not still thinking about bugs. Definitely not. This entrant in our list is “truffle,” a fancy food so maybe that will… no, wait, truffles are found in the dirt and so are bugs. Please give me a moment to clear my mind. Well, I’m back. Maybe you assumed “truffle” would make this list. We’ve covered the extremely intense world of the truffle economy before, but it never ceases to amaze me how far people will go into the criminal depths for those little bulbs. In Provence, France, in 2005, a group of thieves raided a warehouse holding black truffle bulbs–they broke in at night and accessed the facility using the roof. It’s estimated that they made off with $100,000 worth of truffles. The thieves were never caught. Spanish Garlic In June 2012, Austrian police stopped three “overloaded and sagging vans” at the border between Austria and Hungary, before they were about to leave the country. The Austria Press Association notes that one officer said he knew “what the vans were carrying even before their doors were opened.” He remarked, “‘All three vehicles really stunk like garlic.'” And he was right. It was garlic… 9.5 tons of garlic, valuing approximately €30,000 ($37,500). The garlic came from Spain, originally, and the five men operating the vans, who were all Romanian, were held on suspicion of receiving stolen goods. Is it possible, though, that since they were bound for Hungary and Romania, that they were just really determined to protect themselves against vampires? It’s like diethyltoluamide for the undead! Bordeaux Grapes It’s wine o’clock! In September of 2017, a group of thieves stolen seven metric tons of Bordeaux grapes! Apparently, that summer, the grape harvest had been terrible, with weather conditions killing the majority of the crops in the region. It was predicted that the few grapes that did survive would yield an especially delicious vintage, and thieves broke into a vineyard at vineyard in Génissac, near St-Émilion, and picked all the grapes from their vines (6.5 tons). They also broke into a vineyard near Montagne, and dug up 500 grapevines and took them along, too. It is suspected that these thieves were professionals (vintners, not thieves, but they were good at that too), because who else honestly would know how to churn out impeccable wine from all of that? Beanie Babies Would a list like this be complete without something truly deranged? Bring out the Beanie Babies! In 1997, the toy manufacturer Ty reported that 60,000 Beanie Babies had been stolen from their warehouse in Westmont, Illinois. The total amount of the haul? $300,000. Police Officers from the Carol Stream Police Department found 1,000 of the stolen (what do you call them? Stuffed animals? The original Associated Press copy calls them “dolls,” which feels absurd) toys in a storage unit belonging to a senior citizen. He explained that he had purchased a lot of 1200 at a flea market, and had been excited to resell them. He was arrested, but subsequently acquitted. View the full article

Dark academia is a literary genre that has its origins in Donna Tartt’s seminal 1992 novel. The Secret History is set in the elite Hampden College in Vermont where a scholarship student attempts to create a new identity among a select group of wealthy and privileged Greek scholars. The gothic architecture, the tailored suits, tweed jackets and plaid skirts offer an aesthetic that is a gateway into an exclusive world of classical literature and bacchanalian excess. But dark academia is so much more than that. In the shadow of its classical antiquity are big themes – morality, loyalty, coming of age, sexuality, life and death. It’s a time when characters, as students, are at a stage in their lives when they are old enough to understand and philosophise about those topics but also young enough that they don’t have the responsibilities that might conflict with their pursuit of this knowledge. And the campus setting creates an enclosed environment that allows them the time and space to explore and challenge the darker side of life. In M. L. Rio’s If We Were Villains, a group of seven Shakespearean actors at an elite and secluded conservatory compete for roles and attention until their passions for their art and for each become deadly obsessions. Micah Nemerever’s These Violent Delights follows two opposite yet intellectually equal college freshmen whose friendship and eventual love for each other results in an act of irrevocable violence. Bunny by Mona Awad has another scholarship student at its centre, this time at an Ivy League MFA program where she tries to peel away the layers of obligation, fear, cruelty, jealousy, passion and politeness in a privileged female clique. At the core of all these stories is the intersection of knowledge and power. The characters strive to better themselves, to rise above even their entitled peers. But there is an inevitable tragedy to this because, while they understand the power inherent in the knowledge or prestige they seek, they are not old enough to have earned the wisdom to wield it. Their fatal flaw is not that they don’t recognise their own weaknesses, it’s that they think they are clever enough to outwit them. In The Secret History, protagonist Richard Papen considers his tragic flaw to be “a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs.” Certainly characters are obsessed with how things should appear and aestheticism is pursued without concern for their own personal failings or the limitations of the human condition. The deconstruction of this idea is the central theme of the book and one that flows throughout the dark academia genre. The lengths to which characters are prepared to go to keep up appearances inevitably bring about their downfall as the carefully-constructed facade crumbles under the weight of their own self-deception. It’s competitive elitism that drives this obsession, and the arrogance inherent in these educational establishments means that dark academia novels are hugely about class. The preoccupation with aesthetics is about the performance of class, something that is generally endemic in academia itself. It’s the outsider who allows us to dissect all of this from an objective perspective, throwing light and shade on the attitudes and behaviours we love to hate. My debut novel, When We Were Silent, is set at Highfield Manor, a private convent school in 1980s Dublin, a time when Ireland lived in the clutches of the Catholic church and keeping up appearances was more important than the morals that underpinned them. When outsider Lou Manson tries to expose a culture of abuse at the school, she discovers that the Highfield elite will go to any lengths to protect their own reputation, even when the consequences are fatal. Thirty years later, Lou has rebuilt her life after the harrowing events of the so-called “Highfield Affair” when she is called to testify in a new lawsuit against the school. But telling the truth means confronting her own complicity and there is one story she swore she’d never tell… When We Were Silent looks at the differences between attitudes and behaviours in the 1980s and now, but also at the abiding similarities that these institutions preserve across time. It’s part of the reason for the success of the genre, that glimpse into a timeless fantasy of prestige and privilege that fills us with nostalgia for our own school days and always begs the question: how would we behave in a dark academic setting? Although Lou goes to Highfield with an agenda, it’s not long before she starts to wonder how much of the school’s worth she can leverage while she’s still there: “I could love it here, if I didn’t already know too much. If I’d been bred to hold my silence like a true Highfield girl. I envy them, the certainty of their position, the rewards offered by the privilege of their birth, and at times it kills me to think what could be mine if I chose to play by their rules.” And that is the crux of it, the reason for the enduring popularity of dark academia. That any of us would be able to refuse the privilege of it. To understand it, we need to look at our own fatal flaws, our own fascination with the aesthetic. We know these wealthy, entitled characters have a darkness in them and yet we still aspire to have what they have, to want what they want. We might love to hate them but we have to ask ourselves: would we reject their lives if they were offered to us? *** View the full article

One day in July 2021, while failing to read yet another book during Australia’s never-ending COVID-19 lockdown— nothing much was grabbing me—I got a text message from Fred. It was short and intriguing: ‘Jess, have you heard of Dick Ellis? Look him up.’ Dad, then 74, had read a line in one of the paperbacks he’d bought at a local bookstore, that mentioned an Australian-born colonel, Charles Howard “Dick” Ellis, who’d worked at a very senior level for the intelligence services of the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia. Ellis had been born into impoverished circumstances in the suburb of Annandale, in Sydney, Australia. Annandale today is a well-heeled neighborhood where not a hell of a lot goes on other than dogs being walked. Its streets are uncommonly wide for Sydney, and its Federation houses are largely preserved. It seemed strange that after living in the area for a couple of decades between us, neither Dad nor I had even heard mention of Dick Ellis. Who was he? As a nonfiction writer and biographer always on the lookout for new book ideas, I was immediately interested. One American newspaper called Ellis “Britain’s number-three spy at the end of World War II.” Brian Toohey and William Pinwill, co-authors of Oyster: The Story of the Australian Secret Intelligence Service, described him as “the most intriguing figure who has crossed the often-surprising landscape of Australian intelligence.” Fellow spy-writing duo Desmond Ball and David Horner called him “one of the most shadowy figures of all.” The doyen of espionage nonfiction, the late Phillip Knightley, saw in Ellis the prototype for 007: “His adventures not only rival those of James Bond; he was James Bond.” Knightley claimed Ian Fleming had based the character of Bond on a mix of Ellis, ‘one of the most remarkable secret service agents in the history of espionage’, and the legendary Serbian double agent and ladies’ man Duško Popov. American journalist C. L. Sulzberger, who met Ellis in the 1960s, wrote that the Australian had “gained a reputation as tough, ruthless and brilliant. In World War II he was a big shot in intelligence.’ Ellis has also been called “the Grand Old Man of British espionage … the oldest living professional agent.” Beyond the praise and hyperbole, Ellis—a university dropout—was certainly an accomplished individual: classical musician, scholar, journalist, author, historian, diplomat, consul, polyglot (he spoke, French, German, Urdu, Farsi, Turkish, and some Mandarin, and is credited with a passing knowledge of other languages, including Italian and Spanish), respected intelligence officer, Cold War warrior, and decorated soldier who saw battle in France and Belgium (where he served on the Western Front), British India, Egypt, Afghanistan, Persia, Transcaspia (modern-day Turkmenistan), southern Russia and the Caucasus. Ellis collected a swag of medals and honors including the US Legion of Merit, an OBE (Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire), CBE (Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire), and CMG (Companion of the Most Distinguished Order of St Michael and St George). He had been present at or involved behind the scenes in some of the biggest conflicts and events of the 20th century (World War I, the Russian Civil War, World War II, the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, the creation of the Central Intelligence Agency and Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, the Vladimir Petrov affair, Kim Philby’s defection to the Soviet Union), was friends with or worked with some of the most fascinating people of the century (Roald Dahl, Ian Fleming, Noël Coward, Reginald Teague-Jones, Duško Popov, J. Edgar Hoover, William Donovan, H. G. Wells, Stewart Menzies, William Stephenson), and whose personal narrative involves four undisputed titans of World War II (Franklin D. Roosevelt, Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler, and Winston Churchill). Ellis’s journey was quite staggering in its richness of experiences and people encountered. But much more sensationally, after he died in 1975 the ruddy-cheeked Ellis, drily described by CIA historian Thomas F. Troy as “short (5’5” in his prime), slightly rounded, white-haired, properperson”, was publicly accused of being a traitor. Not just any garden-variety traitor, either: a triple agent who in the 1960s had secretly confessed to his treasonous crimes. It was grave stuff. According to Troy, Dick Ellis was “widely believed to have been both a Nazi and a Soviet agent.” British espionage journalist and author Henry (‘Harry’) Chapman Pincher, who went by the abridged name Chapman Pincher, wrote in 1981 that Ellis had been the beneficiary of ‘the most blatant cover-up and ‘broke down after interrogation in1965 and confessed to having spied for Germany before and during the early stages of the war. This would have been a capital offence (sic) in wartime.’ Pincher passed away in 2014, aged 100. He went to his deathbed maintaining Ellis was guilty, his case against the man an encapsulation of the old idiom “there’s no smoke without fire.” Ironically, though, Brigadier Denis Blomfield-Smith observed that Pincher himself was a perfect candidate for a Soviet mole. (Over his writing career, Pincher certainly accused a good many people of being Soviet agents, mostly with scant foundation.) Adding to all this intrigue, one of the legendary “Cambridge Five” of British traitors, Anthony Blunt, had ‘inferred [sic] during his 1964 confession’ that there was a “link between [Kim] Philby and Ellis”, a matter that would have ramifications for Ellis when he was interrogated in London the following year. Blunt, however, never actually named Ellis, and was publicly outed as a traitor in the House of Commons by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher on November 15, 1979. This was despite a deal that, in exchange for his confession, he was assured he would not be exposed. Blunt reportedly said before he died in 1983, “It’s amusing to see the security services spinning round like mad dogs chewing their own tails.” Kim Philby, who became a Russian spy in 1934, joined the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS or MI6) in 1940 and crossed over to the Soviet Union in 1963, was the most notorious traitor of all time. The mere mention of his name has become a synonym for betrayal and spawned dozens of books. Phillip Knightley, who interviewed Philby at his home in Moscow before Philby’s death aged 76 in 1988, called him “the most remarkable spy in the history of espionage …the most successful penetration agent ever … professionally, as a spy, he is in a class all by himself.” Could Ellis, this unassuming, almost anonymous Australian, have been his secret accomplice? Could Ellis, this unassuming, almost anonymous Australian, have been his secret accomplice? Philby never gave any indication during his exile in the Soviet Union the pair had worked in tandem, yet they knew each other well, and served on an MI6 reorganization committee together after World War II. No mention is made of Ellis in Philby’s1968 autobiography, My Silent War, but Ellis was still alive at the time and no allegations of treason against him had yet to surface in the public domain. Ellis was even considered a possible candidate for the infamous Soviet mole ELLI, whose codename was first mentioned in the 1940s but has never been positively and conclusively identified,despite claims to the contrary. So how has Dick Ellis, such a huge figure in the history of Western espionage, practically been forgotten? It’s rotten enough betraying your country for an enemy state – but to do so for the two most evil empires of the 20th century, fascist Nazi Germany and the communist Soviet Union? It puts you in a category all of your own. Ellis potentially was a bigger traitor than Philby and the FBI’s Robert Hanssen, who in 2001 was caught spying for the Russians. Ellis would be widely talked of as being “a spy for both Hitler and Stalin,” though that is preposterous: he didn’t meet either the German or Russian dictator and is not known to have had contact directly with them or any of their subordinates. Both men, however, feature indirectly in his story. Available sources show that Ellis flatly denied ever being a Soviet mole. It seems though that reports of his alleged connections to the Nazis warrant closer examination. Let me be plain. Even if Ellis had been simply feeding “chicken-feed’, or low-value information, to the Third Reich before World War II under orders from MI6 superiors—or out of penury: by many accounts Britain didn’t pay its secret agents enough as well as give them enough money to pay other agents—the charge that he in any way worked for Nazi Germany is deeply shocking. We’re talking about Nazis, after all: history’s greatest villains and Hollywood’s go-to personification of badness. Indeed, cast as a Nazi agent, Ellis’s name has been publicly connected to a catalog of betrayals: revealing MI6’s bugging of the German Embassy in London; 1939’s notorious Venlo Incident in the Netherlands (where two British agents were kidnapped by the Nazis on the Dutch-German border); being the source for Waffen-SS Major General Walter Schellenberg’s infamous arrest list prepared before the Battle of Britain, Sonderfahndungsliste G. B. (‘Special Wanted List Great Britain’, popularly called ‘The Black Book’), and its accompanying SS handbook Informationsheft G. B.(‘Information Brochure Great Britain’); and feeding intelligence to Adolf Hitler’snumber two, Martin Bormann. It’s as bad as it gets. It has been alleged that Ellis “sold vast quantities of information to the Germans” before the invasion. Pincher insinuated Ellis was responsible for the wartime killing of English actor Leslie Howard: the plane he was traveling in from Lisbon to Bristol was shot out of the sky off the coast of northern Spain by the Luftwaffe. Ellis has even been linked to the attack on Pearl Harbor in Hawaii in 1941. In the 1980s there was no end to Axis-collaboration accusations made against Ellis; but most—and this is an important qualification—had little to no substance at all. How much actual evidence was needed to make a convincing case that the boy from Annandale had been up to no good? Or didn’t proof matter anymore? The MI5 intelligence officer Peter Wright, who died in 1995 at age 78, was in the interrogation room with Ellis when he allegedly confessed; Wright subsequently gave Pincher the inside scoop the latter needed for his books demonizing Ellis (1981’s Their Trade is Treachery and 1984’s Too Secret Too Long). Wright wrote the following in his own book, the 1987 global best-seller Spycatcher: “Ellis was a venal, sly man. He sat there, stripped of his rank, white-faced and puffy. But never once did I hear an apology. I could understand how a man might choose the Soviets through ideological conviction. But to sell colleagues out to the Germans for a few pounds in time of war? I told him that had he been caught in 1939–40 he would have been hanged.” Ellis’s life appeared to be an incredible, untold tale; it was astonishing that no biographer before me had attempted to write a proper book on this enigmatic individual (Phillip Knightley, to his credit, had tried to get a film made about Ellis but it never materialized). But what if, after all the relentless smearing and character assassination from the Daily Mail to Newsweek to the Washington Post, there was another explanation for Ellis’s confession? Could he have made a “false confession” and, like the soldier he was, professed guilt to protect someone else? What if he was innocent? What if there was more to the story of Pincher and Wright themselves and their motivation to “nail Ellis”? What if there was more to the story of Pincher and Wright themselves and their motivation to ‘nail Ellis’? Was Ellis an evil spy and a traitor of epic proportions or a hero of freedom and liberty? Four decades before the term even entered our lexicon, could he have been a posthumous victim of cancel culture, where truth doesn’t matter and an allegation is enough to condemn someone in the court of public opinion? Like any writer of serious non-fiction worth his or her salt,I wanted to explore these questions. I’d written challenging books before—on dead rock stars and Miami cocaine traffickers—and was used to investigating stories where people didn’t want to talk. What I didn’t realize was just how profoundly difficult it would be. _______________________ From THE EAGLE IN THE MIRROR by Jesse Fink (Citadel/Kensington Books, May 21, 2024) View the full article

Recently, the true crime genre has experienced a significant surge in popularity, captivating audiences with its nail-biting narratives of suspense and mystery. From bestselling books to binge-worthy documentaries and podcasts, true crime has become a true staple of pop culture, attracting millions of viewers and readers into the dark world of criminology. However, amidst the fascination with criminals, investigations, and courtroom dramas, there exists a troubling trend of negating victims — and particularly Black victims — and their loved ones from the narrative. The fascination of true crime lies in its ability to unravel complex mysteries, dissect criminal behavior, and explore the intricacies of the criminal justice system. It offers a glimpse into the minds of perpetrators, the tireless work of law enforcement, and the pursuit of truth and justice. Yet, in this quest for storytelling, the voices and experiences of victims are often overshadowed, relegated to mere footnotes in a larger narrative focused on the sensationalism of crime, making it more attractive for the audience. One of the most glaring aspects of this erasure is the disproportionate representation of victims based on race. Black victims of crime are frequently disregarded or marginalized in true crime storytelling, their stories minimized or sensationalized for dramatic effect. This racial disparity reflects broader societal biases and systemic inequalities that permeate our criminal justice system and media representations. The erasure of Black victims in true crime narratives perpetuates harmful stereotypes and reinforces narratives that devalue Black lives. It sends a message that certain victims are deemed less worthy of attention, empathy, and justice, perpetuating a cycle of injustice and inequality. I know this because my own mother was murdered when I was only 6 years old. Through my own journey of healing and advocacy, I have gained insights into the ways in which true crime storytelling can sustain harmful stereotypes and reinforce narratives that devalue Black lives. I have seen how certain victims are deemed less worthy of attention, empathy and justice, continuing a cycle of injustice and inequality. Furthermore, the loved ones left behind by victims are often overlooked or sidelined in true crime narratives. Their grief, trauma and journeys for closure are reduced to brief mentions or dramatic reenactments; avoiding the depth and nuance they deserve. This erasure not only diminishes the human impact of crime but also perpetuates a lack of empathy and understanding for those truly affected by the tragedy. Throughout the process of writing, I dive deep into the complexities of grief, trauma and the quest for closure that I experienced. I realized firsthand how true crime storytelling often overlooks the nuanced emotions and struggles of those left behind, opting instead for sensationalized dramatizations or superficial portrayals of the situation at hand. By unfolding the details of my mother’s case and exploring the impact it had on my life, I sought to bring to light the human side of tragedy — the pain, the healing and the resilience of survivors. Through my writing, I aimed to challenge the narrative and advocate for a more empathetic and inclusive approach to true crime storytelling. My mother’s case became not just a personal tragedy but also a catalyst for promoting empathy, understanding and meaningful dialogue about the human toll of crime on families and communities. To address these issues and bring about meaningful change in the true crime genre, it is essential to center the voices and experiences of victims and their loved ones. This includes amplifying diverse voices, particularly those of marginalized communities such as Black victims and their families. It requires inclusive storytelling practices, collaboration with community advocates, and platforms that prioritize diverse perspectives. Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson is a great example. The book provides a powerful and poignant account of Stevenson’s work as a lawyer advocating for marginalized individuals, including Black defendants facing unjust sentences and death row inmates. It sheds light on systemic injustices and the human impact of the criminal justice system on individuals and communities. Humanizing victims is another crucial aspect of challenging erasure in true crime narratives. Rather than sensationalizing crime scenes or focusing solely on the criminal’s perspective, true crime storytellers must humanize victims by exploring their lives, aspirations, and the impact of their loss on loved ones. This shift in storytelling priorities emphasizes empathy, dignity, and respect for victims and their families. Additionally, challenging biases within true crime storytelling is essential. True crime consumers play a vital role in questioning narratives that marginalize victims and advocating for inclusive storytelling. By critically engaging with true crime content, audiences can contribute to a more equitable and compassionate portrayal of crime and its aftermath. Supporting victim advocacy organizations and initiatives like the Innocence Project and the National Center for Victims of Crime is crucial in addressing the needs of victims and their families. Advocating for victim rights, access to resources and support services, and promoting systemic changes that prioritize justice and healing for all are essential steps in creating a more inclusive and empathetic true crime narrative. By centering empathy, inclusion, and justice in true crime storytelling, we can strive towards a more compassionate and equitable representation of crime and its impact on individuals and communities involved. *** View the full article

Early in my second novel, Return To Blood, one of the main characters discovers the skeletal remains of a murdered woman in the cold black sand dunes of a deserted New Zealand beach. Addison (the young woman who discovers the remains) learns that the bones she discovered belonged to a young woman named Kiri who was the same age as her when she died. Both women, the deceased and the living, are young, headstrong, smart, Māori. Even as Addison’s mother, former detective Hana Westerman, is drawn into the search for who killed Kiri, Addison finds herself likewise drawn into an unlikely relationship with the dead woman, a relationship that crosses the barriers between this mortal world, and the other side. Matakite is, broadly, the Māori concept of the connection between the living and those who have passed – for Māori, the veil between the physical world and the metaphysical world isn’t a solid wall, it’s more like a bank of mist. Movement between the two worlds is entirely possible and is entirely usual; those who have passed away can make their way through the veil of mist and come to us in times of need, or vice versa. I am Māori, of the Te Arawa iwi (tribe), and my family has a strong matakite line. My Uncle Albie was a captain in the 28th Māori Battalion: he was shot in Cassino, Italy, missing presumed dead. After three months a missing person is declared dead, and a tangi (funeral rites) began back home in New Zealand. On the night before the tangi he came in a vision to my Auntie Oha, his wife, telling her he wasn’t dead, and he’d be home in a few months. A message was intercepted soon after that he was indeed alive, and in a German POW camp. He did indeed came home a few months later. When I was 20 years old I had a dream of my dad. He hugged me, in the dream. This was an unusual dream for me. Dad never really hugged me as an adult – that’s what dads of my generation and the generations after do. Not so much my dad’s era. But in the dream, Dad hugged me. He held me. It was warm and it was good. I woke up a little later to a phone call. Dad had died a half hour earlier. While I was dreaming. He had come in that dream, to hug me, a thing he never did, and to say goodbye. For Māori, none of this is supernatural, ooky-spooky, or remotely out of the ordinary. It’s how the world is. Those who have passed come to us when they are needed, when we (or they) are lonely, when they have something important to pass on. The following are a few of my all-time favourite dead characters from crime fiction, film and television, who come back through the misty veil, and who have something to say (usually, quite a lot). THE TREES (novel) by Percival Everett This book reads like the most maddening, unsolvable of locked-room crime novels, for a long time. Until it doesn’t. There is a breathtaking moment when we realise, at the heart of this fiction is a very real character: 14-year-old Emmett Till who was lynched in Money, Mississippi in 1955, after he was falsely accused by a young white woman of making salacious comments towards her. The murders happening today are vengeance, the lynched dead rising up and returning to put right the things that history failed to, by killing the descendants of the original lynch mobs who literally got away with murder. As one character says: “Less than 1 percent of lynchers were ever convicted of a crime. Only a fraction of those ever served a sentence.” In this comic-horror metaphor for the historic and ongoing brutality of the African-American experience, the Dead are coming back to say: “Time to pay up”. THE SIXTH SENSE (feature film) written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan “I see dead people” is one of the most iconic lines of dialogue from the 1990s or maybe any movie epoch. And it’s no spoiler alert (as surely everyone on earth including the living and the dead knows) to say that Bruce Willis doesn’t just pop in from the other side now and then in this movie. M Night Shyamalan’s lightning bolt of genius was to structure an entire 107-minute movie around a lead character who is dead but just doesn’t know it. THE LOVELY BONES (novel) by Alice Sebold “My name was Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered on December 6, 1973.” Such a sledgehammer of an opening, and so elegantly wielded. A wonderful idea that maybe doesn’t quite go the distance, but that works most beautifully in the understated matter-of-fact narration of the 14 year-old dead Susie. A melancholy crime story where the perp gets collared not by the cops, but by an icicle. EDGE OF DARKNESS (TV series) written by Troy Kennedy Martin This benchmark 1985 BBC series may not quite have stood the test of time in terms of visual storytelling, if you did it the disservice of putting it up against pretty much anything from the big-walleted streamers today. But it’s on pretty much every knowledgeable list of the best TV shows of all time, with good reason. An extraordinarily layered political thriller, a decades-before-its-time environmental scream to please wake up before it’s too late. But most of all, this show is a heart-breaking and profound depiction of parental loss. When the dead daughter (played by Joanne Whalley) turns up to on a busy street to have a chat with her grieving dad, it’s quite brilliantly underplayed – like she’s just popped back from buying a pint of milk, rather than from the dead – making the moment completely unforgettable. BEFORE YOU KNEW MY NAME (novel) by Jacqueline Bublitz A young woman’s beaten and strangled body is found by the Hudson River. Another New York tragedy, splashed across newspapers momentarily, before everyone else moves on. Almost everyone. In this blockbuster debut, the Australian woman who found the murder victim is driven to learn everything she can about ‘Jane Doe’, while the ghostly Jane Doe herself watches on as her identity becomes consumed into the daily routines of those who deal with the dead. Rich characterisation of female lives, fears, and desires, a crime story where it is the cops who are just bit players. TUPAC: RESURRECTION (documentary feature film) directed by Lauren Lazan Tupac narrates his own life, career – and even his own murder – using ingeniously excavated and repurposed audio recordings of the man himself. We see his bullet-riddled limo surrounded by crime scene tape in the middle of a Las Vegas street Las Vegas Street, while Tupac asks – “Who shot me? Shit, I dunno”. It sounds exploitative and creepy. 78% on Rotten Tomatoes and an Oscar nomination say otherwise. In a so-wrong-it-feels-right twist, this documentary is pointed to by many true believers as unimpeachable proof that Tupac is actually still alive. THE QUAKER (novel) by Liam McIlvanney Eagle-eyed readers will notice a few New Zealand connections in this list. Bublitz is a Kiwi author, Edge Of Darkness was directed by Kiwi Martin Campbell, The Lovely Bones was adapted by Peter Jackson. Maybe people from this end of the planet feel at ease with the idea of dead people hanging around. Here’s another NZ connection – McIlvanney grew up in Glasgow but now lives in New Zealand. This is a fictionalised retelling of crimes that haunt Scottish consciousness in the same way the Boston Strangler or Zodiac killings haunt US readers. In late 1960s Glasgow, ‘Bible John’ murders three women after nights out at a dance hall. He’s never caught. McIlvanney uses the real case as a springboard for his award-winning novel, but gives each of the victims – all dead at the start of the novel – a strong voice throughout the story. We get to know them and feel for them, making their loss deep and impactful, not just a way to kickstart a whodunnit. SUNSET BOULEVARD (feature film) co-written and directed by Billy Wilder You knew this was coming. An incredibly shot and framed opening scene of a man floating face down in a Hollywood swimming pool. The narrator promises to reveal to the audience what lead to this moment, and the film ends in the same place, with us realising that the narrator knows this story so well because (of course) the guy in the pool is him it’s him in the pool. *** View the full article

The sun was literally roasting Juan Martín de Albujar to death. It wouldn’t kill him, though. The hunger would do him in first. Or so he thought as his canoe drifted down a vast, uncharted river somewhere in the Amazon jungle. He hadn’t eaten for days, not since the gunpowder store exploded and the blame fell on him, the munitions master. There’s nothing a munitions master can do about a wind-tossed spark, but General Silva needed a scapegoat in order to abort the expedition, and it was imperative that the conquistadors get out of the jungle immediately: between the crocodiles, jaguars, and “savages”—their term for the Indigenous peoples—Silva and his 140 men wouldn’t have survived another day without gunpowder. If not for the sudden dearth of it, he likely would have shot Albujar. And he certainly would have executed him on the spot if the munition master’s many friends hadn’t pleaded for mercy. In a compromise of sorts, Silva dumped him into a canoe without any provisions and sent him floating down a river in Guiana (an expanse comprising parts of modern Guyana, Suriname, Brazil, French Guiana, and Venezuela). From Albujar’s point of view, it was the opposite of mercy: a slower, more tortuous death than a bullet. If he were to go ashore—assuming the crocodiles let him past—he stood to become supper for the jaguars before he could find anything to eat himself. The lush jungle, paradoxically, offered almost nothing in the way of food. If he could elude predators, he might be able to track down a rodent. Still, he would have to contend with scorpions, tarantulas, and the fourteen-inch-long centipedes that killed the tarantulas. Not to mention the hundred-odd species of venomous snakes, including the Amazon’s deadliest, the fer-de-lance, or spearhead, named for the way it attacks when disturbed (and because it has the sensitivity of a hair trigger, it’s disturbed frequently). Even the flora could kill a man—the wispy razor grass hanging from the branches, sharp enough to slit a throat, or the aptly named strangler fig roots dangling everywhere. But the greatest obstacle Albujar would face was ordinary, nontoxic flora: the roots, branches, vines, mosses, leaves, and lichens fighting for every last free inch of space that offered access to the odd ray of sunlight managing to squeeze through the forest canopy. Collectively they were impassable, the true king of the jungle, making rivers the only practical way of getting anywhere. Therefore, Albujar’s best hope—his only hope, really—was to stay in the canoe and pray he came upon civilization of some sort. As it transpired, he came upon a group of “savages.” Or, rather, they came upon him, snatching him from the canoe so quickly that he couldn’t be sure whether they were real or the latest concoction of his heat- and starvation-induced delirium. Next thing he knew, they were marching him blindfolded through steamy rainforest to an undisclosed location. Or maybe they had disclosed it; he couldn’t understand a thing they were saying. The march continued for the remainder of the day, the entire day after that, and then for another twelve days, with Albujar forced to endure step after excruciating step on what were likely bleeding, blistered feet, while rain-and-perspiration-dampened breeches chafed the insides of his thighs to bloody pulp and the mosquito bites riddling the rest of his body were slashed into open sores by the underbrush. The overhang, which the blindfold prevented him from ducking, was worse. And those difficulties were mere trifles compared to the terror: what would happen to him when they finally got wherever they were going? The savages were known to be extremely hostile to outsiders. The Aztecs, for example. When a stranger wandered into their midst, their standard practice was to take him to the top of one of their pyramids, slice open his chest, and wrench out his still-beating heart before ritually sacrificing him. At noon on the fifteenth day of the march, Albujar’s captors peeled off his blindfold, revealing stone and adobe homes as far as he could see. “Manoa,” they said, their first word he’d recognized. It meant “lake,” and, more pertinently, it was the name of a gold-rich city supposedly built by Incas who’d fled the conquistadors in Peru. Manoa had not only been General Silva’s objective but also that of dozens of other expeditions over the previous forty years, beginning in 1529, when conquistadors started hearing tales of the emperor who annually coated his body in turpentine and then rolled around in powdery gold dust, gilding himself, before canoeing to the center of a lake, diving in, and sloughing off the gold as an offering to the gods. El hombre dorado, the Spanish took to calling him. The golden man. The moniker soon became an alternative name for his empire, the existence of which was entirely plausible. After all, twice already in the sixteenth century, comparable dominions had been discovered in the New World: the Aztecs’ Tenochtitlán (modern-day Mexico City) by Hernán Cortés in 1519, and the Incan City of the Sun, Cusco (in Peru), by Francisco Pizarro in 1532. Those were small towns, however, Albujar saw now, compared to Manoa, which was so vast that it took him and his captors a day and a half to walk through it—no doubt heading for the pyramid where he would die. On the way he saw tens of thousands of small but solidly built homes, their residents naked save for body paint and substantial gold ornaments suspended from their ears, noses, and necks. They were all agog too: he was the first white man they’d ever seen. Ultimately his party came to a palace, where, to his surprise, rather than die, he was invited to stay as an honored guest. The ensuing months amounted to an extended vacation in a tropical paradise for him, his hosts catering to his every whim. During that time, he learned their language and used it to compile material for the report he planned to deliver to his countrymen, primarily about the emperor, whom the Manoans called Inca. Compared to Inca, Midas had merely a passing interest in gold. Inca’s palace was brimming with it: the guards’ armor, the tableware, even the pots and pans in the kitchens. The halls were lined with life-size golden and silver statues of every living thing in the kingdom, even the trees. Outside lay more gold still, piled like logs left to be burned. And the lake ritual wasn’t just an annual affair: every single day, Inca slathered his body—not with turpentine but with a whitish balsam of the Amyris plants and Calophyllum trees—before his attendants blew fine powdered gold dust onto him using hollow canes. At the end of Albujar’s seventh month in Manoa, when he prepared to go home, Inca allowed him to take as much gold as he could carry. The haul would translate into tremendous wealth and power for Albujar. Even better would be the look on General Silva’s face. Inca’s men guided Albujar back to the Orinoco, at which point his return to civilization might have been a straightforward few days’ canoe ride. Soon into his journey, though, he was attacked by Orenoqueponi tribesmen, who stole all the gold Inca had given him save for some beads inside a pair of large, dried gourds—the thieves must have assumed they were merely canteens. Albujar spent seven years in their captivity, until earning enough of their trust that he was able to escape. ___________________________________ Excerpted from Paradise of the Damned: The True Story of an Obsessive Quest for El Dorado, the Legendary City of Gold, by Keith Thomson. Copyright 2024. Published by Little Brown and Co. Reprinted with permission. All rights reserved. View the full article

Armchair traveling is among my favorite pursuits. And little else surpasses the joy of diving into the most luxurious corners of the world via the pages of a delectable mystery. Give me all the books set in far-flung locales, especially ones exploring places I haven’t yet tread with my own feet—and for the cherry on top, add in a murder to solve. Sign me up for an exclusive members club off the English coast, a sunny, ritzy compound in Lagos, a glamorous river boat cruising the Nile, an imposing hotel high up in the Swiss Alps, a private Greek island retreat, and a secluded Scottish lodge. The juxtaposition of luxury, cultural intrigue, a stunning setting, and, of course, murder proves dangerously delicious, and is the perfect foundation for a riveting thriller. My latest locked-room mystery, The Main Character, spotlights the newly-refurbished Orient Express train as it rolls down the Western coast of Italy, featuring guests invited aboard by a mysterious, bestselling author. But is the author orchestrating a dream trip—or a nightmare? The glamorous carriages and sun-soaked Mediterranean hotspots play quite well with murder—and so do the luxe destinations in the following electrifying mysteries. The Club by Ellery Lloyd. This propulsive romp of a thriller revolves around Island Home, a closely-guarded, ultra-luxurious British island resort. The A-list have convened for the opening weekend—but behind-the-scenes, tensions among the staff swell to a breaking point. Everyone has something to hide, from the CEO to the personal assistant to the housekeeping staff, and so do all the famous, wealthy guests who descend for the event of the century. Lloyd utilizes the sprawling, enticing locale to its max—a Land Rover submerged in the sea becomes a watery grave for dead bodies, and another memorable murder takes place within a lavish suite. The Club is hugely entertaining, with a satisfying finale twist I didn’t see coming. The Lagos Wife by Vanessa Walters. I was immediately sucked into this atmospheric thriller that revolves around Nicole, the missing foreign-born wife of a wealthy Nigerian man, and Nicole’s devoted aunt who flies from England to Lagos to investigate what happened to her niece. Lagos is exquisitely rendered; the city’s heat and bustle contrast with Nicole’s cold husband and calculating in-laws at the sprawling compound that lies at the center of the tale. Cultural norms and clashes abound, adding layered motives and bringing the mystery to a boil. And I was gobsmacked in the best way by the ending—chef’s kiss! Death on the Nile by Agatha Christie. The Queen of Mystery renders one of her finest in this thriller set on a river cruise down the Nile. Agatha Christie spent significant time in her beloved Egypt, both as a child and as an adult traveling with her archeologist second husband. (Her non-fiction account of those times in her memoir, Come, Tell Me How You Live, is not to be missed.) In Death on the Nile, Christie crafts a brilliant, riveting mystery with a most enticing backdrop. As a glamorous steamer boat filled with an array of intriguing passengers makes its way down the river, and excursions embark to pyramids and temples, it becomes clear that something sinister is afoot. Poirot’s little gray cells are in prime form in this, my personal favorite of the entire Christie oeuvre. The Sanatorium by Sarah Pearse. Pearse is one of the best at the luxurious destination thriller, and her first foray revolves around an opulent hotel built upon the ruins of a creepy old sanitorium high in the Swiss Alps. Our protagonist, a detective, arrives to celebrate her brother’s engagement, but she is thrust into an investigative role when his fiancé disappears. The thread counts are high—and so is the body count. Boasting icy gothic vibes, an avalanche rolling in, and a ritzy hotel with underground tunnels where dark, secret experiments were once conducted, this thriller is twisty and transportive. The Fury by Alex Michaelides. This imaginative and highly original thriller takes place on Aura, a private island off the coast of Mykonos. Old friends gather for an Easter getaway at the home of a reclusive ex-movie-star. Cue a weekend of fun…and murder. Split into five acts, the murder unfolds in onion-like layers and ties in classical Greek tragedy themes. As wind batters the island, cutting off access to the mainland, the luxurious estate is the scene of a perplexing crime. Michaelides is a master of deception in this captivating mystery that whisks readers away to Grecian olive groves, ruins, and beaches where the uber-rich cavort. The Hunting Party by Lucy Foley. This clever thriller takes place at a luxe lodge in the rugged Scottish Highlands. With a classic setup of a group of school friends reuniting for a destination trip, things quickly start to go off the rails. The property in the remote wilderness boasts small cabins, scenic mountain views, lush heather heaths, and a loch—how much more atmospheric can murder get? Add in a snowstorm whipping through the weekend to amp up the isolation and menace, and you have one tense, enjoyable read. I stand by this: Lucy Foley makes murder fun! *** View the full article

I have long held the belief that you can tell a lot about a cowboy by the way he treats his hat; the way he wears it, and the way he treats it when he takes it off his head. The same can be said about a musician and his instrument, the songwriter and his guitar. We reveal ourselves by the way we treat our favorite objects, and even more so the way we treat our animals, or the way we speak about others in their absence, and the way we treat both friends and strangers in their presence. I also believe it is the writer’s responsibility to reveal these very human things—in sum and substance, it is the very core of what we do. If we fail to reach for revelation, for insight, unique perspectives and observations, we are selling ourselves short, and likewise our readers. In my life, I have had the great joy to participate in all of these pursuits—horseman, musician, and writer—and for me, there is a distinct confluence, a synergy among them that has taught me a great deal about nature, people, and the world. In recent weeks, I have been doing a number of talks and signings in support of the release of the newest installment of the Sheriff Ty Dawson crime thriller series, Knife River. As has always been the case, my favorite part of those events is the audience Q&A, where readers get to delve deeper into the backstory, the characters, the musical references, and details about the writing process. But the question I encounter most frequently regards the origins of Ty Dawson, and the fictional locale Meriwether County, in which Dawson plies his trade as both a rancher and a sheriff. In fact, I often characterize the series as Longmire meets Yellowstone in the 1970s. But I think it is the time-period itself that sets the tone, and frankly, I love that these books are so evocative for many of us, and the fact that they take place during the 1970s conjures such a vast mélange of memories, images and feelings, and that the musical soundtrack of those times informed more than a mere backdrop, it was the atmosphere. * I like to say that I was born in South California (a term that is infrequently—if ever—used by anyone other than me, but I’ve always liked the look of those words on the page), birthed at the crossroads of the Eisenhower and Kennedy eras, reared in the shadow of Aquarius, and graduated from high school in the ballroom of the Hotel California. I was raised on a small ranch in San Juan Capistrano, grew up surrounded by horses, cattle, and untold acres of farmland (orange groves, strawberries and avocados in my case), learning to saddle and handle a horse (a pony, at first) by the time I had reached my fourth birthday. But music was my first love, and I took to the entire scope of it with my whole heart. So, after graduating college with a degree in Finance and Business, I promptly did what all good business students do: I started a country-rock band. I spent a number of years as a full-time working musician, then as a record producer, and finally as an artist manager—advising, listening, traveling, laughing, negotiating and sometimes arguing with some of the most fascinating people in the world; my exposure to the music of my youth informing every mile and every moment. Perhaps one of my most cherished chapters from that period came from my association with legendary music- and film-producer, James William Guercio, founder of the famed Caribou Ranch Studios. Situated in the rural front range of the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, Caribou Ranch became the iconic recording resort home-away-from-home for artists as varied as Paul McCartney, Elton John, Michael Jackson, Chicago and John Lennon (among dozens of others). This association formed the backbone of a fictionalized narrative thread in Knife River which to say much more about would spoil the fun… Suffice to say, though, that the thing that most effectively fuels creativity and inspiration for me as a writer is music. * As an author, my basic premise is this: Every story is about people. Whether it is science fiction, horror, whodunnit mystery, cozy or literary narrative, the way that people respond to a situation is what creates the trajectory of the story; the locale, setting, and historical timeframe creates the cultural backdrop within which the author’s people process their reality and how the fictional community perceives the story as it unfolds. So, if the jumping-off spot as an author is to create a entertaining and compelling narrative, the lens we employ in the telling of that story indelibly affects the story itself. This is where music comes in for me. I had once heard an interview with Pink Floyd’s guitarist, David Gilmour, in which he mentioned that during the recording of the band’s legendary and iconic Dark Side of the Moon album, he refused to listen to rock music at all (other than what the band themselves were creating in the studio). His justification was that he didn’t want to be influenced by anyone outside the band while they were writing, if he could help it; a statement that illustrates how deep and subliminal those influences can potentially be. I will admit, at the time I recall thinking his position seemed a little excessive, even a bit precious. I have come to eat my words. Turns out, I think David might well be right. The reason, I discovered, was that music—for me—was a sonic “cocoon” of sorts that formed the wall between the fiction I was writing (the environment I was endeavoring to create) and the real world I emerged into when my writing-day had concluded. As most writers already know, that emergence can come as a shock. As a result, when I outline my story I begin by creating a soundtrack, a playlist of sorts, that emotionally, lyrically, and sonically supports the overall tone I’m seeking to realize for the book as a whole. In fact, I use musical cues throughout my novels, if for no other reason than to remind the reader (and me) that there is a sonic ambience of sorts that accompanies the novel and forms guardrails to the tonal quality of a scene, and ultimately the work as a completed piece. At the request of many readers over the years, I now note the “soundtrack” I immersed myself in during the writing of the book in the Authors Notes and Acknowledgments section at the conclusion of each one. * I have a number of author friends who also have deep backgrounds in the arts: oil painting, filmmaking, acting, sculpting, dancing… the list goes on. Others among my writing colleagues have professional experiences that lie well outside of the artistic realm. But the differences among us are rooted primarily in perception, influenced by our life experiences and observations; and because we process information through different filters, we arrive at differing conclusions—or similar conclusions from an entirely different path or train of thought. It’s rather miraculous, really, and an enormous component of our common experience as artists. I really hadn’t intended to get overly “meta” about this writing thing: too much navel-gazing into our “process” rapidly becomes counter-productive. What works for me might not work for you. But all of us require creative nutrition, and a healthy understanding of the influences that inspire us—or ignite that creative passion inside us—these are the things that drive us to pursue the true heart of story we seek to tell. *** View the full article

ASSIGNMENT ONE Story Statement: Find the missing cross and the murderer without getting killed by narco-ranchers and return the cross to its rightful home in the wild borderlands. ASSIGNMENT TWO Antagonist: Wade Baudette knows that God chose him for great things. Born into poverty to shiftless, heathen parents, he left home the day after graduating high school and travelled Central and South America, scraping by on odd jobs, learning the language and connecting with the people. He learned that he was endowed with three undeniable qualities that propelled him to be an instrument of the Divine: faith, eloquence and ambition. Over the next two decades, he built his Miracle Ministry into an international brand and multimillion-dollar juggernaut, filling stadiums and proclaiming the “Prosperous Miracle of Belief.” He’s a true believer who never took a false or dishonest step. Then came the pandemic. Unable to fill stadiums, travel, or sustain his Dallas mansion and megachurch, he and wife Sharon decamped to her family’s ranch in West Texas. Even in the depths of poverty as a boy, he never knew the kind of desperation that consumed him as he watched his empire collapse. There’s nothing he won’t do to fulfill his destiny and re-establish his rightful position atop the spiritual hierarchy, even if it means the sacrifice of lesser lives. ASSIGNMENT THREE Breakout Title: Border Cross Alternatives: Crossbreed Daughter of None American Girl Not Molly Border Babe ASSIGNMENT FOUR Comparables: Winter Counts by David Heska Wanbli Weiden [2020, DEBUT fiction] Comparable to Border Cross in the following ways: · Setting: small town, rural, fairly isolated community but vast in terms of geographical area · Protagonist: recently returned to birthplace, where he must confront his own murky past and about which he has mixed feelings; minority identity; seeks justice · Spiritual element/theme/undercurrent · Cross-cultural and Indigenous themes · Drug issues and drug cartel · In the end, protagonist learns about his/her heritage and finds personal redemption · Gritty and raw, but with a heart Old Bones [2019] and the Nora Kelly series (Scorpion’s Tail [2021], Diablo Mesa [2022] and Dead Mountain[2023]) by Preston and Child · Set in American southwest · Historical artifact with cultural significance is at the heart of the mystery · Wilderness and nature play key role in atmosphere, mystery, themes, character and resolution · Within that context, (wo)man vs. man remains the primary conflict · Strong women characters with inner conflict · Long-hidden history erupting into present ASSIGNMENT FIVE Hook Line: A deputy sheriff must overcome a desperate killer and confront the truth about her own birth in order to expose the narco-ranching operation, recover a priceless artifact and return the artifact to its home in the remote US-Mexican borderlands. ASSIGNMENT SIX Inner Conflict Conditions: Terra grew up as Teresa Flynn. She has known from a young age that she was adopted. She has always had a small cross that her parents told her was with her at the time of adoption. They knew nothing about her biological parents. Raised in an Irish-Catholic family, she was lovingly taught to be color-blind and to disregard her light brown skin, black hair and dark eyes. She was no different from her fair-skinned, red-haired parents and (not-adopted) sister. Growing up, these earnest reassurances were undermined by manifest realities—e.g., she was short and restless, her sister statuesque and scholarly—and by her own feelings. Through her teenage years, the physical, emotional and psychological gap between her and her family became harder for her to ignore. The appreciation she felt for their attempt to elide the differences was supplanted by questions and resentment. When she joined the military after high school, she decided to research her adoption and discovered that her given name was Terra and that her birthplace was someplace called Hades, Texas. Google Maps showed a small town east of El Paso and not far from the Mexican border. Under “Mother’s Name” and “Father’s Name,” the papers indicated “Unknown.” She decides in that moment to call herself Terra, but her newfound knowledge brings mixed feelings and more questions: she wanted to learn more but was afraid of what she might find. She desperately wants to know more about her origin and identity, and possibly forge a connection to people—Does she have blood relatives?—and a place. But will her efforts only drive a greater wedge between her and her adopted family? And what if she learns something that only makes her feel like more of a misfit than she already is? Should she, instead, put her energy into repairing ties with her parents and sister and trying to forge more of a connection with them? She decides to take a job that will put her face-to-face with all these questions—and more. Scenario: She knows she is “from” this town but doesn’t feel like it, feels nothing like a sense of “hometown” or roots. Since moving to Hades six months ago, people ask her where she’s from and she doesn’t know what to say. What did she expect? Before, she had always said Boston. Since researching her adoption papers, the question of origin has become hopelessly complicated. After Alma (the woman who cared for her as an infant foundling) provides more details (trigger)—namely, that she was found as a newborn in the arms of her dead mother somewhere in the borderlands along the Rio Grande, that a migrant came upon her and rescued her, along with the small silver cross that hung from a chain around her mother’s neck—Terra’s first impulse (reaction) is to get away from this town, this job. As far away from the border as possible. She feels more intrigued by her own origin story and drawn to explore the borderlands, and yet horrified, saddened, afraid to learn more. Moreover, Alma tells her that the Atrial Cross stolen from the church must, like Terra herself, return to its origins. And that Terra herself must undertake that journey. Terra knows little about her origin and birth. Her adopted family has told her next to nothing, and despite her skin color and features, they tell her she’s as Irish Catholic as they are. As she grew to adulthood, she could no longer deny the feeling of disconnect from them and their whitewashed sense of her identity. Flouting her family’s expectations of her, she joins the Army after high school. She quickly earns a reputation for extreme toughness and a no-nonsense attitude. Hoping to learn more about who she is, after her discharge from the Army she has taken a job in the West Texas town where her adoption papers say she was first found. She wants to learn everything she can about her background and parents, though something tells her it’s complicated and that she may not like what she finds. Trigger: Within a few months of beginning her new job, Terra accompanies the sheriff on an emergency call to the border. Border Patrol is asking for assistance with a group of migrants on the run, some of whom are reportedly injured. When Terra arrives on scene, her heart is pumping. Something visceral stirs in her gut. She feels some kind of connection to these strangers fleeing for their lives. Without consciously deciding to do so, she finds herself disregarding the sheriff’s order and undertaking an arduous and treacherous effort to reach two migrants rimrocked in a canyon. Risking her own life, Terra eventually reaches a young mother clinging to the side of a rock face gazing down at the lifeless body of her little girl a hundred feet below. Terra calmly and skillfully harnesses herself to the mother and leads her to safety. Throughout the emotional ordeal of laying the child’s broken body in the woman’s arms one last time, then staying with the woman as she was taken to the county hospital, Terra remained more composed and self-controlled than most of her male colleagues. Later that evening, upon arriving home, Terra closed her apartment door, removed her gun, curled up in a ball on the floor and sobbed as she had never done before. She wants to be here, to search out her origin story, to ask the hard questions, but does she want the answers? She wants to do the law enforcement work, but does she want to see the pain, let alone feel it? Secondary Conflict An unremarkable cross hanging at a side altar of the Holy Angels Catholic Church in Hades, Texas, has recently been attributed with the power to work miracles. Desperate believers are flocking from afar to seek miracle cures, putting the town in the national spotlight. While Deputy Sheriff Terra Flynn finds such claims to be nutty, she can’t deny the cross’s importance: when the cross suddenly goes missing, the parish priest reveals to Sheriff Cal Wetter and Terra that it is actually a rare and valuable Aztec artifact with a complex origin far beyond Holy Angels. Belying her initial impression, the cross fascinates Terra with its unusual, hybrid identity. Early in the investigation, she begins to suspect that her boss, Sheriff Wetter, may have stolen it. He has been sheriff for many years and is leading the investigation, and she’s relatively new to the job and Hades, putting her in a delicate and tenuous position. What should she do about her suspicions? How can she pursue them without alerting the sheriff or one of his allies? What if she’s wrong? The extraordinarily rare cross captivates nearly everyone, and Terra knows that it must be recovered, no matter the cost. ASSIGNMENT SEVEN Hades, Texas. Population 7,238. Cutler County seat. A couple hours east of El Paso and an hour from the Mexican border. Summers are hot and dry, winters cold and windy. The horizon feels a long way off and skies are endless. Ranching is big around Hades, but it draws a smattering of tourists, adventure seekers and artists. Some key sub-settings depicted in the novel: · Known as an artsy town with galleries selling unusual gems, paintings and one-of-a-kind handcrafted products. Proud of its quaint downtown, with a handful of cafes, restaurants and coffee shops and a historic library overlooking the peaceful and inviting village green. A short drive from canyons, rock faces, mountains and the Rio Grande, it provides the perfect base for hikers, rock climbers, off-road cyclists and outdoor enthusiasts looking for wilderness adventure away from the crowd. · From the beginning, which depicts migrants on the run from cartel thugs while being pursued by a US sheriff’s deputy, to the end, where that same deputy, our protagonist, is being pursued by the villain, himself a collaborator with the cartel, the novel takes readers into rugged wilderness in its varying landscapes and topography. Between Hades and the border, vast open stretches of Chihuahuan Desert sit side-by-side with rolling hills that give way suddenly to dramatic cliffs and rock faces which, in turn, spill open and cascade down into the variable waters of the Rio Grande itself. Near the novel’s first plot point, the body of Cutler County Sheriff Cal Wetter is found along the banks of the Rio Grande. · Big Bend National Park and Big Bend Ranch State Park: two enormous areas of rugged natural beauty and deadly terrain rarely if ever trodden by human feet. Deep canyons, sheer drops, dramatic rock outcroppings, remote and little-known slot canyons. · Zino Ranch: 50,000 acres that span the distance between Hades and the Rio Grande. A vast spread of majestic isolation where it’s not unusual to stumble upon a carcass—even a human one—which could go undiscovered for days, weeks, or indefinitely. Home to Patsy Zino, whose husband of 55 years died of COVID two years ago. During his illness, it also became home to their daughter, Sharon and her husband Wade Baudette, who live in a separate house on the ranch. The ranch consists of numerous houses and guest houses along with countless other buildings and facilities, including barns, stables and, since COVID forced him out of his expensive Dallas location, a small bakery that produces Wade Baudette’s communion wafers for his Miracle Ministry. Zino Ranch is ostensibly a normal Texas ranch, on whose southern border are security cameras that help the US government catch drug smugglers. What the government doesn’t know is that the ranch foreman runs a narco-ranching operation. Herds of cattle are legally brought across the border onto Zino land, after which select heifers are herded and prodded into stalls where they are injected with a vaccination against Blackleg—all of which is normal and legal. During the vaccination, however, bags of fentanyl are swiftly and deftly extracted from the heifer’s vagina. The fentanyl is then moved to the bakery facility, where it is baked into communion wafers and distributed throughout the Southwest in unassuming station wagons marked with the Bread of Heaven logo. · In the two years since Wade and Sharon have lived on the ranch full-time, the Big House has become a reflection of Sharon’s extravagant taste. While the views from its generous windows and wrap-around porch are expansive and breathtaking, the visitor’s eye is drawn at least as irresistibly to the interior furnishings thoughtfully procured from around the globe. · For the past several months, claims have been made that a small cross in Holy Angels Catholic Church has been the source of miracles. These claims have gone viral, bringing a steady stream of hopeful and desperate pilgrims from near and far to the small town of Hades—and with them a throng of media. Outside the church, a long line of these miracle-seekers snakes around the church and down the block, a mix of migrants and Anglos, rich and poor, young and old, many manifestly hobbled, sick, weak or disabled. Once inside, they kneel before the cross and submit written prayers and petitions. Some pray in breathless silence, others wail and cry out, all with desperation in their eyes. Hades is ill-equipped to handle the spectacle, and conflict ensues: among the miracle-seekers, jostling and vying for position; for Holy Angels pastor, Fr. Tim Day; and especially for Sheriff Cal Wetter and his deputies, who have their hands full. · When the cross goes missing, Wade Baudette has an idea for shifting attention from Holy Angels to his own Miracle Ministry. He will host a Revival weekend. It is a spectacle attracting several thousand participants who gather beneath enormous marquee tents to be inspired by Baudette’s unique brand of preaching. Loudspeakers, huge video screens, cameras that livestream the event, port-a-johns, food trucks, and emergency medical people/vehicles, which come in handy when people start swooning and passing out (either from the Holy Spirit or the stifling heat, depending on one’s viewpoint). · In several scenes, the reader is taken behind the small house that the Dzul family has called home for over 100 years. Its current resident, Alma Dzul, is a 69-year-old artist, craftswoman, woodworker, stone-carver and blacksmith. She is a member of Holy Angels parish but also a practitioner of Indigenous and Aztec (spi)ritual dance. She privately performs this dance at night within a carefully cultivated and curated bower on the edge of her property that borders but is indistinguishable from an endless landscape of desert and mountain. In and around the well-stocked workshop that she first constructed as a young girl and has lovingly re-fashioned and extended ever since, she exercises her craft, using an array of chisels, knives, hand saws and hand planes, hammers and mallets, files, carving gouges, rasps and countless other tools and implements. Hanging from the walls and ceiling are colorful drawings of Aztec gods and figures, along with objects hewn from stone and carved in wood, earthy as well as brightly-colored objects and works of art depicting the sun, moon and figures from Aztec religious practice.

My father grew up in a small lumber mill town in Idaho called Potlatch, where the panhandle meets the pan. In 1953, Potlatch High School won the state championship in Track & Field. How’s that for a school with a graduating class of seven? How’s that for a school whose Track and Field team consisted of one person? My father! (Not at the time. Later. Dad didn’t even know Mom yet.) He won every event except the relay and that was only because the rules stipulated that a relay must consist of a minimum of three participants — or, in Dad’s case, 42.857143 % of his entire graduating class! My grandparents boasted a lot about that accomplishment, but my father did not. When I asked him why, he said it was because real sports meant being part of a team. I have always been terrible at team sports – unlike my father, I never knew what I was doing, what my teammates were doing, what they were going to do, or what they expected me to do. In high school I wrestled (sucked on offense, but hard to pin) and distance swimming. For me, the difference between writing for TV and writing books comes down to the difference between me and my father. Not in a Freudian sense — which applies to every writer in every discipline — but in the pursuit of my writing-as-sports-analogy as applicable to my early writing career when I had to choose between putting the bulk of my writing efforts into scripts or books. My natural inclination (long distance swimmer) suggested books, but … my wife, Brigitte, and I had a baby on the way and, in theory, script writing promised to generate income faster. So, I asked Dad what internal judo move he’d utilized on his team-player mentality that allowed him to triumph in a string of solo efforts to heroically win State. Dad said, “Ah, it’s all athletics. Just throw your body at it as hard as you can.” I translated that into the following advice: It’s all writing. Just throw your (fingers? eyeballs? head?) at (the blank page) as hard as you can. All writers face the blank page. That’s what makes us heroes. But where book-writers face that blank page in a vertiginous endless-void-like silence, scriptwriters face it engulfed by a deafening sonic tsunami of clamor. To me that clamor sounds like a pack of hyenas at dinner. A movie-writer friend describes a subsonic groan; another a banshee shriek; another his mother banging on his bedroom door and asking what he’s doing in there. Even before typing “Fade In” script writers hear that noise, and no matter the individual manifestation, like, we know the source: pre-existing demands by a Host of Others. These “Others” are not the amorphous and elusive “audience” that all writers — book and script alike — hope to reach. That audience can be muted in the same way that — depending upon our belief system — we scrape through the day in denial that gods, aliens, God, or whoever is running the computer simulation in which we all live is watching our every move. Scriptwriters face additional Others. Other Others. Flesh-and-blood human beings with faces — producers, directors, actors, etc. Not just indivduals but groups. Nay! Teams of people who, in the best-case scenario will partner up with the script writer to produce the script in its final form. Book-writers have only ourselves to please because the book is its own final form. Scripts are not their own final form. It is only the foundation upon which its final form can be realized: a moving picture. To become a moving picture, scripts require allies, colleagues, compatriots, partners, patrons, comrades, collaborators, co-conspirators, and friends. All of whom will turn on us like hyenas (which is why I hear hyenas) if we don’t deliver what they want, need, and desire. Which is why scriptwriters appear waving a script, saying, “Hey, everybody! What do you think of this?” Looking for affirmation. Book-writers appear, waving books, saying “Hey, everybody! Look what I did!” Presenting the book as an affirmation. To get the Host of Others on board, a script is required to prioritize story above all else. Starting with the person/studio/production company that is paying for the script and expects profits in return. Books can prioritize story if they want — but books have the option to dwell and ruminate, to stop and smell the roses, without causing a ruckus. When scripts ruminate and poeticize, story steps back, crosses its arms, and awaits its cue to take center stage. Meanwhile, the audience checks their phones, or leaves, and the writer is labeled “self-indulgent” or — rarely, but it happens — a “genius”. In a script, it’s easy-peasy in a script to show a character thinking. The scriptwriter simply types: The character thinks — but it’s nearly impossible to show what they’re thinking. We can help by typing: The character thinks about that distant afternoon when their father took them to discover ice. At which point the actor — quite rightly — protests, “How the hell am I supposed to convey that? Shiver? All that shows is that I’m chilly.” The camera can always luxuriate on an expressive face with eyes that reflect the universe. Just not for too long. What counts as “too long” has nothing to do with the writing and everything to do with whose face we’re luxuriating upon. Scripts face outward. All the internal longings and thoughts must be dramatized. Books can look both outward but also inward — telling us in poetic prose all about those longings in ways that get readers to highlight the lines and dog-ear the page. Scripts are about doing. Books are about being. Ask a script writer, “What is your script about?” and we should be able to do so in a sentence or two. Ask a book writer the same question and we usually start with, “Well, it’s about a quite a few things, actually…” Scripts tend to be centered around somebody who wants a tangible something. A thing or an event. Motivated by an internal, universal longing which must be made clear through dramatization. Because not everything in a book requires dramatization, a book can afford to, as an old professor of mine once said, “Dance around the shithouse.” A book doesn’t have to dance, but it can. Which sounds easier until the writer recognizes that, at every step, there are so many options for getting where we want to go. It’s easier to go wrong in a book and there’s nobody but the writer to take the blame. When a moving picture goes wrong, the script writer has lots of people to help fix it — and even more to take the blame. We can blame studio execs: “It would have been great if the script hadn’t been dumbed down for the audience!” We can blame directors: “It would have been great if you’d moved the camera more (or less) gotten some close-ups (or beauty shots).” We can blame editors: “It would have been great if the right image had been on the screen at the right time.” We can blame composers: “It would have been great if the score was sad during the sad times and exciting during the exciting times.” We can blame actors: “It would have been great if it hadn’t been for all that improvisation!” We can blame cinematographers: “It would have been great if you’d been able to see it!” We can blame Locations: “It would have been great if the mansion scene hadn’t been shot in a shed.” We can blame Sound: see cinematographers but substitute “hear” for “see”. We sound terrible but please, remember, when the project is a success, all those same people will take credit — a waste of time because only the director will be successful. Book writers have no one else to blame. At least not for the content. We are reduced to blaming — or praising — marketing. And the narrator of the audiobook. In any case, all a writer can do is learn from my father: Throw yourself at it. Give it your all. Leave the boasting to your parents and offspring. *** View the full article

Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Michael Bennett, Return to Blood (Atlantic Monthly Press) “Bennett highlights Hana’s struggle to reconcile the pull of her Māori roots against her inner cop, a struggle that serves as a compelling backdrop for this twisty, well-crafted mystery.” –Booklist Swan Huntley, I Want You More (Zibby) “Deliciously disquieting…strikes a delicate tonal balance between seductive and serious…Readers who have ever wondered, ‘Do I want to be her or be with her?’ will feel a chill up their spines.” –Publishers Weekly Fiona McPhillips, When We Were Silent (Flatiron) “Auspicious debut alert: Fiona McPhillips’ When We Were Silent is the strongest first novel I have read in ages.” –BookPage Jaclyn Goldis, The Main Character (Atria/Emily Bestler) “Delicious tension and drama. Grab your suitcase and board the Orient Express for a trip you won’t soon forget.” –Kirkus Reviews L.M. Chilton, Swiped (Gallery/Scout) “Chilton shines a blackly humorous light on male misbehavior and love in the age of the internet—plus the timeless and ridiculous societal pressure of finding “the one.” Bound to become a classic of the singles scene.” –Kirkus Reviews Stuart Turton, The Last Murder at the End of the World (Sourcebooks) “Don’t go in the water” takes on new meaning in Turton’s brainy thriller.” –Kirkus Reviews Ruth Ware, One Perfect Couple (Gallery/Scout Press) “Ware once again delivers the literary goods, with a cheeky sense of wit (including a “blink and you’ll miss it” nod to one of her own books), a propulsive sense of pacing, and a fiendishly clever conclusion.” –Library Journal Kaliane Bradley, The Ministry of Time (Avid Reader) “[Bradley’s] utterly winning book is a result of violating not so much the laws of physics as the boundaries of genre. Imagine if The Time Traveler’s Wife had an affair with A Gentleman in Moscow. . . You’d need a nuclear-powered flux capacitor to generate more charisma than Gore. . . His banter with the narrator crackles off the page . . . Readers, I envy you: There’s a smart, witty novel in your future.” –Ron Charles, The Washington Post Hart Hanson, The Seminarian (Blackstone) “A study in contrasts, this book is by turns bloody, gritty, and violent, heartwarming, thought-provoking, and laugh-out-loud funny. An unusual, inventive, unforgettable read that will appeal to mystery aficionados looking for something different.” –Booklist Graham Moore, The Wealth of Shadows (Random House) “Based on astonishing true events, The Wealth of Shadows is both a gripping, cinematic story of wartime subterfuge, and a powerful reminder of how even the most unlikely people can become resistance fighters during times of crisis.” –Flynn Berry View the full article

The first time I went to Adelaide the first thing everybody told me about the city was its specifically non-criminal antecedents. Adelaide, I was repeatedly told, is the major Australian city not originally established as a penal colony by the British. Today Adelaide is a jewel of Victoriana and art-deco architecture, enjoys a close proximity to serious wine making country, and is home to a slew of fantastic arts and literary festivals. But it does have a rather interesting crime history too – particularly true crime. In 1948, a well-dressed, seemingly undamaged, male corpse was discovered on a beach in Adelaide with a half-smoked cigarette left by his side. It became known as the Tamam Shud Case, after a tiny piece of rolled-up paper with these words printed on it was found sewn into the dead man’s pocket – words from Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. Suicide or a particularly clever murder? And if so, who was killed, who was the murderer, and what was the motive? It’s Adelaide’s longest running unsolved case. Kerry Greenwood’s Tamam Shud: The Somerton Man Mystery (2012) reinvestigates the case. Now those in the know will realise that Greenwood is also the author of the bestselling Miss Phryne Fisher books (and the hit TV show). And so her interest in the Tamam Shud case had tipped over into fiction – Tamam Shud (2021) – with a returning Phryne Fisher (who is usually Melbourne-based) in 1948 (rather than her usual Jazz Age persona) returning to Australia having served with the French Resistance during the Second World War. She stumbles upon the Tamam Shud man on Somerton Beach. The Adelaide police are baffled, and Phryne recognises the Tamam Shud clue as a coded message. Then there is the Beaumont Children mystery, three kids that disappeared from Glenelg beach, near Adelaide in January 1966. The three siblings had left their Adelaide home on Australia Day and set off for the beach. By the end of the day, none of the children had returned home and the case remains unsolved. Suspects, physics, baffled cops, and obviously distraught parents ensued. But all to no avail. There are a number of books on the case, the most famous and well-known probably being Alan Whiticker’s Searching for the Beaumont Children: Australia’s Most Famous Unsolved Mystery (2011). And even now, nearly 60 years after the children’s disappearance, new evidence, ideas and books keep appearing, most recently author Stuart Mullins and former South Australian police detective Bill Hayes’s Unmasking the Killer of the Missing Beaumont Children (2023). There’s also a good novel loosely based on the case by Stephen Orr, Time’s Long Ruin (2011). And a final true crime linked to Adelaide – the infamous Snowtown murders. In 1999, several bodies were discovered in barrels inside at bank vault in the South Australian town of Snowtown, up the coast from Adelaide. The Snowtown murders were Australia’s most horrific and sustained serial killing. Again the case has led to a number of books (and a very good 2012 movie by Justin Kurzel). Former police reporter, Jeremy Pudney, covered the case and wrote The Bodies in Barrels Murders (2005). Pudney investigates those who were caught and jailed (after a prolonged investigation), but asks why they committed the horrific crimes they did and just why South Australia has a reputation for producing the country’s highest number of serial killers? A question, incidentally, also posed by Stephen Orr (see above) in his book, The Cruel City: Is Adelaide the murder capital of Australia? (2011) that looks at some of the city’s most infamous crimes and asks why Adelaide? Enough true crime. Let’s look at some crime fiction set in Adelaide and South Australia. Best selling Australian author Jane Harper found success with The Dry (2016) featuring her character Federal Police Agent Aaron Falk. He reappeared in Force of Nature (2017) and then, though perhaps Harper is better known for setting her novels in the remote Australian Outback, heads into South Australian wine country in book three of the Aaron Falk series, Exiles (2023). A mother disappears from a busy festival on a warm spring night. Her baby lies alone in the pram, her mother’s possessions surrounding her, waiting for a return which never comes. A year later Aaron Falk begins his investigation of the disappearance. Garry (yes with two ‘r’s) Dicher is a household name to Australian crime writing fans and a South Australian. Among his many books and various series are the Constable Paul Hirschhausen novels. The series starts with Bitter Wash Road (2013) – published as Hell to Pay in the USA – featuring Hirschhausen, a whistleblowing cop forced out of the Adelaide force and posted to a remote one-cop station in the Flinders Ranges, the South Australian wheatbelt. Thrill killers on the loose prove quite a challenge, but it’s not as simple as that. Meanwhile Hirschhausen has his own problems – he’s called a “dog” (serious Australian insult) by his fellow officers as he receives pistol cartridges in his mailbox. Paul Hirschhausen returns in Peace (2019). It’s Christmas and he walks in on a a strange and vicious attack that sickens the community while Sydney Police are asking his help looking into a family living. on a long forgotten back road. There’s more Hirschhausen in Consolation (2021) and Day’s End (2023), both set in rural South Australia. Gill D Anderson was born in Edinburgh and immigrated to Adelaide where she set her novel Hidden From View (2019) featuring Police Sergeant Lynn Gough investigating domestic abuse cases. Something Anderson knows about given her background in social work background and the field of Child Protection. And finally, as ever something a bit different and highly recommended. This time a Young Adult novel – Adelaide foothills resident Vikki Wakefield’s All I Ever Wanted, which won the 2012 Adelaide Festival Literary Award for Young Adult Fiction. Mim knows what she wants, and where she wants to go. Anywhere but home-in a dead suburb and with a mother who won’t get off the couch. Her two older brothers are in prison, so now Mim has to retrieve a lost package for her mother. Does this make her a drug runner? She’s set herself rules to live by, but she’s starting to break them. All I Ever Wanted is both a thriller and a gritty romance and though it’s a grim world Mim inhabits her character is uplifting. A great Young Adult find from South Australia. Despite the true crimes we’ve noted above, Adelaide is a great city – the sun shines bright, and the wines are great. But like everywhere this slice of South Australian paradise also has its dark side and that’s where Crime and the City inevitably goes! View the full article

“Aunt Betsy, what do we do with these boxes? They’re filled with paper,” my nephew shouted across the large playroom. In preparation for the estate sale, we were cleaning out my mother’s office, something that hadn’t been done in 32 years. We’d sorted through medical files, personal diaries, books, magazines, photographs and even empty wine crates. The only paper that we’d found to date was in boxes that contained unused stationery—engraved with her name and address. I looked at the boxes. They were the same vanilla-colored glossy cardboard that held letter-size stationery. “Bring it here so I can look at it.” I opened the first box. The top sheet was typewritten with the words Dune House by Eunice Mays Boyd. I thumbed through the perfectly clean manuscript set in San Francisco. The second page read, “Dedicated to Marilyn Reed Roberts”. My mother. It was finished sometime between 1948 and 1950 when she was married to my father. The second box was much lighter. I opened it. Slay Bells, a Christmas murder mystery also set in San Francisco. The third box looked more worn and held, One Paw Was Red. I flipped the pages in this last box and saw a familiar name, F. Millard Smythe. I understood, it was the fourth mystery set in Alaska. Her three published mysteries took place in Alaska, featuring a small, unassuming grocer and amateur sleuth. Eunice won awards and received accolades for her Alaska cozy mysteries Murder Breaks Trail, Doom in the Midnight Sun, and Murder Wears Mukluks. In my hands, I held the fourth book in this series. The last of the Alaska mysteries. Eunice Mays Boyd was my godmother and I called her Nana. I knew she had written a book set in Europe which she began when she retired from the University of California; I’d read that manuscript when I was twenty years old and in college. The plot was clever with numerous twists and red herrings—a classic Christie-style “whodunit”. I read the manuscript, typed on yellow draft paper with penciled-in corrections, in one sitting. Her last five years were filled with travel to Europe and this mystery was set in France with a bus tour traveling from the Roman ruins of Nîmes to the medieval walled city of Carcassonne. She died soon after I read the book. When her house was cleared, my mother rescued that manuscript and gave it to me. The 250 pages were held together on a brown pressboard clipboard. For forty-five years I kept that manuscript in its clipboard. When my time became more flexible, I thought it would be fun to see some of the sites she described in A Vacation to Kill For. In 2014, I spent five days in Carcassonne where I re-read the book, walked the places she described, and confirmed her descriptions. At the end of the trip, I wondered what might be involved to publish this murder mystery. That was as far as I got…a thought. But that all changed when I discovered the other three unpublished murder mysteries. I read them. I knew the timeframe for Dune House. Slay Bells, also set in San Francisco was near the Stonestown shopping center, where we lived between 1957 and 1963. One Paw Was Red had to have been written after Murder Wears Mukluks (1945) and before Dune House between 1945 and 1947. Eunice had lived in Fairbanks, Alaska for twelve years. She began to write as a way to pass the long winter nights and dark winter days. She wrote about the Alaska she knew—the Alaska of the 1930’s and early 1940’s just before the United States entered World War II, when she divorced and returned to her family’s home in Berkeley, California. Murder Breaks Trail (1943) was followed by Doom in the Midnight Sun (1944) then Murder Wears Mukluks. Nana regularly participated in the Berkeley Writers Circle. I remember her going to meetings on Saturdays then coming home enthused with ideas and new, clever ways to murder. She read two to three cozy mysteries a week and prided herself on identifying the killer well in advance of the denouement. With her bed-ridden mother, Mabel Ainsworth Mays, we watched Perry Mason and I would engage in the conversation and try to find the guilty party—Nana always won! One day, when I came to her home for a routine bi-monthly weekend, she gave me a Nancy Drew mystery. I finished it that night and the next morning she pulled three small leather bound books out of the bookcase. Her books. She said the publisher, Farrer Rinehart, had given her these special copies. Next, she brought out a hardback book with a red and white cover—The Marble Forest (1950). She proudly opened the book to the first page filled with signatures. “Nana, what’s this? Why are there so many signatures,” I asked. “A group of us decided to write a mystery together. Each of us wrote at least one chapter. We were all members of the San Francisco chapter of Mystery Writers of America. Twelve of us participated and I wrote the third chapter, which is why I am third in sequence.” I counted the autographs, “But there are only eleven autographs.” I looked at the book’s cover and saw the author was Theo Durrant. “Okay, but who’s the author?” “All of us but one. Virginia Rath (The Dark Cavalier) died in 1950 before we got copies of the book and couldn’t sign. Her health was failing so we decided to use letters from the healthy eleven, so…Theo Durrant has eleven letters. The name was created by using one letter from each of our names. I am the “E”, Anthony Boucher is the “H”. Look.” It wasn’t obvious. Then she scribbled on a piece of paper how the name was derived: Terry Adler (On Murder’s Skirts) AntHony Boucher (The Case of the Seven of Calvary) Eunice Mays Boyd (Murder Breaks Trail) Lenore Glen Offord (Murder on Russian Hill) Dana Lyon (The House on Telegraph Hill) Cary LUcas (Unfinished Business) Richard Shattuck (The Wedding Guest Sat on a Stone) William WoRley (My Dead Wife) Allen Hymson (San Francisco writer) Florence OsterN Faulkner (Wedding for Three) Darwin Teilhet (Death Flies High) I opened the book to the blurb which began, “How long could a four-year old girl live buried in a casket?” It scared me so I closed the book but never forgot the opening. The Marble Forest (1953) became the basis for the move Macabre (1955) starring Jim Bacchus. When I was older, we watched it on television with my godmother. Although proud of her accomplishment, she pointed out all the places the film either cut corners or didn’t follow the book. The result—we saw the movie at least two more times with and without commentary. Later I discovered that three of the authors used pseudonyms. Anthony Boucher (or William White) was a well-known local author, writer and critic. The other pseudonyms belonged to women who wrote under men’s names (Allen Hymson = Alma Hymson, Richard Shattuck = Dora Richard Shattuck). These writers were born in the first decade of the twentieth century and were avid readers during the Golden Age of Mystery Writing dominated by the British authors Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers. The SF Bay Area writers were all in their forties, had honed their skills and created clever whodunnits in local venues. They were part of the Golden Age of American Cozy Mystery Writers. In all those years, after the success of The Marble Forest/Macabre, she wrote but seemingly stopped in the early 1960’s. She never mentioned her unpublished manuscripts. It wasn’t until she retired that she put fingers to keys. *** What to do? I now had a critical mass of manuscripts. I felt an obligation to honor Eunice’s memory and to let others enjoy her skillful, intelligent writing. Thus began my journey. First step was to convert the typed pages into a Word document—Done. The next step was a manual edit. Then, a local editor suggested, why not get the rights to her published books and ensure I had the literary rights. I thought I had these rights, but couldn’t find a copy of her will so a literary lawyer pointed out that possession didn’t count for nine-tenths of anything. Fortunately, I grew up knowing members of my godmother’s extended family. Even though Nana had no children, her niece, Nancy, and family visited the Berkeley home frequently. Nancy was also friends with my mother and they kept in contact through the years. Well, up to a point. Nancy died decades ago and I’d lost touch with her children after Eunice’s death in 1971. Enter LinkedIn. I found her grandnephew and sent him a note. We connected online. He suggested I get in touch with his brother who was the keeper of their family’s pioneer history. I did. With their help, I was able to identify her surviving heirs: their sister and Eunice’s nephew, Harry. Back to the internet. I spent hours figuring out which Harry Mays it was, deduced the email, then bingo, found the phone number. I dialed it and miraculously a woman answered the landline. “Hi, I’m Eunice Mays Boyd’s goddaughter. My mother was Mal Matys. I knew Harry’s parents George and Harriett and I was the little girl at the house on Forest Avenue.” “I remember Mal well,” she replied. We chatted for a while and she told me Harry wasn’t very well. She put Harry on the phone and I told him about the books and my desire to publish them. “So, would you like me to sign a release?” “Yes!” I replied. The lawyer wrote a release and I sent it immediately to Harry with two copies and a self-addressed stamped envelope. Ten days later I had his signature. Two weeks later the grandnephews and grandniece gave their permission and six weeks later Harry was dead. Whew—just in the nick of time. I had what I needed to publish the new books, and, decided to republish her “classic” works. My task escalated from four books to seven. But…I needed the rights to republish her Alaska mysteries. The internet came to the rescue with a copy of the standard Farrar & Rinehart contract from 1943 which required giving them 90-day notice. Notification—done. I was good to go. Next step…find a publisher. I contacted two publishers who reviewed books submitted directly by authors. Otto Penzler at Mysterious Press wrote back immediately saying that he remembered reading Murder Wears Mukluks and found it delightful. He would be happy to republish her Alaska mysteries and maybe One Paw Was Red. Remarkably, the next day I received a reply from Level Best Books wanting to learn more. Verena Rose was intrigued because Eunice had written during the Golden Age. After reading Dune House, Level Best agreed to publish all seven books. Dune House and Slay Bells were published in December, 2021 and A Vacation to Kill For was published in 2023. Murder Breaks Trail will be republished in 2024 followed by Doom in the Midnight Sun. Murder Wears Mukluks and One Paw Was Red are in the future queue. It was a great way to pass time during the Pandemic lockdowns. My journey has refreshed many memories and reconnected me with Eunice’s family. It also introduced me to the world of writing and publishing. At the time, the Level Best team ran Malice Domestic. I decided to attend and had no idea of what to expect. I was overwhelmed by the availability of free mysteries, the ease of meeting and talking with accomplished writers. Maureen Jennings (Murdock Mysteries) even suggested that F. Millard Smyth’s series could become a television series set in 1940s Alaska. I was asked to participate as a last minute replacement on a panel to talk about what makes a good cozy—some internet research and Nana’s books helped me survive the experience. It was fun to meet other Level Best authors and be part of a group. I am proud to have undertaken this journey. It has been hard work, but I’ve learned. It is an adventure to enter into an entirely new discipline. Nana inspired me to write my own books. My medical thriller The Goldilocks Genome (May 21, 2024 publication date) and HEPATITIS Beach, a non-fiction coming-of-age adventure about my doctoral fieldwork experience studying hepatitis B virus in Melanesia. The lessons I’ve gleaned for my own literary estate include the importance of filing a copy of all book-related contracts with one’s lawyer and specifically gifting one’s literary rights. I am grateful for the experience of bringing Eunice’s “lost” murder mysteries to life and for the time I spent with her. A time capsule is a gift too precious to ignore. *** View the full article

It’s that time of year again. There’s a new Guy Ritchie film in theaters. Last year, I went to the movies and experienced the soul-warming balm of the nearly-incoherent heist movie Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre, and this year, I wanted to experience that again. So, I took myself to see Ritchie’s new film, The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, which seemed like it would be a heist story set during World War II. When the movie began, a title card flashed that said the film was based on true events, and I was like, right, it’s based on the factual event of World War II. But I wasn’t open-minded enough. Turns out, the film is specifically based on a real-life and very cockamamie WWII mission called “Operation Postmaster” that was only declassified in 2016. Upon learning that, I wondered for a moment why Ritchie had not called the film “Operation Postmaster,” but then I remembered that his movie last year was called “Operation Fortune,” and it’s a known fact that you can’t have two operations so close together. Speaking of which… I was surprised to hear about the existence of “Operation Postmaster” because of that very rule! The British are already known for an absolutely bananas, top-secret WWII mission to turn the tide of the war: Operation Mincemeat. I have read the book Operation Mincemeat, seen the movie Operation Mincemeat, and seen the West End stage musical Operation Mincemeat, and I thought that this was the only absolutely insane, t0tally confidential war operation that the British had pulled off. But no, turns out there’s another one, too. And that’s the one this movie is about. Clearly, the educational merits of The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare are manifold. I was surprised to learn anything from this movie because, truthfully, I’ve never learned anything from a mid-career Guy Ritchie movie besides the fact that I really like a movie in which bad guys carrying guns have slower reaction times than the good guy who is carrying just one knife. I like a movie about a heist team made up of several hulking, wisecracking men and a single cool woman! I like a movie where something goes wrong with the plan that a crew has meticulously worked out to the very last detail and now they have to improvise a whole new plan and it works anyway. I want a large body count provided by the same stuntmen over and over and you can actually tell, you’re like “oh that’s the guy who got nailed with the fishhook in the opening” or whatever. I like a movie where people are so British, they can barely speak English. I like a movie with a cast that includes Cary Elwes. I like all this, and Guy Ritchie has never not given it all to me. What is The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare about? It almost doesn’t matter! But I’ll explain anyway. Henry Cavill plays G.H. “Gus” March-Phillips, a military officer of some kind who’s currently serving jail time because he doesn’t play by the rules. This is great news. I also love a movie in which no one follows the rules. If someone follows the rules, I will walk out. Anyway, Winston Churchill (Rory Kinnear, only I didn’t realize that he was supposed to be Winston Churchill for like 2/3rds of the movie because he doesn’t look or sound like Winston Churchill and why would you cast Rory Kinnear as Winston Churchill?) and Cary Elwes, who plays a military commander they call “M,” want March-Phillips to lead a secret, unofficial, unsanctioned, and illegal renegade mission. It’s very cool. He has to take a crew down to the Atlantic-side African island of Fernando Po, where the Nazis are keeping a giant ship that they use to store all their equipment to maintain the U-boats which patrol the Atlantic Ocean. The plethora of U-boats has been preventing American ships from bringing aid to Britain and the Allies. So, if March-Phillips blows up that ship, the Brits will basically stymie the Nazi control over the Atlantic. Sounds like a plan! March-Phillips says he’s down to help, but he needs a badass crew. He has a few guys in mind: an Irish firearms virtuoso who hates the Nazis (Hero Fiennes Tiffin), an explosives weirdo (Henry Golding), a Swedish one-man-killing-machine (Alan Ritchson), and his best friend, Geoffrey Appleyard (Alex Pettyfer), I guess because they’re best friends. So, the British government is like, hm okay, we’ll let you include these guys as long as you add to your team 1.) this really cool agent (Babs Olusanmokun) who has set up a contact in Fernando Po already, and 2.) a very sexy woman (Eiza Gonzalez) who knows how to do everything and who will have a million costume changes despite traveling with only one small valise. March-Phillips is like, you drive a hard bargain, but you’ve got a deal. So then, yeah, they all go to Fernando Po and pull off the mission. Eventually, March-Phillips recruits another cool guy, Kambili “Billy” Kalu (Danny Sapani), who has his own crew of cool guys, and they all join in together. There are snags that require some fancy-footwork, and a Nazi or two that Eiza Gonzalez has to seduce, but they all overcome all these obstacles. Honestly, it doesn’t even seem that hard. And that’s it, that’s the whole movie. There is no complicated multi-act structure. There are no sophisticated themes. There is absolutely no character development. And that’s fine! Who needs character development? This is a movie about several tough men and a very cool woman who go on a journey to kill Nazis and sabotage their large-scale plans for World Domination. I fail to see how anyone could develop character beyond that, anyway! And sure, sometimes the action scenes are a little confusing, like it’s hard to know where the characters are, exactly, in relation to each other. But you know what, that’s also fine! They know! The characters know. When I watch a Guy Ritchie movie, I’m not going to backseat drive. I know we’re going to get where we’re supposed to go and I don’t care if it doesn’t make sense. Everyone involved appears to be having a bloody great time, and so am I. The only thing that would have made this movie more enjoyable is if I were also eating an entire family-size bag of Doritos. The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare is a chipper extravaganza of nonsense black-ops, a jolly-diverting entrant in the canon of “Nazi killing” movies. It’s like if The Dirty Dozen weren’t gritty or unhinged. Actually, it is a great movie for people who wanted to watch Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds but were worried that it might be too shocking and bloody. And, you know what? I learned stuff from this movie. One thing I’ll say seriously is that we as a country are not taught enough about the Nazi occupation of Africa and this movie reminded me to go do more research on that topic. But, and I’m returning to being unserious now, perhaps the thing I learned the most from The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare is that the guys who ran MI5 or whatever during the 1940s probably had the same psychological profile as Guy Ritchie—a flair for dramatic narrative and a devil-may-care attitude about the finer points of execution. It all checks out. Overall, I had a great time. I do have a few questions, though. I’ve laid them out as follows. There are a million scenes of people being obsessed with their gold cigarette lighters. British brigadiers, scrappy agents, Nazi scum… they’re all yanking out and flicking open their cigarette lighters, even when no one is lighting anything. Why is that? Literally, though, why did they cast Rory Kinnear as Winston Churchill? Actually, let me rephrase this. Why did they cast Rory Kinnear, a man who doesn’t look a thing like Winston Churchill, as Winston Churchill and not Darkest Hour-the hell out of him, prosthetics-wise? He’s clearly wearing some makeup, but it is not enough and therefore doesn’t work. Why would they not lean into the physical “Winston Churchill”-ness of the character of Winston Churchill? Aren’t there like six hundred Winston Churchill-looking actors just walking around London? Why wasn’t one of them captured and brought to set? Honestly, “Rory Kinnear” is an even weirder cast because (while he’s a talented actor and deserves widespread recognition), he’s not famous enough for this to be some fun, forgivable stunt casting. You know who they should have cast, if they wanted to do stunt casting for Winston Churchill? Mike Myers. I think that would have been great. At one point in the film, Eiza Gonzalez wears this denim outfit that appears to be a tight-fitting romper, but is revealed to be a set of separates; a tiny, midriff-bearing jacket and high-waisted pants. Is this outfit historically accurate? I’m not being an asshole; I really want to know. Because it’s really cool. When does it come out on DVD? View the full article

“I gave her my ugliness.” This is what I said to my editor when we first spoke about El, the protagonist of my debut novel Man’s Best Friend. El’s issues—her selfishness, her unavailability—were very much my issues in my early twenties. I was the friend who dodged phone calls, the employee who might not make it in on Monday, the girlfriend of questionable loyalty. In my attempt to be no one to anyone, to outrun the potential for abandonment, I hurt the people in my life, myself most of all. El is much more destructive than I was: my own misadventures were hardly pulse-pounding. I walked so El could run, deep into her darkness. She was never written to be aspirational. Novels about destructive women have always been my favorites. In the lead up to the release of Man’s Best Friend, I’ve been thinking about fiction in this tradition, and wondering why it is that problematic female protagonists inspire such love/hate reactions from readers, why I fall so firmly on the love side. I had my theories, but I decided to start by looking at the science. Women are, surprise surprise, the safer sex. “Few… have examined gender as a potential moderator of the emotional dysregulation associated with violence,” one study points out, though it asserts that men are more likely to exhibit violent behavior than women. Another study confirms that women “more rarely and/or less intensely” behave in a self-destructive manner than men i.e. are less likely to binge drink or drive recklessly. What these studies could not answer for me is why women cause less harm, on average, than men. It’s a question of nature or nurture: are women less destructive because of some genetic predisposition, or because we’re coached into compliance? [A]re women less destructive because of some genetic predisposition, or because we’re coached into compliance? When I read novels that center destructive women I feel a pulse beneath the words, a dark song of repressed despair that resonates in my body. If women ruminate on the harmful and the selfish, if the darkness is within us, can we really chalk it up to evolution that it’s less likely to express itself outwardly? Much more convincing to me is the idea that, within the confines of the patriarchy, women behave in accordance with cultural expectation because it’s the only way to be acceptable, likeable, loveable. This goes doubly for women of color, who are saddled not only with the burden of patriarchy but of white supremacy, too. As Raven Leilani has said, “Unlikeablility is a very different thing to navigate for Black women… What we call unlikeability in white women, I think Black women feel, but have to suppress in order to survive.” Yes, there are many excellent novels by women of color with unlikeable or destructive female protagonists, Leilani’s Luster among them, but I doubt anyone would argue that women of color author and successfully publish such novels more than white women do. All this to say, it’s my belief that oppressive social constructs are deeply entangled with women’s decreased potentiality for destruction, self-centered or otherwise, and thus the destructive woman on the page (particularly if she isn’t white) feels transgressive—and, for some readers, unsettling and unwelcome. On Goodreads or Bookstagram, critiques of harmful female protagonists aren’t often fleshed out. You’ll see something like: insufferable whiny DNF’d at 15% or I’m all for a complicated MC but this?? Sometimes, though, the takes are sweeping, full of observations about how “unhinged” characters are all well and good, but this character felt unhinged for unhinged’s sake. Don’t even get me started on the readers who rate American Psycho five stars but need their destructive women to have some spelled out tragic #MeToo or capital T trauma backstory to justify their wrongdoing. And then there are those readers like myself, who love a destructive female protagonist. It would be nice if this were a reflection of progressive values, but really it’s just my taste, informed, I suppose, by my own life experience. It’s taken a lot of time and effort to cultivate compassion for my past self, the twenty-two year old whose abandonment issues and untreated alcoholism made her a not so great roommate, daughter, friend. When I see pieces of my self-destructive past glimmering like shards of glass through someone else’s prose, I feel a certain comfort, a gratitude that I’m not in that broken place anymore. And even when I don’t identify, even when I confront a violent and irredeemable protagonist who I don’t love but love to hate, I am riveted by the author’s transgressive act in portraying such a woman. I present to you now a list of excellent novels about destructive women. These authors use the page to liberate woman from the constraints of culture, allowing her to be what is not allowed or not anticipated, and in doing so don’t condone harm but expand our understanding of the human condition. Pizza Girl by Jean Kyoung Frazier One of my favorite reads in recent years, this novel tells the story of Jane, a pregnant 18-year old pizza joint employee who becomes obsessed with a female customer. Jane neglects every caring person in her life as well as her unborn child (she drinks throughout her pregnancy), instead focusing her attention and empathy on the customer. The sophistication of Frazier’s narration is especially impressive; she has a gift for demystifying Jane for the reader while allowing Jane to remain eighteen, barely adult, a mystery to herself. Wideacre by Philippa Gregory Back in the mid-2000s everyone read The Other Boleyn Girl in anticipation of the Natalie Portman/Scarlett Johanssen feature adaptation, but Wideacre is Gregory’s debut novel. The protagonist is a squire’s daughter, Beatrice Lacey, and she is queen of the Faustian bargain. I won’t spoil all the twists and turns, but be forewarned: nothing taboo is off the table in this novel. Beatrice graduates from one heinous act to the next, all to keep hold of her beloved land, the locus of her identity. The Pisces by Melissa Broder Lucy, a PhD student reeling from a break-up, moves to Venice Beach for the summer and, while coming to terms with her love addiction, becomes infatuated with a merman. The vulnerability of this protagonist is so acute it will no doubt inspire skin-crawling discomfort for those who haven’t become acquainted with their shadow selves. I love this book: you might, too, if descriptions of U.T.I.s after hotel bathroom anal sex are your thing. My Men by Victoria Kielland (translated by Damion Searls) The torrent of stunning prose in this novel is almost as violent as the protagonist, Belle, herself. Belle Gunness was a real-life American (Norwegian-born) serial killer. In Kielland’s telling, Belle’s darkness incubated for a long time before she graduated to murder. When Belle’s behavior does escalate, Kielland draws us into Belle’s confusion: “The face the mirror, which image should she believe in?” Kielland paints her protagonist with such a human brush that the ending, where we learn the unspeakable horror Belle is responsible for, gives the reader a taste of serious whiplash. I dare anyone with a little life experience not to relate to this passage: “[I]t really hurt to love, it was like being skinned alive, and yet everyone took every chance they could get, every time. Full-grown adults, it was absolutely insane.” I’m a Fan by Sheena Patel In the immortal words of David Fincher, “I like characters who don’t change, who don’t learn from their mistakes.” In her debut, Patel’s first person (unnamed) narrator shares one damning insight after another about the age of social media, white privilege and sexual power dynamics, but while she confesses her personal missteps in full, all her powers of insight don’t save her, in the end, from the kind of delusional thinking that got her into trouble in the first place. Many readers have been and will continue to be hooked by the premise of I’m A Fan—a young woman, infatuated with a married man, online stalks his more prized mistress—but the book is so much more than a pulpy premise. For me, Patel achieves the thing all storytellers aim for, creating the universal within the specific, mirroring back to her reader the prison we create for ourselves when, as creatures of capitalism, we harm ourselves and others in pursuit of a life that only looks Good and Right. The Guest by Emma Cline The guest of The Guest is Alex, a twenty-two year old sex worker who has conned her way into a relationship with Simon, an older guy, and the owner of a sumptuous Hamptons summer home. But after a dinner party faux pas Alex is exiled from Eden, and for the rest of the novel she’s in survival mode, counting the days until she can see Simon again, using anyone and everyone in her path so she can remain in the Hamptons, away from New York City and Dom, a dangerous man she’s stolen from. Each of Alex’s victims is such a desperate character (an uptight house manager is a secret cokehead; a rich young woman, a literal member of the club, has no friends) that Cline distracts us, for most of the narrative, from Alex’s psychological desperation. The reader is put in the same position as Alex herself, who’s held her emotions at a distance for a long time. Cline doesn’t use Alex’s hidden fragility to excuse her bad behavior, nor does she force Alex into an ethical makeover after some dark night of the soul: redemption is not necessary because Alex is no hero. Boy Parts by Eliza Clark Irina, the protagonist of Boy Parts, initially comes across like a version of Lisbeth Salander, a sharp, incisive and hard to know bisexual woman with obscure taste. She’s revealed, however, to be someone Lisbeth might target, a sexual sadist harboring a deep dark secret. Clark assigns Irina problems that haunt many women, including an eating disorder and more than one experience of sexual assault. Irina grapples for control behind the camera, photographing men, the would-be predators, just as she seeks control around her appetite, planning to vomit whenever she consumes something apart from bagged salad. Readers who struggle with the problematic female protagonist will no doubt stumble (among other things) over Irina’s poor treatment of her closest friend, but it’s this relationship that really allowed me to fall in love with this book. This is not simply, as some have suggested, a “female” American Psycho: it read to me like a story about one woman’s profound struggle with attachment—attachment to love, attachment to success, attachment to reality. Luster by Raven Leilani Some might take issue with Edie’s inclusion in the destructive female protagonist tradition, because Edie is not all that hard to love, ultimately. This is a main character who does graduate to a more mature perspective in the end (literally as well as figuratively—her painting improves over the course of the novel). That said, Edie’s behavior in the early chapters of Luster is problematic and frustrating, and in my view firmly cements her in the transgressive canon. A Black woman in her early twenties, Edie is fired from her publishing job for inappropriate sexual behavior. She’s been involved with so many colleagues, men and women, she’s not even sure who brought her behavior to the attention of HR. Edie compares herself unfavorably to another Black female colleague: “She plays the game well… She is Black and dogged and inoffensive… I’d like to think the reason I’m not more dogged is because I know better, but sometimes I look at her and I wonder if the problem isn’t her but me. Maybe the problem is that I’m weak and overly sensitive. Maybe the problem is that I am an office slut.” Leilani’s choice to have Edie address us in the first person present makes the narration inherently unreliable, so we don’t know, after this admission of Edie’s, how much we should forgive and how much we should judge. Should we be understanding that Edie is not more dogged? Should we think she’s weak? Both, I think. Most of the novel is the story of Edie’s entanglement with Eric, an older, alcoholic white man, and how she comes to move in with Eric and his wife, Rebecca, and their adoptive daughter Akila. Edie’s sexual relationship with Eric is fine by Rebecca until it is not, at which point Edie carries on with Eric anyway, for a time. More interesting than this, however, is the fact that Edie allows, even encourages, Eric to hurt her, hit her. At a certain point, Eric leaves Edie a remorseful, drunk voicemail saying something about how he knows she’s a human being. It’s not terribly relevant whether Eric knows this or not—the only relevant question is whether Edie knows who she is, what she deserves. Will I continue in this pattern of destruction, or won’t I? These are the worthy stakes of this novel. *** View the full article