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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

July 5, 1915 Police headquarters, Centre Street, Manhattan The bombs came in all kinds of packages. Often they arrived in tin cans, emptied of the olive oil or soap or preserves the cans had originally been manufactured to contain, now wedged tight with sticks of dynamite. Sometimes they were wrapped with an outer band of iron slugs, designed to maximize the destruction, conveyed to their target location in a satchel or suitcase, “accidentally” left behind in the courthouse, or the train station, or the cathedral. Many of those devices were time bombs running on clockwork mechanisms. The more inventive ones utilized a kind of hourglass device, releasing sulfuric acid into a piece of cork, the timing determined by chemistry, not mechanics: how long the acid took to eat its way through the cork, until it began dripping onto the blasting cap below. Many were swaddled in old newspaper pages. One of the most notorious bombing campaigns sent the devices through the mail, dressed up in department- store wrapping. And sometimes the bomb was just a naked stick of dynamite, with a fuse simple enough to be lit with the strike of a match, ready to be flung into an unsuspecting crowd. Many bombs were delivered anonymously. But others were accompanied by missives sent to a local paper, or left on a doorstep: threats, intimations of further violence, delusional rants, and more than a few manifestos. The smaller bombs— the ones detonated by a storefront, a few notches up from fireworks— were the mobster version of an “account overdue” mailing: the big stick of the extortion business. A few came from clinically insane individuals without a cause, propelled toward the terrible violence of dynamite by their own private demons. But most of the explosions that made the national news during those years were expressions, implicit or explicit, of a political worldview. The political bombers were a diverse bunch: socialist agitators, Russian Nihilists, Irish republicans, German saboteurs. But of all the bomb throwers of the period, no group was more closely associated with the infernal machines—as the press came to call the bombs—than the anarchists. The forty-year period during which anarchism rose to prominence as one of the most important political worldviews in Europe and the United States—roughly from 1880 to 1920— happened to correspond precisely with the single most devastating stretch of political bombings in the history of the West. Indeed, the whole modern practice of terrorism— advancing a political agenda through acts of spectacular violence, often targeting civilians— began with the anarchists. What was anarchism, really? Start with the word itself. Today the word anarchy almost exclusively carries negative connotations of chaos and disorder. But when the political movement first emerged in the middle of the nineteenth century, the word’s meaning was much more closely grounded in its etymological roots: an-, meaning no, and -archos, the Latin word for “ruler.” The anarchists believed that a world without rulers was possible. At times, they convinced themselves that such a society was inevitable; imminent, even. The anarchists maintained that there was something fundamentally corrosive about organizing society around large, top- down organizations. Human beings, its advocates explained, oftentimes at gunpoint, had evolved in smaller, more egalitarian units, and some of the most exemplary communities of recent life—the guild-based free cities of Renaissance Europe, the farming communes of Asia, watchmaking collectives in the Jura Mountains of Switzerland—had followed a comparable template, at a slightly larger scale. These leaderless societies were the natural order of things, the default state for Homo sapiens. Taking humans out of those human-scale communities and thrusting them into vast militaries or industrial factories, building a society based on competitive struggle and authority from above, betrayed some of our deepest instincts. At its finest moments, anarchism was a scientific argument as much as it was a political one. It had deep ties to the new science that Darwin had introduced, only it emphasized a side of natural selection that is often neglected in popular accounts: the way in which evolution selects for cooperative behavior between organisms, what Peter Kropotkin—anarchism’s most elegant advocate—called “mutual aid.” As a theory of social organization, anarchism was equally opposed to the hierarchies of capitalism and the hierarchies of what we would now call Big Government. For this reason, it lacks an intuitive address on the conventional left-right map of contemporary politics, which partly explains why the movement can seem perplexing to us today. Whatever you might say about Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman and Peter Kropotkin—the three main anarchists in this book—they should never be mistaken for free-market libertarians. They wanted to smash the corporate regime as much as they wanted to smash the state. But the other confusion about the movement lies in the language itself. The main reason that the word anarchy now carries the implicit connotation of troublesome disorder is because a century ago, a wave of anarchists insisted on blowing things up, again and again and again, in the name of the movement. That sense of unruly chaos that the word anarchy triggers in our mind today is the aftershock of all those explosions, part of the debris field they left behind. For the anarchists, it was arguably one of the most disastrous branding strategies in political history. They turned a word against their cause. Why exactly were the anarchists so intent on blowing things up? That is, by definition, a technological and scientific question as much as it is a question about radical ideologies: How did anarchism and dynamite—born in the same decade but otherwise unrelated—come to be so closely intertwined? Dynamite gave small bands of humans command of more energy per person than they had ever dreamed of having before. Dynamite, quite literally, gave them power. The anarchists happened to be the first political movement to embrace that new power. But why were they compelled to make that choice? Could they have made a more persuasive case through less destructive means? To even begin to answer those questions, we need to understand where the anarchist’s appetite for political violence originally came from, its complex symbiosis with the everyday violence that industrialization had unleashed into the world. For every death at the hand of a bomb-wielding anarchist, a hundred or more would die from factory accidents. We also need to understand what that appetite for violence—enabled by the energy density of the dynamite-based explosion—helped bring into the world. When the anarchists began dreaming of a society unfettered by institutional authority, there were no forensic detectives, no biometric databases of identity, no anti-terror agencies. Where official police forces did exist, they were usually in bed with urban crime syndicates and political machines; national and international investigatory bodies like Interpol or the FBI or the CIA were decades from being created. But in the end it turned out to be those institutions that triumphed over the stateless dream of the anarchists. In many key respects these techniques and organizations were prodded into being by the emerging threat of the infernal machines, like an immune response to an invading virus. The innovation of dynamite-driven political terrorism created a counterreaction from the forces of top-down authority, one of those stretches of history where some of the most powerful institutions in the world are shaped by the activities of marginal groups, working outside the dominant channels of power. In this case, though, the legacy of the anarchist movement ultimately possessed a kind of tragic irony: the dream of smashing the state helping to give birth to a regime of state surveillance that would become nearly ubiquitous by the middle of the twentieth century. In the summer of 1915, the site in the United States that best represented that new regime was the Identification Bureau of the New York Police Department, created originally by a cerebral detective, Joseph Faurot, and eventually overseen by Commissioner Arthur Woods, a well-born Bostonian turned social reformer. The bureau was on the ground floor of the NYPD headquarters in Lower Manhattan, lined with file cabinets containing tens of thousands of photographs and fingerprints, organized by intricate classification schemes. In a predigital era, the Identification Bureau was the closest thing imaginable to the U.S. government’s plan for “Total Information Awareness” that would become so controversial in the months after 9/11. The Identification Bureau had an equally revolutionary idea at its core, one that had first developed in Paris and London at the end of the nineteenth century before Faurot and Woods brought it state-side: the idea that crime and sedition were fundamentally problems that could be solved with data. The way to combat individuals or groups who were intent on disrupting society was not to overwhelm them with physical force. Such naked expressions of power only inflamed the passions of the radicals. It was better to contain dissent through more subtle means: file cabinets filled with information, undercover operations, a web of invisible oversight stretching across the country and, increasingly, across the world. This book, then, is the story of two ideas, ideas that first took root in Europe before arriving on American soil at the end of the nineteenth century, where they locked into an existential struggle that lasted three decades. One idea was the radical vision of a society with no rules—and a new tactic of dynamite-driven terrorism deployed to advance that vision. The other idea—crime fighting as an information science—took longer to take shape, and for a good stretch of the early twentieth century, it seemed like it was losing its struggle against the anarchists. But it won out in the end. How did that come to happen? And could the story have played out differently? The history of the struggle between those two ideas involves a global cast of some of the most fascinating characters of the age: most of all Berkman, Goldman, Kropotkin, Woods, and Faurot. But doing justice to that story demands that we take a wider view of the historical timeline: venturing back to the original invention of dynamite itself and its first deployments as a political weapon in czarist Russia, the growth of anarchism as a political worldview in the late 1800s, the pioneering innovations of forensic science in Paris that evolved in part to counter that growth—all the way up to a terrifying, but now mostly forgotten, stretch of New York City’s history in the early twentieth century, when the metropolis experienced thousands of bombings over the course of just two decades. If you had to select the one point on that timeline that marked the apex of the struggle between anarchism and the surveillance state, the point where you might get even odds as to how it was all going to turn out, you could make a good case for the night of July 5, 1915. Despite the late hour, the Identification Bureau was bustling with activity. A bomb had detonated two days earlier in the U.S. Capitol building; the financier J. P. Morgan, Jr., had been at-tacked at his home in suburban Long Island the following morning; and the detectives had just discovered that the suspect in both crimes had recently purchased two hundred sticks of dynamite in New York, only six of which had been accounted for. For weeks Joseph Faurot had been receiving death threats in the mail from anarchist groups, reminding the detective of the fast approaching one- year anniversary of one of the most devastating explosions in the city’s history, a blast that destroyed an entire apartment building on the East Side, the work of anarchists plotting an attack on an-other titan of industry. That damage had been wrought with only a few sticks of dynamite. The trove of explosives currently missing threatened to make the previous year’s blast look like a bottle rocket by comparison. But the clash between the anarchists and the NYPD was not only visible in the frenetic activity inside the Identification Bureau itself. To see it in its full scope, you needed to leave the file cabinets and the fingerprint studios behind, walk out the plate glass doors into the hall, venture down a set of fire stairs into the darkened hallways of the basement. There you would have seen a cheap suit-case, leaning against a doorway. Below the muffled hum of activity in the Identification Bureau directly above, if you listened very in-tently, you might just have heard the quiet metronome of a ticking clock. ___________________________________ Excerpted from the book THE INFERNAL MACHINE by Steven Johnson. Copyright © 2024 by Steven Johnson. Published in the United States by Crown, an imprint of Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. View the full article

The incredibly successful suspense author Harlan Coben once told me—with a chuckle—that he thought conducting research for a book was just another form of procrastination. Guilty as charged on some occasions, but in most instances the research I’ve done for all nineteen of my mysteries and psychological thrillers has been extremely beneficial to the process. First and foremost, it helps me get my facts straight. Readers can be forgiving—to a point. They assume that as an author you might need to take some poetic license to move the plot along, but they also want to know that details you provide about everything from locales to characters’ jobs to crime scenes make sense. But that’s not the only reason I do it. When I’m digging, I often come across information that inspires a great plot development, or even a killer plot twist. Much of the research I do these days is online, but I also visit locations I’m writing about and talk to lots of experts, mostly on the phone, but sometimes in person if they can spare the time. I’ve not only interviewed plenty of cops, forensic experts, criminal profilers, lawyers, doctors, EMT workers, psychiatrists, psychologists, and real estate agents but also the occasional acting coach, magician, electrocution expert, and dog whisperer. When I’m researching, I’m mostly concentrating on what details can be used for background and what can come out of characters’ mouths, but later, away from my computer, I often realize that something I came across was just plain fascinating to have learned. I’ve even ended up using a few nuggets of wisdom in my own life. Here are some of the most intriguing, weird, and/or quirky things I’ve discovered along the way. 1) DNA evidence has become an important tool in solving homicides, but here’s a point that’s been driven home for me during the dozens of interviews I’ve done with former death scene investigator Barbara Butcher, author of What the Dead Know: Learning About Life as a New York City Death Investigator: Many homicides are solved today not because of DNA but thanks to CCTV footage and/or cell phone data. 2) I’ve never featured a body language expert as a character in any of my books (hmm, maybe I should, though), but I’ve interviewed a few because I’ve found their research helpful when describing how characters move and gesture during conversations. Something I learned while writing The Fiancée: One way to convey power through body language isn’t with a particular gesture or facial expression but with stillness. When you move your head and arms too much (something acting teachers call “becoming entangled”), your body leaks energy and you come across as nervous and unsure. 3) Speaking of energy leaks, one supposed indication of a poltergeist, beyond the commonly cited “bumps in the night,” are unexplained cold spots. Because, according to one so-called expert, spirits draw heat and energy from a room. I don’t believe in ghosts, but cold spots now make me nervous. 4) In Hitchcock’s Vertigo, Detective Scottie Ferguson suffers from acrophobia, an extreme fear of heights, which I’m sure you’ve heard of or might even experience yourself. And you’re probably also aware that some people have a fear of snakes, or spiders or flying. But in researching phobias for my next book, I learned that there are hundreds of them, including, koumpounophobia (fear of buttons), lachanophobia (fear of vegetables), octophobia (fear of the letter eight) and philemaphobia (fear of kissing). 5) The protagonist in my 2020 novel, Have You Seen Me, is a personal finance writer, so for background I interviewed financial expert Jean Chatzky, CEO of HerMoney. During one of our conversations, she told me about a field of study I’d never heard of called behavioral finance, which examines why smart people do stupid things with their money. Chatzky says that the reason for a lot of stupid money behavior is that we’re wired for instant gratification, which can be hard to override. One coping strategy, she says, is to “trick yourself by setting up artificial roadblocks, such as unsubscribing from shopping emails, taking your credit card number out of the automatic one-click ordering, and using cash, which is psychologically harder to part with.” 6) If you’ve ever gone to the ER with a relative or friend who needed stitches, you were probably told to take a seat rather than stand by the person’s side. You might have protested initially, especially if the patient was your child, perhaps promising the doctor or P.A. that you wouldn’t be in the way and guaranteeing them that the sight of blood didn’t bother you. But what I learned from Paul Paganelli, M.D., a retired ER chief I’ve interviewed for almost every book, is that it’s not unusual for someone who swears he or she isn’t squeamish to actually pass out while watching stitches being done. Until the “take a seat” rule became commonplace, parents would frequently hit the ground, sometimes sustaining serious, life-altering head injuries. 7) According to some estimates, between twenty-five and fifty percent of people have experienced at least one episode of a distressing condition called sleep paralysis, which occurs most frequently as someone is either falling asleep or waking up. It involves a feeling of being conscious but at the same time unable to move or speak. For some it can include a feeling of extreme pressure on the body or a sense of being choked. Some have even reported having a sense of a witch-like creature perched on their chest. That’s why this phenomenon is referred to in someplaces, including Canada, as “old hag syndrome.” 8) In my 2022 novel, The Second Husband, the protagonist is a trend forecaster, and I interviewed several for background. Trend forecasters do research and surveys, but some of them also like to follow what trend forecaster Jane Buckingham calls “the rule of three:” If something catches your attention once, it’s chance; if you see it twice, it’s coincidence or a curiosity; but if you see it three times, it could very well signal a trend worth paying attention to. 9) I never stop having my eyes opened by Barbara Butcher, who during her years with the NYC Medical Examiner’s office investigated over five thousand death scenes. Here’s another insight from her, an observation about death scenes that I try to remember for real life: “What we need to know is around us for the taking as long as we are truly taking it in. The biggest mistake a death scene investigator can make is going in with a pre-conceived idea. Take your hands off your ears and put them over your mouth. Learn to listen, see, smell, and absorb everything around you without speaking your thoughts first.” 10) The protagonist in my current psychological thriller, The Last Time She Saw Him, is a career coach named Kiki Reed, and though I’ve written several books on career success myself, I touched base with several career coaches while writing the book. One expert, Eliot Kaplan, former VP in charge of talent acquisition at Hearst Magazines, told me that one of the biggest complaints interviewers have about job candidates is that they don’t seem enthusiastic enough (which is probably a result of nerves or trying too hard to seem professional and buttoned up). “Don’t be afraid to show how much you want a job,” he told me. In fact, he suggested, it doesn’t hurt to sit a little bit on the edge of your chair. I have Kiki suggest this to one of her clients. 11) A couple of books ago, I was writing a scene where the protagonist sat down with an attorney after she sensed she’d fallen under suspicion with the police for a homicide. To better write the scene, I asked acclaimed white collar defense attorney Susan Brune how she would advise my character. One piece of wisdom she says she offers defendants early on is: “research yourself, just as the police will be doing.” That way a client becomes aware in advance of what will be turned up. This would mean not only Googling yourself, but reviewing your online search history, phone logs, texts, emails, calendar, credit card statements, and E-Zpass history. Even if we aren’t under suspicion, it’s probably not a bad idea to occasionally check out the information that’s available about ourselves. 12) You’ve probably read or heard the wonderful Maya Angelou quote, “When people show you who they are, believe them the first time.” Forensic psychiatrist Karen Rosenbaum says that’s good advice, but so is a common misquote of the comment: “When people tell you who they are, believe them.” People, she explained to me, have blind spots when it comes to their own personality and motives and sometimes don’t realize that others may be put off by the truth of who they are. “They might blurt out things that are at the core of who they are,” she adds, “without realizing the impact it may have on the listener or audience. Like a governor who brags about shooting her dog.” 13) Here’s another other piece of information I learned researching and have tried to use in my own life. It came from a detective supervisor in a police department’s mental evaluation unit, whose job was to respond to people having mental breakdowns or threatening suicide: “In a crisis, we often have a little more time to react than we realize,” she told me. She said that in her career it had made all the difference to count to ten before acting in a crisis, using that time to think through the best strategy before responding, rather than just letting her adrenalin guide her actions. *** View the full article

Assignment 1: Act of Story Statement To save humanity aboard the spaceship Igaia Assignment 2: The Antagonist Senator Aules sponsored Guadalupé to join the ruling Corporation’s religious Order. Her meteoric success is a point of both pride and envy for him. The Senator is the architect of a secret Corporation plan to enslave the farming community who joined Igaia to escape oppression on Earth. When Sister Guadalupé learns she has been his unwitting accomplice, she must face the true nature of their relationship and the mission. Aules reports to Patron Jones, the charming Elite funder of Igaia’s mission, virtually present on board via Walker Jones. Neurological alterations and implants allow Walkers to link to their Patrons, so that the reclusive ultra-rich can experience what their Walkers do. Guadalupé has ‘served’ Patron Jones regularly through Walker Jones, and has strong affection for both. When Aules’ secret plot is revealed, we learn that the Patron has a contingency plan to destroy Igaia and all on board, thus enabling a new narrative on Earth in which the Patron is the hero who safely disposed of Earth's greatest enemies. Revealed now as the greater antagonist, the Patron sexualizes the countdown, demanding Guadalupé’s presence as he links to his heartbroken Walker, to extract the ‘Ultimate Gift’ climax at the moment of death. Assignment 3: Breakout Title Dea ex Machina Hymn to our Stars Semper Supra Assignment 4: Genre and Comparables Genre: Sci-Fi In a bold sound byte: Beyoncé’s Run the World (Girls) meets Brave New World, an eco-feminist 2001: A Space Odyssey Light from Uncommon Stars by Ryka Aoki Similar in bringing to life complex characters, centering women and LGBTQ+, driven by love and adventure and conspiring to help each other in impossible circumstances and a speculative context - whose joyous, page-turning story also invites us to forgive and better ourselves and our society. Cloud Cuckooland by Anthony Doerr Similar themes of future climate crisis and institutional/governmental use of technology to ‘get us through’ the trauma of a dystopian future, with a story of surprising hope driven by complex, highly intelligent characters willing to sacrifice for love, our planet, our future and as atonement. Assignment 5: Hook Line (logline) Spiritual leader to a colony bound for a distant planet, Sister Guadalupé must face the truth that her religion has been weaponized to impose the destructive social order that is dooming humanity. Assignment 6: Inner Conflict and Secondary Conflict Inner Conflict Sister Guadalupé is a High Priestess of the Order, pop-star meets preacher meets sex worker in the new religion of ‘self love’. Kind and friendly, she struggles with the selfishness her role is intended to promote. She believes in the tenet of Free Love, and wrestles with the degradation she feels in some contexts of this ‘service’. Lupé has been admonished for her intellectual pursuits and reprimanded for pushing the boundaries of spiritual-societal concepts of the Order. Igaia’s mission gives the priestess the freedom to live into her potential and beliefs, more than she expects or may be ready for. Scenario 1: We meet Senator Aules As Guadalupé revels in the spectacular journey through space and in meeting the ship’s crew on the bridge, Senator Aules arrives and interrupts. He jovially insists on a hug, while Sister Guadalupé is ‘intensely aware of the crew's eyes on them, as she was of the Senator's hand sliding rapidly down her back to a less avuncular position. The priestess skillfully slipped back and held the older man's hands at arm's length, masking the defensive move with a coquettish smile.’ Lupe tries but ultimately fails to cover her embarrassment at his repeated broadcasting of sexual and social ownership of her. They leave together, taking a circuitous public route, his ‘pet priestess on parade’, as usual. In the end, she’s grateful for the extra time for her Service Pill to take effect, so that by the time they reach his chambers, she’s ready and willing to service him as expected. Secondary Conflict People all around Lupé underestimate and demean her because of her appeal and her role in the very religion they all subscribe to. Whether it’s Aules treating her like his property, Lieutenant Kali assuming she has no understanding of science or technology and is a tool of the Corporation at best, or the Patron angrily reprimanding her for daring to think she has the ability to understand much less the status to question the plans of the Corporation. Yet Guadalupé, to a fault, responds by trying to connect, however she can. Scenario 2: Kali uncovers a sinister connection Lieutenant Kali is a top coder with the Military Protectors, on board with a tight group of friends and a Captain she’d follow anywhere. Following the trail of barely detectable aberrant code, Kali and her friend Will uncover Aules’ plot and a connection in it to Guadalupé. Immediately suspicious, Kali then stumbles upon Lupé leaving Will’s quarters. Spurred on by jealousy, the coder ignores facts and gaps in data to assume that Guadalupé is a collaborator in the plot with Aules. Assignment 7: The Incredible Importance of Setting Dea ex Machina opens with an unattributed letter to an unidentified friend. In it, the writer proclaims, ‘The Mars colony failed. Catastrophically. This is the truth the world must believe.’ Our story begins some twenty years later, aboard the first interplanetary colonization expedition since. On Earth, humans live in an Epoch of Distance, characterized by an extreme caste system, with the reclusive ultra-rich Elite at the top. In the words of Creator Duanna, ‘We looked away as laws were re-written to turn billionaires to trillionaires, and the rest of humanity to an indentured workforce. We cleaved that caste chasm with our own labor, feeding it with our colonized data and debt and selling our voices in government. Elected officials and judges became corporate hires. Pop stars became sex idols, sex became religion, and religion married business. Together they embraced and excelled at disseminating opiates to the masses of the ever poorer global working class. Daily life went on. And the earth was slowly consumed.’ Our story occurs on board the spaceship Igaia, transporting a complete colony and all necessary equipment to a distant planet, to begin the extraction of fuel resources desperately needed back on Earth. Among the passengers, the Agrarians aim to learn from terraforming the new planet so that they can return to Earth with new advancements in adaptive regeneration. The Corporate Senators speak in other rooms of the planet as a possible new home for humanity, should efforts to rehabitize Earth to our needs fail. Igaia is the AI running the eponymous ship, in partnership with its inventor, Creator Duanna. The spaceship’s adaptive intelligence, revolutionary regenerative fuel use, and iterative well-care for passengers, all while moving beyond the speed of light, make the expedition possible. We learn that the AI was born of necessity, designed by Duanna to save her own life. The two function symbiotically, as both aggressively evolve. Duanna wrote our opening letter, and at the moment of crisis and opportunity on the ship, she exposes the annihilation of the Mars colony by the Corporation. In the final chapters of the book, we discover that Duanna secretly assembled her most beloved people on Igaia, so that they all might escape Earth to create a new kind of society.

At Night Court one Christmas, John Larroquette gave me a sofa pillow embroidered with: “Dying is easy. Comedy is hard.” Larroquette, who makes the work of acting comedy and drama look effortless, gave it to me knowing it also crystalized the struggle of a writer. The real battle isn’t writing comedy or drama. It’s mixing the two. In crime and thriller novels, it’s murder. But not impossible. There’s simply a high degree of difficulty. Yet, when it works, it’s freaking magical. I’m talking about you, Mick Herron. Your Slow Horses series crackles with mystery and tension. But what elevates it is the humor. Reviewers call it dark comedy. I call it human comedy because it comes out of characters responding like real people to real situations. Sometimes with fright, horror, violence, or tears. Other times, with a wisecrack or an insult. Or, when one of them is Jackson Lamb, the world-weary den father of MI5’s dumpster, with a loud, prolonged, public passing of gas. Reading Herron, you let out shock laughter in the backwash of tragedy. His novels are a must-study for a tone balance that’s pitch perfect. Why? I worked on Nurse Jackie, a dark comedy TV series. That meant we wore the twin masks of drama and comedy. Like I said, a high degree of difficulty. So, beginning each year, I made a speech to the writers’ room that, to pull off this feat, comedy and drama need to be good roommates. It’s that simple and that complex. Let’s stick with books. Let’s celebrate the alchemists—authors who forged tense mysteries and thrillers where humor also thrives. Like Janet Evanovich, right from the gate, in 1 for the Money. Elmore Leonard, who mined humor with hapless strivers in Swag, Get Shorty, and more. Then there’s Carl Hiaasen and the recently departed Tim Dorsey, both making Florida seem like a fun place to take a beating. Rachel Howzell Hall brings the funny amid tragedy through her LA homicide detective, Elouise Norton. Can’t leave off Robert Crais, Joe R. Lansdale, or Gregory McDonald. And then there’s the master, Donald E. Westlake, who consistently staged a Cirque du Soleil balancing act in The Ax, The Hook, and his intimidatingly sublime Dortmunder series. These top-flight authors took me to school. I’ve not only studied how they crafted a story, I’ve marveled at the ways they threaded the needle between laughter and slaughter. They helped me find my hybrid voice in my first novel, The Trigger Episode, and all seven of my Nikki Heat series, writing as Richard Castle. I’m still learning from them. What have I learned? If you’re looking for rules, I’m not your guy. In his essay, “Ten Rules of Writing,” Elmore Leonard’s first rule was never open a book with weather. My first Nikki Heat novel was entitled Heat Wave, and guess what I opened with? Yup. Elmore Leonard, you were a god to me but, sorry, Dutch, that book went to number six on the New York Times list. Then there’s “Mario Puzo’s Godfatherly Rules for Writing a Bestselling Novel.” First rule: “Never write in the first person.” Huh. My latest spy thriller, The Accidental Joe, had difficulty getting traction at first, a euphemism for WTF?! At the risk of finding a horse’s head in my bed, I undertook a page-one rewrite, changing to…the first person. The process was scary, but the upshot was a fresher book with a singular voice, some healthy swagger, and a fat dollop of organic humor. It sold immediately. So, let’s not talk rules; let’s talk considerations. First off, why use humor? You may have your own reasons. One of mine is to use it with protagonists who are new to a world so I can have them draw on sarcasm, irony, and wisecracks to expose truth and react to norms without going all earnest. Not a fan of earnest. What about jokes? Consider that a no. It’s a mystery or thriller, not open-mic night at the Chuckle Hut. The minute you start writing in joke forms (A hitman walks into a bar…) do some hard thinking. The best comedy comes from character, attitude, and point of view, not one liners. Save the banana peels. As above, slapstick and pratfalls are red flags. Just like joke-jokes, extreme physical comedy smacks of contrivance and tone breakage. Be honest. Does your humor play real? Put yourself in the situation. Whatever action is going on around you, would you really say or do this? Really? Are you trying to wear two masks at once? Humor works if it’s well placed. Sometimes the perfect lighthearted dialogue collides with darker action or slows the pace. Remember that thing about comedy and drama being good roommates? Be careful not to shoehorn in humor where it becomes a distraction or an obstacle. A life-death chase or your climax is not the time to bring out the laugh track. I try to spot it where the readers can catch their breath after I’ve just taken it away. Character will make humor work for you. The key is to make it organic. If it’s something only this one person could say or do and only in this moment, your chances are good. Be consistent. Establish your tone and stick with it. The sudden appearance or disappearance of humor is as jarring as a POV swap. Finally, trust your gut. If the funny is funny but feels “off,” don’t force it. Basic as it sounds, humor works when it works. If it’s not right, don’t deny your feelings. Adjust or cut. If in doubt, walk away and grab one of those above books. You may come back inspired. Or at least have a good laugh. *** View the full article

Chicago has produced more than a few successful African-American writers, in both the literary and sales sense, including Richard Wright, Gwendolyn Brooks, Lorraine Hansberry, Willard Motley and Sam Greenlee. Inspired greatly by Richard Wright, whose classic texts Native Son and Black Boy helped create a literary path for many Black boys with a pen and a headful of ideas, novelist Ronald L. Fair isn’t as well known as his textual contemporaries, but he was another wonderful writer who emerged from that hard city. Fighting every step of the way as he embarked on the revolutionary road of creating literature on his own terms, he had a bigger mission in mind than just fame and fortune. “I doubted that I would ever make any money as a writer of this kind of fiction, but that didn’t matter because I would be telling it like it is,” Fair wrote in an essay published in the April, 1965 issue of Negro Digest. “No more polite lies. No more biting of the tongue or twisting of truths. Richard Wright’s death would mean something, because I would keep him in mind and swing away.” According to “Bearing Witness in Black Chicago” by Maryemma Graham (1990), “Fair began writing in high school in order to provide an outlet for his own developing and inquiring mind. Like Red Top, a character in the novella ‘World of Nothing,’ writing was a mental and spiritual exercise. But the path that led to a literary career was interrupted by three years in the Navy and two years at a Chicago business college. Then Fair spent ten years as a court reporter for the city of Chicago.” Fair’s 1963 debut was the slim Many Thousand Gone: An American Fable. A dark satire in more ways than one (it was reissued last year from the Library of America), the book depicts a fictional Mississippi town called Jacobs County that neglects to tell their local “colored folks” that slavery is over. After a few of the slaves, most notably Jacobs County elders Granny Jacobs and Preacher Harris (the only Black person in town who could read) discover that there exists a free world beyond their plantations, they became fixated on getting their families to the Negro Promised Land they believe Chicago to be. When a copy of the Black-owned/Chicago based Ebony magazine is mailed to the town, word gets out that there was a place where they could live as nicely as white people and keep a few dollars in their pockets. When Fair decided to satirize slavery it could have gone all wrong, but, as Negro World (owned by Ebony’s parent company Johnson Publications) observed in 1965: “It is a measure of Mr. Fair’s artistry that the pain and fury behind the laughter is always finely felt.” Yet, while the golden streets of Chicago and other northern wonderlands (Pittsburgh, Detroit, New York) served as the perfect strivers’ fantasy, the reality of those harsh, cold cities was quite different than expected: shabby tenements, and later housing projects, replaced the plantations and the laws of justice still weren’t balanced. Fair, whose own parents made the sojourn from Mississippi, was born and raised in Chicago and knew very well the levels of race inequality that were prevalent in housing, schooling, banking, salaries paid and the policing of Black communities. These heavy subjects are tackled in Fair’s powerful and naturalistic second novel Hog Butcher (1966). This told the story of a college-bound Chi-Town high school basketball champion headed for college named Nathaniel Hamilton, whom everyone calls Cornbread. A neighborhood hero, Cornbread is gunned down by a white policeman who mistook him for a thief as he ran home in the rain holding a bottle of orange soda. The policeman, half an interracial duo of blue boys, thought Cornbread was the burglar they had been pursuing minutes before, but his deadly mistake causes the community and “the system” to explode. A small riot breaks out minutes after Cornbread is slain and the mayor’s sends in a task force of, “twelve officers, all over six feet, cruising slowly down the block on motorcycles. They were so big the motorcycles looked like children’s toys under them,” to occupy the neighborhood like a military force.” With the only witness to their senseless crime being a ten-year old kid, Wilford Robinson, who along with his buddy Earl, idolized every cool Cornbread made on the battlegrounds of the basketball courts, the goal of everyone including civic leaders, the welfare agency and violent cops, one who beats-up Wilford’s mother, is to make the boy be quiet. As the state builds their web of lies, the truth becomes the scariest enemy. Negro Digest editor Hoyt W. Fuller wrote in the October, 1966 issue of that publication, “Hog Butcher is…a sharp portrayal of a diseased city. That the picture might fit any American city is merely coincidental.” Author Richard Guzman, editor of Black Writing from Chicago: In the World, Not of It?, wrote a 2015 essay on Fair and Hog Butcher, “Though some have commented on the novel’s humor and, in particular, on the energy and courage of the two adolescent protagonists through whom some of the action is seen, the novel is a sobering exploration of social class … and, of course, police violence.” In The Contemporary African American Novel: Its Folk Roots and Modern Literary Branches (2005) author Bernard W. Bell wrote that Fair borrowed the term “hog butcher” from Carl Sandburg’s 1914 poem “Chicago” (‘Hog Butcher for the World, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with Railroads and the Nation’s Freight Handler; Stormy, husky, brawling, City of the Big Shoulders…’), but also believed that “the white Chicago system is the hog butcher that cuts out the souls of blacks.” Maryemma Graham notes, “Hog Butcher, considered by most critics to be (Fair’s) best, drew heavily upon his intimate knowledge of Chicago’s legal system. Fair sets up the oppositional forces in Hog Butcher on several levels… Fair is quite detailed in his descriptions about how the police department and the court systems work with regard to black people and the black community, obviously drawing upon his years of experience as a courtroom reporter. This necessarily leads to a focus on the social dynamics of the black urban experience, a fact which invited some very negative reviews from Fair’s critics.” “Hog Butcher was different from any novel I had ever read,” novelist Cecil Brown wrote in a 2020 essay. Brown, who considered Fair one of his literary heroes, met him in 1966. “His prose was exciting and infectious; you could not begin reading one sentence without reading the next sentence. But the most important thing was it was about police brutality. The story was set right in Chicago where we were having riots.” When Hog Butcher was reissued in 2014 from Northwestern University Press, Brown wrote the forward, In 1975, during the height of the Blaxploitation movement that was going down in American movies, Hog Butcher was adapted by screenwriter Leonard Lamensdorf and director Joe Mandrake. Released under the title Cornbread, Earl and Me, the picture was an American International Picture release that starred thirteen-year-old Laurence Fishburne in his film debut as Wilford. There was also NBA star Keith Wilkes as Cornbread, Rosalind Cash as Wilford’s mother and Bernie Casey playing the other policeman. Soul-jazz unit The Blackbyrds did the soundtrack. Though not as brilliant as the funky scores composed by Isaac Hayes or Curtis Mayfield, leader Donald Byrd created a serviceable soundtrack. While filming the adaption, considered a classic in some quarters, told the story from Wilford’s point of view, Fair used the third-person omniscient that showed readers how Cornbread’s murder affected each side from the Black cop and the frightened grocery store owner to the uncaring Deputy Coroner and the knight in shining armor lawyer Benjamin Blackwell, who was working for Cornbread’s family. In Cecil Brown’s forward to the 2014 edition, he wrote, “Mr. Fair presented a new style of writing in Hog Butcher. The story is told not in a traditional narrative mode, but in an impressionistic style that relies heavily on interior monologue. The style enables Fair to move into and out of the minds of different characters and back and forth between past and present. Along with Richard Wright’s first novel, Lawd Today! (published posthumously in 1963), Hog Butcher can be seen as a milestone in the use of interior monologue to portray the consciousness of African American characters.” Although Fair never claimed that Hog Butcher was based on a specific case, almost sixty years after its initial publication the novel serves as a reminder that American police brutality in the Black community wasn’t something that began in the age of cell phone cameras, police dashcam footage and surveillance monitors. Four years before the film version was released, Fair was encouraged by writer Chester Himes to flee the racism of Chicago in 1971; he lived in various European countries before finally settling in Finland in 1972. Since Hog Butcher was reissued in 2014, more writers and critics have embraced the book, including a chapter I wrote for Sticking It to the Man: Revolution and Counterculture in Pulp and Popular Fiction, 1950 to 1980 and an essay by writer Kathleen Rooney, who stated in 2022, “I would like to nominate Fair’s novel to appear alongside To Kill a Mockingbird on syllabi everywhere because instead of exceptionalism and white saviors, Fair’s story depicts—with a cast of lovable, hateable, believable characters from the young man who gets murdered to the cops who murder him—how power’s highest aim is always to preserve itself and how collective action is the best hope anyone can have against systemic injustice.” Though his work is important, Fair didn’t think America appreciated Black writers. “Being a Black writer was a dead end,” Fair told Cecil Brown in 2010. Eight years later, in February, 2018, Fair died from a a cerebral hemorrhage. He was 86. According to his widow Hannele, though he stopped publishing, Ronald L. Fair never stopped writing. “I have many of his unpublished manuscripts with me that deserve to be published,” she wrote Cecil Brown in 2018. Hopefully one day those works will be shared with the world. View the full article

El Nino-induced flooding of biblical proportions has inundated my home this year, which can mean only one possible thing: TIME TO READ SOME GOTHIC FICTION! It’s giving damp. It’s giving mold. It’s giving drip-drip-drip on the window pane. And the weather event causing me personal misery is also a perfect in-road to highlighting one of the greatest years yet in the Great Gothic Fiction revival. It could have been a great moment for fungal fiction, but we already covered that trend in Lit Hub with this fantastic list for lovers (and haters) of The Last of Us. Carmella Lowkis, Spitting Gold (Atria) All is not what it seems in this lush and twist-filled tale. Two spiritualist sisters, famed in their teen years for their convincing seances, must come together for one last con. Spitting Gold is carefully plotted, fully characterized, and incredibly satisfying. Let the ectoplasm flow! L.S. Stratton, Do What Godmother Says (Union Square, June 11) 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. Donyae Coles, Midnight Rooms (Amistad, July 2) 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? Clare Pollard, The Modern Fairies (Avid Reader Press, July 23) 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. John Fram, No Road Home (Atria, July 23) 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… Del Sandeen, This Cursed House (Berkley, October 8) 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. View the full article

I was never a fan of science fiction. I have a vivid imagination but with the exception of the original Star Trek, there’s something about stories set on different planets, or filled with aliens or with robot point-of-views that disconnects me from the story in a way in which I can’t recover. But I’ve discovered in the past few years that much like my coffee, I do enjoy science fiction in very specific ways. My latest novel An Intrigue Of Witches is a treasure hunt founded in a historical mystery with coded messages and puzzles to be solved. It combines my favorite genres: mystery, adventure, fantasy and science fiction. My favorite time travel tropes are ones grounded in reality, set in the near future and fueled by hard science – meaning the scifi elements have to be scientifically accurate and logical. I enjoy reading science fiction that is believable and almost doable with our contemporary understanding of science and level of technical advancement. But I also need my scifi to have a lot of heart. Poignancy. Be character-driven and based in family connections and interpersonal relationships. I suppose I need some sort of anchoring, if I’m to explore science fiction in a way that makes sense to me. I have probably watched more scifi TV and film than I have read books in the genre, but the few I have read share the same four elements: a government or military context—because let’s face it, if time travel is a thing, it’s highly probable that the military and or government will seek to control the technology. Secondly, based on the frequency in which we are advancing in technology, it will happen sooner than later. Thirdly, the scifi elements are based on technology that is already existing in the real world. And lastly, include a well-developed main character, who themselves are navigating significant relationships with their family and friends throughout the story. To that end, here are my three recommendations for time travel books suited to readers who don’t usually read science fiction. Version Control by Dexter Palmer This novel almost appears to not to be about time travel. Like it’s not a dark, looming shadow over the characters in the story. The main character, Rebecca is living her life, dealing with the minutiae of being an adult, while her husband, a scientist is hard at work on a device that is like a time machine but definitely not a mechanism for travel through time. The most important events are happening off the page, but they are impacting the lives of the characters in the most incalculable of ways. It’s a very nuanced, indirect look at time travel, and how it could impact lives. Here and Now and Then, by Michael Chen This story is about a regular Joe that readers can relate to. The main character, Kin Stewart lives in our world. He is a husband and father, works in IT and struggles to maintain a positive relationship with his daughter. The twist? Kin is a government time traveler from the future who was stranded in the past when one of his devices malfunctioned. With no way to return to 2142, he creates a life for himself in his past and our today. What could go wrong? A lot. Especially when a team member finally returns to bring him back to his world and a family he doesn’t remember. At its heart, this is a family drama, a story about hard choices and the impact time travel can have on every day people. The Rise And Fall Of Dodo by Neal Stephenson and Nicole Galland The main character in this book, Melisande Stokes, is an expert in linguistics and languages at Harvard. Her life is irretrievably changed when she randomly bumps into a military intelligence operator who asks her to translate some very old documents that may prove a long history of magic in the world, abruptly cut off in the mid-1800s. This mishmash of history, fantasy, science fiction, time travel and witches provides an intriguing look at how the government might try to fix history if they had access to both magic and time travel. *** View the full article

For some reason the forum will only let me change a few words here and there. So I've written a revised answer to the 4th Assignment - Comps. COMPARABLES Revised Version. Recent Titles: It’s been difficult to find newer fantasy epics with middle-aged protagonists. I’ve listed the three below based on reading the samples and plot descriptions. Each has a protagonist with strong skills or gifts, living quiet lives until they’re unexpectedly thrust into a quest to save the world/their families. The Shadow of What Was Lost, James Islington The Last Ranger, J.D.L. Rosell The Song of All, Bk 1, Tina LeCount Myers Older Titles: Eye of the World, series, Robert Jordan: While I'm not at the level of Robert Jordan, his "magic" system is similar in that it uses inborn gifts that need mental focus to use, and they can be difficult or impossible to use if the practitioner has an emotional difficulty. I see the two series below as “aspirational” in their prose style and characterizations. I like the authors’ writing, the action moves at a good pace, and the characters are relatable (and past their 20's, with life experience to show for it). The world-building is detailed and feels “lived in”. Legend of Paksennarion series, Elizabeth Moon: A protagonist unaware of the magic he’s inherited, until he finds his unknown family background. Protag and allies must protect their kingdoms from dark magic. World of Five Gods series, Lois McMaster Bujold: Two of the three books in this trilogy have middle-aged protagonists who must use their wits and life experience to defeat dark-magic antagonists. Meanwhile, the search for more recent comp titles goes on…

FIRST ASSIGNMENT: write your story statement. A young woman sets out to find a missing girl to try to forgive herself for the cousin she couldn’t save a decade ago. SECOND ASSIGNMENT: sketch the antagonist. The antagonist of my story is a drug dealer named Lucifer. He is the one that Fiona witnesses kidnap the missing girl, but a twist comes in the final battle scene revealing who he is conspiring with. Lucifer is an antagonist to two different women that Fiona becomes, giving her two perspectives of him and his capabilities. He’s a tattoo-covered skinhead, small and scrappy, seeking power and control wherever he can get it. The reader also learns about Lucifer’s back story through third-person POV threaded throughout the novel, which gives insight into who he was before he went “bad” ahead of when the protagonist figures it out. The third person POV gives more information about Kevin, the supporting character/love interest/missing girl’s brother, and informs the reader that Lucifer was Kevin’s best friend turned nemesis. Lucifer kidnaps Kevin’s sister (the missing girl, Hannah) in retaliation. THIRD ASSIGNMENT: BREAKOUT TITLE The Vicarious Life of Fiona Ferguson The Lonely Life of Fiona Ferguson The Mystical Mind of Fiona Ferguson FOURTH ASSIGNMENT: - Two smart comparables for your novel. Genre: Magical Realism (could be marketed as Mystery or Book Club fiction) Comps: The Midnight Library by Matt Hair meets All the Missing Girls by Megan Miranda FIFTH ASSIGNMENT: write your own hook line (logline) with conflict and core wound. When a young woman gets the power to immerse herself in the past life of secondhand merchandise the last time it was worn, she witnesses a missing girl’s kidnapping and embarks on a journey to face her inner demons and uncover the secrets being covered up in a small New Jersey town. SIXTH ASSIGNMENT: sketch out the conditions for the inner conflict your protagonist will have. The primary conflict is to find Hannah, the missing girl, whom Fiona witnessed being kidnapped. Fiona feels more like an underdog than a heroine, but her cousin’s unsolved case drives her forward despite her inferiority complex. Inner conflict: After being depressed for a decade, Fiona struggles with self-doubt and insecurity. She feels like an outcast. She’s struggling to find purpose and claim her place in the world. When Fiona runs into an old friend and hears about the girl’s family and career, Fiona feels small, unaccomplished, and insecure. While others were building their lives, she was secluded from the world and missing out on new experiences. She must grow beyond her victim mentality to become a victor, move forward, and get what she wants out of life. Secondary Conflict: Fiona’s new boyfriend turns out to be the son of her parent’s old friend, a pervert she secretly saw sexually molest her teenage cousin before she went missing. Fiona must decide if she can escape her negative association with her boyfriend’s father and be with the first young man she’s ever wanted to love. FINAL ASSIGNMENT: sketch out your setting in detail. The setting of my novel takes place in a small town in New Jersey. Freeman is a made-up place modeled after a little town along the Delaware River just over the border from Pennsylvania. Built upon Native American soil, the town is filled with ancient stories about early settlers who built their fortunes by establishing the area’s first railroad system, their ancestors continuing their legacy of wealth and power, generation after generation. The town is similar to many small American towns where everyone is connected somehow—through work, school, church, etc. My story is set in the present day, but in an effort to make it timeless, I did not incorporate the use of too much modern technology. Much of the story occurs at Second Chances, a thrift shop where Fiona works. Here, she finds the enchanted sculpture that turns her life upside down. Fiona’s apartment is also part of the plot. It is a little garage that she moves into early in the story as her parents urge her to be independent. Many other settings in my story are briefly visited as Fiona travels into the lives of others—an alleyway, a burger joint, Princeton, a lavish estate, a nightclub, and a gym, to name a few. The settings change to different places, periods, and seasons in New Jersey, with one exception briefly taking Fiona to the West Coast. When Fiona travels into the former life of donated merchandise, each new setting is vividly described as she experiences the moments she’s vicariously living, embracing them with all of her senses.