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You’re reading a mystery. You want to know whodunnit. You follow the detective—maybe it’s a cop or a PI, maybe it’s an amateur sleuth forced into circumstances to play that role—as they unearth clue after clue. Eventually, they identify the villain. How? By marshalling evidence. Maybe there are fingerprints. A witness. DNA. A confession in the penultimate chapter. You as the reader finally arrive at that elusive thing, The Truth. That’s how it’s supposed to work, right? All mysteries are, in a way, a search for truth. Hell, fiction in general is such a search—mysteries are just a tad more bold about it. We read to learn something about ourselves, the people around us, the human condition. So what happens when no one can agree on truth? For too long now, we’ve been living in an age of disinformation. Conspiracy theories, deep fakes, propaganda, bald-faced lies. Between the reality-distorting power of the internet and social media, and certain politicians’ willingness to say just about anything to win power, it’s never been harder to get people to agree on basic facts. People claim to have their own facts, alternative facts, their own evidence. Everyone has their rabbit hole, their echo chamber. Everyone is a villain to someone else. Because of all this, we’ve gotten used to the common refrain that we live in “unprecedented times.” But the thing about writing historical fiction is that you realize that pretty much nothing is unprecedented. All kinds of crazy stuff has happened in human history; it’s surprisingly hard for anything to happen today that hasn’t been foreshadowed at some other time in our history. There are precedents everywhere. We trip over them like a detective trips over a body in the dark. As rampant with lies as 2024 may be (and with an election on the horizon, it’s only going to get worse), and scary as it may be to see the pillars of our society shaken to their very foundations, things were equally scary in the ‘30s and ‘40s. Okay, I know that’s not exactly comforting—no one wants to live through another world war or another fascist dictatorship—but it puts our current troubles in perspective to remind ourselves that our grandparents lived through similar turmoil and found their way to the other side. I’ve always wanted to write a World War II-era crime story, and I’ve always wanted to set something in Boston, the closest big city to where I grew up. Boston is the so-called “cradle of liberty” and an academic mecca where the search for truth is taken seriously indeed. My new novel, The Rumor Game, takes place in 1943 and follows a Boston reporter whose job is to write a weekly column that disproves harmful war rumors. Like the rumor that if women who had perms worked in a munitions plant, their heads would explode (an actual rumor at the time!). America was fighting in the Pacific, had already fought in North Africa, and was planning an invasion of Europe, and the home front was rife with rumors and gossip. Some of it was simply the result of fear, some of it was political posturing, and some was actual propaganda placed by Axis agents. Like the one about the Army hiring abortion doctors because so many “loose women” were serving in the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps. Or the one about Jews not enlisting for the draft. Or the one about Blacks secretly spying for the Japanese. It’s surprising, and at the same time not that surprising at all, the things people will say about each other during times of great stress. Especially about people who look different than them. When my character finds that one of the rumors she’s trying to disprove ties into an FBI agent’s murder investigation, things get complicated. Two people who have great reason to distrust each other, and who disagree politically and live in their own rabbit holes, and who both have ulterior motives, will have to work together to find the truth. Or something close to the truth. If they can even agree on what the truth actually is. *** View the full article

I often wonder when reading mysteries such as the first of its kind The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins or the groundbreaking Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn, what would I do if I was wrongly accused of a crime like certain protagonists in these novels? Would I vigorously proclaim my innocence or would I be so shocked that I’d be incapable of speaking up at all? Knowing myself and my inability to remain quiet in general never mind while being accused of a heinous crime I didn’t commit, I’m betting on the former. However, I can’t really know, can I? Unless it happens, and I really don’t want it to. Still it fascinates me, wondering how I’d handle such a fraught situation, which leads me to my topic today. Mystery novels have long captivated readers with their intricate plots, enigmatic characters, and unexpected twists. One subset of the genre that consistently intrigues and engages audiences is the mystery where the protagonist is compelled to solve the crime, because they are the prime suspect. This unique narrative approach adds an extra layer of complexity and suspense to the story, leaving readers eagerly turning pages to unravel the truth behind the falsely accused investigator. Here are some of my theories as to why these types of mysteries are so compelling. Empathy and Connection: One of the primary reasons readers are enamored with mysteries featuring wrongly accused main characters is their personal feelings about the protagonist, especially if it’s a long running series. The sleuth, either a sharp and insightful professional or a quirky yet likable amateur, suddenly finds they’re under suspicion of a crime like Agatha Raisin in M.C. Beaton’s Agatha Raisin and the Quiche of Death. Readers are invested in Raisin’s struggle to remove suspicion from herself, creating an emotional bond that heightens the stakes of the investigation. Twisted Morality Play: Mysteries often delve into the complexities of human nature, morality, and justice as seen in Before I Go To Sleep by S.J. Watson where the protagonist has no memory of her past and discovers she’s a suspect in a crime she can’t remember. This transforms the narrative into a compelling morality play, especially when she has no idea who she can trust, including herself. Readers are presented with a scenario where right and wrong are blurred, and they are left pondering the ethical dilemmas faced by the falsely accused. Suspenseful Plot Development: The wrongly accused detective trope injects a healthy dose of suspense into the plot. The more the evidence stacks up against the main character, the more invested the reader becomes. As the reader follows the investigation, they are simultaneously unraveling two mysteries—the original crime and the detective’s predicament. The dual narrative creates a dynamic storytelling experience, keeping readers guessing as they eagerly anticipate the resolution of both mysteries as in Lincoln Rhyme’s quest to prove his innocence and find the real killer in The Bone Collector by Jeffery Deaver. Unpredictability and Surprise: The essence of a good mystery lies in its ability to surprise and confound readers. When the detective is wrongly accused, it subverts expectations and challenges conventional storytelling norms. Kinsey Millhone in Sue Grafton’s H Is for Homicide has to use her private investigator skills to get out of jail by working a fraud case for the local police. Readers are compelled to work alongside her as she infiltrates a crime ring, trying to discover the real culprit among a cast of sketchy characters. The unpredictable nature of having a main character barter for their freedom keeps readers engaged and invested in the story until the very end. Character Development: The wrongly accused protagonist trope offers an excellent opportunity for character development. Readers witness the investigator facing adversity—do they protest their innocence or make a run for it and why? Following the main character as they navigate personal and professional challenges draws the reader deeply into their world. Rusty Sabich in Scott Turow’s Presumed Innocent is a perfect example of how character growth adds richness to the story, transforming the protagonist into a multidimensional and flawed figure that the reader can’t help but root for. Mysteries where the detective is wrongly accused provide a captivating and immersive reading experience. How could a reader not be invested in Travis McGee’s need to prove his innocence when he’s wrongly arrested in John D. MacDonald’s The Long Lavender Look? The emotional connection with the protagonist, the exploration of morality, the suspenseful plot development, the element of surprise, and the opportunity for character growth collectively contribute to the enduring appeal of this subgenre. As readers immerse themselves in these enigmatic tales, they are not only solving crimes but also embarking on a thrilling journey of self-discovery and moral introspection. Also, these novels give a me a wide variety of scenarios to ponder when I wonder what would I do if I was wrongly accused of a crime I didn’t commit? What would you do? *** View the full article

Mary Kubica is a very private person. So private, in fact, no one but her husband knew she’d started writing a novel, The Good Girl. And even then, she didn’t let him read her manuscript. She fell in love with writing when she was almost a teenager, she says. “It was one of those things that when I discovered it, I never stopped…It was very much a hobby for me. I never thought it was something I would pursue.” She studied history and English in college and took one creative writing class where she wouldn’t even share her written musings with classmates. After college she taught history in the Chicago suburbs to high school freshmen and juniors. Standing in front of a classroom not far from where she grew up energized her, she says. This says a lot about Kubica. She not shy, just private. After she married and had her first child, she finally started to take writing seriously. Her daughter was just three weeks old, and being at home all the time, Kubica found time to write when her baby was napping. And then a lightbulb went off that changed her life. “When I started The Good Girl, I thought it was going to be a love story…It was starting to develop questions that I didn’t have answers to…So it was totally by accident (that it became a mystery).” She’d never written a novel before. Ever since she was young, she’d started but never finished one either. She just lost interest. “Not with The Good Girl,” she says, “because I put the elements of mystery in it, and it kept my attention. I knew I was supposed to be writing.” “It was the first thing I wrote that has any suspense and mystery elements at all. I felt it was my calling…It was the first thing that I really felt I wanted to get out into the world.” The Good Girl is about a young woman, Mia Dennett, from a prominent family that is fractured, a fact no one is willing to admit, not even to themselves. But Mia feels it. Her dad is a prominent judge and distant father. Her mother, a middling socialite. Mia is kidnapped and held in a cabin deep in the woods by a young man she eventually falls for. The Good Girl explores their evolving relationship and ends with a shocking twist. Kubica wrote her novel from several points of view: Mia, her kidnapper, her mother, and a detective who’s investigating her case. “I’m not a plotter, so it started with this idea of a missing woman…I liked the idea of exploring it from different characters’ points of view. I didn’t write the book in the way you read it…I definitely had to tweak things, so everything was revealed at the right point…that was really a fun experience.” She struggled to find the best way to organize it, so it took a while. In fact, it took five years to interweave all of her characters’ stories. “I knew in my head if I jumped back and forth, it would get very jumbled.” And it did for a while. And to add more hurdles for the young writer, the story flashes from present day to the past. Doing both in a single story is no easy task. For a first-time novelist, it’s like reaching the summit of Mount Everest and planting your literary stake on your first try. When she finally sent a query letter in search of an agent, she was still navigating the guardrails protecting her private writing world. “I think I had to find the confidence to put my work out there.” And it was certainly out there. She contacted 100 agents, and only three eventually expressed interest. But over the months, all three turned her down. She waited two years for a positive response, and none came. And then one day she received a call from Rachel Dillon Fried, a former agent’s assistant. She’d read Kubica’s manuscript two years earlier, but the agent she worked for took a pass. Fried never forgot Kubica’s manuscript and how much she liked it. When she finally was promoted to agent, her top priority was to make The Good Girl one of her first acquisitions. She sold Kubica’s novel to Mira Books and editor Erika Imranyi took over. During the editing process Kubica struggled to handle her editor’s criticism, something she’d never experienced because she’d kept her manuscript to herself. This was the first time anyone had cast a critical eye on every line of her work. “It was hard. You need to be prepared for it,” Kubica says. “That feedback from the editor is so crucial to the process and you have to get used to it. I’ve met some first-time authors who pull back, but it’s so important.” Even after she was published, she still worried her words were inadequate. “The first time I saw The Good Girl in a bookstore my reaction was it was out there for everyone to see…I had no idea though, how it was going to do—if anybody was going to read it. I’m also a bit of a pessimist. I was just thrilled to be published.” However, she says, “I knew that they (Mira) believed in it and that was huge.” And boy did they. Her publisher Mira Books (a division of Harlequin before it merged with HarperCollins) was so enthusiastic about The Good Girl that they paid to splash it on the cover of Publisher’s Weekly where it received a starred review. But as every writer knows, not every review is stellar and over the years Kubica has had to learn how to deal with bad reviews. “You’re never going to please everybody, and I’ve had to tell myself that…I have to write what I want to read…That’s all I can control. I can’t control how the reader responds to it.” She says it took her time to deal with opening up to the world. “My editor even told me to stay off Goodreads reviews.” One of her biggest thrills was attending the BookExpo America when it was at New York’s Javits Center. When she arrived, she saw Mira’s giant banner hanging from the ceiling announcing her novel. The hardback sold well, but never in the bestseller stratosphere. About a year later, eBook sales picked up just as The Good Girl began its paperback run and sales exploded. Kubica hit the New York Times bestseller list with her first novel, and it continued to sell. Today, more than a million copies have sold. Not bad for a debut author. Since her first novel, Kubica has continued to tell her stories through multiple points of view—in fact all her subsequent novels are written in her signature multiple point-of-view style. And since her first novel she’s streamlined her writing process by first writing each character’s entire story. She then weaves the parallel plots together into yet another bestselling suspense read. Writers as a whole suffer from all kinds of insecurities. They are shy, introverts, and like in Kubica’s case, sometimes very private. They struggle every day to overcome these personality glitches because they know they have something to say and must reach out to say it. So, it’s no small accomplishment for someone who values her privacy the way Kubica does, who never saw herself as pursuing a writing career, still manage to lay herself bare to the world. And the world is a lot happier for it. ___________________________________ The Good Girl ___________________________________ Start to Finish: 5 years I want to be a writer: Age 12 or 13 Experience: Writing was my hobby. Agents Contacted: 100 Agent Rejections: 97 Time to find agent 2 years First Novel Agent: Rachel Dillon Fried First Novel Editor: Erika Imranyi First Novel Publisher: Mira Books Age when published: 27 Inspiration: Examining everyday people and what they do in extraordinary situations. I’m a news junky so I get a lot of ideas there, and put my own spin on it. Website: MaryKubica.com Like this? Read the chapters on Lee Child, Michael Connelly, Tess Gerritsen, Steve Berry, David Morrell, Gayle Lynds, Scott Turow, Lawrence Block, Randy Wayne White, Walter Mosley, Tom Straw. Michael Koryta, Harlan Coben, Jenny Milchman, James Grady, David Corbett. Robert Dugoni, David Baldacci, Steven James, Laura Lippman, Karen Dionne, Jon Land, S.A. Cosby, Diana Gabaldon, Tosca Lee, D.P. Lyle, James Patterson, Jeneva Rose, Jeffery Deaver, Joseph Finder, Patricia Cornwell, and Lisa Gardner. View the full article

When I was asked to contribute an essay to CrimeReads, I was given a choice between compiling a Reading List, or to come up with something pertaining to the Themes in my debut novel, Hollywood Hustle. I can tell you, I hate making lists (even for grocery shopping) but since I couldn’t get anything done without them, I make them anyway. And though, as a new author, I have found other author’s suggestion lists to be invaluable to me, being so new to this game I fear a reading list of my favorite books would be a mere echo of so many better curated ones. Kind of like a recipe for spaghetti: Everybody got one, you don’t need mine. But “Theme” is something I can get behind. I theorize that we writers return to the same themes again and again, whether we try to or not, or even whether we’re even aware of it or not. To go a bit further, their origin may be a complete mystery to us. An enigma. I know it is for me. But why do we tend to return to the same themes? A theme is more than a subject, concept, thread, or motif. It derives from the same personal, internal, creative source that our stories do. Without a doubt, the main theme in my book is Redemption. That word is generally defined as “the action of saving or being saved from sin, error, or evil.” In other words, an act that gives someone, being ourselves or someone our main character loves, a future that one can survive, and even thrive in. But what is the root of that redemptive act? For me, it would be “hope”. Hope as a theme (and its first cousin Redemption) is all over my work. Why? Because it is all over my life. How could it not be? I work in Showbiz. Hope is what gets those of us in this business out of bed in the morning, that the embrace of hope will energize us to perform an act that will redeem our lot in life, especially when we are, as we say in Hollywood, “between jobs”. Trust me, a lot of hope is required for those lean times, and we all endure them. If I really unpack it, I can safely say that Hope is a major theme in the screenplays I wrote before coming to novels. Which begs yet another question: What is driving the need to sit down and write in the first place? (I’ll leave that to the shrinks, since I fear figuring it out could diminish my desire to write.) But the more I’ve come to know other authors, the more I’ve also come to believe that the inclusion of repeating themes in our work is fairly universal, albeit mysterious. Perhaps for the simple reason that the presence in our consciousness of that personal “theme” is a reflection of what we’ve most experienced in our lives. When it comes to the notion that a given theme cannot help but seep into our work, it’s because it is almost like a living verb that’s taken up residence inside us. Since my training and background is in the world of drama, Film, TV, Theatre, I’ve had to think about “theme” a lot, but I don’t think I really understood it until I read the late Sidney Lumet’s book, Making Movies. In it, he stresses the importance of clearly identifying the theme of any piece, as that clarity would guide his creative approach. That is to say, he would get clear on the theme, and then he would know how to tell his story. Of course, as a filmmaker, his responsibility was to determine the visual approach to the work after the script had been written. But Lumet was a prolific writer himself who authored many of his own screenplays, either solo or with a collaborator. He also stated that any theme needs to be boiled down to one or two words, again, for clarity’s sake. But Lumet’s handling of Theme is an element he defines before he would shoot his film, which was his real work. As novelists, we tend not to identify it at least after our first draft. A screenplay is a completely different animal, as it is not a finished work. It is more of a big-a** outline for what comes next. (In filmmaking we like to say the script is one thing, then during shooting it becomes something else, and then in editing it becomes something else, yet again.) But, I admit, this is only my hypothesis. So I asked a few colleagues, starting with my friend, best-selling author Alex Finlay, to weigh in. When asked if he tends to return to the same themes, he answered: “I don’t go into a novel with a theme in mind, but instead, I’m just hoping for characters and a story that will keep me motivated and interested enough to finish the damn thing. But at some point, I realized that all of my books – from Every Last Fear to my upcoming If Something Happens to Me – deal with the legacy of trauma, or, more accurately, people coming out on the other side. Not to get too insufferably literary, but a quote from Hemingway captures my recurring theme: ‘The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places.’” Now, I won’t presume (nor will I ask) why Trauma has been a recurring theme for Alex, but having read all of his books (minus the yet-to-be-released title) I can easily see what he’s talking about. There is definitely something about trauma that threads throughout Alex’s work. But by his own admission, there is an even deeper angle, something at the end of the trauma: Survival. Writing is a journey of its own, and for Alex it also seems to be a journey through trauma to the ultimate destination of survival. Perhaps “survival” is a better word for what he’s exploring when he writes? That I will ask him. (And Alex, you could never be “insufferably literary”, only compellingly so.) Says #1 New York Times best-selling author Lisa Gardner, “For theme, I gotta go with Alex. I never plan a theme in advance. Most of my thrillers have been based around some central question from what would you do if you discovered you were married to a serial killer (my first novel The Perfect Husband) to what kind of person would dedicate her life to finding missing people the rest of the world has forgotten (the Frankie Elkin series). Having said that, many of my novels have shared similar themes which have evolved over time. For a bit, I was definitely exploring what does it mean to be a survivor (from surviving to thriving).” Ms. Gardner had more to say on the subject that I did not include here, but that also reflected her process of not identifying a theme when she writes, but rather a conscious exploration of her main character’s living condition within the context of a engrossing story (and I will point out there’s that survive/thrive thing again.) For Blake Crouch (Dark Matter, Recursion) he may be conscious of wrestling with something in his personal life while he’s writing his story but (like Alex and Lisa) he’s not chasing an identified theme as he writes: “In terms of the themes in my writing, I tend to gravitate toward issues I’m dealing with at the time. In this way, my writing becomes a kind of self-therapy. I discover and work through my issues with the characters in my book. However, I often don’t realize what theme/issue I’m tackling until the first draft of the book is finished.” I’ll make the claim that these three highly accomplished authors support my basic point; that there’s something elliptical within that drives us through the telling of our stories. I don’t sit down and say, “I’m going to write about redemption today,” any more than Alex declares he’s going to write about trauma. It just comes out that way. But I’ve learned what they share in their creative journeys is that they all tend to explore some theme that involves “overcoming.” So now I have to wonder if that is part of what we experience in the simple act of trying to write a complete story in novel form: Will I overcome this process of writing enough to survive … and thrive? I suppose my second novel will feature Redemption, as well, as will my (developing) third. But I won’t know for sure until the story dictates itself to me, tells me where it wants to go, dead bodies, and all. I do know that every time an author finishes a novel, they are better at it than they were on the previous one. Could that be the internal engine driving us? That if we complete this book, we have survived it … and thrived? And therefore, we are redeemed? I really don’t know, because I still don’t know where the hell it comes from. As Alex reminds us of what Hemingway said, I do know this, “The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places.” *** View the full article

Pharaoh Ramesses II was an unrepentant warmonger and slaver, but he is also credited with building the earliest known library in the 1200s BCE. To paraphrase the equally problematic Walt Whitman, he contained multitudes. Inscribed in stone over the sacred library doors was a Greek phrase meaning “healing place of the soul.” Rather elegant for a man who almost certainly married at least four of his daughters, but I can’t argue the point. Stories heal. Books save lives. I’m proof, and odds are, some of you are too. The first book I remember finding myself in was Lois Lowry’s The Giver. Like Jonas, I had seen things I could never unsee, things I could not explain to other kids. Partly because I didn’t have the language, and partly because we never stayed in one place long enough. My protector was sometimes my predator, sometimes my best friend, sometimes in need of protection herself. I saw the system fail long before most kids my age knew that it could, and that knowing marks you. In Jonas I found a mirror. In his choice to use the very things that made him different to help others, I found hope. I found a paradigm where hurt kids could lead, inspire, and find their own way. Later, I would meet myself in the lunar-eyed girls of Francesca Lia Block’s achingly beautiful novels. I met girls who saw rainbows in oil-slicked puddles and cried at the beauty of music, and also sometimes cried for no reason at all. I met girls who sometimes stopped eating because it made them feel light and clean when nothing else could, and who sometimes loved people who didn’t come back and instead of growing numb, chose to love all the fiercer for it. In her books and others I found stories of kids who sometimes hurt themselves because watching the scabs form was the only thing that made them believe that someday they could heal from everything else. I found friendships that existed only in my heart, friendships that planted seeds where someday flowers would bloom into a path to the flesh-and-blood people who would become my chosen family. Writing is about telling a great story, sure. But for me, part of what gives those stories their glitter is the fairy dust of the writer’s own loves and hurts, their fears and furies woven into unforgettable characters. I owe everything to those who came before and put so much of their hearts into those stories. When I began writing Till Human Voices Wake Us, I knew who Cia was: a bold, clever girl who had survived this incredible tragedy determined that it wasn’t going to define her. But some ghosts refuse to stay buried, and trauma ignored always claims its due. I knew that Cia’s journey would be as much about having the courage to go back as it would be about the choices she would make moving forward. At the time I began writing this book, the world as I knew it was shifting. Maybe avalanching is a better word. Politicians began burning books on TikTok and xenophobia became resoundingly-endorsed policy. Hate speech was endorsed by global leaders as the hallmark of freedom, and the fragility of civil liberties already paid for in blood became heartbreakingly evident to those privileged enough to have taken them for granted. This book was born out of the question of who we will allow to chart our course from here: the dreamers or the fear-mongers? The builders of bridges or the builders of walls? And can anything correct our course if we choose wrong? Cia’s story is about finding your footing when the world drops its mask and stops pretending to be anything but a battlefield. It’s about the wounds we carry and what we choose to do with them. Do we love bigger and harder for the hurt that we’ve endured, or do we weaponize it to protect ourselves and those we care about? * View the full article

Peg Tyre and Peter Blauner are New York Times bestselling authors who have over a dozen published novels and multiple awards between them. They’ve also been married for 34 years. Their novels STRANGERS IN THE NIGHT and THE INTRUDER, originally published in the 90s, are both being released for the first time in hardcover by Dead Sky Publishing. Peter Blauner: Most people these days mainly know you as a responsible and respectable journalist who writes very seriously about subjects like education. They have no idea you published a pair of funny, scary, sexy crime novels back in the 1990s. You want to tell them how that happened or should I spill the beans? Peg Tyre: Well, getting a book republished after all these years is like meeting an old version of yourself. I guess I’ve evolved. The newspaper business I was part of went away, and other opportunities in journalism came up, and then other opportunities outside of journalism. I’m the same person, just older. What do you think, Peter more mellow? PB: I don’t think people looking for “mellow” reach for the Peg Tyre shelf. I think people looking for excitement and scintillating ideas are more in your aisle. Anyway, when you wrote this book, you were already holding down a full-time job covering crime for a New York newspaper and raising a toddler. What on earth were you thinking? PT: Ha! From one point of view, it was a kind of madness. From another, it was just the writing life. Nobody ever says, “Ok, now the world is gonna just slow down for you so you can figure out how to write that novel.” You have to do it however you can. One thing about living with you, Peter, is that your work habits are like a metronome. Very steady. Very deliberate. Very unswerving. I absorbed some of that, which I needed to be productive. I’ve always had a lot of energy and a weird stubborn kind of stamina and focus but watching you defend your regular writing time helped. I also felt like these stories were bursting out of me and it was a great relief to sit down and try to get them on the page. PB: How weird was it that you went from writing about Donald Trump and these snooty society types in a New York magazine gossip column to covering down-and-dirty crime in the Bronx and Queens? Most people who went to the kind of colleges you went to didn’t really understand why you would want to do that. A lot of them might have thought that was deliberately stepping from the penthouse into the gutter. How can you explain that to “normal people”? PT: Honestly, it was such a step up. I mean, I took that society job because I needed the work but I hated that phony baloney ego stroking. I had a low opinion of journalists who covered rich people, hoping that some of their god-like aura that surrounds the wealthy would rub off on those ink stained schlubs.. It’s sad. Pathetic, really. I wasn’t raised around people who were wealthy and powerful and I guess I never got the memo that I was supposed to measure people for the size of their bank accounts. Covering crime, I learned a lot about people – and saw some pretty terrible things, brutal things, craven things but also situations in which people acted in a way that was amazing, astonishing, heroic and beautiful. Also, funny. It really helped me formulate a world view. PB: One thing I love about re-reading the nove—I should say one of the things that I love—is that it captures a particular time in the city and the romance of the Big City newspapers in what was probably their last great era. But there were also terrible things going on: rampant inequality, five or six murders a day, AIDS, and all the other hallmarks of the 80s and 90s?, Do you think younger readers will understand what was fun about being a reporter then? PT: Well, it wasn’t a desk job, that’s for sure, And every day, I felt like I was in it. Anything that was happening in this big wild pulsating chaotic city could randomly come careering into my life. And I never knew on Monday what Tuesday would look like. And it could be wildly frustrating—I mean, standing outside the yellow tape of a crime scene while the detectives talked to my (male) competition—ugh. And it also could be just wild. Like one time, a currency exchange place got robbed at JFK airport and I went out to figure out what had happened. On the face of it, it’s a dumb crime to follow up on. Reporters don’t spend too much time on bank robberies and the like because it’s all corporate PR people trying to prevent you from finding out what happened. But when I got to JFK, the people who worked at the currency exchange place couldn’t wait to talk to me. They were saying “It was Bernie! He robbed us! He’s the sweet old guy who has been sweeping the floors here for 20 years! He did it! But he loved us! He was like family, “What could have come over him?” It was unexpected. They gave me Bernie’s address and I went straight to his house and rang the doorbell. His adult son answered, and he told me this dad was a good man, the centerpiece and caretaker of his big extended family. The son shared that just five minutes ago, the son had found a shoe box of cash and a note, which he produced for me. The note recounts that Bernie, at the insistence of his family, had gone to the doctor for his longtime stomach ache and while he was waiting for the test results, he’d become convinced he was dying of cancer. He admitted, apologetically, that he’d robbed his old friends at the currency exchange place so his family would have some money after he was dead. And that he was going off to kill himself to save him and his family the agony of watching his slow painful death. Well, that’s a story, I thought. But it got crazier. The adult son tells me his dad doesn’t have cancer. The doctor called that morning, after Bernie had left for work, to say Bernie’s stomach pain was caused by an ulcer. Remember, this is before cell phones. So now Bernie is somewhere, believing he’s a wanted man, dying of cancer, getting ready to end his own life. And everyone—his son, his wife, the neighbors, the people he robbed—they all are like “BERNIE COME HOME! IT’S NOT CANCER!”—which of course, was my front page headline the next day. And then the local Tv stations picked it up. And it was the story of the week. I ended up finding Bernie a hot shot lawyer who I knew from another story I was working on, who brokered Bernie’s surrender to the District Attorney, who was totally charmed by the old man’s story. Bernie ended up getting Pepto Bismol and supervised release. I mean, that’s the kind of thing that could happen on a Tuesday. And who knows what Thursday would look like. PB: I still think the story of Bernie could be a novel as well. But there’s something I notice when you try to tell younger people these stories about the Bad Old Days in the city. They get this kind of petrified look. Sometimes I think they just don’t understand what it used to be like. And then other times, I think they’re just appalled that we were so into the mayhem of it. Especially when we’re trying to explain how things could be terrifying and funny at the same time. What do you think has changed? Could you write a book like Strangers in the Night or The Intruder now? PT: Some readers are looking for experiences—and stories—that are affirming and comfortable. I don’t think either of us could really relate to that when we were younger (although personally, I get it a little more now.) Generally, we have always put ourselves in weird situations for the sheer joy of hearing people’s stories. I mean, you were in Egypt during the Arab spring, and the West Bank and Gilgo Beach researching that serial killer. I think if you are up for engaging with the true panorama of human experience, the kind of books we’ve written could be for you. PB: When I look at the novel again, I remember how much I loved Kate Murray the reporter. But I also love all the funny little realistic details like the detectives watching the animal documentaries when they’re supposed to be working and the reporter who tries to curry favor by writing “Ode to Sparky,” about a dog who died. Somebody could describe the book as The Front Page meets Sex in the City, but Strangers in the Night is actually much more matter of fact than either of those. What parts stood out for you when you looked at it again? PT : Awww, Peter. You are too kind. You’ve always been my biggest cheerleader and I appreciate that about you. What stood out for me is the sheer level of energy in these books—and this was before Adderall. And how they are full of longing. I think a lot of people could still relate to that. *** Peg Tyre, the bestselling author of THE TROUBLE WITH BOYS, has written for Newsweek, the New York Times, the Atlantic, Fast Company and Scientific American. She has won numerous awards, including a Pulitzer Prize, a Clarion Award, and a National Education Writers Association Award and was a finalist for a National Magazine Award. Tyre’s novel, STRANGERS IN THE NIGHT, was recently re-released by Dead Sky Publishing. She lives in New York City with her husband, novelist Peter Blauner, and their two sons. Peter Blauner is the author of nine novels, including THE INTRUDER, a New York Times bestseller and bestseller overseas that will soon be released for the first time in hardcover from Dead Sky Publishing. He first broke into print as a journalist, writing cover stories for New York magazine about crime and politics. He has written for numerous TV shows, his novels have been published in twenty-five languages and his short fiction has been anthologized in Best American Mystery Stories and NPR’s Selected Shorts from Symphony Space. He lives in Brooklyn, New York with his wife, the bestselling author Peg Tyre. View the full article

My debut novel is a tribute to my hero, Jane Austen, in the format of a murder mystery. It is fitting because Austen’s classic works are essentially mysteries where the heroine must uncover the true characters of those around her, especially the hero. In a world where a women’s entire future depends upon who she marries, it pays to investigates one’s love interest thoroughly. With that in mind, here are all six of Jane Austen’s heroines, ranked from worst to best for their detection skills. There is one young woman who combines all these qualities in abundance and whose prowess at sleuthing outshines even her greatest protagonist, and that’s Austen herself. Throughout her works and letters, she displays an innate understanding of human nature, a passion for justice, and an unflinching gaze at the mercenary society which she inhabits. That’s why, when I was looking for a way to tell Austen’s life story, I couldn’t resist making her the star of her very own murder mystery. In this first installment, Miss Austen Investigates, The Hapless Milliner, my Jane is very young and most definitely in her Catherine Morland era. However, when the body of a milliner is found bludgeoned to death at a ball, and Jane’s gentle brother Georgy is thrown into gaol, nothing will prevent her from using her sharp wit and fierce determination to uncover the true culprit and save Georgy from the gallows. Emma Woodhouse It’s ironic that Austen’s most lacklustre sleuth is the protagonist of her most perfect mystery, for Emma follows the conventions of a contemporary whodunnit. There’s no dead body, but Austen cleverly sprinkles the clues as to the real story, the secret engagement between Jane Fairfax and Frank Churchill, throughout the narrative. Unfortunately, Emma is too self-absorbed to spot them. The sheltered life she’s endured trapped at Hartfield with her controlling father, combined with her extreme privilege, have left her bereft of insight. She really is clueless. Although Emma develops enough self-awareness to regret her terrible behavior and understand her romantic feelings for Mr Knightley by the end of the novel, in terms of sleuthing skills, I’m afraid it’s ‘badly done, indeed!’ Catherine Morland Catherine should be most suited to a life of solving cozy crime. The ‘horrid’ Gothic novels she’s read (the Regency equivalent of our true crime obsession?) make her an expert on dastardly deeds and she’s on the hunt for the truth about what happened to the former mistress of Northanger Abbey as soon as she arrives. At first, it might seem as if Austen is encouraging us to laugh at Catherine’s wild imagination when she accuses General Tilney of murdering his wife. Catherine is certainly mortified and allows herself to be persuaded out of her convictions by Henry Tilney’s pompous sermon. But it’s hard to ignore the fact that Catherine turns out to be right – there is something monstrously callous about General Tilney, who throws teenage Catherine out of his house, at a moment’s notice and with no protection, for not being as rich as he thought she was. Excellent instincts Catherine. Fanny Price Unlike Emma and Catherine, poor Fanny doesn’t have the luxury of complacency. Having been ripped away from her family and emotionally abused by her wealthy relations, Fanny is constantly on her guard. Rightfully so, as one wrong move and she’s sent back to her negligent parents as punishment for refusing a socially and financially advantageous match in Henry Crawford. But Fanny won’t bend. She saw through Henry’s roguish charms the moment he arrived on the scene. Her lowly status and her own timidity leave her powerless to prevent the corruption wreaking havoc at Mansfield Park—from the inappropriate choice of amateur dramatics to the slavery it’s built on—but she sees everything, and, through her, we see it too. In Fanny’s own words: ‘I was quiet, but I was not blind.’ Elinor Dashwood and Anne Elliot Joint runners up are ‘sensible’ Elinor and ‘capable’ Anne. Their steady temperaments mean others are constantly confiding in them, even when Elinor and Anne would rather they did not. Colonel Brandon trusts Elinor with the tragic tale of Eliza Williams because, unlike the emotionally incontinent Marianne, he knows she can govern her response to it. Lucy Steele forces Elinor into her confidence to warn her off her fiancé, and even Willoughby has the gall to make Elinor his confessor. Rather than collapsing under the burden of everyone else’s admissions, Elinor discretely uses this knowledge to navigate towards a satisfactory conclusion. Similarly, Anne’s legendary tact means she’s forced to listen to the complaints of her various acquaintances and given the task of babysitting the insufferable. While Anne may not relish an evening of Benwick’s mournful poetry, it is her gentle probing of the melancholy captain which causes Wentworth to realise he’s still in with a chance. Nice work ladies. Elizabeth Bennet Mr Darcy accuses Lizzy of setting out ‘wilfully to misunderstand’ everyone she meets, but he’s as wrong about her as she was about him. When Lizzy realises the discrepancy between Wickham and Darcy’s accounts of their prior relationship, she proactively sets out to investigate by questioning the witnesses (including Aunt Gardiner and Pemberley’s housekeeper) and weighing up the probability of one man’s version of events against the other’s. It is to Lizzy’s credit that she’s ever willing to be proved wrong and, even better, to examine why she might have let herself be deceived. She can even laugh at her foibles. This delightful humility throughout her epic journey of self-discovery is what makes Lizzy not only Austen’s best detective, but also her most beloved heroine of all. *** View the full article

Spenser’s Boston, Temperance Brennan’s North Carolina, Dave Robicheaux’s New Iberia…real places with fictional detectives. The setting is an important part of any series of books and is often informed by a deep connection the author has with the location they have chosen. Robert B. Parker spent his whole life living and writing in Boston. Kathy Reichs, like her protagonist, is a forensic investigator based out of Charlotte who also worked in Quebec, both locations brought vividly to life in her novels, and James Lee Burke sets the majority of his work in his hometown, except when he occasionally detours to place a mystery in Montana. When we were coming up with the character of Miranda Abbott, we knew she had to start off in Los Angeles. Or Hollywood, to be precise. What better location for someone who was once the star of a network television series playing the crime-solving, karate chopping, bikini-wearing Pastor Fran in Pastor Fran Investigates, a show we like to think of as a cross between Murder She Wrote, Father Brown, and Charlie’s Angels. Of course, it’s been 15 years since Miranda’s series was unceremoniously cancelled, she’s living in what Armand Gamache (as written by Louise Penny) would refer to as “reduced circumstances,” and she’s blissfully unaware that she’s no longer famous. Miranda gets turned down for a role on the reality series The Real Has-Beens of Beverly Hills, her agent fires her, and she gets evicted from her run-down apartment. Just when things seem dire to the point of catastrophe, a mysterious postcard arrives, summoning her to…well, where exactly? We wanted Miranda to be a fish out of water, wherever we sent her, and we knew that we wanted her new location to be a permanent relocation, and the setting of the series. We do not live in the same city. One of us (that would be Will) lives in Calgary, a modern metropolis of over a million people, and the other one (that would be Ian) lives in Victoria on Vancouver Island, which could – if you stretched the point – be described as “an exotic town on an island in the Pacific Ocean,” but is certainly no Montego Bay, which already has Raythan Preddy and Sean Harris wandering around solving crimes. So, no point in using a location we were familiar with as the setting. We also wanted a small town, but not too small, with the ability to bring in characters from other locations just to keep the local body count to a manageable number. We decided on a west coast location and thought Oregon would work best. Portland, possibly? Too large. And Joe Burgess has that town covered. Maybe Ashland? Too small. And we don’t know much about Ashland, other than what we could glean from the Jules Capshaw mysteries, and the one time one of us (Ian) attended their Shakespeare festival. We decided to make up our location. A fictional place with a fictional detective. We wanted a town that was not too big, not too small, but just the right size. We thought about calling it Goldilocks, briefly, but common sense prevailed, and instead we invented Happy Rock, Oregon, which is a fictitious town, indeed, but which is located on the very real Tillamook Bay. Look it up. Happy Rock is like Ed McBain’s gritty Isola, or the Hardy Boys fictional Bayport, or the idyllic Cabot Cove, which is also completely imaginary, a fact one of us (Will) was completely surprised by. The best part of creating a completely imaginary made-up location for the Miranda Abbott mysteries? Freedom. Glorious, glorious freedom. We can do anything we want. If we want Happy Rock to have a historic Opera House, done. Do we need a stately hotel? Boom. How about a lighthouse? Why not? We’re only limited by our imaginations and the requirements of the story. We created a town with a handful of businesses sprinkled along a small coastline. A three-person police force. A weekly newspaper. Everything we might need. The worst part of creating a completely imaginary made-up location? Also freedom. Horrible, horrible freedom. We must, from book to book, keep the geography and layout of the town consistent. If Happy Rock was, you know, a real community, although it certainly feels real enough to us, we’d probably have to deal with the odd reader correcting or contradicting us. “You can’t actually make a left turn out of the entrance to the Duchess Hotel,” “The Cozy Diner doesn’t actually share a parking lot with Tanvir’s Bait & Hardware,” “Actually the Opera House actually faces to the southeast.” We just assume they would overuse the word “actually.” Since Happy Rock isn’t a real place, and we can’t consult a map or look for information about it online, we have to make sure a reader doesn’t point out “in the previous book Harpreet’s store wasn’t across the street from the bookstore.” This reader wouldn’t use “actually,” of course, but they’d be right, dammit. So, we not only write the books, but we also have to read them. Writing the Miranda Abbott mysteries is a lot of fun. We’ve just finished the first draft of the third book in the series, and as long as readers keep enjoying them, we’re going to keep writing them. However, before a manuscript gets to be a book, we’ve read it edited, copy edited, line edited…we’ve reviewed the typeset and advanced reader copies, listened to the audio version…frankly by the time it hits the bookstore it’s not quite as much fun for us to read. Besides, we already know who the killer is. The best thing about Happy Rock? Location, location, location. Happy Rock is just far enough off the beaten track to be isolated but not so much that we can’t bring in outsiders or tourist or, most importantly, victims and/or suspects. When we finished the first Miranda Abott mystery, we realized that a few of the characters we created would not be able to appear in subsequent novels. Someone revealed as a murderer would be noticeable by their absence in a later book, and a character who is a suspect in one shouldn’t probably appear in another book since some readers have the annoying habit of reading books in a series out of order. However, as long as we’re careful in our writing (and our reading) we’ll be able to keep Happy Rock as real as possible. No matter what order you read the books in. * View the full article

The hero of Leave No Trace, Michael Walker, is a former park ranger and current special agent for the Investigative Services Branch (ISB) of the National Park Service (the park service’s version of the FBI). So to celebrate the upcoming publication of Michael’s inaugural adventure (February 27 from Minotaur Books), I thought I’d provide some context for the role park rangers have played in pop culture, specifically film and television: Hey There, It’s Yogi Bear (1964) Of course, we had to start with the animated film that was based upon the syndicated TV show “The Yogi Bear Show.” Ranger Smith, Yogi’s perpetual, decades-long nemesis in Jellystone National Park, was very likely an entire generation’s introduction to the very existence of park rangers. Yogi and Boo-Boo were every bit as good here as in their shorter form tales, sure to be appreciated by purists while others may prefer the 2010 live action (more or less) version featuring Tom Cavanaugh as Ranger Smith with Dan Aykroyd voicing Yogi and Justin Timberlake voicing Boo-Boo. Flipper (1964-1967) Ranger Porter Ricks is responsible for preserving the safety of animal and human alike in Coral Key Park, Florida while raising two sons. In addition to foiling poachers and protecting marine and mammal life, Ricks portrayed one of the first single fathers ever on television. One of his sons, Sandy, was played by blond-haired, blue-eyed Luke Halpin who became one of the original teen TV pinups. But the real star of the show, of course, was the domesticated dolphin who played the role of a water-dwelling Lassie in adventures amid a beautiful setting. Gentle Ben (1967-1969) After “Gunsmoke” and before “McCloud,” Dennis Weaver played a park ranger assigned to Everglades National Park, while also raising a family that includes the tame bear of the title. Clint Howard famously played the boy, alternately rescuing and being rescued from trouble by his pet bear. “Gentle Ben” was pretty much the same show as “Flipper,” minus Luke Halpin’s blond locks—no coincidence since both shows were made by Ivan Tors and were filmed on location in Florida. Grizzly (1976) Speaking of bears, the not-so-tame, eighteen-foot monster who is kind of “Jaws,” only with paws, quickly dissolves into an inadvertent spin into camp. Tom Wedloe steps into the Roy Scheider role of the Spielberg classic, playing another park ranger in Everglades National Park, where the giant bear has staked its claim. As a homage to its forebear, the hero’s wife is similarly named “Ellen.” Don’t look for a Quint-like bear hunter, unless you count a helicopter pilot who assists the ranger’s efforts to restore the natural order. The River Wild (1994) Played with rugged machismo, Benjamin Bratt’s stalwart Montana park ranger is nonetheless unable to save a white-water rafting guide played by Meryl Street from killers who’ve taken her family hostage amid the rapids. Streep did a number of her own stunts, but there was a scare at the end of one day of filming when Hanson asked Streep to shoot one more scene, even though she was exhausted. Street eventually gave in and ended up getting swept off the raft into the river and had to be saved by a river rescue team. Broken Arrow (1996) Pilot Christian Slater joins forces with Park Ranger Samantha Mathis to take on nuclear terrorists who’ve managed to steal two atomic bombs off a disabled stealth bomber. This thriller helped define an era that also spawned other action-dominated films like “The Rock” and “Con Air,” but failed to turn Slater into an action star on the level of Nicolas Cage. Slater might know his nukes in the movie, but it’s Mathis’ knowledge of the rough terrain of Utah’s Glen Canyon National Recreation Area that ultimately saves the day. Cocaine Bear (2023) We saved the best, and most recent, for last. The always great Margo Martindale plays a park ranger named Liz whose worst day ever confronts her with yet another bear who is not a monster, but a cocaine addict—well, at least user in that he’s consumed enough of the drug to get a small country high. Appearing terrified even though she never actually worked with a live bear during the shoot posed little problem. “It was easy,” the Emmy Award-winning actress told “Entertainment Weekly. “I’m easily frightened. And I’ve had a big bear right on our property, right out in front of our house, several times.” *** View the full article

Various medical phenomena have shocked, surprised and fascinated us since the dawn of time. From the terrifyingly named Alien Hand Syndrome to alleged accounts of spontaneous human combustion, we are insatiable for stories which slip outside our realm of understanding. We are driven—be it through empathy, morbid curiosity, fear or intellectual interest—to ponder the meaning of our existence, and wonder: what does this mean? why does this happen? how can we feel safe, when our field of knowledge is incomplete? In If I Die Before I Wake, the protagonist suffers a fall which leaves him in a coma, suffering from locked-in syndrome. However, the realization quickly dawns that this was not an accident but attempted murder. How can he find the perpetrator and potentially save his life, when he cannot communicate with the outside world? It’s an interesting premise. Here’s another: in The Silent Patient, a woman with apparently no motive kills her husband and has never spoken since. Can her new therapist unlock the puzzle of her elective mutism and find the truth? Interesting, right? Crime fiction invites readers to peer into the mind of criminals and turn a mirror to their own darker instincts and desires, and there are countless other examples of medical riddles being used in this genre, from amnesia – explored in S.J. Watson’s unforgettable Before I Go to Sleep—to Munchausen’s by proxy in Gillian Flynn’s incisive thriller, Sharp Objects. Done well, they can draw attention to a condition or disorder, raising awareness as well as providing an interesting and engaging story. Done badly, they can damage your reputation as a writer, offend sufferers of the condition and spread misinformation. So, think about why this particular medical phenomenon interests you. Why do you want to tell this story? The disorder or condition should not be there as a convenient device or deux ex machina to solve plot or character issues. Neither should it be the sole focus of the story, but it will almost certainly shape the individual’s perceptions of life. How do friends and family see this person? How does their condition change the way they see themselves? How do people relate to them? Is someone secretly jealous of the attention they receive? I was inspired to write My Name Was Eden after being diagnosed with Vanishing Twin Syndrome: one of my twins had literally vanished in the womb and become absorbed by its sibling. The surviving twin – my son – was born, and as he grew, so did my curiosity about what happened to the other. There were more questions than answers, however: upon researching the condition, I was surprised to discover that little had been documented about Vanishing Twin Syndrome, despite it happening in approximately 1 in 5 twin pregnancies. Stranger still, there were stories of the surviving twin absorbing the vanished twin’s DNA, others where they reported feeling “different”, and I thought this raised some interesting questions – not only about genetics, but also about personality, the formation of identity and the debate surrounding nature and nurture. My Name Was Eden is a story about vanishing twin syndrome, yes, but beyond that, it’s about the conflicting forces which act upon a family and how these can drive a person (or people) to commit acts of crime. In short, it is not the medical phenomenon that pushes the story forward, it’s the characters and their responses to change. When writing about medical phenomena, research is essential, but if there is limited information available, read articles, blog posts, forums. Be sensitive. If possible, talk to sufferers of the condition or their relatives/caregivers and find out how it impacts them on a day-to-day basis. This is key to understanding the condition from a personal perspective. Where do they live? How much support do they receive? Can they afford the treatment they require? Consider the time period that your crime fiction is set in. Early medical treatments such as bloodletting and lobotomy were once accepted medical procedures, and while it’s true that we now have a much greater understanding of the human body and have come a long way in terms of scientific advancements, there is still much that continues to confound and defy medical expectations. Take Stone Man Syndrome, a genetic condition whereby muscle and connective tissue regenerate as bone in response to damage, gradually forming a second skeleton. Or Walking Corpse Syndrome: a mental disorder whereby a person believes they are missing body parts, or even that they have lost their soul or died. Luckily, our job as fiction writers is not to cure, but to explore. Could my experience of Vanishing Twin Syndrome have been triggered by anxiety or stress? Possibly. Or maybe it was caused by something unknown to medical science at this time. Paradoxically, without modern technology to enable earlier and more sophisticated scanning, I would not have known about the vanished twin at all. It begs the question: what else can’t we see? Sometimes, we’d just kill for answers. *** View the full article

Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Rebecca Roque, Till Human Voices Wake Us (Blackstone) “Debut author Roque confidently weaves together dynamic characters with complex histories to riveting effect.” –Publishers Weekly Ian Ferguson and Will Ferguson, I Only Read Murder (MIRA) “The brothers Ferguson pull out all the comedic stops, taking on Hollywood elitism, community theater, and small-town quirkiness in a fast-paced, lighthearted murder mystery…readers will enjoy following the hilariously inept Miranda as she tries to solve the crime in this promising series starter.” –Booklist Christoffer Carlsson, Under the Storm (Hogarth) “When the body of a young woman was discovered in an incinerated farmhouse in 1994, resolution was swift—it was murder, her boyfriend did it, case closed. But for the boyfriend’s nephew, Isak; the arresting officer, Vidar Jörgensson; and the entire community of Marbäck, closure is a myth about to be shattered.” –Sarah Weinman, The New York Times C.J. Cooke, A Haunting in the Arctic (Berkley) “An unnerving tale full of ghosts, selkies and plenty of mystery, which Cooke deploys not only to craft the novel’s frights but also to probe ideas of grief and retribution…haunting.” –The New York Times CJ Box, Three-Inch Teeth (G.P. Putnams) “Franchise fans will appreciate new details about Joe’s complicated family, the obligatory high-country landscapes, and yet another corrupt law enforcer… [E]asy to swallow in a single gulp.” –Kirkus Reviews Thomas Mullen, The Rumor Game (Minotaur) “Time and again, Mullen’s suspenseful storytelling pulls us forward.” –The New York Times Book Review Jessica Bull, Miss Austen Investigates (Union Square) “Bull’s Jane is an endearingly clumsy detective, equal parts clever and impulsive, and the investigation contains the kind of high stakes that similar breezy historicals often lack. This series seems destined for a long run.” –Publishers Weekly Maurice Carlos Ruffin, The American Daughters (One World) “A high adventure, a revealing history, and a chronicle of one woman’s self-realization. Ruffin also displays some of the cunning imagination and caustic wit he showed in his previous work by interspersing his narrative with imagined transcripts from the past, present, and even the future. Black women as agents—literally—of their own liberation. Who wouldn’t be inspired?” –Kirkus Reviews A.J. Tata, The Phalanx Code (St. Martin’s) “Lots of credible action, plenty of government traitors, and shocking losses fuel the action. Tata continues to rise among the ranks of today’s top military action writers.” –Publishers Weekly A.J. Landau, Leave No Trace (Minotaur) “Leave No Trace is an expertly crafted gut-punch thriller. The action leaves you aghast, always guessing and very glad you read it. A.J. Landau takes no prisoners when it comes to high octane, fast moving storytelling.” –Michael Connelly View the full article

The city of the Highlands, located on Scotland’s dramatic northeast coast, where the River Ness meets the Moray Firth. 65,000 or so folk but apparently one of northern Europe’s fastest growing cities that gets consistently ranked in the top five UK cities for quality of life. Doesn’t mean there isn’t a few murders to write about though in this northeastern outpost of Tartan Noir…. GR Halliday’s trilogy features Detective Inspector Monica Kennedy. In book one, From the Shadows (2019), Kennedy teams up with Inverness-based social worker Michael Bach. Sixteen-year-old Robert arrives home late. Without a word to his dad, he goes up to his bedroom. Robert is never seen alive again. A body is soon found on the coast of the Scottish Highlands. Then another boy goes missing…. DI Kennedy is back in Dark Waters (2020) where tourists to the Highlands seem to be getting abducted. Meanwhile Monica has been called from Inverness to her first Serious Crimes case in six months – a dismembered body has been discovered, abandoned in a dam. A killer is on the loose in the Highlands. And finally, in Under the Marsh (2022) Kennedy receives a call to visit Pauline Tosh in the remote Highlands Carselang prison. Twelve years ago Kennedy caught Tosh, a serial killer and sent her to prison for life. In the jail Tosh hands Monica a hand-drawn map with a cross marking the desolate marsh lands near Inverness and other bodies. JD Kirk’s Detective Chief Inspector Jack Logan series (19 books in total) also takes place in and around Inverness and that part of the Highlands and are all steeped in Highland locations and famous sites. We’ll focus on the 14th book in the series City of Scars (2022) where Logan tracks a sadistic killer who begins picking off victims on the streets of Inverness. The body count grows alarmingly fast, Logan is getting nowhere while his personal life is taking a beating. Some nice atmospherics around Inverness and its back streets. Margaret Kirk writes ‘Highland Noir’ Scottish crime fiction in the DI Lukas Mahler trilogy, all set in and around her hometown of Inverness. Her debut novel, Shadow Man, won the Good Housekeeping First Novel Competition in 2016 and comes highly recommended by any number of the luminaries of the Tartan/|Highland noir scene (Val McDermid et al). Shadow Man (2016) introduces ex-ex-London Metropolitan police Detective Inspector Lukas Mahler, now based out of Inverness. The day before her wedding the queen of Scottish daytime TV is found murdered. On the other side of Inverness, police informant Kevin Ramsay is killed in a gangland-style execution. Are the two killings related and is the Inverness underworld involved? Mahler is back in What Lies Buried (2019) – an abducted local kid and the discovery of human remains on a construction site near Inverness which reignites a cold case from the 1940s. And lastly, In the Blood (2021) a corpse in Orkney, a cluster of islands off the northeastern coast of Scotland leads back to a case Mahler handled back in his London days with the Met Police. Helen Forbes is another Inverness based crime writer and sets her Detective Sergeant Joe Galbraith series in her hometown. Shadow of the Hill (2014) starts in Inverness where an elderly woman is found battered to death in the common stairwell of an Inverness apartment building. But then the investigation spreads across Scotland as far as the Hebridean island of Harris, where Galbraith spent his childhood. Galbraith returns in Madness Lies (2017) with a murder in the centre of Inverness in broad daylight. It’s a high-profile case – such a random act of violence rarely seen in the city and, in this case, a high-profile Inverness city Councillor. Everyone tells Galbraith he had no enemies, but someone clearly wanted him dead. The action roams across Inverness with side trips to the Hebridean island of North Uist and down to London. One more contemporary Inverness novel. And this one from Scottish Tartan Noir legend Christopher Brookmyre, best known perhaps for his Jack Parlabane novels. Parlabane is an investigative journalist who, in order to do his job as he sees it, is not above breaking a few trespassing and burglary laws. In Black Widow, the seventh Paralbane book, Jack is investigating an Inverness surgeon suspected of her husband’s murder following a car accident in the Highlands. Black Widow was the Scottish Crime Book of the Year 2016, an award now named after the late and very great Scottish crime writer (and generally regarded as the founding father of Tartan Noir) William McIlvanney. And finally, SG Maclean is an Inverness writer who has written a brilliant historical mystery, The Bookseller of Inverness (2022). It’s worth laying out the plot in some detail for those not necessarily au fait with Scottish eighteenth century history. After the Battle of Culloden (the final confrontation of the Jacobite rising of 1745), Iain MacGillivray was left for dead on Drummossie Moor. Wounded, his face brutally slashed, he survived only by pretending to be dead as the Redcoats patrolled the corpses of his Jacobite comrades. Six years later, with the clan chiefs routed and the Highlands subsumed into the British state, Iain lives a quiet life, working as a bookseller in Inverness. One day, after helping several of his regular customers, he notices a stranger lurking in the upper gallery of his shop, poring over his collection. But the man refuses to say what he’s searching for and only leaves when Iain closes for the night. The next morning Iain opens up shop and finds the stranger dead, his throat cut, and the murder weapon laid out in front of him – a sword with a white cockade on its hilt, the emblem of the Jacobites. With no sign of the killer, Iain wonders whether the stranger discovered what he was looking for – and whether he paid for it with his life. He soon finds himself embroiled in a web of deceit and a series of old scores to be settled in the ashes of war. The Bookseller of Inverness is a great historical crime novel that takes you into old Inverness and a deep dive of Scottish history too. Perhaps the ideal place to start reading about the capital of the Highlands. And perhaps finally, finally…. As we mentioned Culloden…Douglas Skelton’s The Blood is Still (2020) should get a mention. When the body of a man in eighteenth-century Highland dress is discovered on the site of the Battle of Culloden, journalist Rebecca Connolly takes up the story for her newspaper. Meanwhile, a film being made about the 1745 Rebellion has enraged the right-wing group Spirit of the Gael which is connected to a shadowy group called Black Dawn linked to death threats and fake anthrax deliveries to Downing Street and Holyrood (the Scottish parliament building). When a second body – this time in the Redcoat uniform of the government army – is found in Inverness, Rebecca finds herself drawn ever deeper into the mystery. View the full article

As a licensed psychotherapist, I can attest to the importance of mirroring in therapy when a patient shares their feelings, thoughts, and experiences, and the clinician mirrors them back in a supportive way. For example, if a patient discloses something they’ve never shared with anyone before due to a fear of being judged, and the clinician applauds the bravery of their disclosure, the patient has the opportunity to feel seen for the first time. The act of mirroring affirms their experience and may leave them feeling less alone, as one of the antidotes to despair is human connection. The same can be said and has been said about books—novels in particular: “Books are sometimes windows, offering views of worlds that may be real or imagined, familiar or strange. These windows are also sliding glass doors and readers have only to walk through in imagination to become part of whatever world has been created or recreated by the author. When lighting conditions are just right, however, a window can also be a mirror. Literature transforms human experience and reflects it back to us, and in that reflection we can see our own lives and experiences as part of a larger human experience. Reading, then, becomes a means of self-affirmation, and readers often seek their mirrors in books.” ― Rudine Sims Bishop, professor emerita at Ohio State University Because books are often used as mirrors by readers for their own experiences, mental health representation in fiction is especially important. Adult contemporary fiction, including the crime fiction space, has long featured characters with various mental health issues. Some examples include addiction (alcohol use disorder) in The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins, self-harming (non-suicidal self-injury disorder) in Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn, and domestic violence (post-traumatic stress disorder) in The Last Flight by Julie Clark. While eating disorders have been represented in young adult and, more recently, in new adult books, they have been largely left out of adult contemporary fiction. That is one of the reasons I set out to write a thriller featuring a protagonist in eating disorder recovery. Since She’s Been Gone is about a psychologist, Beatrice, known to loved ones as Beans, who lost her mom to a hit-and-run twenty-six years ago. When a mysterious woman shows up at her office and tells her that her mother is still alive and in danger, Beans embarks on a heart-pounding journey to uncover the truth about what really happened to her mother. Don’t worry, I’m not giving anything away—this happens in the book’s first few pages! It’s a dual-timeline thriller that shows how an eating disorder affected Beans beginning at the age of fifteen in the aftermath of her mother’s death and how it resurfaces later in her adult life, first during her marriage when she was pregnant and later when the bombshell news is dropped on her that her mother may still be alive. One of the many misconceptions about eating disorders is that they only affect young, thin, white women. Recently, a national book club turned down my book, stating their readership skewed older and that books featuring eating disorders are better suited for a younger readership. In fact, eating disorders impact people of all ages, genders, races, and body types, affecting roughly 10% of the population. They also thrive in secrecy and shame, which is why representation in books matters so much. People are less likely to seek help if they carry shame due to false beliefs that they are the only ones impacted by something like being an adult with an eating disorder. I’ve received messages from a wide range of readers who read advanced copies of my book, including but not limited to a nurse, a librarian, and a mother of a toddler, thanking me for writing it and explaining how an eating disorder has personally impacted them. Some of the most moving messages I’ve received have been from parents with children in eating disorder recovery thanking me for writing my book, stating it helped them better understand what their children are experiencing and up against. Just as importantly, I have received messages from readers stating everything they had learned and thought about eating disorders from the media was incorrect and that they now have more compassion for those struggling with eating disorders. Let’s face it: the media has historically done a terrible job of portraying eating disorders as glamorous and aspirational due to the fat-phobic society we live in. My hope is that publishing Since She’s Been Gone, which I view as a form of advocacy, will help destigmatize this illness so those impacted will reach out, open up, and seek treatment as needed. Being diagnosed with an eating disorder is not a choice. It is a disease. But the message in my book is clear: there is hope for recovery. * View the full article

A 38-year-old English woman sits on a bench at the Gare de l’Est train station in Paris, on her first solo trip abroad. It’s a providential time for an escape. Her marriage has collapsed. She has survived a suicide attempt. She has embarrassed herself in front of the entire country (although only she knows exactly how, and why). She has found some success as a writer, but it’s far from clear that she’ll be able to recapture that early magic. She needs inspiration! Something new. Smoke drifts across the platform. A whistle pierces the air. It’s time to board the train. With hands trembling from excitement and trepidation, Agatha Christie steps onto the Orient Express… The most famous mystery novel of all time, Murder on the Orient Express, was published on New Year’s Day, 1934. In America, it was published as Murder on the Calais Coach, to avoid confusion with Graham Greene’s Stamboul Train, which had been published in the U.S. as Orient Express. It’s instructive to compare these two books. Both Christie and Greene instinctively grasped the dramatic possibilities of rail travel: suspense, romance, and the taut desperation of passengers trapped in an intimate, not say claustrophobic, environment. Greene adopts a conventional approach for what he might have later called an “entertainment”: a motley group of characters, all with their own secrets and fears, find their fates intertwined on a train that is, a favorable critic might say, “hurtling towards a rousing climax.” Christie is up to something different, and more sophisticated. Two fundamental facts define travel by rail: the train is always in motion and the passengers are all strangers. Christie subverts both. First, she slams the brakes by famously stranding her Orient Express on the tracks in the snowbound Alps, instantly plunging the novel into a variant of the Locked Room puzzle (what TV screenwriters now call a “Bottle Episode”). And then she cleverly invents a premise — medium spoiler alert! — in which none of the passengers are strangers. Christie had already upended the mystery genre eight years earlier with The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, in which the killer is revealed to be the one character who is typically not allowed to be the murderer. Now she was doing it again. The typical mystery is focused on one singular question: Which of these suspects is the murderer? Christie’s innovation in Orient Express was to contrive a solution — major spoiler alert! — in which everyone is the murderer. To revolutionize a genre once is astonishing, but to do it twice? Now you’re just showing off. And Christie wasn’t done. In her best novel, 1939’s And Then There Were None, she came tantalizingly close to devising a mystery in which no one is the murderer. (I’m one of those cantankerous fans who pretend this book’s explanatory epilogue simply doesn’t exist.) We know what came next for Christie: fame, fortune, films, TV, her self-transformation from gifted storyteller to one-woman industry reliably churning out books year after year (“A Christie for Christmas” as the marketers would say). To her millions of fans living now around the world, all of this success appears as well-plotted and foreordained as one of her books. But of course, Christie knew nothing of what lay ahead. Let’s return to our imagined little scene at that train station in Paris. Christie’s divorce had been finalized just a few months earlier. She is, at this point, probably as famous for her mysterious 11-day disappearance as for her books. (She was found in a hotel, checked in under the name of her then-husband’s mistress.) We know, but she does not, that on the hot dusty plains near Baghdad, Christie will soon meet a dashing archaeologist — nearly 14 years younger! — with whom she will live, happily, for the rest of her life. We want her to succeed. We’re rooting for her. Inside the dining car, the novelist’s eyes study her fellow passengers. They betray themselves with every word and glance. A small smile flashes across her face as she thinks to herself: If you had to murder someone on a train, how would you do it? A woman fails at suicide. She buys a rail ticket to an exotic destination. She recalls, vaguely, reading newspaper articles about a famous kidnapping in America. Of such raw stuff is life — and literature — made. *** View the full article

Recently, for the first time since they started making movies together in 1984, we’ve been able to guess what each Coen Brother might bring to their cinematic partnership. The Brothers, Joel and Ethan, who have collaborated constantly since their debut feature Blood Simple, have spent the last few years making films apart. Joel made the fascinating, heady nouveau-expressionist adaptation The Tragedy of Macbeth in 2021 and (in addition to a propulsive documentary about Jerry Lee Lewis), Ethan made Drive-Away Dolls, the droll crimey road-trip lesbian buddy comedy which hits theaters this weekend. The Brothers, who are even more secretive about their process than they are about their lives, have not shared how they have come to make the films they have. Their oeuvre is especially fascinating because it’s a real variety pack of genre and tone. Sometimes they make transcendent, gritty masterpieces like Inside Llewyn Davis, Fargo, True Grit, Miller’s Crossing, and No Country for Old Men. Other times, they make strange, brilliant experiments like Barton Fink, O Brother, Where Art Thou?, and The Ballad of Buster Scruggs. They have made unparalleled, genre-sampling comedies like The Big Lebowski, Raising Arizona, Hail Caesar!, and A Serious Man. They’ve made films that you might not have heard of, like The Man Who Wasn’t There and The Hudsucker Proxy. And they’ve made a handful of films that are generally thought of as weird, frenetic, and (for lack of a better phrase), not great: The Ladykillers, Intolerable Cruelty, and Burn After Reading. (The thing about the Coen Brothers is that their films feel endlessly reshuffle-able in these groups according to personal preference; this is mine.) They’ve also written movies of every possible type and at many levels of quality: the underwhelming caper Gambit, the uninteresting Suburbicon, the crass heist film Bad Santa, the sweeping war drama Unbroken, and the serviceable Cold War thriller Bridge of Spies. The question of “what makes a Coen Brothers’ movie?” can’t really be answered in any other terms than Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s, in his decision in the 1964 Jacobellis v. Ohio pornography case: “I know it when I see it.” You do, too. There’s probably some sort of formula, but the type of movie the Coen Brothers seem to make is, to me, one that smartly blends fathoms of knowledge about cinematic and literary history, an appreciation for many different eras and kinds of filmmaking, and a sense that the only audience they really care about is themselves. I’ve never seen another series of films that seem, so much, to be made for the enjoyment of the filmmakers alone. Anyone else’s approval seems like a convenient bonus. So what does it mean to watch half of a Coen Brothers’ movie? Rather, to watch a whole film and notice how similar it feels to a Coen Brothers’ film, except for a few absent things? After watching Drive-Away Dolls, I felt safe to at least joke that Joel supplies the noirish, literary investments, and Ethan supplies the buddy-comedy elements and whatever in their corpus passes for bawdiness. But actually, just as much as I could not help but feel, and wonder about, the Coen-ness of Drive Away Dolls, I also recognized that this was a very new kind of movie to have their name attached, and I found it fascinating to watch that develop. Ethan directed and co-wrote the film with Tricia Cooke, his wife, who co-produced it. The story, which takes place in 1999, is about two young women, the free-spirited Jamie (Margaret Qualley) and the uptight Marian (Geraldine Viswanathan), who go on a road trip together from Philadelphia to Tallahassee. They’re friends, as odd-couple as it gets, and they’re both looking to get out of town; Jamie wants to go find herself after being caught cheating on her girlfriend Sukie (Beanie Feldstein), while Marian, still single after breaking up with her girlfriend three years ago, plans to go visit her aunt. They rent a car from a Drive-Away, a service that pairs cars bound for certain cities with people who plan to drive to those cities anyway, and begin their plans to head down South. In more ways than one. Marian wants to get to driving; Jaime wants to get Marian laid (and get laid herself), and plans a bunch of side trips to lesbian bars and parties. But both women don’t know that their car is concealing contraband goods—or even that these items are being hotly pursued by a mysterious group of individuals who desperately want them back. That group’s leader is Colman Domingo (ever-suave, but dangerous), and he sends two stooges (Joey Slotnick and C.J. Wilson) to track the girls down. What follows is a lighthearted story of pursuit and commitment that unfolds in parts as a madcap crime comedy and a genuinely sweet romance, with psychedelic interludes aping 70s lesbian sexploitation films. It might seem difficult to pull off all of this well, especially in a film whose runtime is a taut 84 minutes, but the film’s pacing is fine; it bounces along satisfactorily, propelled, mostly, by the earnest and game performances of its cast, especially Qualley (who has been giving the extra-hard assignment of speaking with a deep Texas drawl), Feldstein, Plotnick, and Domingo. Additional small performances by Matt Damon, Pedro Pascal, and Bill Camp pepper the film with amusing moments. Critics will doubtlessly be divided on this film, but I hope even those who don’t care for the film acknowledge how, in parlance of our times, it “commits to the bit.” Its real title, censored for mass distribution, is Drive-Away Dykes. This isn’t a film which cops out by queerbaiting its audience or pussyfooting around the promised sexual themes. There are elements of the plot that are extremely goofy, but the film unapologetically grips onto them and uses them to lean all the way into pulp, wryly and jocularly paying homage to the lesbian grindhouse cinematic canon while also boldly attempting the first modern, mainstream, softcore lesbian sex comedy. This feels rather vanguard for a Coen movie of any kind, since the movies made by the Brothers feel generally uninterested in sex even when their narratives call for it (even though sometimes, as in Burn After Reading, they are interested in phalluses even when their narratives don’t call for it at all). Perhaps this is due to the influence from Cooke, who identifies as gay and wrote the draft for Drive-Away Dolls many years ago. There are a few moments that break up the film’s momentum, a few things that seem designed to get laughs at the expense of narrative and tonal coherence. The experience is sometimes just as erratic as the story is erotic. Drive-Away Dolls is not perfect, by any means. For instance, without going into spoilers, I’ll say that the film takes its protagonists in certain directions that I don’t quite think are supported by their relationship as we see it. Nonetheless, it is a very intrepid, gutsy, good-natured endeavor with many genuinely enjoyable elements. And, even if you think it comes together or not, you can’t deny that it makes quite a splash. View the full article

It’s another great year for historical fiction, as many of my favorite trends from the past few years continue; in the list below, you’ll find con artists and queens, spies and spiritualists, nurses and ne’er-do-wells, vagabonds and vigilantes, and marginal characters of all kinds fighting to stay afloat in a cruel and inconsiderate world. The works below have a bit of a 19th and 20th century bias, in particular focusing on the mid-1800s and the Interwar Period, as well as several set just after the end of WWII. You’ll find the familiar within the strange, and the strange within the familiar, in each of these works, for the job of the historical novelist is to walk the tightrope between universal human truths and particular period details. I do not envy this Sisyphean task, but I do celebrate all those who accomplish it. Joel H. Morris, All Our Yesterdays (Putnam) Setting: Scotland, 12th Century In this rich historical reimagining of the lead-up to Macbeth, Morris asks, what if the Lady MacBeth had a son? And what if her new relationship with the thane MacBeth after the death of her brutal first husband was predicated on equality and respect, as opposed to the beaten-down womanhood of others in 11th century Scotland? Thoughtful, eerie, and full of medieval magic, Morris’ take on the much-maligned lady will perhaps have you rooting for her and her partner, or at least, feeling some sympathy for her quest of vengeance. Briony Cameron, The Ballad of Jacquotte Delahaye (Atria) Setting: Caribbean, 17th Century This is a fascinating take on a rumored real-life figure, the swashbuckling Jacquotte Delahaye, but one which takes plenty of narrative license to fill out the gaps in her amazing tale. Jacquotte begins the novel as a shipbuilder, but through no fault of her own, soon becomes an outlaw, and must take to the high seas to preserve her own life and those of her companions. She quickly grows her crew through enlisting some nontraditional sailors, and finds herself on a path towards safety and autonomy—if she can keep herself from a showdown with her nemesis, of course. Joyce Carol Oates, Butcher (Knopf) Setting: New Jersey, 19th Century This well-researched historical tale of medical experiments gone haywire looks to be a perfect match with Joyce Carol Oates’ visceral style and violent explorations of American sins. Set in the 19th century, Butcher follows a disgraced surgeon sent into exile at a “Asylum for Female Lunatics,” where he finds himself surrounded by vulnerable patients and with few potential consequences for wrong-doing. This is sure to be one of her best yet, and I don’t say that lightly. Amanda Jayatissa, Island Witch (Berkley) Setting: Sri Lanka, 19th Century Another gothic tale helping to decolonize the genre! Set in 19th-century Sri Lanka, Amanda Jayatissa’s Island Witch follows the outcast daughter of the local demon-priest as she tries to find answers in a series of a disappearances rocking her small community. Jayatissa’s novel is steeped in folkloric traditions and sumptuous landscapes for thrilling, feverish read. Carmella Lowkis, Spitting Gold (Atria) Setting: Paris, 1866 Another Atria title on the list! And another one concerned with mystical frauds—this time, two spiritualist sisters, famed in their teen years for their convincing seances, held in the most prestigious salons and parlors of Paris. The elder sister must be coaxed out of her comfortable retirement married to a baron so the two can pull off one last con, but all is not what it seems in this lush and twist-filled tale. Spitting Gold is carefully plotted, fully characterized, and incredibly satisfying, so I must apologize to all for telling you how great it is so many months before you can actually read it. Elizabeth Gonzalez James, The Bullet Swallower (Simon & Schuster) Setting: Texas and Mexico, 1895 This new novel about family secrets and living landscapes takes on epic proportions, jumping between mid-century Mexico and the final days of the old West, turn of the century, unlocking a cache of sins passed down through one family and reverberating across the generations. Gonzalez writes with great skill and imagination. –DM Katherine Arden, The Warm Hands of Ghosts (Del Rey) Setting: Flanders, 1918 Two soldiers are lost in no man’s land when they find a mysterious h iome of revelers waiting to take them in, but not quite ready to let them leave. Meanwhile, the sister of one, a combat nurse, returns from Canada to seek her brother in the mud and muck of the front lines. Katherine Arden’s haunting gothic delves deeply into the emotional and physical landscape of WWI for an enthralling and heartbreaking read. Kirsten Bakis, King Nyx (Liveright) Setting: New England, 1918 The first novel from Kirsten Bakis in 25 years! In King Nyx, set during the height of the Spanish Influenza, a sensible woman of a certain age and her flighty yet devoted husband head to a remote island. They’re looking forwards to a stay at the manse of an eccentric robber baron; her husband is hoping to finish his magnum opus on meteorological anomalies (rains of fish, frogs, blood, etc), and Bakis’ narrator simply wishes to get some rest. Upon arrival, however, they find out that multiple girls have gone missing from the rehabilitation home/workhouse also located on the island, and they must isolate in quarantine for at least two weeks before they even meet with their mysterious benefactor. There are neighbors in quarantine as well, also on the island for an intellectual retreat, and Bakis’ narrator soon teams up with the kindred spirit next door to understand what’s going on. Bakis’ symbolism is particularly on point, with a creepy garden, a beautiful set of parakeets, and automata aplenty. Future students will highlight the crap out of this book. Lee Mandelo, The Woods All Black (Tordotcom) Setting: Appalachia, 1920s Leslie is a battle-hardened nurse for the Frontier Nursing Service, where he’s often sent to outposts so remote they don’t care about his gender-non-conforming ways, but his latest posting seems bound to endanger him from the get-go. He’s ready to perform a certain amount of femininity to get the townsfolk to at least agree to get their children vaccinated, but he’s soon out on a limb trying to rescue another gender outlaw as the small village joins forces against both, fueled by their preacher’s hatred and his angry god. This book was so good. And sexy. Very, very sexy. Don’t read that ending in public. Chris Harding Thornton, Little Underworld (MCD) Setting: Omaha, 1930s Chris Harding Thornton is a seventh-generation Nebraskan, so you know that this tale of underworld greed and vengeance set in 1930s Omaha is going to be authentic AF. Thornton’s language captures the pulp era perfectly, and her sharp metaphors and quick action sequences poetically dictate the disastrous lives of her ne’er-do-wells as they struggle on the margins. A must-read from a writer to watch. Vanessa Chan, The Storm We Made (S&S/Marysue Ricci Books) Setting: Malaya, 1945 In one of the best espionage novels I’ve ever come across, a bored Malaya housewife lets a Japanese spy charm her into giving up the secrets necessary for her nation to be invaded; later, as the war continues, her guilt grows monstrous as her children suffer. Clare Beams, The Garden (Doubleday) Setting: New England, 1948 Clare Beams’ luminous and disturbing new novel is set in a grand old home built by a robber baron and then turned into a hospital for women having difficulty bringing their pregnancies to term. The house is more prison than shelter, and the doctors are more interested in experimentation than care. Irene, the headstrong heroine of the novel, finds herself in need of a backup plan to secure the safe delivery of her infant, and that’s when things get really weird. While this book is well-grounded in its historical setting, the way the book explores medical and societal control over women’s bodies feels incredibly contemporary. John Copenhaver, Hall of Mirrors (Pegasus) Setting: Washington, D.C., 1954 In the midst of the Lavender Scare, a mystery novelist is murdered, killed in an arson attack on the apartment he shared with his lover and writing partner. The grieving writer is hell-bent on finding the cause of his partner’s death, but Copenhaver’s teenage sleuths-turned-lovers from The Savage Kind are alternately helping and hindering in the investigation, as they continue to pursue their old nemesis, now wreaking havoc in the State Department. An excellent continuation of Copenhaver’s series, richly detailed and with convincingly realized characterizations. Maxim Loskutoff, Old King (Liveright) Setting: Montana, 1970s Maxim Loskutoff’s Old King is as majestic and foreboding as the old growth forest featured so heavily in its pages. The setting is Lincoln, Montana, where, in the wake of America’s bicentennial, an angry recluse named Ted Kazinski (the Unabomber) is preparing to spread chaos through the US mail system, convinced that his acts of random violence will spark an uprising against the era of the machines. Loskutoff spends only small sections of the book immersed in Kazinski’s disturbing perspective, peopling the rest of his pages with a well-sketched cast of characters strongly divided on a host of questions: do they protect the forest or exploit it? Is modernity an evil? Is it inevitable? And can it be stopped? Bret Anthony Johnston, We Burn Daylight (Random House) Setting: Waco, 1993 That setting tells you straightaway what this one’s going to be about: the Branch Davidians, the Waco siege, and the ordinary lives caught up in a flash-point moment that will reverberate for a generation to come. We Burn Daylight uses the perspectives of two star-crossed lovers—the sheriff’s son and the unbelieving daughter of a cult member—to navigate the complexities of the showdown, for a moving and epic tale. I would expect no less from Johnston. View the full article

At my desk in the office at the bottom of the garden, under a jacaranda tree, in one of the most violent countries in the world, I write a murder mystery series set in a pretty village in the Cotswolds, in England. In real life, the Cotswolds is a place where the murder rate is close to zero. A local news article “Rise in violent crime in Cotswolds” tells us that there was one homicide – a category which includes both murder and manslaughter – in the year 2022. In the previous 12 months, there had been none. In our books, life in the Cotswolds is far more perilous. Under the pen name Katie Gayle, my co-author Gail Schimmel and I have killed off a dozen or so people in six books and counting, in a popular genre called “cozy mystery”. Think Murder She Wrote, or the books of Agatha Christie or Richard Osman. A defining characteristic of this genre is the absence of graphic violence, grit and gore. When bad things happen, they happen off-page, out of sight, and with a certain delicacy. The victims are more often than not pushed off hilltop walking paths, or drowned in picturesque lakes, or bonked on the head in the heat of the moment with heavy domestic objects (a frying pan, a doorstop). When readers meet them, the violence is over. Some of the victims are long dead, but recently discovered. The crime is solved not by the police, but by an amateur sleuth – in our case, Julia Bird, a practical, wise woman of 60+ – using instinct and good old common sense. Thanks to her efforts, justice is served. I forget exactly what I was writing that morning, a year ago – perhaps Julia was taking a walk through the soft green of the spring woods with her chocolate labrador, or on her way to her volunteer job at the local Charity Shop where she might happen upon a useful clue – when a man appeared at the door of my office with a gun. I had heard the garage door open, and my son’s footsteps, and his voice: “My mom’s in there.” When I looked up, he was standing at my door with another man, who I took for a friend until I saw that he was older, and he was holding my son’s arm tightly, and he had a gun. Three more men jostled nervously behind him. Because I don’t live in a village in the Cotswolds, but in suburban Johannesburg, I said to myself, quite rationally, “Ah, okay, so this is how it goes down. An armed robbery. It’s finally happening to us.” I know dozens of people who have been robbed, carjacked, mugged, scammed, and held up, but other than the cellphones pickpocketed from my kids at clubs and festivals over the years, we have largely dodged the odds for decades. The man cut to the chase: “Do you love this boy?” I assured him in a voice so calm I didn’t recognise it, that yes, I love the boy. “Where are the guns… the safe… the money?” We own neither guns nor a safe full of cash – I wondered briefly if everyone else had such things, and if our oversight in this matter made things better or worse for us – but I assured him that I would give him whatever else he wanted. And I did. I gave him the wedding ring off my finger. All my “good” jewelry, my mother’s and my grandmothers’, none of which I ever wore, because who, in Johannesburg, would be so foolish as to wander about in gran’s amethysts? Instead, I tucked the little sack of treasure into the corner of a high up cupboard in my bedroom, and when the moment came, I climbed on a stool and handed it over at gunpoint. I feel there’s an edifying lesson there, or an inspiring meme about wearing your good bra and lighting the Jo Malone candles, but that’s not the point I’m here to make. They took phones and laptops. Passports and bank cards. A crappy television. My RayBans. The saxophone my husband has played in dozens of bands since he was 17. Oh, and our car, which the boy had been driving when they followed him into the garage and held him up. Because we were mostly face down on the carpet while the men ransacked the place, other absences went unnoticed, and months later, when we’d ask each other, “Have you seen my black coat… my torch… the backgammon set…” (That last, in a smart leather case, was a disappointment, I’m sure). The third person The trauma counselor had me look at a point on the wall next to her and give a brief account of what happened on that day. I was to tell it fast, without dwelling on details, and I was to tell it in the third person, as if it had happened to someone else. This intrigued me. One of the most defining choices you make as a novelist is that of the narrative voice, or point of view. It’s the perspective from which the story is told. Each narrative position brings with it its own problems and possibilities. The voice that comes most naturally to me as a writer is the close third person. The best way to describe it is as if the protagonist has a camera on her shoulder, showing the reader the action. It’s not the protagonist herself talking (that would be first person), but it is the protagonist’s view of the world. The close third person is, in many respects, a terrible choice of narrative voice. It’s one that causes me no end of trouble. It has all the disadvantages of the first person narrator – you can only see what your protagonist sees, think what she thinks. It means your protagonist has to be in every scene, and has to find out anything that happens “off stage” through investigation, conversation or some other means. The close third person also lacks the advantages of the more traditional omniscient third person narrator, who resides outside of the action, who can travel through space and time, who can get into anyone’s head, who knows what everyone in the story knows – and sometimes more. I’m not cut out for all-knowing omniscience. Or for the constant spotlight of the “I”. The close third’s slanted intimacy, the feeling of being almost inside the protagonist’s head, but a little detached, works for me. And now here I was in the trauma counselor’s room, telling my robbery story in some therapised version of the close third person, speaking fast, as instructed, without explanation or elaboration. She walked into the house with him behind her… They took the boy… He told her to lie down… I offered none of the details that a novelist would ordinarily linger over and polish, or work for effect. The way the robbers stepped politely over the sleeping dog on their way into the house. The peculiar feeling of a shared objective with my captor, working together to get this thing done quickly. His heavy work boots – all I saw of him, as I kept my head down to avoid seeing his face. The heft of the little drawstring velvet pouch of rings and necklaces in my palm. The weird sense of time, and the wondering – are we halfway through this yet, maybe even three quarters? The hyper-vigilant listening, the gratitude for every minute without the sound of a gunshot. He pointed… She nodded… They left… In a couple of minutes, the tale was told. It sounds kooky, but I’m not averse to a bit of kooky in extremis, and it seemed to sort of work. My words raced, relating the events, but for the first time, my heart did not. I was detached from my own story. Gradually, we begin to feel calmer. Family, friends and neighbors hold us with their bountiful love, care and food (even in trauma, a young man welcomes a lasagne). We go again to the trauma counselor. We sleep a little better. There’s less weeping. Less forgetting of words, appointments, pots on the stove. I no longer feel as if my veins run thick with cortisol soup. You might call it healing. The second body In a murder mystery story, the discovery of a second body brings new information. It provides fresh clues and opens up the investigation in surprising new ways. It discounts certain potential suspects and brings others to the fore. It tells our sleuth something she didn’t previously know. Two months after our robbery, on a warm summer evening, I returned home from a poetry club meeting, buoyed by words and friendship and a glass of champagne, to find my husband standing outside on the veranda waiting and pacing. “J is dead.” I knew from his face that there was more. “He was killed. In a home robbery.” Not far from where we live, in a suburban home on a tree-lined street, a gentle, brilliant man, a poet, a writer, a husband and father, had been stabbed. The cortisol soup came sloshing back. My son sat with me on the step. We hugged each other and sobbed, my boy and I. All the holding-it-together, and the could-have-been worse, was revealed as naïveté, as foolishness. Something in us broke, possibly forever. If the second body tells our fictional sleuth something useful that she didn’t know before, this second, devastating real world crime told us something horrifying, something intolerable – that we are not safe. That no one is. It told us that the world is even more terrible than we had imagined. What we had tried to pass off as a random, isolated incident, was in fact one stitch in a great fabric of violence. This was the way the world was – vile and brutal and not to be trusted. It told us that the close third person recounting was wishful thinking. There is no safe distance at which to observe. This was, and always would be, a first person encounter. I was held up. They pointed a gun at me, and worse, much worse, at my beloved child. J was killed. His children lost their father. The same is true of every one of the too many victims of violence. Each one, the I in their story. Each someone else’s beloved my. I write this on the one year anniversary of the robbery. My boy is studying in Amsterdam. I miss him like a phantom limb, but I am pleased he’s there. I’m still here in the ‘burbs, in the peculiar middle class South African space of being both comfortable and deeply uncomfortable. I walk the parks and pavements daily with the elderly stepped-over dog, feeling mostly safe, always vigilant. I no longer work in the little office in the garden, with its window overlooking the bird table where crested barbets eat papaya. It had been my haven since the busy days of a house full of children, a place where I’ve written hundreds of articles and books, but since the men with the guns, I haven’t felt calm there. I hope to go back one day. In the meantime, I work as an itinerant, in the tv room, or at the kitchen table, sometimes in another city, writing improbable tales of death in the Cotswolds, for a British publisher, for English and American readers. It’s only because of their sheer implausibility that we can invent these curiously delicate yet alarmingly regular deaths in fictional country villages (let alone the successful investigations by a woman of a certain age). Readers and writers know it’s a set-up, a trope, a fantasy. In real life, those people are safe. Where I live, no one is truly safe and violence is never off-page. It’s in your own car or house, or on the street, or in the park. It’s in your head. A clever elderly lady and her labrador are not going to solve a crime, or prevent the next one, and neither, in all likelihood, will the police. I live with a deep sense of vulnerability, and an intimate knowledge of danger. Many people in my country live much closer to that knowledge than I do. There’s nothing cozy about violence in the real world. Perhaps packaging up the unthinkable as such is a way of acknowledging the horror of the world, while keeping it at a distance – the distance we experience in the third person, or the trauma counselor’s office. The inevitable tragedy of life is wreathed in natural beauty, and community, with a cat on its knee and a cream scone at hand. Someone does come to save the day. Bad people are punished, or repent. Good people are rewarded. Order is restored and justice is served. Our deepest, primal longings are fulfilled. On the page, at least. View the full article

“You have a magic lamp,” Bunny began, taking a pull on her cigarette. She exhaled and squinted through a ribbon of smoke. “And you have one wish. What is it?” “One wish?” Amanda’s gaze swept across the moon-bathed rooftops in contemplation. She laughed mirthlessly. “Just the one?” “Not easy, is it? See, most people would say they want to be rich, but you already know what that’s like. Or someone might say they want to be famous, but you already know what that’s like too, don’t you?” “Not anymore,” Amanda said, turning to face her. “There,” Bunny pointed her cigarette at Amanda. “That’s it. Money is money, it comes and goes, and it never really makes anyone happier. Don’t get me wrong, being rich is a lot easier than being broke, nobody is going to argue about that. But being famous? Having people recognize you, adoring you, going out of their mind at the mere sight of you? God, it must be the best feeling in the world.” She dragged on her cigarette, and when Amanda didn’t say anything, Bunny asked, “Is it?” “Yeah,” Amanda said in a very small voice, and then she fell silent a moment, dizzied by the nostalgia. An image slipped out of her memory: eating sushi at an expensive restaurant and ordering wine that cost more than her outfit, before having the entire bill waived by the manager in exchange for a photo. Then, stepping outside only to see a gang of over twenty people waiting in the freezing December rain for autographs. One girl crying with joy, unable to speak through trembling lips because Amanda had hugged her. She could feel pressure building behind her eyeballs, the sting of tears threatening to blur her vision. The champagne was making her maudlin, but if she was honest with herself, it was more than that. She hadn’t spoken to anyone about the death of her career since the label dropped her. She’d had a window of opportunity to vent – offers streaming in from magazines and trashy tabloids – but the pain had been too raw, and she had been too distracted. “Why am I here, Bunny?” “Something has come up that you might find interesting. A company contacted me to enquire about your services. I had to explain that I no longer represented you, but that seemed like a great way for us to get back in touch. Perhaps we can work together again if you find everything agreeable.” “Who was the company?” “They’re called The Midori Media Group. You won’t have heard of them; they’re new.” “They want me to sing?” “Ah, now here’s where it gets interesting,” Bunny said, funnelling smoke from the side of her mouth before crushing her cigarette out on the balcony and flicking the butt over the edge. “No, it’s not that kind of gig. They’re interested in you, your story.” “Story? What story?” “Hold on,” Bunny began calmly. “There’s a little bit to unwrap here, but in essence, they want you to take part in a social experiment of sorts.” “Oh brother,” Amanda groaned. “Don’t fly off yet, just hear me out. It’s not some tacky reality TV show. In fact, it’s not even TV. It’s all completely private, and you stand to make two hundred and fifty thousand pounds. Tax free.” “What?” Amanda thought she had misheard. “That’s what they want to pay you. One week’s work. Quarter of a million pounds. And it gets better. Midori Media are hugely influential behind the scenes. They can put you back in the spotlight if you decide you want to make more music. I could negotiate a great deal for you.” She spoke with a flat earnestness that completely contradicted her previous, easy tone. Her expression became placid and all those emotional subtleties – the friendly smile, the wide, understanding eyes – dissolved. A cavalcade of questions clogged Amanda’s brain. She stuttered before she could get any of them out, and then shook her head, trying to sift away the sludge. “Wh–what would I be… um, doing?” “They have designed a social experiment, and they believe that your input would be invaluable. Your experience, combined with your personality, make you an extremely attractive candidate for the role.” “That doesn’t tell me anything, Bunny. For god’s sake, will you stop with all this mumbo jumbo and just say what you mean?” Amanda said, aware of how hard she was breathing, wisps of vapour trailing from her lips. “In theory, you and five other candidates would live in a secluded mansion for a week. Every day, you will be required to take a pill.” “Pill? What pill? I thought this was a… what did you say? A social experiment. You didn’t say anything about a pill.” Bunny’s hands came up and patted the air between them in a calm-down gesture. “It is a social experiment but there is an element of medical research involved. But don’t worry. I have it in writing that the pill is completely harmless and has no adverse side effects.” “This sounds fucking insane, you know that? I can’t believe what I’m listening to right now.” Raising a hand to hush her, Bunny continued. “Each of you will be given a pill, but five of you will be taking a placebo. You won’t know who is taking what, or what the pill does.” Excerpt continues below cover reveal. Amanda shook her head. “Is that all the business you wanted to discuss? Because if it is, you can have my answer now: I’m not interested.” “Even though I have a contract that says the pill is completely harmless with no side effects?” “I don’t care if you have a written note from the Pope. You want to let them drug me? Is that what you brought me here for? You want to use me for medical testing?” The confusion made her head throb. She gulped in air, but couldn’t seem to get enough to take a deep breath. “There’s only a one in six chance that you would be taking anything at all.” “I still don’t like those odds, Bunny. This has nothing to do with my music, does it? This is about turning me into some kind of guinea pig.” “Amanda, think about what I’ve just told you,” Bunny said patiently. “This is a legitimate business offer; a lot of money for no work at all. It’s a gig, nothing more.” “And I suppose you get a cut, do you?” “Naturally.” Bunny nodded. “But not from you. If you sign, I settle with Midori. Your quarter mil has nothing to do with me. You and I wouldn’t even need to have a contract between us… that is, unless you want me to manage you again when the experiment is done. What do you think? Amanda Pearson rises from the ashes. A new look, a new sound, a new album. It’s got a great publicity spin already.” Amanda gripped the guardrail surrounding the balcony ledge and stared out at the skyline, her brain working overtime to process the information while simultaneously calculating the percentage of truth in Bunny’s proposal. “So, let me get this straight, just so I have it all clear in my head,” Amanda said, the cool night air kissing her hot face. “A few years ago, you and the label decide to throw me on the scrap heap because you think I’m a fucking drug-addled mess.” “Nobody called you that, Amanda.” “Nobody called me at all. I just get a letter saying, Thanks very much but you’re a stupid little cokehead, so your career’s over. That about right?” When Bunny refused to meet her eyes, Amanda continued. “And now you have the nerve to contact me out of the blue as though you didn’t just abandon me, and… the punchline is, you want to pay me to take more drugs.” A snort of laughter left her then, and she turned away, seeing the cityscape through tear-blurred eyes. Bunny placed a palm on Amanda’s shoulders and said, “It was business. That’s all. And now it’s water under the bridge.” “Not to me it isn’t.” She swallowed down a rising sob, adding, “I was only a kid, Bunny, for fuck’s sake.” She blotted her eyes with her index finger. “I needed your help. You were like a big sister to me. I trusted you.” Passing Amanda a tissue from her purse, Bunny said, “I know that. But believe me, cutting you loose was a blessing in disguise. You might not see that now, but the truth is, you were just too young for that kind of pressure.” Bunny picked a loose strand of hair from her mouth and gripped the guardrail. “Mental health wasn’t top of the list of priorities back then. Now we have psychologists on hand at the show, and at the label. It would be much different for you if it were today.” “Yeah,” Amanda said dryly. “Too bad I don’t have a magic wand to turn back time.” “No, but this might be a second chance.” “Really? Because it doesn’t sound like much of a second chance to me. It sounds like you want to pump me full of drugs, film it to make me look like a fool, and then push it on the public.” “Not at all.” Bunny’s voice was eerily calm, as though she were trying to lull her into a meditative trance. “There will be cameras in the house, but that’s to monitor the six candidates. The footage will not be made public. That’s all in the contract, and before you ask, I’ve had our solicitors go through it with a fine-tooth comb. It’s legit, and it’s watertight.” “Yeah?” Amanda made a small spitting sound. “That contract won’t be too much use to me when I go blind or my arms drop off, will it?” “The pill has no–” “No side effects? Yeah. You must think I’m some kind of fucking idiot. You expect me to believe that they’re going to pay me all that money to take a drug that doesn’t do anything?” “Yes, that’s what the contract says.” Amanda was momentarily lost for words. This proposition had stirred up a confusing cocktail of emotions, and she felt both giddy with frustration and sick with anger. Biting back the encroaching bitterness, Amanda thought very carefully about what to say next. She settled for: “It was nice seeing you again, Bunny. Take care of yourself.” Amanda opened the fire exit door to step back inside. Bunny touched her arm, delicate as a lover. “They’re extremely influential.” She pointed through the window at a young woman who was crossing the room, waving and smiling at the other partygoers. “They’ve helped build and rebuild numerous careers. You want to get back to the top of the mountain, don’t you? Fortunately, there’s always more than one path.” Amanda watched the woman, who couldn’t have been older than twenty but looked as young as sixteen, approach the piano. She wore a billowy gold dress that was almost as bright as her perfect smile, her long hair cascading like a black waterfall over her shoulders. The room hushed to silence as the woman straightened up and began to sing. She didn’t need a microphone; a large, captivating voice left her petite body, raising the fine hairs on the nape of Amanda’s neck. The woman’s voice was honey on toast; a sweet thickness flowing with coarse emotion. “She’s good isn’t she,” Bunny whispered in Amanda’s ear. “Maybe not as good as you were. Still, her debut single drops first week of December. Christmas it’ll be number one. Album platinum by February. By summer she’s headlining the O2.” Amanda opened her mouth to respond, but for a second, she forgot how to breathe. The jealousy held her lungs hostage, and the throb in her head turned into a steady, rhythmic beating. That uneasy sense of familiarity shivered through her as she watched the performance, picking up all the little vocal nuances. She was incredible. “Does she remind you of anyone, Amanda?” __________________________________ Excerpted from Honeycomb by S.B. Caves. Copyright © 2024 by S.B. Caves. Reprinted with permission from Datura Books, an imprint of Angry Robot Books. All rights reserved. View the full article

Summer is coming. I promise. It’s right around the corner. If you’re anything like me, summer means the beach. And the beach means getting in some uninterrupted reading. That’s a luxury for most of us. One year, I took a beach vacation with just a girlfriend and myself, with no children and husbands—it was complete heaven. We ate when we wanted, slept when we wanted, and read uninterrupted. At one point I turned to my friend and said, “The only thing that would make this beach better is a bookstore.” Voila! My Beach Reads series was born. The third book in my series A Killer Romance, takes place during the off-season. Have you ever wondered what becomes of those little towns when the tourists aren’t around? Well, in my fictional St. Brigid, they create events to continue to draw people in like the Romance by the Sea Valentine’s week event. A big-time romance author visits the bookstore to read from her new book. Brigid’s Bakery crafts special Valentine’s-themed baked goods, like honey cakes, they only make once a year. And let’s not forget about the new chocolate shop, holding a chocolate and wine tasting evening. (My character Summer was the first one to buy a ticket for that!) Of course with all this celebration romance and love, nobody expects a murder. This is one of the curious facets to any cozy mystery, most of them taking place in charming small towns, places you’d never really imagine something like a murder taking place. Murders only happen in big cities, right? Nope. I have a list. Quaint small towns. Charming rural areas. And yes, lovely little beach towns. Granted, reading about the beach is not as much fun as being at the beach. But I’ve found that in the cold and dark days, reading a light-filled cozy mystery can help to warm your bones. Here some of my favorite cozies with beaches in them. The Maine Clam Bake Series by Barbara Ross. Even though this is not the kind of beach a lot of people think about when thinking beach mystery, you can’t get better in terms of the sharp, witty writing and slice of Maine culture though out this series. It offers a different kind of beach vibe. I adore this series main character, Julia Snowden, who is a woman after my own heart. At the last count I had, there are 11 books in this series, so you better get started now. An oldie but a goodie for me is the Books by the Bay series by Ellery Adams. It’s one to the first cozy mystery series I became addicted to. Full of fleshed-out characters, interesting mysteries, and a slow-burn romance, I couldn’t stop reading this series and eagerly awaited each new book. Judging from the success of this series and author, I think it’s safe to say I’m not the only one. Since my series is a bookstore on the beach, I’ve taken a keen interest in other businesses set on the beach in the cozy mystery world. One of my favorites is Tara Lush’s Coffee Lover’s Mysteries, set at a coffee shop on an island off the coast of Florida. The series is full of Florida quirkiness. Lush lives in the state and she knows it well, after working as a reporter there for many years. This is a fun and well-written series that will make you long for just one more cup of coffee. For a slice of another kind of beach business, check out prolific Kathi Daley’s Resort at Castaway Bay Mystery Series, where the main character, Sydney Whitmore, is a forensic psychologist, returned back to Shipwreck island to help run the family business—a resort. The series manages to ooze charm through some twisty, serious mysteries. Another charming series is the Enchanted Bay series by Esme Addison. If you like a more than a little mystical woo-woo, combined with lyrical writing, then this is your beach series. Think mermaids, legends, and herbal healing combined with murder and family drama. Set in a coastal town in North Carolina, the series offers another kind of beach vibe. Whether you’re into mermaids, clambakes, or bookstores, beachy cozy mysteries might just be your answer in the middle of long cold winter. After all, when the snow is piling up outside, who couldn’t use a little slice of beach? *** View the full article

The rise of the unreliable narrator in fiction has made huge success of bestsellers like The Girl on the Train, Gone Girl, and Fight Club. The narrators of these stories have compelling tales to share, but what makes them even more exciting and keeps us turning those pages is not what they’re telling us…but rather, what they aren’t. I first listened to The Girl on the Train and was immediately drawn in by the weaving stories of several different main points of view. It’s Rachel, though, who’s telling a story we simply can’t be expected to believe. Her drinking means that she can’t really trust her memories (or rather, those big blank spots in them) and therefore, neither can we. Similarly, the heroine of The Woman in the Window struggles with alcohol and drug abuse, which makes the story we see through her eyes a patchwork of assumptions. Other popular books with unreliable narrators rely on mental illness, or the passage of time, or amnesia, or other explanations for why the person telling us this story shouldn’t be believed. When the main point of view character is lying to us, the reader, we learn not to believe what they have to say and start looking for clues to what’s going on in what’s happening around them. It might take us a while to understand the narrator can’t be trusted, but once we do, every word they say, every action they take, is ripe for dissection. In the very best stories with unreliable narrators, we get to the end of the story breathing as hard as if we just ran a race, or maybe shouting out a triumphant “I knew they weren’t telling the truth!” But what about stories that don’t have an unreliable narrator and instead feature unreliable secondary characters? What if the main character is revealing everything she knows to be true all along, and yet nothing about the story is actually happening the way we think it is? For this to work, we have to be deep inside that main character’s head. First or third person point of view, it doesn’t matter, so long as all we know is what they know…because when everyone around them is filling in the pieces of the puzzle that turns out to be of a picture that doesn’t match the front of the box, who do we point the fingers at? Unreliable narrators hide their truth with evasion, amnesia, passing out drunk, or careful literary sleight of hand. When the secondary characters are doing all the misleading, though, they can just straight up…lie. Yep, I said it. They lie. They lie to the main character, which leads to misunderstandings, bad choices or tragedy. They lie to the reader, too, through that narrator we’re rooting for. Are you the sort of person who reads a book or watches a movie and screams “no, you fool! Don’t go into that dark basement alone!” If so, you might be the sort of reader who likes books with untrustworthy secondary characters. When everyone’s lying to your heroine, she’s bound to do some stuff you think is pretty dumb. But how can you blame her, when the people who are supposed to love and take care of her are deviously and purposefully leading her astray? Unreliable narrators get themselves in that hot water, but leading characters surrounded by dastardly, lying secondaries end up in the boiling pot no matter what they try. A few of my favorite books with unreliable narrators: American Psycho by Brett Easton Ellis: You can’t trust a word Patrick Bateman says, because he’s clearly unhinged. Or is he? Maybe he’s just a horrible person. Or maybe he’s imagining it all. Who knows? (Easton Ellis’ more recent book, Shards, gave me an unreliable narrator vibe for a totally different reason. The author is the main character. But he’s not. But he sort of is…) Never Lie by Frieda McFadden: This book should be called Nothing but Lies, and I mean that in the best way. I suspected something was up but couldn’t figure out who was telling the lies. It kept me riveted and shouting out my warnings to the point-of-view characters. Behind Her Eyes by Sarah Pinborough: This was my first read from Pinborough, and I had no idea there even was an unreliable narrator, that’s how unreliable the narrator was…except it was really a secondary character pulling that wool over the reader’s eyes. Or was it? I’m still not sure who to trust. Probably nobody! Another riveting read! Of course, The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins was one of the first of more recent releases to set the unreliable narrator train on the tracks. It’s a classic choice if you want to dive deeply into a story told in part by someone who literally cannot remember huge chunks of what she needs to know in order to put all the pieces together. I’ve written a few unreliable narrators myself, so in my most recent release from Crooked Lane Books, Like A Mother, I didn’t want the readers to feel like the main character, Sarah, wasn’t to be trusted. I hoped the readers would connect with her and her story with an understanding that she felt forced into the choices she has to make. Told in third person point of view, Sarah’s is the only perspective we have, so although it’s not a first-person story, we only ever know what Sarah knows. And what Sarah knows is not always the truth. In fact, I’d say that the only person in the whole book that doesn’t lie is Sarah, herself. Everyone else? Utterly unreliable! Sometimes, the best parts of the book are the parts that simply didn’t happen the way we’re told they did. *** View the full article

It’s that season again—the time to plan summer vacations. How about touring small towns and visiting some occasionally wacky, but always fun, festivals? In Wisconsin, for instance, where the Deputy Donut Mystery series is set, provides a wealth of summer fairs, festivals, and family-fun weekends. At one gem and mineral show, kids can dig for treasures in an agate pit! Three different festivals provide sawdust piles where kids can grub around looking for things. At least one of these sawdust piles is stocked with money. And speaking of not exactly staying pristine, you could participate in, or merely watch (maybe from a distance), a cow chip hurling competition. There are also festivals featuring cheese, butter, fish, beef, bacon, or beer. There are arts and craft shows, concerts, and gatherings of airplanes and classic cars. In real life, you can expect these small-town festivities to go well. In cozy mysteries, however, festivals can be another story. Amateur sleuths suddenly find their hands full of things like magnifying glasses, binoculars, and cameras. These intrepid sleuths have to struggle to stay ahead of killers and their deadly secrets. In Double Grudge Donuts, Fallingbrook, Wisconsin is celebrating the first (annual, they hope) Fallingbrook Arts Festival. During the afternoons, performers tour the town, showcasing their talent on sidewalks in front if businesses, including Emily Westhill’s Deputy Donut coffee and donut shop. In the evenings, the day’s performers compete for prizes. With its Musical Monday, Troubadour Tuesday, Wee Wonders Wednesday, Theatrical Thursday, Funny Friday, and Skit Saturday, The Fallingbrook Arts Festival should be among the tamer Wisconsin festivals. It doesn’t work out that way. Partly because of his bagpipe’s squawking during another performance, Kirk MacLean wins the Musical Monday competition. That night, sleepers are annoyed at being awakened by the skirl of the pipes. On Troubadour Tuesday, Kirk struts around town blasting his bagpipe while hapless singers try to ignore him. Kirk is making enemies fast. And then, early on Wee Wonders Wednesday, Emily’s cat Dep leads Emily to Kirk’s body near his bagpipe—and also near a piece broken from a Deputy Donut mug. Emily needs to do some investigating, or she or her parents, who are judges for some of the competitions, might be arrested, and Emily and the town detective’s wedding might be postponed, perhaps permanently. If your summer vacation plans involve more reading in chairs than riding in cars, visit some quirky events by reading cozy mysteries, nibbling delicious snacks, and trying to solve crimes along with amateur sleuths. As an added bonus, you should be safe from clinging sawdust or flying cow chips. Murder at a Scottish Castle by Traci Hall This festival season is a bad one for bagpipers! Paislee Shaw sells cashmere sweaters in her shop in Nairn, Scotland. The local dowager countess wants to feature Paislee’s sweaters in the castle’s gift shop—an honor and an opportunity for Paislee. To top it off, the dowager countess invites Paislee to the annual bagpiping competition on the castle grounds. Paislee brings Grandpa, her son, and her Scottish terrier Wallace. Jory, the previous year’s bagpiping champion brags that he will, for the second year in a row, trounce the previous champion, the dowager countess’s son, who has won for many years. However, when Jory begins playing his bagpipe, he keels over. Rescuers rush to his aid. In the panic, his bagpipe disappears. The investigation into Jory’s collapse becomes a murder investigation. Because of Paislee’s previous successes in fingering criminals, the dowager countess insists that Paislee should clear the laird’s name. For the sake of her sweaters, Paislee doesn’t dare refuse. Snack suggestion: Scottish oatcakes drizzled with honey Claret and Present Danger by Sarah Fox And pipers aren’t the only performers whose careers end suddenly and tragically during these cozy mystery festivals. Sadie Coleman, the owner of the literary pub, The Inkwell, is happy when the Trueheart Renaissance Faire and Circus comes to Shady Creek, Vermont. A flirtatious illusionist’s show is sold out, but he gives Sadie tickets when he visits The Inkwell. During this “wizard’s” performance, Sadie’s excitement turns to horror. The man collapses on stage, and it’s not an illusion. As if that isn’t bad enough, the police suspect one of Sadie’s employees of the wizard’s murder. And then another performer dies. . . . Can Sadie, with the help of her boyfriend, a former PI turned craft brewer, clear her employee’s name and bring justice to a killer? Snack suggestion: Brie baked in phyllo pastry and topped with claret jelly Murder at the Blueberry Festival by Darci Hannah Lindsey Bakewell’s Beacon Bakery, in a lighthouse on the shores of Lake Michigan, is to be the site of a pie-eating contest during the Blueberry Festival in Beacon Harbor, Michigan. At first, people laugh at what appear to be mere pranks. But things go from amusing to bad to worse . . . to deadly. Why is a boat floating near the lighthouse, and why are its only occupants a live goat and a dead man dressed as a Viking? Luckily, Lindsey has help in her search for answers—including her ex-SEAL boyfriend and her Newfoundland dog Wellington. And then there are the goats, each with its own agenda, which, to Lindsey’s dismay, might include attempting to win the pie-eating contest. Snack suggestion: Blueberry muffins! A Twinkle of Trouble by Daryl Wood Gerber Courtney Kelly owns a fairy garden shop, Open Your Imagination, in Carmel-by-the-Sea, California. Courtney can also see fairies, who help her (or not) in various ways. As Courtney is preparing to look after her booth at the Summer Blooms Festival, Genevieve, an influencer who was not invited to participate, writes nasty things about the festival and some of Courtney’s friends. But then, right outside the festival, one of Courtney’s maligned friends is found standing over Genevieve’s body. Courtney is certain that the friend cannot have murdered Genevieve. While growing her own plants for her fairy gardens, teaching people how to create the miniature displays, interacting with her fairy sidekicks, and trying not to annoy law enforcement, Courtney will need to investigate. Snack suggestion: Gingersnap brownies—the recipe is in the back of the book Deep Fried Death by Maddie Day After just one look at the cover of DEEP FRIED DEATH by Maddie Day, you know you’re in for a wild ride. Robbie Jordan, owner of Pans ‘N Pancakes, reluctantly plans for her restaurant to sponsor an entry in the Abe Martin Festival’s annual outhouse race on Memorial Day. Before Pans ‘N Pancakes can attempt to push their replica outhouse toward the finish line, a body tumbles out, along with the murder weapon—a cast iron skillet from Pans ‘N Pancakes. Robbie, her restaurant, and even her brother-in-law are implicated. Robbie will need to set the police on the right course, or by next year’s festival, she might be visiting the courthouse, not racing an outhouse. Snack suggestion: pancakes slathered in butter and maple syrup *** View the full article

Whether it’s whispered around a campfire, or passed down across generations, folk tales have often been the spark that ignited much of our love for stories. They give us brief glimpses into different times and different cultures, and it’s always a treat for me to find these threads woven into works of fiction today. It has even inspired me to reimagine my favourite Sri Lankan folktale in my latest book, Island Witch. In my new novel, set in 1880s Ceylon, Amara, the daughter of the local demon priest, is caught in the cross currents of her traditional beliefs and the new colonial ideas that have been brought into her coastal town, while being bullied and called a “witch” herself. When a series of attacks starts plaguing the men in her village, she must figure out who is behind them before her father is accused of these crimes. However, she’s been having dreams which eerily predict these attacks, and can’t shake the feeling that all this is tied into to when she woke up, dazed and confused, to the sound of her mother’s mysterious cries. Island Witch is a reimagining of Mohini, Sri Lanka’s most popular ghost, famously depicted as the local Woman in White. This list of books spans across many genres and hails from different corners of the world, but they all draw inspiration from popular myths, lore, and folk tales. Midnight is The Darkest Hour, by Ashley Winstead In the religious town of Bottom Springs Louisiana, the Low Man, a vampiric figure, is attacking residents, leaving the townsfolk afraid that they would be next. Ruth Cornier, the daughter of the local preacher, finds herself at crossroads when a battered skull is discovered in Starry Swamp, surrounded by mysterious carved symbols. Along with her best friend, Everett, a boy from the wrong side of the tracks, Ruth delves deep into the town’s secrets in attempt to solve the crime, a feat that will garner them many enemies along the way. Atmospheric and creepy, with lush imagery of swamps and the ever present undertone of religious panic, Ashley Winstead effortlessly weaves lore into a page turning mystery. Gods of Jade and Shadow, by Silvia Moreno Garcia Set in Mexico in the 1920s, the story follows Cassiopeia Tun, the granddaughter of a small town patriarch. Cassiopeia’s mother eloped with Cassiopeia’s dark-skinned father, disgracing the family, but had to return to home when her husband died. Cassiopeia is ordered to work as the family maid, and her future seems bleak until she opens a locked chest in her grandfather’s bedroom, and releases an imprisoned Mayan god of death, Hun-Kamé. Hun-Kamé sends Cassiopeia on a life-changing quest— one which features demons, evil spirits, sorcerers and flappers dancing the Charleston. The Nesting, by CJ Cooke Despite his wife, Aurelia, committing suicide in the very same place, Architect Tom Faraday resolute in his decision to finish the high-concept, environmentally friendly home he’s building in Norway. When Lexi Ellis takes the job as nanny to Tom’s daughters, she falls in love with the picturesque landscape and the two young girls. But she can’t shake the feeling that something feels off in the isolated house nestled in the forest along the fjord— unexplained, muddy footprints inside the house, Aurelia’s diary appearing in Lexi’s room, but most disturbingly, one of the girls keeps telling Lexi about how she sees the Sad Lady. Lexi starts to believe that Aurelia didn’t kill herself after all, and that perhaps her death was the result of a sinister spirit in the fjord. Sistersong, by Lucy Holland Based on the traditional folk ballad of ‘The Two Sisters,’ this story takes place in magical ancient Britain in a time where Saxons battle with individual holdings, and a new religion is competing with old magic. The three siblings, Riva, Keyne and Sinne, each possesses their own form of magic as they take on diverging paths, all while the Saxons draw near. American Gods, by Neil Gaiman A classic in it’s own right, American Gods is a fantastic interpretation of what gods spanning various myths and lore would look like in modern society. The story starts with the main character, Shadow’s, wife dying in a mysterious car crash days before his release from prison. On his way back home, he meets Mr Wednesday, who introduces him to a world quite unlike he has ever seen, while they embark on a journey through the heart of America. The Witch’s Heart, by Genevive Gornichec This reimagining of norse myth features the witch, Angrboda, who possesses the power to divine the future. But when Odin, the highest of the Norse gods, demands her power for himself, she turns him down. In return, he punishes her by burning her three times on the pyre. Thankfully, Angrboda escapes, leaving her smoldering heart behind. She takes refuge in the forest, when a man shows up and offers her heart back—so igniting the love story between Angrboda and Loki, the son of the very god who tried to kill her. *** View the full article

My initial exposure to Juanita Sheridan was harrowing: I’d just sent my publisher my first Hawaiʻi murder mystery when a friend asked, “Have you read the Hawaiʻi mysteries of Juanita Sheridan?” Unsettled, I scrambled to find Sheridan’s books – all out of print, so it wasn’t easy. When they finally arrived, I opened The Kahuna Killer at random and found to my consternation that Sheridan had ended a chapter this way: “Pilikia. That word means trouble.” I’d ended a chapter of my book nearly identically: “Pilikia. Trouble.” Yikes! I snapped her book shut and resolved not to read another word until I’d completed at least my second Hawaiʻi murder mystery. I didn’t want my books influenced by hers, much less did I wish to be thought a plagiarist. I stuck to my resolution, so two years passed before I picked up Juanita Sheridan’s books again. But wow, I’m glad I finally did. For those unfamiliar with Sheridan – which seems to include practically everyone who reads or writes about murder mysteries, although this may soon change (see below) – she was once, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, a best-selling writer of detective fiction. That says a lot, because back then, according to David Bordwell in Perplexing Plots: Popular Storytelling and the Poetics of Murder (2022), fully twenty-five percent of all works of fiction and most radio plays were murder mysteries. Then as now, it was a crowded field. Sheridan managed to thrive in it. Four of Sheridan’s books feature her Chinese American amateur detective Lily Wu and also Janice Cameron, who serves as Lily’s sidekick and Sheridan’s narrator. The first volume, The Chinese Chop (1949), is set in New York, immediately after the Second World War. It’s the book in which Lily and Janice, two young women who happen to hail from Hawaiʻi, meet for the first time. Janice is the white roommate Lily needs in order to secure a room in Washington Square; at the time no one there would rent to the Chinese, even a Chinese-American like Lily. Lily has an undisclosed reason for choosing one rooming house in particular. And almost immediately, the building superintendent turns up dead. That’s unnerving for Janice, who’s initially unsure whether Lily committed the crime or intends to solve it. But Lily herself, we learn, is never unnerved – not in this book, and not in the three set in Hawaiʻi after Lily and Janice return there. Sadly, no book-length biography of Juanita Sheridan exists. But the basics of her colorful life – which, she acknowledged, would not be credible if they appeared in fiction – are well summarized in the late Todd and Enid Schantz’s introduction to their Rue Morgue Press edition of The Chinese Chop (2000). Sheridan was born in Oklahoma in 1906. She spent the last years of her life in Guadalajara with her final husband, who may have been her eighth or ninth. She died in 1974. What a lot she packed into sixty-eight years! Most notably, after youthful attempts to write short stories in New York and California, she left her toddler son in 1935 and sailed to Hawaiʻi so she could concentrate on writing murder mysteries. She stayed until 1941, getting back to New York just before Pearl Harbor. Sheridan’s six-year island sojourn provided the material for three Lily Wu mysteries set in Hawaiʻi a decade later: The Kahuna Killer (1951), The Mamo Murders (1952), and The Waikiki Widow (1953). The latter, widely hailed, was distilled into a 1959 episode for “Hawaiian Eye,” a TV series that made actress Connie Stevens a teenage idol. Sheridan worked on screenplays for the first episodes, then quit Hollywood in disgust, perhaps over her intricate novel getting mutilated for the small screen. Largely forgotten today, Sheridan is fortunate in the devotion of those who do remember – or belatedly discover – her. Rue Morgue Press re-issued the Lily Wu quartet more than two decades ago, before going out of business; some of those editions can still be found. And – great news! – Maggie Topkis of Felony & Mayhem Press plans to re-issue the entire quartet herself, beginning with The Chinese Chop in June 2024. So what makes the Lily Wu quartet, and particularly the three volumes set in Hawaiʻi, so impressive, once one’s been exposed to them? Their timeless features include excellent writing, compelling plots, and a gratifyingly warm relationship between two talented and forceful women, Janice Cameron (as Watson to Lily’s Holmes) and Lily Wu, the sleuth Anthony Boucher of the New York Times declared the best female detective of the era, and with whom he confessed to be in love. But the time-specific aspects of Sheridan’s Hawaiʻi tales distinguish them too. She entered adulthood during the Golden Age of Detective Fiction in the 1920s and 1930s, when female sleuths tended to be inoffensive older white women such as Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple. Yet Lily Wu is the precise opposite: a forceful young Chinese-American woman prepared to use her fists and feet and any other weapon available – along with her exceptionally shrewd mind – not just to defeat evildoers but to clobber them. She’s an undeniably unique creation; there was no detective like her in the Golden Age, or even later when Sheridan’s books appeared. Then there’s Sheridan’s generous and affectionate treatment of Hawaiian and Asian characters, at a time when real world treatment of them, even in Hawaiʻi, was anything but. The Hawaiʻi of which Sheridan wrote is, fortunately, a vanished one, but she offers a fascinating and diamond-hard glimpse of it for her readers. In the Honolulu of Sheridan’s books, white matrons as society queens preside over sprawling mansions and provide fancy evenings with lace, crystal, and silver for white luminaries of island society. These formidable hostesses can stage a traditional luau with Hawaiian musicians or a formal recital of Mozart by a string quartet, but for help they rely on ill-paid Hawaiians or Asians who speak little (except to Lily Wu), and even then imperfectly and with a good deal of pidgin. There’s no doubt where Sheridan’s sympathies lie. Although patronized and treated as insignificant by Honolulu grandees, Hawaiians and Asians are the characters Sheridan imbues with sagacity and dignity. That might seem unremarkable today. But consider Sheridan’s times – times when Native Hawaiians were called “kanakas,” an offensive slur nowadays, and when Linda Dela Cruz, the most popular Hawaiian singer of her day, could include these lyrics in her hit song, “Come My House,” and be considered funny: You come my house for one big luau, that’s the Kanaka style. You eat and eat ‘til the food all pau, that’s the Kanaka style. You drink and drink till you just one wreck, that’s the Kanaka style. Then you stop until the next welfare check, that’s the Kanaka style. Sheridan was ahead of her time, too, in getting Hawaiʻi right more broadly. She learned a variety of Hawaiian words and used them sparingly but always to good effect. She studied and accurately portrayed certain practices of the ancient Hawaiians, including human sacrifice. Joyce Carol Oates recently observed on social media that when a murder mystery tries to combine the supernatural with a detective story, it’s the detective story that suffers. Sheridan avoided that problem by attributing belief in Hawaiʻi’s pervasive supernatural world to her more credulous characters, never to Lily Wu or Janice Cameron. Like the racism of Hawai’i in her time, belief in the supernatural among Native Hawaiians was something Sheridan observed carefully and could describe deftly without ever relying on it to solve a mystery. If anything’s missing from the Lily Wu tales, it’s that although Janice Cameron matures and changes throughout the four books – it’s easy to read Janice, a novelist, as Sheridan’s doppelganger – Lily Wu never does. In Hawaiʻi she’s the same Lily she was in New York: elegant (we see a lot of women’s clothing in Sheridan’s books), mysterious, infinitely resourceful, and unfailingly brilliant, yet always patient with the slightly less brilliant Janice. This constancy is hardly a failing. It’s Sheridan reaching back well before the Golden Age of Detective Fiction to find a kindred spirit for Lily Wu: Sherlock Holmes himself, another amateur sleuth who throughout his adventures remains, in personality and psychology, a finished creation, a constant. Fortunately for us, the constancy of Lily Wu is merely an intriguing foundation, one on which Juanita Sheridan proceeded to construct her sophisticated, detailed, and engrossing quartet of mysteries. Kudos to Felony & Mayhem Press for republishing them, seventy-five years after they first appeared, for a prospective new era of admirers. *** View the full article

I am eight years old. The bullies are waiting for me outside the girls’ bathroom. I race down the school hall as fast as my young legs can carry me, but the bullies are faster. They pounce, pushing me down, and I hit the floor hard, the air slamming out of my lungs. You’re a killer. A boy yells. Like your mom. Killer, killer. I tell myself not to look at them. That gloating stretch of their mouths. The shadows lengthening over me. The front door bursts open, and Mimi appears, her eyes spitting black fire. My cousin, only a year older, but her rage fills the hall. The bullies scatter like frantic ants, but this time, she is faster. A well-aimed punch and the leader flees, his nose bloodied. She helps me up and hugs me tightly. If anyone ever tries to hurt you again, let me know and I’ll destroy them. She promises me. Don’t worry, Tanvi. I’ll always watch out for you. She promises me that, too. Back then, I didn’t know promises were just words. As lightweight as ash scattered by the wind. Brittle like shattered glass. Excerpt continues below cover reveal. Even after summer break, Orin High still smells of damp clothes left too long in the washer. The sweat from so many fourteen to eighteen year olds must be baked into the hundred year old brick building and its many moldy crevices and dusty corners. But mixing with that musty cloth smell is the scent of softeners, of sloppy joes and baked cinnamon bread, of conversations and laughter, of rushing footsteps and slamming locker doors. So it’s not all bad. At least that’s what I tell myself. And as I take in the quiet of the last week of summer vacation, I can almost believe it. Stillness pervades every hallway, every bathroom, every classroom and even the desks and chairs quiet, holding their breaths. It’s the last day to register for junior year and I managed to make it. Barely. The office secretary wasn’t too happy, judging from her frequent glances at the clock, whose minute hand hovered at three minutes to three. But I came in right before the office closed for a reason. All the registrants were done and gone. I take a deep breath and start toward the exit to the parking lot. It wasn’t always like this. I never dread the start of school year. True, elementary school was hell—kids could be particularly brutal to newly minted orphans adopted and brought to Orin by their aunts. But the bullying subsided in middle school after I ceased to remain interesting, when I displayed none of the characteristics of what they thought a killer’s daughter should have, when I faded into the grimy school walls and became invisible. By the time high school came around, my latent nerdiness had kicked in and I fell in love with organic chemistry and calculus, much to my cousin and fellow nerd Mimi’s joy, and my best friend Krista’s annoyance. But things changed last fall, the start of my sophomore year, when the invisibility cloak fell off and I was recognized again. And the shadows returned, solidifying into a new threat, a new bully. I shake off that familiar prickling of dread and push open the front doors to walk onto the school’s sprawling portico, where the soft glow of the midafternoon August sun turns the tiles a sparkling white. The oaks and maples scattered around the schoolyard have taken on shades of orange and red and form a startling contrast against a backdrop of green lawn and smooth blue cloudless expanse of sky. Fall is on its way to southeastern Michigan. It’s my cousin Mimi’s favorite season and therefore mine, too. My fingers tingle, anticipating the feel of the smooth, velvety leaves turned crinkly and multicolored by a lack of chlorophyll. I imagine the satisfying bounce of throwing myself into a pile of dead foliage, scattering it, creating chaos. Of laughing with Mimi for hours over cider and Bollywood gossip. But this fall will be different. Because she, my once best friend, my rock, the reason I could outrun the shadows from my past, has betrayed me to those shadows instead. I spot her leaning against an oak, her pink halter top and faded denim shorts visible all the way across the parking lot. Looking at us, no one would think we’re related. Her skin is several shades lighter than my dark brown, and her features, her aquiline nose and wide forehead, take after her white dad. Her thick black hair and dark eyes though are as Indian as mine. Those eyes fall on me and she straightens. I start to lift my hand, hoping to wave, hoping she’ll wave back. Hoping the widening distance between us in the last several months suddenly vanishes, like her coldness was nothing but my imagination. But then her gaze shifts to something behind me. My spine stiffens with the instinctive reaction of a hunted animal. I made a mistake; the school wasn’t as empty as I thought. And I know who it is before I turn and meet baby blue eyes narrowing with derision, the minuscule curl of lips painted a deep scarlet. Beth Grant. She’s a senior and Mimi’s classmate and the unquestioned leader of Orin High’s popular clique. I chose the last possible minute before registration closed so I could avoid her, and yet she still managed to find me. She allows the large front doors to swing shut behind her and strolls across the portico. Each click of her heels tightens the vise around my chest, my heart thudding with the same question I’ve asked myself a gazillion times. Why the hell did she target me? She displaced me as Mimi’s best friend last year and decided to scorch the earth behind me, judging from the way Mimi froze me out. She’s not just a frontrunner in the race for Mimi’s affections, she’s won the damn thing, and should fear no competition from me. I edge toward the banister, creating a wide berth for her to pass, and lower my eyes, shame burning fire across my cheekbones, hating my fear. My breath hitches, counting the seconds as she lingers beside me. Then she swishes past, leaving the air scented with vanilla but not enough to muffle the tinge of something sharp and metallic. I look up. Sunlight glints gold on her hair, turning blonde strands into a fiery tiara. Turning her into a queen. She has everything: a castle for a home, reigning power at school—and my cousin’s undivided devotion, judging from the way Mimi hurries toward her. I bet it’ll be fun to be Beth Grant, Mimi told me months before she slid into Beth’s circle. To be taken care of and waited on hand and foot. To have all the money in the world and never have to worry about stuff like college and a job and shit. I’ll take care of you, I tried telling Mimi, but she already had that look in her eye. That determined look she gets before a track competition she desperately wants to win. Beth’s footsteps change from the clicking of heels on concrete to the muffled scrape on grass. Then they fade into the parking lot and the roar of an engine. I stare after her blue Porsche with a bitter rage that’s as intense as it’s helpless. I know bullies and I know what it feels like to be bullied. After all, I was exposed to my first dose at the age of eight. They punched me, knocked me down, called me a freak and a psycho. But what Beth did destroyed me. When she lit my mom’s candles—the candles that destroyed my life—and made me eight again, watching my mom turn into a monster. Dark wisps of smoke creep into the corners of my vision, veiling the sunlight, filling my nose with an acrid scent. And above it rises the sound of Beth laughing as she recorded my meltdown on her phone, while Mimi stood by, watching me throw up all over the pristine white carpet in Beth’s house. Killer, killer. I shake off the memory, but the fact lingers, making my head spin: Beth has that video. It’s all she needs to remind everyone of who I am, who my mother was—the killer who took her husband’s life. Then it’ll be back to square one. It’ll be like when I was in elementary school. But Mimi won’t be there to fight for me this time. She betrayed my secrets to Beth. She stole my mom’s candles and showed them to her new best friend. Why did you do that? I screamed at her after waking up in a pool of my own vomit. You knew what I went through. You promised you’d protect me! But she didn’t care. Like she didn’t care when she got into Beth’s car just now and drove away without another glance at me. The grass blurs under my feet, changes to tar, and then I’m on my bike, my face wet with tears. I try to tell myself I’m paranoid, but the words fall flat. What else did Mimi tell Beth about me, about my past, that made Beth decide to come after me? And what if she doesn’t stop? Why would Beth record me if she wasn’t going to show someone—everyone? I can’t leave Orin and run away. Where can I go? My house in Detroit, once filled with Mom and Dad’s laughter, is now an empty shell, occupied by strangers. The only family I have left is my aunt and cousin. Auntie… She has stayed by my side for eight years, cried with me when the nightmares came, held my hand through every therapy session, “You’re my daughter, honey, just like Mimi. We’re your family, and we’ll always be there for you.” I can’t leave her. I can’t lose her. I blink hard, then wipe my face on my sleeve. For Mimi, always is over. If Beth wants to ruin my life, Mimi won’t do anything to stop her. __________________________________ Excerpt from When Mimi Went Missing © 2024 Suja Sukumar, published by Soho Teen. Cover art by Colin Verdi and cover design by Janine Agro. View the full article

There is a famous image of a ballet dancer’s feet—one clad in pale tights and a pristine pink pointe shoe, ribbons neatly tied, while the other foot is bare. Band-Aids, blackened toenails. Blisters and bunions. The contrast is stark, the statement obvious: in ballet, there is the illusion and there is the reality. There is beauty, but underlying that beauty is pain. As the mother of a professional ballet dancer, this image resonates with me. And when I began writing my most recent novel, The Still Point, about a group of pre-professional ballet dancers in their final year of high school and their ambitious mothers, I wanted to offer both sides of this world. I wanted to explore both the dream and the darkness of this particular art. Ballet books have become popular lately, especially when the world of ballet is facing scrutiny for its often-archaic views of femininity, race, and power. Here are four books—two novels and two non-fiction—which seek to peel back the satin and reveal the tender pain beneath. Girl Through Glass by Sari Wilson I read this novel several years ago when it first came out—drawn to both the ballet storyline (which follows a young student at the School of American Ballet) and the 1970s time period. A haunting portrait of a young dancer caught in the spell of a much older male mentor as well as Mr. Balanchine himself, Girl Through Glass is in some ways a #metoo story set in the rarefied world of the New York City Ballet. They’re Going to Love You by Meg Howrey Like Girl Through Glass, Meg Howrey’s novel, They’re Going to Love You is about a former SAB student, though this novel is a dual timeline novel set in the present and in the 1980s. Howrey, a former professional ballerina herself, is at the top of her game in this novel about the futility of ambition in a world which rejects anyone who does not fit ballet’s physical ideal. I have read this book twice—and the second time I took note of the sadness underlying the story. Carlisle’s love of dance, in the end, is no match for the narrow definitions of what make a “ballet body.” The novel is about much more than this, of course; it is not only about art and ambition but also about family secrets and legacy. But Howrey truly captures the exclusiveness of the ballet world, and the pain of one dancer’s exclusion. Don’t Think, Dear: On Loving and Leaving Ballet by Alice Robb What I found so interesting about this book was the delicate balance that Robb manages between critique and homage of the ballet world. Like the other authors I have mentioned, Robb is an insider as well—a former student at the School of American Ballet. And this positions her to speak both from inside the bubble and outside of it. She tackles the power dynamics at play in ballet companies and the unrealistic demands on female dancers without ever losing sight of the ballet world’s magnetic pull. Turning Pointe: How a New Generation of Dancers Is Saving Ballet from Itself by Chloe Angyal Journalist, Angyl, takes on the darker side of ballet in this meticulous exploration of an artform that is only now beginning to reinvent itself. A keen examination of a world that demands so very much of the dancers who embrace it, Turning Pointe is a must read for all ballerinas and consumers of dance. However, it is particularly informative for young dancers pursuing careers in the dance world—and those hoping to be agents of change within it. *** View the full article