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The characters boarding the SS Varuna, the location of the opulent locked-room mystery universe conjured in Death and Other Details by writers, executive producers, and showrunners Heidi Cole McAdams and Mike Weiss, have a lot of baggage—literal, figurative and emotional—to unpack. In their kit bags (and steamer trunks) are lifetimes of secrets, lies, sex and, yes, some video footage. Someone on board the celebratory cruise—organized and paid for by Lawrence Collier, who is retiring from his eponymous company—is going to be murdered. And, as Rufus Cotesworth, the “World’s Greatest Detective,” played by Mandy Patinkin, intones after the body is discovered, “The murderer is among us.” Cotesworth may be the “world’s greatest detective,” but it’s Violett Beane’s Imogene Scott, who is the smartest “guy” in the room. To solve the case, Cotesworth will need Imogene’s mad skills of observation and subterfuge. The only problem: Imogene loathes Cotesworth, who abandoned the investigation into her mother’s murder when she was a child. Death and Other Details may visually resemble an Agatha Christie-esque adventure but look—and listen—closely. The territory inhabited by this ten-episode tale of murder on the high seas lies between two lines delivered early in the first episode: “Details matter,” and “the world is ugly, and the people are sad.” The second line, from Wallace Stevens’ “Gubbinal,” is delivered by Teddy Goh, played by Angela Zhou, the groomed-to-the-nth-degree maitre d’ of the SS Varuna, while addressing the ship’s staff. Batten the hatches, rough seas ahead. (Disclosure: Mike Weiss is my son-in-law) Nancie Clare: In the press materials, you said that you are friends, but not writing partners, I need an explanation. Mike Weiss: We crossed paths in writer’s rooms… Heidi Cole McAdams: That’s not how we met! Mike Weiss: That’s not how we met. That’s true. That’s true. Heidi Cole McAdams: We met when I was an assistant working for a writer who wanted to develop with Mike because he really loved his work. We also had friends in common through Mike’s wife, Logan. Through the years we ended up in a few of the same writers’ rooms and enjoyed working together. We thought it would be fun to write something together. Then when the idea for Death and Other Details came to life it was the first script we ever wrote together. Mike Weiss: It’s true. And it was remarkably easy. We didn’t argue very much at all! I think one of the things that makes us—if we are in fact—effective writers and producers, is that we have incredibly disparate interests. But there’s an overlap. And in the middle of that Venn diagram of overlapping interests and abilities, is a stylish, heightened murder mystery. We had an incredibly fun time working together and are still good friends. Nancie Clare: Okay, you mentioned Venn diagrams. Am I imagining it or does the show seem to inhabit a territory—or the common area of a Venn diagram—delineated by two standout lines delivered early in the pilot episode: “details matter” and “the world is ugly, and the people are sad?” Mike Weiss: I think you are getting to something that we strived to do from the beginning: we wanted to tell a smart fun story, which meant that we challenged ourselves in a lot of ways. We challenged ourselves to have intense plot twists and plot advancements in every single episode. And we challenged ourselves stylistically to be ambitious, to be a little bit literary and a little bit erudite, which all I think swims in the same direction as the backdrop for the show. But yeah, we aimed high. Heidi, is that right? Heidi Cole McAdams: We like it that way! Nancie Clare: Is Death and Other Details the first episodic show to draw inspiration from a Wallace Stevens quote? Mike Weiss: As you know, my younger son’s middle name is Wallace because of my great affection for the mid-twentieth century American poet Wallace Stevens. [NB: since Mike’s younger son is also my grandson, I did know this.] Nancie Clare: I’m not sure if the rules of fictional universe building are the same for screenwriting as they are for crime novels. I’m not sure there are any rules at all! But this is a question I’m always interested in: When a new series is created, populated with new characters, what came first, the characters or the story, which informed the other? Heidi Cole McAdams: The very first thing that happened was we knew that we were writing a murder mystery. So, the story started first, but then the second thing we started talking about was who is [lead character] Imogene Scott and what is her story? And what is this mystery that she’s entangled in and how is it personal to her and why does she care? It ping-pongs back and forth as we start building what was the murder and who was the murderer and who are the other suspects surrounding her. I think the [what came first, story or character] are interconnected in a way that you can’t really separate, at least for me. Mike Weiss: Heidi, hearing you answer that, I think something that happens while you’re building one of these stories is you’re creating—hopefully—an interesting set of archetypal characters and figuring out how they fit into the mystery plot. But at the same time trying to figure out how to make them memorable and distinct from each other because Death and Other Details has a large group of suspects. In designing those characters, you think about what secrets they’re bringing with them. Because in a genre like this, each character has at least one important secret that they’re trying to hide from the detectives. In that way, you’re synthesizing backstory, character development, and also figuring out how those secrets are going to dovetail into the plot. Nancie Clare: Novels are an incomplete art; they’re finished in the reader’s mind’s eye. Live action, though, completes the picture. The visuals in Death and Other Details—the colors are saturated, the costumes are colorful, the backdrop of the ship is very, very rich—how were they part of the universe-building for the show? Heidi Cole McAdams: It absolutely was from the very beginning because we were doing such an overt homage to the Agatha Christie-era of detective fiction. We liked the idea of setting it on the ship that came from that time. The original pilot script is full of details about what kind of carpet and what wallpaper and the different pieces of furniture. We wrote with the intention of having it be visually rich. Nancie Clare: I didn’t find Rufus Cotesworth—the “world’s greatest detective” played by Mandy Patinkin—a man out of time, regardless of allusions to historical fictional detectives. Cotesworth, is not a fussbudget Hercule Poirot; he’s very 21st century. What were the challenges in creating a detective who, while he’s a master at self-promotion, isn’t a paragon; he has feet of clay? Mike Weiss: We talked about it from the beginning that we wanted him to be a flawed detective. We’re absolutely a show that is an homage to the golden age of detective and private eye fiction. But one of the ways that we wanted to update the character was to make him flawed and human in really relatable ways. In terms of updating him to make him feel contemporary: he’s a celebrity detective and on a downslide. I think the challenge for the character inside the story is to be believable and accurate even though much of the world has labeled him a has-been. And when you get a great actor like Mandy Patinkin making Cotesworth vacillate between these various states of brilliance and being clay footed and making mistakes, it’s incredibly fun. Heidi Cole McAdams: Amazing. Yeah, we were having fun with the idea of the world’s greatest detective. And I love how you talked about him marketing himself because that was the genesis of the difference between Rufus and everybody else. Who he is on paper and how he presents himself in his book—and even calling him the world’s greatest detective at all—there’s obviously some fiction to that. The question in the journey for him over the series is: what am I really? Am I actually talented at this? Am I a total fraud? Is it clear I don’t have all the abilities that I’m purporting to have in my book, but does that mean I’m nothing or does it mean I’m still worthwhile? So that was where we were having fun with. He’s not Hercule Poirot or Sherlock Holmes—he’s pretending to be—but that doesn’t mean he’s not [an effective detective.] Nancie Clare: All of the characters are hiding secrets, many of them multiple secrets. Keith Trubitsky, for example, boards the SS Varuna as sort of an ugly American inventor of plumbing fixtures from Indianapolis, Indiana. And yet when Imogene Scott, the heroine with a tragic past dresses Trubitsky down because of his boorish behavior, he points out that Imogene is not a crusader for the little guy working from the inside because she’s not an insider, she’s a hypocrite. He tells Imogene that she’s a professional best friend; the poor best friend of the wealthy daughter of the host of this grand voyage. Mike Weiss: In a horror genre, you show the audience that you mean business by killing off one of the main characters early in the story. Anyone could die at any time. And I think in the murder mystery genre where everyone is bringing secrets onboard this ship that could be exposed, the fact that Trubitsky is able to very quickly read Imogen and suss out one of her very closely held secrets, shows the audience that we mean business. All of these people’s secrets are going to be exposed, their masks are going to be ripped off during the course of the season. That’s one of the thrills of that early scene for me. Heidi Cole McAdams: It’s also intentional. You want to look at Trubitsky a little closer and wonder what it is this man is hiding? He’s the victim at the heart of the mystery, and he himself has secrets that may or may not be the reason he was killed. Catching that this isn’t normal behavior for him to look at her under a microscope is wise. Nancie Clare: The show takes place on the SS Varuna as it sails the Mediterranean, a ship that a former banker-turned-luxury-ship-owner Sunil Ranja, has painstakingly restored to its mid-twentieth century glory. But just in case we start to get lost in nostalgic glory, wandering around the decks is That Derek, a prepubescent influencer who wields his cellphone as he live-streams the experience. Can you guys talk about that? Because it’s pretty brilliant. Mike Weiss: I’m glad you grabbed onto that. It’s a very intentional choice. Heidi Cole McAdams: We really want the show to transport you, and we love the idea that the inspiration for that transportation brings you back to a different era where things were maybe a little bit more lovely, I guess. But it’s a contemporary story. We wanted to make sure right off the bat you understood that even though the clothes and the decor are transportive, it’s not a period piece. And we end up leaning into the fact that there’s technology in this world as the mystery unravels. Nancie Clare: There’s an undercurrent, or you could say subtext, of socioeconomic commentary. As talented and deserving of being named CEO of her family business as she is, Anna Collier is a nepo baby. This is a contrast to Imogene Scott, Anna’s preternaturally observant, somewhat sticky-fingered, bestie. It’s Imogene who’s the smartest “guy” in the room, but just a professional best friend because she’s the daughter of the secretary who had the bad luck of dying in the Collier’s driveway. Heidi Cole McAdams: I don’t think we’re reinventing the wheel here. I think talking about classism is a huge part of this genre, and it was always a piece of our show, but we never wanted it to be a focus of the show. There are moments and things sprinkled in and out that are parts of the identity of the characters: where they come from and how much money they have. And as the show goes on, you will start to unravel the fact that the big baddie at the center has a lot to say—and think—about that one percent. But it’s meant to be a layer and not the focus. Mike Weiss: Yeah, I agree. There is a tradition of the outsider character who’s able to navigate the world of the upper crust and get to the truth in a murder mystery. Heidi and I talked… Heidi Cole McAdams: A lot about wanting to enjoy the luxuries of the one percent on the show, enjoying them while also exposing them, while also understanding where they came from and why our characters are even allowed to have that. We had our own point of view on these kinds of luxuries and what they do to the world. Mike Weiss: As Imogene says in the pilot, “everything has a price.” And like Heidi said, these things come with asterisks on them. We wanted the audience to occasionally be made aware of [extreme wealth] without distracting from what is meant to be a fun, engaging, diverting entertainment. Nancie Clare: Is there anything you want to say about your hopes or aspirations for this series? Mike Weiss: I mean, Heidi really likes games in a way that I don’t, but again, in the category of overlapping interests, what we both love is the idea of building a big game-like story for the audience to play along with. And we’re really hoping that an audience finds the show and tries to, alongside our brilliant but flawed detectives, figure out what exactly is going on. We look forward to theories and conspiracies and whatever else the audience can ferret it out from our show. Heidi Cole McAdams: Yeah, I mean, I love that you noticed and cared about Wallace Stevens and Thorsten Veblen and I hope there are a lot more little tiny Easter egg things planted in the dialogue, in the production design, in the props, in the whatever, that all add up to solving the murder. And it would be so much fun for us if people notice them. Nancie Clare: Well, here’s hoping that I can talk to both of you at the beginning of season two. Mike Weiss: That sounds like a dream. View the full article

When I began this series for CrimeReads, I imagined myself reading a lot of Raymond Chandler, Dorothy Sayers, and Chester Himes. That was fine with me; other than a brief Agatha Christie phase in middle school, I’d never spent much time on the classics of crime fiction, and I looked forward to hearing what writers I admired had to say about them. What I didn’t anticipate is that I’d also be introduced to novels from the past five or ten years that I’d somehow missed or overlooked. Descent by Tim Johnston—a tense, complex, and beautifully written literary thriller—is one of these. And who could be a better guide to the classics of the modern day than Megan Miranda, author of All the Missing Girls, The Last House Guest, and the forthcoming Daughter of Mine? I’ve long admired Megan’s work for the way it combines the structure of a fast-paced thriller with a literary sensibility and nuanced characterization. (It goes without saying that her books are also insanely fun to read!) It was so much fun talking to her about another novel that combines elements of crime and literary thriller, while telling a profound and sometimes disturbing story about the darkness of the human heart. Why did you choose Descent by Tim Johnston? When I think back to books that really resonate with me, this was the one that came to mind. I might not remember every plot point, but I remember so strongly the journey that this book took me on, and it’s one that I found myself recommending to people over and over for several years after I read it. It was just stunning on several different levels. I’m drawn to books that have an external mystery, but also a mystery inside the characters, and this is a book that did just that. Also I love books that are set in the wilderness, and that setting was such a major element of the novel. The novel begins with the Courtland family, who have taken a trip from Wisconsin to the Rocky Mountains before their daughter Caitlin starts college. While out exploring the mountains with her younger brother Sean, Caitlin is abducted and Sean is badly injured. What does this dynamic and dramatic opening do to set up the story that follows? It just sets you up immediately. You know that their lives are about to change dramatically, and they do. But it just takes such a different turn from a stereotypical missing person story, because the timeline stretches over the years, and the reader really gets to see the depth of the impact on this family. This novel switches back and forth frequently between characters, but the focus is on Grant and his children, Caitlin and Sean. Why do you think Johnston chose to concentrate on these particular points of views to tell the story? I think it’s fascinating how the same incident can happen to a group of people, and yet there are so many different paths and responses that the characters can take from there. It’s so interesting to see how these different people are impacted by the same event—whether they blame themselves, whether they wish they could go back and change something. We get to see how the same trauma affects different members of the family in different ways. This novel is often described as a “literary thriller.” What does that term mean to you? I struggle with these genre categories too, but I’m usually a big fan of books that have that designation. For me, it signifies that it’s not just an exploration of an external mystery, but that there’s a journey into the main characters’ internal states as well. I don’t know if that’s the way other people mean it, but the feeling I get when I read those types of books is that it’s going to be a suspenseful story, but it may also take some side paths along the way. Based on reader reviews, some readers find this to be slow-paced. I love novels that take their time, so it didn’t bother me, but it’s always a risk when you’re writing a book that will be marketed as a thriller. How do you think about pacing in your books? I’m not somebody who is a deterred by a slower pace. I actually really like sitting in characters’ heads for a while. As a writer, though, I think that pacing comes from different elements of tension. There’s the external plot, the danger closing in, but there’s also the tension between characters and what a character doesn’t want people to know about them. I think of it as a push and pull: the external plot or that element of danger is pushing the story forward, but at the same time, the reader’s curiosity about the characters is pulling the story forward. I’m always reaching for that balance, but for me, a lot of it comes in revision. Once I’ve gotten the story down, I can think about the reveal of information. Although the focus in this novel is on characterization, the novel is punctuated by scenes of extreme violence, which seemed necessary and compelling to me but might strike other readers as gratuitous. What did you think about the role of violence in the novel? I think we have to measure violence based on what’s necessary for the story. I thought they were very jarring scenes, but they were fitting for these characters and the journey they were on. The title Descent brings so many elements of the novel together—on the one hand, you descend into the heart of each character, but you also descend into the heart of human nature and the horrible things that people are capable of. I don’t usually include a lot of violence on the page, but that’s because most of the stories I’m telling are taking place in the aftermath of an event. I’m more concerned with the emotional responses that characters have to the things that happened in their past, but that’s a personal choice. I love what you said about the metaphor of descent. I’d mostly associated it with going down the mountain! It didn’t really hit me until after I read, when I could see all these different elements coming together. I felt like gave it another whole level of meaning. The climax of this novel depends on what could be described as coincidence. It’s a move I’d be afraid to make as a writer because of the way it tests the suspension of disbelief. What did you think about Johnston’s use of coincidence as a plot device? I thought it really worked in this story. Coincidence happens a lot in life. Sometimes you’re the one who sees something, so you have the capability of altering the course of what follows. The idea for my last novel, The Only Survivors, began when a cell phone washed up at my feet on the beach. When I sent an early draft to my editor, I told her, “This is going to seem like a really big coincidence, but it’s actually the only true thing in the whole book!” Setting plays a big role in this novel, and some reviewers have described it as a Western as well as a thriller. Sometimes I get tired of the old line about setting being a character, but it’s definitely hard to imagine this story taking place anywhere other than the Rockies. Do you have any thoughts on how Johnston uses setting? How do you choose settings for your work? I love thinking about settings, both in my own work and as a reader. In this case, the tragedy at the heart of this novel happens when this family is on vacation in this totally picturesque, beautiful place. You can imagine them looking out the window and thinking, “Could you imagine a place more stunning? Look what the world is capable of.” And then after the daughter is abducted, it becomes, “How could I have brought my family to this horrifying, terrifying place where anything is possible?” Again, what is happening in the world—in this beautiful and awful place—is also happening inside the characters. That’s so well-said. It just occurred to me that the novel begins in the summer, but then the final scenes take place in the winter. I’ve never been to the Rockies in the winter, but I imagine that it’s completely different place. And that’s so often true. When you visit a place, you usually visit it in the tourist season, and it may be totally different at a different time of year. If you’re out in the woods, in the winter, there’s an element of survival that’s inherent in that story. On Johnston’s website, it says he worked as a carpenter for many years. Grant Courtland is a contractor, and one thing I really enjoyed about the novel is the way characters spend a lot of time making, fixing, or doing things rather than just talking. How do you handle the problem of making scenes with a lot of dialogue compelling? I love how he did that too. It gave another layer of texture and made these characters really come to life. I try to think about what the characters are doing, and if they’re at the beach and can be in kayaks or something, that’s great. Sometimes, though, they just have to be in the house or in a restaurant, and in that case, I try to think about dialogue more in terms of subtext. What is one character saying that the other character isn’t hearing? Sometimes it’s like two people having two totally different conversations. Do you know Tim Johnston in real life? Have you read any of his other novels? I was fortunate to find myself on a panel with him once at a book festival years ago. It was soon after I had read Descent, and it was so interesting to hear him talking about it. Since then, I’ve read The Current, which has a lot of similar elements. I’m not going to do this justice, but it’s about two young women whose car goes into a river in the winter, and one survives and one doesn’t, and there’s a mystery as well. And I think he also has a brand-new book that I’m looking forward to reading now that I’m through my edits. Is there anything you’ve learned from this novel that you might apply to your own work? It made me think about how to stay true to the story that you’re interested in exploring. As you were saying earlier, it doesn’t necessarily feel like a stereotypical thriller plot. After hitting those expected beats in the first chapter, it takes a lot of different avenues, and you’re exploring something different than you maybe thought you would be in the first chapter of the book. I have huge admiration for stories like that, and I feel like those are often the books I remember. Because they’re unexpected. View the full article

This month’s best psychological thrillers have a wide variety of settings and a focus on characterization. There’s also several on this list concerned with upending and evolving tropes in the genre, a valuable goal as the psychological thriller’s heyday continues. Shubnum Khan, The Djinn Waits 100 Years (Viking) Shubnum Khan has written a lush, romantic gothic novel set in a crumbling seaside estate in South Africa. A century before, the house bloomed with an doomed romance; now, a young girl wanders its halls, finding ways to bring new joy to the strange residents, and getting closer to discovering the secrets that first shattered the home’s happiness and led to its present day haunting by a mournful djinn. Abbott Kahler, Where You End (Henry Holt) Abbott Kahler wowed me with the nonfiction book Ghosts of Eden Park, so I’m really psyched for this pivot to thrillers. Where You End explores the twisted relationship between two mirror twins, each a perfect replica of the other in reverse. When one twin has amnesia, the other decides to fill in the details of their childhood with an imagined happiness that doesn’t mesh with the ongoing dangers both sisters are facing. Kate Brody, Rabbit Hole (Soho Crime) Kate Brody’s much-awaited debut Rabbit Hole is a fascinating romp through the internet’s true crime boards as an aimless and depressed young woman seeks answers in her sister’s long-sensationalized death after their father’s suicide makes clear that he never stopped looking for a culprit. She teams with a quirky reddit-fanatic named Mickey in her investigation and the banter between them is a highlight in the book. Brody’s novel continues the ongoing trend of psychological thrillers that become smart critiques of true crime culture. Nishita Parekh, The Night of the Storm (Dutton) Houston during a hurricane is the setting for this thriller featuring a South Asian family trapped in a fancy suburban home with a dead body and a lot of petty resentments. Along with various other storm-set novels coming out lately, The Night of the Storm reminds us that locked-room thrillers are the only true beneficiaries of climate change. Araminta Hall, One of the Good Guys (Gillian Flynn) Araminta Hall’s novel Our Kind of Cruelty showcased her ability to depict toxic masculinity with both deep understanding and righteous judgement. One of the Good Guys continues to explore these same contradictions between how people excuse their own actions and what those actions really mean, channeled brilliantly through her selfish and clueless narrator; a contrast that is additionally highlighted through Hall’s careful examination of media depictions and bias. Highly recommended! Cate Quinn, The Clinic (Sourcebooks) I’ve been getting a little tired of crime novels in which people drink, and drink, and NEVER EAT, so I was pleased to read this twisty tale set inside a rehab facility with innumerable secrets (and very balanced cuisine). When a casino detective with her own addiction issues finds out her famous sister has been found dead in an exclusive rehab facility, she decides to check herself in and discover what really happened. She’s shocked to find herself embracing the treatment plan and her damaged cohorts. Also there’s a lot of conspiracies and a really nice spa. I want to go to the spa now. Alex Michaelides, The Fury (Celadon) Alex Michaelides stunned us all with The Silent Patient and his new one is just as diabolically clever. In The Fury, an aging actress and her host of frenemies descend upon a Greek island to celebrate Easter by sniping at each other while wearing delightfully breezy clothing, and of course, things take a turn for the murderous. Of particular note is Michaelides’ playfully knowing narrator, who is as unreliable as he is entertaining. View the full article

Tracy Clark is the two-time Sue Grafton Memorial Award-winning author of the highly acclaimed Chicago Mystery Series featuring ex-homicide cop turned PI Cassandra Raines. The protagonist is a hard-driving, Black private investigator who works the streets of the Windy City while dodging cops, cons, and killers. Gregg Hurwitz is the New York Times, #1 internationally bestselling author of 24 thrillers, including the Orphan X series, and two award-winning thriller novels for teens. Currently, Gregg is actively working against polarization in politics and culture. To that end, he’s produced several hundred commercials which got over a hundred million views on digital TV platforms. His editorial pieces have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, The Huffington Post, The Bulwark, and others. Thanks so much to both of these wonderful writers for allowing us to run the following interview, in which they discuss a wide range of thoughtful approaches to the genre. Gregg Hurwitz: Tracy, congratulations on launching your second book in the Detective Harriet Foster series. Readers have really been responding well to Harriet—and for good reason. What can they expect from FALL? Tracy Clark: Well, let’s just say that Det. Harriet Foster gets no downtime in FALL. Book 2 takes up just two weeks after the end of Book 1, HIDE. That’s how it works for real cops, so I try to replicate the constant go-go-go for my book cops. There’s usually not a lot of breathing room between cases. Crime never sleeps, right? In FALL, Harriet and her coworkers, her partner, Det. Vera Li, and the team–Symansky, Bigelow, Kelley, and the boss, Sgt. Griffin–are all back. This time out they are trying to solve the murders of aldermen in the city. Someone’s killing them and leaving behind 30 dimes (30 pieces of silver, a betrayer’s payment) on their bodies. The deaths are connected, but the team can’t figure out how for the longest time. But hard work pays off in the end. We also get more information on the subplot that’s been running through the series so far–the death of Harri’s first partner, Det. Glynnis Thompson. Things are not always what they seem. Gregg Hurwitz: You paint Chicago politics quite well, with an insider’s eye, as well as the challenges facing law enforcement in the city. One of the lines from your book is: “This is Chicago. You’ll have an easier time counting the politicians who haven’t gone to prison than counting the ones that have.” When you were researching, what hit you strongest? Tracy Clark: I would love to say that I did a lot of painstaking research, but honestly, my take on Chicago and Chicago politics comes from living in the city my whole life and having a pretty good sense of how The City That Works actually works. On paper, the powers that be will tell you there’s no such thing as The Chicago Machine, that City Hall and the City Council are pristine bastions of fairness and efficiency. That everyone in politics here has a heart of gold and only the best intentions. And then you pick up the newspaper in the morning and find out your alderman is on her way to prison for accepting an envelope full of money slipped under the table. We’re not the only big city with corruption problems, but I kinda think we’re a city that really commits to it. Everybody in Chicago has an alderman story. I just put mine in a book and added some razzle dazzle to it. Gregg Hurwitz: How does your relationship with the Windy City shape your stories? Tracy Clark: It’s everything. The city is a fully formed character in all my books. I don’t think you can live in a place and write about a place and not have that place and your experience with it seep out onto the page in a pretty intimate way. When I write about a neighborhood or a street corner or an underpass, I know it. I’ve been there. I’ve walked it. I know how it smells. I know whether there are rats scurrying around. I love Chicago. There are wonderful people here. The neighborhoods are unique and vibrant. It’s home and the food is great. Gregg Hurwitz: I’ve heard that police officers have come to your events to shake your hand and congratulate you on how accurately Harriet’s professional world is portrayed. It’s always wonderful to get props from the real deal. I’m pretty sure you’ve never been a cop so how did you manage to write their world so authentically? Tracy Clark: Yes, that’s happened a few times now and each time it does it makes me feel great. I didn’t want to write a cookie-cutter cop; I wanted to write real ones (or as real as I could make them). I wanted to write characters that if they were really real you might see them pull up at a crime scene all rumpled and sleep-deprived to do their jobs. No, I have never been a cop. It’s too tough a job. I wouldn’t take it up on a bet. I admire the heck out of those dedicated professionals who do it well and for the right reasons. So, since I’ve never been a cop, I ask cops I know a lot of questions. I want to know why they chose the job, what they find most challenging about it. I want to know how they feel about what they do. The technical stuff you can look up on your own and then ask a source to double-check you for accuracy, but that’s mostly for my benefit so that I know what happens and how. When I start writing, though, that stuff is sort of folded into the background and the characters take center stage. I’m writing about stuff behind the badge. Layers. Who the characters are when the badge comes off at night and they stow their weapons in the lockbox. So, bottom line, if I don’t know it and need to know it, I bug a cop. Cops love to talk, FYI. Be nice. Be respectful of their time. Then ask. Gregg Hurwitz: One of my favorite things about writing Evan Smoak is the way he changes across the stories. When he was taken out of a foster home at twelve and trained to be an assassin, his handler and father figure told him, “The hard part isn’t turning you into a killer. The hard part is keeping you human.” As much as the Orphan X books are a thriller series, they’re also about Evan’s process of learning what it means to be human. What are the bigger arcs and themes you learned from writing the Cassandra Raines series that helped you identify what you wanted to explore in the Detective Harriet Foster series? Tracy Clark: Arcs and themes sound really professional. I don’t even think about them. Maybe I should? I write characters. I drill down really deep on who Harri is and who Cass is as book people. What motivates them? What weighs them down? What are their vulnerabilities? Both women are brilliant at their jobs. Cass is dogged, snarky, smart, relentless and compassionate. Harriet is brilliant and honest, a bit standoffish, but loyal as the day is long. But the interesting thing about her is that she’s living only a half life. She’s firing on all cylinders while that badge is on, but when she takes it off, when she goes home to the house that is only that, she is stuck in a cycle of grief and loss. I find that dual existence absolutely fascinating. I like characters with layers and problems and conflicts and stuff. We all have stuff. Real people falter. Book people need to falter too. Gregg Hurwitz: With Harriet, how did you strike the balance between her backstory and propelling the plot forward? Were there any backstory ideas you scrapped? Or any you’re saving for Book Three? Tracy Clark: I have to feel it out. This part I concede would be a lot easier if I had an outline before I started writing. That way I could see in advance where the character was going and I could add bits of backstory in strategic places like a real professional. But I’m a pantser [editor’s note: authors tend to either be plotters, those who outline before they start their novel; or pansters, those who figure it out as they go along, writing by the seat of their pants], so whatever I come up with I come up with on the fly. When we meet Harriet in book one of the series, she’s on the sidewalk in front of the police station deciding if she wants to go in. She’s just lost her partner. She isn’t sure she has what it’s going to take to keep moving forward. Her backstory instead of giving her strength to go inside, makes the decision all the more difficult. I give her a lot of weight to carry. I tend to strike the balance between too much backstory and weight and not enough by coming at characters from their tender places. Sometimes you learn more about a character by what they don’t say or can’t bring themselves to say. You know them more intimately by the things they hide and the things they run from. Sounds loosey goosey, but it really isn’t. A lot of writing for me is listening and digging at soft spots. Gregg Hurwitz: I understand what you mean and you do that well. It’s something I strive for with Evan, too, particularly as he struggles with personal relationships. Speaking of doing it well, you’ve won the Sue Grafton Memorial Award (twice!) as well as the Sara Paretsky Award. And you’ve often cited the late, great Eleanor Taylor Bland as a major influence. What have you learned from these seminal authors and their characters that helped you to create textured characters and stories of your own? Tracy Clark: I learned that attention to character is everything. Bland, Grafton and Paretsky have created three of the most distinctive and iconic female crime characters around. Just mention the names Marti MacAlister, Kinsey Millhone and VI Warshawski and I bet any crime fiction reader could recite their entire life stories right down to their individual quirks and idiosyncrasies. I wanted to build a character like that, and so I went to work. These writers are great examples. I had the great fortune of getting to know Eleanor. She was such a kind and giving person. Her encouragement and faith in me kept me writing when nothing was happening and the road to publication seemed like it would stretch on forever. I met Sue Grafton once at one of her early book signings and went away motivated to keep working on it. And Sara Paretsky. I’ve been a fan since 1982 and the release of her first Warshawski novel, INDEMNITY ONLY. I still have my copy. I had the great honor of officially meeting her recently after many, many years of politely stalking her at a respectful distance. We live in the same city and I would drive by her house when my writing wasn’t going well in hopes that some of her writer mojo would waft out of her windows and attach itself to me. That never happened, but the drive-by always made me feel better about sticking with it. And she’s just lovely, by the way. I always knew she would be. I also learned by example from Bland, Grafton and Paretsky that supporting the writing community and helping the next writer coming up is vitally important. Many writers helped me find my way. Every writer has had somebody do the same for them. So, you return that gift. Gregg Hurwitz: That is a strength of crime fiction writers — there’s a lot of support in our community. In addition to Harriet, have you discovered yourself starting to become attached to any of the other characters you’re writing for this series? Tracy Clark: I really like Det. Vera Li. She saw Harriet coming and knows exactly how to get her to re-enter the world. Li is equally as intelligent as Harri is and they work well together. Li pushes, Harri pushes back. Little by little, the partnership is moving Harri further and further from her self-imposed isolation. And they make a good team. Gregg Hurwitz: And good teams are key to bringing out nuance in character. What’s your favorite part of writing? Dreaming up the story, blank page, editing? What part do you look forward to most? Tracy Clark: My favorite part of writing is that stage in the process where I can see the finish line and I know where the story is going. I can only think ahead one scene at a time, so I never can get too far ahead of myself, but you always get to a point where you can see the end. That’s when things get easier for me. The blank page is a little frightening, but once I put that first sentence down, it’s less so. I often start with a sentence that isn’t even mine just to get the fingers tapping. I delete it right after I’ve written it, but fooling myself this way gets things going. My favorite not-mine-line belongs to Shakespeare: Now is the winter of our discontent. Made glorious summer by this sun of York. Second favorite: How now brown cow. Don’t know why this works for me, but it does. Tracy Clark’s latest novel, Fall, is now available from Kensington. Gregg Hurwitz’s latest novel, Lone Wolf, is forthcoming from Minotaur Books in February. View the full article

The Mystery Writers of America has announced the nominees for the 2024 Edgar Allan Poe Awards, honoring the best in mystery fiction, non-fiction and television published or produced in 2023. The 78th Annual Edgar® Awards, which also celebrates the 215th anniversary of the birth of Edgar Allan Poe, will be celebrated on May 1, 2024. ___________________________________ BEST NOVEL ___________________________________ Flags on the Bayou by James Lee Burke (Grove Atlantic – Atlantic Monthly Press) All the Sinners Bleed by S.A. Cosby (Flatiron Books) The Madwomen of Paris by Jennifer Cody Epstein (Penguin Random House – Ballantine Books) Bright Young Women by Jessica Knoll (Simon & Schuster – Simon Element – Marysue Rucci Books) An Honest Man by Michael Koryta (Hachette Book Group – Little, Brown and Company – Mulholland Books) The River We Remember by William Kent Krueger (Simon & Schuster – Atria Books) Crook Manifesto by Colson Whitehead (Penguin Random House – Doubleday) ___________________________________ BEST FIRST NOVEL BY AN AMERICAN AUTHOR ___________________________________ The Peacock and the Sparrow by I.S. Berry (Simon & Schuster – Atria Books) The Golden Gate by Amy Chua (Macmillan Publishing – Minotaur Books) Small Town Sins by Ken Jaworowski (Macmillan Publishing – Henry Holt and Co.) The Last Russian Doll by Kristen Loesch (Penguin Random House – Berkley) Murder by Degrees by Ritu Mukerji (Simon & Schuster) ___________________________________ BEST PAPERBACK ORIGINAL ___________________________________ Boomtown by A.F. Carter (Penzler Publishers – Mysterious Press) Hide by Tracy Clark (Amazon Publishing – Thomas & Mercer) The Taken Ones by Jess Lourey (Amazon Publishing – Thomas & Mercer) Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice for Murderers by Jesse Q. Sutanto (Penguin Random House – Berkley) Lowdown Road by Scott Von Doviak (Hard Case Crime) ___________________________________ BEST FACT CRIME ___________________________________ In Light of All Darkness: Inside the Polly Klaas Kidnapping and the Search for America’s Child by Kim Cross (Hachette Book Group – Grand Central Publishing) Number Go Up: Inside Crypto’s Wild Rise and Staggering Fall by Zeke Faux (Penguin Random House – Crown Currency) Tangled Vines: Power, Privilege, and the Murdaugh Family Murders by John Glatt (Macmillan Publishers – St. Martin’s Press) Crooked: The Roaring ’20s Tale of a Corrupt Attorney General, a Crusading Senator, and the Birth of the American Political Scandal by Nathan Masters (Hachette Book Group – Hachette Books) I Know Who You Are: How an Amateur DNA Sleuth Unmasked the Golden State Killer and Changed Crime Fighting Forever by Barbara Rae-Venter (Penguin Random House – Ballantine Books) The Lost Sons of Omaha: Two Young Men in an American Tragedy by Joe Sexton (Simon & Schuster – Scribner) ___________________________________ BEST CRITICAL/BIOGRAPHICAL ___________________________________ Perplexing Plots: Popular Storytelling and the Poetics of Murder by David Bordwell (Columbia University Press) Spillane: King of Pulp Fiction by Max Allan Collins & James L. Traylor (Penzler Publishers – Mysterious Press) A Mystery of Mysteries: The Death and Life of Edgar Allan Poe by Mark Dawidziak (Macmillan Publishing – St. Martin’s Press) Fallen Angel: The Life of Edgar Allan Poe by Robert Morgan (LSU Press) Love Me Fierce in Danger – The Life of James Ellroy by Steven Powell (Bloomsbury Publishing – Bloomsbury Academic) ___________________________________ BEST SHORT STORY ___________________________________ “Hallowed Ground,” by Linda Castillo (Macmillan Publishers – Minotaur Books) “Thriller,” Thriller by Heather Graham (Blackstone Publishing) “Miss Direction,” Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, September-October 2023 by Rob Osler (Dell Magazines) “The Rise,” Amazon Original Stories by Ian Rankin (Amazon Publishing) “Pigeon Tony’s Last Stand,” Amazon Original Stories by Lisa Scottoline (Amazon Publishing) ___________________________________ BEST JUVENILE ___________________________________ Myrtle, Means, and Opportunity by Elizabeth C. Bunce (Hachette Book Group – Workman Publishing – Algonquin Young Readers) The Ghosts of Rancho Espanto by Adrianna Cuevas (Macmillan Publishers – Farrar, Straus and Giroux BFYR) Epic Ellisons: Cosmos Camp by Lamar Giles (HarperCollins Publishers – Versify) The Jules Verne Prophecy by Larry Schwarz & Iva-Marie Palmer (Hachette Book Group – Little, Brown Books for Young Readers) What Happened to Rachel Riley? by Claire Swinarski (HarperCollins Publishers – Quill Tree Books) ___________________________________ BEST YOUNG ADULT ___________________________________ Girl Forgotten by April Henry (Hachette Book Group – Little, Brown Books for Young Readers) Star Splitter by Matthew J. Kirby (Penguin Young Readers – Dutton Books for Young Readers) The Sharp Edge of Silence by Cameron Kelly Rosenblum (HarperCollins Publishers – Quill Tree Books) My Flawless Life by Yvonne Woon (HarperCollins Publishers – Katherine Tegen Books) Just Do This One Thing for Me by Laura Zimmerman (Penguin Young Readers – Dutton Books for Young Readers) ___________________________________ BEST TELEVISION EPISODE TELEPLAY ___________________________________ “Time of the Monkey” – Poker Face, Written by Wyatt Cain & Charlie Peppers (Peacock) “I’m a Pretty Observant Guy” – Will Trent, Written by Liz Heldens (ABC) “Dead Man’s Hand” – Poker Face, Written by Rian Johnson (Peacock) “Hózhó Náhásdlii (Beauty is Restore)” – Dark Winds, Written by Graham Roland & John Wirth (AMC) “Escape from Shit Mountain” – Poker Face, Written by Nora Zuckerman & Lilla Zuckerman (Peacock) ___________________________________ ROBERT L. FISH MEMORIAL AWARD ___________________________________ “Errand for a Neighbor,” Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, January-February 2023 by Bill Bassman (Dell Magazines) “The Body in Cell Two,” Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, May-June 2023 by Kate Hohl (Dell Magazines) “The Soiled Dove of Shallow Hollow,” Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, January-February 2023 by Sean McCluskey (Dell Magazines) “It’s Half Your Fault,” Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, July-August 2023 by Meghan Leigh Paulk (Dell Magazines) “Two Hours West of Nothing,” Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, September-October 2023 by Gabriela Stiteler (Dell Magazines) ___________________________________ THE SIMON & SCHUSTER MARY HIGGINS CLARK AWARD ___________________________________ Play the Fool by Lina Chern (Penguin Random House – Bantam) The Bones of the Story by Carol Goodman (HarperCollins Publishers – William Morrow) Of Manners and Murder by Anastasia Hastings (Macmillan Publishers – Minotaur Books) The Three Deaths of Willa Stannard by Kate Robards (Crooked Lane Books) Murder in Postscript by Mary Winters (Penguin Random House – Berkley) ___________________________________ THE G.P. PUTNAM’S SONS SUE GRAFTON MEMORIAL AWARD ___________________________________ Hard Rain by Samantha Jayne Allen (Macmillan Publishers – Minotaur Books) An Evil Heart by Linda Castillo (Macmillan Publishers – Minotaur Books) Bad, Bad Seymour Brown by Susan Isaacs (Grove Atlantic – Atlantic Monthly Press) Past Lying by Val McDermid (Grove Atlantic – Atlantic Monthly Press) A Stolen Child by Sarah Stewart Taylor (Macmillan Publishers – Minotaur Books) ___________________________________ THE LILIAN JACKSON BRAUN MEMORIAL AWARD ___________________________________ Glory Be by Danielle Arceneaux (Pegasus Books – Pegasus Crime) Misfortune Cookie by Vivien Chien (Macmillan – St. Martin’s Paperbacks) Hot Pot Murder by Jennifer J. Chow (Penguin Random House – Berkley) Murder of an Amish Bridegroom by Patricia Johns (Crooked Lane Books) The Body in the Back Garden by Mark Waddell (Crooked Lane Books) ___________________________________ SPECIAL AWARDS ___________________________________ GRAND MASTER Katherine Hall Page R.L. Stine ELLERY QUEEN AWARD Michaela Hamilton View the full article

Science fiction and fantasy are often full of epic space battles and sprawling quests. But to me, they’re best at their most intimate and personal. Even with mystical abilities or cybernetic enhancements, people are still messy and complex and deeply flawed. Fantastical elements can often even intensify those aspects of human nature. Our relationships, our failures, and of course, our crimes. I love a great whodunnit, and one with sorcery or sentient spaceships is even better. In my debut novel, The Longest Autumn, priestess Tirne must solve just such a mystery. As one of four seasonal Heralds, it is her job to escort the deity Autumn between the human and godly realms each year for his season. But this time, the magic mirror separating their worlds shatters after they pass through. Tirne is accused of sabotage, and her title of Herald is stripped from her. The world is trapped in endless autumn. While sorcerers and priests work to repair the mirror, crops fail and plague sweeps through the populace. Time runs out as Tirne dives into her temple’s intrigues to find the true culprit, clear her name, and regain her prestigious position as Herald. In a similar vein, I’ve included some of my favorite fantasy and science fiction mysteries below. The Death I Gave Him by Em X. Liu This unique spin on Shakespeare’s Hamlet is a closed-circle, futuristic murder mystery set at Elsinore Labs. Hayden Lichfield works with his father on the Sisyphus Formula, a possible way to cheat death. When the elder Lichfield is murdered, the lab goes into lockdown. Hayden investigates the murder, which leads into a twisty tale of revenge, depression, and existentialism. The story also features a heartbreaking but charming take on sentient artificial intelligence. Told through fictional memoir excerpts, phone transcripts, and descriptions of security footage, it’s the perfect blend of the literary and science fiction genres. Magic for Liars by Sarah Gailey Magical schools are a common setting in fantasy, but Gailey makes the concept fresh in this contemporary whodunnit. Ivy Gamble is a hard-drinking loner of a private investigator, hired to solve a grisly murder at a magical high school. Her estranged sister is a teacher there, and the story perfectly balances Ivy’s personal stakes and fractured relationships alongside the murder case. This fast-paced read is witty and breezy, with just the right amount of grittiness sprinkled in. Six Wakes by Mur Lafferty In a world where cloning allows anyone to extend their lifespan indefinitely, the six-person crew of a spaceship all wake up as fresh clones in their ship’s lab. They emerge into their own murder scene. Their previous bodies are obviously decades older, but all memories of their time on the ship are missing. Together, they must discover what happened over the past years and solve the mystery. Complicating matters, every one of them has past crimes they’d prefer to keep hidden. It’s a compulsive read of a whodunnit with a truly compelling premise. Voyage of the Damned by Frances White This fantasy novel releasing January 2024 features twelve magical heirs of a kingdom–one from each province–embarking on a luxury ship for a pilgrimage to their sacred mountain. On the first night, one of their number is murdered. As the unwelcome, low-class pariah of the group, suspicion falls on Ganymedes Piscero. He searches for the true killer while guarding a secret of his own. He’s the only one on the ship without magic. It’s a page-turner of a book that’s equal parts humor, heart, and mystery. Even Though I Knew The End, by C.L. Polk A historical fantasy novella ripped straight from film noir, this story features Helen Brandt, a woman who made a deal with a demon ten years ago. The collection date for her soul is only days away when she receives an offer she can’t refuse. A new demon offers to return her soul if she uses her mystical abilities to track down the White City Vampire, a serial killer who’s been stalking the streets. Given the chance to spend the rest of her life with the woman she loves, Helen takes the offer. Her quest to find the murderer is full of twists and turns, with narration that would be right at home in a black-and-white detective movie. Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo Set in present day, Ninth House follows Alex Stern, a young woman with the rare and extraordinary ability to see ghosts. This gift earns her an invitation to attend Yale University, where she uses this talent to monitor the university’s mystical secret societies. The upper-class students use various forms of magic to charm their way into politics, manipulate the stock market, and climb the social ladder even higher. But when a girl is murdered and the underground societies are possible culprits, Alex must find the killer. An unsettling portrayal of the murkier sides of human nature, this tale is dark and troubling and beautiful. The Deep Sky by Yume Kitasei A clever and thoughtful whodunnit set on a spaceship traveling to colonize a new world, this book alternates between two timelines. In the past, the protagonist Asuka struggles with questions of identity, belonging, and family on a dying Earth, all while competing with other hopefuls for a place on the mission. In the present, an explosion during the journey kills three people and knocks the ship off-course. Asuka is the lone survivor of the explosion and accused of the crime. The remaining crew must band together to right the ship while Asuka hunts for the true saboteur. Poignant, lyrical, and tense, this is a stunning debut novel. Winter’s Orbit by Everina Maxwell Equal parts whodunnit, science fiction, and romance, this read is like a sugary dessert. Set in a fictional high-tech solar system, a prince dies suddenly. His cousin Kiem is tasked with marrying the prince’s widower Jainan to secure political alliances. When it’s revealed that the prince was murdered, Jainan is the prime suspect. He and Kiem search for the truth behind the crime while they grow ever closer to one another. A deliciously slow-burn love story wrapped in a crime investigation, this book is comforting and sweet despite the murder at its heart. Murder at Spindle Manor by Morgan Stang This delightful gaslamp fantasy novel is perfectly balanced between darker elements and humor. Isabeau Agarwal is a monster hunter seeking her latest quarry at a quaint roadside inn. The beast can hide in human form, and she must determine which of the residents is actually the inhuman creature. But the investigation is made even more complicated when one of the guests is killed. Isabeau now must find both the shapeshifting monster and the murderer over the course of a single night. Jam-packed with twists and turns, this novel blends supernatural horror, magic, and a complex mystery that unravels perfectly. *** View the full article

If I had to describe The Nice Guys (2016) in one word, it would be “underrated.” Though it achieved instant critical acclaim, its modest performance at the box office prevented it from achieving both a mass audience and fulfilling its potential as a franchise. But the concept of being “underrated,” of having people and the world around you think less of what you really are, was baked into this film’s identity even before its somewhat disappointing release. This adjective permeates almost everything about it, from its story to its sense of humor and even its commentary on life itself. This idea of being “underrated” is best embodied in the performance given by Ryan Gosling. That performance as one of the film’s two leads, which subverts his knack for playing reserved tough guys with the help of his great comedic talents, is the heart of the movie as well as an encapsulation of its comedic, underdog-loving spirit. The Nice Guys takes place in Los Angeles in 1977. Down on his luck private investigator Holland March (Gosling) works oddball cases to support himself and his compassionate teenage daughter Holly (Angourie Rice). One day, while trying to find a young woman named Amelia Kuttner (Margaret Qualley, in her first significant performance), March crosses paths with brutal enforcer Jackson Healy (Russell Crowe). Though the two men initially clash, they eventually start working together to find out what Amelia knows about the murder of an adult film actress named Misty Mountains (Murielle Telio). Their investigation finds both men bantering and bonding as they explore the violent underbelly of Los Angeles and secretly hope for a shot to show the world that they are more than what it thinks of them. Director/co-writer Shane Black provides both of his leads with a perfect and economical first scene. For example, hardboiled Healy’s introductory scene features him beating up a creepy man to protect a 13-year-old girl, all the while spouting hard-nosed lines in his voice-over like “But if you got trouble with someone…you might ask around for me” and “marriage is buying a house for someone you hate.” You might expect March’s first scene to also establish him as a gutsy tough guy, especially since he is played by Gosling. In previous films like Drive (2011) or Only God Forgives (2013), he had excelled at playing quiet loners who expressed themselves more through silent looks and acts of violence than they did with words. After seeing Crowe do his best impression of a tough guy, you might expect Gosling to give his, too. Black immediately establishes that this will not be the case. In contrast to Healy, who was first introduced standing and getting ready to punch someone, Black shows March lying in a bathtub as he wakes up from a nap. The phone rings, and the camera tilts up to reveal that March is wearing a full suit in the wet tub. As he hears a voice message from his daughter, March tries to move out of the tub, only to fall. Undeterred, March crawls to the phone, only to miss the message. Saddened, he looks at something he wrote on his hand: “you will never be happy,” with a smiley face drawn underneath it. March soon begins to speak in his own voice-over. But unlike the one Healy has, his is much more wearied, as evidenced by its first line: “I wish I wished for things, man.” This brief scene sets up almost everything that you need to know about March. He is visibly sadder than Healy, seems less competent, and is much more ridiculous. But at the same time, March demonstrates a great will to not give up. He may not pick up the phone before it stops ringing, but you get a feeling from his awkward yet determined crawling that it was only due to time. Despite his wearied air, there’s a will to survive that underlies everything he does. March might seem best defined by two Yiddish words: “schlemiel” and “schlimazel.” There’s an old saying that, at a dinner, a schlemiel is someone who spills soup while the schlimazel is the person who gets the soup spilled onto them. It is easy to imagine March fulfilling both roles simultaneously (by spilling soup onto himself). Throughout The Nice Guys, March suffers everything from grief (his wife died before the events of the film), terrible work assignments, as well as repeated instances of physical harm that range from Healy breaking his arm to falling off a ledge and down a big hill. But Gosling consistently mines March’s bad luck for comedy gold. He reacts to this long and varied string of misfortune with a hilarious array of funny faces, bits of physical comedy that would’ve played well in the silent era, and perfect comedic timing. One of his reactions to his bad luck is arguably the funniest moment in the whole film. It comes when Healy breaks March’s arm, because it causes Gosling to let out a high-pitched scream which sounds like an old woman sobbing after someone has broken her favorite vase. It’s a moment that I can’t watch without laughing. But even though March is on the receiving end of many of the film’s jokes, he is much more than a comedic fool. He has a sense of pathos due to his tragic backstory (his inability to smell prevented him from stopping the fire which killed his wife) and Gosling grounds his antics in the type of exhaustion you can get when you feel like your best days are behind you, if you even had them at all. In addition, Gosling makes you feel the frustration that March feels when he is misunderstood or underrated. Though he masks it with sarcasm, you can still feel the pain he gets when Holly calls him the “world’s worst detective” and that she hates him. This sense of being underestimated or misunderstood is something that seems to influence the parts that Gosling likes to play. In an interview to promote The Gray Man (2022), Gosling noted that he likes the Universal movie monsters because “they’re misunderstood…they’re having a hard time. We can all relate, I think, on some level.” That quote applies not only to March, but to many of Gosling’s most beloved characters. Lars Lindstrom in Lars and the Real Girl is thought of as strange for having a sex doll, but his surprisingly sweet and nonsexual relationship with “Bianca” ends up serving as the catalyst for him to finally overcome the trauma which has defined his entire life. His nameless character in Drive is thought of as an ice-cold force for violence, but he proves that he possesses great reserves of compassion that he uses in vain attempts to help Irene Gabriel (Carey Mulligan) and her family. More recently, Ken in Barbie chafes at being unable to be “kenough” to win Barbie’s love. All of them try to show the people around them that they are more than what they believe them to be. One of the things about being misunderstood or underrated is that it makes showing someone what you can really do even more satisfying. Despite his bad luck and moments of stupidity, March does provide value to the investigation that he conducts with Healy. He’s good at deducing things and makes almost all the important breakthroughs in figuring out who killed Misty Mountains and what Amelia has been planning. Later, after March has figured out the answer to a mystery it has taken him the whole film to solve, he sarcastically but sweetly says “world’s worst detective, huh” to Holly with a gleam in his eye. That moment, and later ones where March learns that he is worthy of happiness or smiles as he’s realized that he has proved himself to the people in his life who matter the most, are even more rewarding because of how quickly they disprove what the people around him had long thought of him. At this point in time, it’s hard to watch Gosling as the hapless March and not think about the performance he would go on to give as Ken in Barbie (2023). At times, due to his hilarious line readings and moments of exuberant physical comedy, it is tempting to view this performance as a type of dry run for the work he would do in Barbie, much like how it is tempting to view Qualley’s performance in this film, with its chaotic energy and statements supporting radical politics, as a rehearsal for her work in Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood. But March is also his own character, especially when you analyze him within the context of what might be one of Gosling’s favorite words: “kenergy.” What does that word mean, you might ask? Gosling defined “kenergy” as both “a word I made up on a press junket so I didn’t have to really answer any questions, that’s haunted me ever since” and “the strength and vitality required for a sustained period of Kenning,” which he went on to describe as both “another random word I made up” and a verb meaning “ to give more than is necessary or required to reflect so that others might shine.” Do those highly academic yet totally made-up phrases apply to Golsing’s performance as March? At a first glance, March might seem like he has kenergy. Gosling is billed second after Crowe, and he does excel at supporting him. In fact, whether it is people with whom he has multiple scenes like Rice or one-scene wonders like Lance Valentine Butler as the adult-minded Kid on Bike, Gosling’s reactions to their idiosyncrasies makes all of them shine brighter than they would against a different actor. Watching him reflect their moments of comedic success so that they shine more is a little like watching him support Margot Robbie in Barbie. But the key quality of Gosling’s performance which makes March less of a proto-Ken and more of his own character is his effortlessness. He doesn’t give more than is necessary or required to reflect so that the people around him might shine. Instead, his straight-faced responses to the lunacy around him feels effortless. He elevates Healy, Holly, as well as all the scoundrels and oddballs of Los Angeles that he interacts with not by putting in too much work, but simply by being himself. For me, Gosling’s performance as Ken is like Gene Kelly, because his every movement and line reading to support others demonstrates the great, highly athletic effort that he puts in to make sure that they might shine. In contrast, Gosling’s performance as March is like Fred Astaire, because it has an ease and confidence to it which make everything he does seem effortless, even if it may not feel that way to the beleaguered March. The Nice Guys seems destined for an afterlife as a beloved cult classic, the type of thing you can’t or won’t turn off whenever you see that it’s on cable or want to watch on a streaming service on a Friday night. But it also deserves to be acknowledged as having one of Gosling’s best performances. It captures the mixture of charisma, comedic chops, and sincerity which have helped make him beloved and will probably net him at least another Academy Award nomination for his work on Barbie. While I would love for there to be a whole franchise of films starring him and Crowe as March and Healy, it is comforting to know that we will always have this one, and that anyone who seeks it out will be rewarded with one of the most underrated American films of the late 2010s. View the full article

I grew up in Philadelphia, where winters could be brutal. David Goodis said it best on the opening page of Black Friday: “January cold came in from two rivers, formed four walls around Hart and closed in on him… He was shivering and he could feel the cold eating into his chest and tearing away at his spine…The cold was even worse on Broad Street. From the east it brough an icy flavor from the Delaware. From the west it carried a mean grey frost from the Schuylkill.” Temps that low can make a human being long to be somewhere else. Somewhere warm and sunny… like Los Angeles, California. But when you’re cold and can’t afford a winter vacation, you do the next best thing: you put on a movie set in sunny L.A. Which is how I ended up in the habit of spending every January watching a very specific kind of crime movie—something I call the L.A. “hang” film. By “hang” films, I mean crime movies (though sometimes not) with a more leisurely pace, where the relationships and culture and soundtrack and locations take center stage, while the plot kind of hums along in the background (if there even is a plot). In short, a “hang” film is one where you enjoy hanging out with the characters, even if their lives are circling the drain. After years of these virtual January vacations, I finally moved my family to sunny L.A. in 2016. And two years later, I started writing California Bear, which was very much inspired by this small body of films that were released in and around the 1970s. It’s no coincidence that these “hang” films coincided with the rise of New Hollywood—with Dennis Hopper and Francis Ford Coppola leading the charge. But by the 1980s, any attempts to make a “hang” film was probably noted to death by a coked-out exec looking for endless action-driven set pieces. Don’t get me wrong—I love a good mindless 1980s action flick. I’ve even written novel versions of them (see: The Blonde, Fun & Games). But as I’ve gotten older, I realize that real life is more like a hang film. There you are, eating donuts or drinking beer or driving around L.A. with Kris Kristofferson on the radio… all the while you have no idea that someone is out plotting your demise. Maybe you’ll clue into it in time. Maybe not. But hey, at least you had a good hang along the way. Here are the L.A. films I would obsess over during those bitter cold January evenings on the mean streets of Philadelphia. (By the way, I am typing these words on a raw, rainy, and bitter January day here in Pasadena.) MODEL SHOP Released: February 11, 1969 To my mind, Jacques Demy’s Model Shop was the first L.A. “hang” film and set the tone for the others on this list. This is not a crime film, though plenty of transgressive things happen in it. George Matthews (Gary Lockwood) is broke, unemployed, and about to lose his vintage M.G. convertible to the bank. He has a hot girlfriend named Gloria (Alexandra Hay) and a groovy little pad in Venice Beach—but this is the late 60s, when groovy Venice pads came with oil derricks outside your bedroom window. And Gloria is on the verge of throwing him over for a better prospect. So George climbs into his M.G. and cruises around L.A. looking for a hundred bucks to keep the repo at bay. This movie, by the way, really isn’t about the hundred bucks. It’s about the human beings George meets up with along the way, including Tom Holland (the director of Fright Night, in an early acting role), the real-life band Spirit (playing themselves) and of course Lola… the French woman who is working in the titular model shop until she can make enough for a return trip to Paris. (A model shop, by the way, is a place where you can rent a camera to take photos of women in various states of undress.) The rest of the film is about the temporary entanglement of these two very different lives, played out in the California sun—and for Gary, against the looming specter of Vietnam. CISCO PIKE Released: January 14, 1972 This might the most leisurely-paced ticking-clock thriller I’ve ever watched. But that’s part of Cisco Pike’s wily, druggy charm—it’s the journey, man, not the destination. Wave away the pot smoke and you’ll find that Cisco Pike has a classic crime plot: a dude with a shady past promises his girl he’ll go straight, but he’s forced back into the life anyway. Cisco (Kris Kristofferson) and his partner Jesse Dupree (Harry Dean Stanton) once sold a million records as a pop duo; now Jesse is hooked on smack and Cisco’s still reeling from a drug bust at the hands of twitchy narcotics cop Leo Holland (Gene Hackman). One Friday afternoon Holland shows up at Cisco’s Venice Beach apartment not to bust him, but recruit him. Seems that Holland’s lucked into (read: stole) ten kilos of grass, and he needs Cisco to move ten thousand dollars’ worth by Monday morning. “That’s an awful lot of grass to move in two days,” says a dubious Cisco. Thus begins Cisco’s epic drug dealin’ Odyssey, which takes him to L.A. recording studios, the Hollywood Hills, the Troubadour, Beverly Hills, and grungy topless bars on a mission, in the words of Bill Norton’s screenplay, “to subvert the minds of the good citizens of Los Angeles.” I adore this movie so much I have an original poster hanging in my writing office. THE NEW CENTURIONS Released: August 3, 1972 This is your ideal hang film—if your idea of a good time is hanging out with the Fuzz. There is no Big Bad guy in this movie, nor some kind of citywide conspiracy to unravel. Instead, we follow three rookie members of the LAPD (Stacy Keach, Scott Wilson, and Erik Estrada) as they are paired with more seasoned cops to teach them how to navigate the streets of early 70s Hollywood. Imagine a full season of streaming procedural series compressed down to 103 minutes—and yet, it’s still very much a hang movie… or more appropriately, a ridealong movie. Even though I’d heard of the Joseph Wambaugh novel, the movie was unknown to me until I took a bus tour of L.A. back in 2009 and our guides—Kim Cooper and Richard Schave of Esotouric—played a clip where the wonderfully gruff George C. Scott (as “Andy Klivinsky”) shows Baby Keach how to keep prostitutes off the streets when charges never seem to stick. “Klivinsky’s law states,” Scott explains, “give one pass down Western Avenue just to show ‘em the wagon. If they don’t run for cover, pick ‘em up, run around for couple of hours, and generally bust up their evening. It’s illegal as hell, but it works.” HICKEY AND BOGGS Released: September 20, 1972 In this early buddy team-up, Los Angeles is presented as a Warren Zevon-style daymare of sirens and sunbaked streets and automatic weapons within easy reach of children. An amoral paradise where murders are ordered as easily as a sandwich and a bottle of Coke. A city where defenestration and killer smog and a fusillade of hot lead on the 50-yard line means it’s… Tuesday. And what about the Chandler-style heroes, the chivalrous knights who are supposed to hold this place back from the brink of chaos? Not only are they tarnished and afraid, but they’re either full-blown alcoholics or haunted divorcees unable to afford their phone bill. Robert Culp (I Spy) directed Hickey & Boggs from an early Walter Hill script—which could be seen as a dry run for 48 Hrs. Actor Jason Culp told me that his father took Hill’s script up to a cabin in the mountains and spent a week rewriting every line of dialogue. “As he had always done for Bill [Cosby],” Jason explained, “keeping their relationship in mind. That was what interested him the most—their relationship. Dad and Bill would call each other ‘Stan’ and ‘Ollie.’ And in a way, Hickey & Boggs is a noir version of Laurel and Hardy. No matter how they feel about each other in the moment, they will never leave each other in the lurch.” THE LONG GOODBYE Released: March 7, 1973 In my freshman days as a mystery novelist, I witnessed some light-hearted banter between editor/bookseller Otto Penzler and novelist Michael Connelly as they debated the merits of The Long Goodbye, Robert Altman’s divisive adaptation of the Raymond Chandler novel. Otto was firmly in the no fucking way camp; Connelly, on the other hand, says the film saved him from a life in building construction. I first watched Long Goodbye under perhaps the best possible: while staying in the very same apartment where Eliot Gould’s Marlowe lives in the film. This was thanks to the generosity of the same Mike Connelly, who graciously invited me to crash there on my L.A. book tour stop. Now please imagine me, incredibly jetlagged and waking up in a strange bedroom with a cat. Me, shuffling into the kitchen to find a glass of water. Then imagine me, putting the DVD into the player and watching… Eliot Gould as Marlowe, waking up in the same exact bedroom with a cat, then shuffling into the same exact kitchen… I wasn’t just enjoying a hang film; I was living it. Needless to say, I’m with Connelly on this one. NIGHT MOVES Released: June 11, 1975 Technically, this Arthur Penn-directed (and Alan Sharp-penned) detective story is only half an L.A. hang film; the other half takes place in the Florida. But I argue it qualifies, because private eye Harry Moseby (Gene Hackman) does a lot of hanging out on both coasts. Harry’s latest case is a wandering daughter job, but he finds the daughter pretty quick—realizing too late that she’s in the middle of a conspiracy involving stunt men and seaplanes and ancient relics and… well, none of that is super important, because remember: this is a hang film. And the grim fun of this neo-noir tale is watching poor Moseby try to puzzle out the mysteries of his own marriage along with the case at hand. I realize that sounds terribly downbeat, and it is… but Night Moves is also masterful, and probably my favorite private eye movie next to The Long Goodbye. After I moved to L.A., I had the special thrill of realizing that Harry does a lot of driving up and down San Fernando Road in Burbank, just down the road from we were living. THE KILLING OF A CHINESE BOOKIE Released: February 15, 1976 I first watched this John Cassavettes gangster film at the New Beverly Cinema (owned and operated by Quentin Tarantino), during a mini-festival honoring the late director in November 2016. I had only been in town a few months, and Killing was the secret tour of Hollywood I never knew I needed. Ben Gazzara plays Cosmo Vittelli, who not only owns a burlesque joint on the Sunset Strip but considers himself an artist. “My name is Cosmo Vittelli. I’m the owner of this joint. I choose the numbers, I direct them, I arrange them. If you have any complaints, you just come to me and I’ll throw you right out on your ass.” Problem is, he’s also a hardcore gambler, and has just finished paying off a seven-year debt to a local loan shark. To celebrate the final payment, Cosmo goes on a bender and ends up.. well, right back where he started, $23,000 in the hole, and on the verge of losing his beloved Crazy Horse West. The local mob dangles a solution: if Cosmo murders some low-level book, the debt will be cleared. You may have heard this noir plot before, but no one tells it like Cassavettes. And it really clicks into place when you realize that Cosmo is a stand-in for creatives; the studios are the mob. If you want the ultimate “hang” experience, opt for the longer, more immersive 1976 version (available on the Criterion Channel). CUTTER’S WAY Released: March 20, 1981 Yes, this “L.A.” hang film is largely set in Santa Barbara, about ninety miles up the coast. And yes, it was released many years after the heyday of the hang film. But this Ivan Passer film is one of the last gasps of this forgotten subgenre. Jeff Bridges is Richard Bone, a gigolo (and to my mind, Jeff “The Dude” Lebowski in a past life). John Heard is Alex Cutter, a barroom blowhard and Vietnam vet (who could have possibly served with Walter Sobchak). Together they team up to solve a murder, with Cutter convinced it’s all part of this huge international conspiracy. Maybe it is! Maybe it isn’t. What becomes clear is that this case is way above Cutter and Bone’s pay grade (not that anyone is paying them). I first watched Cutter’s Way during a college course on Vietnam War films. But I didn’t truly appreciate it until I’d read the source novel—Newton Thornburg’s brilliant Cutter and Bone—years later, and then revisited the movie. Both book and film were huge inspiration for my characters Jack “Killer” Queen and Cato Hightower in California Bear. And even though the film pretty much skips the last third (seriously) of the novel, I highly recommend both. MIKE’S MURDER Released: March 9, 1984 James Bridges wrote and directed this final L.A. hang movie, and it is sort of the flip side to Model Shop. Debra Winger plays Betty Parris, a Brentwood bank teller who has an on-again, off-again romance with Mike Chuhutsky, who works part time as a tennis instructor. The other half of the time? He’s a drug dealer. Mike the Criminal is just as much as a cipher as Lola the Model, and after his murder (not a spoiler; it’s in the title), Betty takes it upon herself to… well, not so much solve the mystery of the killing, but the mystery of Mike himself. I’m a huge fan of the theatrical version of the film, but I was fascinated to learn that Bridges’ original cut told the story in reverse… pre-dating Christopher Nolan’s Memento by a decade and a half. I’d give anything to spend two hours hanging out with that version. *** View the full article

Here are the undisputed facts. On March 15, 1968, Lieutenant Colonel Frank Barker ordered Captain Ernest Medina to lead his company of about 100 men in an attack on the village of My Lai (4) in Quang Ngai province, South Vietnam. At 8:00 am of March 16, 1968, Medina’s company assaulted the village. In a little over an hour, the Americans killed somewhere between 100 and 500 Vietnamese civilians and committed several rapes. There is simply no doubt that this was a “war crime” under any definition. Why did it occur? The American military did not order the massacre. Quite the contrary, the US Army in Vietnam was very concerned with avoiding civilian causalities (and remains so today). The brass issued complicated “Rules of Engagement” that were solely designed to prevent civilian causalities. Everyone from field officers to grunts were required to learn them. When they were violated (and they were), the Army conducted investigations to see what went wrong. If criminal culpability could be shown, the Army brought charges. Frank Barker and Ernest Media knew the regs. They did not attack My Lai on March 16, 1968 with the intention of slaughtering Vietnamese peasants. But that’s what happened. Why? To answer this question, one needs to understand two things: that the US was fighting a “war of occupation” in Vietnam and the particularities of the My Lai operation of March 16, 1968. After the Second World War, the Great Powers began to engage in a series of “small wars.” They are well known: the French in Vietnam, the British in Malaysia, the French in Algeria, the Americans in Vietnam, the Soviets in Afghanistan, the Americans in Afghanistan, and the Americans in Iraq (twice). They did not—and could not—fight these wars as they fought World War II. There would be no great clash of armies in huge battles. Rather, they would be fought by new kinds of specially trained soldiers (e.g., “Green Berets”) who used the sophisticated techniques of “counter-insurgency warfare” to fight “guerillas” or “insurgents.” That was the idea, anyway. In fact, what happened is that the Great Power simply invaded the target country. In 1968, for example, the US had over 500,000 military personnel in Vietnam. Once “in country,” the Great Power always did the same thing: set up strongpoints (“firebases”) where troops could be relatively safe; sally out of those strongpoints to engage and defeat the “insurgents”; create larger and larger pacified areas (“inkspots”); and generally try to convince the locals that you are there to help them (“winning hearts and minds”). The trouble is it never worked. The incomplete list given above—Vietnam, Malaysia, Algeria, Afghanistan, Iraq—is a list of military and human tragedies. None of these conflicts ended well. Why is this? The reason is that the Great Powers were not, despite what they claimed, fighting “counter-insurgency wars.” Rather, they were fighting what should be called “wars of occupation.” We don’t ordinarily think of these post-World War II conflicts in these terms. The brutal, imperialistic Nazis, we think, occupied countries. We don’t. We try to aid other countries by supporting the “good guys” militarily. The “bad guys” are the “insurgents,” and we are there to help kill them. Our intentions are good. So were Frank Barker’s and Ernest Media’s on March 16, 1968. They were there to help. But the fact is that the Great Powers were occupiers. The residents of the countries invaded (Vietnam, Malaysia, Algeria, Afghanistan, Iraq) were never given the memo that the foreigners were there to help them by killing “insurgents.” Rather, they saw a foreign power invading their country, a country that may not be perfect but was theirs. Naturally, they took offense at this affront. What were these foreigners doing in their country? These well-armed strangers say they are here to help, but they seem to be killing a lot of us and blowing stuff up. It’s little wonder, then, that the occupied—regardless of their politics—came to see the foreign troops for what they were: occupiers. They resisted the foreign troops in a great variety of ways, some rather casual (not giving information about the whereabouts of armed guerillas) and others deadly (planting mines, sniping, joining the guerilla forces). Nearly all of them, however, wanted the foreign troops out. Frank Barker—and US ground forces in general—were sent to fight insurgents, namely the Viet Cong and their allies he North Vietnamese. But what they discovered was that they were, at least in Quang Ngai province, fighting the nearly entire hostile, alienated Vietnamese population. This realization is reflected in the way the soldiers spoke about the residents of Quang Ngai province when interviewed by the Army after the massacre. When asked why they killed civilians, they would routinely ask their interlocutor how they knew they were civilians. They would point out that these “civilians” were dangerous, as was shown by the numerous causalities they suffered from sniping and mining. And they did not refer to them not as “civilians,” but rather “VC sympathizers.” From the point of view of soldiers fighting in Quang Ngai, there were no safe Vietnamese. Barker understood the situation and it worried him. He knew that any operation ran the risk of civilian casualties simply because his men viewed the local population as “VC sympathizers.” If he was to have any chance at achieving his mission—killing the VC proper—the Vietnamese peasants had to be removed, thus leaving only the VC. It was for this reason that in the run up to the March 16th operation he asked the South Vietnamese authorities to remove all the civilians from My Lai (4). The South Vietnamese told Barker that removing the civilians from My Lai (4) was impossible. That might have been the end of it; Barker could have called off the assault. But he, being an ambitious officer trying to “make rank,” decided to proceed anyway. And he did so on the basis of two bits of “intelligence,” both of which proved to be entirely inaccurate and possibly made up. First, his intelligence officer, Captain Eugene Kotouc, told him that the entire 48th VC Battalion was in and around My Lai in heavily fortified positions. They were not. Second, Kotouc told Barker that all the Vietnamese civilians would be “at market” outside My Lai (4) on the morning of March 16th. This, of course, was ridiculous, as later Army investigators pointed out. Everything Barker did thereafter suggests that—remarkably—be believed what Kotouc said about the situation in My Lai. On March 15th during the briefing, Barker told Medina that My Lai (4) was essentially a VC fortress and, significantly, that there would be no Vietnamese civilians present. In his own briefing to his platoon commanders—one of whom was Second Lieutenant William Calley—Medina told his men to kill everyone in the village—permissible because there were no civilians—and destroy everything they found—permissible because it was a VC fortress. When the Medina’s troops landed outside My Lai on the morning of March 16, they did not encounter the expected VC force in the village. There were a few armed VC in the area, but the 48th VC Battalion was not there. This, too, might have been the end of it; Barker could have ordered his men to search the village and leave. But Barker ordered an assault. The men of Medina’s C company attacked the village and the massacre ensued. It’s important to recognize that different men acted differently during the slaughter. Many, seeing that the residents of My Lai were at best innocent peasants and at worse “VC sympathizers,” refused direct orders to fire. Others—and William Calley is the primary example—conducted organized executions of at least two groups of Vietnamese. One might well ask whether war crimes are the inevitable companion of war. I do not know the answer to that question. But the tragedy of the My Lai massacre suggests that they are the likely companion of what I have called “wars of occupation” such as those fought by the US in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and even today in Syria. It’s really as simple as this: if you invade and occupy another country, the citizens of that country are—to one degree or another—going to turn against you. They will—whatever their politics—want you to leave, and they will take measures to see that you do. They will not all be armed guerillas, but they will nearly all be hostile. This fact—near universal hostility—will make it very difficult for troops in the field to make distinctions between “combatants” and “civilians.” Of course, this is not to excuse any of the perpetrators at My Lai (4); they committed murder and escaped justice. But it is to say that where the boundaries between “combatants” and “civilians” are unclear, as in wars of occupation, officers and soldiers are at great risk of making deadly mistakes. Some of these mistakes will, inevitably, result in war crimes. *** View the full article

Growing up in a middle-class family in Mumbai, I wasn’t surrounded by luxuries, but there was one thing our home was never short of – books. My love of mysteries began with the first Famous Five novel my dad brought home and immediately, I was hooked. As an adult, thrillers and mysteries continue to be my favorite genre, but I wish there were more novels written with main characters who looked like me. When I started writing my own novel, following the advice, ‘write what you know’, I centered my locked room novel on a multigenerational South Asian family. The main character is Jia, an Indian single mom who is invited by her married sister, Seema to take shelter in her fancy house during Hurricane Harvey. Jia has to deal with her family’s judgement on account of her divorce. Tensions within the family rise in tandem with the floodwaters ultimately escalating to murder and Jia must keep her son safe while trapped with a murderer. The story is as much a whodunit as it is an exploration of the social stigmas faced by women in Indian culture and challenges of motherhood, issues relatable to members of the South Asian community. My hope is that just like Enid Blyton allowed a little girl in Mumbai to travel the English Countryside, this story provides an insight into the lives of people immigrating from countries with a colonial past. Thankfully, we are seeing more diversity in crime fiction recently and here’s a list of my favorite novels by AAPI (Asian American and Pacific Islander) authors: Now You See Us By Balli Kaur Jaswal Maids are a fixture in middle class families in India, and it is not uncommon for families to hire help to assist with cooking, cleaning, and childcare. As a toddler mom with a full-time job in America and forever drowning in laundry and dishes, I now have a newfound appreciation for the kind maid who came to our flat every day, helping our family and sometimes even filling us in on neighborhood gossip! The novel Now You See Us by Balli Kaur Jaswal is written from the perspective of three Filipina domestic workers in Singapore. When one of them is accused of murdering her employer, they know the scales of justice are tipped against a domestic worker. Together, they band together, risking their lives and livelihood to figure out the real perpetrator. Balli Kaur Jaswal deftly examines the inner lives of domestic workers with layers of social commentary about their mistreatment at the hands of Singapore’s elite families. The setting comes to life in this novel, sprinkled with delightful details about the local cuisine. Mango-chili pizza? Sign me up. Kismet By Amina Akhtar Lifelong New Yorker leaves the city life to pursue wellness in the mountains of Arizona. This may sound like the start of a rom com, but Amina Akhtar cleverly flips the script in this wonderful dark thriller about a serial killer. The book handles a multitude of topics from cultural appropriation to the hypocrisy of the wellness industry. The protagonist Ronnie Khan is deeply sympathetic as she escapes from her abusive aunt and I as a desi could relate to several moments, such as when she rubs suntan lotion vigorously to prevent her skin from turning darker. Arizona landscape is almost a character in this story and while we encroach upon nature and wildlife in real life with wanton disregard, it has a rightful place in this story with several chapters by ravens. Bandit Queens by Parini Shroff Bandit Queens is a novel set in a village of Gujarat, a western state of India. The main character is Geeta, a woman who becomes an outcast with a bad reputation after being abandoned by her husband. Everyone in her village thinks she is responsible, and things get worse when she is inveigled into a scheme by several village women to murder their abusive husbands. Using this intriguing premise as a springboard, Parini Shroff performs a literary high-wire act of creating a darkly comic tale while handling sensitive topics like physical abuse and harassment. One of my favorite parts of the novel are the character details, which I found highly relatable. In one scene, Geeta touches the ends of her earring studs, reading this I remembered how my mother taught me to do this to secure my earrings. The dialogue is peppered with local vernacular, but is done in a way that’s not distracting. All the female characters in this story have distinct, yet relatable voices and over the course of the novel, as Geeta comes to trust the women in her loan group circle, she realizes she is not alone after all. Murder And Mamon by Mia Manansala Mia Manansala’s cozy mystery combines my two favorite topics – food and gossiping aunties. The story centers on a group of aunties aka Calendar Crew. Meddling aunties are not to be trifled with, and when someone comes after one of their own, the main protagonist Lila must uncover the group’s secrets to solve the mystery. The book should come with a warning against reading it on an empty stomach because it is full of delicious, mouth-watering recipes. Reading about Lila biting into a honey topped scone filled with clotted butter, I was tempted to whip up something in my kitchen before remembering my many culinary deficiencies. I can’t wait for the next installment in this series. *** View the full article

Another year has dawned, and it’s time for another list purporting to be the sum of all Most Anticipated Titles in our beloved genre. I have been asked to keep the number of titles on the list to 50, for my own sanity. But who needs sanity when you have books?!? And what a year of books it is already shaping up to be, featuring tons of high-concept thrillers, deeply insightful psychologicals, Golden-Age influenced mysteries, and plenty of take-no-prisoners noir. Keep an eye on the site over the next few weeks as we draw out various subgenres for additional previews. As always, this list is long not because we expect everyone to read everything—quite the contrary! We want to give you enough recommendations so you can find the right title to bring you joy. ___________________________________ JANUARY ___________________________________ Nicolás Ferraro, My Favorite Scar (Soho) In this neo-noir, a father and daughter go on a bloody road trip across Argentina, fleeing from trouble and in pursuit of more. Ámbar is the story’s protagonist, and it’s her complex journey through her father’s past sins that gives the story its heart. The rest is a dark, compelling vision of violence and retribution. –DM Nishita Parekh, The Night of the Storm (Dutton) Houston during a hurricane is the setting for this thriller featuring a South Asian family trapped in a fancy suburban home with a dead body and a lot of petty resentments. Along with various other storm-set novels coming out lately, The Night of the Storm reminds us that locked-room thrillers are the only true beneficiaries of climate change. –MO Christopher Golden, The House of Last Resort (St Martins) This is the first of two haunted house in Italy novels on this list! In the latest high-concept horror from the reliably terrifying Christopher Golden, a couple working remotely move to Italy and buy a cool house with a dark backstory. They probably deserve what’s coming to them in terms of expats and housing shortages, honestly…Although the town they move to is suffering severe population decline (attributed to the lure of the city, rather than the body count of the local ghosts). –MO Cate Quinn, The Clinic (Sourcebooks) I’ve been getting a little tired of crime novels in which people drink, and drink, and NEVER EAT, so I was pleased to read this twisty tale set inside a rehab facility with innumerable secrets (and very balanced cuisine). When a casino detective with her own addiction issues finds out her famous sister has been found dead in an exclusive rehab facility, she decides to check herself in and discover what really happened. She’s shocked to find herself embracing the treatment plan and her damaged cohorts. Also there’s a lot of conspiracies and a really nice spa. I want to go to the spa now. –MO Elizabeth Flock, The Furies: Women, Vengeance, and Justice (Harper) Journalist Elizabeth Flock looks at justice with a Taddeo-esque approach, telling the stories of three women who killed after a wrong. There is a Southern U.S. woman who killed her rapist; the leader of a northern Indian gang that avenges victims of domestic violence; and a fighter in an all-female militia in Syria, where ISIS is working to dismantle the lives and rights of women. –JM Shubnum Khan, The Djinn Waits 100 Years (Viking) Shubnum Khan has written a lush, romantic gothic novel set in a crumbling seaside estate in South Africa. A century before, the house bloomed with an doomed romance; now, a young girl wanders its halls, finding ways to bring new joy to the strange residents, and getting closer to discovering the secrets that first shattered the home’s happiness and led to its present day haunting by a mournful djinn. –MO Katia Lief, Invisible Woman (Atlantic Monthly) A once-promising filmmaker who left it behind for her family is forced to reckon with her studio executive husband’s past sins, just as their family embarks on a new start in New York, in Katia Lief’s taut and impeccably suspenseful new novel. Lief offers up a compelling portrait of artistic ambition and compromise, balanced against the unwinding of a timely mystery. –DM Vanessa Chan, The Storm We Made (S&S/Marysue Ricci Books) 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. –MO Tara Isabella Burton, Here in Avalon (Simon and Schuster) Tara Isabella Burton is a fascinating thinker and writer—she has a doctorate in theology from Oxford, and in addition to novels she writes nonfiction on things like contemporary American post-religious spirituality and our obsession with self-branding. I particularly loved her 2018 novel Social Creature (think Tom Ripley gets Instagram), so would I like to read her new book about a possibly magical theater cult? I would, I would. –Emily Temple, Lit Hub managing editor Kate Brody, Rabbit Hole (Soho Crime) Kate Brody’s much-awaited debut Rabbit Hole is a fascinating romp through the internet’s true crime boards as an aimless and depressed young woman seeks answers in her sister’s long-sensationalized death after their father’s suicide makes clear that he never stopped looking for a culprit. She teams with a quirky reddit-fanatic named Mickey in her investigation and the banter between them is a highlight in the book. Brody’s novel continues the ongoing trend of psychological thrillers that become smart critiques of true crime culture. –MO Thomas Perry, Hero (Mysterious Press) An attempted robbery at a Hollywood house leads to a local kingpin putting a hit out on the security guard who stopped the plot, a woman who now finds herself a local celebrity—and the target of a relentless assassin. Perry is a gifted storyteller with a perfect sense of pacing and a knack for conjuring up fascinating characters. –DM Kiley Reid, Come and Get It (Putnam) Um, Kiley Reid + campus novel + crimey undertones? WHEN can I get my hands on this book???? Reid’s Booker-longlisted debut Such a Fun Age was a trenchant and effervescent delight, and I’ve been waiting for her next novel. The novel takes place in 2017 at the University of Arkansas, where an ambitious RA takes an unusual opportunity with a visiting writing professor and things begin to spin into unexpected territory. I’m foaming at the mouth for this book. I would like to come and get it, indeed! –OR Elizabeth Gonzalez James, The Bullet Swallower (Simon & Schuster) 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 Lea Carpenter, Ilium (Knopf) At last Lea Carpenter is back (after 2018’s Red, White, Blue) with another sideways approach to the international spy novel—in this one, a young woman is swept off her feet by a much older suitor, but after they’re married, he asks her for a “favor”…never a good thing. –ET Abbott Kahler, Where You End (Henry Holt) Abbott Kahler wowed me with the nonfiction book Ghosts of Eden Park, so I’m really psyched for this pivot to thrillers. Where You End explores the twisted relationship between two mirror twins, each a perfect replica of the other in reverse. When one twin has amnesia, the other decides to fill in the details of their childhood with an imagined happiness that doesn’t mesh with the ongoing dangers both sisters are facing. –MO Duane Swierczynski, California Bear (Mulholland) A serial killer called the California Bear is coming out of hibernation to kill again, setting the wicked pace for Swierczynski’s latest thriller. We follow a wide cast of characters, each working through their own bouts of guilt and determination, as the story converges on the killer’s upcoming bloody deeds. This is a page turner in the extreme. –DM Benjamin Stevenson, Everyone on this Train is a Suspect (Mariner) Oh man. A new Benjamin Stevenson. God bless us, every one. If you haven’t read his previous novel, the charming and self-aware Everyone in my Family has Killed Someone, you’re missing out. It’s a funny, chatty, thoroughly twisty ride that you won’t forget. And now there’s a sequel! Our mystery expert protagonist Ern Cunningham is back. And this time, he’s on a train full of book industry types who all turn into amateur sleuths when someone among them is murdered. I’m losing my mind, people. –OR Janice Hallett, The Mysterious Case of the Alperton Angels (Atria) Having swallowed The Appeal, the Twyford Code, and The Christmas Appeal in basically one gulp, I cannot wait for The Mysterious Case of the Alperton Angels, in which whodunnit puzzlemaster Janice Hallett goes true crime. Get this: in the novel, two authors looking to write a book about the famous Alperton Angels cult (which insisted to a young mother that her baby was the AntiChrist, committing a mass suicide when the woman and her child fled and disappeared), team up to find out what really happened. But, as is often the case with true crime, they find that the truth is way stranger than fiction. I’m very intrigued. –OR Sarah-Jane Collins, Radiant Heat (Berkley) In this Australian eco-thriller, Alison emerges from her burnt-out home after a wildfire only to find a dead woman in her driveway. Who is the woman? How did she die? And why did she have Alison’s name and address on a slip of paper inside of her well-stocked billfold? I’m excited to read further into this one and see where Sarah-Jane Collins goes with this intriguing and timely set-up. –MO James Lee Burke, Harbor Lights (Atlantic Monthly) A new short story collection from American master James Lee Burke would be cause enough for celebration, but readers will be especially rewarded by the rich, evocative settings of the stories in Harbor Lights. Each story deftly conjures up a world (and its darker forces) and fills it with characters at unexpected crossroads of history. Burke is the great poet of contemporary crime fiction, and his immense talents fill these stories to the brim. –DM Araminta Hall, One of the Good Guys (Gillian Flynn) Araminta Hall’s novel Our Kind of Cruelty showcased her ability to depict toxic masculinity with both deep understanding and righteous judgement. One of the Good Guys continues to explore these same contradictions between how people excuse their own actions and what those actions really mean, channeled brilliantly through her selfish and clueless narrator; a contrast that is additionally highlighted through Hall’s careful examination of media depictions and bias. Highly recommended! –MO John Dickson Carr, The Problem of the Wire Cage, introduction by Rian Johnson (American Mystery Classics) American Mystery Classics has just released another Golden Age gem, a whodunnit from 1939 by the great John Dickson Carr (Agatha Christie famously referred to him as the only writer who could stump her). Get a load of this impossible premise: a man is found dead in the center of a clay tennis court. And there is only one set of footprints leading to the body–his own. As if this isn’t great enough, this edition features a wonderful new introduction from the Oscar-nominated filmmaker Rian Johnson (who wrote and directed Knives Out and Glass Onion and created Poker Face). Whodunnit fans, don’t miss this! –OR ___________________________________ FEBRUARY ___________________________________ Rachel Kapelke-Dale, The Fortune Seller (St Martin’s) This book combines so many things I enjoy….Really, just horse girls and tarot readers, but who doesn’t want to read about horse girls and fortune tellers? In Kapelke-Dale’s delightful forthcoming novel, the elite members of Yale’s equestrian team welcome a new girl into their midst, one who comes with impeccable riding skills and a surprising talent for tarot. Not everyone is as happy with her presence, or her fortunes, as the narrator, and soon enough, murder and sabotage mar the collegiate halcyon days of the privileged characters (such a pity…). This book also fulfills my theory that people at Ivies are way too burned out from trying to get in to enjoy their time there. So glad I went to a state school (Hook ‘Em.) –MO Kobby Ben Ben, No One Dies Yet (Europa) In 2019, Ghana declared a “Year of Return” and welcomed tourists from across the diaspora to visit the country. That is the backdrop for Kobby Ben Ben’s psychological thriller featuring four American tourists and their competing guides—one religious and humorless, hired to take the Americans around the official sits, and the other queer and cynical, brought in through a dating app to give the tourists a taste of Ghana’s gay underground. This may be one of my favorite novels ever. It’s so funny. It’s like Patricia Highsmith traded her self-loathing for a decent sense of humor. –MO Mike Lawson, Kingpin (Atlantic Monthly) In the new installment to the Joe DeMarco series, Lawson’s fixer is put on the trail of a mysterious death linked to a Boston real estate kingpin with some secrets in his closet. Lawson immerses readers in a world of rough operators and political maneuvering, all of it highly satisfying and suspenseful. –DM Katherine Arden, The Warm Hands of Ghosts (Del Rey) 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. –MO Amina Akhtar, Almost Surely Dead (Mindy’s Book Studio) A new book from Amina Akhtar is always a treat (if by treat, I mean, bitter, humorous explorations of modern ills…so I guess, like, Sour Straws as the treat specifically). In Almost Surely Dead, we go back and forth between two time frames: the days leading up to the disappearance of a seemingly ordinary woman, Dunia Ahmed, and the ongoing investigations in the months after, as Dunia becomes the subject of a true crime podcast with a bizarre hook: before she vanished, Dunia was subjected to not one murder attempt, but many. –MO Tracy Sierra, Nightwatching (Pamela Dorman Books/Viking) Tracy Sierra has done the impossible: changed my mind about the home invasion thriller. In Nightwatching, a young widow is shocked one night to find an intruder in her home, and spends several desperate hours using all her wit and wiles to protect her children and find a way to seek help. While much of the story is about the night itself, just as gripping is what happens afterwards. –MO Robert Jackson Bennett, The Tainted Cup (Del Rey) Holmes and Watson get a new twist in this fantastical noir set in a mysterious empire in which nothing is as it seems. The high, thick sea walls of the outer rings of the empire, built to withstand the colossal titans that swim in from the ocean depths to exact a ruinous chaos, and now, the walls have been breached. It’s up to a misanthropic genius and her new sword-wielding assistant to find the culprits who wish to destroy the empire, and in so doing, stop the empire’s own steady decline. Perfect for those who loved China Mieville’s Perdito Street Station and Kraken, but wished their was more camaraderie and crime-solving. –MO Jahmal Mayfield, Smoke Kings (Melville House) This book has such a great set-up. In Mayfield’s self-assured and righteously furious debut, a group of Black vigilantes is determined to exact vengeance on those who never received punishment by kidnapping their descendants and making them contribute reparations. When one of their targets turns out to be a white supremacist leader, they must martial all their cunning and resources to defeat him, and in the process, find a way to preserve their mission despite growing doubts. Mayfield’s tough, muscular prose infuses the novel with a beautiful darkness as the characters struggle in ways that will hopefully have the reader thinking too. –MO S.E. Porter, Projections (Tor) What a compelling and creative story. In Projections, a boy kills a girl in the mid-19th century in upstate New York. The girl becomes a ghost, the boy becomes a magician, and he takes her along with him to a magical city in which she screams, forever, tethered to his soul and stripped of her energies to fund his despicable enterprises. The magician continues to kill, over and over, telling himself he seeks a perfect love; the ghost, meanwhile, slowly begins to discover her own powers, and may just be able to finally stop him. Emotionally evocative and visually stunning, Projections is the kind of novel that makes you long for a high-budget adaptation. –MO Kirsten Bakis, King Nyx (Liveright) 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. –MO Francis Spufford, Cahokia Jazz (Scribner) The set-up for this one is an alternative history in which indigenous people were never decimated and the Mississippi city of Cahokia developed as a badass place for smoky jazz in the 1920s. As the detective protagonist goes high and low looking for a culprit in a recent murder, he also illuminates the scope of world-building Francis Spufford has achieved. Sure to be one of the most distinctly imagined texts of the year, in any genre. –MO Jason Pinter, Past Crimes (Severn House) In Pinter’s new thriller, set in the year 2037, true crime has gone into the virtual world with a morbid twist: fans pay to enter simulations and try to solve crimes as they unfold. The novel’s protagonist is a pregnant woman who licenses survivors’ stories for the experience, until she finds herself a target and has to go on the run. –DM E.A. Aymar, When She Left (Thomas & Mercer) The gravitational pull of a powerful crime family is at the center of Aymar’s new thriller, as a young woman takes her chance to run off and a reluctant assassin is set on her trail, although along the way he’s looking for his own way out. Aymar artfully assembles a fascinating mix of motivations and characters and keeps the adrenaline pumping right up to the satisfying conclusion. –DM J. Robert Lennon, Hard Girls (Mulholland) J. Robert Lennon is one of the great genre-hoppers and I can’t wait to see what he gets up to in the crime sphere. We’ve got estranged twins reconnecting to find their mother, globe-hopping adventure, family secrets, and the pace of a great thriller? Plus, things are often quite a bit stranger than what the jacket copy says in a Lennon novel, so I’m excited to see how this goes. And it’s apparently the first in a series! –DB Megan Nolan, Ordinary Human Failings (Little, Brown) A visceral, knowing exploration of human misery and the ways we fail ourselves. Also, I’ve never seen a better description of my own attitude towards dating (which should….probably worry me). In Ordinary Human Failings, set in London in 1990, a toddler is murdered, and the suspect is the 10-year-old daughter of a family that’s been cast as Irish ne’er-do-wells by the salivating tabloids. When an unscrupulous newspaper reporter puts the accused child’s family up in a hotel, he’s hoping to bleed them for lurid details to feed to the eager public, but Nolan uses these interviews as a way instead to explore how people become trapped in patterns that cannot hold, despite the best of intentions. My god, this book is good. –MO Amanda Jayatissa, Island Witch (Berkley) 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. –MO Vera Kurian, A Step Past Darkness (Park Row) Vera Kurian is back with another crackerjack premise; it’s the summer of 1995 and six high school students with nothing similar between them are attending a secret party in a mine when they witness a horrible crime that binds them together for life. Until twenty years later, when one of them winds up dead. I’m gonna pregame this one with I Know What You Did Last Summer. ___________________________________ MARCH ___________________________________ Andrew Boryga, Victim (Doubleday) In Boryga’s debut novel, Victim, a young hustler on the rise learns to manipulate the currency of identity as he bends the truth about his past and establishes himself in the world of New York media and letters. The satire in this novel comes in sharp and merciless, but the friendship at the story’s center steals the show, rounding out all the complexities and contradictions of two young men on different sides of the truth. Boryga is a keen observer of culture and a storyteller with style to spare. –DM Aggie Blum Thompson, Such a Lovely Family (Forge) It’s springtime in DC, the cherry trees are in full bloom, and a garden party is about to become a crime scene. I will partially admit to reading this because I have beloved relatives in Bethesda and thus can picture both the cherry trees and the McMansion monstrosities, but beyond the author’s excellent use of setting, this is also a delightfully twisty domestic thriller with nearly as many suspects as there are characters. Such a Lovely Family will keep you turning pages well into the night, and waking up the next day feeling rather appreciative of your family’s disinterest in hydrangeas. If your family does have hydrangeas, well, then I don’t know what to tell you. Avoid garden parties? –MO Jennifer Thorne, Diavola (Tor) I was a big fan of Jennifer Thorne’s folk horror Lute so I devoured her new book, and what a fabulous read it was. Diavola takes place mostly in a Tuscan villa where a family has gathered to dine, drink, and bicker; meanwhile, the villa’s ghosts grow hungry, and ready to punish those who disturb their rest. Diavola is an evocative gothic with a hilarious sense of petty family dynamics, and I enjoyed every word. –MO Jennifer Croft, The Extinction of Irena Ray (Bloomsbury) Jennifer Croft is the renowned translator of Olga Tokarczuk and this debut takes full advantage of her background in the best way possible. In this complex and metaphysical mystery, eight translators arrive at a sprawling home in the Polish forest, only to find their author has gone missing. Where is Irena Ray? What secrets has she been keeping from her devoted fans? And what’s with all the slime mold? –MO Chris Bohjalian, The Princess of Las Vegas (Doubleday) Bohjalian’s newest, The Princess of Las Vegas, offers up the perfect balance of sophisticated characterization and wild, rollicking plot. Crissy Dowling is a Lady Di impersonator at a royals-themed Vegas casino, but her neatly calibrated (if a bit eccentric) life comes unraveled, and soon she’s tied up in an investigation into the murder of the casino’s owner. –DM Joyce Carol Oates, Butcher (Knopf) 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. –MO Joel H. Morris, All Our Yesterdays (Putnam) 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. –MO Lisa Unger, The New Couple in 5B (Park Row) A mystery-thriller set in a grand NYC apartment building that might have a history of dark secrets and murder, where two unsuspecting inheritors have just moved into the kind of unit they’d never dreamed they could have? Lisa Unger, you have my attention. And are you by any chance also a realtor? –OR Abigail Dean, Day One (Viking) From the author of Girl A comes a new and prescient thriller about a school shooting in an idyllic English town and the conspiracy theories that soon proliferate. Dean has picked a tough topic, but one I predict she’ll explore with sensitivity and grace. –MO Tana French, The Hunter (Viking) French returns to the same small town in the west of Ireland where she set The Searcher, picking up the story of Cal and Trey, who find themselves embroiled in yet another murderous mystery to do with the Reddys. You needn’t have read The Searcher to appreciate this novel—which is wonderfully evocative, entertaining and propulsive all the way through, even if I still miss the magic-tinged weirdness of French’s Dublin Murder Squad series—but it helps to understand some of the motivations. Besides, there are worse reasons to revisit a good book. –ET Seicho Matsumoto, Point Zero translated by Louise Heal Kawai (Bitter Lemon) In this welcome reissue of a lost classic from 1959, a young woman is wed to a businessman via arranged marriage, only to have him disappear soon after. She barely knows the man, much less what could have happened to him, but still finds herself in dogged pursuit of the truth, no matter how uncomfortable it may be. The immediate post-war era in Japan looms large as the backdrop to understanding both how she experiences her losses and how the tragedy came to be. –MO Gigi Pandian, A Midnight Puzzle (Minotaur) Another fabulous locked room mystery from Gigi Pandian, who’s ably channeled the diabolical puzzles of John Dickson Carr mysteries into her own quirky style. In A Midnight Puzzle, Tempest Raj, the magician-turned-secret-staircase-builder, returns, this time facing a dramatic crisis that could destroy her family’s entire business. The key to solving the mystery lies in the clever use of booby traps by Tempest’s tormenter, and Tempest must race against time to keep more from falling prey to these ingeniously engineered killers. –MO Elle Cosimano, Finlay Donovan Rolls the Dice (Minotaur) Finlay Donovan is back, let’s goooooooooo. Our favorite struggling writer/single mom/amateur sleuth/easily-mistaken-for-criminals heroine is back in this rollicking adventure set in Atlantic City, where Finlay’s BFF/nanny Vero’s childhood crush is being held following a kidnapping. And her mom and ex-husband are coming, too. Loan sharks, carjackings, and murder abound. God, we’re soooo back. –OR Sophie Wan, Women of Good Fortune (Gallery) This book is so damn delightful! In Women of Good Fortune, Lulu, Rina, and Jane have come up with the perfect heist to get out of the marriage trap and fulfill their dreams: they are going to steal the gift money from Lulu’s upcoming wedding to the scion of one of Shanghai’s wealthiest families. The heist requires an elaborate plan, and it’s no wonder that the novel got a shining endorsement from Grace D. Li, author of the last great heist story I enjoyed. I cannot wait for this to become a movie. Also I really appreciate that Sophie Wan’s bio includes her interest in “staying hydrated”—may we all learn from her example. *drinks water quickly* –MO ___________________________________ APRIL ___________________________________ Sara Koffi, While We Were Burning (Putnam) In this well-plotted cat-and-mouse thriller, a surburban white woman still reeling from the death of her best friend hires a Black personal assistant to help her with day-to-day tasks. Little does she suspect that her new employee only took the gig so she can keep investigating the circumstances surrounding her son’s death, and figure out which “concerned citizen” was the person who called the cops and put her beloved child in their cross-hairs. The looming, inevitable confrontation between the two is forceful and stunning. Koffi has used the thriller genre with great effect for a prescient critique on the petty resentments and deliberate ignorance that underpin our racist power structure. –MO K.T. Nguyen, You Know What You Did (Dutton) In this propulsive psychological thriller, artist Annie “Anh Le” Shaw is sent spiraling when her mother dies suddenly, and long-repressed memories begin to crowd their way to the surface to destabilize her further. When a local art patron disappears, and Annie finds herself waking up in a hotel room next to a dead body with no idea how she got there, things really get unhinged. Although this is Nguyen’s debut, her voice is already self-assured and powerful, and I can’t wait to see what she does next. –MO K.C. Constantine, Another Day’s Pain (Mysterious Press) Carl Kosak, the esteemed writer who went by the pseudonym K. C. Constantine, passed away last March, but thankfully his final novel, # 18 in the Rocksburg Police Department series, is coming to print—more than twenty years since his previous one. Another Day’s Pain takes us back to Rocksburg, PA, where our erstwhile hero Detective Ruggiero “Rugs” Carlucci plans to retire. But that’s not going to be so easy… a fitting, gripping, thrilling swan song for author and character alike. –OR Don Winslow, City in Ruins (William Morrow) City of Ruins is the conclusion to the celebrated Danny Ryan trilogy, but even more significantly, it’s Winslow’s final novel. In the new installment, Danny Ryan is living the life of a casino mogul, after quite a few twists and turns along the way from PRovidence, via Hollywood. But now he takes on a new development and earns the ire of some of the country’s biggest power players. It’s an epic conclusion to the series, and a fitting cap to Winslow’s storied career. –DM Laura McHugh, Safe and Sound (Random House) Laura McHugh has been one of the major forces in bringing women’s stories into the rural noir genre, and Safe and Sound looks to be another well-plotted and furious examination of small-town misogyny. Two sisters decide to look into the disappearance of their cousin, taken from the home in which she was babysitting them and leaving only blood and unanswered questions behind. As determined as the sisters are to find the truth, there’s other voices just as determined to keep them in the dark. –MO Anthony Horowitz, Close to Death (Harper) THE BOYS ARE BACK! Almost. So soon! Man, I have been waiting, waiting, waiting for the fifth installment in the Hawthorne and Horowitz series and it’s finally almost here!! I feel like a kid, counting the days until Christmas. If you don’t know the series, you should. The gambit is charming: the celebrated crime writer Anthony Horowitz is the first-person narrator/Watson-style sidekick to a fictional detective character named Daniel Hawthorne. They’ve had some rocky patches (looking at you, book 4), but they’re back together, and this time, solving a murder in the idyllic countryside. A perfect mystery for spring! –OR Kellye Garrett, Missing White Women (Mulholland) When Kellye Garrett publishes a new book, you KNOW you’re going to be in for an amazing read. Our heroine is Bree, whose new boyfriend, Ty, has taken her away on a romantic trip to New York City. But on the final night of her stay, she comes downstairs in their rented Jersey City townhouse and finds a dead body. And not just any dead body, the body of a missing white woman whose disappearance has been virally covered. Oh, and Ty is missing. Bree’s aware that, as a Black woman, her situation is really precarious right now. And she has no choice but to figure the truth out, herself. I’m counting the MINUTES. –OR Karen Jennings, Crooked Seeds (Hogarth) If the road to hell is paved with good intentions, then perhaps the road to healing is paved with uncomfortable truths. In Crooked Seeds, set in drought-stricken Cape Town in 2028, a middle-aged woman in the throes of alcoholism receives a visit from some police officers who’ve made a gruesome discovery—several bodies have been discovered behind her childhood home, and her white supremacist brother, not seen since the 90s, is most likely at fault. She must lay aside her own seething resentment at life’s bitter gifts in order to understand the part she, too, played in the abuse of power and the injustice of apartheid, and maybe, just maybe, finally find some closure. (This book is especially disturbing to read if you are thirsty. I swear, I drank like 8 glasses of water while constantly wishing for her narrator to do the same.) –MO Alyssa Cole, One of Us Knows (William Morrow) I raved about Alyssa Cole’s 2020 thriller When No One Is Watching, and I’m psyched for her next foray into the genre. In One of Us Knows, a woman recovering from a debilitating mental illness gets a new position as caretaker of a historic estate, only to be trapped with several visitors when a storm descends upon their remote location. When one of the motley crew is found murdered, Cole’s heroine must solve the crime to allay suspicions placed upon her, despite her own difficulty trusting her mind. –MO Chanel Cleeton, The House on Biscayne Bay (Berkley) A grand and troubled house on the edge of glittering Biscayne Bay is at the center of Cleeton’s new historical novel, which follows two timelines and two women, both approaching the house’s story with their own secrets. Cleeton delivers a sophisticated and innovative take on the gothic tradition. –DM Megan Miranda, The Only Survivors (S&S/Marysue Ricci Books) Megan Miranda is one of the nicest people in crime fiction, but that doesn’t stop her from crafting some of its most diabolical plots and shocking twists. I’m very much looking forward to reading her latest, in which the survivors from a deadly high school bus crash spend each year’s anniversary of the disaster keeping each other company—and secretly searching for the culprit behind the supposed accident. –MO ___________________________________ MAY AND BEYOND ___________________________________ Carmella Lowkis, Spitting Gold (Atria) 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. –MO L.M. Chilton, Swiped (Gallery) Another send-off of modern dating, this time with an extra-fun twist! Chilton’s unlucky-in-love heroine finds herself under suspicion of murder after the shocking demise of multiple men with whom she’s matched. Who is the culprit killing off all these (admittedly mediocre) dating prospects? And why are they so determined to pin the blame on her? –MO Julie Mae Cohen, Bad Men (The Overlook Press) What a delightfully weird book. Bad Men continues the “sympathetic feminist serial killer” trend that I noted last year, and adds the hope for a happily ever after to the mix. When serial-killing socialite Saffy Huntley-Oliver meets her perfect man, she’s ready to engineer whatever machinations are necessary to draw him in as a potential mate, but she’s going to have to figure out the balance between her new lover and her old hobbies. Don’t worry, the dog doesn’t die. Some people do, of course. But no dogs! –MO Elle Marr, The Alone Time (Thomas and Mercer) Elle Marr’s consistently chilling and insightful psychological thrillers have been growing in repute for some time, so I’m glad I finally dived into her latest and found it to be just as good as I’d hoped. Violet and Fiona are two sisters who survived a horrific plane crash in childhood and spent months defying death in the wilderness. They’ve always said their parents died instantly in the crash, and they’ve always been suspected of hiding some details. When a new documentary crew starts digging, the grown-up sisters must confront their own traumas and hope to keep the real story hidden. This book also confirms my plan to NEVER go into the sky in a tiny, tiny plane piloted by a cranky relative. –MO Monika Kim, The Eyes are the Best Part (Erewhon Books) In this darkly funny psychological horror, a college student must protect her mother and her sister from her mother’s creepy new boyfriend. Like all the other men in their lives, he’s trying to reduce their humanness into stereotypes about doll-like, submissive Asian women, and Kim’s protagonist is certainly not going to let him get away with it. She’s also spending a lot of time having intense dreams about eating bright blue eyes, standing over her sleeping enemies and fantasizing their demise, and generally losing touch with reality in a way that pays plenty of dividends by the novel’s end. –MO Tasha Coryell, Love Letters to a Serial Killer (Berkley) Would you strike up a romance with a potential murderer if he took your book recommendations? In this knowing critique of true crime culture and modern love, a woman begins a romance with a suspected serial killer and becomes obsessed with finding out the truth about her new paramour. I sped through this novel and related to many of its uncomfortable truths about the misogyny within ordinary relationships that makes dating a man accused of horrible crimes who treats you well seem…justifiable? Or at least, rather understandable…–MO Lori Brand, Bodies to Die For (Blackstone) I devoured this novel faster than the winner of a body-building contest drinks water after their win (a joke you’ll totally get if you dive into this searing critique of diet culture and the pressures of professional body-building). Lori Brand has had a long career in fitness that has led to her embracing strength, not weight-loss, and I’m pretty sure this book is the most physically—and emotionally—healthy thriller I’ve read in some time. I may even sign up for a boxing class now… –MO Eli Cranor, Broiler (Soho) Cranor’s latest thriller examines intersecting lives at an Arkansas chicken plant, where an unwarranted firing sends violent ripples out into the world, bringing families to their knees. Cranor paints a vivid, devastating portrait of the cruelty surrounding an imbalanced system, all while maintaining a wicked level of tension that drives this powerful story forward. He is a writer at the top of his game. –DM Wanda Morris, What You Leave Behind (William Morrow) Wanda Morris is back with an intricate real-estate thriller informed by real life events. What You Leave Behind follows a lawyer who’s recently returned to her childhood home in Georgia to heal after heartbreak. Instead, she finds herself trying to discover the truth behind a Black landlord’s disappearance and the menacing new buyers of the property he’d long refused to sell. I’m a huge fan of Morris and the novel’s subject—land grabs—is one that’s perfect for her to demystify. –MO View the full article

The Silence in Her Eyes is a book I wasn’t supposed to write. The first time I told my editor that I was thinking about writing a psychological thriller, she was taken aback. She responded with a groan: “Why do all my authors suddenly want to write thrillers?” If my historical novel The German Girl sold more than a million copies, she said, why would I suddenly want to switch genres? A fair question. But even though it came out of the blue to her, it was actually something I’d been thinking about for years. The very day I finished writing The German Girl, I began fleshing out a new story. I was fully aware that I needed to write the two historical novels I already had under contract: The Daughter’s Tale and The Night Traveler. However, I decided to take some time to work on a different concept that I couldn’t get out of my head. Here was the original idea: In an apartment that closely resembles my own (I’ve noticed all my novels partly take place where I live), a professor from Columbia University is found unconscious and lying in a pool of blood at his doorstep. The surrounding blood is his own, his wife’s, and their three-year-old daughter Leah’s. Neither his wife’s body nor his daughter’s is found. The building’s security cameras had been turned off. Nothing had been stolen from the apartment. Were they murdered or kidnapped? Twenty-five years later, the professor, who has become a bestselling author by recounting the story of his family’s disappearance and how he coped with the loss, receives a visitor. When he opens the door, he is met with a young woman holding the key to his front door in her hand. In that instant, he recognizes his daughter, Leah, and senses the silence in her eyes. Working from the premise that nothing is as it seems, I began to outline this story. As you will discover, The Silence in Her Eyes ultimately turned out to be a very different book than the one I’d first conceived. Maybe after I finish the next two novels I owe my publisher — yes, they acquired the rights to the thriller on the condition I also write two more historical novels— I’ll return to the original plot of Silence and find out what happened to that girl during the twenty-five years she went missing. The challenge for me was that, while secretly writing The Silence in Her Eyes, I was also working on other novels. I think that happens to a lot of writers: our minds work faster than our hands. I was scouring medical textbooks for a reversible medical condition – preferably some form of blindness – for one of the characters in What We Once Were, my next work of historical fiction. As you probably know, there are various types of blindness. One is called prosopagnosia (not a catchy name), also known as face blindness or facial agnosia, which is the inability to recognize faces. (Doesn’t that happen to all of us at times?) However, that form of blindness didn’t fit my story. That’s when I discovered another form of blindness called akinetopsia, the inability for someone to perceive moving objects. The word akinetopsia comes from the Greek: “a” for without, “kine” for movement, and “opsia” for seeing. This rare but true condition – a brain structure alteration due to an injury that can be reversible – immediately struck me as a fascinating element to be used in a suspense novel. With that discovery, my under-the-table thriller took an unexpected turn in the blink of an eye. The protagonist would still be a young woman named Leah. The plot would still unfold in the Morningside Heights neighborhood where I live. In the same apartment with French doors overlooking one of the most beautiful, creepy, and dangerous parks in Manhattan: Morningside Park. I still don’t allow my children to walk through that park when they are traveling to or from school. The apartment would be in a classic pre-war Manhattan building, with a dark and terrifying basement. I recall working on the first draft alone in my apartment while my children were at our Upstate house and getting chills. I’m still convinced I heard strange noises coming from behind the walls. With The Silence in Her Eyes, I constructed a story from the perspective of a 28-year-old woman who had an accident at age seven that rendered her unable to see movement. For the first time in her life, she is alone. She has just buried her mother, and her only connections to the outside world are the woman who has cared for her since she was a child, two elderly women who live in an apartment upstairs, her psychiatrist, and two social workers who occasionally visit her. She lives in a world seemingly populated by salt statues that vanish in a blink. A place where books come to life when she reads them. And through sounds and scents, she can perceive what her eyes fail to capture—and more. The basic story gradually became clear in my mind. The challenge was the style. Initially, the book was narrated in the third person. When I finished, I realized that perspective didn’t work. It needed to be told in the first person. As a reader, you needed to inhabit Leah’s mind: think, smell, hear, and experience the world like her. The chapters had to be short, sometimes even fragmented. Each chapter had to reflect Leah’s static, stroboscopic perspective on her surroundings. I wanted readers to have that experience. I delved into brain studies. I accompanied my eldest daughter to a laboratory in New Jersey to examine and dissect a human brain – she was finishing high school and wanted to do pre-med in college. I asked the doctor a litany of questions, held the brain in my hands, and was captivated. My daughter, on the other hand, ended up enrolling in Mechanical Engineering. I must confess, although I read a lot – I think of myself as a reader who writes – I’m not an avid reader of thrillers. While writing The Silence in Her Eyes, the authors accompanying me were Garth Greenwell, Maggie O’Farrell, Hanya Yanagihara, Ocean Vuong, Hernán Díaz, W.G. Sebald, Thomas Bernhard, José Lezama Lima, Lauren Groff, Benjamin Labatut, and Emmanuel Carrère, some of my favorites. However I did revisit great thriller movies like Rosemary’s Baby and Vertigo, as well as the books they were based on. A review in Publishers Weekly said that this book “bring[s] new life to the familiar Rear Window (Alfred Hitchcock) conceit, wrapping things up with a stunning finale that forces readers to reevaluate each character and their motives.” I was flattered by the praise, but if there’s one Hitchcock movie that inspired me while writing my novel, it’s Vertigo. I was a teenager the first time I saw it, and for me, it is the genius director’s masterpiece. I sought out Vertigo in the neighborhood cinemas of my native city, Havana, and as soon as I saw it, I knew I wanted to be a writer. (Well, that’s not quite true. As a child, every time I finished a book, I dreamed about becoming a writer.) In his book Twentieth Century Job, the Cuban writer Guillermo Cabrera Infante, who began his career as a film critic, wrote about the movie in a way that left a mark on me. He said that Vertigo takes place “among the dead, in search of lost love,” and described it as a surreal film about a necrophilic story. Vertigo gave me the idea of creating two books in one. In chapter thirty — the book has fifty-one chapters — the plot reaches a climax when Leah makes a decision that will forever change her life and the universe she has built around her. From that moment on, it’s as if a new story begins. Nothing is as it seems. The boundary between good and evil is obscured. I’m reminded of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, a Russian writer and Soviet dissident who, for those of us who grew up under a dictatorship, was something of a God. Solzhenitsyn wrote: “And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains … an un-uprooted small corner of evil.” In my historical novel The Daughter’s Tale, there is in a chapter where one of the characters commits suicide in a bathtub — one of my favorite passages. My editor commented: “Armando, there are too many deaths, too much blood. This is not a thriller!” I adjusted the scene a bit, but the death remained. It seems that I already had a thriller writer lurking inside me, without even knowing it. As you can see, what I really enjoy on a creative level is telling stories. Assigning a specific literary genre comes after. In every book I write, I’m always very conscious of style and rhythm. The plot must develop at a consistent pace. I conceive scenes sometimes as if they were theatrical or cinematic. Often, we writers are heavily influenced by the (always well intentioned) advice of agents, editors, publicists, and of course, booksellers. They seek to offer you, the readers, the best possible book, and in that I fully agree. But sometimes, it’s necessary to listen to your heart and write the story that won’t let you go, the one you can’t stop thinking about even though your head says you probably should. Now I only hope that my agent and editor don’t want me to write thrillers exclusively. I have a lot more stories I want to tell. *** View the full article

On January 19, 1919, 34-year-old identical twin sisters Gladys and Dorothea Cromwell boarded the ocean liner La Lorraine at Bordeaux, France, headed back home to New York City. For the previous two years, the twins—descendants of the English statesman Oliver Cromwell and heirs to a fortune—had volunteered with the Red Cross, working on the front lines day and night, getting scant sleep on open fields, tending to wounded soldiers and surrounded by death. Hours into the ship’s journey, in the early evening, witnesses noticed two women on the upper deck, wearing matching black capes, walking arm in arm. They separated. One sister climbed the rail and jumped, vanishing into the darkness. A moment later, the other followed. With two faint splashes, the twins were gone. The tragic tale of the Cromwell twins has haunted me for years. It seems clear that the sisters were suffering from “shell shock,” a phrase that gained popularity amid the horrors of the war (and known today as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder). But what unknowable factors and motivations lurked beneath their final, decisive act? Were they equally tormented by their experience in France, or did one twin suffer more than the other? Did they make the decision to jump together, or did one sister—unable to face life without her twin—follow after the fact? Irish poet Padraic Colum later described the sisters as “twin spirits caught into an alien sphere, strangely beautiful and strangely apart.” His observation invokes the 19th century Gothic literary trope of the doppelganger—a second, shadow self who exists just beyond one’s control. I’ve witnessed this trope play out in my own life, as both of my parents are twins. My father, Ronald, and his twin, Donald, were fraternal, meaning they were conceived when two separate eggs were fertilized by two separate sperm; their genetics are the same as any other brother or sister. But my mother, Katherine, and her sister, Judith, were identical twins. More than identical, they were mirror twins—a rare form of identical twins that occurs when the embryo splits later than usual. Looking at each other was akin to looking into a mirror. My mom is right-handed and my aunt was a lefty. Their hair parted naturally on opposite sides. Like the Cromwell twins, their lives followed the same path: both became emergency room nurses; both had two children; both smoked the same brand of cigarette and spent holidays gambling in Atlantic City. I often wondered if their choices had been entirely their own, or if, by some subconscious force, they felt compelled to repeat each other, beholden to shadow shelves that neither could escape. I was reminded of this question in 2019, when I watched a fascinating documentary called Tell Me Who I Am. It tells the story of identical twins Alex and Marcus Lewis, whose lives were derailed by a strange, rare form of amnesia. When Alex was 18, he suffered an accident that obliterated his memory. When he awakened from a coma, he remembered nothing but Marcus’s face and name. In this tragedy, Marcus saw an opportunity: he could recreate his and Alex’s history, inventing memories that bore no resemblance to the lives they’d actually lived. Their story neatly upended the Gothic trope: there was no shadow self to exert its secret will; the shadow self had ceased to exist at all. I began to think about what my mother and her twin would have done in this extraordinary situation, and was inspired to write Where You End. Kat, one of my protagonists, suffers from the same form of amnesia as Alex. Desperate to relearn her history and identity, she trusts that her identical twin, Jude, will fill in the blanks. Jude is prepared for this request. She placates Kat with vivid sessions of show-and-tell, sharing artifacts and stories purportedly from their past. They had an idyllic childhood filled with books and poems and homemade costumes and inventive games. Their parents, both gone now, were brilliant and kind. On a whim the twins traveled to Europe and stayed for years, roaming from place to place, dipping in and out of strangers’ lives, accepting that their one constant, in both past and present, is each other. Kat greedily anticipates these stories, and with each new revelation she believes she has a better understanding of herself and how to navigate her world. Eventually, Kat begins to suspect that, maybe, Jude has been lying to her all along. If their lives had been so perfect, who is the mysterious woman following and threatening Kat? And what explains Kat’s uncontrollable flashes of violent anger, which begin to jeopardize her sweet new romance? As Kat begins to crack Jude’s carefully constructed fantasy, she is entirely unaware of the dangers she’s inviting. Her desire to know the truth—and, ultimately, herself—threatens not only the twins’ relationship, but their very lives. As I got deeper into my writing, it became clear that Kat and Jude had not lost that mysterious, inexplicable shadow self; it had merely adapted and changed form, starting over from scratch. Kat could not trust Jude’s version of their past, but neither could Jude trust this new version of Kat—“After Kat,” she calls her—a twin sister whose familiarity now feels foreign, all those once-predictable gestures and moods rejiggered in strange ways. In “The Fall of the House of Usher,” perhaps Edgar Allan Poe’s most famous work about doppelgangers, the unnamed narrator shares an unsettling observation about the Usher twins: “sympathies of a scarcely intelligible nature had always existed between them.” And so it is, too, with Kat and Jude. After the twins have relearned each other, they seemed to become less my fictional creation than real, complicated characters with motives and desires of their own, independent of what I had envisioned for them. As the dangers of their past and present converge, I realized that twins, both real and imagined, will always strive to keep their secrets. *** View the full article

Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Thomas Perry, Hero (Mysterious Press) “A tour de force…should be required reading for thrill-seekers.” –Booklist Lea Carpenter, Ilium (Knopf) “Refreshingly cerebral, literary, and cunningly cinematic . . . [Ilium is an] exploration of personal moral ambiguity playing out in the world of international intrigue.” –Booklist Armando Lucas Correa, The Silence in Her Eyes (Atria) “A gripping story…This slow-build suspense novel keep the tension rising as readers are drawn ever deeper into Leah’s claustrophobic world…The twists are enjoyable.” –Library Journal Lizzie Pook, Maude Horton’s Glorious Revenge (Simon and Schuster) “Brilliant . . . Pook’s masterful pacing and meticulous attention to historical detail make this sing. Fans of Stuart Tarton’s high seas whodunits will be rapt.” –Publishers Weekly Alex Michaelides, The Fury (Celadon) “Shades of Agatha Christie and Sunset Boulevard color this outstanding psychological thriller …Michaelides keeps readers on deliciously unsteady ground throughout, ratcheting up the tension until he arrives at the final series of reveals. The result is a character-driven, atmospheric delight.” –Publisher’s Weekly Abbott Kahler, Where You End (Henry Holt) “Historian Kahler makes a brilliant pivot to fiction with this spine-tingling psychological thriller … Kahler never puts a foot wrong. Readers will be rapt.” –Publishers Weekly Lee Goldberg, Dream Town (Thomas & Mercer) “Old bones, paparazzi, rappers, sex tapes, the whole nine yards—topped off with a surprisingly Big Reveal.” –Kirkus Reviews Stacy Willingham, Only if You’re Lucky (Minotaur) “A first-year college student accepts an invitation to leave her dormitory and move into a house with three other women. Then absolutely everything goes wrong…The payoff is handsome.” –Kirkus Reviews Hannah Richell, The Search Party (Atria) “Richell cleverly plants numerous red herrings and skillfully juggles the multiple points of view and timelines to build white-knuckled suspense and keep readers guessing…an engrossing, twisty read.” –Kirkus Reviews Nishita Parekh, The Night of the Storm (Dutton) “Parekh’s impressive debut combines a variation on the locked-room mystery with social commentary on the immigrant experience and the role of women in Indian culture.” –Booklist View the full article

It had to be the worst decision of his life. Heinrich Friedrich Albert was sitting comfortably and reading as he traveled uptown on the Sixth Avenue elevated train in New York on the afternoon of July 24, 1915. When he looked up and realized the train was at the 50th Street station and about to move on, he panicked and decided to rush from his seat, yelling to the guard on the platform to hold the door open. That was all he was thinking about—not missing his stop. As he exited the train, however, a woman sitting near him shouted out that he had forgotten his briefcase. He tried to get back into the train but was unable to do so. In the meantime, a man had taken the briefcase and also exited the train. Albert then saw the man carrying the briefcase in the street and chased him along Sixth Avenue. The man jumped onto the running board of a moving, open surface car and informed the conductor that he was being chased by a crazy man who had just caused a disturbance on the elevated train. The conductor told the motorman to keep the car moving past its next stop, leaving a frantic Albert far behind. Albert, who was the commercial attaché for the German embassy, notified two of his colleagues about the incident. They decided to place an ad in a newspaper offering a reward of $20 for the return of the briefcase and its contents, hoping that the person who took it was just a common thief and, after not finding any money inside, would return it for that meager reward. What they didn’t know at the time was that no amount of money would have resulted in the return of that briefcase. It was now in the hands of the U.S. Secret Service, and the lid was about to be blown off a sophisticated German propaganda, espionage, and sabotage plan inside the United States. The person who took the briefcase was Frank Burke, a Secret Service agent and leader of an eleven-man special squad that William J. Flynn, chief of the service, had formed to uncover German espionage in America in the years leading up to U.S. entry into World War I. Burke was tailing Albert and didn’t hesitate to grab the briefcase when the German left the train. When Burke showed the contents to his boss, Flynn knew he and his men had struck gold. Inside the briefcase were documents detailing Germany’s nefarious plans in America, including a $27 million budget under Albert’s control to fund pro-German propaganda, attacks on ships carrying war supplies for the Allies, and strikes at the docks and in munitions plants. Also involved in the espionage and sabotage activities in America were Captain Franz von Papen, the military attaché for the German embassy (and the future chancellor of Germany), and Captain Karl Boy-Ed, the naval attaché. Both were expelled from the United States in December 1915. No official action was taken against Albert, who returned to Germany when America entered the war in April 1917. Exposing the spy ring was a major triumph for Flynn, who was known as “the Bulldog” for his tenacity in pursuing leads. As one newspaper proclaimed, Flynn “probably did more than any one man to rid this country of foreign spies.” Flynn was a big man. At six feet tall with a cropped mustache and weighing about three hundred pounds, he struck an imposing figure wherever he went. Often in a derby hat, he was once described by a reporter as “large, mountainous almost, up and down as well as circumferentially.” Flynn worked as a plumber, tinsmith, stone carver, and semi-professional baseball player before joining the Secret Service in 1897. He soon rose through the ranks to become one of the most respected and influential detectives and law enforcement officials of that era. Long before Eliot Ness and the Untouchables went after Al Capone and the Italian mob in Chicago, Flynn dismantled the first Mafia family to exist in America. As head of the Eastern Division of the Secret Service from 1901 until 1910, Flynn pursued the Morello–Lupo gang, who were engaged in murder, extortion, counterfeiting, and other criminal activities both in New York and around the country. He ran an intelligence operation that tracked the movements and activities of Giuseppe “The Clutch Hand” Morello, Ignazio “The Wolf ” Lupo, and other members of the gang for several years, building an airtight counterfeiting case against them that resulted in long prison terms for the mobsters. The success against the Mafia made Flynn famous, with front-page stories about him in newspapers across the country. The Boston Globe described him as “one of the greatest detectives in the world.” Understanding the value of good publicity for one’s career, Flynn also published first-person accounts of his adventures. While he loved the media attention and benefited from the usually glowing stories about him, Flynn nevertheless played down the image of anybody being a supersleuth like the fictional Sherlock Holmes: If you want some reading that will put you gently to sleep, try a detective’s record of a sensational case, just as he keeps it: “Interviewed three shoe clerks; no result. Analyst reported poison lotion to be talcum and water. Spent afternoon in subway, endeavoring to locate guard with missing tooth; no result.” And that goes on for weeks and maybe years and still no result, till you have very grave misgivings about the adventures of analytical criminologists and their pale, flexible hands, not to mention their eyes that seem to pierce, etc. No it’s a great bore to be a real detective, when you compare yourself with a super-detective in a novel, growing more super with every chapter. Flynn’s life, however, was anything but boring. In between his exploits against the Mafia and German spies, he also attempted to end corruption and ineffectiveness in the New York Police Department (NYPD) when he was named deputy police commissioner in 1910. Flynn joined his men in raids on gambling houses, “chasing gamblers up fire escapes and across roofs and dropping down skylights.” Flynn began to reorganize the Detective Bureau to make it more effective and eliminate graft in the police department but was met with opposition from his superiors and entrenched political interests opposed to any reforms within the NYPD. Calling it “a thankless job,” he resigned after just six months and returned to the federal government, where he was promoted to chief of the Secret Service in 1912. Flynn and his family were targets for revenge from criminals that he put away, including the mob. While in prison, Ignazio Lupo sent out orders to members of his gang who were still free to assassinate Flynn. Giuseppe Morello’s half brothers, Vincenzo, Nicola, and Ciro Terranova, debated a plan to kidnap Flynn’s children. They did not follow through with the kidnapping, but when Flynn learned of this, he told his children to never venture alone more than one hundred yards from their home. Christmastime was a dangerous holiday for the family. Suspicious packages disguised as gifts and addressed to his children and wife would arrive at their home in New York. On one occasion, Flynn started to open a package addressed to him with a return address he was familiar with. But he noticed that something was just not right with the package. He ran outside, put it in the yard, and then got a bucket of water and doused it. He gave it to a Secret Service agent who confirmed that it was a makeshift bomb that would have killed or seriously injured Flynn and his family had it gone off. After that occurred, to the great dismay of Flynn’s children, Secret Service agents dunked every package that arrived at the home in water before they first opened them, thereby ruining any legitimate presents for the children. Flynn’s exploits against German spies and saboteurs as head of the Secret Service built up his legend and caught the attention of the movie industry. A twenty-part silent movie serial about his adventures was made in 1918 by Wharton Studio, a pioneering film studio based in Ithaca, New York. King Baggot, an international film star and a friend of Flynn’s, played a fictional character patterned after Flynn, who appeared as himself in one of the episodes. Had this been the end of his career, Flynn would have cemented a stellar legacy. Incorruptible, fiercely patriotic, and determined to get results no matter how long it took, he would have left an impressive record of accomplishments that served his country well. But it was when he took on anarchists and other radicals in 1919 that his career began a downward slide. After anarchists set off bombs in seven cities on the evening of June 2, 1919, including one at the home of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, Flynn was appointed director of the Bureau of Investigation (BI), the forerunner of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Palmer, with great fanfare, announced the appointment of Flynn to head the BI and find the perpetrators, calling Flynn “the greatest anarchist expert in the United States.” With these lofty expectations, Flynn faced a difficult task. There was no blueprint to follow on how to organize an investigation into such a sophisticated attack as the June 2 bombings, which had been preceded by a nationwide package bomb attack targeting prominent government officials. Flynn therefore devised the first counterterrorist strategy and policy in U.S. history. He established a powerful federal police force along with a top-notch team of agents to aid him in the pursuit of anarchists and other radicals in the country. Palmer, though, created a new division in the BI, the Radical Division, and put a young, ambitious former library clerk named J. Edgar Hoover in charge. Hoover soon hijacked Flynn’s investigation and, along with Palmer, orchestrated the infamous Palmer Raids, which involved illegally rounding up, detaining, and in many cases deporting aliens who had committed no crimes. Flynn supported the raids and never spoke up against these violations of civil liberties. Combined with his failure to solve the series of bombings, this tarnished his otherwise stellar reputation. Flynn had one last chance to redeem himself. After a horse-drawn wagon exploded on Wall Street in September 1920, killing thirty-eight people and injuring hundreds of others in the worst terrorist attack on American soil at that time, Flynn once again tried in vain to find the perpetrators. With no meaningful progress to show from his investigation, he was removed from his post in August 1921 and never again returned to government service. For Flynn, this was an inglorious end to his distinguished career. He opened a private detective agency a couple of months later and made two of his children, Elmer and Veronica, partners. That was a bad choice, as both were alcoholics and irresponsible, overspending and upsetting clients. Flynn’s wife, Anne, was also an alcoholic who made alcohol in the bathtub of their home for herself and some of their six children when they were of age to drink. The excessive drinking of the family (Flynn mostly abstained from alcohol) and the problems with his detective agency depressed and weakened Flynn, who died of heart failure on October 14, 1928. Although retirement was not a happy time for him, Flynn did launch one business venture that gave him great joy. In 1924, he edited a new fiction magazine called Flynn’s. To make sure readers knew who was behind this publication, the words “William J. Flynn, Editor, Twenty-Five Years in the U.S. Secret Service” appeared below the title. This gave Flynn a chance to relive his glory days with the Secret Service. While most of the stories were fictionalized, some were based on actual cases that Flynn or his former Secret Service colleagues had worked on. Flynn’s (it would undergo various name changes over the years) became one of the most popular detective magazines of its time. It continued to be published for many years after Flynn’s death. “I might have become a prosperous plumber had I stuck to my shop and original business,” Flynn once told a reporter, “but I’m glad I followed my bent and am now a detective.” Surprisingly, there is no published biography of the man who became one of this country’s greatest detectives by pursuing the Mafia, spies, and terrorists and forged a lasting place for himself in American history. He was at the center of some of the most sensational events of the early twentieth century, and yet today, very few people know his name. This book is the first to tell the fascinating, exciting, and at times tragic story of William J. Flynn. The challenges that he faced more than one hundred years ago still plague America: organized crime, espionage, and terrorism. Understanding how one man tried to tackle these issues and his successes and failures can offer us insight into these endless problems. ___________________________________ Excerpted from The Bulldog Detective: William J. Flynn and America’s First War Against the Mafia, Spies, and Terrorists, by Jeffrey D. Simon. Published by Oceanview Publishing. Copyright 2024. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission. View the full article

“I loved books and wanted my whole life to be around books.” Such were the words of Richard Marek, an acclaimed editor, author, ghostwriter, and longtime Dutton president and publisher who died in 2020. In his half-century in book publishing, Marek helped bring over 300 books into the world, including Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, James Baldwin’s If Beale Street Could Talk, Thomas Harris’s The Silence of the Lambs, and several of Robert Ludlum’s “Bourne” thrillers. I never imagined that my own manuscripts would end up in the hands of an editor like Marek, much less be the last he ever worked on. In 2018, I was searching for an agent for my first novel, The Reflecting Pool. Connections and good fortune put me in touch with my agent, Judith Ehrlich, who, in turn, introduced me to Marek. I couldn’t have known just how impactful this introduction would be. Novel-writing was a third act for me. I began my career as an officer in the Foreign Service, spending over twenty years in Washington, D.C. and at foreign embassies before turning to playwriting. After my plays were produced both nationally and internationally, I got the itch to write a book. Thus came a thriller, set in the capital and my hometown for over sixty years, about a murder leading an intrepid homicide detective all the way to the White House. In search of an agent and fruitful contacts, I attended ThrillerFest and signed up to have published thriller authors critique the story. Soon afterwards, a good friend connected me with Judith, who was also his agent. Judith was intrigued by the main character and impressed by the plot’s potential but thought the manuscript needed considerable rewriting. She made a promise: if “Richard” could make it marketable, she’d represent it. Richard had, by this time, helped establish the Independent Editors Group, a consortium of freelance editors, many of whom had also spent decades in the industry’s upper echelons. He described himself and his colleagues as old timers, but he was being modest. They were all skilled editors who had a keen understanding of what publishers wanted. When he read my pages, he was also taken by the main character, Marko Zorn, in whom he saw “a badass,” someone he wanted to root for. The only trouble was that Zorn had no past. “You tell us that the eyes of the dead girl give him a special need to solve the case,” Richard wrote, “but you take this no further. Why?” He went on: “What’s Zorn’s real name and why did he change it?” The way he saw it, a character who broke the law, even for the sake of justice, had to be haunted. If readers had no access to such a character’s inner demons, they would not be sympathetic. He pointed me toward Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch, who is relentlessly spooked by the murder of his mother. “I remember him far more than the plots of Connelly’s novels,” he said. Of course, I took his advice to heart. Marko’s character came alive as a tough, but impatient detective driven to pursue justice on behalf of the vulnerable. He is a maverick who doesn’t play by the rules and often consorts with criminals. The Reflecting Pool took shape, found a publisher, and landed on the list of Amazon Editors’ Picks in Mystery, Thriller & Suspense. I asked for Richard’s guidance while I wrote the sequel. Early in the process, he helped to resolve a key plot issue in what eventually hit shelves as Head Shot. Around this time, he’d learned that his esophageal cancer had returned despite extensive chemotherapy. He really was in no condition to take on clients but agreed to make an exception for his sake as much as mine. He was eager to have something to take his attention off his imminent death. “What is better than passing time with a fictional renegade who drives around in a sports car, one-upping the bad guys and coming to the rescue of those in need?” he quipped. It was a joy for both Judith and me to continue working with such a brilliant mind. He was so sick, however, that the sound of his voice became increasingly distressing. It was devastating when we finally got the call we’d been dreading. His wife reassured us that he had been surrounded by his loved ones when he passed. After his death, his influence lived on. Judith had contributed a lot of help with plotting for The Reflecting Pool, and this had impressed Marek. He’d told her, “You should have been an editor.” She now channeled his editorial voice as I continued my work on Head Shot. “More point of view, otherwise your reader won’t care about the character.” “Too much dialogue before the action scene interferes with the pacing.” “Don’t give away too much too soon.” “This coincidence strains credibility, you risk losing the integrity of the story and the trust of your reader.” “We shouldn’t know who the true villains are until the end of the story.” Richard’s past encouragement gave her confidence in her suggestions, which enabled me to finish writing the book. The third novel in the series, Firetrap, will be published in January. I received good editorial input on this manuscript, but by now Richard’s key directives were emblazoned in my mind and I followed them. In many ways, this book is a tribute to the man who so fervently believed in stories with heart, once co-authoring a book, Here is My Hope, about a marble statue of Christ in Johns Hopkins Hospital, where thousands of people had taken their tears and prayers. Conceived in response to headlines about the opioid crisis, Firetrap tells of Zorn’s efforts to bring down a criminal drug empire that is claiming countless lives. It also reveals more of the backstory of the detective who resorts to his gun only when absolutely necessary. Some readers are incredulous that a homicide detective, even a smooth-talking one, would go anywhere unarmed, and I suspect that some will likewise find it far-fetched that a single person could cripple a vast criminal enterprise. They will simply have to shake their heads and accept it, as I have also learned from Richard to hope against hope. As gun and opioid deaths climb alongside NRA and Big Pharma profits, we need to dream big. Like my beloved editor, I have come to believe that we can read and write our way to a better world. After all, to read and write is often to be haunted by a story; and while stories can be scary, they can also bring comfort and embolden us to confront the real monsters, who exist not merely on the page or in our heads, but in the world. View the full article

We all thought everything was going to change didn’t we? There was a moment back there, when more and more women started standing up and saying, ‘yeah it’s happened to me too’, when Harvey Weinstein went to prison, when women starting talking publicly about what it’s actually like for us to exist in a man’s world, when marches happened, when the media got behind the hashtag. But, let’s be honest, when you look at your life and the life of the women you love, fundamentally what has really changed? To be sure, no longer can a predatory boss make advances without fear of a tribunal. Coercive control is a recognized offense. Equal pay is at least discussed. Most companies are aware of how many women they employ and in what positions. Except, six years on, our everyday lives look very similar to how they always have. We still take on the majority of the domestic labor, we still have to listen to sexist crap in the media and at home, we are still statistically paid less, there are very few of us sitting on boards or at the top of organizations. Women are still snatched off badly lit streets, many have their lives oppressed by mental control, plenty are exploited sexually and domestically and, shockingly, in the US on average three women a day are killed by an intimate partner. Thriller writers have used this underlying fear which accompanies all women’s lives for centuries. We know that there is nothing scarier than being trapped inside your own home, or mind, by a man who wants to control and contain. Thriller writers often don’t need to kill women—they know the stuff of nightmares is much more subtle than that, much more creeping and dread filled. Stories like this have been written since before the term thriller was even coined. So many of our classic novels like Jane Eyre, Rebecca, Wuthering Heights, Madame Bovary, Lolita, Anna Karenina – they’re all essentially about women being judged, not being believed and being manipulated. Then came writers like Patricia Highsmith, Dorothy L Sayers, Barbara Vine, Mary Higgins Clark and Shirley Jackson, who changed the landscape by being unapologetic about what they were trying to achieve with their writing and what they wanted to make us think. And then, more recently, the genre has exploded. Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl shook everything up again, reminding us all of the power of the twist and, since then, we’ve been spoilt for choice with so many writers like Paula Hawkins, Lisa Jewel and Laura Lippman (to name a very few) producing ever more complex and shocking novels. One thing all of these writers have in common is their ability to mix a cracking, page-turning story with serious social and political commentary. In fact, I believe that is one of the great joys of writing thrillers, that we get to combine great story telling with important themes. It is no co-incidence that so many writers and readers in this genre are female, because the themes which are so ripe for exploring in these stories are also the themes which dominate women’s lives. As #MeToo happened a writer friend of mine joked that we might all be out of a job. Well, as ever the joke’s on us because, when it comes to female fear and male violence, nothing has changed. The question for thriller writers then is how are we going to address this? How are we going to continue to write what we see in a post #MeToo world, a world which was meant to be so much better, but simply isn’t. For a while I’ve sensed something in the air that felt like the beginning of an answer to this question. A feeling that women are done playing nice. You only have to watch a little bit of reality TV to see young women refusing to put up with the toxic masculinity that dominated those shows for so long. #MeToo might not have fundamentally changed things, but it’s made us angry. Because of all of this I knew, when I started writing One of the Good Guys, that I wanted to flip the narrative. I didn’t want small wins, I wanted to shock and provoke. During the writing process I kept a little strip of paper pinned above my desk. It read: women have had enough and it made me brave. It reminded me that I didn’t want my book to have any female victims in it, I didn’t want anyone to be saved. I wanted to reflect that groundswell of anger I was feeling amongst the women I knew. Except, at the beginning, I wasn’t sure how to do this because it felt like I was going to have to flip the whole idea of what a thriller is and what we as readers expect from it. I love walking and, about a forty minute drive from my home in Brighton on the South Coast of England, is a wild walk along a cliff path. Along the route you pass three ramshackle cottages which sit right on the edge above a high drop in to treacherous seas. Sometimes I would see a woman in one of these cottages and it made me think about what it would be like to live in such an isolated spot. Naturally the first thing I thought about was the night and how scared I would be. But then I thought about what it feels like to walk alone through the darkened streets of a city and realized I wasn’t any safer there. When my agent sent One of the Good Guys out to publishers she started her letter with a line which encapsulates this feeling: if most men claim to be good, then why are most women afraid to walk home alone at night. It was the perfect way to sell my book because it had been on these walks that I had worked out what I wanted to do with the story. I decided to take the traditional thriller tropes—a woman living alone on the edge of a cliff, two young women vanishing in a seaside town, a new man in the neighborhood—and flip them on their head. The book is told in three parts, the first from good guy Cole’s point of view, the second from his ex-wife, Mel’s and then in the last third, we switch between a statement by the woman Cole meets in the first section, Lennie, and lots of different types of media – social and traditional. I was very keen to do this because I think this is one of the places misogyny is still allowed to fester. Women are still judged so harshly in these spheres, their lives like open wounds for anyone to pick through. Nowhere else do we see as clearly how high the bar is to be a good woman and how low it is to be a good man. I am far from the only thriller writer thinking this way at the moment. Recently I’ve read some brilliant novels such as Catherine Ryan Howard’s The Trap, Kelleye Garret’s Missing White Woman and Rebecca Makkai’s I Have Some Questions For You. All these books are asking the same questions as I am in One of the Good Guys about how, moving forward in this post #MeToo world, we want to see women portrayed in the media and fiction. Because how we tell stories is important. Change only happens when enough people are saying the same words. One of a Good Guys is a book born out of the expectations involved in being a woman versus the expectations we have for ourselves and the anger in the missed opportunities we’ve all just witnessed. It’s a book inspired by the feeling that women are done playing nice. We can’t wait around any longer for things to change, we have to be the change. That note I wrote myself which sat above my desk for the two years it took me to write this book still sits at the heart of the story: women have had enough. And the answer to the question of what we might do in this post #MeToo world might be: watch out, we’re stronger and angrier than you realize. *** View the full article

“The first thing we do,” announces Dick the Butcher in Act IV, Scene II of William Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part II, “is kill all the lawyers.” Approximately four hundred years after Shakespeare’s death, this pithy phrase has become one of his most famous witticisms, appropriated often to disparage the legal profession, or at least acknowledge the unfortunate social archetype of the crooked, or even overpriced, counselor. The context in which Dick utters this phrase, though, is key to understanding its true meaning, and Shakespeare’s intent. Dick is a villainous character who wants to eradicate society of the very defenders of justice who could both stop the revolt he intends to help spur and remove the power he hopes to usurp. The strange quote acknowledges, therefore, that society could not exist in a state of fairness and peace without the protectiveness of both the law and its staunch guardians. One possible reading of this quote is that Shakespeare was insisting that the lawyers were the most fundamental defense against the grossest manifestations of power-hungry antics wrought by the scum of humanity. Context, you know, is everything. The 2003 film Intolerable Cruelty, written and directed by Joel and Ethan Coen (from a script they co-wrote with Robert Ramsey and Matthew Stone), presents its own memorable take on lawyers. They are either powerful, smooth-talking spin-doctors who are legendary for winning cases or establishing legal precedents, or slower-paced and over-emotional (perhaps over-thoughtful) representatives who are never able to beat the first sort. The lawyers in this film, all based in or near Beverly Hills, are either part of the wealthy, plastic community or sad-sack outsiders. While law, as a profession, facilitates the bulk of the plot, it does not distinguish its so-called champions from an environment in which everyone is entitled and self-centered. I’m not going to say that Intolerable Cruelty is anywhere near the Coen Brothers’ best film. I’m not even going to say that Intolerable Cruelty is a film I particularly, personally enjoy. But I do find the film very interesting. I find all the Coen Brothers’ films interesting. But Intolerable Cruelty, an aggressive, revenge-obsessed screwball comedy and pillory for the apparent vapidity of Beverly Hills, features some of the most fascinating choices in their whole oeuvre, I daresay. And what makes Intolerable Cruelty so especially interesting is that, in its central love story, it makes an argument about the explosiveness of the rich and powerful by representing how such individuals use, of all things, poetry. According to Shakespeare in Twelfth Night, “Music is the food of love,” and in As You Like It, “lovers are given to poetry.” The Coen Brothers know this. Poetry and music are on the altar here, offer the most dramatic protestations, and are sacrificed in the process. Yes, when characters attempt to convey depth, they quote from sources historically reputed to have depth, appropriating beautiful phrases and poetic evocations not for their true meanings but for the emotional punches they apparently pack. These rich and powerful characters change the situations and even the rhetoric of quotes to suit their own worldviews and goals, warping beautiful things for their own convenience, instead of understanding that their disruptions change the significance and remove the beauty of such things, in the first place. Intolerable Cruelty offers a sparse (but effective) historical cross-section of what poetry even is, in the first place; the writers who have their words twisted and turned into cannon fodder are William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, and, jumping ahead a few centuries, Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel. I’ll get to the plot summary in a moment, but bear with me for a little longer. Let me describe to you the strange opening scene, and you’ll see what I’m getting at. Picture this. A jaguar races down a shady, tree-lined street in sunny Los Angeles. A ponytailed Geoffrey Rush is at the wheel, singing along to his stereo, loudly and off-key. “I am just a poor boy though my story’s seldom told,” he bleats. He is louder than the song itself, the Simon and Garfunkel track “The Boxer” playing diegetically through his car speakers. He continues, “I have squandered my resistance on a pocket full of mumbles, such are promises.” At face value, there is nothing strange about beginning a film with the evocation of such a weighty metaphor. But the strangeness of the presence of this song lies in the relationship between the audio heard and the visuals with which it is paired. Let’s slow-mo it: a cheesy-looking middle-aged man in an expensive-looking summer suit speeding along in a pristine luxury car down a palm tree-lined street in Beverly Hills, belting the lyrics to “The Boxer,” a sad and contemplative song about the fears of selling out, wasting one’s potential, and struggling with low income, as well as the pointless trials underwent by underdogs, and the resilience to preserve in an unforgiving and commercial world. The song, with its choirboy vocals, dripping acoustic guitar strums, and 1960s-era sounding refrain (consisting of variations on the sound “la”), not to mention resolute setting in New York City during an unforgiving winter, makes it certainly an out-of-place score to this distinctly sunny and affluent space. What makes Intolerable Cruelty so especially interesting is that, in its central love story, it makes an argument about the explosiveness of the rich and powerful by representing how such individuals use, of all things, poetry. And it is just as out-of-place in the following scene, in which the man, Donovan Donaly, who we find out is a soap opera producer anointed with a Daytime Emmy, pulls up in the driveway of his villa only to discover that his wife, Bonnie, is cheating on him with a young man selling pool cleaner. “The Boxer” fades out during most of the shouted accusations as well as during Donovan’s attempts to shoot his pistol at his guilty wife. But it comes back during the scene’s climax, after Bonnie has stabbed Donovan in the backside with his own Daytime Emmy, and hopped into his car to dive away. As Donovan screams at her, “That’s my Jag! That’s my Jag! That’s by bloody Jag! You bitch! Bitch! Bitch!,” punctuating each shout with a fire of his pistol in her direction, “The Boxer” starts playing again, this time from the car stereo as Bonnie revs up the engine to make her getaway. The unlikely pairing of “The Boxer” with the rest of this scene reinforces, if nothing else, the comparative shallowness of the environment the remainder of the film will present, and the curious presumption of these characters, who purport to appreciate works of art even when inserting them into improper or nonsensical contexts. There are four Simon and Garfunkel songs in Intolerable Cruelty—a humorous soundtrack choice, given the group’s close cinematic relationship with Mike Nichol’s 1967 film The Graduate, having created its soundtrack. The Graduate explores themes similar to “The Boxer”—particularly the fear of “plastics,” and shallow, overly capitalist environments (the very environments that sprawl in Intolerable Cruelty). Not to mention, The Graduate is about the complexities of human emotional relationships and Intolerable Cruelty represents them as being rather simple. This makes the tone all the more knowing, all the more wry. Right, so, the urban dirge “The Boxer” opens the film, the rainy “April Come She Will” plays during a wedding, as does the quirky “Punky’s Dilemma.” The ballad “Bridge Over Troubled Water” plays at a second wedding, in a scene later on. And all four of these songs will be reproduced in this film as inferior versions—the first is “The Boxer,” which is immediately forced to become a garbled version of a tragic song that a character transforms in a subtle attempt to justify the act of selling out, and the soundtrack to a tawdry divorce. Donovan disappears from the movie at this point, until almost the very end. Most of Intolerable Cruelty is about the war between two people, the reigning king of divorce law, Miles Massey (George Clooney), and a sultry black widow, Marilyn Rexroth (Catherine Zeta-Jones) the wife, of Miles’s client in their divorce suit, Rex Rexroth (Edward Hermann). Though Miles is representing her husband and therefore is her opponent, Miles, rapt by her beauty and intelligence, asks her to dinner. They each find their perfect matches in the other, and behave competitively, showing off to impress the other. At the restaurant, he flirts, “Your husband had told me you were the most beautiful woman that he’d ever met. I didn’t expect the most beautiful woman I’d ever met.” Marilyn, smiling sideways, responds with an eloquent quote from Shakespeare’s long poem Venus and Adonis, which is about the goddess of love falling in love with a handsome youth who is not interested in her advances because he prefers to hunt, instead. “Dismiss your vows, your feigned tears, your flattery; for where a heart is hard they make no battery.” Marilyn appropriates Adonis’s line to Venus, in which he begs her to leave him alone, to one-up Miles’s flirtation. In doing so, she flirts more eloquently than he, and simultaneously shoots down his romantic compliment. Miles one-ups her back, quoting from Shakespeare’s literary competitor, Christopher Marlowe, with a pithy line from Hero and Leander, about two lovers who overcame the river and gigantic tower that separated them, “Whoever loved that loved not at first sight?” With this quote, Miles wins this tiny contest, and they proceed to banter more bitterly in modern vernacular English. This scene reflects the ease with which both characters wield poetry for their own satisfaction in impressing one another. Marilyn and Miles also use the same quotes for their own satisfaction in wounding one another, later on. In the courtroom scene during Marilyn and Rex’s divorce trial a few months later, to win his side of the case, Miles quotes Marilyn’s previous Shakespeare quote. Miles knows that she, simpering and crying while she is on the stand, is faking devastation to appeal to the jury and win the case, so he, longing to defeat, shock, and impress her, accuses her of the same over-emotion she had previously uttered to him. “Dismiss your vows, your feigned tears, your flattery; for where a heart is hard they make no battery” he tells her slyly, as she looks up from her tissues, nearly breaking character with her surprise. He eventually rephrases it, at the request of Marilyn’s lawyer. “Mrs. Rexroth, have you ever been in love?” “Yes, of course,” she responds, wailing, “with Rex.” “And you’ve always loved him?” Miles asks. Marilyn’s gaze turns stony. “Whoever loved,” she retorts, quoting both Miles and Marlowe, “that loved not at first sight.” Here, they use the same poetic quotes they had used to impress and flirt with one another to hurt. Their understanding of the contexts or stories behind each quote is irrelevant—the quotes are malleable to their specific purposes. Though they do not change the poems, themselves, they change the new contexts in which they are presented, appropriating them into their own private language in which the words, themselves, are actually meaningless— but the using of another’s words transforms them into more powerful weapons. It is clear that Marilyn and Miles appreciate the poems more as devices that can augment one’s status in repartee, than based on their literary merits. The Coen Brothers use the poetry of Shakespeare and Marlowe, both classic (nearly clichéd) literary authorities on the topic of passionate love, for wooing and warring, but they refer back to the more modern poetry of Simon and Garfunkel for marrying. Both “April Come She Will” and “Bridge Over Troubled Water” are wedding songs—not because the characters seem to have any appreciation for the band (aside from Donovan Donaly, and his appreciation for them is cursory and misguided), but because the band seems to serve a romantic cliché, similar to how Marlowe and Shakespeare function. They are all known to provide the expected romantic notes for certain romantic situations, so they are used in such contexts, even when their appropriations and reincarnations (ignorantly executed by the characters) are not actually romantic or even enjoyable to hear. [Spoilers ahead]. The film proceeds as a battle between Miles and Marilyn. The film will take us to two weddings, both with Simon and Garfunkel soundtracks. Both weddings are cons—shams concocted by Marilyn, longing for revenge against Miles, who thwarted her chance of a vast alimony by defeating her in the Rexroth divorce case. “April Come She Will” is played on a guitar by a hippie of a preacher who sings the song rather poorly as he wanders down the aisle towards the altar, at the wedding between Marilyn and a man she assures everyone is an oil tycoon, Howard D. Doyle (Billy Bob Thornton), but who is really an actor. Marilyn will fake-marry Howard, and then fake-divorce him, to appear to have made off with much of his fortune. Then, she will seduce Miles. She asks for a pre-nup between them, one of his famously ironclad ones, and he agrees, understanding that she wants to protect her apparent fortune. But, when they marry, she tears it up as a gesture of love and faith to him. He agrees, not realizing that what he has just allowed to be destroyed is his own protection of his own fortune against a penniless and vengeful person who plans to divorce him and take his money, as punishment. Why is “April Come She Will” being played at a wedding? (I ask the same question of that one Parks and Recreation episode.) It’s a sad song. The woman leaves the guy at the end! “A love once new has now grown old!” But those lines have been removed! The song, which is about the many months the speaker spends loving a woman, from April to September, now only includes April to May, the months where she will “stay.” Marilyn has her con down to every last line. During this same wedding scene, when Marilyn and Miles are discussing her inevitable plans to divorce Howard Doyle, Miles is distracted for a moment by a sound in the distance. It is the free-spirited pastor singing along to Simon and Garfunkel’s oddity “Punky’s Dilemma.” In the distance, the words, “Wish I was a Kellogg’s Cornflake, floating’ in my bowl, taking’ movies” can be vaguely overheard. This song, written for The Graduate, seems to serve little purpose at this wedding, or in this film, except to momentarily distract Miles with its quirkiness. It seems likely that the Coen Brothers gave the song a cameo because they simply liked it. They do that kind of thing! Then again, it might have some meaning? Maybe? The song, essentially making fun of the vague dreams of youth, is reduced to a cute distraction for the few seconds it can be overheard, but this is not the same as the butchering that the other Simon and Garfunkel songs have experienced. “Punky’s Dilemma” serves a nobler purpose, though, subtly calling to mind the impulsivity of the ending in The Graduate, in which Elaine Robinson is at her own wedding when she spirits away with the protagonist and then instantly regrets it. It’s possible. It’s also possible that it means nothing. Anyway, the final time Simon and Garfunkel is played is at the wedding between Marilyn and Miles. She has succeeded in tricking Miles into agreeing to marry her, and they head to a chapel in Las Vegas, where Miles’s assistant, a fellow lawyer named Wrigley (Paul Adelstein), meets them and hands them all the necessary items for their wedding, including Miles’s personally designed pre-nup, and their wedding song. “The music,” he tells them quickly, unpacking the suitcase full of wedding essentials he has prepared, “is Simon and Garfunkel,” the way someone might brag about a label of fine wine. Only the best! Again, Simon and Garfunkel is expressed as necessary to romance, because its songs connote poetry and romance. Wrigley does not even mention the actual song he has selected; it does not matter—Simon and Garfunkel has become the band, or brand, for the occasion. Poetry is homogenized in Intolerable Cruelty—all Simon and Garfunkel songs are treated the same, as are the lines from the respective Shakespeare and Marlowe poems, which are not even mentioned outside of their unnamed extracted materials. There is no distinguishing between Shakespeare and Marlowe either—the two quotes work well in dialogue, and become a new conversation, instead of representatives of two highly different bodies of work. In a way, Shakespeare and Marlowe are married, in this film—but in the cruel way Marilyn defines marriage, as a lack of independence. Thus, the forms of poetry used by these conniving and superficial people are not only mashed together in both tonal similarities and ease of referencing, but also stuck to one another, smashed into a single entity. Wrigley’s song choice turns out to be “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” a song appropriate for such an occasion, so, unlike “April Come She Will,” it needs no censoring of its dark bits to seem suitable. However, it is also being played on both the pipe organ and the bagpipes, and its melodic nature is practically indistinguishable, and its lyrics are unheard. (The song has to be played this way, in the first place, because Marilyn and Miles are marrying in a roadside chapel in Las Vegas run by a Scottish man who rents them kilts instead of tuxedos.) The evident impulsivity of their marriage (and Marilyn’s truly sly, long-term planning lurking underneath) has resulted in the transformation of an artistic work from beautiful to clunky and shrill, a jarring and awkward cacophony whose end will feel merciful. The song, and its truly beautiful message, are sacrificed entirely for this second marriage, revealing that even unintentional appropriation in a plastic society (Las Vegas, this time) results in a reduction in beauty of the songs and lyrics with which people choose to surround themselves. The shallowness of this environment and its poor romantic situations are so dangerous, they have proven destructive to several works of art. Let’s go back to the beginning for a moment. “The Boxer” is the only song that plays in its original version. Though all four Simon and Garfunkel songs are sang or played diegetically by characters in the film, the opening shot of the film features Donovan singing along to the song. His own rendition sounds both drowned-out and mangled. And he also alters the words of his own version to suit his own devices, to fit his own worldview! He begins the third line of the first verse, “All lies in jest,” a few seconds before Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel do, and when he realizes his mistake, he pauses before they sing the next line, “still the man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest,” ignoring it and making an explosion sound with his mouth. His version satisfies his own whims. Here, he is the “Man” of which they sing—a figure literally hearing what he wants to hear and disregarding the rest, without realizing that he exists as their prediction and an archetype. In the next shot, a few verses later, Donovan replaces a key phrase to the song’s message. “[Asking only workman’s wages, I come looking for a job but I get no offers] Just a come-on from the whores on Second Avenue,” plays the song. “I do declare, there were times when I was so lonesome I took some comfort there.” In a line intended to stress the sadness of the speaker’s plight and his desperation for a valid connection, Donovan, though, switches out the word “whores” for the bouncy phrase “those gals,” turning the speaker’s tragic sell-out into a casual sexual encounter. He also adds a whoop of “WOO HOO” after “Avenue,” as if cheering on the more romantic impulse. The thing is, Donovan himself will become a tremendous sell-out if he is not one already. After Bonnie is caught cheating, she hires the shark Miles to facilitate their divorce. Even though she is in the wrong, Miles is so good at divorces, that Donovan loses everything, except his Daytime Emmy, and is seen later sleeping on the sidewalk with it. He eventually becomes rich, again, when he partners up with Miles Massey, the very man who had brought him to ruin, to produce a new television show called “America’s Funniest Divorce Videos.” He sells out to the man who had destroyed him, as well as profits from the misfortunes of others that are nearly identical to the misfortune that had previously befallen him. His adaptation of the song “The Boxer,” removing the speaker’s sad act of giving into the whores, and adding in a fun and sexy alternative, indicates his refusal to comprehends its entire identity, and his own—as indicated by his passionate rendition, he prefers “The Boxer” as a poetic-sounding song that can energize him without making him admit to the possibilities that he has achieved his great success through lowbrow pandering or that, regarding his own love life, he has been seduced for his money, instead of being able to seduce someone else. If Miles Massey and Marilyn Rexroth appropriate pretty-sounding poetry for offense, Donovan does it for self-defense against his conscience. No one in the film, actually, is poetic independently. This is why they appropriate poetry—to gain a conversational, argumentative, or even emotional advantage. The twisting and contortion of these songs at the hands of the wealthy and indifferent involves a performance component that reinforces this theme; as I’ve said, all of the song versions are bad! They are very unpleasant! They are not only appropriated in length, content, or intent—but sound. The characters who perform these songs, or who command the performances of these songs, are not as deep, emotionally, as the feelings they realize can be conveyed in such works. For example, after singing his part from “April Come She Will,” the pastor makes his own attempt at poetry, while officiating. “In today’s cynical world,” he says, “it is so hard to take that great leap of faith aboard the ship of love and caring.” This is hardly poetic. No one in the film, actually, is poetic independently. This is why they appropriate poetry—to gain a conversational, argumentative, or even emotional advantage. Remember, when Donovan is outraged and sad that his wife has been cheating on him, he spurts forth an angry tirade solely consisting of repeating the phrase “You bitch!”—which is hardly as articulate as the song “The Boxer” that moves him so much in the previous scene. Appropriating quotes from, for example, Marlowe and Shakespeare, provide Marilyn and Miles the conversational edges they crave when speaking with one another. Marilyn and Miles are both extremely articulate but cannot outdo the other relying merely on their own wits. And they try! They speak in an intense, overdramatic style, as clearly and loudly and emotionally as if they are standing, un-miced, on a stage, and this is only exaggerated when they quote things, distorting the poetry as they turn it into prose. Anyway, the characters in Intolerable Cruelty treat literature and music in the same fashions they treat everything else. They embody the culture of this superficial and affluent Beverly Hills society—where nothing is sacred, not even art, and not even marriage. Lawyers are presented as guard dogs for the rich, powerful and self-serving, while still being rich, powerful, and self-serving, themselves. The manner in which art and marriage interact, at the hands of these characters, is even worse—the manipulation of art facilitates the manipulation of marriage. It is especially ironic, then, that music and poetry are the tools used to manipulate love in such a dark way, and particularly sad, then, that they lose their respective beauties through the process of being manipulated. Perhaps, for the first time, the slower-paced and over-emotional (perhaps over-thoughtful) lawyer, Freddy Bender (Richard Jenkins), identifies this uncomfortable manipulation in the most efficient way. To the judge in the courtroom, during the Rexroth trial with the Shakespeare-spouting Miles, he calls out, “Objection” to Miles’s using a quote from a poem when interrogating Marilyn. “On what grounds?” the judge asks. Freddy pauses for a moment, pondering hard. “Um,” he says, trying to think of exactly how to phrase Miles’s off-color method, “Poetry recitation.” Objectively, reciting poetry seems like a harmless thing to do in court—but Bender knows that, when it comes to lawyers such as Miles Massey, context, apparently, is everything. View the full article

Our Crime and the City columnist and international correspondent Paul French looks back at some of 2023’s best crime series from around the globe. * Ganglands (Braqueurs) series 2 (Netflix France) – Julian Leclercq and Hamid Hlioua’s trademark fast paced revenge drama brings back grizzled veteran heist merchant Sami Bouajila and banlieue diva sidekick Tracy Gotoas. The second series is filmed mostly in Brussels and features some great shoot outs and car chases. Kin series 2 (RTÉ Ireland) – Peter McKenna and Ciaran Donnelly’s tough Dublin crime family drama returned for a second series of the somewhat depleted Kinsella family left from series 1. The show is loosely based on Ireland’s Kinahan Gang and the deadly Hutch-Kinahan family feuds in 2015 (and arguably still ongoing). Claire Dunne as the emergent family matriarch is terrific. Top Boy series 5 (Netflix UK) – We were promised that the final season of Top Boy would leave no loose ends and writers didn’t disappoint. Across five seasons Sully (Kano) and Dushane (Ashley Walters) have ruled East London’s Summerhouse Estate and defended their turf against all comers. But all things come to an end. Man of the moment Barry Keoghan makes a splendid addition to the cast in the final season with one spectacular shoot out that sees more bullets fired than are actually fired in London in several years! No spoilers, but the final episode is all it was promised to be. Scrublands (Stan/Nine Network Australia) – A brilliant adaptation of Chris Hammer’s novel set in the drought-ridden New South Wales hinterlands. A small-town priest (chillingly played by Kiwi actor Jay Ryan) kills five of his parishioners before being shot himself, leading to a journalist’s investigation into his motivations and the secrets of a small outback town. Shetland series 8 (BBC Scotland) – the series continues with Douglas Henshall as DI Jimmy Pérez swapped out for Ahley Jensen as DI Ruth Calder in the new series. Fans will miss Perez but DI Calder’s arrival in Lerwick is working well with audiences. A Shetland girl’s sudden return home from big bad London sparks a chain of events that unsettle the islands. Informa (Netflix Japan) – Japanese film and TV wunderkind Michihito Fujii has been blazing great guns through Netflix Japan. His Netflix movies, 2020’s A Family (about a struggling provincial Yakuza clan) and 2023’s Village (about a shocking environmental crime) are both brilliant. Informa follows a Japanese tabloid reporter tired of working simply as a celebrity scandals writer who accepts a new challenge when he is assigned to make contact with a former Yakuza informant. Lupin series 3 – (Netflix France) – Omar Sy has nailed it consistently as Assane Diop in this modern-day adaptation of the Arséne Lupin stories filmed in and around Paris. And the show has come thick and fast with series 3 following on fast from 1 and 2. Happy Valley series 3 (BBC UK) – this year’s major UK TV obsession set in Yorkshire’s Calder Valley and with Sergeant Catherine Cawood (the much-praised Sarah Lancashire) sparring with Tommy Lee Royce (a very different James Norton from usual). As with Top Boy, all loose ends resolved in this final series which had the nation on tenterhooks till the final scene. Exterior Night (Esterno Notte) (RAI Italia) – The 1978 kidnapping and assassination of former Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro by Red Brigades terrorists. Director Marco Bellocchio adapted his own movie into a TV series about the biggest Italian national trauma since the end of World War II. Bellocchio retains and expands his Rashomon style with the tragic kidnapping seen from the POVs of Moro’s fellow high-ranking Christian Democrats, the elderly and ailing Pope Paul VI, two Red Brigade terrorists, and Moro’s family. The Gold – (BBC UK) – The BBC does true crime with this series (a second is coming apparently) about the 1983 Brink’s Mat Robbery at Heathrow Airport, the country’s biggest at the time and that still reverberates. The basic problem was they stole too much gold and it is still said that every piece of jewellery bought in Britain contains some of the Brink’s Mat heist haul. It all become too hot and handle and, it’s true!, thieves do fall out. Dominic Cooper excels while Hugh Bonneville eschews Downton and Paddington to be a hard-working London copper trying to sort the mess out. View the full article

Detective series or thrillers about murders demand from the reader a level of intellectual curiosity, as well as nerves of steel and a strong stomach. When well written, they are gripping page turners that, more often than not, leave the reader with a sense of satisfaction that the crime has been solved and the perpetrator punished. However, novels about missing people demand and offer this, and more. They propose the tantalising possibility of hope. The enduring appeal of a story about a missing person comes, I think, from the fact that it allows the reader to grapple with a broader range of emotions, everything from despair to hope. The missing and their left-behind are suspended in an unfathomably cruel in-between space that haunts the reader. Those left behind can’t grieve or find closure, those missing are not here but not gone. Stories about missing people therefore address a ubiquitous unease at accepting oblivion. Maybe something that has become more attractive as our world becomes increasingly secular. The reader is placed in an ambiguous purgatory, which whilst far from comfortable, does offer opportunity to believe in an outcome that doesn’t have to feature a body in a morgue. That permission to desire something less bleak is compelling. When writing Woman Last Seen and Two Dead Wives (both books centre around missing people) I grappled with the fact that the missing might very well be dead but that isn’t the only possible story or the only possible conclusion. Whilst reading about someone who is missing the reader obviously wants to discover where they might be, but other questions are raised too. The reader must ask, did they run away from something or towards something? Did they leave of their own accord, or were they taken? Are they now dead, or still alive? Most importantly, will they come back? So stories about missing people therefore are multi-faceted, nuanced and, above all, hopeful. Readers are teased as they predict not only who dunnit but what was done exactly? That’s why although there are countless novels about missing people, they all tell a different story and have a place. Here are some of my favourites. Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn The book equivalent to ‘the face that launched a thousand ships’. I’m sure there were books about people disappearing before Flynn’s Gone Girl, of course there were, but this one heralded a slew of unreliable narrators, stories about marital disharmony and jaw dropping WHAT THE ACTUAL… moments. Will remain one of my forever favourite reads. Then She Was Gone by Lisa Jewell. This tense, clever page-turner about a daughter who goes missing just before she completes her end of school exams is sad, torrid and dark but also heartfelt and tender. Ellie had her whole life before her but then she vanished. Narrated mostly from the point of view of the mother who just will not and cannot accept her daughter has gone, Jewell freshly articulates every parents’ worst nightmare in this twisty page turner. The Girls Who Disappeared by Claire Douglas Twenty years ago on a miserable rainy night, Olivia Rutherford is driving three friends home when a figure in the road causes her to swerve and crash. When she regains consciousness, she finds herself alone in the car – her friends have vanished and they are never seen again. Despite pressure from investigators and journalists, Olivia won’t speak of that fateful night. The question is, what is she hiding. Local Woman Missing by Mary Kubica When a local mother and her six-year-old daughter, Delilah, suddenly vanish, their close-knit suburban community is rocked by fear and suspicion. Eleven years later, Delilah shockingly reappears. Gradually secrets hidden deep in the past are revealed but is the truth about those missing years palpable to the shocked and scared community? Three Women Disappeared by James Patterson and Shan Serafin When an extremely powerful and dangerous man is killed, the three women closest to him suddenly disappear —his wife, his personal chef, and his maid. Now Detective Sean Walsh is racing to discover what happened to the women, and why the victim wound up dead. However the more he discovers about this controlling and treacherous man’s affairs, the more reasons he finds for the women to stay hidden. The Missing Place by Sophie Littlefield The oil business is booming in small-town North Dakota. With all the workers coming and going from the “man camps” set up to process the overflow of new town residents, it’s easy for people to disappear. Colleen and Shay couldn’t be more different, but they are united by the same mission: to find their missing sons. But the oil company that is at the heart of the town’s prosperity might also be at the center of these disappearances—or at the very least helping to cover them up. View the full article

It was at the tender age of twenty-one years old that I was first exposed to the untethered brilliance that is Sam Shepard. While studying screenwriting at Loyola Marymount University’s School of Film & Television, I was simultaneously dabbling in acting, going on auditions scattered around Los Angeles for third-rate TV commercials, micro-budget independent films, and acting in plays produced by a theater company whose stage was just a stone’s throw away from Skid Row. I was a headstrong, brash, and extremely opinionated young whippersnapper who had very black-and-white ideas on what made a piece of fiction, regardless of what medium it was in, good or bad. I was, to put politely, a bit of a prick. Then, I enrolled in a scene study class at a tiny little studio in Larchmont, a quaint historic neighborhood in the City of Angels, and was assigned to perform an excerpt from Fool for Love. Like all “dutiful” (the actual word you’re looking for is pretentious, folks) film students, I thought that I was an expert on Sam Shepard—after all, I had seen him act in The Right Stuff and a couple of other things, so what else was there to learn, right? Thinking I was knowing what I was getting into, I paid a visit to the Samuel French bookshop on Sunset Boulevard (RIP), picked up a copy of Fool for Love, and plunked myself down at a nearby coffee shop with an overpriced latte to give it a looksie. I looked up 45 minutes later. I had blown through the entire read more quickly than someone hopped up on Adderall. I hadn’t moved an inch, and my untouched espresso concoction had grown colder than a native Southern Californian in a New Hampshire winter. To say I was moved was the understatement of the century—what I just read had metaphorically blown my brains to bits all over the sidewalk. I didn’t know much at that age, but I was absolutely, positively certain of one thing right then and there: my artistic soul had been forever altered by Mr. Shepard’s words. Fool for Love brazenly broke every single rule and concept of structure I had ever been taught in a writing class. The unconventional plot was rugged and uncompromising, the dialogue piercing and incisive, and the themes explored in the piece challenged me in ways that I had never experienced before. On its face, the one-act play is an examination of the tumultuous, broken-beyond-repair relationship of May and Eddie, lovers whom we later discover are half-siblings. But beneath that deliciously pulpy, tangibly gritty surface, Fool for Love is so much more than that. It’s a treatise on trauma—a dissection of the toxic fragility of familial bonds and how, more often than not, they cause the most permanent, inescapable damage to a person’s psyche. I had never seen a writer explore this axiom through characters existing on the fringes of society with such unbridled, raw emotion. I was hooked. I read as much Sam Shepard as I could get my hands on over the ensuing months, and he became my North Star. Put more simply? Shepard gave me creative purpose and direction. Because of Fool for Love, I realized that I wanted to dedicate my professional life to fashioning works that investigated the darkest, most jagged edges of the human condition—and the role that familial strife played in forming them. Fast forward to 2021. I had left the cesspool that is Los Angeles (and the film/TV industry) and moved back to the East Coast. And while the screenplays and plays I had written (two of which were produced) had garnered me some attention, awards, and plaudits, I knew that I wanted to flex a new muscle and write something completely different, something that I had been wanting to do since I was young—a novel. The only thing was…I really didn’t have any idea where to start. So, once again, I turned to my muse—good ol’ Sam. I re-read my three favorites of his: True West, Buried Child, and, of course, Fool for Love. And, in keeping with Shepard’s renegade-like, trailblazing spirit, I decided to buck my usual practice of meticulously outlining and just start typing—dive in headfirst to unknown waters with the essence of his work as my only guiding light. And I’m so freakin’ glad I did. What came of my throwing-caution-to-the-wind plunge was Blue Ridge, my debut Southern crime noir novel releasing January 9th, 2024 from Level Best Books. Drawing motivation from the propulsive, no-holds-barred, visceral style of Shepard’s writing, Blue Ridge is told in the dueling first person POVs of two identical twin brothers—one of whom wants to murder the other…but is beaten to it by an unknown entity and framed for the act. Spread across three different time periods, the surviving brother must untangle a nefarious political conspiracy that not only threatens the sanctity of democracy, but also promises to expose the devastating secret intertwining the brothers forever—the death of the woman they both loved. Besides the narrative being greatly inspired by Shepard’s ethos, he also has a literal foothold in the novel—each of its three parts is prefaced by an on-theme quote from a Shepard play, a love of his work is debated amongst the main characters, and even one of the brother’s pet pit bull is named after the man. Oftentimes while crafting Blue Ridge, when I found myself not quite sure how to develop a new plot point or character beat, I would ask myself—what would Shepard do? This became such a regular occurrence that I started mentally abbreviating it to save time—WWSD? And while I know that Blue Ridge isn’t perfect—nothing is, after all—I’m incredibly proud of the finished product. It is a debut that is everything I wanted it to be—and an achievement that I simply would not have been able to accomplish without using Sam as my storytelling shepherd. *** View the full article

Rod Serling’s “The Twilight Zone” is the gold standard for anthology TV shows, science-fiction and fantasy TV series and, some might argue, TV shows period. The series, which ran for 156 episodes from 1959 to 1964, has some rivals for those accolades, for certain. “The Outer Limits,” broadcast from 1963 to 1965, had some sterling episodes. But Serling’s original series, often imitated, has never been duplicated. Although … I would argue that its first reboot, appearing on CBS for 65 episodes from 1985 to 1989, comes closer to capturing the spirit and integrity of the original – even closer than filmmaker Jordan Peele’s polished remake that aired 2019-2020. More on that reboot in a bit. The mid-1980s was an odd time for TV, with the debut of real prestige TV a few years away and only a few series that really stood out from the pack, including “St. Elsewhere” and “Hill Street Blues.” Even series with occasionally strong episodes like “Miami Vice” were very much a product of the commercial TV world of the time. The 1980s “Twilight Zone” definitely made concessions to be on broadcast TV. But – here’s the heresy – it comes closer to, even approaching, the quality of the original than any other series. But before all that, there was the word, and the word came from Rod Serling. Honoring Serling’s legacy Sometimes in the original “Twilight Zone,” creator/frequent writer Serling supplied only voice-over intros and outros for episodes. Often he appeared on camera and, like Alfred Hitchcock at the time, subsequently became a well-known figure to television viewers. In his narrations, Serling was by turns ominous, humorous and ironic, just like the 92 scripts he wrote for his 156-episode series. The playwright – whose work with “The Twilight Zone,” his lesser follow-up series “Night Gallery,” and film screenplays including “Requiem for a Heavyweight,” the prophetic political drama “Seven Days in May” and the original “Planet of the Apes” – shined a light on humanity in a manner that even the most common denominator of viewers could understand. He won a Peabody, Emmys and turned himself into a cultural touchstone. Time is passing, for certain, but a large percentage of the population still knows enough about Rod Serling to, at least, have a sense of what he contributed to the culture before his death in 1975. Serling lived on through his writing but also for a fleeting glimpse we get of him in the opening credits for the reboot series, which began on CBS in September 1985 and appeared, in sometimes truncated form, into 1989 (the third and final season airing through television syndication). In 65 episodes, more or less, running an hour long but usually consisting of a couple of 20-minute-plus stories plus shorts, the 1980s “Twilight Zone” helped perpetuate Serling and his best-known achievement for another generation of fans. And while it was at it, the reboot featured early-, late- or career-high performances from the likes of Danny Kaye, Glynn Turman, Morgan Freeman, William Peterson, Frances McDormand, Bruce Willis, James Cromwell, Helen Mirren, Elliot Gould, Adolph Caesar, Mare Winningham … just too many others to mention. And it provided a showcase for the work of authors and screenwriters like Stephen King, Harlan Ellison, Ray Bradbury, Alan Brennert, Richard Matheson, George R.R. Martin, Robert Crais and David Gerrold, Rod Serling himself and directors including Wes Craven, William Friedkin, Joe Dante, John Milius and Martha Coolidge. For a while, the 1980s “Twilight Zone” was the place to be, obviously. A reboot you ‘Need to Know’ If you watched the series when it originally aired, it’s likely a few episodes still stick with you. The first season episode “Gramma,” Harlan Ellison’s adaptation of Stephen King’s original story, is remembered as one of the scariest things to appear on TV at the time. The King original, which appeared in his collection “Skeleton Crew,” is about a boy who’s scared to be left home alone with his ailing grandmother … and with good reason. As memorable as “Gramma” was, a few others live on in my memory, although not for scares. These episodes featured Serling-worthy stories, characters and twists. “Profile in Silver” might be my favorite episode of the reboot. Writer John Hancock’s story finds a 22nd century instructor at Harvard going on a solo personal field trip back in time to observe the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The academic Joseph Fitzgerald (Lane Smith) can’t bear to let JFK (Andrew Robinson) be killed, however. He warns him just as shots ring out in Dallas. JFK and a suspicious Secret Service supervisor reward Fitzgerald with a trip back to D.C. But almost immediately, other events – severe weather, political assassinations and military action – break out and Fitzgerald, a distant descendant of Kennedy, becomes convinced he must undo the heroic action that saved the president’s life. “Need to Know” is probably my other favorite episode. William L. Peterson, star of films like “Manhunter” and “To Live and Die in L.A.,” stars as a government agent who comes to a small town where insanity seems to be contagious. Frances McDormand is the town resident who asked for help when her father went mad. Tension builds and the episode – based on a story by Sidney Sheldon, no less – has the same feeling of dread and paranoia as “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.” And that ending! There’s “Shatterday,” written by Ellison, directed by Craven and starring Willis, about a man who loses himself but is replaced; “Paladin of the Lost Hour,” starring Kaye and Turman, about a man who keeps the world running, in a tale that might remind viewers of Ray Bradbury; “Her Pilgrim Soul,” about a lab experiment that recreates a woman (the wonderful stage actress Anne Twomey) from the past; and lighter fare like “I of Newton,” “The Uncle Devil Show” and “Dealer’s Choice.” I can’t argue that every episode of the 1980s show is the equal of the original, which was a collective masterpiece. It’s hard to imagine how any series could come closer, though. There was a “Twilight Zone” movie, of course, and two more attempts to recreate the small-screen success of Serling’s vision. Remakes still in fashion I have almost no memory of the 2002 reboot of “The Twilight Zone,” featuring Forest Whitaker as the host and narrator. The reboots are always a study in which actors are hot at the time, and this reboot featured performances from Jason Alexander, Lou Diamond Phillips, Jason Bateman and even Bill Mumy, returning in a follow-up to the “It’s a Good Life” story from the very first version of the show. Titus Welliver and Andrew McCarthy are among the neighbors freaking out in a new version of “The Monsters are Due on Maple Street.” About 42 stories were told over the course of a single season, usually two per episode. More interesting, although still lacking compared to the first two incarnations of the show, is director and host Jordan Peele’s remake that aired in 2019 and 2020. The series had big names – Kumail Nanjiani and Tracy Morgan in the first episode alone, followed in later episodes by Adam Scott (in a more paranoid remake of the original series’ “Nightmare at 30,000 feet”) and others. I swear it seems like a preponderance of episodes feature people in the entertainment industry and it feels too self-referential. I did like the conceit that the episodes took place in the same world, however, with the airliner from “Nightmare” showing up as a model on a flight to Mars in another episode and Nanjiani’s face on magazine covers in another episode. I wanted to like Peele’s version more than I did, but I was struck by how slow some of the 20 episodes seem. The inclination to give each story an hour – probably intended to emphasize the gravitas of the series – seemed to work against the punchiness of the franchise. Sci-fi and fantasy anthologies are still very much a thing, with “Black Mirror” presenting absorbing and disturbing stories in the “Twilight Zone” manner. There’s no series that equals the story-telling power of the original, however, except for its 1980s incarnation. View the full article

“How do you get your ideas?” Novelists are asked that question all the time. Answering it is a little like trying to explain how you got your personality or why you keep having that dream about showing up for a book signing completely naked. This year marks the thirtieth anniversary of my first novel, The Pardon, in which Miami criminal defense attorney Jack Swyteck made his debut. Jack is back for an eighteenth adventure in Goodbye Girl. Psychoanalysis aside, I can say from experience that the ideas for this long-running series have come to me in one of two ways. Sometimes, it’s the proverbial bolt of lightning. Other times, the story percolates for months, even years. The Pardon: A Bolt of Lightning For my first published novel, the “bolt of lightning” came in the form of a brush with Miami-Dade Police. My girlfriend (now my wife) and her family had lost their home to Hurricane Andrew and were living with me in a two-bedroom townhouse with no electricity. Right around then, my literary agent called to tell me that he had knocked on every publisher’s door in New York and, “Sorry, James, no one wants to buy your book.” The manuscript I had written over the past four years, while practicing law full time at a major Miami law firm, had crashed and burned. But there was a glimmer of hope. “You got the best rejection letters I’ve ever seen,” my agent said. “Try again.” I was afraid. I couldn’t waste another four years going down the wrong path. I spent night after night staring at a blank computer screen. One night around one a.m., I needed a break from my computer, so I went for a walk. A Miami-Dade Police appeared out of nowhere. “Can I see some identification?” the cop said. I had none—no wallet, no driver’s license, nothing. I was dressed in jogging shorts and T-shirt, ready for bed. “Someone reported a peeping-Tom in the neighborhood,” the officer explained. I stood nervously beside the squad car as he called in on his radio. The dispatcher recited the physical description of the prowler, and I could almost see the cop ticking off similarities on his mental check list. “Under six feet,” the dispatcher said. Check. “Mid-thirties.” Check. “Brown hair, brown eyes.” Double check. “Wearing blue shorts and white T-shirt.” Holy crap! I’m going to jail! “And a mustache,” the dispatcher finally added. The cop narrowed his eyes, trying to discern whether someone could have mistakenly thought I had a mustache. Finally, he said, “Go home.” I walked quickly, thankful I wasn’t riding downtown in the back of a squad car. An arrest would have surely put me in the newspaper. Just being arrested could have ruined me. My life had nearly changed forever. And in another way, it had. The feeling of being innocent and accused left my heart pounding. I took that feeling to the most dramatic extreme and wrote a scene about a death row inmate, hours away from execution for murder he may not have committed. That scene I wrote that night—all night—is the opening scene of The Pardon, my debut novel, published by HarperCollins in 1994. Goodbye Girl: Ten Years in the Percolator Have you ever downloaded music or movies without paying for them? Digital piracy costs the entertainment industry billions. No one can stop it, and in that sense, Goodbye Girl is a dark journey into the virtual Wild West. The tag line for the novel reads “A contentious intellectual piracy case leads to an unsolved murder, and Jack Swyteck’s client—a pop music icon—is the accused killer.” It sounds like something out of today’s headlines. But the idea percolated in my head for more than a decade. In 2010 I was one of the lawyers involved in an epic courtroom battle for ownership of EMI Records. EMI and its iconic labels have been home to countless recording stars, from Frank Sinatra and the Beatles to Bob Dylan and Mariah Carey. In 2007 EMI was acquired in a deal worth €5.9 billion, and the buyer sued, feeling cheated. A big part of EMI’s financial trouble was music piracy. It was killing the entire recording industry. Our legal team lost the trial, but with an inside look at the ravages of piracy, I came away thinking, “there has to be a novel here.” Piracy and pop stars seemed like fertile ground, but I write legal thrillers, and I needed a place for Jack Swyteck in my story. Then came the real-life battle between Taylor Swift and Scooter Braun. Braun and his companies controlled the rights to Taylor Swift’s master recordings, which meant that he was in a better position than anyone to profit from her original catalogue. Swift then re-recorded her first six albums and told her millions of fans to buy “Taylor’s Version.” Brilliant. With that, a story came to me. Jack Swyteck represents “Imani,” a fictional pop icon whose professional nemesis is her ex-husband. Imani would rather thieves profit from her music than let her ex-husband pocket the royalties. She doesn’t re-record her albums. Instead, she tells her fans to “Go Pirate!” A contentious legal battle ensues, and someone ends up dead. Imani has more legal problems than she can handle, and her lawyer, Jack, is at the center of the storm. Was it the percolator (piracy) or the bolt of lightning (Taylor Swift’s brilliant business move) that inspired Goodbye Girl? Maybe a little bit of both. *** View the full article

The term Cascadia conjures images of thick green forests, lush ferns that could swallow a small car, creeping pea-soup fog, windswept bluffs with crashing ocean waves far below, and buckets upon buckets of rain. Those forest are filled with wild animals, some of them of the folklore variety. But the bioregion of Cascadia is so much more than rain-soaked coastlines, extending from southern Alaska to San Francisco, then expanding east to claim all of Washington, and most of British Columbia, Oregon, Idaho, and even a bit of Montana. There’s some rolling farmland and high mountain terrain thrown in for good measure. It’s a diverse region where the flora and fauna make it a little too easy for comfort to hide a body in the woods. What better atmosphere could there possibly be for authors to delve deep into crime fiction or readers to curl up with a good book while rain pelts the windows? I’ve spent most of my life in Cascadia, reading under those towering trees, so it was natural for me to set my new cozy mystery, Hammers and Homicide, deep in the heart of it all. Set in a small town in the Blue Mountains of Oregon, my main character is running her hardware store and enjoying the golden beauty of late August, until a land developer is murdered in her store. Below are seven crime reads that overflow with the spirit of Cascadia. Snow Falling on Cedars, David Guterson One of the most atmospheric books to take you right into the heart of Cascadia’s “falling waters” temperament, is David Guterson’s Snow Falling on Cedars. This book has had a coveted spot on my favorites shelf for years. It is set on San Piedro, a fictional island off the Washington coast where local fisherman Kabuo Miyamoto is on trial for the murder of Karl Heine. It’s alleged that Miyamoto killed his fellow fisherman over a land dispute dating back to WWII when the Japanese-American residents of the island were rounded up and sent to relocation camps. A winter storm on the craggy, remote island brings plenty of slashing rain and freezing fog to immerse the reader straight into those Pacific Northwest vibes. Secrets Don’t Sink, K.B. Jackson K.B. Jackson’s Secrets Don’t Sink takes us inland about twenty miles, but keeps us in a harbor town on a tidal river in Washington’s Puget Sound area. When journalist Audrey O’Connell delves deep into the town’s history in order to write a feature article for an upcoming town festival, she finds far more than she bargained for. Buried history, family secrets, and murder make for a compelling read. Jackson dives into the area’s indigenous Coast Salish roots and secrets that will turn the small town on its head. Death on Tap, Ellie Alexander Staying in Washington for one more book, Ellie Alexander’s Death on Tap takes us east to the Bavarian-themed village of Leavenworth in the Cascade Mountains. This is the first in a series where craft beer brewer Sloan Krause brews up tasty pints and manages to get herself entangled in murder mysteries. In Death on Tap, Sloan has left her husband and her position at the Krause family brewery. She’s gone to work at Nitro, a new brewery in town and is settling in just fine. But when Sloan finds another brewer dead in the fermenting tub with Nitro’s secret recipe in hand, the calm she was beginning to find froths over. Alexander does a great job of bringing the reader right into the heart of the Cascades with her vibrant descriptions of snow-encrusted peaks and crisp mountain air. The Child Finder, Rene Denfeld Moving south, The Child Finder by Rene Denfeld takes the reader deep into Oregon’s Skookum National Forest. Three years before, five-year-old Madison Culver disappeared while on a family outing to cut a Christmas tree. Told from multiple POVs, Naomi is “the child finder,” a private investigator known for her almost eerie knack for locating missing persons. The other voice is “the snow child,” a young girl whose identity remains hidden for much of the haunting story. Even though this book really goes into some dark places, the evocative atmosphere of the snowy forest holds the reader captive with its haunting beauty. Hidden Pieces, Mary Keliikoa Let’s take a detour over to the northern Oregon coast in Mary Keliikoa’s Hidden Pieces. Sheriff Jax Turner is at the end of his rope when a call comes in that a fourteen-year-old girl left for the school bus stop one morning, but never made it onto the bus. Her backpack is found in an unregistered sex offender’s car, and as the case begins to echo a cold case from Jax’s early career, he’s bound and determined to rescue the girl and not repeat the mistakes of the past. The setting is impeccable and moody with towering trees and sideways rain. The fact that it transports the reader to my beloved northern Oregon coast doesn’t hurt one little bit. The Book of Cold Cases, Simone St. James Next, we’re going to stay oceanside with The Book of Cold Cases by Simone St. James. The setting is the dark and rainswept Oregon coast where the biggest mansions hold the heaviest secrets, and some crimes come back to haunt you. True crime blogger, Shea, has a morbid fascination with the unsolved 1970s Lady Killer Murders, so when she meets the woman who was accused, and acquitted, of the murders, she implores the older woman to grant her an interview. The story is told from both women’s viewpoints and moves back and forth through time as the story unfolds. St. James is a master at building a sense of place. This supernatural tale of suspense gave me a chill as if the pounding Pacific Northwest rain was dripping down my spine. Welcome Home to Murder, Rosalie Spielman Lastly, let’s pivot east to the fictional town of New Oslo, Idaho in Rosalie Spielman’s Welcome Home to Murder. This is the first book in the Hometown Mysteries. Recently retired Army veteran Tessa Treslow has reluctantly returned to her small hometown with her dog Vince in tow. While she’s deciding what’s next, she’s happy to put her mechanic skills to use by helping out at her aunt’s auto body shop. But when a man is murdered in Aunt Edna’s garage on the night Tessa returns to town, it looks as if someone is framing Aunt Edna for the murder. Not about to let her aunt take the fall, Tessa throws herself into finding the real killer. Not only does Spielman do a fabulous job showing the beauty of this rural area, the addition of Mangus the Moose charging through the woods will leave readers hooting with laughter. While the setting for New Oslo is still Cascadia, it’s much more rural farming country than lush coastal setting, highlighting the diversity of the bioregion. *** View the full article

When I was eight, I read a book that would dictate the course of my life. That book was Harriet the Spy. As a kid in suburban California, I was endlessly curious. About ancient Egypt, about animals, and about my neighbors. Suburbia, as we’ve read in countless domestic thrillers, is a place of secrets. I didn’t know this explicitly when I was a child, of course. But I think I sensed it. Which is why when I picked up Louise Fitzhugh’s Harriet the Spy, it made total sense. I could spy on my neighbors, just like Harriet, and find out All The Things! It was easy to believe that adults were concealing some choice secrets. I didn’t find out anything interesting, but I did get to know my neighborhood and the act of scribbling on paper fostered my love of journals and notebooks. (I need to issue a blanket apology here to the folks who lived in Rincon Valley in Santa Rosa, California, in the mid-70s. Sorry for skulking around your yards.) But while I was traipsing around my street, poking around for anything amiss, I was unknowingly preparing for my dual adult careers: journalist and novelist. Harriet taught me to observe, and to write. She taught me to think critically and ask questions. Most of all, she taught me to be skeptical of authority (although in fairness, my hippie father did that too. Hey, it was the seventies!) I think about Harriet a lot while writing cozy mysteries. Creating a character whose sole mission is to snoop around when they’re not law enforcement isn’t easy. Let’s face it: one of the main things that’s charming about cozy mysteries is also the genre’s Achilles Heel. How does an everyday person turn into an amateur sleuth? In real life, someone who did that would be considered dangerous, or very, very odd. This is a frequent criticism of the genre. The idea of a baker/librarian/florist learning of a homicide (and possibly even is a suspect themselves) then becoming so moved that they launch their own investigation is, at its core, bonkers. It’s also what cozy fans adore. Harriet the Spy laid the groundwork for this. It wasn’t just about snooping; it was about curiosity, about seeing beyond what’s under the surface. I think that’s why reporters in cozy mysteries are so satisfying to me and why my first cozy series (The Coffee Lover’s Mystery series) is based on a former journalist. The concept takes the DIY ethos of Harriet and merges it with a character who has a totally legitimate reason to investigate. They need to bring their readers the truth — what could be more important than that? They’re supposed to ask questions. They’re put on this earth to be pests. True story: as a journalist, one of my sources called me a “pest.” I took it as a badge of honor. It’s that relentless pursuit of truth that Harriet instilled in me, guiding both my fiction and real-life adventures in digging up the stories that matter. Here are some cozy mysteries with reporter heroines: Front Page Murder by Joyce Tremel: This is a WWII-set mystery about Irene Ingram, whose newspaper publisher father has gone to work as a war correspondent. She’s the editor-in-chief in her father’s absence, and that rankles some men in the newsroom. She also ruffles feathers when she starts asking questions about the death of the paper’s star crime reporter. While trying to keep her family’s small-town paper alive, she also stumbles upon an antisemitic crime tied to the murder. Not only did Tremel capture the era wonderfully, she also accurately portrayed the hectic routine of a small town newspaper person, too. A Dash of Death by Michelle Hillen Klump: Laid off journalists are a staple in real life, and it was good to see Klump reflect this reality in her book. Samantha Warren lost her investigative reporting job and her fiancé — but she’s starting a new mixology company and is featuring her homemade bitters at an event. Someone turns up dead and one of Samantha’s drinks was poisoned with oleander. This book features lots of investigation and great descriptions of the Houston food scene. Doomed by Blooms by Anna St. John: Once a reporter always a reporter, and when heroine Josie Posey retires, she finds that she longs to get back into the action. She’s asked by the local paper to do a fluff piece on a local ballerina — but then the dancer’s husband turns up dead. The story features a spirited group of friends and a sheepdog named Moe. Live, Local and Dead by Nikki Knight: Radio DJ Jaye Jordan leaves her New York City life and buys a small town Vermont radio station. But when she’s target practicing with a snowman, she stumbles upon a dead host — that she fired. Includes a flatulent moose and a cute cat! Knight is also a real-life radio host for legendary New York City radio station 1010 WINS. Off the Air by Christina Estes: Jolene Garcia is a local TV reporter in Phoenix, Arizona, splitting her time between covering general assignments—anything from a monsoon storm to a newborn giraffe at the zoo—and special projects. Jolene investigates the murder of a controversial talk show host, who died under suspicious circumstances. Jolene conducted his final interview, giving her and her station an advantage. But not for long…This book comes out March 26. A Bean to Die For by Tara Lush: Former crime reporter Lana Lewis is fully embracing her post-journalism life. Her coffee shop is thriving, her shih tzu needs a haircut, and she’s meeting her boyfriend’s family for the first time. But when an elderly environmental activist is found dead in the community garden, Lana’s snooping instincts kick into high gear — and then there’s a second murder… View the full article