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You’ve seen the Amish culture in books, movies and even in exaggerated “reality shows.” Without electricity, automobiles, TV, radio or other modern conveniences, the Amish drive horse drawn buggies, use kerosene and candle light, and generally live a rural farming lifestyle. It’s like stepping back in time with a community of people who choose a simple existence and reject any outside influences on their self-described Plain way of life. The Amish have attracted a lot of attention from curious tourists and authors alike. Not only are people curious about this peculiar culture, but it gives a wonderful setting for murder mysteries with a tight-knit community that will protect its own. But how does a community maintain such a unique way of life for hundreds of years without being influenced by the rest of society around them? The Amish use the analogy of a fence. The Amish community, their families, and their way of life are all inside the fence. When someone leaves the Amish way of life, it is called “jumping the fence.” They have left the protection of the community and gone to live like the non-Amish outsiders. While non-Amish people can look over that fence and observe their unique way of life, they are not permitted in close enough to influence them. There is a careful balance struck between the tourists whose interest and curiosity help the Amish to make a living and the private Amish life that is lived within the community. But what keeps outsiders out and insiders in? Language Language is one rung of that fence. The Amish speak a German dialect called Pennsylvania Dutch, and it is the first language an Amish person learns at home. Small children don’t understand English and often don’t start learning English until they go to school. When Amish people speak to each other, it is in their mother tongue. Outsiders don’t understand the conversations, and it helps to keep insiders insulated against outside friendships and influences. Conformity Staying very alike in dress, attitude and behavior is another way to keep people united. Amish communities have a deep belief in being non-prideful. That covers a lot of ground for the Amish, but the bedrock is that everyone is of equal value, and they do not want to set themselves apart or try to puff themselves up. The women all wear a cape dress, which is a certain style of dress that the women sew for themselves at home. Certain colors are permitted, depending on the community, but no prints. The women all wear the same head covering over a tight bun called a kapp, and the same style of apron over their dresses. The women do not cut their hair. The men all dress the same as well with the same colors of shirts to choose from, the same style of pants, and suspenders that complete their outfit. They also wear the same straw or felt hat and have their hair cut in the same style. When a man marries, he grows an Amish-styled beard, so that the men have the same sort of appearance, just like the women do. Houses are all built in similar style, and even the buggies they drive are all made in the same style with the same colors, as well, so that no one stands out in the community. Conformity shows a humble attitude, and a desire to blend in, maintain their uniqueness, and cooperate. Family ties Family ties work to hold people together in one community. The Amish life centers around the nuclear family. A mother, father, and their children are both the bedrock of the community, and the ultimate goal for every young person. Children work alongside their parents learning the skills they need to live off the land. The boys work with fathers doing the outside work with the animals and crops, and the girls work with their mothers learning to cook, bake, clean, sew and do handcrafts. Of course, there are times when the girls and women are helping with the outside work as well, but the Amish tend to keep very strict gender roles. Grandparents will live with their children’s families and are a treasured addition to the family unit. With a close, loving family unit that works together, plays together, and worships together, the family ties are very strong. Amish young people are all given the choice to stay in the community or leave for a regular North American lifestyle, and most of them choose to stay. Their friends, grandparents, aunts and uncles, cousins, parents and siblings are all part of the Amish world. Why would they walk away from every relationship that matters to them? If they do choose to leave, it is a very traumatic experience. Rules In order to enforce the ideals and unique lifestyle, the Amish follow a strict set of rules called the Ordnung. The Ordnung sets out all of the requirements for Amish life, and most of these are at odds with regular North American habits. It sets out how they are to dress, how their buggies are to look, what conveniences they are permitted, such as a generator to run a heater in the barn, or if they are permitted to use a cell phone for business purposes. Once a young person chooses to be baptized into the church, they are then expected to follow those rules. If someone flouts the rules, there are some strict consequences, up to an including shunning. That is when the entire community turns their back on a person until they repent of their transgression and come back into compliance with the community’s rules. The rules are strict, but they also reinforce a strong sense of community an uniqueness. When one is in good standing with the community, there is warmth, assistance in time of need, close friendships and a sense of belonging. These rules unite the community together in their behavior as well as their way of seeing themselves. The Amish are different, and they want to maintain their unique ways without outside influence. And they succeed! The fence holds the community together, and protects them. In Amish mysteries, we explore what happens when someone inside the Amish community is murdered. With that tight sense of community and those strong, protective ideals, who might be willing to kill, and why? And how far will the community go to either protect its own, or find the culprit? The Amish try to deal with all discipline at a community level. They do not call in police support for anything except the direst situations. And a murder counts as dire. So when a detective steps into this Amish community, he or she is dropped into a completely foreign culture. How can they navigate all those cultural differences without an Amish culture interpreter? It’s the perfect setup for a cozy mystery, isn’t it? With a setting filled with cozy comforts like delicious Amish food, the picturesque family-focused community, and an old-fashioned dedication to a Plain, simple lifestyle without modern conveniences, the reader is drawn into a completely different world. Here, rule-breakers might be thrown from the bosom of the community and shunned, but a murderer might still linger in their midst. *** View the full article

The woods have been a popular setting in literature for centuries, from the Grimm Brothers to today’s bestsellers, but what makes a forest such a seductive setting for fiction? When I started putting together ideas for my second novel, What Waits in the Woods, I turned to this interesting and ubiquitous setting. But why? What draws us to the deep, dark woods? We all shudder at the fairy tales the Grimm Brothers gathered, edited, and published in 1812. Since, generations of children have been lulled (or terrified) to sleep by these dark tales. In more modern times, fairy tales have been softened to exclude the most brutal and bloodthirsty elements. Still, the story of Hansel and Gretal, for instance, remains a pretty scary tome for little kids. One common element of these age-old tales is the forest. Hansel and Gretal are abandoned in the woods where they struggle to find their way home, back to civilization, but find instead, an evil witch who has other, shall we say, cannibalistic, plans for them. The idea that this hag has made her gingerbread house, a trap for children, in the woods is important and vital to the story. The woods are a place where evil lurks. Where mean old ladies can safely capture children and no one from town has any idea what’s up, and it’s up to the kids to fight their way out, which of course they do. Thank goodness! The dichotomy of the forest, I believe, is what intrigues us. It is a place that is wild and free. Where childhood adventures are given free rein. Where sprites and fairies hide beneath flower petals. And a place where even forbidden romance can bloom. Nathaniel Hawthorne uses the forest to great effect in his masterpiece The Scarlet Letter. The woods are where Hester goes to meet the love of her life, Arthur Dimmesdale. There she can literally let her hair down far from the prying eyes of her critical and rule-bound Puritan neighbors. But even Hester recognizes the dark side of the woods when she admonishes her young daughter: “Hold thy peace, dear little Pearl!” whispered her mother. “We must not always talk in the market-place of what happens to us in the forest.” For the forest is not only a place of freedom and magic, but also a place where one can break all of societies’ rules, like Hester, a married woman, having an affair with the local pastor. Although Hester believes her husband has been dead these seven years, her society still considers her affair adultery. They see an erring woman whose reputation is further tarnished when she gives birth to a child years after her husband was last seen. The forest literally is a place where nature rules, where man’s laws go to die, where what people do is shielded from society’s view. Thus, terrible things can happen there. There is a feeling of anonymity when one is in the woods and for someone who is harboring villainous thoughts, the woods are the perfect venue to act on those evil designs. Therefore, the forest makes the perfect setting for fairy tale and thriller novels alike. In 2007, Tana French’s debut thriller, In the Woods, was released. I’m a huge fan. Her books are cleverly written and atmospheric beyond measure. That she chose the woods as an integral setting in her first thriller only makes sense. She introduces her detective, Rob Ryan, who as a child goes into the woods to play with two of his little friends. Only Rob returns and the fate of the other children is a tantalizing mystery. The acclaimed Ruth Ware got her start with her bestselling debut, In a Dark, Dark Wood. The story relies heavily on an eerie forest setting. Main character Nora is invited to spend the weekend with old friends in a glass house surrounded by thick and menacing woods. So, of course, everything goes downhill from there. In 2017, Karen Dionne’s bestseller, The Marsh King’s Daughter was released. Okay, this takes place in a marsh, but it’s surrounded by woods in the upper peninsula of Michigan. I’ve been there. There are LOTS of woods. The setting is natural and isolated, beautiful and scary at the same time. And it is the perfect hideout for Dionne’s sadistic villain. I chose the woods as a key setting for my second novel, What Waits in the Woods, partly because I love this setting in the books noted above (and so many others!) and also because I grew up in the wilds of upstate New York. When I first moved to Georgia many years ago, people assumed I hailed from New York City. They were astonished to learn that my hometown of less than 200 people is a five-hour drive and a world away from the Big Apple. My town, like so many others upstate, is a tiny village surrounded by farmland and forest. I spent my childhood playing outside, like we all did back then when the only media entertainment available was Saturday morning cartoons on one of the three TV channels. The woods and fields became our playground, an enchanted natural world that we explored in minute detail. We might be gone for hours but never after dark. When dinnertime summoned or the sun disappeared beyond the horizon, it was time to come inside, into the man-made safety of our homes and leave the natural world to the creatures of the forest. And maybe a ghost or a bogeyman or two. In What Waits in the Woods, we return to the fictional small town of Graybridge, Massachusetts. My main character, Esmé Foster, lives in an old house on the edge of the forest. Paths through the woods connect her house to the dilapidated Ridley homestead in one direction and a gloomy Victorian mansion inhabited by the eccentric Mr. York in the other. Of course, there’s a murky, sinister pond in the middle of the forest for good measure. Esmé reminisces fondly about her childhood, and then her teenage years, with her close group of friends and their exploits in the woods. But all is not fun and games. The woods were also the scene of mishap and murder in the past. Now, in the present, Esmé is home again and trying to pick up the life she left behind over ten years earlier. She is drawn to the woods and yet frightened, especially since her best friend is found murdered in her backyard at the edge of the woods. What was Kara doing in the woods that dark night? And was the killer actually looking for Esmé? Is there a murderer hidden amongst the oaks and pines? Esmé fears for her own safety, yet the woods call to her. Again, I think it is that duality that makes the woods such an alluring setting. Wild wonder and enchantment—and hidden danger. No one employed this theme more expertly than the iconic Robert Frost. His poetry, which features the natural world of New England, is filled with beautiful renderings, yet fraught with sometimes sinister undertones. Consider one of his most famous works, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” It is a bewitching poem, one of my very favorites. A traveler stops to admire the sublime beauty of snow softly falling on an isolated wood, yet the theme of the poem has a much deeper, darker interpretation. The woods are lovely, dark and deep, But I have promises to keep, And miles to go before I sleep, And miles to go before I sleep. The narrator is torn—natural world or man-made world? The choice is between darkness and light, magical or mundane. Or consider the deeper interpretation, he is teetering between choosing life or death. Scary stuff, and yet . . . *** View the full article

If you are going to write a sensational, news-worthy crime story into your fiction, you have a few models for how to proceed. First, there is the Gone Girl model. Use a real-life crime as your inspiration—in Flynn’s case, the disappearance of Laci Peterson—and take liberties. Change names, character backgrounds, and crucial plot elements. Twist the ending, maybe. Allow your readers the faintest ring of familiarity, but make the story your own. Writers who have done this—Eliza Clark in Penance, Emma Cline in The Girls, Alexis Schaitkin in Saint X—are usually not interested in the crime itself, but in the human drama behind it. They, like all of us, watched these events unfold in real life, and wondered about the places we couldn’t see. They wondered how a person goes from a nice, normal schoolgirl to a cult member. They wrote the how of it. They found a hidden truth that only fiction could touch, deep inside bizarre and overreported stories. Your second option: you can use a real-life crime as inspiration and leave the facts exactly as they are. Authors who have done this include Jessica Knoll (Bright Young Women) and Willa C. Richards (The Comfort of Monsters). These authors are interested in the crimes at hand, but they’re not interested in the mainstream narrative. Their texts offer correctives to cultural myths. In Knoll’s case, she questions the “charming” Bundy narrative and draws focus away from the man himself and back to his last victims, the titular young women. Richards’s book, which is set in Minneapolis during the “Dahmer summer,” doesn’t even address its most famous killer by name. Nor, it’s worth noting, does Richards get into the graphic details of his lurid crimes. Instead, she looks at the way race, class, and sexuality determine who is worthy of victimhood, and she examines the effect of an attention-grabbing tragedy, like the Dahmer murders, on an entire community. The real work of fiction is to fill out the margins, zoom out, and expand our view beyond what the news cameras capture. The third option is that you make it all up. I knew when I was beginning Rabbit Hole that I would need a disappearance, but I didn’t want to use a real crime as the basis. To be sure, I borrowed details from real life, the same as any novelist. (I became, for instance, briefly obsessed with the fact that Hunter Biden took up with his brother’s widow for a time, and used that as inspiration for the political family at the heart of the book.) But I was more interested in the machine—the industry—of true crime in the 21st century than any one actual disappearance. What I mean is: I had begun to interrogate my own interest in the genre. I have been a reader of crime fiction since early childhood—Caroline Keene, Christopher Pike, and Stephen King—but I came to true crime in my 20s with nonfiction classics like In Cold Blood, Helter Skelter, and Popular Crime. They were a balm to the serious literature I had to read in college, in grad school, and for my job as a high school English teacher. They were fun, informative, and fast-paced. From books, I quickly expanded into podcasts, based on the recommendations of friends, popular fodder like Serial. Visual media followed with the true crime boom of the late 2010s: The Jinx, Making a Murderer, and the reboot of Unsolved Mysteries. It was a gradual slide from slowly-written, deeply researched work into slick, episodic infotainment, complete with talking heads, reenactments, cliffhangers, and sentimental scores. I took everything I saw at face value and chatted with friends about players in these sordid sagas like they were characters in our favorite soaps. That changed in late 2020, when a documentary film titled American Murder: The Family Next Door came out on Netflix. It was comprised mostly of firsthand footage, taken from Shanann Watts’s social media recordings, videos, and text messages. It had the feel of a Blair Witch Project for the modern age. Halfway through, when it was revealed that the softspoken husband at the center of the home videos had savagely murdered a pregnant Shanann, along with their two young daughters, I was shaken. For reasons I still can’t fully name, I woke up to my habit in that moment. Maybe it was just the last straw, but I felt like I was participating in something perverse, like watching a snuff film. I took a step back. I started wondering how I had gotten to a place where I could choose between rewatching Arrested Development and watching a man dispose of his family like yesterday’s trash. However my interest in true crime had begun, it had curdled into something ghoulish. I was a person who fed on the recent, acute misery of others. So here’s how I wrote fake true crime: I turned myself into the villain. The crime at the center of Rabbit Hole is pedestrian and thinly sketched: a girl goes missing, and she stays gone for ten years. What I was interested in—as the author—was not: drooling over her taut, young body; reenacting some sexual abuse perpetrated against her; or imagining her last moments of perfect agony. I knew, however, that those would be the things true crime communities would be interested in. So I wrote them in—my evil twins. In the book, they are many and they are Redditors. They are anonymous and they know no bounds. They speculate over age of consent laws and wonder, in print, whether a man killed his own daughter. They do not treat the people they are talking about as real people. They do not think anyone can hear them. For them, it’s just fun. Toward the end of my days at a true crime consumer, even before American Murder turned me off to the genre, I started to feel nagged by a sense of fakeness. The slick production, the tight editing, the shapely plot arcs—they reminded me not of life, not of the griefs and tragedies I had personally endured, but of fiction. I was becoming aware that out of a large pile of “what really happened,” a narrative was being artificially shaped. Was this the story of this particular crime, or was it simply a good story? When I sat down to write my book, I thought about tidiness: bad guys on one side of a line, dead girls on the other, a noble lawman (or documentarian) standing between. Was there a way to upset those expectations in fiction? Was there a way to make my fiction, which was by definition fake, feel truer to life than true crime? Could I make it messier and frustrating? Could I capture the pain of not knowing? Could I draw a victim that was neither a martyr nor a devil? Could I follow a surviving family member not on a quest for vindication and justice (who among us gets a quest?) but on a downward spiral, fueled by pain and self-destruction? I wanted to try. How to write fake true crime? Fake is easy. The better question is how to write something true. *** View the full article

Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Vanessa Chan, The Storm We Made (Marysue Ricci/S&S) “An intricate puzzle in which [Chan] deftly moves narrative pieces in time and among viewpoints.” –Booklist Kate Brody, Rabbit Hole (Soho) “A gritty, realistically ambivalent look at how insiders and outsiders experience crime, with a realistic main character to boot.” –First Clue Reviews Tara Isabella Burton, Here in Avalon (Simon and Schuster) “Burton’s latest enthralls while exploring the frequently fraught nature of adult sibling relationships. Cecilia serves as the book’s third rail, dividing its characters and imbuing every scene with a crackling tension. At once spellbinding and sincere.” –Kirkus John Dickson Carr, The Problem of the Wire Cage (American Mystery Classics) “Amateur sleuth Dr. Gideon Fell … provides the traditional ‘one of you is the murderer’ summing-up with aplomb. Brilliant.” –Booklist Alice McIlroy, The Glass Woman (Datura) “McIlroy packs a lot into this slim novel, calling into question the permanence of memory, the infallibility of technology, and the trustworthiness of those we love…McIlroy’s well-paced novel will keep readers guessing until the final pages.” –Booklist Amy McCulloch, Midnight (Doubleday) “Chills, thrills and intense suspense. . . . Midnight is a clever mystery, a twisting page-turner, and a blistering adventure.” –Chris Whitaker Adam Simcox, The Ungrateful Dead Gollancz “A great crime noir . . . dark and twisted.” –SFBook Matthew Blake, Anna O (Harper) “A riveting, unsettling crime novel that will keep you turning pages well past your bedtime. Is Anna O a sleeping beauty or a sleeping killer? Matthew Blake’s tension-filled thriller is as elusive and mysterious as sleep itself.” –Nita Prose RG Belsky, Broadcast Blues (Oceanview Publishing) “Broadcast Blues is a page-turning, meticulously plotted crime novel enriched by a terrific New York sense of place, Dick Belsky’s wicked sense of humor, and his insider’s view of the Machiavellian world that is broadcast news.” –Jonathan Kellerman Ashley Elston, First Lie Wins (Pamela Dorman Books) “Ingeniously plotted. . . Elston whips up plenty of suspense and delivers a satisfyingly serpentine finale. This promises more good things from Elston to come.” –Publishers Weekly View the full article

It was a few weeks in that I realized why I was finding motherhood such a shock to the system. As I leaned over the sink to tearfully rinse another streak of projectile vomit from my unwashed hair, I wondered why my expectations of the newborn phase had been so unrealistic. The answer, I realized to my embarrassment, was that my vague idea of what having a new baby around might actually entail had been almost entirely based on—wait for it—a scene from a Disney film. You know the bit in Lady and the Tramp, where the pretty, smiling mother in a gauzy pink gown gently places her baby to sleep in the crib decked with big silky bows, while singing ‘La La Lu’? With a handsome, smiling husband and shiny cocker spaniel looking on fondly from the bedside? Yes, you can laugh now. By the time I became a mother, it was thankfully no longer taboo to laugh about parenthood’s less satisfying moments— projectile vomit included. But it has taken the latest new wave of crime fiction to finally tell the real truth about motherhood: to tear down its fluffy façade for good, and finally explore the lonely, isolating and psychologically disorientating side of parenting. “Mom-noir”, as it’s been dubbed, is having a major moment—with a new cast of female, feminist crime writers exploring the darker realities of motherhood—and interrogating our expectations of it. And their novels are going deeper, and darker, than ever before. In Megan Abbott’s Beware the Woman, pregnancy is stripped of its sugar-coated image, and recast as a time of mounting claustrophobia, paranoia and tension. Even the heightening of Jacy’s senses —“I could smell everything now…even the carpet glue, the wood paste in the staircase post”—serves to make her increasingly aware of how enclosed and vulnerable she is in her sinister father-in-law’s wood cabin as her due date inches closer. Meanwhile, for Whitney– a character at the heart of Ashley Audrain’s The Whispers—motherhood has been a sort of “voluntary death.” She “hates the plastic bins full of toys, and hates sitting on the floor… She hates trying to sound light and cheerful and surprised when she isn’t. She hates feigning interest in things that aren’t real.” Whitney is mesmerized by the way her friend Blair seems to find the experience rewarding. Yet in truth, Blair is “lonely, desperately and achingly lonely, the way a mother with a family is never supposed to be.” In Lisa Jewell’s darkest novel yet, None of This Is True, two very different mothers are driven to breaking point with their lots in life. In Kate Collins’ gothic thriller A Good House for Children, a mother comes close to madness after she is left isolated in the remote home her husband insists is perfect for their family. In Sarah Vaughan’s novel Little Disasters, we see new mother Jess pushed to the edge by a newborn baby who just will not stop crying—and then placed under investigation when she presents the child at hospital with an unexplained head wound. For Harriet Tyce, there was nothing more frightening than the other mothers at her child’s top London school; they became the inspiration for her thriller, The Lies You Told. With characters like these—mothers who are unhappy to be mothers, and who sometimes even feel rage toward their children—the genre is resetting the boundaries of what we, as mothers, feel we can and can’t talk about. “This book trend is opening up new conversations about motherhood that so many women are desperate to have,” says literary agent Madeleine Milburn. They appeal to readers, she says, because “the fears, frustrations and anxieties that we have as mothers are universal experiences.” Most mothers secretly worry about the unlikely things that worry at the edge of our consciousness tipping over into full-blown horror. What if your fears about your child being abnormal turned out to be justified? What if your anger at them spilled over into something you could no longer control? What if your paranoia about being judged by other mothers was not all in your head after all? “Any scenario that feels like it could be your ‘worst nightmare’ lends itself to great suspense,” Milburn says. My novels—and others in the emergent subgenre dubbed “mum-noir”—reflect the way in which, when we become parents, what constitutes “our worst nightmare” changes. As our lives turn inward, at least for a while, our deepest darkest fears become not external—a murderer, a psychopath—but things closer to home. What if your husband is lying to you? What if your mum-friends weren’t really friends at all? What if, one day, your baby cried so loud and so long that you really did lose it? My own novels were inspired by these sorts of fears and anxieties, which to me felt specific to the experience of having young children. In Greenwich Park—mostly written on maternity leave with my first child—anxious pregnant mother Helen befriends the unpredictable Rachel at her first prenatal class—but lives to regret it when Rachel starts to encroach further and further into her life. In my new novel, The Other Mothers, journalist Tash is frustrated with her life—trying to cobble together the remnants of a career after the birth of her son, living in a cramped flat because she can’t, in London, afford any better. In her frustration with motherhood, she feels seduced by the Instagram-friendly lives of the elite, well-heeled women she gets to know at her son’s playgroup—until she realizes these other mothers might know more than they’ve let on about the death of a local nanny. Perhaps crime fiction—existing at one remove to our real lives—gives us a safe space to explore feelings we’d rather not admit we all have. Women are reluctant to admit complicated feelings about motherhood because “we fear being judged,” says the author Audrain, who is also the author of bestselling novel The Push. Are these stories becoming more popular because modern parenthood is more fraught with anxiety than ever before? Perhaps it’s because, as an older mother in Liane Moriarty’s brilliant motherhood thriller Big Little Lies sighs observing a group of kindergarten parents, “mothers take their mothering so seriously now.” For today’s mothers, there is a greater disconnect than ever between expectation and the reality. The time and energy available for “school gates mothering” has inevitably shrunk as women have played a more active role in the workforce. Yet the expectations we set for ourselves about motherhood, our careers and everything else—in the age of Instagram and a thousand parenting manuals—have only grown. Modern mothers have to contend with social media feeding us a version of parenthood that’s barely more realistic than the Disney cartoon version that made its mark on me as a child. The seductive, sanitized—and crucially, shoppable – version of motherhood we see on on our screens can feed an entirely unrealistic expectation of what parenthood actually means or looks like. Author Colette Lyons became intrigued by the relationship between motherhood and social media when she found herself tumbling down Instagram rabbit holes during night-feeds for her unsleeping baby daughter. “Of course, the algorithm knew me,” she said. “So it fed me Momfluencers.” Her guilty late-night scrolling ended up inspiring her dark and unputdownable Mom-noir thriller, People Like Her, which tells the story of influencer Emmy Jackson—aka Mamabare—whose online success as an insta-mom starts to threaten her marriage, her morals and her family’s safety. Like me, Audrain says she has the irresistible urge to make a disclaimer– “I obviously love my children, but….” – every time she says something negative about motherhood in an interview. And yet, the success of the genre is testament to how universal these feelings are. Audrain is sometimes told her complex depictions of motherhood are “very dark” – something she believes shows “just how uncomfortable we are with the deepest truths about women’s interior lives, particularly women who resist the traditional identity of a mother.” She is also frequently asked if she is worried about what her children will think of her books one day—“with the implication that I should.” She says: “I’m not sure fathers get the same line of questioning. And truly, I don’t worry about what my kids will think of my work. I’m not raising them to have unrealistic expectations of what womanhood and parenthood will feel like.” Amen to that. I would recommend giving Lady and the Tramp a miss on your next family movie night, too. *** View the full article

Will robots dream of us in the same way that we dream about them? They say that AI can “hallucinate”, right? Hadn’t Philip K. Dick warned us about all this many years ago? Maybe we weren’t paying enough attention then. Maybe we aren’t paying enough attention now. What a strange world we are being thrust into… and are we ready? Sunny, the titular robot character of my novel, was conceived in a dream. Several years ago, I tossed and turned in bed, unnerving visions unfurling in my head. In this nightmare I was being chased by a robot that I myself had programmed. The domestic robot had turned on me – and I had been under the illusion that it was merely a household appliance, there to help with the laundry, dust a shelf, or vacuum the floor. I was trying to access its “dark settings” in order to switch the damn thing off, but I wasn’t having much luck: I couldn’t find the manual that would provide me with the right set of instructions, and the machine was definitely out to get me. It was one of the nastiest nightmares I’ve ever had, so vivid, so real. I woke in the proverbial sweat, and was instantly relieved to realize we hadn’t yet reached that stage where the machines were taking over. Not yet, at least, not yet. That morning, arriving at the breakfast table, I was visibly shaking, the remnants of the nighttime ordeal still reverberating in my bones. I told my wife about the awful visions, the dreadful thing that couldn’t be switched off, that couldn’t be controlled, and I could still see the eerie red eyes of the robot glowing in my mind. My own fertile imagination had somehow turned on me, it was almost a betrayal – why could I not have had happy dreams, scoring a goal in a World Cup final, or headlining Glastonbury with a kickass band behind me? If dreams are in some way a process of filtering out our fears and anxieties, well, what was I filtering out here? What exactly was a I nervous or anxious about? I had never given much thought to AI before, but it was there, coming for me. Was it a way of sharpening my flight or fight response for when that day eventually came? “Sounds scary,” my wife said, “but it would make a good movie.” And there was the genesis. The spark I needed. Turn this terrifying dream into something positive, or at least something useable. “The Dark Settings” would be its title. Yes, it could very well make an interesting movie, the notion had potential: the visuals were there, the lead characters were strong, it was unsettling as all hell… but how about making it into a darn good novel first. I sprang straight into action while the idea was fresh. I knew AI was going to be a hot topic for years to come. It obviously wasn’t going away. If anything, it was going to be more of a talking point, more of a reading point, more of a debating point as we saw out our days on this overburdened planet. Open up any paper or click on any news site on any given day, and you’re sure to find some article or opinion piece extoling its virtues, premonishing its diabolism. The novel was written quite fast and seemed a winner when I pitched it to friends and acquaintances (no one ever has the patience to listen to anyone else’s dream, but the fact that I had it now as a novel, or the bones of one, well, they’d give me thirty seconds or so in the elevator). The completed novel was first published by Dublin’s indie stalwart press, Betimes Books in 2018 (under the title “The Dark Manual”) who saw its potential and adorned it with a beautiful front cover. Soon after it was picked up for a TV drama series by Apple TV. Things didn’t go quite so smoothly from there, and the venture got stalled along the way (yep, a global pandemic will do that to projects, folks, and a writers’/actors’ strike didn’t help matters either) but finally it looks like Sunny, the robot, will finally grace our small screens, the book now having the same title as the TV show, in the not-too-distant future (which, ironically, is what the book is all about). So, what is “Sunny” the novel now? A mystery? Crime drama? A portentous sci-fi exploration? A slice of literary fiction charting the anguish and dilemmas of a heartbroken woman trying to navigate treacherous times? Sure, why not. All of the above and more, I hope. And what have I learned from all of this? Well, I’ve read all those New York Times op-ed pieces of impending AI catastrophe/utopia (take your pick), and I am never quite sure which way I lean. But my biggest takeaway, from a creative viewpoint at least, is this: that when those murky dreams come, as you lay there at night silent and vulnerable shrouded in darkness. When the robot or the monster or the blurry ghost, or the knife-wielding psychopath comes to track you down, don’t bother boring anyone the next morning (trust me, nobody wants to listen, save perhaps your long-suffering spouse), just write it all down – it’s therapeutic, if nothing else, and you never know what kind of alternative life might emerge. Sunny is here. AI is here. I hope you’ll read my novel; I hope you’ll heed the warnings. *** View the full article

For me, there are few things more enjoyable than a good, old-fashioned whodunnit. Or a good, new-fashioned whodunnit. I say it a lot on this website, but, to me, the best thing that can happen in a book or a movie is someone crying out: “someone in this house is a murderer!” Or, if that doesn’t happen literally, I’d like that to be the overall vibe of what I’m reading or watching. As such, I was thrilled and honored to get to pick the best traditional mysteries that came out in 2022. The “traditional mystery” is a story in which there is a murder (or a robbery), and an investigator (either an inspector or a plucky amateur) follows a series of clues to find the killer (or the thief). If there is in fact a corpse, the story is not about the trauma of death or the proximity to death—the dead body is a riddle, and nothing more. These new entrants into the genre are scintillating and intriguing mysteries, featuring a panoply of gutsy amateur sleuths and dogged detectives, twisty plots and logistical puzzles. All are stylish, playful inheritors to this tradition, delicately toying with the history of the category’s expectations and innovations. Richard Osman, The Last Devil to Die (Pamela Dorman/Viking Books) REJOICE, for the new Thursday Murder Club book has arrived!! (Actually, I should have said RE-JOYCE). I know I say every time how I’m so excited and “this one” is going the best but I mean it every time, and I mean it now. The Last Devil to Die is a delightful romp taking our four protagonists deep into the worlds of drug dealing, art forgery, and, worst of all, the antiques industry. I’ve been waiting for this book for a whole year and it didn’t let me down. I just wish, as with every installment of the Thursday Murder Club series, that it were about a thousand pages longer –Olivia Rutigliano, CrimeReads and LitHub editor Dan McDorman, West Heart Kill (Knopf) With this ultra-clever and teasingly metafictional debut, Dan McDorman has both created a perfect locked room mystery and exploded it. Set in the 70s (or is it so meta as to only have the setting of Now and the character of the Reader?), the story follows a cast of bored, drunken rich people at their elite summer club, where two interlopers have arrived for the weekend: the first Jewish applicant for membership, and a poetically weary private detective who (in my mind at least) definitely pulls off his blonde mustache. After everyone sleeps with everyone else, some murders happen. So yeah, basically The Ice Storm as if written by Borges, then solved by Chandler. –Molly Odintz, CrimeReads Senior Editor Jesse Q. Sutanto, Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice for Murderers (Berkley) Vera Wong is a lonely, bored tea shop owner who can’t seem to connect with her zoomer son, but that all changes when one day she finds a dead body in her shop and takes an important clue for herself before the police can get there. I love a novel featuring a mature woman solving a crime, especially one so confident in her own abilities. –MO Janice Hallett, The Twyford Code (Atria) Okay, so this would be a great mystery novel whether or not it featured a community theater group, but the added drama makes The Appeal into a perfect follow-along caper. Told in emails, announcements, and other found texts, The Appeal has a charmingly meta set-up: two law students have been assigned all of these documents to analyze. If they misinterpret them, the wrong person may go to prison for a long time. And you, the reader, can interpret this fair play mystery right alongside them. –MO Femi Kayode, Gaslight (Mulholland) Investigative psychologist Philip Taiwo is back in this gripping, splashy mystery about the pastor of a Nigerian megachurch accused of killing his wife. But, as Taiwo knows, as often with religious operations like this, nothing is what it seems. –OR Leonie Swann, The Sunset Years of Agnes Sharp (Soho) A dead body has been discovered next door to Sunset Hall, an unconventional senior residence in the English countryside. The thing is, the residents of Sunset Hall are also hiding a dead body, themselves. And they realize that if they solve the mystery of this new dead person, they can doctor their own crime scene to pin their killing on the murderer, exonerating themselves. So they get right to work. A true delight.–OR Nita Prose, The Mystery Guest (Ballantine) A meticulous maid in a five star hotel finds herself at the center of a murder mystery when a guest—a world famous author of murder mysteries—dies in the hotel’s very public tea room. Prose sets up a classic mystery with a few deft notes of psychological suspense to create a heady whirlwind of an investigation. –Dwyer Murphy, CrimeReads Editor-in-Chief Tom Mead, The Murder Wheel (Mysterious Press) Set within the theater world of 1938 London, this ingenious new novel is packed full with lush period detail, a glittery cast of characters, and a genuinely compelling puzzle at its center. Mead knows his subject and gives the reader a full immersion into this compelling mystery. –DM Benjamin Stevenson, Everyone In My Family Has Killed Someone (William Morrow) You know what you should read, this holiday season? My Family Has Killed Someone, Benjamin Stevenson’s smash-hit whimsical murder mystery about coming to terms with who you are (and who you are not). In the novel, our narrator-hero Ernie Cunningham (teacher, crime novel fan, and how-to author) finds himself embroiled in a complicated plot when a family reunion at a ski resort turns into a whodunnit. Could the mysterious events be the work of a serial killer called the Black Tongue? Perhaps. And all this, by the way, takes place three years after Ernie reported his own brother Michael to the police for murder after Michael requested help disposing of a dead body that turned out not to be dead. So, yes folks. I can’t wait for this one. –OR Brendan Slocumb, Symphony of Secrets (Anchor) Brendan Slocumb burst onto the scene with the brilliant literary mystery The Violin Conspiracy, and his follow-up is just as good. Split between the present day and 1918, the story slowly reveals how a renowned composer may have stolen all that made his music great from the autistic Black woman who was once his best friend. Like Slocumb’s debut, Symphony of Secrets uses the framework of classic detective fiction to tell a larger story of cultural appropriation and how our unequal society determines who gets to reap the benefits of talent and produce art. –MO Sarah Penner, The London Seance Society (Park Row) bestselling author Sarah Penner’s book is a canny romp through the Victorian zeitgeist that cemented Conan Doyle’s interests in spiritualism, a world in which science and rationalism clashed with spectacle and illusion and all of those things clashed with a preoccupation with ghosts and the occult. Anyway, it’s about a famed spiritualist and a non-believer who wind up joining forces to solve a murder… and then find themselves embroiled in a crime. Tell me you yourself wouldn’t run through quicksand to acquire this book, and I won’t believe you. –OR Julia Bartz, The Writing Retreat (Atria) Julia Bartz’s horror-whodunnit debut is set during a mysterious month-long writing retreat at a famous horror writer’s estate, where the guests are made to complete an entire novel from start to finish, competing for an enormous book deal. (If ever a book synopsis knew how to read the room, it would be this one.) Cutthroat politics and disappearing contestants don’t deter our heroine, an underdog writer named Alex, from trying to win the literary tournament. But it’s not long before she senses that something far more insidious than the promise of prestige seems to be hanging over the whole affair. Part publishing satire, part haunted house tale, part classic mystery, part snowstorm-set thriller, The Writing Retreat promises an ideal cocktail of twisty, spooky, gripping entertainment, as well as hefty catharsis for anyone who’s ever published anything. –OR Danielle Trussoni, The Puzzle Master (Random House) Trussoni’s new novel is an absolute joy to dive into. A former football star suffers a brain injury that results in him acquiring extraordinary puzzle solving abilities. His path eventually leads him to a woman in prison drawing mysterious puzzles that seem to connect to the work of a thirteenth-century Jewish mystic. If that sounds like a heady, mesmerizing, exhilarating story, you’d be right, and you’d want to get your hands on this Trussoni gem as soon as possible. –DM View the full article

This year’s offering of scifi and fantasy crime fiction leans heavily towards alternative history and near-future imaginings, but with plenty of bizarre and magical detours into the just plain weird. Speculative fiction can be a catch-all phrase in literary circles for anything that’s genre but that literary people like, but here, we’re using it unite an incredibly diverse set of takes paired together only through their shared interest in using crime and mystery tropes to advance and complicate their own takes on other genres. As usual, this list left me both happy and hollow inside, because I will never have time to read All The Books and you may see a few favorites from this year missing from the list. If I could sit in the corner and quietly read for the rest of my existence, I could still never get to all the titles I wanted to recommend, but alas, we have a but a short few years to make our lasting impact on this earth, and also, the world must be lived in, and not merely commented upon (as my therapist would say, but a bit less eloquently pretentiously). Allison Epstein, Let the Dead Bury Their Dead (Doubleday) An evil vila, or shapeshifting spirit in Russian folklore, is the catalyst for this noir take on the Russian Empire just after their pyrrhic victory against Napoleon. As untold suffering grips the empire, and revolutionary fervor brews, a beautiful woman appears to a discontented prince and promises him the changes he so desires, if he will but follow her lead. She soon makes the same promises to a small group of dedicated fighters trying to reform (or overthrow) their current regime. Full of historical detail, Epstein’s alternate history brings together many aspects of Russian history for a novel that, while it may skip around in its inspirations, feels true to the thoughts and feelings of its time period. Em X. Liu, The Death I Gave Him (Solaris) A high-concept near-future locked-room take on Hamlet, The Death I Gave Him follows a family known for their futuristic medical breakthroughs as they face a dramatic crisis. At the start of the novel, the heir to the throne finds his father murdered, and suspects his uncle may be to blame. With the help of his trusty AI assistant, Horatio, he locks down the vast underground lab in which the family pursued their unholy discoveries, and attempts to discover who’s truly at fault. Nathan Ballingrud, The Strange (Saga) Space Western!!!!!! Charles Portis meets Edgar Rice Burroughs in this ode to classic Westerns and science fiction. In The Strange, set in an alternate 1931, a young girl heads out from the Martian frontier outpost of New Galveston seeking vengeance against those who have threatened her father and their family’s precarious existence. Delightful in every way, The Strange lives up to the promise of its title (and then some). Paz Pardo, The Shamshine Blind (Atria) Paz Pardo’s The Shamshine Blind is one of the more exciting debuts to hit in early 2023, a heady mix of high-concept speculative fiction, alternative history, and hardboiled detective fiction. In an alternate 2009, a new chemical compound that can elicit targeted human emotions has been weaponized in war and made ubiquitous for recreational purposes, upending the global and social orders. Amidst the new chaos, a small city enforcement agent gets put on the trail of a new product, a trail that points in the direction of a much broader conspiracy. Pardo’s novel is full of wit and wild invention and is sure to leave readers wanting more. –Dwyer Murphy, CrimeReads Editor-in-Chief Ayesha Manazir Siddiqi, The Centre (Gillian Flynn Books) What would you do to be part of the most elite language academy ever established? And what would you be willing to keep secret? The Centre follows a struggling translator who learns of a place where people can go to become completely fluent in a new language in mere days of effort. She is determined to reap the rewards, but shocked when she begins to find out the dark secrets underpinning the secretive institution. A vicious and entertaining speculative satire of late-stage capitalism. D. L. Soria, Thief Liar Lady (Del Rey) What if Cinderella was not, in fact, a dainty fan of the monarchy, but instead, a conniving revolutionary con artist fighting her way to the top of power in a divided kingdom warring over ancient magic? Also, what if her stepsisters and her stepmother were all really nice to her? And finally, what if the prince to whom she was engaged had a distractingly handsome and brooding foster brother with revolutionary potential of his own? D. L. Soria explores these possibilities and more in her delightfully fractured fairy tale. Owen King, The Curator (Scribner) In Owen King’s delightful new fantasy, The Curator, a revolution has upended a fantastical city in which cats are gods, conjurers are criminals, and the aristocracy uses fiendish means to hold on to their place in society. Meanwhile, a young woman seeks answers in her brother’s demise, and may find them in the ruins of a museum dedicated to investigating the most esoteric secrets. King’s novel feels like the heir to Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels, particularly one of my favorites, Night Watch. Caitlin Starling, Last to Leave the Room (St. Martin’s) A scientist is performing dangerous experiments deep inside the earth that appear to be warping the very geography of her city. Meanwhile, her basement keeps getting deeper….and deeper…until one day, a door appears where there was once a blank wall. On the other side of the door is the scientist’s doppelgänger, and her perfect complement—cheerful when she is morose, friendly when she needs solitude. This book has brought me a delicious sense of unease, and Starling’s signature intricate world-building is once again on full display. Also, there are some A+ power reversals throughout the novel for fascinating take on how circumstance and fear determine morality. Jinwoo Chong, Flux (Melville House) Flux is full of surprises and difficult to describe. Three storylines slowly begin to converge into a tale of time-traveling corporate serial killers. Woven into all three stories is a connection to a 1980s detective show featuring a now-canceled star facing damning abuse allegations. If you like stories featuring neo-noir style, corporate corruption, and anything else that wouldn’t be out of place in a slightly more humorous version of the Blade Runner universe, then check this one out! Also notable as an exploration of queer and Asian-American identities. Chris McKinney, Sunset, Water City (Soho) Chris McKinney’s Water City trilogy comes to a thrilling finale in Sunset, Water City, set in McKinney’s underwater Hawaiian citadel in a post-climate change future. Read this trilogy if you’ve ever wondered what a Philip K. Dick novel would feel like underwater—that sounds like a joke, but this is impeccable scifi noir and a stirring series for our times. View the full article

The Christmas Egg, first published in 1958, is an unconventional Christmas crime novel by an unconventional writer. Mary Kelly was one of the most talented British novelists to write crime fiction in the post-war era, coming to the fore just before P.D. James and Ruth Rendell appeared on the scene. Having risen rapidly to the heights, she abandoned the genre after publishing a mere ten books over a span of eighteen years. Her disappearance from the scene was as mysterious as it was complete; she did not publish a novel after 1974, even though she lived until 2017. This was her third book. Like its predecessors, A Cold Coming and Dead Man’s Riddle, it featured Detective Chief Inspector Brett Nightingale. In the run-up to Christmas, he is confronted by the puzzle of the death of the elderly Princess Olga Karukhina, who had fled her native Russia in the wake of the Revolution. But this is not an elaborate whodunit in the tradition of Agatha Christie or Dorothy L. Sayers. Nor is it a police procedural novel of the kind that John Creasey had popularised in the 1950s. Kelly’s principal focus is on the study of character and on the idiosyncrasies of British society. The idea for the story came to her after she was sent, in error, a set of books about Russia to review. The books were meant to be sent to Marie-Noelle Kelly, and this prompted Mary Kelly to read the work of her not-quite-namesake. This in turn led her to attend an auction of Fabergé eggs. Her knowledge of Islington, an important setting in the story, came from evening walks in the neighbourhood after she and her husband had visited the opera at Sadlers Wells. When, eight years after its original appearance, the novel was finally published in the U.S., the eminent American critic Anthony Boucher lauded it in his column in the New York Times. Noting that Nightingale was an amateur tenor, he described him as an “unusually attractive” character. For Boucher, the book was “fascinating as a stage in the development of an important writer, and a pleasing entertainment in its own right.” Kirkus Reviews also approved the novel, pointing out that the story involved “more pursuit than procedure,” and saying it was “easy to read, fast to follow, with no remission of interest.” Mary Kelly’s love of music is evident in much of her fiction, including The Christmas Egg. She was an enthusiastic singer, a mezzo-soprano with an extensive knowledge of lieder, capable of singing Schubert’s song cycle from memory. Brett Nightingale’s wife, Christina, was an opera singer, and Mary gained insights into the life and work of professional singers from Monica Sinclair, a member of the Covent Garden Opera Company who was Sir Thomas Beecham’s preferred choice as contralto. Critics who shared Kelly’s devotion to opera, and derived particular pleasure from her work, included two notable commentators usually associated with the classic whodunit rather than the psychological crime novel, namely Boucher and the composer Bruce Montgomery, better known as the detective novelist and Sunday Times reviewer Edmund Crispin. The Christmas Egg consolidated Kelly’s developing reputation as a quirky, intelligent crime novelist, but she was never interested in following fashion or working to a template. Later, in an excess of modesty that seems typical of her, she would describe the three Nightingale books as “sins of my youth.” She wrote a novel without Nightingale, Take Her up Tenderly, which was rejected and never published. Her next book, which appeared in 1961, was very different, and it heralded a breakthrough in her literary career. The Spoilt Kill was set in the Staffordshire Potteries, and had a workplace setting as memorable as it was unusual. The protagonist was an enquiry agent called Hedley Nicholson, but he was as unlike, say, Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe as Nightingale was unlike Freeman Wills Crofts’ Inspector French or Ngaio Marsh’s Inspector Roderick Alleyn. The book was critically acclaimed and won the Crime Writers’ Association Gold Dagger for the best crime novel of the year, which was presented to her by Sir Compton Mackenzie. Given that in winning the prize, Kelly’s book edged out John Le Carre’s Call for the Dead, which introduced the now legendary George Smiley, the scale of her achievement is clear. She was promptly elected to membership of the prestigious Detection Club at the age of thirty-four; later, she became the club’s secretary. In reviewing The Christmas Egg, Boucher expressed the hope that Nightingale would return. What he (like almost everyone else) failed to realise is that, in a very oblique passage in The Spoilt Kill, Kelly had effectively killed off her first series detective in a car crash. Nicholson reappeared in her next novel, but he, too, was quickly abandoned. After that, she concentrated on writing stand-alone novels, and although her style was too understated for her ever to achieve bestseller status, she retained a devoted coterie of admirers. Edmund Crispin was among them, enthusing over Write on Both Sides of the Paper (1969): “her insights into human behaviour are tethered, wonderfully effectively, to the availability of spending money and the frequency of buses… Such conscientiousness may sound dull. In fact, however, it is all in a flight with the gentle, witty, profound acuity with which her characters are treated.” Yet there was something willful, as well as something admirable, about the way that, throughout her career as a novelist, Mary Kelly defied the conventions and commercial imperatives that guide the fortunes of almost all writers. Her publishers, not surprisingly, began to despair of her. So did some critics. Even her admirers admitted to some frustration. An example was H.R.F. Keating, who opened an essay about her books in Twentieth Century Crime and Mystery Writers as follows: “One of the best contemporary British crime writers, but: such must be the verdict on Mary Kelly.” Keating regretted the fact that she published so infrequently, and felt that she skimped sometimes on plotting, but emphasised that “there is enormous pleasure to be got from her books…what propels the reader through the pages is…the sheer excellence of the writing…from her very first sentence Mary Kelly observes so meticulously, describes so exactly and economically. Hers is a never-blinking eye.” Mary Theresa Coolican was born in London on 28 December 1927. She was educated at a convent and at Edinburgh University, where she met her future husband, Denis Kelly (to whom I am indebted for sharing his loving and fascinating memories of her). After marriage and grad- uation, she worked as an auxiliary nurse and, like Denis, as a teacher; her first permanent post was as a teacher of Latin and English at the Convent of the Handmaids of the Sacred Heart of Jesus in Beckenham. She enjoyed detective fiction, including the novels of Michael Innes and Dorothy L. Sayers, and the clear struc- ture of the classic genre appealed to her; she often likened the “Golden Age of Murder” between the wars to the era of sonnets and sonneteers. At one point, her publisher promoted her as “the new Dorothy L. Sayers”, but this was wide of the mark. Mary Kelly’s writing was nothing like Sayers’, far less Christie’s. Satisfaction with the plots of her books always eluded her. For a novelist with such gifts and potential, That Girl in the Alley (1974) marked a low-key and anti-climactic end to her career as a published novelist; thereafter just one short story appeared, in an anthology in 1976. She decided to set her next book in Prague, and researched the manufacturing of cellos for the background. Unfortunately, she felt dissatisfied with the new novel, and although she kept working at it, off and on, over several years, she never finished it. Mary Kelly enjoyed socialising with fellow crime writers; her friends included such disparate characters as Patricia Highsmith, Anthony Berkeley, William Haggard, Josephine Bell, John Trench, Joan Aiken, and Michael Gilbert. At one point, when Michael Innes had lost interest in the Detection Club, she persuaded him to re-engage. But she became deaf relatively early in life, and as time passed, she lost touch with her colleagues and the genre. Instead, she pursued other interests. She and Denis were keen botanists, and she enjoyed decorating and gardening. They started renovating houses, selling up, and starting all over again, before eventually settling in Bath. In her seventies, she decided to write another book. The inspiration was the nursery rhyme “Ding dong bell.” The story was to concern a drowning in a well in Surrey, and was meant to be slyly comic. Regrettably, she did not finish it before illness intervened. As a writer, Mary Kelly was one of a kind. It’s clear from reading her work, including The Christmas Egg, that she admired courage and honesty, and these are qualities that she manifested in her personal life. There are no locked room mysteries in her novels, no elaborate puzzles or plot twists, and no eccentric crime-solving genius. But in their quiet, polished way, her best books deserve to be ranked as crime classics. From the introduction to THE CHRISTMAS EGG by Mary Kelly. Introduction copyright © 2020 by Martin Edwards. Reprinted by permission of the publisher, Poisoned Pen Press. View the full article

You might remember our series “10 Crime Movies You Forgot Take Place During Christmas.” We have six installments: one from 2018, one from 2019, one from 2020, one from 2021, one from 2022, and one from 2023. We also a list of the ten MOST obvious crime movies set at Christmas. But you know what we don’t have? A list of crime movies set around New Year’s Eve. Until now, that is. A “Christmas movie” is different than “a movie set at Christmas.” But is a “New Year’s Eve movie?” the same thing as a “a movie set at New Year’s?” Truthfully, I have no idea. But we’re going to figure it out together. This is not a comprehensive list. Realistically, there will be sequels. Let the countdown begin. (Although… this list is not ranked, so not really.) After The Thin Man (1936) After the Thin Man is (as you might expect) the sequel to The Thin Man, but it takes place literally right after. The Thin Man takes place over Christmas, After the Thin Man takes place at New Year’s. Pour yourself some champagne and hit play! Sunset Boulevard (1950) One of the greatest, creepiest scenes in all of cinema is Norma Desmond’s New Year’s Eve party, at which she tells Joe that she loves him. Things don’t go so well after that! The Godfather Part II (1974) The first Godfather movie is a Christmas movie (kind of), but the second Godfather movie is a NYE movie (also kind of). At the big New Year’s Party, Michael Corleone comes up to Fredo, hugs him, kisses him on the lips, and says “I know it was you, Fredo. you broke my heart. You broke my heart.” So, the most important scene. Money Train (1995) Woody Harrelson and Wesley Snipes play former foster brothers-turned-transit cops in this action comedy who wind up embroiled in a plan to steal from the MTA on New Year’s Eve? How? They’re going to rob the money train (a train car that collects and carries subway fares from station to station). J-Lo and Chris Cooper are in this movie also, which is how you know this was made in the 90s. Ocean’s 11 (1960) Yes, the original Oceans 11 is about a New Year’s Eve heist! You have to hand it to the Rat Pack for even having energy enough to pull of a heist on NYE; I barely have enough energy to stay awake until midnight. Walk Softly, Stranger (1950) Do you love Joseph Cotten and Alida Valli in the classic noir The Third Man? Well, do I have a movie for you! Joseph Cotten plays a small-time criminal who arrives in a midwestern town where he falls in love with a paralyzed shoe factory heiress… but this doesn’t stop him from traveling to other cities to pull off heists. An insane movie. Insane. Repeat Performance (1947) If you only watch one movie on this list, let it be Repeat Performance, one of most interesting, ahead-of-its time movies made in the Golden Age of Hollywood. And I still don’t know exactly what a “New Year’s Eve movie” is but this is definitely one if there is any. The movie opens on New Year’s Eve 1946, with an actress having killed her husband. But she wishes she could do the whole year over again… and gets that chance. Fruitvale Station (2013) Ryan Coogler’s feature debut Fruitvale Station is about the real-life death of Oscar Grant, a young man shot and killed by Bay Area Rapid Transit officers in Oakland in on New Year’s Eve, 2008. Dick Tracy (1990) You remember the scene, when Al Pacino’s New Year’s Eve party is interrupted by cops with machine guns. “Police brutality, boys.” Looking for Mr. Goodbar (1977) Truthfully, I wouldn’t watch this one if you’re hoping to start the New Year off HAPPY. View the full article

Good and bad. Good. There were many good things in Daniel Kennicott’s life right now. He was entering his seventh year as a homicide detective and had advanced in record time to be one of the top officers on the Toronto homicide squad. After too many years of failed and near-miss relationships, he was living with a woman, Angela Breaker, who seemed to be his perfect match. Bad. It had been ten years since his older brother, Michael, his only sibling, had been murdered. The case never solved. Twelve years since his parents had been killed in a car crash, and even though the driver had pled guilty to impaired driving causing death, Kennicott was still convinced there was more to the story. Good. Earlier today he’d come back home from a small hill town in Italy, where he’d learned many things, including a delicious new tomato sauce recipe. This evening he was strolling through Little Italy, in his arms a brown paper shopping bag filled with groceries he was bringing home to make dinner. He’d bought his favourite Italian pasta, imported buffalo mozzarella, a big bundle of basil, a handful of cremini mushrooms, a pair of white onions, a homemade sausage, and a dozen locally grown field tomatoes. The tomatoes were in season in midsummer and would be perfect. Bad. This uneasy feeling he’d had for the last half hour as he’d gone from shop to shop, greeting the merchants he’d gotten to know during the fifteen years he had lived in the neighbourhood. He’d been warned to be careful, so he kept checking behind him, looking for reflections in store windows, searching for something out of place. Someone watching him. Following him. Good. College Street on a summer night. The streets of Little Italy ablaze with colourful lights, banners, umbrellas, and decorations. The bars and restaurants and stores overflowing with people, laughter, and cheer. Music blasting out on every block. A cool rain had begun to fall, making the street scene look like a misty Hollywood movie set. Even better, he wouldn’t be alone tonight in his second-floor flat nearby. He was going home to Angela. He always enjoyed the walk up from College, leaving behind the lights and traffic and streetcars and noise of the main street for the darkness and calm of Clinton, the side street where he lived. Heading home, Kennicott had convinced himself that his concerns were overblown. That there was nothing to worry about. Almost convinced himself. Excerpt continues after cover reveal. The narrow sidewalk had turned slick from the rain. He peered down at the muddy footprints of overlapping adult shoes, dog paws, children’s feet, residue from the park at the end of the street. What was it that he was looking for? He glanced behind him back down the street. No cars coming. He looked up ahead to the top of the street. There was one set of headlights, far away. A vehicle pulled over at the end of the block, a no-parking zone. Its headlights were on, and its engine was running, spitting out vapour through its tailpipe, like a winded athlete exhaling into the cooling night air. Six houses away from his home, he slowed his pace, watching the car. As his eyes adjusted to the dark street, he could see it wasn’t an ordinary vehicle but one of those trimmed-down, sleek SUVs. Black. It still wasn’t moving. He thought about stopping, yet some instinct told him that was a bad idea. He kept walking. Five houses away now. None of these homes had side alleys he could duck into. His house did, a pathway that led to the side-door entrance to his second-floor flat. His landlords, the Federicos, had installed a motion-detector light when he told them that Angela, whom they adored, had moved in. It would click on once he got there. Kennicott laughed to himself when he thought about Mr. Federico. Last week he had bought an expensive flexible hose and attached it to the wall at the side of the house. “Better to water my tomato plants,” he told Kennicott. “See, it bends, like rope.” “Impressive,” Kennicott said. “Please, Mr. Daniel.” Federico looked around and lowered his voice to a conspiratorial level. “Not tell Rosa the price.” “I would never tell your wife. Your secret is safe with me.” The SUV at the end of the block pulled out into the street. It hadn’t put its turn indicator flasher on. Why did that seem menacing? Kennicott fixed his eyes on the car. It crept toward him, like a tiger on the prowl. Behind it, he saw another SUV pull in at the top of the street. Same shape, same black colour. It stopped in the middle of the road, cutting off any other vehicle from entering the block. Run, a voice in his head shouted at him. Daniel, run! Angela was a marathon runner, and in the last few years she’d gotten Kennicott into jogging again, something he’d done in what felt as if it were a lifetime ago when he was in law school. The sidewalk was too slick. He slipped and almost tumbled to the ground, catching himself just in time. One of the tomatoes rolled around the top of the shopping bag like a basketball circling the rim of a net and tumbled out. It nestled under the streetlight, a red dot on a sidewalk painted pale with rain, like a red bubble nose on a white clown’s face. He bent down to grab it, but the tomato slithered out through his fingers. He pivoted to look up the street. The SUV was charging toward him, accelerating at surprising speed. Run, run, he shrieked to himself again. Forget the tomato. His feet found purchase on the sidewalk, and he was off. Three houses, two houses, one. He was almost home. The SUV was racing down the empty street. He made it to the pathway and took a sharp turn to his right. The motion-detector light clicked on. Bright, like a prison camp searchlight zeroing in on an escaping convict. He was steps from his door. He knew he shouldn’t look back, but he couldn’t help himself. The SUV climbed the curb. In the blazing light he saw that its back window was down. He saw the gun, saw it explode a split second before he heard it boom, a split second before he felt something tear into the top of his right arm. His body slammed onto the ground. The bag of groceries flew out of his hands. Pain hit, searing into his brain, rocketing through him. He was aware of the sound of the SUV roaring away. The groceries. What about the tomatoes? Would they be crushed by his fall and ruin the sauce he was about to cook Angela? He heard doors opening. Footsteps. Frantic. “Daniel. Oh my God, Daniel!” It was a woman’s voice. Who? Angela. That’s right. That was good. I’m sorry about the tomatoes, he wanted to tell her. But he couldn’t speak. That was bad. “911!” someone was yelling. “Call 911.” He felt something touch his arm. It was a hand. Pressing down on him. “Daniel, Daniel, can you hear me?” the woman was saying. The woman. Yes, Angie. Angela. He’d called her Angie once and she said she hated the name. Something about how her grandmother who called her Angie wouldn’t let her go out and play at night in the housing development where she grew up. Afraid of stray bullets. Bullets. Not good. “Please, Daniel, please. Stay with me.” Stay. With Angela not Angie. At home. He was almost home. Good. He’d been shot. Bad. Angela was here with him. Good. What else was good? He searched his brain. He wanted something else to be good. Ari Greene. Kennicott’s boss. His mentor. If anyone could catch the shooter it was Greene. He’d solved every homicide case except one. That was bad. Kennicott could feel Angela pushing hard against his skin. He had to tell her she was doing the wrong thing, tell her the right thing to do. There was no time to waste. The words wouldn’t come out. All he could do was shake his head. He closed his eyes. The rain was coming down harder now. His whole body felt cold. “Daniel, hold on,” she said. He forced his eyes open. He could still move his left arm. He reached up and touched her. Bare skin. Angela wasn’t wearing a coat. She’d be wet and cold. He wrapped his fingers around her arm. To pull her close. To tell her what she had to do to stop the bleeding. He was fading out. Somewhere there was the sound of a siren. Footsteps, many footsteps. More sirens. People talking. Someone else was close now, saying something to Angie. He couldn’t speak. All he could do was hold on to her arm. Try to keep her warm. “Please keep your eyes open,” she said to him. He rolled his head to the side. He could only open one eye. It was enough. He stared at the glimmering cement Mr. Federico watered down every night with his expensive new hose, shimmering in the motion-detector light. And the rivulets of red blood, leaching out across it, like an evil spider spreading its legs, readying to strike a final deadly blow. __________________________________ From WHAT WE BURIED. Used with the permission of the publisher, Simon & Schuster. Copyright © 2024 by Robert Rotenberg. View the full article

This year’s top horror novels distinguished themselves not only through quality but with their use of metaphor to approach societal ills obliquely. Through the lens of horror, and the examination of monstrosity, we see the many ways that hatred, prejudice, and and the enforcement of conformity warp our communities and our own minds. These novels also function as a graceful way of lifting ourselves out of the traps of circular thinking that are so often the cause of repetitive, unwelcome, and problematic assertions. Some of the selections achieve this project through a hilarious skewering of modern morality, while others go deep into the darkness, only to lead us out with a flickering lantern and a small, but essential, message of hope. I tried so hard to limit this list to 10, but of course, it ended up being 15. The amazing landscape of new releases this year continues to prove we’re living in a new golden age of horror (and 2024 is already shaping up to be just as fabulously full of terrifying tales). Kiersten White, Mister Magic (Del Rey) What a beautiful and surprisingly affecting novel Mister Magic turned out to be! A reunion for the former child stars of a mysterious television show is the pretense for a gathering of lost souls trying to make sense of their bizarre childhood. Who was Mister Magic? Why did their games on the show feel more like punishments? Why can no one find any episodes preserved on hard copies? And what can the former stars do to make sure the dark presence behind the show doesn’t come back to shape a new generation of young minds? Kiersten White does an incredible job at drawing out the violence behind the lessons of conformity and obedience aimed at turning children into well-behaved adults, and wrote this novel as part of her own journey to process childhood religious traumas. Liz Kerin, Night’s Edge (Tor) Liz Kerin uses the vampire trope as a perfect metaphor for abuse in Night’s Edge, a disturbing and insightful look at the dynamic between a vampire mother and the obedient daughter who does everything she can to keep her mother fed and happy (and, well, not attacking her). Her mother’s alternating emotional manipulation, terrifying violence, and empty excuses showcase the dynamics of DARVO and how love is twisted by those who see only their own need. Stephen Graham Jones, Don’t Fear the Reaper (Saga) Stephen Graham Jones blew me away with the first in his Indian Lake trilogy, My Heart is a Chainsaw, and Don’t Fear the Reaper is, if you can believe it, even better than the first! Jade is back, now in her 20s, as a killer and a snowstorm converge on the town of Proofrock and another massacre looms. Can Jade stop the serial killer Dark Mill South before he finishes taking vengeance for 38 Lakota men killed in the 19th century? The fast-paced novel takes place over only a day and a half, and you’ll want to read it just as quickly. Eric LaRocca, Everything The Darkness Eats (Clash) Eric LaRocca grew up in a stifling small town in Connecticut, so he knows what he’s talking about in this claustrophobic tale of horror and hatred in a tiny community. While the townspeople are distracted by their own problems and prejudices, a mysterious entity known as Mr. Crowley has been steadily kidnapping the most vulnerable residents in town and taking them to his basement for an unholy project. LaRocca came onto my radar with the viscerally disturbing and hugely enjoyable Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke, and Everything The Darkness Eats cements his reputation as an essential horror writer for our time. Carissa Orlando, The September House (Berkley) Carissa Orlando’s The September House uses hauntings as a brilliant metaphor for abuse, and what people can get used to, as well as a prescient comment on the tight housing market. Orlando’s narrator loves her home, and if she needs to ignore some ghostly children, be served tea by a taciturn housekeeper with a gaping face wound, and scrub the blood off the walls once a season, then so be it. Her husband isn’t so good at tolerating the house, but then, she’s learned how to tolerate much more from his treatment of her than she ever expected. When her daughter comes to stay, and her husband goes missing, it’s up to Orlando to continue saying “everything’s fine” for far too long. But the ghost in the basement may finally spur her to action…I found myself cheering at the end of this book. Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Silver Nitrate (Random House) Both of Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s parents worked in radio, so perhaps that’s part of the inspiration behind this bonkers ode to sound engineering and the (literal magical) power of the human voice. Silver Nitrate features a sound editor and a has-been actor as they befriend an elderly icon from the Golden Age of Mexican cinema, only to find themselves drawn into a vast conspiracy to harness the magic of the silver screen and bring an occult-obsessed Nazi back from the dead. This book has everything, and I could not recommend it enough! Alison Rumfitt, Tell Me I’m Worthless (Tor Nightfire) In this intense haunted house story, three girls spend a night in a property cursed by the hatred and violence of those who first occupied its grounds. One is trapped in the house forever, and the other two barely escape, the house’s dark powers having revealed both their vulnerabilities and hatreds to each other. Rumfitt uses body horror and the tropes of the haunted house skillfully to explore the trans experience in an England full of terfs, and Tell Me I’m Worthless contains a strong anti-fascist message for a nation beset by growing prejudices. Juan Martinez, Extended Stay (University of Arizona Press) El Norte meets Barton Fink in this hotel horror. Two siblings flee from Colombia to the United States and end up at a dingy hotel in Las Vegas where strange figures lurk in the corridors and monsters feed off of the sorrow of the most vulnerable. What follows is both a brilliant horror novel and a sharp critique of capitalism and exploitation. Cassandra Khaw, The Salt Grows Heavy (Tor Nightfire) What if Ariel laid eggs and then her monstrous daughters laid waste to the entire kingdom? A mermaid, her daughters, and a plague doctor (the only creature spared in the massacre) go on a wintry journey in which they encounter a disturbing village that evokes the darkest of the original Grimm’s fairy tales. Khaw’s prose is visceral, disturbing and beautiful in equal measure. John Milas, The Militia House (Henry Holt) In this military horror novel, a rare but hopefully growing subgenre, American soldiers stationed near the ruins of an old Soviet outpost in Afghanistan find themselves in the midst of strange happenings, unexplained disappearances, and disturbing visitors. Milas is a wordsmith, and this novel is as haunting as it is impressive. Gerardo Sámano Córdova, Monstrilio (Zando) Part of a new wave of haunted house horror that continues to expand and redefine the genre, Monstrilio is about a woman who creates a monster from a piece of her dead son’s lung, feeding it bloody sacrifices as it grows into the image of her long-gone child. Her monstrilio is loved, cared for, and wholly monstrous. But are not the monsters among us also capable (and deserving) of love? Read this if you liked Sarah Gailey’s Just Like Home! Also of note: that cover design. It’s just so damn good. Sam Rebelein, Edenville (William Morrow) A novelist has a very vivid dream. He wakes up and writes a novel. That novel comes across the desk of a mysterious researcher who curses her discovery. She doesn’t want to kill the author—perhaps, she can hire him as an adjunct creative writing teacher instead? And so the author and his girlfriend head to a small liberal arts college where the English department has a strangely otherworldly agenda. This book was a wild ride from start to finish, with a heavy dose of humor thrown into the mix. Nat Cassidy, Nestlings (Tor Nightfire) A couple with a baby gains access to the perfect two-bedroom in Nat Cassidy’s ode to creepy New York legacy apartment buildings. Ana and Reid are struggling after birth leaves Ana paralyzed, and they worry about moving to a higher floor in terms of emergencies and accessibility, but the apartment is just too nice to say no to. There’s a reason they’re being welcomed into the building, however: their neighbors have sinister motivations. Of note is the novel’s take on antisemitism as horror, in the guise of a hateful former landlord echoing currently rising prejudices. Elizabeth Hand, A Haunting on the Hill (Mulholland) Elizabeth Hand is one of the coolest writers around, and I absolutely adored A Haunting on the Hill, a Shirley-Jackson-estate approved continuation of The Haunting of Hill House (This time with more hauntings! And more hills! Actually probably just the one hill). Playwright Holly Sherwin and her girlfriend Nisa head upstate with a troupe of actors to stage and rehearse a new play. Sherwin is confident that the crumbling gothic manor of Hill House will bring out their creative sides, but instead, they are joined by their hauntings. This was a favorite book of the year for my colleague Olivia Rutigliano, who also did a wonderful interview with Hand for the site. Clay McLeod Chapman, What Kind of Mother (Quirk) I was shattered by Clay McLeod Chapman’s grief horror Ghost Eaters, and in What Kind of Mother, Chapman revisits some of the same themes of loss and absence, this time in the guise of a domestic thriller with supernatural overtones. A palm reader heads back to her hometown with her teenage daughter, only to reconnect with an old flame who is struggling with the loss of his young son. After reading his palm, Chapman’s heroine finds herself convinced her lover’s son is still alive. But where could he be, and who could have taken him? View the full article

The CrimeReads editors make their selections for the best crime anthologies released in 2023. * Shane Hawk and Theodore C. Van Alst Jr. (eds), Never Whistle at Night (Vintage) “Spine-tingling and suggestive storytelling. . . . Entertaining and thought-provoking, especially in its highlighting of the lurking terrors—from intergenerational trauma to environmental destruction to toxic allyship—confronting Indigenous peoples today.” –Kirkus Reviews Molly Odintz, Scott Montgomery, Hopeton Hay eds, Austin Noir (Akashic Books) “With the common thread of Austin, Texas, Austin Noir is a new compendium of original short stories, each of which are showcased gems of noir fiction and unreservedly recommended for both personal reading lists and community/academic library Contemporary Mystery/Suspense collections.” –Library Bookwatch Sarah Weinman (ed), Evidence of Things Seen (Ecco) “This is a book about finding justice in a system that can frequently be unjust. These are stories about inequality, victims who must fight to be heard, and the tendency of the legal system to marginalize, or ignore, entire groups of people. . . . A valuable addition to the ever-growing genre of crime nonfiction.” –Booklist Patrick R. McDonough, Hot Iron and Cold Blood: An Anthology of the Weird West (Death’s Head Press) “Each short story comprising Hot Iron and Cold Blood: An Anthology of the Weird West is unique, carefully crafted, and memorable. A fun read from cover to cover.” –Midwest Book Review Jordan Peele and John Joseph Adams, Out There Screaming (Random House) “[An] electrifying anthology . . . These tales are all both gruesomely imaginative and firmly rooted in the realities of anti-Black racism and brutality—and there isn’t a weak one in the bunch. This is essential reading for any horror fan.” –Publishers Weekly View the full article

It’s that time of the year again, and, no, I’m not talking about the holidays. I’m talking about year-end-list time. Just like the holidays, year-end lists can be anxiety inducing, especially for authors. So, as a reprieve from everybody and their Uncle Bob’s “Favorite Books of 2023,” I’d like to offer you something a little less stressful. Something that might help you become a better writer. Over the course of this last year, I’ve had the pleasure of interviewing eleven outstanding crime writers for “Shop Talk.” We’ve covered everything from haunted office spaces to the importance of daily naps. If you happened to miss one of the entries, you’re in luck. Below you’ll find every 2023 Shop Talk condensed into something like a stat sheet. A quick glance at how these amazing writers do what they do. I learn something every time I sit down and talk shop with an author. I hope you will too. Jane Harper Writes every day: No Morning or night: Writes during school hours Wordcount goal: Scene goal Outline: Yes (40k word “plan”) Writes with: Phone for notes/Desktop for writing Revision: Prints out and reads Writerly vanities: Office space and tea Office: Reserved for writing only Best quote/advice: “There are only certain things within your control, so focus all your energy and passion on them. Worrying about whether you’ll get a publishing deal or what happens after that can be overwhelming to the point of writing paralysis. Concentrate instead on the things you can do every day to make your manuscript the best it can be — find a working style that suits you, carve out regular time to think and write, do the research you need to do, consider if planning your novel would help you, even if you only plan out the tricky bits.” Brendan Slocumb Writes every day: Writes daily when working on a manuscript Morning or night: Starts at noon Wordcount goal: 2,500 words Outline: Yes Writes with: Mac (even though he’s an Android guy) Revision: Reads aloud and uses beta readers Writerly vanities: Old sitcoms playing in background (no music), and edibles Best quote/advice: “Try to avoid saying, ‘I have to do it like this or else they won’t get it.’ Trust your instincts. Outline the entire story from the beginning to the middle to the end.” Nita Prose Writes every day: Yes (“Writing is a muscle. Use it or lose it.”) Morning or night: Two shifts: before day job and after day job Wordcount goal: No Outline: Yes, a little Writes with: Computer, unless stuck, then longhand Revision: Revises as she goes, then lets it sit, then beta readers Writerly vanities: Books Best quote/advice: “Avoid magical thinking. Focus on story and character. Ride intuition as long as you can, then revert to craft when you get stuck.” Josh Kendall (Editor) Works every day: Mostly Morning or night: Keeps job hours (kinda) Wordcount goal: NA Outline: NA Writes with: Uniball pens / manila folders Writerly vanities: Ethiopian coffee Office: Yes (home office and office-office) Best quote/advice: “My mother was a social worker. Her specialty was helping children and the parents of children who had suffered horrendous, often criminal abuse. She had an office in the basement of our house. Her patients were always around. I couldn’t stop thinking about them. Maybe my curiosity in crime fiction came from that, this deeper question of who are those people and what are their stories.” Wanda Morris Writes every day: Tries to Morning or night: Early morning Wordcount goal: Goal is to have “butt in desk” Outline: Loose outline Writes with: Yellow legal pad and Pilot G-2 gel pens Beta readers: Yes Writerly vanities: Tea and natural light Best quote/advice: “When I was unpublished and desperately searching for an agent, I got so much advice on what you ‘should’ and ‘shouldn’t’ do—always write every day, only write when you’re inspired, always plot, never plot, etc. It was mind-boggling and often conflicting. So, I tend to shy away from absolutes when giving writing advice. The only thing I do encourage newer writers to do is to read a lot and read outside your genre.” Kelly J. Ford Writes every day: No Morning or night: September through December for first draft Wordcount goal: Yes, but doesn’t freak out about it Outline: Sometimes Writes with: Laptop Revision: Let it cool for a month, revise, beta readers Writerly vanities: Daydreaming Best quote/advice: “My brilliant mentor and talented author, Michelle Hoover, routinely quotes Goethe to her writing students: ‘Do not hurry. Do not rest.’ That advice has really stuck with me since I first heard her say it in 2010.” Danya Kukafka Writes every day: Pretty much (takes the pulse of her manuscript every day) Morning or night: Morning (Unless it’s a “Full Friday”) Wordcount goal: No Outline: “0 Draft” Writes with: Scrivener Beta readers: Husband and agent Writerly vanities: Writing journal Office: Yes (haunted) Best quote/advice: “The process is the point. The sitting down and the writing of it—that’s the point. You’re always going to have a thing you want if you’re thinking about external gratification. There’s always something. You just want to get to the end of this chapter. You want an agent, a second book deal, a bigger advance . . . You can focus on those things, but they won’t get you anywhere. The only way to feel satisfied with writing is to enjoy the actual process of writing. No, not even enjoy it. I don’t like it a lot of the time, but I consider it an act of mediation, of preservation, self-care, whatever you want to call it. Religion even, in a certain way. Thinking about it as thing you must do for the sake of doing rather than a means to an end—that is the absolute key.” Nina Simon Writes every day: Mostly Morning or night: Morning Wordcount goal: Depends on where she is in the process Outline: Combination Writes with: Scrivener Beta readers: Yes, the more the merrier Writerly vanities: Black tea Office: Kitchen (Santa Cruz mountains) Best quote/advice: “There’s a piece of masking tape stuck to the windowsill in my kitchen. It says: PERFECT IS NOT THE GOAL. A FUN, HEART-FILLED STORY IS THE GOAL. I stuck it up there at a particularly agonized moment. It continues to comfort and inspire me every time I sit down to write.” Lou Berney Writes every day: Yes Morning or night: Both (with nap in between) Wordcount goal: No Outline: “Map” Writes with: Pen/pad for brainstorm, Scrivener for mapping, Word for writing Beta readers: No Writerly vanities: Walking the dog Office: Sofa, sometimes Best quote/advice: “Fiction at its best is very distinctive. That’s the kind of story I want write, so I try to keep fewer and fewer people involved.” Michael Farris Smith Writes every day: Yes (Monday – Friday) Morning or night: Morning (after he drops kids off at school) Wordcount goal: 1,000 words Outline: No Writes with: Laptop (needs to be able to move with it) Beta readers: No Writerly vanities: Drive around and listen to music Office: Studio space Best quote/advice: “Even if it’s only fifteen minutes a day, find that time to be habitual about it. I wrote six novels teaching full-time, married, raising two daughters, and doing all the other stuff that life asks for, and I got them all done because I decided to go to work on it every morning, even if it was for only thirty minutes, just to keep going and trying to get better. There is no substitute for that.” Featured image: The Empty Chair by Sir Samuel Luke Fildes View the full article

Bonnie MacBird is regarded as one of the top Sherlock Holmes writers, and her five Sherlock Holmes Adventures for HarperCollins have developed a following. Frank Cho is a top Marvel artist whose cover illustrations are legendary. Together they have collaborated on WHAT CHILD IS THIS? – a Sherlock Holmes Christmas novella. A Holiday pick by both the Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post, WHAT CHILD IS THIS? is newly out in paperback for Christmas 2023. It is a delightful and unique entry into the Holmesian world – written by Bonnie and beautifully illustrated by Frank. Bonnie and Frank explain how the collaboration came about. BONNIE: The Baker Street Irregulars (BSI) are a famous Sherlockian organization in the States and hold an annual gala every January. The programs are illustrated and suddenly had a new look with carefully inked drawings combining a period and modern look – a simply beautiful take on Holmes and Watson. Who did these beauties, I wondered? Frank Cho! Frank is a Marvel superstar but I didn’t know that at the time. However, I was knocked out by these gorgeous pen and ink renderings… and struck up a conversation with him. Besides being Sherlockians, both of us share a love for the pen and ink style of the late nineteenth century, and the conversation carried forward. I soon discovered how deep his Sherlockian roots were! FRANK: I think, like you, I’ve always been a big Anglophile, especially anything relating to 19th-century Victorian England. I grew up watching Jeremy Brett’s Sherlock Holmes but also Hammer Studios monster movies. So, Sherlock Holmes and the horror genre has occupied my mind since childhood one way or another. My best friend, Mike McSwiggin, reignited my interest in Sherlock Holmes and Victorian England about 20 years ago when he gave me the Naxos Sherlock Holmes series on audiobook, read by David Timson, for Christmas or my birthday. These Sherlock Holmes audiobooks sent me down the rabbit hole and the rest is history. BONNIE: My love of Holmes goes back to age 10 when I devoured the canon and its hold on me has never let up. Jeremy Brett of course is an indelible Holmes, but I’ve also loved many screen versions before and since, including Benedict Cumberbatch, with the wonderful Martin Freeman as Watson. Hugh Laurie as House. Peter Cushing, Christopher Plummer, and of course Basil Rathbone. I could list many. They are clear in my head, though in my novel I see them younger than most of these actors. FRANK: But then how did you think of me for WHAT CHILD IS THIS? BONNIE: For my fifth book in the series, I pitched my editor at HarperCollins something a little different from the first four books. WHAT CHILD IS THIS? was to be a softer tale, no murder – but a definite pair of mysteries with some action elements. It was to be a Christmas story and shorter length – a novella. I saw it as a gift book and was thinking of having illustrations. Your beautiful work for the BSI made you the perfect choice. HarperCollins was delighted when I suggested you. Of course, Frank, you are most well-known for comic book covers—superheroes, beautiful women, monsters and action pieces. Did illustrating a Holmes book feel like a departure for you? FRANK: Yes and no. Since I love old black and white movies, I’ve always envisioned Sherlock Holmes in black and white so it was an easy and natural transition from creating these bright and kinetic comic book images to these atmospheric black and white images. BONNIE: And of course, I’d seen your beautiful Holmes and Watson illustrations on the BSI programs. As for Holmes and Watson themselves, I write and envision them in my books as vibrant, handsome men in their mid-thirties, which they would have been in the time period. FRANK: I agree with you, Bonnie. I see both Watson and Holmes in their thirties. For me, Sherlock has a more “bird of prey” look about him … almost vampiric with a fountain of tireless energy behind his eyes, while I picture Watson as a sturdy “everyman” with a slight military bearing and more benevolent vibe. BONNIE: It was fun choosing the scenes to illustrate. FRANK: It was a team effort. My girlfriend, Ashalie Evans, and I read through your book a few times and selected what we considered to be the most exciting and relevant scenes to portray. BONNIE: Yes, you and I were easily in agreement on those. And you generously added some small items to sprinkle throughout, adding to the Christmas feel! I love those. The cigars, the wreath, etc. What was especially fun was that you added a cat into one scene which did not appear in the writing. But I loved the idea and reverse engineered him into the scene, to good effect! FRANK: Ha! BONNIE: I particularly love how you also captured two reoccurring characters in my books. Heffie O’Malley, the half-Jewish, half-Irish street urchin who proves helpful from time to time. And the thorn in Holmes’s side, the French detective Jean Vidocq. Both of these have become readers’ favorites and you nailed them perfectly. Frank, you introduced me to the illustrator Franklin Booth, clearly an influence on your work. Can you talk about what inspires you in his technique and how you incorporate it into this work? FRANK: I was actually introduced to Franklin Booth through Bernie Wrightson’s Frankenstein book. In the Foreword or Introduction of that book, Bernie talked about how Franklin Booth influenced and inspired the look of his Frankenstein art. Again, I’ve always been fascinated by Victorian England, and Franklin Booth’s line-heavy art style perfectly encapsulated that look for me. BONNIE: It speaks to me, too, Frank. Both beautiful as art in itself, and illustrative of story at the same time. I love what you did in WHAT CHILD IS THIS? and hope we will collaborate again. FRANK: Yes, of course! I hope so, too! *** View the full article

What I told her was this: “Read Once Upon a River.” Let me explain. I was at an event promoting my own new novel, Once These Hills, when a woman approached me and asked me where I got the idea to write about my main character, a fierce mountain girl, good with a bow and arrow, who roams the hills of eastern Kentucky, killing game . . . and sometimes men. “The whole idea for it, the genesis of the entire book,” I answered, “comes from Bonnie Jo Campbell’s novel, Once Upon a River.” I think she expected me to say more. I didn’t. Not because I intended to be rude, but because that was the whole of it. I simply said, “Read Once Upon a River.” I could go on and talk about Campbell’s many awards and distinctions—they’re impressive—but for me, it’s more important that her book touched me so profoundly that I decided to write a novel in the same spirit—or to attempt to do so, at least. There’s such a deep sadness and beauty in Campbell’s tales of rural Michigan, such a terrible truth underneath. In reading her for the first time, I realized I was in the presence of a modern master. Her new novel, The Waters (2024, W.W. Norton) is again peopled with rural Michiganders: farmers, church people, and blue-collar workers. But Campbell adds something else this time, a mystical element that transforms the setting and its narrative, something that elevates the work to another level. Fans of American Salvage, Once Upon a River, Mothers, Tell Your Daughters, and Campbell’s other books will love this new novel. Yes, there are violent scenes, deviant passages, and the Campbellesque grit her fans all know and love. So what about this new element, then? The Waters definitely possesses something unearthly, something fierce, and at times something unsettling and eerie. Anyway, I recently talked to her about all of this. CM: Bonnie Jo, your excellent forthcoming novel, The Waters (W.W. Norton, 2024) signals a stylistic departure from your story collections, American Salvage and Mothers, Tell Your Daughters, and from your previous novel, Once Upon a River. The Waters is chock full of rural types familiar to most readers, like those we see in your previous work, but it also establishes a sort of mythology around characters, around a core group of women and around their simultaneous power and vulnerability. In this sense it veers into mythology, into a sort of magical realism (?) we don’t see in your other work. The Waters is a fantastic synthesis of real and unreal, or real and surreal, or whatever we’re calling it. Did you set out to write a novel like this? Did the style emerge organically? BJC: Thank you, Chris—I am thrilled that you like The Waters. You wouldn’t believe what I set out to write many moons ago: a playful romp about a teenager who loves mathematics and lives on a farm with an annoying little sister, a boozy mother, and a bitter, angry grandmother. But as I wrote that book, called Math Slut, I became haunted by the tragedy and struggle that I sensed lay behind the comedy. So I went back in time to when my protagonist, nicknamed Donkey, was eleven, and I discovered the strangeness and mystery of all the characters and especially the strangeness and mystery of the swamp itself. Swamps are bubbling cauldrons of fertility and obfuscation and a great place for trouble. As I allowed myself to depart from strict realism to embrace a more gothic sensibility, I found even my sentence structure becoming more sinewy and complex. This allowed the whole sensibility of the book to become shimmery. CM: It’s not a spoiler to say that the novel depicts more than one violation of female characters–rape, assault, gun violence. Some of these events affect not only the characters but the narrative arc itself. Perhaps they even shape a collective consciousness amongst other characters. These are formative events in the world of the town, “sins” that govern behavior and the broader mindset of the characters . . . even if not everyone is aware of the specific transgressions. What was your objective in conceiving of crime in this respect? BJC: Like the characters in the book, I only gradually came to know the nature of the crimes and transgressions. The difference is that many in the town are willfully ignorant, blinded by their worshipful view of certain powerful men. Even their love of firearms—also connected to a problematic view of masculinity—blinds them to the dangerous situations they create and perpetuate. Meanwhile, the most violent men in the story see the nonconforming behavior of the women on the island as sinful. In my way of seeing, nobody is innocent, but it seems those who are self-righteousness are likely to commit the worst crimes. Also, there is the natural world. Though we can’t classify the natural world as criminal, there are inherent, essential dangers there as well, and those dangers also drive the story. CM: The Waters establishes some dichotomies, conflicts that run the course of the novel. One of them involves natural healing versus conventional Western medicine. A central character is Hermine “Herself” Zook, a healer who has inherited her skills from an ancestor, or from many ancestors, perhaps ancient ones. Her work is the province of women exclusively, and it’s shrouded in some mystery. Interestingly, the rural people of the novel put great stock in Herself’s elixirs and healing herbs. And yet, they are kept at bay from her work. In fact, they are prohibited from the swamp island on which she lives. What is it that you wanted to explore with this dichotomy, or with healing and women’s relationship to it? BJC: Well, I really love writing a cranky old woman, an embittered farm wife, or any woman who has had to grow hard as a result of hard living. Such women can be—or seem to be—far more brutal than the men, and they’ve endured childbirth to boot! As a writer, it’s a real pleasure to express anger and bitterness through a character like Hermine who can skin a rattlesnake as easily as she can make a blueberry pie. And then there’s an additional pleasure when the plot allows us to glimpse the soft-hearted side of such characters—after all, she loves her granddaughter powerfully and would do anything for her. Personally, as I have moved through cancer and other maladies of aging, I have come to feel ambivalent about our medical model, where every remedy involves pills or knives (or occasionally radiation). Western Medicine is great if you break a bone and it’s almost certainly the best thing if you have cancer, but a whole lot of minor medical complaints would be better served by a cup of herbal tea, or even a well-administered placebo. And I do believe that a lot of what ails us—aches, pains, even some diseases—is really soul trouble, the trouble of being human in this world, and for that a swamp-witch might know more than doctor. “It’s a real pleasure to express anger and bitterness through a character like Hermine who can skin a rattlesnake as easily as she can make a blueberry pie.” –Bonnie Jo Campbell CM: It seems that some of the women characters in the novel are unwillingly destined to play roles, or to serve some non-traditional function. This not to say that they do not “take to” their vocations, their charge, and even thrive there. But they may not always want to serve in the capacity chosen for them. I’m thinking of a character like Dorothy, known as “Donkey.” In some respects, this young girl wants to go to school, wants to study mathematics, wants to have a normal family. But work as a healer, and as Hermine’s protégé, is thrust upon her. Can you talk about this dynamic and about the character of Dorothy? What does she represent in the world of the novel? BJC: In the mythology of this family, as in most fairy tales, the youngest person turns out to be the wisest. I’m usually uneasy putting a kid’s point of view out front—I’m not interested in exploring innocence—but I’m interested in how her ability to be logical works as a superpower; like any superpower, she has to learn to use it judiciously. In middle class families, kids supposedly get to be carefree, but in poor families, kids have jobs to do, and in this case, she has to help her granny cure what ails the town—not doing so would put them all in danger. And of course, every kid’s side job is also to rebel against her family. Donkey’s been told her whole life that a father doesn’t matter, so she’s seeking a father in every man in town; her mother says school is a racket, and so Donkey hungers for a formal education. The rattlesnake is the one animal she is forbidden to screw around with, so naturally, that is the animal she’s obsessed with, and that ends about as well as you might expect. CM: Can you talk about the importance of physical landscape in your work, both in The Waters and in your previous books. Flora and fauna, water, the woods, even cultivated farmland, have certain valences in your work. They change depending on the narrative and on which characters inhabit these areas. Yes, this question is intentionally broad, and there would be no way to answer in short form. Even so, can you explain what it is about physical nature that compels you to write about it as you do, so lyrically and meaningfully? BJC: Oh, swamp, I sing your praises! The landscape gives birth to everything else in this story, and in all my work really. My first novel, Q Road, is a dry-land novel about a girl who marries a farmer in order to own his property; my second novel, Once Upon a River, is about a girl who is the physical embodiment of a Michigan river. This novel, The Waters, is the swamp, through and through, with all the stink and lushness and fertility and uncertainty—the very ground is unstable and might swallow up a hapless wanderer. The landscape—with its beauty and dangers—works as tonic on some characters, and we get to know everybody in the book by how they see and respond to this place. Some want to preserve the swamp and all that grows here; others want to fill it in, develop it, and civilize and Christianize it; a few would like to hide away here and not be found. Choosing the right landscape for any story is critical because it will determine what kind of story it is. During the writing of The Waters, I kept studying the swamp, let it bloom in my mind and in the natural world around me. I read books about swamps, fens, and bogs, and I spent time wandering through natural landscapes, trying to figure out what happens next. I can honestly say that the swamp itself helped me write this book. Helped a lot. View the full article

I’ll say it again: I actually can’t believe I found another ten crime movies that take place at Christmas. I really, really thought I had scraped the bottom of the barrel last year, rustling up things like “Psycho because there are Christmas decorations in Phoenix while Marion Crane drives away with the money.” But no, thanks to two new movies this year, I’ve assembled another list of ten. In December 2018, our editor Dwyer Murphy assembled ten thrillers that might surprise you with their holiday settings, and in December of 2019, I added ten more. And then in December of 2020, I added another ten more, and in 2021, I added another ten more, and last year I added yet another ten more. Here’s how it works: these are crime movies set during the Christmas season but which are not really, technically “Christmas movies.” I explain this EVERY year but I’ll do it again: when I make another one of these lists, these aren’t movies like Die Hard or Bad Santa or Lethal Weapon or last year’s Violent Night: famously crimey and obviously Christmassy. NO SIR. These are the movies you probably don’t really remember are even set at Christmas. PSA: If a movie isn’t on here and you think it should be, check the other five lists! There are 50 movies to check! We also have put together a list of the ten MOST obvious crime movies set at Christmas, if you are looking for the first two Die Hards or first two Home Alones. All right, I think that’s everything. For the SIXTH time (Jesus Christ), I present to you another ten more crime movies you might have forgotten take place at Christmas! American Psycho (2000) I’m actually really surprised that this one wasn’t on previous lists. But yeah, uncomfortable yuppie Christmas party amid all the murdering. Check! The Last Boy Scout (1991) It’s a Shane Black movie, so you’d assume it’d be set at Christmas. But The Last Boy Scout is one of his rare movies that seems to be subtle in setting. Still, it seems to be set at Christmas; Bruce Willis’s daughter keeps drawing pictures of a devily-St. Nick figure called “Satan Claus.” This seems to suggest that we’re approaching Yuletide? I’m gonna count it. Silent Night (2023) John Woo is back and he brought with him a controversial Christmas-set, neo-silent movie about a dad (Joel Kinnaman) who sees his young son get killed on Christmas Eve and then, while recovering from a throat injury that costs him his voice, goes after the gang responsible. This holiday, it won’t be just shepherds quaking at the sight! Remember the Night (1939) This charming Fred MacMurray-Barbara Stanwyck Christmas romantic comedy, written by the great Preston Sturges, is about an attractive lady thief who is caught shoplifting in a store during the holiday shopping rush, and the assistant district attorney prosecuting her who can’t get a jury together before Christmas so decides to *bring her with him when he goes home for the holiday.* Cheers! 3 Godfathers (1948) Okay, so, this John Ford western about three fugitive bank robbers in the old west might not seem like a Christmas movie, except ahem, it’s a version of the story of the Three Wise Men making a pilgrimage for baby Jesus. In case you doubt this, when the three bank robbers FIND A WOMAN IN LABOR AND HELP HER GIVE BIRTH, AND THEN BECOME THE BABY’S PROTECTOR AFTER SHE DIES, one of those characters literally compares the baby to Jesus and the three of them to the Magi. So. First Blood (1982) Rambo!!! Yes, it’s set at Christmas!!! And this one, the first one, is actually appropriate for this list because it’s about a guy’s personal rampage rather than a movie about a guy returning to Vietnam to kill a lot of people. (In other words, it’s a crime movie rather than a WAR CRIME MOVIE.) Meet John Doe (1941) More Barbara Stanwyck! I’m not complaining at all, but it’s crazy how many Christmas movies she starred in! Hollywood’s one-woman North Pole. Anyway, this Frank Capra movie is about a journalist who commits fraud and hires a homeless Gary Cooper to help her cover it up. On Christmas Eve! Eileen (2023) Eileen! This thriller, which is basically perfect almost all of the way through, snuck onto our radar only a few weeks ago. Anne Hathaway rocks her portrayal of a sultry, secretive psychologist at a young men’s prison in Massachusetts. She, Rebecca, is the first bright spot in a while that Eileen (Thomasin McKenzie), who works in the prison, has experienced, and it’s not long before Eileen begins to grow veeeeeery interested in her. The movie builds well and is really interesting, but a late-in-the-film monologue from Marin Ireland brings the house down. Deep Cover (1992) Yes, this incredible, early 90s Laurence Fishburne neo-noir classic centrally features Christmas: just look at this incredibly evocative, upsetting opening scene featuring a murder during Christmas time in snowy Cleveland, 1972. Eastern Promises (2007) Eastern Promises! I kind of can’t believe I forgot that this movie is set at Christmas, but hey, look at the title of this series! And it’s REALLY Christmassy! If you have any doubts, let me refer you to this article written by none other than S.A. Cosby, called “Eastern Promises or How Baby Jesus took down the Russian Mob.” Or, just watch the movie. View the full article

At its heart, Blood Betrayal is a novel about fathers and how they shape our sense of belonging. Two separate police shootings take place in the novel: that of Duante Young, a Black graffiti artist, and the killing of Mateo Ruiz, a gifted Latino musician who is shot during a drug raid. As my detectives, Inaya Rahman and Waqas Seif, dig into Duante’s life, they discover that his father’s early death unraveled him. He was angry in his grief, trying to adjust to a new life in Colorado where no memories exist of the father he cherished. Mateo Ruiz’s father, Antonio, grieves the loss of the son who was the pride of the family. Mateo was at home in his pluralist identities, grounded by the hard work and simple faith of the man who’d sacrificed to give his son a better life. Finally, the estranged father of a police officer implicated in Mateo’s death, comes to Inaya for help in clearing his son’s name. As a counterpoint to the fathers of the two young men who are killed at the beginning of the story, the fathers of my detectives Inaya Rahman and Waqas Seif, also play an important role. I connected my American detectives to their fathers’ heritage because I wanted to write about places where alienation is a fact of life, and the question of belonging is disputed. Inaya’s father came to America as a refugee from Afghanistan, a land he loves and one that holds the key to the crime that unfolds in this novel. Both as a detective and as a woman who is proud of her heritage, Inaya questions her father about a past he is reluctant to acknowledge, eager to know her family’s history. His silence creates a void of knowing. Similarly, Seif’s personal history is shrouded in mystery. We know from the first two novels in the series, that Seif’s Palestinian father was murdered abroad. The younger brothers that Seif has raised are adamant in their quest for answers about their father’s death, but Seif deliberately thwarts their plans to travel to Jerusalem, pointing out the dangers involved. Seif’s story unfolds bit by bit. In Blackwater Falls, we learn that Seif has suppressed his identity as the son of a Palestinian father, going so far as to drop his father’s surname. He’s all but renounced his faith as a Muslim, to the point that the Arabic language feels foreign in his mouth. But when he hears it spoken by a person of interest in Blackwater Falls, and then hears the call to prayer in Blood Betrayal, flickers of his past come to life, along with the pain and rage he’s worked so hard to suppress. It was important to me that Seif be allowed to own his rage as an individual with a history mired in tragedy, and as a member of a community that has suffered under decades of military occupation. A sensitivity reader on both the Blackwater novels was perturbed by the fact that I had written Seif as someone whose anger simmers beneath the surface, and then overflows, rightly wary of a characterization that suggests a one-dimensional angry Muslim male or stereotypical angry Arab. But I had planned for this in writing Seif by excavating the reasons for his rage: the murder of a father he cannot get justice for. The fact that he can only come to terms with the war against his people by denying the very gift his father bequeathed him: that of heritage. He takes his mother’s surname to spare himself the pain of witnessing the erasure and dehumanization of the Palestinian people. His struggle is not an imagined one. In recent days, cultural events that have come under attack or that have been suspended include the Palestine Writes Literature Festival at the University of Pennsylvania, an Islamic art exhibit at the Frick Pittsburgh Museum, and the Royal Ontario Museum, or ROM, censoring the work of Palestinian artists in a recent exhibit, among others. Even a Muslim Writers Festival that I have been part of organizing for the past year has sustained serious pressure to censor the creative expression of Palestinian Muslim writers. Thus, as any Palestinian would be, Seif is faced with how cheaply Palestinian life is held, day after day, year after year. As a character, he would know of the unpunished murder of the Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, at the hands of an Israeli sniper, and the subsequent attack on her funeral by IDF soldiers. Or the targeted killing of Rouzan al-Najjar, a young paramedic, during the nonviolent Great March of Return in Gaza in 2008. Or the shooting and killing of children by Israeli forces in Jenin in recent days. A father is a link to history and identity, and Seif’s identity has been challenged since the day he was born, by virtue of who he is. As the former Israeli Prime Minister, Golda Meir, once said, “There [is] no such thing as Palestinians.” In making Seif’s rage specific to who he is as a man deeply affected by the loss of his father, I researched the issue of Israel’s detainment of the bodies of Palestinians, including children, who are alleged to have participated in attacks against Israeli forces or civilians. Many Palestinian bodies have been withheld from their loved ones after death, a practice sometimes referred to as “necroviolence”, meaning that Israel continues to exert control over Palestinians even after their death. If Seif’s father was among those whose bodies are kept either in fridges or at Israel’s “cemetery of numbers”, where the dead decompose unidentified and unprotected, Seif would be among those Palestinian families who plead for the return of their loved ones, so that funerals can be held according to the deceased’s beliefs, a right protected by international humanitarian law. Seif and his brothers would have spent their lives wondering if it was possible that their father was still alive, or alternatively tormented by the thought that his body was subjected to terrible indignities, including the possibility of his organs being harvested without his family’s consent. The fate of Seif’s father is a glimpse into the horrors associated with life as a Palestinian. The evidentiary record of the consistent and ongoing human rights violations of Palestinians is well-established by now. Three separate major human rights organizations, as well as the United Nations, have documented the apartheid laws that make life for Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza intolerable. Israel’s imprisonment of Palestinian children without charge or trial is a key aspect of the Occupation, as is the indiscriminate dispossession or murder of Palestinian civilians, either by settlers or Israeli forces, without accountability for those crimes. In the present moment, we have witnessed eight weeks of the Israeli bombardment of Gaza, where 2.2 million Palestinians, a majority of whom are children, have been blockaded and under siege for the past sixteen years. This prolonged bombardment of Gaza is in retaliation for the heinous attack on Israeli civilians by Hamas on October 7th yet lacks any adherence to the laws of war that distinguish between combatants and non-combatants, and that are predicated on necessity, last resort, and proportionality. The moral dilemma that is then posed is whether the appalling war crimes committed by Hamas justify a tenfold number of war crimes in response. It also presupposes that the violence began on October 7th, eliding the violence that the Occupation has meted out to Palestinians for decades, as if it is only Israeli suffering that matters. The retaliation campaign waged upon not only Hamas, but on the imprisoned civilian population of Gaza, has resulted in the loss of an estimated 16,000 Palestinian lives, about 70% of whom are women and children (statistics as reported by December 5th). According to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), nearly 1.9 million people are internally displaced, which is 85% of the population. Hospitals have been bombed to the point that the healthcare system in Gaza has collapsed, more than 200 medical staff have been killed, and Palestinian journalists—those who would document the atrocities on the ground—have been killed in disproportionate numbers. Scholars of genocide and of international law have been debating whether in addition to war crimes and crimes against humanity, Israel’s actions in Gaza amount to a genocide of the Palestinian people. It seems to me that given this history and these circumstances, Seif is entitled to his rage. It seems to me that given this history and these circumstances, Seif is entitled to his rage. Writing Seif’s history as a Palestinian character into the Blackwater Falls crime series was personal for me, just as Inaya’s Pashtun roots replicate my own. With Seif, I’ve been reflecting on a lifetime’s experience of advocating for the human rights of the Palestinian people. In a recurring theme for me, my first encounter with the Palestinian struggle came through my father. When my father led family prayer, he would make dua or supplication for the people of Palestine, a people he strongly identified with because of the Indian army’s presence in Kashmir. As a man who survived the fallout from Partition, he understood what it meant for the people of Kashmir to live under the boots of a military occupation. And when as a teenager, I began to ask about him about his prayers, he had a library full of books to share with me. The Palestinian struggle for independence has crossed my path many times in my life. As an undergraduate doing research on the first Intifadah, I interviewed a professor who showed me the rubber bullets advertised as non-life-threatening by Israeli forces. The bullets had a lethal metal core that I weighed in my hand, a real-life diary of a Palestinian wound.[17] I also spent long hours in the stacks at Robarts Library at the University of Toronto, reading the poetry of Mahmoud Darwish and Adonis, who wrote in his poem “Afflictions”, “Why is every atom of Palestine’s ash an open wound?” I wrote essays about the plight of Palestinians, and a media content analysis of Yasser Arafat’s speech before the UN in New York. As an undergraduate, the first poem of mine published by the university newspaper was called “Haifa Dream”; it described a longing to return to the homeland that existed before 1948. In the only creative writing class I took at university, the portfolio I submitted for my final grade was a series of poems about Palestine, inspired by Mahmoud Darwish, called “Sand and Stones.” I would later make use of an untitled poem from that collection in my novel, The Language of Secrets, a novel in which I refer to the “Nakba”, meaning the calamity of the dispossession of 700,000 Palestinians in 1948. In a final act of serendipity, I met my husband of twenty-three years at a lecture on Palestine given by Dr. Chris Giannou, the renowned Canadian war surgeon. His memoir entitled Besieged: A Doctor’s Story of Life and Death in Beirut, describes his time in the Shatila camp, site of the Sabra and Shatila massacres in Lebanon. Later, my husband would volunteer at a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon, while I would go on to spend three and a half months in Ramallah, as part of a now-defunct study abroad program. The Palestine and Arabic Studies program was offered by Birzeit University, a cluster of buildings that appears against the stone-studded hills like a white rose in the desert. I lived in a hostel called Qasr Al Hamra—the Red Castle—with Palestinian girls, and spent my time learning about the Occupation, while experiencing some of its realities firsthand: the bypass roads for Israelis that wound around the West Bank, the checkpoints that abounded, the arbitrarily demolished homes of Palestinians, the memorial at Kiryat Arba that venerated a man who murdered Palestinians inside the mosque at Hebron, the routine presence of guns and soldiers, the confusion of different license plates that denoted permissible travel zones, and the confrontations between Israelis and Palestinians in the Old City that seemed less lethal back then. The hardships imposed on Palestinians by the occupying Israeli power were evident everywhere I turned. Then there was the striking wrongness of my freedom to travel the short distance from Ramallah to Jerusalem to pray at the Dome of the Rock, Canadian passport in hand, when my friends from Gaza couldn’t. I’m reminded that I taught English to three classes of students at Birzeit, bright young people who were brimming with hope for the future. An experience juxtaposed against a rock-throwing demonstration I witnessed, where I ended up choking on tear gas, while a student turned to me angrily and said, “This isn’t entertainment for foreigners. We’re fighting for our lives.” I’ve never forgotten that young man’s anger, never forgotten that I had more rights in Palestine than the Palestinians I lived with. Decades later my friend, Saeeda*, who had endured the siege of Gaza, would write to me and say, “I need to get my family out of this living hell.” I remember Gaza well. The scent of jasmine in the evenings. The muted roar of the sea. The chain link fences and the rubble, the ominous barrier that was the Erez Crossing. I also remember that young girls from Gaza City welcomed me to the now destroyed Islamic University of Gaza, where I met another Asma who was glowing with pride as she showed me her science project. The innocent joy of those girls at meeting a Muslim from another part of the world has stayed with me through the years—it pains me to this day, especially as I cannot know if those girls grew up to leave Gaza, if they died under Israeli bombs, or are imprisoned there still. This pain would be familiar to Seif, with his unanswered questions about his father’s death. For myself and for Seif, I believe that if we don’t feel anger at cruelty and injustice—at war crimes and crimes against humanity—then when are we entitled to feel it? Seif and I share the view that there cannot be peace and security for one people in the holy land without peace and security for the other. Freedom and equality cannot prevail under apartheid law. This is a truth that Seif’s father held to that Seif must wrestle with in future books, a belief that could redefine his understanding of his past. As a character, he is due a reckoning with his own history, one suggested by a poem I wrote many years ago for a friend: O homeland, o heartache, When will we meet? *** View the full article

The CrimeReads editors make their selections for the year’s best true crime books. * Jillian Lauren, Behold the Monster (Sourcebooks) This startling new book uncovers the crimes of serial killer Samuel Little. Through her many conversations with Little and meticulous research, Lauren begins to uncover the reasons why so many murders, now tied to Little, were once overlooked. The book is built out of Lauren’s long correspondence with the killer, but never sidelines the victims. Lauren’s interrogation of her own obsession with these cases adds an extra level of insight to a story that contains endless nuances, all of them artfully unfolded by a precise and powerful writer. –DM Patricia Evangelista, Some People Need Killing (Random House) Evangelista’s deeply reported, deeply felt exposé of the so-called war on drugs conducted for years in Duterte’s Phillipines is an extraordinary work of nonfiction crime. In Some People Need Killing, which takes its title from a vigilante’s chilling remark, Evangelista takes readers through a years-long odyssey of an underworld of extrajudicial killings and mayhem, as her country staggers toward all-consuming violence under a ruthless autocrat. And yet the humanity, too, shines through, as Evangelista draws portraits of those swept up in these bigger social forces. –DM Michael Finkel, The Art Thief (Knopf) Author Michael Finkel has a knack for finding fascinating personalities and bringing them to life on the page, whether it’s a reclusive man in the woods of Maine (The Stranger in the Woods) or, as in this year’s standout nonfiction title, Europe’s most prolific art thief, Stéphane Breitwieser. Over a course of years, Breitwieser and his girlfriends stole objects from museums and churches, often walking out quite casually with the artifacts, and, rather than selling them, put them on display in a secret room for their own private appreciation. In Finkel’s telling, Breitwieser makes an intriguing defense of his actions and calls into question what we think we know about these priceless works. The Art Thief is one of the most interesting and provocative books you’ll read this year. –DM Yepoka Yeebo, Anansi’s Gold (Bloomsbury) In Yepoka Yeebo’s Anansi’s Gold, we get a portrait of an international con man who imposes himself in the middle of an imperialist legend and mines it for everything it’s worth. Following a US-backed junta and the deposing of its national leader, Ghana was long rumored to have a missing stash of gold. That’s where John Ackah Blay-Miezah came in. He spent decades criss-crossing the globe persuading ‘investors’ to inject money into his fund with the promise of a share in that legendary fortune, once it was wrestled free. His scam included powerful figures in Ghana and abroad, and set a wild trail for Yeebo to follow these years later. It makes for a gripping story of international finance and individual greed. –DM Max Marshall, Among the Bros (Harper) Marshall’s harrowing investigation into fraternity life and interstate drug trafficking stands as one of the year’s most eye-opening reads. What looks at first to be a story of campus crime turns into an epic of national corruption, with fraternity life at the core. Marshall wades into the morass through the College of Charleston, where a group of fraternity bros who started pressing and dealing their own pills soon entered into a massive conspiracy. Marshall also follows a bigger story: one where nearly every major American corporation and institution stocks its executive ranks from a fraternity culture that encourages excess and depravity. –DM Ali Winston and Darwin Bondgraham, The Riders Come Out At Night (Atria) In this searing history of police violence and civil rights activism in Oakland, two longtime investigative journalists unpack the circumstances that led to Oakland’s massive amount of police shootings and other officer misconduct over the past half century. The book also goes into the many half-hearted attempts to hold officers accountable and curb their violent behaviors. Monumental and not to be missed! –MO Harry N. MacLean, Starkweather: The Untold Story of the Killing Spree that Changed America (Counterpoint) In this deeply empathetic take on the tale of 19-year-old spree killer Charles Starkweather and his 14-year-old girlfriend Caril Ann Fugate, all the assumptions made over the years about the two are questioned, and Caril Ann Fugate’s role in particular is reevaluated. When the two went on trial for the 1958 murders that made both infamous, Fugate was painted as either a murderous femme fatale or a heartless collaborator, rather than a victim of threats, domestic abuse, and terrible circumstances. MacLean rights the record and gets deep into the psychology of not only his subjects, but their claustrophobic and constrained time and place. –MO David Grann, The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder (Doubleday) Grann is not only a meticulous researcher, but a brilliant storyteller too. In The Wager, we get a wild tale of shipwrecks, mutiny, and court marital; its lessons—about how people tell stories, and who to believe—are eerily prescient today. In 1742, 30 emaciated sailors—survivors of a ship that left England two years before and had wrecked on a desolate island off the coast of Patagonia—wash up on the coast of Brazil. Then, six months later, another boat lands off the coast of Chile with three castaways—and their story is very different. They claim the 30 sailors are actually mutineers. The first group accuses the new arrivals as murderous senior officers. A court martial is called to determine the truth. Grann pulls the story together from archival materials, diaries, and court documents (he even traveled to the island where the sailors were marooned), all to get to the truth. But whose truth matters most depends on who has the best story to tell. –Emily Firetog, Lit Hub deputy editor View the full article

The inspirations and concerns informing this year’s historical mysteries and thrillers may be grim, but the fiction crafted to explore them is luminous. The 1920s continue to loom large, as do their preoccupations with inequality, excess, and grief (including a great number of novels featuring seances and spiritualists, peaking post-Pandemic as a way to access historical methods of reaching loved ones as both comforting and deceitful). You’ll find multiple titles on this list split between the past and the present, or the further recesses of history spliced together with the more recent past, emphasizing that historical tales are, like all culture, an ongoing conversation of interpretation and resonance. Shannon Chakraborty, The Adventures of Amina Al-Sirafi (Harper Voyager) Setting: Golden Age of Islam/Medieval Era Indian Ocean In this swashbuckling, fantastical adventure, set during the Golden Age of Islam, a fierce warrior and former pirate is brought out of retirement by a stubborn mother determined to free her daughter from a terrible captivity. Amina Al-Sirafi cannot refuse her, and also, is rather bored, so she sails off into the Indian Ocean to fight for justice, freedom, and one last chance of glory. A vividly imagined and wonderfully scripted tale that pays homage both to real historical events and the many legends and myths whose embellishments make life worth living. Katherine Howe, A True Account: Hannah Masury’s Sojourn Amongst the Pyrates, Written by Herself (Henry Holt) Setting: Late 18th Century, Boston and the Caribbean, 1920s Boston and Florida There is no one I trust more with historical fiction than Katherine Howe, whose work always manages to capture not only the prosaic details of the past, but the lived experience of it. Howe, a lifelong sailor and an official Expert on Piracy, is particularly well-suited to telling this swashbuckling story of a young woman who disguises herself as a boy and joins the ragtag crew of a fierce gang of pirates as they search for treasure in a perfectly plotted continuation of Treasure Island. Interspersed between the pirate’s adventures (and affecting queer love story) is the story of a bored researcher in the 1920s who, together with her flapper gamine of an undergrad, head for the Florida Keys seeking the fortunes promised in the worn pages of the pirate’s memoir. Howe will continue to regale us with these colorful criminals in the Penguin Book of Pirates, to be released in the new year. Laura Shepherd-Robinson, The Square of Sevens (Atria) Setting: 18th Century England In this lush gothic, a young girl who knows the art of predicting fortunes becomes ward to a kind intellectual, who raises her in safety and anonymity in 18th-century Bath. As she grows into a poised young woman, she finds herself increasingly curious about her fairy-tale origins, in which her fortune-teller father ran away with her aristocratic mother. When a chance comes to know more of her history, she takes it, even as a larger conspiracy threatens her found family. Victoria Kielland, My Men Translated by Damion Searls (Astra House) Setting: Norway and the United States, late 19th Century Nasty, brutal, and short, Victoria Kielland’s My Men features Norwegian-American lonely hearts killer Belle Gunness, who lured widowers and their children to her farm with the promise of care and inheritable land, then slaughtered both her lovers and their families. The novel frames Gunness’ murderous quest as an almost-inevitable perversion of the American Dream. Kielland’s lyrical, abstract, and visceral prose, capably translated by Damion Searls, has won acclaim in her native Norway and is a beguiling match to her terrifying subject matter. Nilima Rao, A Disappearance in Fiji (Soho) Setting: Fiji, 1914 Nilima Rao’s debut introduces my favorite new detective this year, Akal Singh, who has been banished to the colonial outpost of Fiji after an incident derailed his police career back in Hong Kong. He’s the only Indian detective on the force, and his Sikh religion and middle-class upbringing initially keep him from seeing common cause with the other Indians on the island, brought to Fiji to work the sugar cane as indentured servants and hopefully escape the depths of poverty. When Akal is assigned the case of a missing worker on a plantation, he’s at first inclined to believe that she just ran away, but as he learns more details and sees the harsh conditions under which she labored, he quickly begins to suspect foul play is afoot. A Disappearance in Fiji is that rare and perfect combination of historical detail, social criticism, engaging character portraits, and a carefully plotted mystery with no loose ends. A great start to what will hopefully become a long-running series. Brendan Slocumb, Symphony of Secrets (Anchor) Setting: New York City, 1920s Brendan Slocumb burst onto the scene with the brilliant literary mystery The Violin Conspiracy, and his follow-up is just as good. Split between the present day and 1918, the story slowly reveals how a renowned composer may have stolen all that made his music great from the autistic Black woman who was once his best friend. Like Slocumb’s debut, Symphony of Secrets uses the framework of classic detective fiction to tell a larger story of cultural appropriation and how our unequal society determines who gets to reap the benefits of talent and produce art. Anbara Salam, Hazardous Spirits (Tin House) Setting: 1920s England In this fascinating portrait of spiritualism, identity, and doubt, a young wife becomes concerned with her husband develops a focused interest in becoming a spiritual medium. Is he a fraud? Does he believe his own words? Can they preserve their place in societal hierarchy with his new-found love of a looked-down-upon profession? And how far will her love carry her along in his journey? Salam has an incredible grasp on historical details, attitudes, and mores, for a carefully wrought and emotionally compelling read. The short length of the novel belies its complexity and depth, and I hope Anbara Salam continues to craft historical novels for a long time to come. Cheryl Head, Time’s Undoing (Dutton) Setting: Alabama, 1920s and 2010s Cheryl Head turned to her own grandfather’s murder for the inspiration behind this timely tale of injustice and protest. Time’s Undoing is split between two time periods—the 1920s, when the narrator’s grandfather is murdered by a police officer in Birmingham, and the 2010s, when the narrator heads to Alabama on a journalistic assignment to connect what happened to her grandfather to ongoing issues with racist policing. She quickly finds herself up against those who would rather the truth be buried, but finds unlikely allies ready to help her fight for the truth, no matter its implications. Tara Ison, At the Hour Between Dog and Wolf (IG Publishing) Setting: WWII France In one of those amazing life twists that feels as bizarre as it is inspiring, Tara Ison, the writer of the cult hit Don’t Tell Mom The Babysitter’s Dead has crafted one of the best tales of collaboration ever written. In Between the Hour of Dog and Wolf, Tara Ison takes us into the mind of an adolescent Jewish girl being hidden with a French family during WWII. She spends so much time pretending to align with the ideals of the occupiers that she finds herself beginning to agree with them, in what reads as a Jewish version of Lacombe, Lucien. Perhaps it’s not such a twist—both book and film are about the ways we assume new roles when necessary to survival, whether that’s taking a job as a fashion consultant to feed siblings and putting on a batshit fashion show (a la Babysitter) or pretending to be a fascist to to protect from others knowing that you are Jewish. Okay, maybe that last comparison is a bit of a stretch, but still, everyone should read this book and also everyone should should rewatch that movie. Lev AC Rosen, The Bell in the Fog (Forge) Setting: Los Angeles, 1950s Lev Rosen’s Lavender House perfectly captured its 1950s setting while bringing queer stories to the fore. It also introduced a detective I’d follow through any number of books, Evander (Andy) Mills, so it’s great to see the private dick return for a new foray into the shadows of a repressed, but vibrant, era. In The Bell in the Fog, Rosen’s detective has set up shop above a gay bar offering investigative services to the queer community when he receives a visit from an old flame from the Navy. The ex is being blackmailed, and the further Andy digs, the more dangerous his sleuthing becomes. View the full article

On Oak Island, everybody gets up early. By dawn, with the fog turning into a drizzle, the crew is hard at work. I’ve taken refuge inside the rusted hulk of an old tank car, where I can take notes without the ink smearing. Up the hill, men cluster around a drilling rig that is pounding its way into the island’s interior. Shouts and curses echo through the fog. “Sand!” someone yells. “We’re in sand, damn it!” All around me lies the evidence of the hunt: big Ingersoll-Rand air compressors, enormous pump heads, piles of steel casing, acetylene tanks, strange infernal machines, and bright aluminum ducts snaking their way across the ground. The chill September rain is slowly coating them all. In 1909, a young law clerk named Franklin Delano Roosevelt trod this very ground with pick, shovel, and high hopes. Admiral Richard Byrd, Errol Flynn, and Vincent Astor all at one time or another took an interest. Here in Mahone Bay, about forty miles southwest of Halifax, Nova Scotia, I am at the site of the most intensive treasure hunt in history, a hunt that has lasted 193 years, cost millions of dollars, and killed six men. The raison d’être for it all is a narrow, water-filled shaft called the Money Pit—and what may be hidden in its muddy depths. To date, not one penny of treasure has been recovered. Nor does anyone know what might be buried here, who buried it, or why. The island stubbornly refuses to yield anything but the most tantalizing and infuriatingly ambiguous clues. But the Oak Island mystery may soon be solved. Triton Alliance Ltd., a group of Canadian and American investors, is making the biggest assault yet on the Money Pit. They are digging a shaft of gargantuan proportions twenty stories into the very heart of the island. In doing so, Triton will either find treasure and uncover an important archaeological site, or they will have burned up $10 million digging an empty hole. The mystery of Oak Island began in the summer of 1795, when a teenage farm boy named Daniel McGinnis decided to do a little exploring. He rowed out to Oak Island, tied up his boat, and started poking around. His story, along with those of the many who have followed, goes something like this: At the seaward end of the island, the thick forest of red oaks suddenly gave way to an old clearing, dotted with a few rotted stumps. In the center stood an ancient oak with a sawed-off limb. The limb showed evidence of rope burns and, in some versions of the tale, had an old ship’s tackle hanging from it. Directly underneath, the ground had subsided into a shallow depression. From this, a young boy could draw only one conclusion: buried pirate treasure. McGinnis returned the next day with two friends, Anthony Vaughan and John Smith, and they began digging. At two feet they struck a tier of flagstones. On pulling these up, they found themselves digging in what appeared to be an old shaft excavated in the hard glacial till, a mixture of clay, sand, gravel, and rocks. The shaft had been filled with loose dirt and they could see old pick marks in the walls. At about ten feet they hit a platform of rotten logs, the ends embedded in the clay. They eagerly ripped these up and kept going. At twenty feet they struck another platform, and yet another at thirty. With no end in sight, and no doubt their chores seriously in arrears, the three boys gave up—but only for the time being. Both McGinnis and Smith later bought land on the island, hoping eventually to reach the vast treasure that they were sure must lie at the bottom of the pit. When a well-to-do man named Simeon Lynds heard the story, he enlisted workers, including the three young men, in a new assault. Work began in 1803. At forty feet they struck another log platform. They continued to hit platforms at regular intervals, and they also encountered a layer of charcoal, a layer of putty, and a layer of fibrous material that was later identified as coconut fiber. At ninety feet they found something really exciting—a flat stone inscribed with mysterious figures. They quickly tore up the platform beneath it. Soon, water began seeping into the pit and they found themselves bailing as much as digging. As night came on, they probed the muck at the bottom of the pit with a crowbar and struck something hard at the ninety-eight-foot level. “Some supposed it was wood,” one researcher wrote later, “and others called it a chest. This circumstance put them all in good spirits and during the evening a good deal of discussion arose as to who should have the largest share of the treasure.” There would be no sharing of treasure. The next day the diggers arose to find the pit sixty feet deep in water—salt water. Bailing proved to be as futile as bailing out the ocean. This first, failed effort was only the beginning. Syndicate after syndicate was floated to get to the bottom of the pit. They dug, pumped, excavated, drilled, dynamited, trenched, cribbed, bulldozed, and blasted the island, turning the eastern end into a cratered wasteland. At some point in the early nineteenth century the original hole was nicknamed the “Money Pit,” although the only direction money seemed to go was into the pit, not out of it. In 1849 diggers built a platform over the Money Pit and cored down with a pod auger, a primitive type of drill. The drilling engineer, Jotham B. McCully, later stated that the drill struck wood at ninety-eight feet, dropped through twelve inches of space, then rattled through “twenty-two inches of metal in pieces,” struck more wood, another twenty-two inches of metal, then wood, then soil. The auger failed to bring up any metal except three links of a gold chain which, McCully theorized, “had apparently been forced from an epaulette.” Around this time, treasure hunters made another curious discovery. One day a workman was sitting alongside the cobbled beach at Smith’s Cove, a small cove five hundred feet east of the Money Pit. He noticed that as the tide ebbed, the beach “gulched forth water like a sponge being squeezed.” The crew immediately built a cofferdam around the spot and excavated the beach. To their astonishment, they discovered that the beach was a fake—that is, it had been made to look like a beach but was in fact a giant filtering and drainage system. Underneath the cobbles they found thick layers of eel grass and coconut fiber lying on top of an elaborate system of box drains. The drains led, like the five fingers of a hand, to a point opposite the Money Pit. They were, apparently, the head of a “flood trap” designed to keep the pit filled with water. The reader may well wonder how the original diggers intended to retrieve their treasures from such a death trap. Current theories, for which there is yet no evidence, are convincingly simple. Once the pirates—let us call them that for the moment—had dug the Money Pit sufficiently deep, they would have started side shafts that sloped gently back toward the surface. Treasures would have been hidden in the ends of these side tunnels, three hundred to five hundred feet away from the Money Pit but perhaps only thirty feet below the surface. The pirates would have known the direction and distance from the Money Pit, left highly visible as a decoy, to each of the treasure troves and it would have been a simple matter to dig them up. In 1897, drillers brought up more strange clues. From the 155-foot level, the drill bit carried up a half-inch-square piece of parchment with two letters written on it with a quill pen. In another hole the drill was stopped cold at 126 feet by what seemed to be an iron plate. A magnet was raked through grit brought up from the hole and it pulled out thousands of iron filings. A year later, dye dumped into the pit emerged from the seabed at Smith’s Cove, providing more evidence of a tunnel connection. But it also emerged from the South Shore Cove, establishing the existence of two flood tunnels, thus making things more complicated. Everyone assumed that whoever would go to that much trouble must have buried an enormous treasure. Around the turn of the century, fortune hunters estimated it at $10 million; by the 1930s, this had doubled; by the sixties, some people were talking about $100 million or more. Today it is pegged at $500 million to “several billion.” So what has been the problem? Why in the world hasn’t someone been able to get to the bottom of the Money Pit? ___________________________________ Excerpted from The Lost Tomb by Douglas Preston. Copyright © 2023 by Splendide Mendax, Inc. Reprinted with permission of Grand Central Publishing. All rights reserved. View the full article

Brilliant. The NAPE drills did a job on my nervous system, for the better.

OMG no question!

They need to hear the truth, tactfully delivered, of course.

It was a very good year for movies. It seems like everyone made a movie, this year. We got new movies from veteran auteurs like Martin Scorsese, Wim Wenders, Michael Mann, Sofia Coppola, Paul Schrader, Todd Haynes, Kelly Reichardt, Christopher Nolan, Alexander Payne, Ava DuVernay, Wes Anderson, Hayao Miyazaki, Greta Gerwig, David Fincher, Frederick Weisman, Ira Sachs, Nicole Holofcener, and Rebecca Miller. We got a slate of masterpieces from new-in-town filmmakers like A.V. Rockwell, Celine Song, Nida Manzoor, Cord Jefferson, Kitty Green, Daniel Goldhaber, and Juel Taylor. We were, in a word, blessed. But we didn’t get Richard Linklater’s Hitman movie, and that’s because Netflix bought it at NYFF. Screw you, Netflix. There were a lot of TV-sequel movies, too. Luther and Monk came back, this time on film. For my money, the three best movies of the year are Oppenheimer, The Holdovers, and May December or Past Lives. That third place-spot has had a lot of occupants as I’ve attempted to refine my personal list. But the list you see before you isn’t that list: no, this is a list of the best CRIME movies of the year because this is, after all, a crime website. Okay, let’s roll. Anatomy of a Fall Justine Triet’s Palme d’Or-winning courtroom drama Anatomy of a Fall, about a woman who may or may not have murdered her husband (by pushing him out a window in their Alpine chalet), is one of this year’s absolute best, a riveting film that will make you doubt everything, including whether our protagonist is guilty OR innocent. How to Blow Up a Pipeline Don’t sleep on How to Blow Up a Pipeline, the engrossing heist-ish thriller adaptation of Andreas Malm’s groundbreaking nonfiction book. Malm’s book argues that that peaceful protests have proven themselves ineffective in stopping the widespread annihilation of the earth and its inhabitants by climate change, and the only thing that can make any real change is property damage. The film follows a group of young people (mostly early 2os but a couple people around 30) as they band together with a specific mission: destroying a new oil pipeline that has been built in Texas. They all have different reasons for coming to this decision, but their effort will be both a symbol of resistance and a real, practical hindrance to the environmental ravaging posed by the pipeline. Killers of the Flower Moon Martin Scorsese’s epic three-and-a-half-hour film about the Osage killings of the 1920s is a truly spectacular achievement, both for the tender way in which it was made and the historical events which it helps bring to light. Filled with gorgeous cinematography and featuring an especially brilliant performance from Lily Gladstone, Killers of the Flower Moon‘s best feature is how clearly invested it is in doing right by the Osage people of then and now. The Osage’s participation in the making of the film has been well-publicized, but it’s clear, when viewing the film, that Scorsese not only wants to get the historical details right without exploiting the Osage or their suffering but that he also wants to tell the story in the most respectful, collaborative way possible. The Killer The Killer, David Fincher’s hitman-centric sort-of-comedy thriller, didn’t get a wide theatrical release (really, screw you, Netflix) and that’s a shame. I had the good fortune to grab a viewing on the big screen and man, I’m so glad I did. The movie might settle on you in different ways; for example, you might be annoyed, rather than entertained, that the movie is fundamentally about a guy who messes up at his job and who then makes that everyone else’s problem. But you can’t deny that the film’s first act, a lavish sequence set in Paris, is one of the most beautiful film sequences ever made. Have you seen stills of the scenes featuring the apartment building our killer protagonist is watching? That apartment is a composite shot made up of tiny little individually-filmed soundstages all tiled together. Gorgeous. Glorious. I’m dead, and Fincher, not his slipping-up assassin antihero, killed me. They Cloned Tyrone Where was the fanfare for this fun, smart, pulpy Blacksploitation-style, Nancy-Drew-referencing whodunnit when it came out? Juel Taylor’s film, featuring scintillating performances from John Boyega, Jamie Foxx, and Teyonah Parris, also didn’t get a wide theatrical release (again, screw you, Netflix!!!) but you should really treat yourself to an at-home viewing. It’s about a motley group of Black neighbors in a depressed urban community who realize a government conspiracy is afoot. A smart and groovy time. Have I sold you on this yet? May December I don’t know if May December is a genuine crime movie but it’s sure ABOUT a crime, and based on a crime that had a true-crimey kind of cult fame. So it’s going on here, dammit. This film ALSO didn’t get didn’t get a wide theatrical release (NETFLIXXXXX!!!!!!!), but please watch it. Julianne Moore plays Gracie, a woman who was convicted, as a thirty-six-year-old, of having sex with a thirteen-year-old boy. Nearly twenty years layer, she is married to him and they have three, nearly adult kids. Gracie and Joe (Charles Melton) have weathered prison, a tabloid firestorm, and are now braving the visit from an actress (Natalie Portman) who is researching playing Gracie for a movie role. Except, and not to boil her down to merely a plot device because she is not, Elizabeth’s presence begins to expose cracks in the married couple’s ostensibly happy life together. And yes, Charles Melton is really as good as you’ve heard. Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning, Part One Ah, Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning, Part One, otherwise known as Mission Impossible 7, otherwise known as the movie that shook Joe Biden to his core. Tom Cruise, one of Hollywood’s most outspoken critics of computerized cop-outs and a champion of handmade, practical moviemaking and effects, as well as his best friend, director Christopher McQuarrie, have made the best installment of the franchise yet, a mind-boggling, adrenaline-fueled anti-AI fable with the greatest stunts I’ve ever seen put to film. They should have done focus group screeners of this movie with the participants strapped to blood pressure monitors. You’ll know why when you see it. Polite Society Nida Manzoor’s girl-power kung-fu fantasy was one of this year’s biggest delights, a lively, empowering, thoroughly fun movie. In it, a preteen girl in London named Ria Khan (Priya Kansara) dreams of being a stuntwoman, and finds herself putting those skills to use to rescue her older sister Lena (Ritu Arya) from her imminent marriage into a wealthy family… who might be more sinister than they let on. The Royal Hotel The Royal Hotel, the new film from director Kitty Green, flew under the radar a bit, but it’s really worth your time. (Also, no one’s really talking about how it is based very clearly on a documentary, but it is.) Anyway, it’s about Canadian backpackers Hanna (Julia Garner) and Liv (Jessica Henwick) who wind up in the remote Australian outback, bartending at a hotel in the middle of nowhere. But, as two women (almost) all alone in the desert, they begin to feel that something is… off about the whole place. Talk about tension! My goodness. A Haunting In Venice Look, even if you don’t like Kenneth Branagh’s Poirot, you can’t deny that A Haunting in Venice was the clear best of his three Agatha Christie adaptations, an elegant supernaturally-tinged mystery loosely adapted from a lesser-known Christie novel. But visually, the film was a carnival(e) of cinematography and camerawork, a spooky, aesthetic extravaganza you don’t want to miss. Eileen Eileen! This thriller, which is basically perfect almost all of the way through, snuck onto our radar only a few weeks ago. Anne Hathaway rocks her portrayal of a sultry, secretive psychologist at a young men’s prison in Massachusetts. She, Rebecca, is the first bright spot in a while that Eileen (Thomasin McKenzie), who works in the prison, has experienced, and it’s not long before Eileen begins to grow veeeeeery interested in her. The movie builds well and is really interesting, but a late-in-the-film monologue from Marin Ireland brings the house down. View the full article