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The CrimeReads editors select the month’s best debut novels in crime fiction, mystery, and thrillers. * Jamison Shea, I Feed Her to the Beast and the Beast Is Me (Henry Holt) In this ballet horror novel, a young ballerina is given a chance at power after a star of the company takes her under her wing. But all power comes at a cost, and this power derives from an ancient source with its own agenda. I’m not sure what it is about dance that lends itself so well to horror—think Black Swan or Suspiria—but add this one to the list of stories that take the bloody feet and brutal precision of the dance world and turn them into visceral horror. –MO Kyle Dillon Hertz, The Lookback Window (Simon and Schuster) The Lookback Window is a powerful debut with a clarity of voice and mission to be much admired. It follows the story of Dylan, the victim of sex-trafficking, now afforded an opportunity to sue the perpetrator, but first he goes on a dark journey of self-exploration. Kyle Dillon Hertz writes with tremendous fire and artistry. –DM Nigar Alam, Under the Tamarind Tree (Putnam) Alam’s debut spans decades and generations in an epic mystery emanating out of one fateful night in Karachi in 1964, following the reverberations altering so many lives. Alam handles the sprawling, ambitious material with enviable dexterity, and brings out a story that’s full of texture and humanity. –DM Ken Jaworowski, Small Town Sins (Henry Holt) In a tough Pennsylvania town on the precipice, three lives and three stories barrel toward calamity in this debut novel from Ken Jaworowski. Small Town Sins gives us a portrait of modern America in all its dark complexity, as Jaworowski brings insight and empathy to his characters’ struggles, while always maintaining the story’s strong momentum. –DM View the full article

Danya Kukafka is the nationally bestselling author of Girl in Snow and Notes on an Execution. I first met Danya a few months back at the Edgars. It was a brief, two-ships-passing-in-the-night sort of moment. Danya had just had her picture taken in front of the Poe-themed backdrop, and I was next in line. We smiled. We nodded. That was it. But then, a few hours later, Danya was up on stage, giving a supremely moving speech as she accepted the Edgar for “Best Novel.” I was already a huge fan of her sophomore book Notes on an Execution (seriously, if you haven’t read this, it’s a genre-bending, transcendent masterpiece), but that speech, the message she delivered — it made me even more curious. I wanted to know how this woman thought, how she worked, where she worked, if she’d had to sell her soul to write such inventive prose. I was not disappointed, but I was at little spooked, especially at first… Eli Cranor: The door behind you, it just swung shut. Did you see that? Danya Kukafka: Yeah, we have ghosts. This house was built in 1914. EC: There’s really nobody back there? DK: Nope. Just me and my dog. EC: A haunted house. Okay, yeah. That makes sense, but it’s not the best segue into the start of this interview. Anyway, I like to begin these things by asking how you got started writing. DK: Do you remember the show, Reading Rainbow? EC: Of course. DK: Well, I submitted a book to them when I was in third grade. I really wanted to win that contest, but I didn’t. After that, I was constantly writing. I wrote three novels in high school. I queried agents. I got a couple of requests for manuscripts. I remember I went and shook my dad awake. I was like, “Dad! Dad! Look! The agent wants to read my book.” And he was like, “What?” Thankfully, all those agents passed. Those books were not meant to be published. So, yeah, I wrote three books before Girl In Snow was picked up. That whole experience showed me I could get to the end of a story. I realized I could do it, that I wanted to do it over and over again. All of that practicing and whittling away at it, was really helpful for me. EC: And you were in the publishing world pretty early, right? Like before your first book came out? DK: I went to NYU. I was in New York. I was doing internships with publishing houses from the time I started college and all the way through. So, yeah, I’ve always been doing book publishing alongside my writing, and I still am. I now work as a literary agent for Trellis Literary Management. EC: Have you ever wanted to just write full time and leave the industry side of things behind? DK: I did leave publishing to write Notes on an Execution, and that was the most miserable I’ve ever been. EC: Miserable? Why? DK: There were a couple of different factors. My first book performed pretty well, but not like crazy well. There was a lot of pressure on whether I’d be able to sell a second book. How much money would I make on the second book? How well would it do after the track of the first one? Writing a second book is uniquely difficult. I’m on my third now, and I’m like, Oh, this is a breeze. Or I guess I should say it’s emotionally easier. It feels easier because it’s not that huge can-you-do-it-again pressure. Anyway, I knew I had to write a second book, so I quit my publishing job. I was working as an editor at Penguin Random House. I didn’t want to always wonder what it would’ve been like to write full time. My husband got into law school. We moved from New York to Seattle. I didn’t really know anybody. I came out here and was like, I’m gonna write my second book! And then proceeded to just punch myself in the face for at least a year. I wrote a draft of a book. I gave it to my agent. She hated it. Told me to basically throw it out, which I did. This was about six months into writing full time. That was horrific. I’d put everything into this thing, but it wasn’t working. I didn’t have any other alternatives, so I started over. And it was that second draft that ended up becoming Notes on an Execution. EC: Jesus . . . DK: Right? After that, I’ve slowly worked my way into becoming a literary agent. It’s much more flexible than my editorial career. Agenting, strangely enough, has turned out to be the solution. EC: That’s so interesting. There’s really something to be said for having a counterweight. Like something to balance out your writing life and your life life. DK: Yeah. For me, it’s more of an emotional counterweight than anything else. Just like knowing that my writing can still be fun. Not everything is riding on it. I still have my other career. I have people who count on me. I have calls to take and important meetings. It’s not just me banging my head against the wall. I mean, I can bang my head against the wall when I want. I’ve left that space open for myself, but it doesn’t have to happen like it did for my second novel. EC: And there’s only so many hours in a day, right? So many creative hours, especially. DK: That was my exact problem. I would sit there for four hours in the morning. I’d hit a wall, be totally exhausted, look up and be like, Oh my god! My husband didn’t get home from school for another five hours. I didn’t even have a dog yet. What was I supposed to do with myself? I felt like I was using sixty percent of my brain. EC: Let’s get into your process. You get that first seed of an idea, what do you do? DK: I just think about it for like years. I just keep sitting on it and letting it grow. What’s weird, I don’t think I’ve ever thrown out an idea. If it’s not working, I just twist it, then twist it some more, until it’s almost unrecognizable, but it always comes from the same thing. EC: Do you have an idea bank? I have a spot on my wall where I write “Novel Ideas,” and then let them kinda fight it out to see which one I’ll go for next. DK: It doesn’t really work that way for me. I only ever have one idea at a time. I have absolutely no idea what will come after this book I’m working on now. I think I have to finish it first. Like, my brain has to move on from the current project. EC: Okay, so now you’re past the gestation period. You’ve got your idea, and you’re going to start writing. What’s your first step there? DK: I just kind of puke it out . . . EC: No outline? DK: No, I try to be extremely free with myself. I call it my “Zero Draft.” It’s not even a first draft. It’s actual word vomit. I don’t even go back and read it. EC: Do you finish it? Is the structure there, the total arc of the narrative? DK: It depends. For the book I’m working on now, I wrote the zero draft all the way to the end, but it was really short. Thirty-thousand words or something. It was super skeletal, but I got through it. Relatedly, the thing I got to the end of has very few parallels to the draft I have now. It’s trash, but it’s necessary. EC: Do you work on a computer? DK: I go back and forth. If I have no fucking idea what I’m going to write, I’ll sit down with a notebook and pen. It just feels better. I always go back and transcribe whatever I’ve written straight into Scrivner when I’m done. EC: Scrivner. Really? You’re the first author I’ve had on here that’s mentioned that. DK: Oh my gosh. I live and die by Scrivner. EC: Why? DK: You can see the whole book without having to scroll through the whole book. Especially for that zero draft, you can see these early plot points and how they’re arranged in the shape of the book. You feel like you’re in a bird’s eye even when you’re in the draft. EC: This is really interesting to me. I’m somewhat of a pen/pad enthusiast. I’ve always thought about how that part of the process changes the end result. And now that you’ve got me thinking about software like Scrivner, I can’t help but question how it changes the story. DK: Well, I can say this: Scrivner changes my visual understanding of my book. I can read over my whole book in like an hour if I want to. I’m not actually reading it, but the way that software is set up, I can see it. It’s almost like a sculpture. I can see every scene, every chapter, all outlined on the sidebar. I can even move them around if needed. When I put it in Word, it’s a different story. It’s just an endless scroll. EC: Damn . . . DK: Yeah. EC: I feel like I’ve been over here playing with rocks. DK: I’m telling you. Once you figure it out, you can’t go back. EC: It kinda scares me, though. Like any new technology, I guess. For me, I have all these old superstitions, these ways that have worked. But every time I talk with another author, I learn something new. Something always changes. Speaking of which, what are the things that have stayed the same for you over the years? DK: My process journal, which is deranged. They’re just black Moleskins. No lines. I filled up three of them for Notes. I make these black boxes for the hours where I was writing. I do an entry for each day. I write down what’s working, what’s not working, and what comes next. EC: How does that help you? DK: You know that quote about how writing a novel is like driving at night, you can only see as far as the headlights shine but you can get the whole way there? With a process journal, I feel like you can see as far the headlights shine and you can see everything behind you at any given moment. Which I think is so helpful. There are also sessions when you’re just cutting stuff and moving things around, you know, tinkering all day, but you still sat down for some hours and did the work. You should get credit for that. EC: Outside of your process journal, are there other rituals you use to get you into the writing headspace? DK: The journal is huge. The minute I open the cover, the writing session has begun. My emails are turned off. I have my headphones on… EC: What are you listening to? DK: I listen to music that makes me feel like my characters. That is very important for me. I’ll listen to the same song forever. For Notes on an Execution, I listened to the same Bon Iver song on repeat for like two years. It was disgusting. I also will light a little candle on my desk sometimes. But most important for me is knitting. I’m always knitting while I write. EC: So, like, you pause, and you’re thinking, and your hands are . . . DK: I open my document. I’m reading over a scene. I’m knitting while I read over the scene. I write some. I stop and I think about it. I knit some. I write some more. I don’t even notice usually when I switch from knitting to writing. My hands are just moving and my brain is working, and then it’s like, Okay, that’s what you’re going to write next. I know this is like so specific and crazy. EC: No, those knitting needles are literally the exact reason I wanted to do this column. When did you first start the knitting thing? DK: Right around the time I began edits for Notes on an Execution. It was during COVID. I was revising and knitting and then it just bled over into my writing time too. EC: What time of day do you write? DK: Morning. I’ll get to my desk as early as I can make myself, which is usually around eight. I’ll triage all my agency emails. Anything that needs to be urgently handled, I’ll handle. EC: So you do look at email before you sit down? DK: I have to, yeah. Especially since I’m on West Coast Time and that’s like noon for a lot of people. If I have longer things I need to attend to, I’ll jot them down then put my headphones on and get to writing. I try to aim for an hour or two every day. Sometimes, I’ll do an evening, which is nice. My husband cooks dinner, does all the cleaning, walks the dog, while I sit up here with a glass of wine and write. Just one glass, though, or it doesn’t work. Recently, I started implementing a “Full Friday.” I totally clear my calendar for these days. I’ll do three hours in the morning. Lunch. Three hours in the afternoon. Dinner. Then three hours at night. I find that that almost feels like a writing retreat. I’m just totally in it. EC: What was the reason behind you wanting to start those “Full Fridays?” DK: So, the draft I’m working on for book three right now—I knew what I needed to do, but my hour or two a day just didn’t feel like enough. I just needed to get through to the end of that draft. I ended up also going away for a weekend with my dog. I wrote for the whole forty-eight hours. It was amazing. I wanted to replicate that feeling, without having to book an Airbnb every time. EC: While you’re drafting, are you working every day? DK: Pretty much. I did just take two months off while my agent was reading my draft. I’m back at it now, but it’s slow going. The goal is every day, though. I’ve learned to not beat myself up too much about it. A friend of mine once said you have to take the pulse of the manuscript every day, and by taking the pulse, you keep the book alive. EC: Okay, after you get the first draft ready to share, who do you send it to? DK: My husband and my agent. They read pretty early and pretty often. My husband gives me so much support. He’ll make small notes, but generally, he likes almost every draft. My agent read a hundred-page chunk of this book I’m working on now, and then we totally scrapped it. We had one character that was working, so I went with that and made it through another thirty-thousand words, but I couldn’t get to the end. Then we had a four-hour-long call and I went off and wrote the ending in like two months. It still wasn’t there, though. My agent ended up making this huge murder wall in her office, trying to get the timeline nailed down. EC: That’s an agent. And you’re an agent. I’ve never had an agent on for Shop Talk, but I know there’s some craft involved in agenting as well. Are you that hands-on with your clients? DK: I’m definitely an editorial agent. My background is in editing. For me, that’s where I like to be. That’s why I take someone on. I want to work on that book. I want to sell it of course, and future books, and shape that author’s career, but for me so much comes back to editing. I will say my agent and I have a very unconventional relationship. We met when I was nineteen and she was twenty-two. I was her first client. And now, I’m agent at the same agency where she is. So, yeah, we’re kind of unique. I will say most authors have that sort of relationship with editors, not agents. EC: Once y’all get the book where you want it, do you have a final step before you send it off to copyedit? DK: I read it out loud. It’s like an eight-to-ten-hour process. EC: Are you reading alone? Or do you read to anyone? DK: My dog. He’s asleep under the desk now. He knows a lot about book publishing, more than most humans, actually. EC: Do you do any reading before you sit down to write? Any particular books? DK: I like craft books. They help me get in the right headspace. There’s a new one called Refuse to be Done by Matt Bell. I really like that one. There’s another one called Writing Down the Bones. It’s old, but it’s just little segments that are perfect to get you in the right mindset. EC: A lot of folks who read this column are aspiring novelists. What’s your best advice for those who are just starting to write? DK: I’ve had people call me out for this because I have a writing career, but really, 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. EC: Yeah, it’s a worthy, if painful, enterprise. Which brings me to my last question. Why do you write? DK: God. That is a crazy question. Okay, well . . . I write because I have to? Yeah, it’s the only way I feel like myself. Even these last few months where I’ve been waiting on my agent to read and not writing, I’ve felt disconnected. Almost like disassociated in some ways. Writing is the deep stuff of you, right? It’s the only way I know how to touch that. I’d be a shell without it. I don’t have any larger or loftier reason, though. I’m not trying to do good in the world. If it does do good in the world, great. I love to hear when I impact readers. To see that that’s an outcome of it is beyond thrilling. But it’s very hard to go into such a tedious, arduous process with that as a goal. It’s kind of all navel gazing anyway, right? Yeah. We are navel gazing. We’re just telling a little story from our little brains. There’s no reason to do that unless it’s for you. View the full article

No pain, no gain! A common refrain, and the quintessential mantra of those who hustle. While you’ve probably seen this couplet superimposed over dozens of muscular athletes wielding barbells like feathers, there are much smaller, quieter examples of pain as the pathway to a different type of success: healing. Very few people can put in an intense workout and escape the painful bodily backlash the next day, and the process of healing is no different. Trauma hurts and so does banishing it. I write about trauma because I am intrigued by how much our pain shapes us, and by the overall resilience of the human spirit. While the biggest examples of this are usually seen in news stories of miraculous survival, it’s not necessary to go through a life-changing event in order to be hurt. Core memories can be created by something as simple as a painful word spoken by someone you love, filed to a point sharp enough to poke at you your entire life. There is no such thing as a trauma-free life; we are all the result of our reaction to pain and our ability to deal with it. But when it comes to severe trauma, the consequences of avoidance can be devastating. Some people are able to break the cycle of abuse by appreciating the pain it caused them. They strive not to hurt someone else the way they were hurt—even though they might want to. But in far, far more cases, another adage is true: hurt people hurt people. Many people who have endured severe pain feel entitled to inflict it on others—they may enjoy it. In recent years, bullying has extended way beyond the playground, and we have the videos to prove it: three-minute snippets of miserable people inflicting misery on others. While I find damaged characters the most compelling to write about, one troubling aspect of doing so is that in order to show their growth and their arc, you have to keep hurting them: again and again and again. And that’s because retraumatization—facing your demons when they show up—is a major part of healing. In my new novel, Before You Found Me, my goal was two portray two characters with extremely traumatic backgrounds, and to craft a unique pathway to healing for each, demonstrating how personal and painstaking the journey can be. There’s Rowan, a twenty-two-year old woman who narrowly escaped death at the hands of her ex-fiancé, and Gabriel, an eleven-year-old boy who has spent the last three years held captive in a basement by his grieving father. Fresh off her own trauma, Rowan discovers Gabriel trapped in his basement: beaten, starved, and convinced he deserved nothing more. With an all-too-intimate understanding of the failures of the legal system, Rowan acts in haste and desperation, snatching Gabriel from the dark and taking him halfway across the country for a fresh start; a beautiful, pain-free life for both of them. I wanted to create arcs that demonstrated the importance of support, but also showed the strides the characters took to change their own lives. Being young, naïve, and damaged herself, Rowan is deeply flawed, yet heroic in her actions. After abducting him, Rowan bubble-wraps Gabriel into a new life, leading him toward a real future on a path lined with bright and shiny things. She showers him with the comforts he’s long been denied, offers endless support and golden opportunities—anything that will stop him from looking behind him. Spoiler Alert: It doesn’t work. In an effort to avoid retraumautizing Gabriel, Rowan denied him the opportunity to process his anger and grief and truly heal. No pain, no gain, right? A major part of the healing process involves learning how to acknowledge and work through trauma rather than repressing it or acting out. Because she is young, hurt, and vulnerable herself, only a tiny part of Rowan realizes this—so tiny it’s easy to ignore. In developing traumatized characters, there is no standard blueprint to follow. Trauma usually has a domino effect, with one event often leading to another. Relying on the commonalities of fear and anxiety is impossible because trauma does not affect people in the same way—it’s deeply personal. But one shared trait is the ability to mask trauma and seek out distractions. While this can look like healing, it’s just the opposite. Trauma is like a sponge, and ignoring it is like sticking that sponge in a glass of water. It’s only going to get bigger. The fact that so many people choose to do just this is a huge testament to the pain of retraumatization. When you choose to face your demons, you do so prepared to fight. But when your demons suddenly face you, it’s all too easy to be overcome. Like trauma, we all have flaws in our thinking, and my favorite flaw is an overflowing heart. A person who feels so deeply for another that they’re willing to sacrifice their own safety, their own happiness, their own life, for the benefit of someone else. That’s what I found in Rowan. But the best of intentions aren’t always so, and in writing this book, I discovered that right alongside my characters. It was important for me to allow them to confront their own demons on their own terms because no matter how much it hurt, they came out far stronger on the other side. *** View the full article

I love crime fiction for its versatility, how it can incorporate well-realized characters, a wide range of tones and styles, and social commentary all within propulsive plots. A crime sets up an immediate conflict: a wrong is committed, and someone tries to address it and restore order. Crime fiction can include a wide range of stakes, from “Who stole Grandma’s award-winning pie recipe?” to “How do we catch the Pigface serial killer?” It offers a window into the dark recesses of the human soul while also celebrating the better angels of our nature. As a genre, it’s one of the most accommodating forms of storytelling. That being said, when I look at the crime novels on my shelf, the majority of them focus on male protagonists. Nothing intrinsically wrong with that—Chandler’s Philip Marlowe is an iconic private eye, and Martin Cruz Smith’s Arkady Renko is my favorite investigator in literature. But all too often, women in crime fiction are relegated to the role of femme fatale or sidekick or victim in need of rescue. In Never Turn Back, my first Faulkner Family Thriller book, I introduce Susannah Faulkner, the sister of that book’s protagonist, Ethan. Both are victims of a violent home invasion that leaves them orphaned as children, and while Ethan grows up with a job and a house and a “normal” life, Suzie becomes a wild and dangerous young woman. Early on, though, Suzie refused to remain a side character, and as I dug deeper into her character, she became the protagonist and narrator of the next two books in the series. Can I do this? I remember asking myself as I set out to write Suzie Faulkner. Can I, a middle-aged heterosexual guy, write a strong, engaging, sexually fluid female character in her twenties? Fortunately, I am lucky enough to have lots of strong women in my life, and they and the women in the crime novels below inspire me to create powerful, complicated, and compelling female characters in my own fiction. Cop Town by Karin Slaughter (2014) Slaughter’s standalone is set in 1970s Atlanta. Kate Murphy is a brand-new police officer on a force that recently hired women but doesn’t want them there; being an attractive blond makes her harassment worse. On the surface Kate seems like a pretty, rich girl playing cop, and before her first day is over she wants to quit. But she is also a recent widow and Jewish, both of which deepen her character and her fortitude—most of her white male co-workers are misogynistic racists who are also suspicious of Jews, and an openly antisemitic cop killer roams the city streets. Kate gets partnered with Maggie Lawson, whose brother and uncle are also cops, although unhappy that Maggie wants to continue the family tradition. Both women must contend with colleagues who despise their presence, the aforementioned cop killer, and a shifting social and cultural landscape. Details like the uniforms the women are given—all deliberately too big, even the shoes—ground the story in a gritty realism. Cop Town is as much about Kate and Maggie’s growth and acceptance of themselves as police officers as it is a gripping thriller, and Kate’s journey especially makes for compelling reading. Everybody Knows by Jordan Harper (2023) Mae Pruett is a “black bag” publicist for LA’s elite; when they have problems, they call her to make them go away. A trifle world-weary, Mae recognizes some of her clients are scumbags but willingly cleans up their crises for a paycheck and the prestige her successes bring. When her boss is gunned down in what seems to be a random attack, Mae investigates on her own and runs into a conglomeration of personal assistants, lawyers, crooked cops, fixers, social media influencers, and private security thugs—the retinue of today’s rich and powerful. The more Mae descends into the underbelly of a world she thought she knew, the more depravity she uncovers, and she is forced to come to a reckoning with her own conscience. Mae is not immediately likable as a character, but having a ringside seat to her realization that she needs to save her own life, both figuratively and literally, is enthralling. This is a thrill ride that does not let up. Gods of Howl Mountain by Taylor Brown (2018) If Raymond Price, Charles Frazier, and Cormac McCarthy had written a crime novel set in 1950s North Carolina, they might have written this. The protagonist, Rory Docherty, is a bootlegger dodging both federal agents and rival whiskey-runners while haunted by his service in the Korean War, which left him with a wooden leg. Rory is a compelling protagonist, but the standout character is his grandmother, Granny May, a former prostitute turned folk healer. In an atmospheric world of moonshiners, snake healers, and corrupt sheriffs, Granny May is a formidable presence, forging her own way in a violent world that is not bereft of hope. She also gets some of the best lines: “‘Christ’s father let him die on that cross,’ she said. ‘I understand why he done it.’ She leaned closer, whispering: ‘But Christ never had no granny like me.’” Twentymile by C. Matthew Smith (2021) Smith’s debut novel is, on the surface, a thriller. Tsula Walker, a special agent with the National Park Service’s Investigative Services Branch, is assigned a case concerning the death of a wildlife biologist inside Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Soon a villain is revealed, Harlan Miles, whose family was forced off their farmland in the 1930s when the federal government sought to create the park. Harlan is a great antagonist, not least because his grievances have some merit. But Tsula, a member of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, has her own complicated perspective on the park land that was taken from her ancestors. Smith examines the troubled history of the park and the very nature of land ownership, all within the taut confines of an atmospheric thriller. Tsula is a fresh, dynamic character, and Smith writes her with grace and strength. ___________________________________ Additional Reading: Strong Women in Crime Fiction ___________________________________ No Home for Killers by E. A. Aymar Firekeeper’s Daughter by Angeline Boulley Burying the Honeysuckle Girls by Emily Carpenter The Paragon Hotel by Lyndsay Faye In the Woods by Tara French She Rides Shotgun by Jordan Harper Things We Do in the Dark by Jennifer Hillier Never Have I Ever by Joshilyn Jackson The Beekeeper’s Apprentice by Laurie R. King Like Lions by Brian Panowich Don’t Talk to Strangers by Amanda Kyle Williams Winter’s Bone by Daniel Woodrell *** View the full article

Novels, I’ve found in my writing experience, come out of ideas that won’t be denied. They surface from the mind like something primeval climbing out of muck. Once they’re out there, wet and dripping, there’s no putting them back under the black tar. My novel about an apocalyptic cult, Minor Prophets, came out of me that way, a piece at a time, first a head, then a tail, then a confused monstrosity of parts. I had just moved to Chicago after a lifetime spent on the east coast. One rainy night the first week my husband and I arrived, lost in our new city, carrying shopping bags of home goods back from a Target on the Near North Side, we passed a grassy field, a square of wild unkempt emptiness with no place in the middle of a city. In the middle of the field, a small white church, leaning and ramshackle, its classic black steeple stabbing into the night sky, forbidding and haunted and strange. FOR SALE, the sign read. CHURCH. We were lost, and this church stood, a ruined beacon, dubious sanctuary. Here is the novel, though I didn’t know it yet. Here was the American story that would suck me in, obsess me, haunt me, endanger me. Every novel is a dangerous seduction for its writer. I’m a writer who has always been fascinated by the dark side of religious institutions, about women and power and spirituality, about the transcendence of spiritual experience mixed with doubt, abuse, and dread. As I wrote Minor Prophets, I tried to penetrate the darkness at the heart of religious extremism, the frightening tenderness in its sweet core of belief. There’s something so appealing, so relatable, about a cult member’s search for transcendence and immortality. And there’s a fine line between that quest and total destruction. I’m as susceptible as anyone else. Lonely in a new city, missing my mother, who died several years before of cancer, but went to college in Chicago, I felt occasionally like I was touching secret, sacred places from her life. I walked by the lake and wandered up and down the city’s broad, wind-blasted avenues, wondering where she might have visited. I was still struggling to understand how it could be possible that she was gone, how the world could keep turning in such an unimaginable aftermath. I did not know who I was without her. Another moment that lurched out of the muck:: I was flipping through tv channels late at night and stumbled across a reality survival show. Can you last in the wilderness of Alaska? A team of newcomers with minimal survival training is set loose in the interior. They’ve been hunting, and have made their first kill, but it’s a porcupine, and the novice survivalists are at a loss, unsure of how to cut it open. Finally, they do, and the guts — all those warm pulsing parts of the animal who was alive just moments ago — bulge out. Someone cuts out the bladder and holds it up. It’s full, and glowing yellow with the light behind it. Something odd and organic and real, saintly and soiled at once. I didn’t know what it meant, but II was electrified by this vision of life and death in its brutal, biological reality. In my novel, a girl skins a porcupine in the first chapter. And then she walks into the kitchen, where her mother is assisting another woman with a secret abortion. Life and death, its fine bloody line. In those years in Chicago, I listened to Glynn Washington’s excellent podcast on the Heaven’s Gate cult (called Heaven’s Gate). With well-researched, unsensational detail, he builds the story of this doomed group and their ultimate destination, a mass suicide in a rented mansion in San Diego. An excellent storyteller, Washington takes the time to linger on the odd little details: their fondness for Star Trek (one member writes “39 to beam up” in their signout book), their matching unisex bowl cuts, the almost tender way each member is paired with another and served a spoonful of apple sauce laced with phenobarbitol. Cults, I’ve learned, have a uniquely American history. While they’ve popped up around the world, no other country or culture has produced so many new and fringe religions in contemporary history. There are the Mormons, the Spiritualists, the survivalists and preppers: Manson’s Family and David Koresh’s Branch Davidians, Jim Jones’ Temple and Stephen Gaskin’s Farm. In my novel, the protagonist surfs through online support groups for survivors of cults like these, learning how much they had in common: thought control, coercive sex, child marriage, anti-abortion dogma, the promise of death a poisoned drink away. American culture has always been open to the idea of re-invention; the authority and tradition of top-down religion has been rejected by so many, but then there’s a void left to fill. American culture has always been open to the idea of re-invention; the authority and tradition of top-down religion has been rejected by so many, but then there’s a void left to fill. New Age and fundamentalist Christian cults are eerily similar in their conservatism, how they police the body and promise liberation in the same breath. Heaven’s Gate banned sex and many of its members castrated themselves. The Farm banned birth control. Koresh’s Branch Davidians were strictly celibate except for its leader, who married any girl his God told him to marry. I read books and listened to radio shows about them all, taking notes, telling anyone who would listen the most disturbing things I learned. What was the common link, the toxic thread? If I could just find it, I thought, I’d know what story I needed to tell. I can see how it was becoming an obsession. Maybe for novelists, each book is its own cult religion. I looked up the original farewell videos of the Heaven’s Gate members on Youtube. These macabre documents are nineties-style suicide notes, filmed on stuttering VHS tapes. The members of the cult come on in pairs, sitting in plastic lawn chairs against a verdant green garden. They laugh sheepishly, they refer to their own bodies as “their vehicles.” They have learned to view themselves as beings of spirit and air, completely separate from these bodies that in a matter of hours, they will shed. The videos are cheesy, like old home movies, and they’re terrifying. I’m finding that cults share a nearly inevitable slide toward end-of-the-world thinking. Most cults don’t begin with thought police, isolation, mass death. They’re subtle, they tell a compelling story that we can’t turn away from. They start with a flyer in a community center basement, a blocky web 1.0 site, a mysterious, provocative, charismatic leader. The leader promises many things: focus and beauty and the hidden secrets of the bible. A secret way to connect with a higher truth. TLiving a life without B.S., giving yourselfto a true and pure principle. If the message comes at a crisis point in someone’s life, then that person is vulnerable. If we’re lonely, if we’re hurting, if we’ve always longed for some greater sense of connection and belonging, we are vulnerable. It can take over the lives of rocket scientists and philosophers and PhD’s. Education is not always protective; I’m surprised to learn in my research that engineers and mathematicians are particularly prone to falling for end-of-the-world ideologies, perhaps because they like solving puzzles and cracking codes, and they believe they can understand secret knowledge that others cannot. Isaac Newton spent the last decades of his life consumed with the idea that he could calculate the end times by studying the Bible. Genius can lead us down rabbit holes. Cultlike thinking is something that can enter anyone’s life, depending on the time, the place, the circumstances. It can spread like a whisper in your ear, or a disease. It can promise you that there’s a special place where you belong when you feel alone in your grief, or offer the tantalizing promise that death is not the permanent blank wall you thought it was. I can see, now, why I had to write this story. Why faith of any kind can offer such seductive comfort if you’re grieving. It’s 2015, then 2016, the height of election season. My husband and I take road trips north to Michigan’s remote Upper Peninsula to hike in the woods. As we head out of Chicago and travel deeper into rural farmland, the Trump signs in yards, leaning against old barns or jutting proudly out into the road, grow larger and larger, looming in our vision. They seem ominous, a whiff of doom in the air. I’m discovering, along with many Americans, that there is more than one country, more than one narrative of American life. For urban dwellers like me, the election results are a rude awakening: there is a dark vein of extremism that has always been there as part of our shared story, and now it’s rising. In my novel, a girl grows up in a militant, apocalyptic organization in the woods of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Her father, the cult leader, has fashioned her into a prophet for the group, and she, needing his love and acceptance, performs and prophesies. But while many cult novels focus on the simplistic explanation of “brainwashing”, I wanted to understand what makes believers fall in love. If I was going to write this novel truly and honestly, I couldn’t come at it from a position of contempt. I needed to imagine my way into a room full of praying people, into the body of a child speaking in tongues. I had to acknowledge the ecstasy and beauty of belonging. My girl protagonist is a victim of her father’s manipulations, but she’s also a recruiter, a manipulator all her own. If she’s going to escape this world, she will have to grapple with her own complicity. For most of a year I watched my mother die, and I saw the tender, focused care she received from her hospice nurses. These men and women came to our house nearly every day, listening to her needs and working to make her last weeks and months meaningful. While watching them care for her, I begin to learn that hospice care is about radically re-envisioning the goals of medicine. A good hospice caretaker must step into the terrifying moment of after: after a diagnosis is terminal, after it feels like the doctors have given up on you, after the goals of cure are no longer a possibility. Instead, a good hospice nurse navigates the search for new meaning: to dig value out of every day, after a personal apocalypse has occurred. in so many of the cults I’ve studied, it is women’s bodies that are the battlefields upon which wars are waged. In the present-day storyline of my novel, the girl protagonist is working as a hospice nurse in Chicago, navigating her messy escape from the cult and struggling to live in the outside world. Part of her journey is with her dying patients, witnessing the very private journey they must go on. The end of the world, as it turns out, is a personal experience, not only a global one. We all have our personal apocalypse to journey through. And for the living left behind, it’s a question of figuring out how to live in the aftermath. That was the critical final piece of my novel: I realized I was writing about what happened when the world you’d been planning for didn’t materialize. What happens when the world doesn’t end, and you must go on, feeling your way through one day and the next? When my mother died, our usual hospice nurse was not available. Instead, a stranger came to our house, did not remove her sneakers, marched up to the bedroom and checked my mother’s pulse. “Oh yes. She’s in heaven now,” she declared. I felt a wild surge of anger: my mother was resolutely non-religious, and never used language about heaven, God, or angels. This pronouncement, this promise made, felt like a lie, told in the silence left behind her passing. I can still taste the anger of that moment, now more than ten years ago. And that’s another element of Minor Prophets, the missing piece of my obsession: that in so many of the cults I’ve studied, it is women’s bodies that are the battlefields upon which wars are waged. They’re the weapons, the tools, endlessly manipulated and coerced, nearly always silent in the stories that emerge in the aftermath. Their untold stories flash across my brain: women in long dresses, holding children, peering into the cameras of outsiders with wariness of wild animals; women presented with impossible choices; girls told to worship, girls told to obey, girls denied the interpretation of their own story; women alone in rooms with powerful men; women searching for some kind of revelation, wanting their own transcendence. Women looking hopefully upward, seeking a god, finding only a human face staring back. *** View the full article

My current series revolves around the Locard Institute, its forensic science focus made of equal parts research, training, and private investigation for clients who need/can afford it. The Locard does not exist, alas. I invented and designed it for flexibility in plotting—but CSI schools are real enough. As labs are accredited and techs are certified, a certain amount of continuing education credits are required to maintain those standings. Forensic training classes might last from a morning to a week. Students include cops, fingerprint analysts, drug lab techs or death investigators with experience anywhere from a few months to a few decades. Most any professional employee would find the idea familiar. Doctors travel to learn new surgical techniques. Civil engineers practice laying out a planned community. Personnel from Personnel must keep up on EEOC-compliant employee application forms. Supply managers must learn how to do inventory via a tablet app. The process is also familiar. Training flyers arrive at your work email or your boss leaves one on your desk. The HR department has to give you the okay to travel, pay the tuition and make you sign three forms in order to be trusted with the company credit card—after first giving you the sharpest of looks, as if it’s her personal financial future at stake if you return without an itemized receipt from McDonald’s. Where CSI schools differ is in the subject matter. And the execution. In Basic Bloodstain Pattern Interpretation we spent days experimenting with horse blood (donated by living horses) by dripping it from pipettes while walking, while running. We soaked sponges in it, covered the walls and floor with reams of brown paper, and hit the sponges with hammers, baseball bats and latex-enclosed fists. We hung the sponges downfield and shot them. We soaked weapons and tools in it and swung them around. Sure, all that could have been explained in a PowerPoint presentation, but would we have retained it? And would a slide show have been as much fun? (Funny story: Of course, classroom instruction doesn’t always translate to reality, just as that supply manager might find the handy tablet app is not so handy when on a loading dock in a snowstorm while wearing heavy gloves. In the Basic Bloodstain class we worked with paper covered walls and the floor—flat surfaces at a ninety-degree angle. In the Advanced class, they might throw in a small end table. Wall, floor, table. Flat, level surfaces. At this point I was technically a bloodstain pattern expert so when we had a brutal stabbing inside a garage, my boss called me in to do my stuff. I burst onto the scene with enthusiasm—and stopped. The garage was half storage facility and half man cave, with a flat screen, couch, coffee table, fan, gun safe, tool bench, tool cabinet along the walls and the entire center filled waist-high with an impassable mountain of boxes, empty luggage, old bikes, pool toys, lawn care equipment, and who knows what else because we saw no reason to excavate down to the box of P90X DVDs. Blood covered a good portion of the floor, but thrashing had shoved the couch and the table and the flat-screen so that I didn’t know if the patterns had been deposited before or after movement, skewing angle determination. I turned to my boss. “Where’s my wall, floor, table? I could do that!”) At a ‘buried body’ class we examined (happily, didn’t have to exhume it, since it was there for the semester-long community college class) the grave of a small pig. The college teacher had placed it on a small island in the middle of a campus pond, to keep the odor from disturbing the students studying less smelly things like accounting or computer science. I can’t say I learned a lot about how to conceal a clandestine grave because a few of us spent the time instead observing a fish make a nest in the surrounding waters. It would scoop up sand in its mouth, take it to the edge of its crater, and spit it over the berm, creating a perfectly round circle. Sorry, but this model of determination was a little more interesting than the migration pattern of maggots. In Crime Scene Reconstruction, we used colored string to lay a grid along a section of lawn and here’s-the-gas-line-don’t-dig flags to mark where tossed bullet casings lay. (Again, didn’t work quite so well in a house that qualified for an episode of Hoarders where the ground is anything but level.) We also observed qualified personnel fire bullets into vehicles to demonstrate how to tell the bullet’s direction of travel. Picture an oval swimming pool with a zero-entry slope at one end. That will be the bullet’s first contact with the vehicle. The other end, where the metal is a little bunched up into a hole, is where the bullet finally built up enough metal to deflect it into puncturing the door or roof or hood. Cracks in the windows will crater, with the larger diameter on the exit side of the glass. In regular window glass, cracks will form in spider-legs, emanating outward in a line from the hole, but will also form in concentric circles around the hole. If you examine the edge of the broken pieces you can tell which side of the glass the bullet entered from the stress marks. But if two shots are close enough together for their cracks to intersect, you can tell which came first—cracks will end in existing cracks. If the lines from hole B end in lines from hole A, B came first. Meanwhile, back at where the shooter is standing, casings fly from his automatic pistol and scatter, bounce and roll across the sidewalk. They do not land in the same place. In other words, in those episodes of CSI where they calculate exactly where the casing went as it was ejected from the gun is so much applesauce. Sometimes, our courses are purely classroom instruction. I recently spent two days listening to FBI latent print examiners go over the current thinking in how to word court testimony explaining fingerprint analysis, identifications, and eliminations. You may have heard rumblings in the past dozen years about how fingerprints ‘don’t work any more’ or ‘have no basis in science’ and so on. That is more of that applesauce, but, there is a very real need to standardize how it is documented, supported, and explained to a jury. The Organization of Scientific Area Committees for Forensic Science, begun by DOJ and now administered by NIST, is attempting to do just that, not only for fingerprints but for all forensic disciplines. They create a set of standards for training examiners, for quality control, for writing reports, for testimony, and then publish the drafts so anyone who wants to, such as me, can submit questions or suggestions for improvement, which they will consider and perhaps implement. Then they will send out another draft, and the refining continues. The process is necessary, wonderful, intelligent, responsible and democratic…and glacially slow. Technology, of course, changes daily and at an ever increasing pace. I just spent three days at work learning how to use a new alternate light source. It looks like a small tablet with a big ole camera lens attached, and that’s pretty much what it is. Except the camera also has a light source that can deliver wavelengths from bright white to the ROYGBIV stuff to ultraviolet to infrared. And has built-in filters in the necessary colors to enhance or block the wavelengths as necessary. And has a camera that can capture the resulting surface image and offload same via USB or Bluetooth. And has preset programs that have made it largely idiot-proof. Are you looking for blood on a purple sweater? It will give you the five top combinations of light and filter with a touch of a fingertip. Searching for gunshot residue on a multicolored backpack? Tap, tap, and click. I can’t describe what a wonder this thing is, especially for someone like me who has never been able to really comprehend light theory or remember what color filter goes with what wavelength and why. Sometimes the stuff you see on CSI isn’t really applesauce. So, yes, CSIs really go to school, and quite often. That part of the Locard Insitute series isn’t fiction. Walk into any forensic continuing ed class as the attendees will span all ages, genders, races and locations. Some people might be there because they needs the CEUs, or because they’re newbies to the field and need all the stuff they didn’t get in college. Sometimes they’ve been in the field for years but recently had other duties added to their lab. Sometimes they just want to get out of town for a week on their agency’s dime. But what would happen, I asked myself, if one of them moonlighted as a serial killer? Could they resist the temptation to ply their trade in the midst of those trained to catch serial killers? Could any psychopath resist that challenge? The answer, as you’ll see, is no. *** View the full article

The Southern California stretch of the PCT that sits between Warner Springs and the Anza Trailhead runs forty-one desolate miles between two rural highways, State Routes 79 and 74. Despite the long views of barren ridges, the meanderings through fields of strange boulders, and the occasional funky cactus, this isn’t the most scenic section, but it was a convenient place for a trail hopeful named Eric Trockman, who lived in nearby Temecula, to test out his equipment for three days before he began his PCT thru-hike for real. On February 20, 2015, four days after the contentious call between Chris and Min, Trockman hiked north from Warner Springs. Eighteen miles later, his calves feeling sore, he came across something “a little peculiar.” Another hiker’s stuff—a yellow and silver ground pad, a blue sleeping bag, a backpack, a tarp, and a pair of trekking poles—was lying next to the trail, as if the owner might return at any moment. Trockman assumed the hiker must be out looking for water or going to the bathroom or trying to find cell service. But, in case there was more to it than that, he snapped a picture of the gear with his phone. The photo recorded the time and date of this fateful encounter: February 20, 2015, at 2:15 p.m. After he got home, Trockman logged online and clicked his way to PCT Class of 2015, a Facebook group of about three thousand members that consisted of that year’s thru-hikers (and their fans). Trockman had posted a handful of tips in the past (even advising fellow hikers that “Loose stuff in the pack is annoying, get more Ziplocs/stuff sacks”), but he learned as much from the group as he shared with them. On the twenty-fifth, however, Trockman read an unsettling post that reminded him of the abandoned gear he’d seen a few days earlier. A 2015 PCT hiker had gone missing. The lost man was twenty-eight, the same age as Trockman, and he’d disappeared from the same section Eric had hiked—except Chris Sylvia had walked it in the opposite direction. Trockman shared his photo of the abandoned gear in the Facebook thread and provided his name and phone number to search and rescue, but no one interviewed him about what he’d seen until I called two years later. When I first spoke to Trockman over the phone, he told me he felt guilty about this. Perhaps he should have made more of a fuss when he first saw Chris Sylvia’s belongings. “Hikers find weird stuff all the time!” I reassured him. “You took a picture. That’s more than I might have done, and I’m a former law enforcement officer.” A few weeks before I called Trockman, I came across a Reddit post published in February 2017 by Chris Sylvia’s oldest sibling. Still haunted by the TV series episode on Sylvia that never aired, I’d kept tabs on the case and was saddened to see that little progress— if any—had been made in finding the lost hiker. “This month my brother will have been missing for two years” is how Joshua Sylvia introduced a thread he had created on the second anniversary of his brother’s disappearance. In an attempt to stir up interest in the case, Joshua made himself available to answer any questions a would-be sleuth might have. “Hopefully the chance of him being a John Doe isn’t too high. I was able to track down his dental records. And DNA was taken from our mom.” I winced. That’s so heartbreaking. Then, as I scrolled through the entire thread, I came across this comment: “I was contacted not long ago about a pilot that is being put together for A&E about missing hikers,” Sylvia’s brother informed the Redditors. “If all goes according to plan, my mother and I should be getting flown to California this summer.” Reading this stirred something in me. Joshua had misplaced his hope for resolution on Hollywood attention, but because I’d been involved in the project’s early development, I knew the television producers had since moved on. I surmised that no one had informed the family of this outcome, so a few days later, I contacted Joshua to let him know the show wasn’t happening. Then I called his mother, Nancy Warman, who thanked me for taking an interest in her son’s disappearance, and I made that promise to get her some answers. Six weeks later, on November 6, 2017, I was at the Paradise Valley Café near Anza, California, waiting for Eric Trockman to join me for breakfast. He arrived looking every bit the part of a veteran PCT thru-hiker—wearing modern khaki attire, a neatly trimmed beard, and an agreeable disposition. After a brief greeting, I cut to the chase (“I want to know more about the gear!”) and shoved my coffee out of the way so I could spread out a topographical map on the table between us. Then I pointed to the Anza Trailhead on State Route 74, one mile east of us. From there, I moved my finger southbound along a dashed line representing the PCT. When I hit Chihuahua Valley Road, I stopped. “Is this where you found it?” “Yes,” Trockman confirmed. “About a four-minute walk south of that road.” After I finished my brandied French toast, we left the Paradise Valley Café and headed to the spot where Trockman last saw Chris Sylvia’s gear. Once we were in the vicinity, we consulted a color copy of the photo he’d taken that I’d printed out and brought along until we located a unique rock verifying the exact location. Across the trail, I noticed a small cross constructed from reclaimed wood and rusty nails. The unnamed rustic memorial had since collapsed. I picked it up and hammered it back into the ground with a stone. Our experience as thru-hikers led Trockman and me to the same conclusion. The Sylvia gear site was not a camping spot. With its lack of shade, rocky surface, and awkward angle, it wasn’t even a tempting location for a long break. What the site did offer, however, was an advantageous view of Chihuahua Valley Road. You could watch a vehicle coming from a mile or more away and have time to trot back to the trail before the car passed. Even so, this hitchhiking method would test one’s patience. We only saw one other car on that road the entire time we were there. We climbed a hill behind the gear site to check for cell service. To our east, the Anza-Borrego Desert stretched out below the PCT, which meandered high above ridges covered with shrubs typical of California chaparral, a semiarid landscape of chamise and manzanita that grow thick and scratchy but rarely higher than your head. At the top, we could see for miles in every direction. The PCT was identifiable as was Chihuahua Valley Road and other landmarks. Unable to find cell service, we reconnected with the trail and hiked south. A five-minute walk from the gear site brought us to a handmade sign welcoming hikers to a hostel known as Mike’s Place. Years ago, Mike Herrera bought a patch of land on an isolated ridge east of the PCT and built himself a man-cave getaway. A big fan of the trail and its hikers, Herrera invited the travelers to fill up their canteens from a water tank on his property. He also encouraged them to camp on his homesite. This act of charity had earned Mike the title of “trail angel”—a generous person who supports a thru-hiker’s journey in various ways, such as by giving them free rides, food, or lodging. Up to a hundred backpackers visited his hostel each day during peak hiking season. To handle the demand, Herrera had hired caretakers to live at his compound. His hospitality was genuine, but his hostel had a mixed reputation, causing some to avoid it. As one hiker told me, “I don’t stop at Mike’s; it’s too much of a party atmosphere.” At the sign, we turned off the PCT and continued to the compound past the metal water tank. Red plastic cups in the bushes hinted at the vibe—part desert rat, part rowdy frat house. On the back patio of the ranch-style home, the caretaker, a guy in his thirties with a shaved head and a bushy goatee, catered to three young women thru-hiking south. When Eric and I joined them, the caretaker greeted us. “What brings the two of you here?” It was apparent by our gear—or lack thereof—that we weren’t thru-hiking. “I’m looking into the case of the young man who went missing from the trail near here,” I answered. “Do you know anything about it?” “And what do you know about it?” The caretaker’s hostility made me flinch. “I’m working with the family, and I know his gear was found less than a ten-minute walk from here . . .” “He didn’t make it here.” The abrupt certainty of this statement made me apprehensive. To soften the tension, I introduced myself and mentioned Chris Sylvia’s family would be grateful for any help he could provide. The caretaker identified himself as Josh McCoy. When I asked to see the 2015 trail register (a logbook in which hikers write the dates they passed through a particular site), McCoy got up from his plastic chair, pulled a dusty composition notebook from an outdoor shelf, and handed it to me. “This register begins in April,” I said, flipping through the pages. “I need to see the one from February and March.” “Are any pages torn out of it?” Again, McCoy’s tone seemed to be accusing me of something. Damn, this guy is as suspicious of me as I am of him. “No, it’s intact. There must be an earlier one.” McCoy denied there were any more trail registers for 2015. I doubted this, but prying information out of McCoy was like shucking oysters with a nail file. Everything came out in sharp bits. Apparently, Chris’s toiletries had not been in the pack. Mountain lions had been heard howling right around the same time he’d disappeared. Search and Rescue had based their operations at Mike’s Place. The scent dogs had searched everywhere. McCoy himself had checked every nook and cranny, but the only thing he’d found was a blue denim jacket with a fake wool liner. I made note of his description of the jacket, but I believed McCoy had more info to give. “You must know this area better than anyone,” I said. “Do you have a theory?” “Hmm…” Obviously, a scenario came to mind, but before he could utter it, McCoy pressed his lips together, effectively clamping his mouth shut. With body language so startlingly closed off, this guy seemed increasingly dubious. At that same moment, some new visitors arrived, and McCoy left us alone on the porch to greet them. While Trockman distracted the female thru-hikers with small talk, I walked over to where McCoy had retrieved the trail register, pulled out all the notebooks, and scanned the dates. I knew it! There was a register with entries dated in late February and early March 2015. I snapped pictures of those pages with my cell phone and quietly returned the notebooks to the shelf. We left soon after. On the drive back to Trockman’s car, I asked him what he thought about my exchange with the caretaker. I’d been too direct in my questioning, he said, “but that guy was definitely hiding something.” Back at my rental cabin in Warner Springs, I mulled over the day’s events. Perhaps McCoy had sensed the authoritative park ranger that would forever be a part of me. That’s what the encounter with him had felt like—all those times I’d stood in front of some sketchy-looking dude who would rather chew nails than talk to a woman in uniform. But on the trail, perhaps more than anywhere, appearances can be deceiving. There’s a term seasoned trail experts use—“hiker trash”—that refers to how the uninitiated often confuse weather-beaten, disheveled, skinny-as-a-rail thru-hikers with more worrisome types like ne’er-do-wells, escaped convicts, and meth addicts. It’s a taxonomic challenge, not unlike separating a poisonous mushroom from a batch of edible ones, but as experienced hikers will tell you, tiny details can help you distinguish friend from foe on the trail. Here’s a hint: pay close attention to the things they carry. Needing an unbiased sounding board for my theories, I called my husband, a former Secret Service agent who was now a Special Agent in Charge for the United States Forest Service. I’d met Kent Delbon in 1993, back when we were both law enforcement rangers at Yosemite. Working together had stoked our early romance, but Kent was now holed up at our Denver apartment while I was out alone in the backiest-backwoods of Southern California. Always the more sensible one, Kent reminded me there was no cell service at Mike’s Place. “Returning to a remote locale to interrogate a potential suspect without backup could be dangerous,” he warned. “Like Clarice Starling down-in-the-basement dangerous?” I joked. “Exactly.” But my husband knew better than to talk me out of going back. I had promised Chris’s mother I’d get her some answers, and I couldn’t stand not knowing what made McCoy clam up. I sighed. “On this case, I need to think less like a cop and more like a hiker.” The next morning, I stopped at a local grocery store on the way to Mike’s Place, where I purchased a case of beer, some Red Bull, Oreo cookies, a huge jar of peanuts, and a bottle of Jack Daniels. It was ten thirty a.m. when I arrived at the remote outpost and knocked on the back door. Twice. No answer. I peered through a dirty window and detected no movement within the shadowy interior, so I poked around the compound instead. About fifty yards from the house sat an ancient wood shack and two dilapidated RVs only a cold, wet thru-hiker or the Unabomber wouldn’t mind calling home. I explored the campers looking for clues, or some flash of insight, and found none. I walked around to the front of the main house. A wisp of smoke rose from a metal pipe on the roof. Someone was inside. As I stepped onto the porch, I spotted a dark figure moving on the other side of the screen door. “Josh?” I called out. “It’s Andrea, from yesterday. I brought some trail magic [free food] for the hikers.” “Hi, come on in.” McCoy pushed the door open with one hand. In the other, he held a steaming beverage. “Have a seat.” For a man cave in the desert, McCoy’s living space was cozy. Stuffing emerged from the arms of thrift store furniture positioned to face a window with a pleasing view of the chamise-studded ridgeline between Mike’s Place and the PCT. I sat down while my host threw a stick on a tiny fire burning inside a wood stove. “Can I make you a cup of tea?” he asked. “Sure. Hey, I’m sorry for bugging you, but I have a few more questions.” McCoy looked me in the eye. “I want to help,” he started, apologizing for yesterday. “I want the family to have closure, but I was worried our conversation would scare the lady hikers.” “No problem,” I said, softening. “I’m sorry, too. I should have picked a better time for us to talk.” McCoy’s little fire warmed the fall chill, and his manner toward me felt much more like that of a gracious host. In a sweet way. Not in an overly-charming-because-I’ve-got-to-win-you-over way. I felt completely safe and completely foolish for being suspicious of him. McCoy had a prickly side and, as I later learned, a deep-seated distrust of authority. But I now understood why many thru-hikers enjoyed this cluttered retreat managed by trail angels in the rough. Once the mood had eased a bit, I laid out on McCoy’s coffee table a trail map, some photographs, and my notebook. I then showed him a picture on my phone that I’d pulled off Chris Sylvia’s Facebook page. In it, Chris wore a brown fleece hoodie with fake wool lining. Was this the coat McCoy found at the bottom of a dry waterfall? “Nope, it was definitely a blue denim jacket.” Remembering our tense encounter the day before, I pressed McCoy to tell me why he was so certain Chris hadn’t stopped at Mike’s Place. He admitted that he couldn’t have known for sure if Chris visited in February 2015 because he didn’t start work at Mike’s until months later. Next, we talked theories. Maybe Chris walked off the trail despondent over his breakup with Elizabeth Henle. Or he skipped town and flew to Costa Rica. Perhaps, while looking for water or a cell signal, he got lost and fell or died of exposure—or, because his toiletries were rumored not to have been found in his pack, a mountain lion attacked him while he was relieving himself. Hey, maybe he joined a cult. Yeah, right. We both laughed at that idea. Then McCoy offered another idea, one so real and scary it had made him clamp his lips shut yesterday to avoid frightening the lady hikers. Now that it was only the two of us, McCoy confided in me. The sunny skies and isolation along this section of the PCT had attracted a specific category of entrepreneur: guys who grew illicit crops and had business practices that often turned violent. I assured McCoy I’d look into it. McCoy welcomed me to stay at Mike’s Place for as long as I liked, but I was eager to search some before it got dark. McCoy unloaded my bribe—trail magic—from my rental Jeep. “The hikers are going to love this.” He smiled, eyeing the beer. Back at the Sylvia gear site, I studied a ridge to the south—an enticement for further exploration. But once I stepped off trail to ascend the rocky slope, the thick brush fought back. I’ve endured enough cross-country travel through a variety of landscapes, vegetation, and weather conditions to have a sense of scale on the matter. Walking uphill through the scrub to peek under dozens of granite boulders ranked seven out of ten in terms of painful aggravation. What kind of person would spend more than fifteen minutes pushing through the brittle chamise and eye-poking shrubs to reach the top of this ridge? An escaped fugitive trying to avoid cops and hounds? Possibly. A suicidal person looking for a cliff? I doubted it. A bored young man wanting to pass time while waiting for a ride? No way. Pushing through the brush on these ridges was so horrendous I concluded that neither mountain lion nor maniac could drag a hiker’s body ten yards through this crap without leaving behind a boatload of evidence. I punished myself for over an hour before deciding to search elsewhere. I drove down and parked where a drainage hit the road. A mile walk up the dry creek brought me underneath the trail where Eric Trockman had spotted Chris’s gear. Drainages have a way of collecting our debris, but this one was nearly pristine. I saw no sign of human existence, other than a few rusty parts from an ancient power line and a shiny Mylar balloon that had floated in from who knows where. That evening, I returned to my one-room rental cabin in Warner Springs, poured myself a glass of California red purchased at the only store in town—a local quick mart/gas station—and opened my laptop. Part of my process in attempting to track down Chris Sylvia was to study similar cases to try to find patterns and overlaps. The circumstances behind Louise Teagarden’s disappearance in the late 1950s and the delayed recovery of her remains seemed relevant because she also went missing from the PCT corridor, approximately ten trail miles north from where Chris began his hike. Although it took thirty years for hikers to stumble upon her body, I imagined I’d do a quicker job of finding Chris. During my time with the NPS, I had taken part in a variety of search operations—searches for lost hikers, downed aircraft, flash flood victims, swimmers who went underwater, homicidal fugitives from justice, and suicidal subjects. Some of these people were located days, weeks, or months after they disappeared. A few were found by accident. But every case I worked was eventually resolved. As a professional searcher, I was taught to view a missing hiker case as a “Classic Mystery” in which we must look for clues as earnestly as we search for our subject, because people do not disappear into thin air. Something is left behind—we sometimes just have to work harder to find it. Or so I believed. In Managing the Lost Person Incident, a reference text for search professionals published by the National Association for Search and Rescue (NASAR), a lost person is defined as “a known individual in an unknown location, whose safety may be threatened.” Typically, at the beginning of a search, a missing person’s identity is known, but their personality and habits might not be. That’s why, in a wellmanaged search effort, someone is assigned the role of “investigator” and the search investigator’s first duty is to interview friends, relatives, and peers of the lost person. While gathering information for a “subject profile,” the investigator develops a deeper understanding of the missing individual and, at least in theory, this helps us predict their behavior so that we can best determine where to search for them. While researching other missing hiker cases for clues that might help me find Chris, two disappearances grabbed my attention: Kris Fowler and David O’Sullivan, the other men who had vanished from the PCT shortly after Chris. As I dove into the reports of their last known whereabouts, the mysterious circumstances surrounding their cases took hold of me. It was nearly midnight by the time I closed my laptop and slid into the warm bed inside my Warner Springs cabin. Above me the blades of a ceiling fan whooshed, spinning round and round like my thoughts as I ruminated over all three of the PCT Missing. What on earth had they been doing? And what in the heck were they thinking before they went off everyone’s radar? ___________________________________ Excerpted from TRAIL OF THE LOST: The Relentless Search to Bring Home the Missing Hikers of the Pacific Crest Trail by Andrea Lankford. Copyright © 2023. Available from Hachette Books, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc. View the full article

We all love a tradition, don’t we? Whether it’s been passed down to us or we’ve adopted it ourselves, traditions bond us as families, friends or communities. They give us a warm, cosy feeling that we are part of something bigger, doing what others have done long before us, letting us pleasingly sink into a long line of ancestors and future offspring. We are safe in numbers, in tradition; the rules are set and all we have to do is play our part. And traditions are fun, right? Just good old-fashioned innocent fun. Well, that’s what I thought, too, until I actually dug into some of America and Britain’s most heart-warming traditions and followed their history all the way back to their completely bizarre roots. In the US and Europe, we take a lot of our everyday habits and seasonal traditions to be universal, and harmless, but on closer inspection it turns out we are doing some very strange stuff on the daily! Let’s start with an easy one: the simple handshake. I mean, do I know what I’m actually doing when I shake hands with someone? I think I, like most people, had the vague knowledge that handshaking had something to do with demonstrating peaceful intent, reassuring my new acquaintance that I didn’t have a massive weapon hidden behind my back ready to finish them off as soon as I got close enough. But what I didn’t know about shaking hands is that the gesture has been in use for at least 3000 years —first evidenced in a 9th Century BCE relief that depicts the then King of Assyria forging an alliance with the King of Babylon. It was a gesture used to seal political, constitutional, bonds. You see, handshakes aren’t just polite, they are promises; they are used in oath making. Perhaps something to think about the next time you meet a realtor or a car dealer. But in this day and age what exactly are we promising with a handshake? Perhaps in a sense we are making the same promise as those ancient kings: I will enter into a state of trust with you as long as you also maintain that bond. Perhaps odd that you would need to express that sentiment, for example, at the start of a business lunch, but then you would notice if someone left you hanging, wouldn’t you? At first being left hanging might seem funny, idiosyncratic, but then afterwards we might reassess. We might even begin to fixate on the interaction, slightly distrust the person or ourselves and just straight-up ask ourselves: but why the hell didn’t they just shake hands? What are they trying to prove? Which leads me to conclude that a handshake is as important now as it ever was because our innocent little social tics are signals, signals to others that — whether we ourselves understand them, or not — we agree to play together by ancient rules. We will care, we will protect, we will respect, or fear, or love. And sure, your entire heart and soul might not be behind that handshake with Craig from Marketing, but the act itself is enough. You are signalling that you will give Craig the same treatment you would give a king — and so what if it is only goodwill in deed and not in thought. At the end of the day, deed is all most people really need from you. Traditions, habits and customs are the secret sauce that holds our days and society together. They are more about our willingness to play the game than anything else, they are gestures that reveal we know the rules and we promise to play fair only to the extent everyone else does. While researching my latest novel, The Family Game, set around the holiday season and its vast array of customs, I fell down a rabbit hole of tradition: the family and the seasonal varieties. Questions followed hard and fast on the back of each other: why do we bring trees inside, who is Santa, how does a Roman Catholic Saint have flying reindeer, and elves, is there a naughty list, and what’s all this about lumps of coal? My Christmas list goes on… Let’s start with the trees. Christmas trees are evergreens and, at least to the non-horticulturalist, appear to never die. Pagan cultures often used evergreen as protection to banish the devil or death itself from their homes due to the fact its branches appeared to possess immortal or resurrective properties. The tradition of having a full tree in the house stems from Germany where devout Christians would set up Paradise Trees in their homes. These Garden of Eden inspired trees (of Adam and Eve fame) would be festooned with apples and wafers, in a nod to both the tree of Knowledge and the Eucharist. Though the wafers latterly became cookies. Queen Victoria’s Husband, Prince Albert, is often credited with having introduced the Christmas tree to British culture, but Albert, the prototypical Manic Pixie Dream boy, and introducer of lots of other fun stuff as well as being quite the whizz in the sack (nine kids?!), was not the first German spouse to drag a tree into a royal British Sitting room. The first recorded use of a Christmas tree, at least in an official setting, appears to be by Queen Charlotte, the German wife of George III, who requested an evergreen tree be erected and decorated at Queen’s Lodge, Windsor, in December 1800, nineteen years before Albert was even born. Though I do concede that Albert, being very much the Harry Styles of the 1800s, would invariably have given the trend more traction when he got behind it half a century later. In terms of the Christmas tree making its way into American living rooms, the tradition of decorating a seasonal tree had of course travelled across to America with the earliest Germany settlers, but it wasn’t until Albert’s adoption that the Christmas tree really hit the big time and became a festive (and often, entirely secular) must have. But what about the flying reindeer, I hear you scream, go back to that bit? How did a fusty old dead saint get hooked up with a jaunty red suit and a gang of flying mammals? Well let’s tackle the big man first: St. Nic. So, here are the facts: Father Christmas was in reality a 4th Century bishop from Myra (now Turkey) and he got his reputation for leaving gifts in children’s houses after hearing that a man (he didn’t know) couldn’t afford to settle dowries for his three daughters. In order to prevent said daughters from being forced into prostitution, apparently the alternative to marriage at the time, St. Nicholas (just Nicholas back then I’d imagine) snuck over to the man’s house and threw a big bag of gold coins through their open window. So far so Christmas stocking filler, right?! Anyway, Nicholas came back to the family’s house three nights in a row throwing a bag of coins every time, and on the final night the father of the girls caught Nicholas in the act, and overcome with gratitude, showered him with thanks. Nicholas told him not to make too much of a fuss about the whole thing or tell anyone what a lovely guy he was as it would only spoil it – and then, after a bit, the Catholic church made him a saint. St. Nicholas’s feast became a new calendar fixture, every early December, encouraging people to give small token gifts to good children and twigs or coal to bad ones. And the red suit? Well, that was his Bishop outfit, though obviously the pointy hat appears to have flopped slightly over time. But what about the airborne reindeer, I hear you still screaming? Ok, so here’s where things get a little confused: in Northern European mythology the Norse God Thor rode about in a chariot pulled by two flying goats, but here’s my point—Thor is translated as ‘Donar’ in German. Sound familiar? Not much is available in terms of connecting the dots here—which seems to imply that a lot of the Santa Claus myth has developed through the oral tradition—the first written mention of the reindeer pulling Santa’s sleigh being in a poem from 1821. But the reindeer aren’t flying in that they’re just reindeer. Then in 1891 the US government, in connection with the Sami people of Northern Norway, brought over 539 reindeer and 418 sleds in a one-off project to introduce reindeer husbandry to Alaska and teach local Inuit people to herd and breed the animals. Reindeer numbers soared and to promote the sale of furs and meat in the US, the company responsible, in collaboration with Macy’s department store, began staging an annual Christmas parade featuring Santa Claus and teams of Sami and Alaskan herders driving teams of reindeer – linking the two together visually for the first time. But then when did they start flying??? Oh, that? That was just some copywriter working for a toy store who had to come up with a free Christmas giveaway colouring book for children. And Rudolph the flying reindeer was born. But don’t be disappointed, there’s still a lot of magic in all this, I promise, and a lot more, weird, macabre, old stuff…like Krampus (the 9ft devil monster who accompanies Santa everywhere?!), and hessian sacks that bundle you up to hell, and magic evergreen rods that banish the devil, and of course leaving your shoes out on the 5th December. But to find out about all that juicy, weird, very unsettling stuff you’ll have to grab a paperback copy of my new book. Oops, I’ve only gone and made it too commercial, haven’t I? *** View the full article

From the earliest days, Hollywood and its overseas competitors and wannabes were addicted to Chinatown. In tandem with Limehouse fiction, Fu Manchu series, and Charlie Chan mysteries, the so-called China flicks—or, ahem, yellow flicks—exploited the stereotypical eerie ambience of Chinatown as the cinematic obbligato. With its exotically clad citizenry, crooked alleys, curio shops, opium dens, gambling parlors, brothels, hidden warrens, trapdoors, and an occasional flying dagger in the dark, Chinatown, whether in realist street scenes or carved out of cardboard and fantasy, appeared readymade for film noir. In some ways one may say that Thomas Edison, who had made a short reel titled Chinese Laundry Scene in 1895, followed in 1898 by a technically more experimental Dancing Chinamen—Marionettes, was a trailblazer of Chinatown Noir. The latter film, consisting of just one scene in which two marionettes dance on strings pulled by an invisible hand, presents strangely multijointed bodies that seem to be able to perform physically impossible feats. Edison’s competitor at American Mutoscope and Biograph made Chinese Rubbernecks in 1903, a film that shows a Chinese laundryman grabbing the head of his coworker and pulling it until the neck stretches across the screen and then springs back. Such a feat, created with dummies, reflects cinematic fantasies about the supposedly robotic Chinese physique and anticipates the kind of techno-Orientalist portrayals, for instance, of Fu Manchu more or less as a mind-controlling, soul-snatching cyborg. Rising from the steam and starch of her father’s laundry in Los Angeles, Anna May Wong (1905-1961) entered early Hollywood when many films were saturated with noirish Chinatown imagery. As I have pointed out in my book, Daughter of the Dragon, in those years when film technology was still in its infancy, the fascination with Chinatown became comingled with the very nature of cinema with its intention to capture reality on the one hand and to “shock and awe” on the other. A passing glance at the titles of those Chinese-themed pictures made close to Wong’s Hollywood debut reveals how eagerly the producers had exploited popular fantasies of turn-of-the-century Chinatown: The Chinese Lily (1914), The Yellow Traffic (1914), The War of the Tongs (1917), Mystic Faces (1918), and City of Dim Faces (1918). Wong first appeared in the 1919 film The Red Lantern, starring Alla Nazimova, the First Lady of the Silent Screen who coined the term, “sewing circle,” a discreet code for a gathering of lesbian and bisexual thespians. In the film, released in the same year as the other star-studded China flick, Broken Blossom (directed by D. W. Griffith), Wong was an uncredited extra as a lantern-carrier whose face remains unrecognizable in the crowd. From that unceremonious beginning Wong would rise to become a global star, one that redefined the genre of Chinatown Noir. Some critics may have dismissed her as a willing participant in the concoction and perpetuation of Chinese stereotypes, but that assessment overlooks the insurmountable hurdles she had to overcome and the extraordinary talent and tenacity she had demonstrated as a star coolie, if you will, surviving and thriving in Hollywood’s proverbial Dream Factory. A stark departure from all the yellowface actors ranging from Nazimova to Mary Pickford, Myrna Loy, Barbara Stanwyck, and Luise Rainer, and frustratingly denied lead roles due to racist restrictions of Hollywood, Wong brought authenticity and nuance to her roles while trying to remain true to herself and to her heritage, undermining the stereotypes that threatened to define her. Looking back at her astonishing career, which boasts of over sixty films, a dozen stage plays, several television series, and countless vaudeville skits, I would recommend to my fellow mystery aficionados a prime-cut selection of what I consider to be quintessential Anna May Wong movies by which she left an indelible mark on Chinatown Noir: Piccadilly (1929) A swan song of the silent era, Piccadilly was written by the bestselling British author Arnold Bennett and directed by the German auteur E. A. Dupont. A British film somewhat freed from straitlaced Hollywood but by no means devoid of racial bigotry, Piccadilly was a feast for the eye as it cast Wong in her most provocatively erotic and seductive role. The story involves Shosho (Wong), a scullery maid who snatches a job as the dancing star at the fashionable Piccadilly Club from Mabel Greenfield (Gilda Gray), a blonde whose Charleston routines begin to get stale. Using her erotic and youthful charm, Shosho also steals Mabel’s place in the heart of the club owner, Valentine Wilmot. In the final seduction scene, Shosho takes Wilmot back to her flat in Limehouse. Full of kitschy, derivative bric-a-brac like goldfish, pagoda lanterns, a Buddha portrait, and looming shadows of a dragon, the exotic décor suggests a den of an Oriental seductress ready to ensnare her unsuspecting prey. Appearing behind a diaphanous screen, Shosho has slipped into a braless sequined dress dangling on two thin straps, plus a matching embroidered veil. Not surprisingly, she lures Wilmot into her web. In the end, Shosho was shot dead by Jim, her jealous Chinese lover. Daughter of the Dragon (1931) Adapted from a Fu Manchu novel by Sax Rohmer, Daughter of the Dragon was vintage Anna May Wong. Teaming up with two of the biggest stars for Asian roles of the period—Warner Oland (my favorite Charlie Chan impersonator; see my book Charlie Chan) and Sessue Hayakawa, Wong played the lead as Ling Moy, the daughter of the “insidious Chinaman.” While in Piccadilly Shosho was just a simple, unabashed hedonist, at best a seductress with no malice, only ambition for career success, in Daughter of the Dragon Ling Moy was more cyborg than human, who in Rohmer’s potent racial imagination possesses “the uncanny power which Homer gave to Circe, of stealing men’s souls.” Inheriting the family’s mantle upon Fu Manchu’s death, she turns into a “man-daughter,” a monstrous female figure, who, like Lady Macbeth, cloaks an almost masculine pride in her ability to double-cross and to execute a murderous plot. Wong’s apotheosis as a dragon lady in this film may have drawn the ire of some racially sensitive viewers and historians, but Daughter of the Dragon is a perfect example of how talented artists, working within constraints—a virtual form of footbinding, if you will—both exploited and exploded the stereotypes cast by the film industry. Accentuated by a combination of highly stylized dialogues, flashy costumes, exotic sets, and theatrical actions, what Wong achieved with the dragon-lady persona was sharing with her audiences the thrill of being part of what might be deeply shameful, an almost illicit pleasure, exposing the stereotype as a cinematic construction rather than simple mimesis. Shanghai Express (1932) As a China flick, Shanghai Express was part of the enduring Hollywood tradition of casting a white actress, yellowface or not, in the exotic setting of faraway China. It is true that Josef von Sternberg’s classic was a star vehicle, not for Wong, but for his own “discovery” and new German import, Marlene Dietrich. Carrying a motley cast of passengers, including a notorious China “coaster,” Shanghai Lily (Dietrich), and a reformed Chinese prostitute Hui Fei (Wong), Sternbger’s hand-painted Shanghai Express chugs precariously through the maelstrom of wartime China. Using a Chinese-character clock as a timekeeper, the story unfolds like a murder mystery that has to be solved by a supersleuth before the train reaches its destination. The railroad journey might have set a good tempo for the plot, but the Austrian auteur was never known to be a zippy storyteller. Sternberg was far more interested in making love to his star with the camera. Every time Dietrich’s character appears on-screen, she is almost always shot full frame, as if every gesture, look, or word was loaded with significance. Under special butterfly lighting, Dietrich’s face glows in the dark like a silver moon, her wispy hair taking on lively thickness and incredible sheen. Even Ayn Rand, the patron saint of libertarianism, claimed that rarely had any time so impressed her as Shanghai Express, and when pressed for a reason, Rand spoke of the scene that was unforgettable to her: “The way the wind blown through the fur-piece around Marlene’s shoulder when she sits on the back platform of the train!” Next to the aura of the Blonde Venus, Wong held her ground remarkably well, as her character commands a force field of her own in the film. While Shanghai Lily prances around like a dressage mare in heat, Hui Fei plays solitaire and smokes cigarettes alone, minding her own business. Shanghai Lily may speak some clever lines, such as “It took more than one man to change my name to Shanghai Lily,” but it is Hui Fei who delivers the most hardboiled quips in the film, rendered in Wong’s sultry voice with the steely firmness of Fu Manchu’s daughter. After she kills the degenerate warlord Henry Chang (Warner Oland), Shanghai Lily says, “I don’t’ know if I ought to be grateful to you or not.” Speaking like a gun moll in a classic noir, Hui Fei replies, “It’s of no consequence. I didn’t do it for you. Death cancels his debt to me.” In this China saga, with all its guns, armies, and imperial powers, no one has the power or will to change the course of history, except for Hui Fei, the lowly prostitute, who has the courage to take down a supervillain to settle a personal account. In other words, Wong’s character is the real engine driving the Shanghai Express. Daughter of Shanghai (1938) Dubbed the “Anna May Wong story” by studio insiders at Paramount, Daughter of Shanghai was released in 1938 when China was in the headlines every day after a full-scale Japanese invasion. In the film Wong played Lan Ying, the daughter of a San Francisco Chinatown importer. After the murder of her father, Lan Ying becomes a detective on the trail of smugglers, traveling as far as the Caribbean and occasionally having to don men’s clothes. Because of the intensity of the action involved, the director, Robert Florey, asked Wong to trim her long fingernails. For a dozen years, she had diligently cultivated the stiletto tips of her slender fingers and protected them against breakage by wearing gold guards. Like Mary Pickford’s golden ringlets or Veronica Lake’s peek-a-boo cascade, these gilded cuticle attachments had served to exoticize her presence. Yet, for the sake of making her character more believable in the film, the proverbial dragon’s daughter sacrificed her nails. In the context of all of her sacrifices—she had died, as Wong once put it, a thousand times deaths on-screen—it is worth noting that Daughter of Shanghai was the first film in which her character is given a happy, romantic ending, although it was, of course, with an Asian man. In her star vehicle, Wong paired with the Korean American actor Philip Ahn, who played a federal agent, Kim Lee. The combined factors that Wong and Ahn were chums from high school and that Kim Lee proposes marriage to Lan Ying at the end of the film spurred the Hollywood rumor mill into wild speculations that the two Asian American actors were romantically involved, unaware that Ahn was, quite possibly, gay. In more likelihood these two actors, living in an era when homoeroticism was taboo, were using each other as a proverbial “beard.” In an industry where being “outed” as a homosexual could easily doom one’s career, these two already marginalized Asian actors faced double jeopardy and would have to tread even more carefully in a pre-Stonewall world. *** View the full article

“Put silver in your pockets, walk with dirt in your shoes, or he’ll poke your eyeballs from their sockets, and boil your bones in stew.” (Katherine Greene is the pen name of two women writing twisty thrillers) Our upcoming psychological thriller, The Woods Are Waiting, begins with a morbid nursery rhyme that highlights a very specific set of superstitions that are followed by an isolated community in the foothills of the Appalachian mountains. Silver and dirt have a long history of protective properties in many different cultures and the residents of the fictional closed off town of Blue Cliff, Virginia have held onto these beliefs and macabre traditions for generations. So, what is it about superstitions and legends that when added to a story can make it a darkly thrilling read? When we began to write our book, we were drawn to the idea that seemingly irrational concepts can take hold in people. And how, sometimes, it’s easier to believe in superstition than to accept a darker reality. According to a recent Gallup poll, one in four people in the United States consider themselves to be superstitious. We see this in everyday life. Some hotels don’t have a thirteenth floor. There are athletes that wear the same pair of socks for an entire season because they believe it brings them good luck. Gamblers in Las Vegas carry lucky charms, like a rabbit’s foot, thinking it will help them hit the jackpot. It’s often otherwise intelligent, sensible people who engage in these ritualistic behaviors that have no real basis in fact or reason. Despite the lack of any scientific basis, individuals adhere to them all the same and they are sometimes passed down from ancestors. This can result in customs becoming embedded in regional culture, like you often see in the southern United States. It’s this blind faith that intrigued us and became the backbone for our story. Superstitions are defined as a belief that is not based on human reason or scientific knowledge. We also find that they can often be intertwined with local legends. The silver and dirt in The Woods Are Waiting is directly tied to a belief in the fictional Hickory Man, a malevolent spirit in the woods. In the same way that superstitions are passed on, so are urban legends and folklore, like the Moth Man in West Virginia and the Jersey Devil. These spooky stories can provide an undercurrent of darkness and tension that lends itself well to the unpredictable twists and turns of a thriller novel. When used as a foundation for the broader story, superstitions, particularly those that become ritualized and have an intrinsic connection to lore, can create a fraught, ominous atmosphere that fits well into the genre. When you think about it, superstitious beliefs are perfect fodder for a psychological thriller. It can help to create a layered, nuanced plot that oozes suspenseful creepiness. The superstitions specific to an area, like the Appalachian mountains, can help a writer craft a tale that looks at our inherent need for community and control and weaves it with the darker aspects of humanity. How the characters navigate and react to superstition and legend builds depth that allows for the exploration of the psychology of human emotion, which can go to dark and twisted places. Writing about superstitions, their origins, how characters are impacted by these attitudes, and whether they believe in these traditions, can lead to unique and exciting story lines. In The Woods Are Waiting almost everyone in the small Appalachian town are believers. Even the most ardent skeptics find themselves using artifacts they have been told will protect them. Our main characters find this reliance on generational customs an equal mixture of comforting and terrifying. It’s this dichotomy that shapes their interactions and the trajectory of the plot. Before starting our writing process, we took a deep dive into some well known superstitions and their origins. It was interesting to find ways to thread them throughout the novel. Here is a list of some superstitions, some we were already familiar with, and how they came about. 1. It’s bad luck to walk under a leaning ladder. This originated over 5,000 years ago in Ancient Egypt. A ladder leaning against a wall creates a triangle, and Egyptians regarded triangles as sacred–as exhibited by their pyramids. To them, triangles represented the trinity of Gods, and to pass through a triangle was to desecrate them. Another exciting fact is that in England in the 1600’s, criminals were forced to walk under ladders on their way to the gallows! 2. Crafting poppets to heal or harm. We used this particular superstition heavily in our book. Corn husk poppets have a long history in Appalachia. A poppet is a human-like figurine made of many different types of materials, particularly left over foodstuff items. There is a strong link between these small dolls and protection, with the idea being that the poppet is used as a way to make a connection with a person in need of healing. These are different from the well known voodoo dolls which are effigies created to inflict harm on someone. 3. Breaking a mirror leads to seven years of bad luck. In ancient Greece it was common for people to consult mirror seers who told their fortune by examining their reflection. In the first century A.D. The Romans added a caveat to that superstition—they believed that people’s health changed in seven year cycles. So a distorted image, like that from a broken mirror surface, would result in seven years of ill-health and misfortune. Incorporating superstitions into stories is not a new concept, with writers using this plot device for centuries. You find them in Homer and Shakespeare as well as more modern classics like Huckleberry Finn and To Kill a Mockingbird. Because of people’s inherent desire to not only understand, but to control things they can’t explain, these macabre traditions and beliefs can help to create an undeniably creepy atmosphere that is perfect for an intense and unpredictable thriller. * View the full article

No serial killer fiction list would be complete without mentioning Red Dragon. Hannibal Lecter probably needs to introduction, but remains the model for the devilishly smart and manipulative psychopath. Of course, Harris gives us not one, but two serial killers within the book’s pages, and “The Tooth Fairy” is a very different kind of killer: one who is troubled, and unstable, and almost finds himself drawn to be kind when he falls in love. It’s a great portrait of the different types of killer, and of how trickery nearly undoes investigator Jack Graham. The Bone Collector has to go on any serial killer reading list too. Jeffrey Deaver’s gripping tale of a quadriplegic investigator teaming up with a rookie cop to bring a serial killer to justice grabbed me right from the start. It’s got all the best cat-and-mouse elements of a serial killer chase, and better still, has a real kick-in-the-teeth feeling of the serial killer being four steps ahead without it being a huge cheat. Moving to UK shores, and specifically Scotland, I’m a huge fan of Ian Rankin’s Black and Blue, in which a serial killer on the loose has disturbing similarities to real-life uncaught killer Bible John. The sense of brooding threat behind the killer’s actions are brilliant, and the pace relentless as Rebus tries to get into his mind and predict what will happen next. In stark contrast to this vision of serial killers as supremely clever, skilful evaders of justice is Catherine Ryan Howard’s brilliant The Nothing Man. For me, this superb tale – told from the alternating perspectives of the woman who is on the serial killer’s tail and the killer himself – is one of the most brilliant revelations of the reality of most killers: that they are not demi-gods, or supremely clever. They’re often men who feel inadequate, like they are nothing, and want to take back power. The Unsolved Cases With almost half of murders in the US remaining unsolved, it’s little wonder that there are serial killers who have long evaded justice. Those serial killers retain a particular place in public consciousness, and there are books that delve brilliantly into the long-lasting effects of this on those who lost, and on those living in the killer’s shadow. Michelle McNamara’s I’ll Be Gone in the Dark is an extraordinary account of the effects of obsession on those who become caught up in trying to find a killer. It is beautifully captured pushes back against the neat endings we find in Hollywood. And ever present in the book is a meticulous in its attention to the victims. They are all of them real, vibrant humans. People to mourn. Even though the Golden State Killer (the name McNamara gave him) was ultimately found, he was identified only after McNamara’s death and the book’s posthumous publication. So this book stands as a great unsolved serial killer title. Zodiac, Robert Graysmith’s account of the North Californian Zodiac killer, who preyed on at least five victims and claimed to have killed 37. Unlike the Golden State Killer, who seemed intent on getting away with his crimes, the Zodiac clearly enjoyed the sense of power that writing to the press gave him. Perhaps the most interesting side to Graysmith’s story is, like McNamara’s, the way he becomes drawn obsessively into an attempt to solve the case. A political cartoonist for the San Francisco Chronicle, he worked for the paper that the killer chose to write to. It was this connection that drew him in, and his liking for puzzle solving that hooked him. It is fascinating to note that the chief suspect of both Graysmith and the investigating officers was ruled out by DNA later on, and that only a few months ago a press release stated that there was strong evidence that another man was in fact the Zodiac killer. I can’t help but feel a surge of hope at the idea that all such unsolved crimes will eventually be pinned down by advances in DNA testing. I wonder whether the same might one day happen for James Ellroy, whose mother was murdered when he was ten. Those events and the urge, as an adult, to try to solve the crime were the inspiration for his My Dark Places, Ellroy’s brilliant and moving account of his pursuit of her killer. The Tireless Investigators As a follow-on to the unsolved books, I thoroughly recommend diving into Paul Holes’ brilliant Unmasked, his own account of the Golden State Killer investigation. Though less piercing in its psychology, the process of investigation is fascinating, and the eventual unmasking of Joseph James DeAngelo through forensic genealogy is absolutely fascinating to read about. And for those interested in reading a book with both a British slant and some genetic brilliance, I recommend The Blooding by Joseph Wambaugh. It’s a fascinating account of how the hunt for a killer produced the first conviction via DNA testing. It’s brilliantly characterised, and the dead ends and frustrations only add to the sense of light at the end of the tunnel. The Gangland Killers Although solitary serial killers hold a huge place in our minds when we think of those who have murdered many, there are a number of undoubted psychopaths who have operated within various mob settings who have killed frightening numbers of people over the years. I recently dived into Murder Machine, an account of the gang set up in Brooklyn by Roy DeMeo under the oversight of the Lucchese crime family. DeMeo was, by all accounts, violent and vengeful, and was directly responsible for the murders of over 200 people. The book by Gene Mustain and Jerry Capeci was primarily researched through interviews with one of the peripheral DeMeo gang associates, a man named Dominick Montiglio who was the nephew of a key player and ultimately sought to get himself out. Though perhaps a little biased as a result, the account is nonetheless a fascinating insight into how a man changes from an ambitious young boy into a violent psychopath – and then meets his end through equally brutal means. * View the full article

You’ve written a great first novel. There’s buzz! There’s praise! The book is flying off bookstore shelves. Even the notoriously finicky and hot-blooded reviewers on Goodreads adore it. They’re throwing stars at you like henchmen in a ninja movie. Your publisher loves the book so much in fact, that they want you to write another one. Pronto. Welcome to the Land of the Sophomore Slump. Many writers spend years crafting their first book in a headspace that’s blissfully free from deadlines, contracts, and fan expectations. Then, when their debut novel is (miracle of miracles!) successful, they’re expected to crank out the next book in the series in record time–often less than a year if they’re writing a mystery series. The pressure to live up to expectations has gotten the better of many an author. Even Harper Lee, who penned what is routinely ranked among the greatest American novels of all time, struggled to repeat To Kill a Mockingbird’s success. My second book, Ashes to Ashes, Crust to Crust, came out earlier this year, but I had a fortunate turn of fate that kept me from facing the usual pressures that portend the Sophomore Slump. The pandemic delayed my contract and thus pushed back the release of my Deep Dish Mystery Series, which meant that I was able to finish books two and three before the first book even came out. Now that I’m working on book four in the series, though, I’m doing my best to guard against Senioritis! My own experience leaves me even more impressed when a fellow author manages to pull off a series that improves with each new outing. Here’s my list of Seven Sophomore Slays that’ll keep you glued to your Kindle. Forget mere whodunnits, these next-in-the-series reads are truly next-level. The Man Who Died Twice by Richard Osman The second book in the Thursday Murder Club series, The Man Who Died Twice is every bit as witty and charming as its predecessor. Set in an upscale retirement village in the English countryside, the books follow the exploits of an unlikely quartet of septuagenarian crime-solvers. In this installment, millions of dollars’ worth of pilfered diamonds fall into the club’s collective lap, along with a whole heap of trouble. Packed with plenty of clever surprises and the most charming, three-dimensional cast of characters (#BogdanForever!), this series should be on every mystery lover’s TBR list. The Raven Thief by Gigi Pandian If you thought the plot of The Secret Staircase, the first book in this fun, modern series, was twisty, get ready for a story that’s a virtual corkscrew of impossibilities. When a body drops on the table in the middle of a mock séance, professional magician Tempest Raj needs to unravel how the killer managed to pull off a crime that’s impossible in four different ways. There’s a lot going on in The Raven Thief, but Pandian writes in a way that’s makes it easy to keep everything straight. I can usually see the murderer coming a mile away (it’s my job, after all!), but Pandian’s books always keep me guessing. Her bonus trick is that she creates memorable, distinctive characters and a vivid emotional landscape that feels magical without being supernatural. Finlay Donovan Jumps the Gun by Elle Cosimano As with the first book, I was hooked from the hilarious opening scene, which has Finlay and her partner-in-crime/children’s nanny Vero presiding over the watery grave of Finlay’s kids’ pet fish. The stakes quickly escalate when Finlay is tasked with tracking down a missing hitman. With her sharp wit and unconventional investigative tactics, Finlay won’t rest until she safeguards her family and uncovers the truth. This is the fast-paced caper mom-com series you need in your life. Four Aunties and a Wedding by Jesse Q. Sutanto Jesse Q. Sutanto has built a loyal following with her unique blend of rom-com, murder, and auntie-driven shenanigans. I’ve LOLed at books before, but I’m not sure I’ve ever snort-cackled quite like this. With the help of her four eccentric aunties, main character Meddy Chan navigates wedding prep and complicated family relationships with the same goofy aplomb as in the series starter Dial ‘A’ for Aunties. As in the Finlay Donovan books, the hijinks are outlandish, but the heart is real, as Meddy and Co. work together to defeat a rival family who threatens to ruin her happily ever after. Hard Dough Homicide by Olivia Matthews The second outing in this bakery-centered cozy series picks up where Against the Currant left off. The fortunes of Spice Isle Bakery, a family-run Caribbean joint in Brooklyn, once again take a turn for the deadly when a notoriously bullying school principal bites the dust (and the curry chicken). It’s fitting that a tainted dish appears to be the murder weapon, because the food descriptions in these books are to die for. Extra spice is provided by the smokin’ hot detective who seems to have a thing for main character Lyndsay. I was rooting for Lyndsay and her family right from the start, and this series feels as fresh and binge-able as Spice Isle’s tasty treats. Seven Deadly Sequins by Julie Anne Lindsay Summertime, and the killing’s easy. Seven Deadly Sequins is the fun follow-up to the cat-and-couture romp, Burden of Poof. Bonnie already has her hands full managing her cat’s naughty behavior and running her store, Bless Her Heart, which specializes in upcycling clothes and housewares. But when the death of a local baker gets pinned on Bonnie’s grandmother, the stakes are higher than a miniskirt’s hemline. I’m a fan of Lindsay’s other cat-centric series, written as Julie Chase, and this one creates a similar cast of lovable characters and presents an easy-to-read mystery; this series is a box of brain candy flavored with Southern charm. Gone for Gouda by Korina Moss Gone for Gouda, the second installment in the Cheese Shop Mysteries, serves up a mouth-watering mystery that had me hankering after some queso. When an influential cookbook author ends up dead on the eve of a big promo, amateur sleuth and professional cheesemonger Willa Bauer takes it upon herself to get to the bottom of the case. This installment amps up the drama factor, with Willa’s right-hand man Archie in the crosshairs of the investigation. The characters feel grounded in reality, and their motives and actions are credible. While the heroine doles out the cheesy goodness, Moss deftly doles out the red herrings, keeping readers on their toes until the very end. I hope you’ll agree that these second books are second to none! *** View the full article

Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Hugh Lessig, Fadeaway Joe (Crooked Lane) “[This] debut catches fire . . . [For] those who read for intriguing characters.” –Library Journal Jesse Q. Sutanto, I’m Not Done With You Yet (Berkley) “This is a wickedly enjoyable treatise on the dark sides of female friendship.” –Publishers Weekly Douglas Preston, Lincoln Child, Dead Mountain (Grand Central) “Down-to-earth action tackles an otherworldly mystery in this devilishly plausible yarn.” –Kirkus Erin Flanagan, Come With Me (Thomas & Mercer) “Edgar winner [Erin] Flanagan (Blackout) explores the dark side of female friendship in this nail-biting thriller…It’s another strong outing…” –Publishers Weekly Karen Slaughter, After that Night (William Morrow) “[G]rueling, pitiless, yet compassionate…. It’s a signal achievement of Slaughter that the climactic revelations add still another layer of horror to her tale.” –Kirkus Reviews D.W. Buffa, Lunatic Carnival (Polis) “Buffa’s characters are compelling; the dialogue authentic and well crafted.” –Library Journal Andrea Lankford, Trail of the Lost (Hachette) “A gut-wrenching and compelling investigation of long-distance treks gone wrong.” –Kirkus Jonathan Maberry, Long Past Midnight (Kensington) “Maberry supplies plenty of chills, both earth-bound and otherworldly.” –Publishers Weekly Robert Swartwood, The Killing Room (Blackstone) “If you’re craving nonstop action, multiple high-speed chases, all kinds of lethal weapons, and surprise plot twists galore, pay a visit to The Killing Room by Robert Swartwood. And bring your bulletproof vest, just in case.” –Jason Rekulak Kevin O’Brien, The Enemy at Home (Kensington) “Equally excellent as historical fiction as it is a mystery…A richly detailed, wonderfully compelling tale set in Seattle in the midst of the second World War.” –Brian Kenney, firstCLUE View the full article

“Almost perfect in its playlike purity and delightful prose.” —Barzun and Taylor on The Birthday Murder Lange Lewis was a woman of mystery. She made a splash in 1942 with the publication of her first novel, Murder Among Friends. It was praised in reviews published in the New York Times (“This appears to be Lange Lewis’s first book. Let us have more”), the San Francisco Chronicle (“Salaams to Miss Lewis and a recommendation to any and all fans who like their detective stories literate, civilized, and well-planned”), and the Oakland Tribune (“Devotees of violent demise in literary form have a treat coming at the hands of this young woman, Lange Lewis”). The Chronicle and Tribune also ran a prominent headshot of the author. The photo shows a young woman with a stylish 1940s pompadour and contemplative eyes. Despite this early author’s photo, for the most part, she eschewed author profiles both on her book jackets and in the press. Perhaps this is due to the fact that Lange Lewis led a fascinating and complicated life that did not lend itself to a brief summary. Lange Lewis is the nom de plume of Jane de Lange Lewis, who was born September 10, 1915 in Oakland, California. Her parents, both artists, met when they were living in the same boarding house in Manhattan. Arthur Munroe Lewis and Jean (“Jennie”) Clark de Lange were 40 and 41 years old, respectively, when they married in 1911. They then moved to Oakland, Arthur’s hometown, where Jane was born. Arthur, who had previously been employed in the art department of the San Francisco Chronicle, found work as a magazine illustrator, and Jane’s early childhood was spent in Oakland and Berkeley. In the 1920s, after a brief residence in Los Angeles, they moved back to New York where Arthur continued his career as a marine painter. The Lewis family’s time in New York was short, however. After Arthur’s death in 1931 at age 59, Jane and her mother moved back to Los Angeles. Jane enrolled in Los Angeles High School and graduated in 1935. While in school, she was a member of the Poetry Club (her first known published writing was a poem in her senior yearbook) and the Philomathian Society. She then entered the University of Southern California as part of the Class of 1939, where she was a member of the Women’s Literary Society and earned Phi Beta Kappa honors. She worked as a sales clerk and a bank teller to help support her mother. On October 17, 1940, Jane married a twenty-three year old newspaper artist named William Mansfield Beynon. The day before the wedding William had registered for the draft and he was called up in November 1942, just months after Jane’s debut novel was published. The marriage did not survive the war. What exactly happened to this young couple is unknown. Jane continued to use her married name until at least March 1944 when her fourth book, Cypress Man, appeared (under the name Jane Beynon). Not long after that she married her second husband. Malcolm (“Mal”) Havens Bissell, Jr., was the son of a prominent geographer, geologist, and humanist. Mal’s father, after earning a Ph.D. from Yale, taught at Bryn Mawr College before heading west to Los Angeles to establish the Department of Geography at USC. Not destined to follow in his father’s academic footsteps, young Mal wandered about Latin America working as a reporter and photographer for the Associated Press. It is not clear how Jane and Mal met, but after separating from her first husband Jane was living in an apartment near the USC campus, where she was working as a departmental secretary. Mal had returned home to Los Angeles and was living with his parents. It seems highly likely that they came into contact with one another somewhere on or near campus. In 1943, Mal enlisted in the Army and in 1944, Jane and Mal (an aspiring writer himself) were married at Fort Ord in Monterey County. While he was in basic training, they collaborated on a mystery story, “Murder in Acapulco,” which was published in the second issue of Avon Detective Mysteries in 1947 and is clearly inspired by Mal’s Latin American adventures (the plot involves an American journalist, on his way from Mexico City to Buenos Aires, who gets involved in a murder on the Mexican Riviera). Their daughter, Haven Jean Bissell, was born on February 6, 1945. Mal’s military career ended in October 1945 after a lengthy illness resulted in his discharge. This marriage also did not survive and Jane and Mal divorced in 1948. In 1952, Jane married again. On August 5, she wed George A. Brandt (no relation to this author) two months after the publication of her final mystery novel written as Lange Lewis. Shortly after their wedding they moved to Mexico City (perhaps Mal’s tales of life south of the border made Jane want to experience it for herself), where she worked as a teacher at Colegio Coronet Hall from 1953 to 1959. After returning to California, Jane’s third (and last) marriage also ended in divorce, in 1964, and she lived the rest of her life in the San Fernando Valley. Lange Lewis’s mystery-writing career lasted ten years, from 1942 to 1952, during which time she published six novels and one novella. All but Cypress Man and the novella she co-wrote with her then-husband Mal Bissell feature her series character, the tall (six feet five inches), phlegmatic, and methodical Lieutenant Richard Tuck of the Los Angeles Homicide Squad. The first three novels are set in and around a Los Angeles university. Tuck investigates a group of medical school students following the death of a departmental secretary (Murder Among Friends, 1942), the murder of an aspiring actress playing the lead role in a drama department production of “Romeo and Juliet” (Juliet Dies Twice, 1943), and the poisoning of an eccentric vegetarian who has hired two recently-graduated English majors to help him write a stage play (Meat for Murder, 1943). As an alumna of the University of Southern California, and then as a university employee after graduation, it is clear that Lewis wrote what she knew and set her stories there. In Juliet Dies Twice, Lewis attempts to disguise the campus by naming it “Southwest University,” but eminent crime fiction critic Anthony Boucher (USC Class of 1932, who would have known) observed in his review that the book was “for USC alumni a grand roman à clef, for others that rarest of mysteries—a really good novel with a university setting.” For her fourth Tuck novel, The Birthday Murders (1945), Lewis leaves the academic setting behind and moves her narrative to the Hollywood movie colony where her protagonists, a successful novelist and her movie producer husband, live across the street from Humphrey Bogart. And, in her last book, The Passionate Victims (1952), Tuck re-opens a cold case involving the unsolved murder of a Hollywood High School freshman girl whose body had been found in Laurel Canyon six years before. After the publication of the last Tuck novel, Jane curtailed her writing for a number of years. She published a few short stories, worked on a never-published novel, and edited a feminist newspaper called Woman West for six months until it folded in 1970. She made a comeback in 1975 with a historical romance set in Mexico titled Love in the Hot-Eye Country, published as a paperback original by Bantam Books. For her new career as a historical novelist, she wrote under the name Jane Lewis Brandt. She had more success with her next historical novel, La Chingada, which reimagined the life of La Malinche, or Marina, a 16th century Nahua woman who served as an interpreter for the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés and was published in hardcover by McGraw-Hill in 1979. The novel was translated into Spanish, as Malinche, and both the English and Spanish editions were reprinted several times. Jane Lewis Brandt died on February 1, 2003 at the age of 87. Unfortunately, Lange Lewis is largely forgotten today. No movies were ever made from her books. Collectors of vintage “mapbacks” are likely familiar with the three Lewis titles published by Dell between 1944 and 1948. Book reviews were uniformly favorable. Anthony Boucher thought Meat for Murder had “one of the year’s most ingenious poisoning setups” and praised The Birthday Murder as “possibly the best of Miss Lewis’ admirable novels.” He speculated that 1944’s Cypress Man may have been an early effort, “dug out of the trunk and somewhat revised,” due to what he perceived as a 1930s sensibility among the characters. Although he was not as impressed with the plot as her other books, he nevertheless credited her “almost unique ability to write the kind of young people that I in those ’30s knew and (I confess) was. I read her with interest, admiration and a certain mirror-conscious embarrassment.” Boucher was disappointed with her last book, The Passionate Victims, which he thought was uneven. Although he did not publish a review, his notes on the book nevertheless praise the “beautiful detail work on middle-class L.A.” and compare Lewis favorably to Margaret Millar, who in four years would be named a Grand Master by Mystery Writers of America. Lenore Glen Offord, Boucher’s successor as the mystery reviewer at the San Francisco Chronicle, however, gave it her second highest rating and called it a “well-written yarn” with detection theories that “make refreshingly good sense.” There appears to be critical consensus that The Birthday Murder ranks at the top of Lange Lewis’s oeuvre. Barzun and Taylor included entries for four of her books in their landmark A Catalogue of Crime and had especially nice things to say about it: “There is no lost motion or verbiage. The author’s sense of character is displayed, too: the book is full of women sharply differentiated . . . Almost perfect in its playlike purity and delightful prose.” The mystery revolves around Victoria Jason Hime, a successful writer, and her recently-wed husband, Albert Hime, a producer of “Class B” films. Victoria’s latest novel, Ina Hart, a story about a woman who poisons her husband, has been optioned by Hollywood and Albert is being considered to produce it (which would be his first “Class A” project). When Albert ends up murdered the night before Victoria’s thirty-fifth birthday, in exactly the same manner depicted in Ina Hart, suspicion naturally falls on the widow. Lieutenant Tuck, who always seems to be the one called upon to investigate “when violent death left its usual haunts on the wrong side of the tracks and entered a home in Beverly Hills, a Los Angeles university or other such genteel places,” arrives on the scene and takes charge. In all of Lange Lewis’s stories characterization is at least equally as important as detection and in this novel the female characters stand out. Victoria Hime, her oldest friend Bernice Saxe, Moira Hastings, an ambitious young ingénue who covets the lead role in Ina Hart, and even Victoria’s myopic and absent-minded maid Hazel, are all distinctly drawn and thoroughly developed. Lewis gives each of them plenty to do to keep the plot moving, and their attitudes towards things like work and marriage display a modern feminist sensibility. Lange Lewis does miss a trick, however, in leaving one of her recurring female characters, Briget Estees, out of The Birthday Murder. Brigit is introduced in Murder Among Friends as the only woman on the Los Angeles Homicide Squad. And she is not in the squad room just to make coffee or type reports. She is a full-fledged, if junior, member of the team, actively participating in the investigation, bantering with Tuck and the other detectives, and offering her own opinions and insights into the case. As Lewis describes her, Briget is five foot eleven, has red hair, wears size eight oxfords, and is a “hundred and fifty pounds of healthy womanhood.” Together, she and Tuck make an imposing pair. She is about to take a larger role in the investigation when she is re-assigned to go undercover in another case in which a deadly stalker, dubbed “Black Overcoat” by the police, has already killed five women (spoiler alert: Briget gets her man). After this promising start, however, Lewis dropped the character from her second book, Juliet Dies Twice. Briget returned in the third book, Meat for Murder, and again played a small but significant role in the investigation before finally taking center stage in the last novel. In The Passionate Victims, she is still the only woman in the Los Angeles Homicide Department, but Briget is now on an equal footing with Tuck. She chases down leads on her own, interviews suspects and witnesses, and even takes a bullet in the line of duty. Maybe with all of those other strong, well-developed female characters in The Birthday Murder, Lewis felt there was no room for one more. Had she included Briget in the Hime murder investigation, it could have provided a nice bridge from the character’s relatively minor contribution in Meat for Murder to her major role in The Passionate Victims. At the time Lange Lewis began writing, women had been working in the LAPD for over thirty years, so adding a female detective to her series seems like an obvious choice. In fact, with her first appearance coming in 1942, Briget Estees may just be the first female homicide investigator in an American crime novel. She is definitely in the vanguard. One cannot help but think, though, that Briget represents an opportunity missed and that had Lewis better-developed this aspect of her novels, she would have stood a much better chance at a higher profile among current mystery aficionados. In a profile published in Contemporary Authors in 2002, the year before she died, Jane wrote: “If I have any advice at all for young writers it is: Have another way than writing to feed your face and throw a bone to the wolf at the door, and learn to rewrite. No word you put on paper is immortal or carved in stone or engraved in bronze. A good way to cut is with scissors. Scotch tape is responsible for more good transitions than the typewriter. As for the question ‘Should I be a writer?’ the best answer still is ‘Only if you can’t help it.’” Luckily for mystery fans, Jane de Lange Lewis Beynon Bissell Brandt couldn’t help it. ___________________________________ Excerpted from the introduction by Randal S. Brandt. The Birthday Murder, by Lange Lewis. Published by American Mystery Classics. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission. –Featured image: Los Angeles College of Fine Arts, U.S.C., circa 1900, via Water and Power Associates View the full article

Beautiful Penang, on the northwest coast of Peninsular Malaysia, by the Malacca Strait. Its densely populated capital of George Town is a feast of colours and heritage buildings. If geography is destiny then Penang and George Town are evidence of the theory – deemed vital to the East India Company, the navies of a half dozen colonial countries and any number of pirates. The Straits of Malacca remain one of the world’s key waterways, linking east and west, but also one of the most pirate infested too. It’s had some interesting visitors over the years too. Penang-born Tan Twan Eng’s The House of Doors (2023) is set in 1921 and mixes real and fictional characters and events. Penang-born Lesley Hamlyn and her husband, Robert, a lawyer, and war veteran, are living at Cassowary House on the (as it was known then) Straits Settlement of Penang. At the same time Chinese revolutionary Dr. Sun Yat-sen is in town. When “Willie” Somerset Maugham visits (and of course Maugham was well known for his tales of colonial Malaysia) everyone’s life is thrown into upset. Not least because Maugham, always on the hunt for his next story, senses scandal — the trial of an Englishwoman charged with murder. Will the colonial authorities hang a white woman? Maugham’s tales of scandal in Malaysia are in several of his short story collections, especially his collection The Casuarina Tree (1926). Class divisions, racial tensions, adultery, and most other failings of human nature are abundant. The most famous story in the collection is “The Letter” where a lawyer, Joyce, is called on to defend Leslie Crosbie, a planter’s wife who is arrested after shooting Geoffrey Hammond, a neighbor (and perhaps lover), in her home in Malaya while her husband is away. Tan Twan Eng skilfully weaves elements of this case into his novel which, by the way, was a movie in 1940 with Bette Davis, while the real case is told in Eric Lawlor’s Murder on the Verandah: Love and Betrayal in British Malaya (1999). The story Lawlor recounts has even more surprise twists than Maugham’s short story. The case also appears in Martin Vengadesan and Andrew Sagayam’s Malaysian Murders and Mysteries: A Century of Shocking Cases that Gripped the Nation (2020). And while we’re talking true crime. If you want to know what goes on in Penang after dark and out of view of the good decent citizens of George Town then Ewe Paik Leong, a Malaysian author living in Kuala Lumpur, has written Penang Undercover (2019) — sex industry workers, mamasans, and bargirls in George Town’s bars, Penang’s grifting trishaw riders, happy-ending massages that don’t end all that happy for conned and cheated tourists. To be sure a tad sensationalist but usually with a wry and witty eye on events. More up to date is Trevor Pearson’s Murder in Penang (2022) set among a group of heavy drinking, football crazy ex-pats. There’s a dangerous bet and much disloyalty and lack of trust among the group to work out the mystery. Then there’s Grace McClurg’s Straits and Narrow (2008, and as in the Malacca Straits) which sees Rachel Carson, a forensic psychologist, on a tour of Southeast Asia, up in a murder that causes her to question here career choice. The novel bounces between Penang and nearby Singapore (the two ends of the Malacca Straits). McClurg is a criminal psychologist working in Singapore. On the more cozy sides of things is Elaine K Collier’s A Malaysian Misdemeanour (2023), the third book in her Innocents Abroad Crime series. Donna and Fiona are enjoying a little spiritual culture in southeast Asia but find themselves left alone with a 6-year-old boy after his parents and two diving instructors disappear from a diving platform off the coast of Penang. It’s a mystery that starts in Penang and ends up in Singapore. By the way, other books in the series hit the Greek Islands and Sardinia. And finally, something a little different. There’s a long tradition of ghost stories in Malay culture and so it’s perhaps not surprising that some authors have chosen to mash up the ghost and crime genres together to see what they get. English author Murray Bailey’s Singapore Ghost (2021) introduces Ash Carter, in Penang babysitting a newspaper reporter investigating ghost stories. Things turned deadly and the novel bounces between Penang and Singapore as Carter finds himself on the wrong side of a Chinese Secret Society and its leader, Chen Guan Xi. Bailey’s Ash Carter series is apparently inspired by his father’s experience in the Royal Military Police in Singapore in the early 1950s. Far lighter, and of interest perhaps to Young Adult readers is Penang Pixie (2019), the third book in the Southeast Asia Paranormal Police Department series by John P Logsdon and Noah K Sturdevant. It’s a complicated series for those not completely au fait with the world of investigating wizards, demons, and warlocks! Officer Mark Vedis is in charge of a special operations group in the Southeast Asia Paranormal Police Department (PPD). The post was awarded after an incident in the Kansas City PPD that caused him to merge with a demon. That turned him into the first warlock in existence for a long time. the series ranges across Southeast and East Asia – Bangkok, Seoul, Singapore, Tokyo, and Penang. And in Penang apparently are the Shadow Five, a supernatural mafia that doesn’t take prisoners. There’s clues, mysteries and action and it’s been a popular series in Asia. And so Penang joins the (ever growing) list of seemingly idyllic island locations – the Greek Islands, the Scottish far north islands, the Maldives – we’ve covered in Crime and the City that – guess what! – turn out to be dangerous as hell! But don’t let that put you off – George Town and Penang really are delightful. View the full article

Fight Club, Chuck Palahniuk’s era-defining debut novel about a load of disaffected men beating the bejesus out of each other in order to feel alive, was first published twenty-seven years ago today. The book rapidly gained a cult following, was adapted into one of the most iconic movies of the 1990s (despite an initial failure at the box office), and, of course, originated the modern pejorative use of the word “snowflake.” Here’s what the very first reviews had to say about “Gen X’s most articulate assault yet on baby-boomer sensibilities.” I don’t want to die without any scars. “A volatile, brilliantly creepy satirefilled with esoteric tips for causing destruction, Fight Club marks Chuck Palahniuk’s debut as a novelist. Ever wonder how to pollute a plumbing system with red dye, or inject an ATM machine with axle grease or vanilla pudding? Along with instructions for executing such quirky acts of urban terrorism, Fight Club offers diabolically sharp and funny writing. The novel’s unnamed 30-year-old narrator is a chronic insomniac who lives in an unnamed city, works as a ‘recall campaign coordinator’ for an auto maker and suffers from a pervasive sense of anomie. To raise his spirits and help him sleep, he attends support groups for the seriously ill. At a testicular-cancer meeting, he meets Marla Singer, a ‘faker’ like himself who is ‘lost inside.’ In Marla’s presence, the narrator loses his ability to ‘hit bottom’ and ‘be saved,’ so he seeks out a new release. He finds ‘service industry terrorist’ Tyler Durden, who splices sex-organ scenes into G-rated films and commits atrocities against food in an upscale hotel. Upping the ante, the narrator and Tyler form a club where young men beat each other into comas. Fueled by a nihilistic fervor and financed by a soap-making operation that uses fat culled from liposuction, the Fight Club grows into an anarchic cult set on destroying society through terrorist acts. Palahniuk’s staccato sentences and one-sentence paragraphs convey a sense of instability; his constant repetition—’nothing is static,’ ‘everything is falling apart’—achieves a sectlike brainwashing effect. By the time the narrator begins to grasp the true depth of Tyler’s perversity, it is too late to save himself. But eventually, through an act of self-effacement, he finds, if not peace, at least a refuge.” –Karen Angel, The Washington Post, December 1, 1996 “In the world of Fight Club, healthy young people go to meetings of cancer support groups because only there can they find human warmth and compassion. It’s a world where young men gather in the basements of bars to fight strangers ‘just as long as they have to.’ And it’s a world where ‘nobody cared if he lived or died, and the feeling was fucking mutual.’ Messianic nihilist Tyler Durden is the inventor of Fight Club. Soon thousands of young men across the country are reporting to their work cubes with flattened noses, blackened eyes, and shattered teeth, looking forward to their next bare-knuckle maiming. The oracular, increasingly mysterious Durden then begins to harness the despair, alienation, and violence he sees so clearly into complete anarchy. Every generation frightens and unnerves its parents, and Palahniuk’s first novel is gen X’s most articulate assault yet on baby-boomer sensibilities. This is a dark and disturbing book that dials directly into youthful angst and will likely horrify the parents of teens and twentysomethings. It’s also a powerful, and possibly brilliant, first novel.” –Thomas Gaughan, Booklist, 1996 “Brutal and relentless debut fiction takes anarcho-S&M chic to a whole new level—in a creepy, dystopic, confrontational novel that’s also cynically smart and sharply written. Palahniuk’s insomniac narrator, a drone who works as a product recall coordinator, spends his free time crashing support groups for the dying. But his after-hours life changes for the weirder when he hooks up with Tyler Durden, a waiter and projectionist with plans to screw up the world—he’s a ‘guerilla terrorist of the service industry.’ ‘Project Mayhem’ seems taken from a page in The Anarchist Cookbook and starts small: Durden splices subliminal scenes of porno into family films and he spits into customers’ soup. Things take off, though, when he begins the fight club—a gruesome late-night sport in which men beat each other up as partial initiation into Durden’s bigger scheme: a supersecret strike group to carry out his wilder ideas. Durden finances his scheme with a soap-making business that secretly steals its main ingredient–the fat sucked from liposuction. Durden’s cultlike groups spread like wildfire, his followers recognizable by their open wounds and scars. Seeking oblivion and self-destruction, the leader preaches anarchist fundamentalism: ‘Losing all hope was freedom,’ and ‘Everything is falling apart’—all of which is just his desperate attempt to get God’s attention. As the narrator begins to reject Durden’s revolution, he starts to realize that the legendary lunatic is just himself, or the part of himself that takes over when he falls asleep. Though he lands in heaven, which closely resembles a psycho ward, the narrator/Durden lives on in his flourishing clubs. This brilliant bit of nihilism succeeds where so many self-described transgressive novels do not: It’s dangerous because it’s so compelling.” –Kirkus, August 1, 1996 “Featuring soap made from human fat, waiters at high-class restaurants who do unmentionable things to soup and an underground organization dedicated to inflicting a violent anarchy upon the land, Palahniuk’s apocalyptic first novel is clearly not for the faint of heart. The unnamed (and extremely unreliable) narrator, who makes his living investigating accidents for a car company in order to assess their liability, is combating insomnia and a general sense of anomie by attending a steady series of support-group meetings for the grievously ill, at one of which (testicular cancer) he meets a young woman named Marla. She and the narrator get into a love triangle of sorts with Tyler Durden, a mysterious and gleefully destructive young man with whom the narrator starts a fight club, a secret society that offers young professionals the chance to beat one another to a bloody pulp. Mayhem ensues, beginning with the narrator’s condo exploding and culminating with a terrorist attack on the world’s tallest building. Writing in an ironic deadpan and including something to offend everyone, Palahniuk is a risky writer who takes chances galore, especially with a particularly bizarre plot twist he throws in late in the book. Caustic, outrageous, bleakly funny, violent and always unsettling, Palahniuk’s utterly original creation will make even the most jaded reader sit up and take notice.” –Publishers Weekly, August 19, 1996 View the full article

August is Women in Translation Month! So I figured I’d round up some of this year’s best crime novels in translation by women from around the world. Below, you’ll find Norwegian serial killers, Argentinian vampires, French influencers, South Korean lawyers, and so much more (honestly, a lot of French stuff—it’s been a really good year for French noir). A quick shoutout to the amazing publishers and translators who shepherded these works into a language I can read (although I did, once upon a time, read The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo in French. And some Simenon. Not to brag or anything). Victoria Kielland, My Men Translated by Damion Searls (Astra House) 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. Mercedes Rosende, The Hand that Feeds You Translated by Tim Gutteridge (Bitter Lemon) Set in Montevideo, Uruguay, from where Mercedes Rosende also hails, The Hand That Feeds You is the sequel to Rosende’s much-lauded Crocodile Tears. Ursula, Rosende’s heroine, is now in possession of all the loot from an armored truck, with robbers, cops, and PIs hot in pursuit. Ursula has plenty of tricks up her sleeve, and given the ineptitude of her pursuers, she’s bound to triumph in the end, but how she does it? Comedic thriller gold. Paula Rodriguez, Urgent Matters Translated by Sarah Moses (Pushkin Vertigo) In this perfectly paced and plotted Argentine thriller, a train crash is the opportunity one criminal needs to change his identity and go on the run. Unfortunately, one of the detectives hunting him just isn’t ready to let the case go, and he’s ready to use questionable methods to track down his target. What follows is one of the most delightful cat-and-mouse thrillers I’ve read in quite some time. Mariana Enriquez, Our Share of Night Translated by Megan McDowell (Hogarth) What a strange and luminous novel. Mariana Enriquez stunned with her collection The Dangers of Smoking in Bed, and Our Share of Night is just as fantastic (and fantastical). Beginning in Argentina in the years of the dictatorship, Our Share of Night follows a father and son on a grief-driven road trip as they mourn the loss of the woman who united them, her dangerous (and possibly immortal) family close in pursuit. A dark vampiric noir that heralds a new era in South American horror. Isabelle Autissier, Suddenly Translated by Gretchen Schmid (Penguin Books) Isabelle Autissier has sailed the world alone, becoming the first woman to do so in a competition, and this survival thriller speaks to the experience of the author. In Suddenly, a French couple sets off on an epic journey, only to find themselves stranded on a remote island in the Antarctic Ocean. This is no Blue Lagoon or Robinson Crusoe—Autissier’s characters will be tested severely, and found wanting. Pilar Quintana, Abyss Translated by Lisa Dillman (Bitter Lemon) A young girl grapples with the complexities of the adult world in this moody psychological thriller. Her mother is deeply depressed, flourishing only when tending to her plants or in the arms of her lover, and her father is older, absent, and unable to process emotions. The father finds out about the lover, who disappears, and the family heads to a modern home in the Columbian mountains to recover their intimacy; the home, like the mother, is beautiful and cold, and its former mistress went out one night in her car and never returned… Chloé Mehdi, Nothing Is Lost Translated by Howard Curtis (Europa) This pitch-dark French noir explores the aftermath of violence and the questions still unanswered in the wake of a teen’s murder by police. 11-year-old Mattia spends his days emotionally managing the adults around him, trying to keep his teachers from realizing he’s gifted, and thinking hard about the murder of 15-year-old Said during a police identity check. As he considers the life and death of Said, he puts together the larger puzzle of oppression in the heavily policed suburbs. Mehdi’s writing conjures the best of French noir, and reminds us why the French named the genre. Maud Ventura, My Husband Translated by Emma Ramadan (HarperVia) My Husband is a sly psychological thriller about a marriage that is not what it seems. A woman passionately in love with her husband keeps a detailed diary of his slights and insults, punishing him accordingly in the name of balance. Surprisingly comical and deeply insightful, My Husband is not to be missed. Louise Mey, The Second Woman Translated by Louise Rogers Lalaurie (Pushkin Press) The Second Woman is at once a chilling psychological thriller and a visceral exploration of internalized misogyny and the mechanics of abuse. The woman of the title is the new partner of a man suspected of involvement in the disappearance of his wife. When the wife returns, with seemingly no memory of him or her son, a game of cat and mouse begins, between the detective and the husband, and between the narrator’s wishful hopes and her slow acknowledgement of her dark reality. Khadija Marouazi, History of Ash Translated by Alexander Elinson (Hoopoe) Hoopoe Editions is dedicated to bringing English language audiences the best in Arabic literature, and History of Ash does not disappoint. In this devastating, lyrical novel of struggle, two prisoners in Morocco, a man and a woman, narrate their journey of resistance, imprisonment, and release during the “Lead Years” of the 1970s and 80s. Leonie Swann, The Sunset Years of Agnes Sharp Translated by Amy Bojang (Soho) Leonie Swann may write in German, but she’s set this darkly comic murder mystery in a retirement community in the English countryside. The inhabitants of Sunset Hall are shocked when one of them is murdered, then even more surprised when a detective comes by to investigate a different murder next door. Can they conceal the first body long enough to pin the murder on whoever was responsible for the corpse next door? And what does a tortoise have to do with it? Juli Zeh, About People Translated by Alta L. Price (World Editions, October 3) At the peak of the pandemic, a woman splits with her boyfriend over his increasingly rigid commitment to environmentalism and heads to the German countryside. The new home needs unexpected work, she and her dog promptly clash with their menacing neighbor, and unexplained things are happening all around her. This literary thriller is an intense exploration of fear and isolation. Hye-Young Pyun, The Owl Cries Translated by Sora Kim-Russell (Arcade, October 3) Hye-Young Pyun’s stunning psychological thrillers delve deep into the horrors of being human and the oppressive mechanics of modern society, and The Owl Cries demonstrates a writer at the top of her game. In The Owl Cries, a ranger has vanished from a mysterious forest and its secluded company town of loggers and researchers. His brother, a divorce lawyer, embarks on a lackadaisical investigation into the disappearance, but soon finds himself mired in the town’s corruption and enmeshed in its secrets. Marie NDiaye, Vengeance is Mine (Translated by (Astra House, October 17) In Marie NDiaye’s sinister and spellbinding new novel, a lawyer is hired by the husband of a woman accused of murdering her three children, despite her lack of experience in high-profile trials. Meeting him unlocks memories for her of a childhood visit to a palatial home, perhaps occupied by the husband’s family, and wonders if she perhaps met her new client when she was 10 and he was 15. But what happened between them? And why can’t she remember the details? Half suspense novel, half dark fairy tale, Vengeance is Mine is a literary tour-de-force. Delphine de Vigan, Kids Run the Show Translated by Alison Anderson (Europa, November 28) Damn, this book got dark. Like, you think it can’t get any darker, then it does. In Kids Run the Show, the younger child of a prominent mommy vlogger is kidnapped, and as the search continues, the reader begins to wonder if the child might be better off wherever they are than at home being constantly filmed. De Vigan has written a blistering critique of influencer culture, the erasure of privacy, and the exploitation of children. The prophetic ending takes us decades into the future to contemplate the psychological wounds of a generation raised to perform on the internet, for a deeply unsettling experience. View the full article

We fry in Leone summer: while Barbie and Oppenheimer cycle so rapidly through ‘good’ and ‘bad’ and ‘ugly’ so as to feel as plastic as their respective subjects—brands and back-room cowardice)—sundry other franchise zombifications feel like ash off of Eastwood’s cigarillo. And as film production itself stands still as a fake cowboy town erected in the desert, activated towards a fairer world, or even a less-cruel one, other fantasies linger, like the question of hyper-hyphenate Mission: Impossible–Dead Reckoning Part One. Here is an expensive legacy sequel full of considered action set pieces and interminably incoherent international implications, less jingoistic and ugly than Top Gun: Maverick but also less open to the (fascistic, even) poetry that that film’s tracts of conquerable sky suggested. It carries the import of nascent finality, mortality even, without acknowledging that it will ever end; once numerical sequels can be segmented further still, they might run forever. Dead Reckoning appears to an industry in crisis and draws near-literal comparisons between its hero’s narrative struggles and the industry’s: we need to return to the movie(s) if we are to reckon with the big bad of AI, if we might finally slay it through something like trust, a tenet everybody knows emerges only from practical stunts and glorious Hollywood spectacle. In this textual double-parking, Dead Reckoning has nothing to say about the state of things—law and order, art and content, fantasy and reality—and is itself that state. It suspends itself and its lead actor in a phantom state of realness: Tom Cruise, the forever running man, has become more real than real and less legible than ever. Surely, no evil man is as compellingly evil as Tom Cruise is, not even Ethan Hunt, the empty-eyed protagonist of some seven and counting Mission Impossible’s. With the series’ prime entry nearly thirty years in the rear-view, Hunt feels less like a beloved character than a useful cipher for Cruise’s image massaging—“he’s being erased in real time.” Cruise’s face hasn’t moved from pure prettiness to haiku evocation like Keanu’s, doesn’t it wear its weathering like a leather toolbelt of dependable (occasionally novel) instruments, like Leo’s. Indeed, those imperfect contemporaries are useful departure points: while Reeves and DiCaprio have become better, looser screen actors as they’ve aged, Cruise has rigidized himself into a stony auteur. This is not a new point: Cruise/ Wagner Productions was founded in 1992 in advance of producing Mission: Impossible (1996) as a way of giving the actor more creative control in the filmmaking process. The production group was dissolved in 2006, in the wake of Cruise’s infamous public treatment of Brooke Shields, to say nothing of his comments surrounding psychiatry and a further burrowing into participation in and advocacy around the Church of Scientology. Cruise has resumed his role as producer in recent years, on Top Gun: Maverick (2020) and all subsequent Mission: Impossible films, on two Jack Reacher films (2012 and 2016). A peculiar focus on oddly-coded justice emerges from this set of films, positioning Cruise as both rogue outsider and executioner of lawful right, even—especially—outside the law. Something is always obscured, despite the man’s face, obviously aging and also somehow not, remaining in plain sight. It’s impossible and dishonest to approach the enfranchisement of Ethan Hunt and Mission: Impossible without also talking about Cruise as monster and mythology. Hunt makes the movies go, as Cruise does. A heightened PR focus post-2020 has repositioned Cruise as an advocate only for cinema itself, resituating his on-set tantrums as aw-shucks ain’t-it-greats gone haywire, suggesting Top Gun: Maverick’s very real box office success as nearly prophecy-fulfilling, an act of Hollywood spectacle lauded by one of (Hollywood) cinema’s protectors and memed into affection by his acolytes. A cynical critic might point to Cruise’s self-generated enshrinement as cinema’s future as further legacy laundering. Since 2008, the man has forbidden journalists from asking about Scientology. A better film—or at least a film less insistent on literalizing Cruise’s perceived threats to and from industry force in his personal and professional life—might have generated productive tension with the state of those forces, rather than absorption into the thin air of mass public relations. Mission: Impossible–Dead Reckoning Part One begins in familiar territory for a US summer blockbuster, vilifying oppositional forces (here, as always, Russia) with a sweeping sub-Red October submarine prologue and re-injecting the viral franchise into the familiar body of a phantom political, globalist-ish landscape. Russian forces have a paradigm-shifting AI weapon—hereafter “the Entity”—that swiftly turns on them and sinks the sub and itself below layers of Arctic sea ice, as if it were the One Ring from Jackson’s Tolkien movies. The film cuts forward and away, reaching for its action figure hero as Ethan Hunt emerges from the shadows of a shadowy room to accept his new mission, which is of course to first locate the MacGuffin—twin portions of a cruciform key—and then determine what it unlocks. Because we’ve seen the locked box sink below the (now science-fictional) sea ice and know that this is part one of an at least two part story, we know that we won’t get that catharsis until another sequel. My pithy aside about melting sea ice isn’t incidental runoff despair but rather a gesture towards Dead Reckoning’s peculiar relationship to the “real” world, both cinematically and socio-politically. It brings up the climate crisis before I do, as CIA director William Kittridge (Henry Czerny, last seen in the 1996 film, a welcome shot of squeaky-clean grease amid McQuarrie and Cruise’s collective fixation on summoning elements of De Palma’s film) later asserts to Hunt that the next global conflict “won’t be a cold war,” that it will involve armed marshaling over shrinking natural resources, access to workable energy sources, and ultimately, truth itself. In other words, everybody—Hunt’s immediately disavowed IMF team, Czerny’s nondescript G-men, Cary Elwes’ conspiracy-pilled zealot-patriot CIA director, a mysterious and blase friend-of-the-Entity named “Gabriel”—wants the keys so they can control the AI so they can control “truth.” This boilerplate of incomprehensible plotting forms a steady foundation for the film’s frequent successes, a series of well-crafted, well-storyboarded action setpieces. A perfunctory sequence in the Arabian Desert collides Hunt into old not-flame Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson), an airport run-around collides him into new not-flame Grace (Hayley Atwell) and then sends the new twosome beeping around Venice—playful, with an eye on Buster Keaton—and then aboard the zero-gravity Orient Express, a bloated but occasionally considered sequence, ultimately in tune with De Palma’s own half-guided attempt at movie-ending train dreams. If I sound reticent in my praise of these sequences, it’s because I must gesture back to the context of the real world. Boilerplate action set pieces in mainstream American films have seen a deepening in recent years, in both their execution and instigation towards more compelling cinematic operations. In the hands of the kinetic-minded Stahelski, Reeves, and a fleet of balletic stunt actors, John Wick has moved from revenge franchise to extended treatise on the violence inside grace and the fallout of a landed punch. All-world setpieces have popped up in the orbit of John Wick’s neon gravity, from Reeves’ and Moss’ motorcycle nightmare through falling eschatological data in Act III of The Matrix Resurrections (2021) to Jim Cameron returning to his own fetish-or-flight site in the new-Titanic ending of Avatar: The Way of Water (2022.) Even Cruise’s Archbishop and old collaborator Steven Spielberg has re-situated what being the most instinctual action film-mover of his time means, first by flexing that fact in West Side Story (2021) and then lamenting it with The Fabelmans (2022.) The central sequence—ogled first in the dead artistic currency of internet content and literal commercial so as to basically be deflated when it finally appears in-film—is Cruise actually driving a motorcycle over a cliff edge. In Dead Reckoning, action is deployed to support two truths: 1.) Ethan Hunt always really accomplishes his mission and 2.) what you are seeing is really happening. Of course, Ethan Hunt does more than just accomplish his mission, resituating both himself and the task to rise above the petty incorporation his ghost-work mandates. Especially as the franchise has tipped towards Hunt-as-Cruise, a master team-member/ task-master drawing dead-eyed platitudes like “what do you care about most in the world,” “my friends” (a shudder: is director McQuarrie’s avatar Simon Pegg’s meager teach-friend?) from the screenplay, the politics of Mission: Impossible have become increasingly, intentionally illegible. It’s as possible to leave Dead Reckoning convinced that the film is deeply suspicious of the American intelligence/ surveillance state and so, is in sync with Hunt’s rogue-minded, exceptional individualism as one true antidote to deep-state crockery as it is reasonable to conclude that Mission: Impossible is the logical answer to American Empire’s continued role in destabilizing populations domestic and abroad under unchecked military expansion and a government hijacked by money-minded elites and reactionary patriots alike and so, is in sync with Hunt’s righteous team of rebels that protest American hegemony by their very continued existence. That there are murky, unintelligible ideologies at war in products whose only existence is to appeal to the largest possible number of consumers is no novel development. That these ideologies are ultimately invoked as perhaps inherently a part of Ethan Hunt’s super-consciousness—one that stands in stark opposition to separate and false super-consciousnesses, to say nothing of foreign ones—inadvertently winds up absolving Hunt of any of the squirmy charm he once exercised as just another spy at the table in Mission: Impossible. Now, he makes the movies go. If, unlike Oppenheimer and Barbie’s summer assaults, Dead Reckoning doesn’t ferry in self-importance, it remains raptly self-interested; there must always be Tom Cruise, there must always be Tom Cruise this way. And it is tempting to read Hunt/Cruise alongside those contemporaries, another man of systems assaulting our senses in the irreal present. Oppenheimer (to its relative credit) positions its title character as another one of Nolan’s lost-in-the-machine men and Barbie (to its relative detriment) suggests not Barbie but Ken as its most compelling figure, equally both subjugated and vile, ultimately the most charming and least-culpable character in the film. Ken is no more laudable than Lewis Strauss and where Nolan is willing to manifest a movie about pure power as emergent from the baseline of cowardice, Gerwig cowardly sets her men free while restricting her women to merely the image of importance and can’t conceive of the bad taste needed to supplant further incorporation. The most interesting filmmakers know that even when a movie isn’t about movies, it’s about making movies, which is a process of desire—possession, projection, perversion. Less-interesting filmmakers recognize this fact but assert their own metaphoric worth—a movie can be about me—as cinematic latex. The least interesting filmmakers are not interested in the image beyond its real-life counterpart, and think movies are about things. The most evil filmmakers recognize that the turning point of cinema’s is/ isn’t-ness was when the twin forces of PR and advertising latched themselves onto the image and so, believe (in good faith or bad) that making movies or making anything might be worth latching onto that latching. Dead Reckoning, the process by which the current position of a moving image is calculated by analyzing its perceived speed and the passing of time, presupposes to address what the future of cinema can and should look like. In the process, it settles on the image of a single man making us watch him hurtle over a cliff over and over again, glitching who he really is in favor of something like friendship, which was never really there. View the full article

A couple years ago, I found myself on a serious Shirley Jackson kick. I devoured as many of her short stories and novels that I could find—including the elusive The Bird’s Nest—Ruth Franklin’s excellent biography A Rather Haunted Life, and of course, the movies. The Haunting circa 1963 was fabulous, to be sure, but my favorite of all was Mike Flanagan’s modern reimagining of The Haunting of Hill House. I remained on tenterhooks for the entirety of the series, but one particular scene at the end of episode five—if you know, you know—had me nearly climbing the walls with sheer terror. One thing you should know: I am what is commonly referred to as a “scaredy cat.” And yet, I love horror. Despite my faint-hearted ways, I watched every single one of Mr. Flanagan’s terrifying series, and enjoy all types of spine-chilling movies, shows, and books. Shirley Jackson remains one of my favorite authors of all time, along with Stephen King, Neil Gaiman, and Edgar Allan Poe. There is something oddly comforting about those dark stories, something I come back to time and time again. Looking at the YA shelves these days, it seems that I am far from the only one. I remember when, maybe just five years ago, horror was genre non grata in most publishing for young people. Sure, there were some standouts—but mostly, editors were still looking for the next great epic fantasy or contemporary page-turner. Today, you can’t swing a cursed knife stolen from the basement of an abandoned mansion without hitting a young adult horror novel. Being that I have written one or two of them myself recently, it begged the question: why have so many others suddenly found themselves on a horror kick, too? It’s been said that horror gains popularity in troubled times because it provides us with a distraction from the terrors of the real world. This seems inarguable—our post-pandemic lives can be perilous to navigate, so it makes perfect sense that readers would gravitate toward escapism. Horror drags us away from expansive, existential fear and into acute terror, sharpened to a knife’s edge. For just a little while, we can sit under our blankets and worry about the monster under the bed instead of the troubles of our world. Horror can also offer us a way to work through our own fears through relatable characters experiencing similar ones in a fictional environment. Through the tragic story of Eleanor Vance at Hill House, readers are invited to explore what haunts our own psyches, and the pitfalls in our minds that threaten to lead us into dark places. I think it’s safe to say that young adults, many of whom were children or preteens through the COVID years, may be searching for ways to cope with and move past their fears. Strange as it may seem, horror can be an effective vehicle for both. But there’s something beyond distraction and catharsis that horror gives us, too. The gift of control. Shirley Jackson once famously said, “I delight in what I fear.” On its face the statement feels contradictory, but in my experience, comedy and horror are sisters with more in common than not. How many times have you screamed and then laughed after a jump scare? Or giggled with horror as something unspeakably awkward happened in a situational comedy? Among all genres, horror and comedy alone are required to elicit very specific emotions in their readers in order to be considered a success. For most people, finishing a horror novel without having had at least one or two hair-raising, heart-racing, jaw-dropping moments feels like a let-down, even if the rest of the book was satisfactorily entertaining. It’s the same thing as seeing a comedy and never getting more than a chuckle. We want the laugh. We want the fear, too. And here’s the thing about those feelings: we control them. They were specifically requested, after all, and we’re pleased when they arrive. Laughter is almost universally welcomed—but fear? Not so much. For most of us, fear arrives on our doorstep like an uninvited guest and stays for far too long. We work so hard to control our fears, lest they control us. When we delve into horror, though, we are no longer pawns to panic and dread. Instead, those stories make fear into a game that every one of us knows how to play. It’s why our hearts quicken when we read that the wind sounds like whispers… Why we brace ourselves when the main character is alone in the house, and a storm is coming… Why we beg the group not to split up to look for a way out… Why, when the best friend finds the key to a forbidden door, we shout, “don’t go in there!” even though we know they’re going to. Horror tropes, when delivered in unique and innovative ways, provide readers with an experience that simultaneously feels frightening and familiar. Compare it to enjoying a favorite roller coaster or haunted house ride, which remains unchanged year after year. We know when the drop is coming, we know when the monster is going to pop out of the shadows. But knowing what’s going to happen doesn’t take away from the thrill of the experience. In fact, it adds to it. This isn’t to say that horror is or should be predictable. On the contrary, one of the best horror tropes is that there should always be a surprise revelation, a big reveal, an unexpected twist of fate at the very end. We may not know what it is, but we know it’s coming—and that’s half the fun. In this way, we get to feel intense dread, suspense, and terror, but at the same time be in control of the experience through familiarity with the rules of the game. Just as we feel a rush of triumph after surviving the biggest roller coaster, we exalt in finishing the scariest books. It is an achievement, a victory against our own fears. And when it’s over, we are pleased to find that our beds are warm, our houses are quiet, and our doors are locked. For the moment, we have control over the monsters without—and the monsters within—and we can rest easy knowing that we are safe. In the end, the current spate of YA horror teaches young people to do what we all should do in these strange times: have courage, stay together, and never underestimate the power of a warm blanket and a good book. *** View the full article

There are innumerable ways to answer the question of “When is it time to stop writing?” It could be time to stop when the publishing contracts dry up. Or it could be when your book sales dwindle to a dribbling trickle. When the last thing you want to do is come up with one more idea. It could also be time to stop when you flat out don’t feel like writing any longer and you’re afraid that every sentence you write reveals that reluctance. I wrote my first published mystery in 2009, and I recently turned in my eighteenth. The use of mathematics tells me that I’ve written an average of 1.125 books per year for the last fifteen years. Another burst of figuring tells me that I’ve had publishing contracts for nearly a quarter of my lifetime. (And if you use a teeny bit of math yourself, you’ll know how old I am, but we’re not going to dwell on that, are we?) In my fifteen years of being published, the world around us has endured numerous upheavals and convulsions. A recession. A pandemic. Social and political instability. A housing crisis. Crushing inflation. During that same fifteen years I’ve endured my own upheavals. The loss of a job and subsequent financial hardship. The death of my father. A complete career change. Serious illness. The death of my mother. The death of beloved pets. Add the inevitable aging thing (see above math problem) and it begins to dawn on me that there are valid reasons why it’s getting harder and harder for me to write while having a full time day job. It all takes a toll, and the last few months I’ve been wondering if it’s time to quit with the writing thing. Don’t get me wrong. I love to write. There’s absolutely nothing that compares to the days when my fingers can’t keep up with my brain, when the words flow freely, when characters say funny things, when descriptions are apt, when things simply go click. The last year or so, though…well, the writing has started to feel like work. Back in the day, I could hardly wait to get to the computer. Characters and dialogue and plot points were always jostling around in my tiny little head and spending a couple of hours at a keyboard after eight hours of sitting at a keyboard for the day job wasn’t a chore at all. Lately? Not so much. For the last two books, it’s entirely possible that I’ve spent as much time engaging in extreme avoidance behavior as I have in writing. And not in a productive way, either. Good avoidance behavior is cleaning bathrooms, washing floors, washing windows, doing laundry, weeding, or getting out the paint bucket to do that touch-up that’s been needed for five years. Sadly, my recent avoidance behavior has been along the lines of watching episode after episode of Doc Martin, Heartland, and/or Grey’s Anatomy. Another type of avoidance behavior that I’ve picked up for the first time ever is reading Recency romances. Give me anything by Georgette Heyer and I’m toast for getting any of my own writing done. I’ve also discovered you can find all sorts of fun online things to exacerbate the avoidance habit. Mini-crossword puzzles. Mahjong. Solitaire games galore. But I did finally get around to writing the words, and not so very long ago, I emailed a completed manuscript to my editor. After I hit the Send button, I stared at the screen and wondered if I’d just submitted the last book I’d ever write. I spent roughly three seconds considering the question, decided I was too tired to care one way or another, shut the computer down, and promptly slept for twelve straight hours. That was about two months back. Since then, I’ve slept through Saturday mornings, washed floors and windows, cleaned bathrooms, done some scraping and painting, a lot of weeding, and rested. A lot. Eventually, I’ve come to the fairly obvious conclusion that my avoidance behavior had its roots in one thing. I was tired. Tired of working both a full time day job and the writing job. Tired of not having enough time to myself. Tired of never having a day off, because with writing, much like with housework, there is always something you should be doing. Most of all? I was tired of being tired. Two months of non-writing and as much rest as possible later, my brain is finally starting to wake up. Plot points are starting to pop into my head at the least provocation. Characters are starting to walk and talk in the edges of my thoughts. I drive past houses or buildings or views that make me think, “Hey, that just might show up in one of my books someday.” Best of all? Somewhere deep down inside me are the stirrings of another book. Or two. Or eighteen. I can just feel pieces of plot and bits of characters swirling around, waiting for me to bring them to life, waiting for me to get the rest that, in retrospect, I’ve needed for years. So. Is it time for me to stop writing? Not a chance. View the full article

“Pull over,” Allan shouted from the passenger seat. The rain was blinding. I refused to stop. My daughter was working the late shift and needed a ride home. “She can take an Uber,” he shouted. I couldn’t trust a random driver to bring my daughter home to safety. That was my job, her mother. With my hands clutched to the wheel, I drove fifteen miles an hour on the highway, the speed limit was 55, passing the dozens of other cars that had pulled over. In 1982 Angela Cavallo lifted a Chevy Impala off of her teenage son. We may not have heard the name Angela Cavallo, but most likely we have heard the story about the mother who saved her child’s life by lifting a car. There are various hypotheses on how it could be possible, fathomable, for a one-hundred-and-forty-pound person to lift a two-ton car. It all starts with love. According to scientists, there are various hormones, chemicals… I’ll stop there. Whether “Love” is rooted in a petri dish in a lab or on some metaphysical plane matters less to me than the power love has on a human that allows them to conquer all! In Angela Cavallo’s case, the love she had for her son gave her the super-human strength for her to commit the extraordinary feat of lifting a car to save him. In my case, the love for my daughter clamped the part of my brain that flashes: WARNING, DANGER, STOP. If we are to, and who are we to not, give credence to Isaac Newton’s third law of physics, we know that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Love conquers all, opposite reaction=Love destroys. In my debut thriller, Her Father’s Daughter, the father’s love for his daughter makes the seemingly impossible, possible. For a serial killer he does the extraordinary. For twenty-five years he sequesters his “true self” and doesn’t kill. It’s that same conquering love that pushed him to kill again. I can’t think of any genre that doesn’t in one way or another touch, or push hard, against the theme. When you have a thriller with a complex serial killer (an oxymoron) as the antagonist (or sometimes the protagonist) exploring the theme of love that conquers and destroys, the author has the opportunity to create a deep visceral and emotional connection for their reader, especially when family and/or romantic loves are involved. If I could count the number of thrillers I’ve read, loved, and relished over the past decade that grabbed me by the throat and heart and messed me up (in a good way) long after I read the last page, it would take way beyond the space I have been allotted for this essay. Over the past year, there have been five authors who do an extraordinary job where the consequences of a love run deep enough to drown. Meg Gardiner’s UNSUB was published in 2017, and when the Boston Globe wrote that it had hints of “Silence of the Lambs,” I immediately clicked and purchased the hardcover. Anyone who had ever taken one of my creative writing classes knows that Hannibal Lecter is one of my favorite characters of all time. How the author, Thomas Harris, manages to get you, me, to root for a serial killer is extraordinary. I shamefully admit I let life get in my way and never read the novel. It was only recently, with a very long drive ahead of me to see my sister, I downloaded the audiobook and was captivated, no serial killer pun intended. There’s no question that the protagonist’s love for her father is the inspiration for her to become a detective who solves crimes and protects people. When the serial killer, to whom her father devoted years of his life and most of Caitlin’s childhood trying and failing to stop, surfaces again, the love for her father, the need to save him, leads her down the similar destructive path that in many ways destroyed her father. Gabino Iglesias’s Devil Takes You Home may not be seen as a serial killer’s story. If we are to give merit to Britannica “… [S]erial killing, the unlawful homicide of at least two people carried out by the same person (or persons) in separate events occurring at different times.” The actions of Mario, our protagonist, fits this definition. Mario’s love for his daughter, her memory, and of his estranged wife is the match that pushes this devoted father and husband, who never committed a crime, to take unfathomable risks, including endangering his own life. The next three authors whose novels are filled with passion, tension, and twists and turns where love both conquers and destroys, I’ve recently had the privilege of asking: How do your book(s) speak to the theme Love Conquers All, But May Also Destroy. Wendy Whitman, author of Premonition and the sequel Retribution, says, “Love is an irrational, overpowering emotion that can cause people to make terrible mistakes they ordinarily would never make.” She goes on to say how the characters in her novels “fare no better.” Cary Mackin, a television True Crime journalist, has a deep-rooted fear of being murdered. The question raised at the start of the novel is: Why, how, does this same person go into a profession where murder is always around? As the novel progresses, we discover how and why this may be. It’s clear, also from the start, she loves her work and has a deep-rooted desire to see that the victim’s loved ones get the justice they deserve. Then there’s Cary’s girlfriend, Detective Hank Nowak, who is so in love, devoted, to Cary that she risks everything, personally and professionally, to find a serial killer. Love conquering and destroying continues in RETRIBUTION, the sequel. Here, the four main characters’ love, romantic or familial, gets the best of them. Author Deborah Levison’s novel, A Nest of Snakes, is another example of how a father’s love for his child gives him the lifting-the-car emotional strength to go public with his story, a story he kept secret for decades. He ignores his lawyer’s warning that if he goes through with testifying, painful soul-crushing memories will surface. When asked the question: Does love destroy in your novel? Levison’s response was, “His [the father’s] love for his son pushes him to move forward and the horrible secrets that emerge during the trial, no one could have predicted all that would be destroyed… evidence, reputations, innocence, and silence.” Last, but many stuffed bookshelves from least, is The Dead Season, the first in the Shana Merchant series by Tessa Wegert. Shana’s love for her family, her work, and the need for justice to prevail, gives her the strength to conquer her severe PTSD, return to her hometown with its terrifying secrets, and confront the many demons of her past. This conquering-love that gives her the courage to do whatever it takes to take down a serial killer also leads to damaging choices that threaten to destroy her family, her career, and her mental state. I don’t think it’s too far-fetched to say the serial killer’s love (in the way he can love) for Shana is the reason he survives his past and his psychotic state. There’s no question this love destroys—kills. When asked the question of the day, “Does love conquer all but sometimes destroys, in Shana Merchant’s story, Wegert’s response was, “You might say that Shana sabotages her own life in order to save others over the course of every book in the series — and I agree that, in Shana’s case, love both conquers and destroys.” *** View the full article

So here we are – The Detective Up Late, the seventh book in the Sean Duffy series… and so some evil rumourmongers say, the last. But it’s the 2020s – everyone has a comeback tour now, so no reason to think Duffy’ll be any different I reckon. For Duffy it’s 1990 – a new decade, the same old grinding “Troubles” in Northern Ireland. ‘The grim, greasy, seedy seventies had bled into the violent, neon, awful 80s…’ – a decade that saw 1,200 Troubles-related murders. Nobody in Carrickfergus Police Station is overly hopeful about the new decade, least of all our man, Detective Inspector Duffy. He’s still that rarest of things – a serving Catholic officer in the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), and an Irishman with a taste for a Gimlet. There’s a missing tinker girl, a nervous Supergrass, a cast of dodgy blokes who may, or may not, be connected to the powers that be (whether those “powers” are the English or the paramilitaries), and Duffy’s planning his imminent retirement. Along the way there’s some nifty one-liners and a shootout that would give Sam Peckinpah a run for his money. There’s also a nice tech-free vibe to The Detective Up Late – no mobiles, no google, and a laptop’s still a cheeky wee dance in a back room at a Carrick gentleman’s club (should such an incongruous thing actually exist). Duffy’s last case? Say it ain’t so! But it’s Carrick CID – nobody’s talking, you wouldn’t believe them if they did, and whatever they said wouldn’t be worth a shite anyway. So the only thing to do is track down Duffy’s creator, Adrian McKinty (himself a Belfast lad). On this occasion he’s sitting in a diner in Manhattan drinking a beer and ruminating on his boy… Paul French: Well Sean Duffy’s certainly full of surprises – it’s 1990 and he hasn’t drunk and drugged himself into an early grave. In fact quite the opposite – he’s hitched, got a 3-year-old daughter, cut right back on the fags, bailing on Carrickfergus for Scotland, and not even throwing the radio across the room when Phil Collins comes on – has he gone soft? Or have you? Adrian McKinty: There’s a lot of affection for Phil Collins these days. His health hasn’t been great, and some people have nostalgia for the 80s – Miami Vice and that ad where the gorilla plays the drums. I, however, am not a fan of Phil or the other posh boys of Genesis (or any fucker who went to Charterhouse) or their ghastly repetitive soulless music beloved by Tory junior ministers and management consultants. But possibly I’ve become more tolerant as I’ve aged and Duffy not smashing the radio is perhaps a sign of that. French: Frankly I’m amazed Duffy survived the 80s, which were just so awful on every level – musically, literarily, cinematically, Docklands Yuppies, otherwise sensible working-class people suddenly drinking rosé and eating sun-dried tomatoes, the nasty never-ending violence of the Troubles – it would have all been too unbearable for Duffy, would it not? McKinty: When you watch the movie The Long Good Friday (1980), basically everything Bob Hoskins predicted about London on that boat trip down the Thames came true. For me the 70s and 80s aren’t the packaged sounds and images of the Rock and Roll Years but more like a David Peace novel. Peace is a genius. He captures the mood of that time better than any of those fucking Hampstead novels which won all the Bookers in that period. Britain was dark and scary and always falling apart in my memory. Belfast was even more apocalyptic and beautiful and weird. Bombings and riots and packs of weans in the streets playing football and kerby. And vast empty spaces the way London was after the Blitz, the way you see it in those Ealing Studios comedies. But no regeneration at all. Once a cinema got firebombed no more cinema. We got a McDonalds after Moscow did because they couldn’t get the insurance. As far as I know it was never fire bombed because it was too bloody popular. French: He’s still checking under the Beemer for tilt bombs, Carrick nick’s still a fortress, British soldiers on the streets, British Intelligence still mind-fucking everyone, and sectarianism’s still the most popular game in town. We’re still eight long, deadly, years away from the Good Friday Agreement. I’m not sure how well he’ll fit the 90s – it’s not a very Duffyesque decade? McKinty: Things definitely calmed down in the 90s but there was still craziness. I remember taking a girlfriend back home from uni for Christmas in about 1993 and she was pretty shocked by the army foot patrols and a massive bombing that we could hear five miles away on the RUC Forensics Lab. Duffy I think will like the music better however if he lives to hear it. French: Duffy’s last case looks like being a missing Traveller girl, someone 99.9% of Carrick CID would not consider getting off their arses for, or a hack reporter writing five lines on. They don’t care about people they consider marginal and trouble, but Duffy does? Against the odds perhaps he’s retained a core humanity throughout the series – that wasn’t true of everyone spanning those years. How does he do it? McKinty: I think in one of the books someone berates Duffy about not being a very good copper. And he accepts the criticism that he’s no Sherlock Holmes or Miss Marple with sudden insights or whatever, but what he is is fucking persistent. He will grind away on a problem OCD fashion until he gets a result. I’ve met a lot of people like that, usually they’re the ones who actually solve the problems, not the flighty geniuses, so I don’t mind making my guy one of those types. And yeah, because he’s an outsider I think he’s willing to dig into a case that other peelers couldn’t ever give a shit about. French: Let’s talk Duffy and booze. A few pints of the black stuff for lunch (we’ll overlook his 6-pack of Bass and put it down to lack of choice at the Victoria Estate offy) seems OK to me. And Sean knows his spirits – keeps a bottle of Bowmore for emergencies, a glass of Jura old enough to join the army, an Ardbeg of similar vintage, pilfers a snifter of the chief inspector’s 1939 cognac occasionally. But, has anyone else except Sean Duffy ever requested lime juice (& by that in Carrickfergus we mean lime cordial!), vodka and soda water in a pint glass? And just how stomach churning is it? Though with a fish supper perhaps the teatime treat of champions? McKinty: I worked briefly in the civil service in Belfast and everyone always tried to get two, or sometimes three, pints in at lunchtime so the afternoon shifts would drift by in a haze. The whisky is an easy one. Everyone I grew up with had a bottle or two of whisky in their house for visitors. A bottle of Johnnie Walker, a bottle of Bushmills and then something that reflected their personality, maybe Bowmore or Jura or Glenfiddich…The vodka gimlets in a pint glass are definitely an affectation. I got them from a guy who lived up the road from us whose girlfriend used to cut the hair of me and my little brother. I don’t know where he got the concept from but his girlfriend had to take breaks from hair cutting to make them for him and I was fascinated watching her. I would have been about 12, she 19, very pretty with a Purdy haircut. He was a real nutcase. Chain smoking, pacing, swearing, 15 years older than her. Went to prison for a triple murder, but then of course released in 1999 under the Good Friday Agreement. French: OK – no bullshit, straight up, if I think you’re lying I’m getting the telephone directories out and we can go at it – is this Duffy’s last case? He might have a wife, a wee bairn, a new house in Scotland but Duffy’s only 40 right? Makes that Jock John Rebus across the water look like Linford Christie? I see him, out there in retirement in Portpatrick, on the forgotten edgelands of the vast God’s Waiting Room of Dumfries and Galloway, and I reckon he’ll get fed up of it in five minutes and be back down the station. Tell me I’m right…? McKinty: I have a feeling that Duffy’s Last Case might be a bit Frank Sinatra’s “Farewell Tour”, but we’ll see. –The Detective Up Late (Sean Duffy book 7) is out August 8 ___________________________________ Glossary (facetiously requested by editor, provided in good faith) ___________________________________ Bass: a once ubiquitous brand of British beer you wouldn’t offer your neighbour’s annoying dog. Beemer: a BMW (a thing rarely seen in Carrickfergus) Charterhouse: An English Public School (i.e. an extremely private and expensive school) known for turning out slightly dim and vacuous, yet entitled, members of the British Tory (see below) Establishment. Docklands Yuppies: a particularly abhorrent variant of the general species of 80s Yuppies known for living and socialising in the Thatcher-era “regenerated” former docks area of East London that became known as “Docklands”. Dumfries and Galloway: the most southerly, and some might say most boring, part of Scotland. As it has a quite elderly population of retirees (now including Sean Duffy) it is known as one of “God’s Waiting Rooms”. Fags: cigarettes Fish supper: the name for the proverbial dinner of battered fish and chips anywhere in Scotland or Northern Ireland. Hampstead novels: the utter low point of English literature. Dreary middle-class monologues of boring affairs and moral dilemmas dressed up as deep and meaningful. Rosé and sub-dried tomatoes (see below) would often be consumed by Charterhouse types (see above). Think Penelope Lively, Margaret Drabble, Ian McEwan. Fortunately now mostly consigned to landfill. Kerby: A ball game played by working class kids in the street, the aim being to throw the ball against the opposite kerb (“curb” in Yank-speak) and catch it on the rebound. In Belfast this game is often treated with the seriousness of the Soccer World Cup. Linford Christie: Jamaican-born British former sprinter who won a load of gold medals. Offy: an off-licence, a shop selling booze for you to drink at home, in the park, your car, or up the graveyard. Purdy: a fictional spy working for British intelligence in the 1970s UK TV series The New Avengers played by Joanna Lumley. She had a distinctive haircut that became fashionable. Any healthy male between 14 and 84 in Britain in the 70s lusted after Purdy/Lumley. Rosé: an insipid type of wine that in 1980s Britain was drunk only by the idle rich and feckless Charterhouse types (see above). Sun-dried tomatoes: a pointless form of ripe tomato that loses most of its water content after spending a majority of its drying time in the sun. In the 80s the consumption of such items in Britain and/or Northern Ireland denoted you as a bit of a Docklands Yuppie (see above) who fancied yourself to be middle class. Supergrass: a slang term for an informant who turns King’s evidence, often in return for protection and immunity from prosecution. The Long Good Friday: a film that if you have not seen it you should….today if possible. The celluloid epitome of the intersection of money, class, and “The Troubles” in 1980s London. Tilt Bomb: a device usually used in the operation of car bombs relying on the force of a jerk or similar movement for the triggering of the desired explosion. Regularly used to assassinate rivals or RUC officers in Northern Ireland during the Troubles. Tinker: a person/community who traditionally made their living by travelling from place-to-place mending pans and other metal utensils. The term is linked to some traveling (or colloquially “gypsy”) and Roma (Pavee) communities. Tory: member of the British right wing Conservative Party. Often spotted in the 80s with neither a chin or spine but drinking rosé and feasting on sun-dried tomatoes and never a fish supper. Uni: university. Somewhere only the very few attended in 1980s Britain. View the full article

It’s almost impossible to imagine. Between 2010 and 2019, one of every seven crime novels published was by a single author—James Patterson. Working with co-authors, he became a novel writing phenomenon and much more, while many literary critics argued his work became much less. Patterson is well aware of the criticism of his assembly-line style productivity. How can one author, even working with co-authors, churn out dozens of books a year and expect any semblance of quality? The native New Yorker bonds with his audience and they’re devoted to him. His readers have devoured more than 400 million copies of novels with his name plastered in large type across the cover. He regularly outsells John Grisham, Stephen King and Dan Brown combined. It’s a fact. The world loves James Patterson and his co-authors even if his critics don’t. Why? Because Patterson understands story. “My strength is I keep people turning pages, and that’s my greatest weakness because I don’t go in depth,” he says. He has entire file cabinets full of plot ideas in his office, and more lurking in his head. Patterson never suffers from writer’s block. Ever. His ideas flow like a never-ending stream of consciousness. When New York Times bestselling thriller author Steve Berry speaks to audiences of aspiring authors about writing, he can’t preach enough about the importance of plot. In a thriller, he says, it trumps character every time. And when another bestselling thriller author, Lee Child, is confronted by the literati about his famed protagonist Jack Reacher’s lack of character depth, he simply responds, “Who’s got the bigger bank account?” Patterson has overcome the critics because he cares about the reviews that count: his readers. He’s the most prolific author in the world and built one of the biggest author brands ever. But it wasn’t always this way. He once struggled to find his future, especially while in graduate school at Vanderbilt University. At one time Patterson considered trying his hand at writing literature—a far cry from the crime, mystery, and thrillers he writes today. He wanted to write since he was young, but he had no direction. During his high school senior year, his parents moved from Newburgh, New York to the Boston suburbs. To earn money, he worked the nightshift at nearby McLean mental hospital, which attracted a lot of luminaries like James Taylor, Ray Charles, and poet Robert Lowell. Lowell was a regular and had been there so many times he’d written a poem about his experience, “Waking in the Blue.” Patterson found his way to Lowell’s room often and the poet would read his work to the young man, sometimes twice a day. Patterson soaked it up. In Catholic high school back in New York, “I wasn’t much of a reader…They were giving us a lot of books we didn’t want to read. Suddenly, I’m going into Cambridge and picking up used books for a dime.” While in college, the novel that moved him most was Mrs. Bridge, a witty story of marriage from a rural Kansas woman’s point of view. Not exactly thriller material, yet it’s author, Evan S. Connell, became one of Patterson’s biggest influences. “I thought I could write a small literary novel,” he says. But eventually he realized it didn’t appeal to him. “I was a little bit of a literary snob back in college. I didn’t read mysteries. Somewhere along the line I read The Day of the Jackal and The Exorcist. I thought these were kind of cool.” He was on a path to obtain his PhD and become professor material after graduating summa cum laude with a B.A. in English from Manhattan College. He moved to Vanderbilt in Nashville, Tennessee for grad school, but a college career enhanced by recreational drugs had left him uncertain about his future. “I was doing too many drugs.” Yet, he notes, “I was doing well in college—mainly A’s—but I needed to clear my head.” He had always been interested in the writings of Thomas Merton, a Trappist monk, theologian, poet, scholar, activist, and bestselling author. So, he decided in February 1970 during his first year at Vandy, to visit the Abbey of Gethsemani, recently Merton’s home south of Louisville, Kentucky, and just up Interstate 65 from Nashville. He wanted to get his head straight and consider the next stage of his life—probably not something unusual for someone who had experienced McLean as an aide. Patterson spent eleven days that February among the Trappist monks thinking about his future and had a long conversation with one of them. “I told him I’ve done a little too much LSD.” The experience, he says, “gave me time to think—think about the whole thing about becoming a writer.” Days later he walked out of the cloistered environment committed to becoming a novelist. “Basically, from then and until now, I’ve smoked weed three times and tried coke when I was in the advertising business. And that’s it.” He returned to Vanderbilt to finish his master’s feature thesis and earn his PhD. But he was quickly motived to end his graduate school experience entirely after earning his master’s. The Vietnam War draft lottery “was the nail in the coffin” for any PhD plans, he says. His high lottery number—265—guaranteed he would not be drafted in 1970 if he were no longer a student, so he quit at the end of spring semester and quickly landed a job as a copywriter with J. Walter Thompson, the iconic advertising agency in New York City. While working as a copywriter by day, he began writing his first novel. “I didn’t read mysteries, so I didn’t know any of the rules, if there are rules.” His manuscript would eventually be titled The Thomas Berryman Number. “I had a day job. Got up 5:30 each morning and wrote until 7:30. I was living on the edge of Harlem, wrote in the kitchen, and sat on a metal chair. The kitchen counter was too high for typing and I hurt my back. So, I started writing with a pencil. I’ve been writing with a pencil ever since.” “What drove me to writing fiction was just people I enjoyed reading. I thought it was presumptuous I could be a writer, but I loved doing it.” Patterson sent his manuscript directly to William Morrow without the aid of an agent. After five months Morrow rejected it. In all, 31 publishers told him no thanks. “There were a lot of rejections. Some of them were pleasant—send me your next book—and a lot of them were form.” Then he heard agent Francis Greenberger was looking for writers for his family literary agency, Sandford J. Greenberger Associates, whose clients included Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Franz Kafka, and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. They later represented such luminaries as Nicholas Sparks and Nelson DeMille. Patterson sent Greenberger his manuscript and two days later received a message to call. Patterson figured it was another rejection. Instead, Greenberger offered to represent him. Greenberger sent The Thomas Berryman Number to Jay Acton, editor at a small press. Acton worked on the book for a month and then turned it down. “Don’t worry about it,” Greenberger told Patterson. “I’m going to see this through.” He sent the manuscript with Acton’s edits to Ned Bradford at Little, Brown and Company—the venerated publisher whose clients included Emily Dickinson and J.D. Salinger, and even the works of George Washington and Benjamin Franklin. At that time, Bradford was working with Norman Mailer and Herman Wouk, yet after reading Patterson’s debut manuscript was intrigued. Bradford invited him to Little, Brown and Company’s Boston headquarters. When Patterson arrived, “a woman brought me to the publisher’s library where there was a fire in the fireplace. She brought me tea and coffee on a tray…This was amazing. I’m in this place where all of these famous people had been published. I never forgot that feeling.” Bradford took him out to lunch and during their meeting, Patterson’s first book blurb arrived from famed crime novelist John D. MacDonald. After several of his publisher’s efforts to design a cover for his novel were rejected, Patterson used his advertising experience to design one himself, which they used. “It actually was a pretty good cover,” he says. The Thomas Berryman Number was published in 1976 while he worked full-time at J. Walter Thompson. “It was the first publication of anything of mine other than for my college literary magazine.” Sales were mediocre. He knew better than to give up his day job. In fact, he worked at JWT for another 20 years, eventually rising to CEO—all the while writing novels in his spare time. Finally, turning 50, he resigned to start a full-time writing career. As for his novel writing, he says, “I didn’t learn shit at Thompson.” Okay, well maybe something. “The only thing I learned there is there’s an audience.” He said they tested every word that came out of the agency before using it. And that explains a lot about Patterson. He understands the market and the brand for popular crime fiction probably better than any other author. The Thomas Berryman Number begins in Nashville, Tennessee, where Patterson went to grad school. A newspaper reporter tries to hunt down an assassin when a rising politician is murdered. Reporter Ochs Jones links the killing to two other murders and begins to suspect racism is behind it. A manhunt ensues for a dangerous assassin. Months after publication of The Thomas Berryman Number, Patterson got a call from The Mystery Writers of America telling him his debut novel was nominated for an Edgar Award. Patterson wasn’t familiar with the award and told the caller he couldn’t attend the awards ceremony since it was only a nomination. “You don’t understand,” the MWA official whispered. “You won.” He went to the MWA awards ceremony with his parents and picked up the Edgar for Best Debut Novel. At age 27, he was now a published author and an Edgar Award winner. And he was in good company. Robert B. Parker picked up the Edgar for Best Novel that year. Since then, Patterson has become a publishing juggernaut and a book publishing philanthropist, pumping millions into the industry. He’s helped independent bookstores stay afloat, given their employees holiday bonuses, and given millions of books to kids and U.S. military personnel in the U.S. and overseas. He has financially supported public school libraries and his and his wife’s alma maters, created teacher scholarships, and has been very public in his support for striking writers in Hollywood. His success has gone beyond anything he could ever imagine and far beyond the dreams of authors everywhere. His success might be ascribed to his year at Vanderbilt University when Patterson discovered a truism for every aspiring writer: It’s better to talk with a Trappist monk about your future than to listen to book critics complain about your past. ___________________________________ The Thomas Berryman Number ___________________________________ Experience: Advertising Copywriter Agent Search: One Publisher Search: 31 rejections Time to Sell Novel: Six months First Novel Agent: Francis Greenberg First Novel Editor: Ned Bradford First Novel Publisher: Little, Brown and Company Inspiration: Evan S. Connell, Larry McMurtry, Thomas Merton, Philip Roth, Jerzy Kosiński, Thomas F. McGuane III, Lawrence Stern. Advice to Writers: I don’t give advice. The stuff you nod your head about from my master’s class—you know already. The stuff you shake your head at is what you need to learn. Website: JamesPatterson.com Like this? Read the chapters on Lee Child, Michael Connelly, Tess Gerritsen, Steve Berry, David Morrell, Gayle Lynds, Scott Turow, Lawrence Block, Randy Wayne White, Walter Mosley, Tom Straw. Michael Koryta, Harlan Coben, Jenny Milchman, James Grady, David Corbett. Robert Dugoni, David Baldacci, Steven James, Laura Lippman, Karen Dionne, Jon Land, S.A. Cosby, Diana Gabaldon, Tosca Lee, and D.P. Lyle. View the full article

I was brought up to believe that our country was governed by whichever party happened to be in office. That’s what my ancestors had instilled in the generations before me and the belief that I was intending to pass onto my own children. And if I hadn’t become a journalist, perhaps history would have continued repeating itself. But instead, I was astounded to discover that our rulers and politicians are merely the organ grinders monkeys, whilst the media is the conductor of the ensemble. I’ve been interviewing celebrities for twenty-five years and I’d like to say that in that time, the media has moved with the times and changed its modus operandi when it comes to the lives they hold in their hands. But despite calls to protect the mental health and privacy of those they’re reporting on and supposed guidelines that they should now adhere to, you only need to look at recent headlines to see that they are still ignored. British tabloids in particular get a bad press, and rightly so. They are notoriously aggressive, far more than their US counterparts, and will pursue a story at all costs, regardless of the consequences. This is most likely due to the ‘Red Tops’ believing that they’re their own censors, having led the unprecedented charge for salacious gossip back in the 19th century, after the government relaxed the law around responsible reporting. Throw in the fact that it is now an over-populated market, where the most lascivious headlines are being fiercely fought over, and you have a swirling pit of ruthless journalists who will stop at nothing for a byline. They quietly build celebrities up, setting them high on a pedestal, but don’t be fooled, because as they lurk in the shadows, they’re lining up for the kill. Waiting with baited breath for the chink in the armour to reveal itself – and just as soon it does….KAPOW! Out comes the hammer and chisel with which to systematically carve out their victim’s insides, leaving them devoid of integrity and honour. It’s cut-throat and mean, and the reason I don’t work for them anymore. It’s also the reason I decided to use the newsroom of such an establishment as the setting of my new novel The Trade Off. With such a wealth of corruption and manipulation to unleash on my characters, it was the perfect backdrop to create suspense and intrigue. But once I deep-dived into my research, even I was thunderstruck by how far some journalists would go and how low they would stoop in order to win the battle of the clickbaits against their competitors. What I discovered wasn’t only ethically wrong, but a crime against human nature and the law, although it took far too long to get the justice its victims deserved. One such case was The Fake Sheikh, an unscrupulous journalist who would pose as a wealthy Arab to trick unknowing celebrities into committing unlawful acts. Young, impressionable actors and singers, who were as equally eager to impress, would be lulled into a false sense of security by an elaborate sting of epic proportions. They would be flown around the world, be put up in the best hotels, wined and dined in Michelin star restaurants, offered multi-million pound contracts to work with their heroes…. It was all theirs for the taking, with one final hurdle to overcome – if they were just able to get hold of a little of the white stuff, it was sure to convince the Sheikh that he was making the right choice. Desperate calls to friends of friends would be made, so sure were they that if they could just honour the simple request, their lives would be forever changed. They were – but not in the way they had dreamt of. Instead, they’d awake the next morning, to see their face splashed across the front pages, with a suspicious looking powder laid out on the table in front of them and a sleazy headline accusing them of being a drug dealer. Careers were destroyed, reputations sullied and previously successful individuals were left on the brink of financial ruin. Is it any wonder that some felt there was no way back? That’s where one of the characters in The Trade Off finds herself. With nowhere left to turn, and having neither the energy or resources to fight back against the injustice, she is forced into taking drastic action when a story appears in fictional newspaper, The Globe. Accused of cheating on her husband, being a bad mother and a fraud, she can see no other way out and pays the ultimate sacrifice. But instead of the double-crossing journalist being held to account, the tabloid goes all out to cover their tracks, pointing the finger of responsibility at anybody in their line of sight. Thankfully, in fiction, we’re able to right the wrongs, and that’s where upstanding Jess Townsend comes into her own, determined to take on her morally-bankrupt superior Stella. She fights corruption with honour, revenge with forgiveness and cheating with honesty, but can the battle be won? Or is her naivety going to take her down a road she can never come back from? I had so much fun pitting Jess against Stella and losing myself in the trials and tribulations of life on a daily newspaper. But those moments were largely short-lived when I suddenly realised that I wasn’t writing fiction at all – for almost everything that happens in The Trade Off has happened in real-life. I hope that there will come a time, in the not-too-distant future when the media will take responsibility for their actions, and those whose jobs thrust them into the public spotlight no longer have to endure the intense scrutiny into their private lives. I also hope that the world is run by the people we vote for and not the puppet-masters who force their hands on policies and dictate how we should live our lives. * View the full article

The kids are almost back in school, vacation season is pretty much over, but there’s still time to travel this summer—just pick up an international crime novel! Here are five new books in translation that will take you all over the world, and into the dark underbelly of the coziest destinations. Isabelle Autissier, Suddenly Translated by Gretchen Schmid (Penguin Books) Isabelle Autissier has sailed the world alone, becoming the first woman to do so in a competition, and this survival thriller speaks to the experience of the author. In Suddenly, a French couple sets off on an epic journey, only to find themselves stranded on a remote island in the Antarctic Ocean. This is no Blue Lagoon or Robinson Crusoe—Autissier’s characters will be tested severely, and found wanting. Stefan Hertmans, The Ascent Translated by David McKay (Pantheon Books) This book is such a fascinating project of autofiction. Stefan Hertmans had already sold his former home in Ghent when he read a memoir by a former occupant that shocked him: before he’d lived there, an SS officer had called the place home. Hertmans uses this jarring revelation as an excuse to explore the home’s long history and reconsider the meaning of sanctuary. Khadija Marouazi, History of Ash Translated by Alexander Elinson (Hoopoe) Hoopoe Editions is dedicated to bringing English language audiences the best in Arabic literature, and History of Ash does not disappoint. In this devastating, lyrical novel of struggle, two prisoners in Morocco, a man and a woman, narrate their journey of resistance, imprisonment, and release during the “Lead Years” of the 1970s and 80s. Karin Smirnoff, The Girl in the Eagle’s Talons Translated by Sarah Death (Knopf) Karin Smirnoff, author of a personal favorite, The Brother, is the first female author to take over the complex character of Lisbeth Salander, and I couldn’t be happier about her continuation of the series. In this latest installment, Salander heads to a small town to assume guardianship of her niece, soon realizing her charge may be in danger. Meanwhile, Blomkvist is dealing with the death of his magazine and the impending marriage of his daughter to a potentially violent man. The two old friends must team up to save their loved ones, and demonstrate once again their loyalty to one another. Leonie Swann, The Sunset Years of Agnes Sharp Translated by Amy Bojang (Soho) Leonie Swann may write in German, but she’s set this darkly comic murder mystery in a retirement community in the English countryside. The inhabitants of Sunset Hall are shocked when one of them is murdered, then even more surprised when a detective comes by to investigate a different murder next door. Can they conceal the first body long enough to pin the murder on whoever was responsible for the corpse next door? And what does a tortoise have to do with it? View the full article