Admin_99

City of Angels, California, 1915 Tongues of flame flickered in the fireplace, hot and silent. Belle needed a window to rest her cheek on, to cool her skin, glowing red, fresh as dew, calm and hot. These little mustache hairs, she ran her fingers over her lips and heard her murmuring lungs. She lit a cigarette and looked out at the city. The enormous oak tree in the evening sun reached its long, gnarled roots along the wall and into the ground; the roots coiled around the fence, crept out under the grass. Clotheslines ran between the branches, sheets and panties flapping gently in the wind. There are things I can’t ever admit, she whispered, things that are too big, too much, she could hardly breathe, that could destroy me. The words grabbed her by the throat, Belle didn’t know when it was all going to snap, but she knew it would. A bullet, an inverted lung, a postscript to a thousand wars, tears ran down her face, there’re too many of you. She felt her stomach turn, in the darkness, one muscle after the other. The evening sun was low in the sky, her upper lip had chapped and split right down the middle, she took a deep drag of the cigarette; little words, almost a little scream, filled her mouth between the smoke and the teeth, tickling her gums, forcing their way out between her slack lips, no one who loves with their whole self can survive it. The waves of the Pacific rolled restlessly up onto the shore, the dark shimmer shone up toward her, and her voice filled the whole room, a truth so huge that it stood in everything else’s way. The words reached toward the window, there was something about the little wrinkles around her eyes, her skin’s little traces of everything that had happened, of time’s furrowed face, of all the problems lurking in her lungs, Belle felt it with perfect clarity, the shimmer, the salt water almost blinding her, there’re too many of you. Rødde Farm, 1876 Brynhild’s head was wrapped in darkness. It was being pushed down into the pillow, face-first. All the colors piled up, her heart beat hard, a pulsing knot of muscle in the middle of the sunset, throbbing red, glowing hot. Everything she was going to see and feel, face-first. Everything she was going to experience. Brynhild slipped back and forth between sweat and dream, floated in darkness as spit dribbled down from her open mouth. The bed creaked, she tensed every muscle in her body and raised her head to the window, the tiniest little movement, it took all she had. Brynhild saw the starry sky prickling, she filled her lungs with air before sinking back down onto the mattress. The dim light of the paraffin candles reached into the room, covered the walls with flickering shadows. Brynhild saw the outlines of her own body against the wall, intermittent, layered, she felt him on top of her, breath on the back of her neck, tongue drawing new lines there. Brynhild’s head was wrapped in darkness. It was being pushed down into the pillow, face-first. Brynhild had taken her clothes off so fast, seventeen years old, so gentle and good, so ready for the world, she’d been ready since the second she saw him, when she straddled his lap, I know you want me. Desires erupted from nowhere, glowing, sudden, the candlelight fluttered in the window frame and there, then, they hovered in the flame, afire and flowing. This was love. No one could tell her otherwise. God was here, so close, and an oily black light filled the bedroom. A thick sauce of something manmade tossed and turned on the mattress. He was so taut and bright, his worthless beautiful body, there was no doubt about it, she loved this man. She felt it in her bones, the craving in her belly, the colors diluting themselves on their own, one sensation slipping unresistant into the other no beginning no end all there in one big pool of sweaty muscles and blurry passings back and forth. Brynhild had undone her braid and her hair streamed down over her shoulders and he’d looked at her sitting on top of him with her starry blue eyes in that milkwhite face, those pinkish cheeks, pale freckles, brown hair everywhere, she had bloomed and opened like a dark flower. The anticipation in two strange eyes, that color palette, all that softness and innocence laid so bare. And the sky really had fallen down to earth that night, pressing down on the house, it had pricked against Brynhild’s skin and she’d felt the stars on her eyes, they’d stung and burned, there was so much hope, endless hope, in a dark blue sky. A new canvas had been stretched onto the frame, the black dirty love-sweat had scattered its seed, the rich farmer’s son from Selbu had walked straight into the attic room, straight between her two half-open lips, straight into her open mouth. He’d taken her into his arms and she’d leaned into him and he’d seduced her with both hands. A touch that made her melt, rocking hips, she took, he gave, convulsing, bit by bit, she lay there for days, shoved into the darkness. That’s how it happened, she’d been raised up high in the name of love and now she was vibrating, she couldn’t stop trembling. A gentle breeze drifted through the curtains, I can die now, but she didn’t die, she was breathing, she panted like a wet little dog, glowing with the morning sun right in her face. Young Brynhild quivered against the sheets, all alone, she was so far from home, from mom and dad and the sheep up on the hill, she could feel it down in her bones, the fumbling, all the uncertainty, everything her eyes had seen the night before. It was a fairy tale, red like the dawn, sheets soaked and stained in a hundred different shapes. Brynhild traced the outlines of the stains with her finger, the spots clearly drawn in the sharp morning light, and she wiped her hand on her thigh. Everything she’d seen the night before, everything that had no words for it, the intense eyes resting on her. Broiling sunbeams pierced the window, thoughts sat in the middle of her head, her ears were listening for the least little movement, the thread of life was stretched tight. Firstborn came back, a huge mass of skin and a wide white smile, so loving and strict, so strong, so addicted to his own desire. This man with pale hair and the smell of dirt and soft leather, boots that squeaked and scratched against the bedframe. Brynhild’s body felt the benediction, the weight in the darkness, the golden shimmer in the heart, it went from soft to hard so fast she didn’t realize what had happened. The dark passion when there was no more daylight, hands that could so suddenly ball into fists. Everything that changed as soon as she wasn’t looking. Little negotiations every single time. All the colors up against her eyes. The forever-warm body. Her head pushed down into the pillow every night. Mouth open till it poured and she had to swallow. The jolting ran through her like night-black shivers through the room. Brynhild lay sunk into the mattress. She lay there with the farmholder class on top of her, a defenseless condition, totally naked, totally unprotected with her whole melting little tip sticking out into the room, a glowing little fuse pointing straight out into the world. The sky blurred above them, thinner and thinner the closer morning came, with spit and drooping eyelids as butterflies thronged between ears of corn and horses ran in circles out in the paddock as if the hooves striking the ground, the gentle light, were weaving them into the landscape of dreams. Brynhild just sank deeper into the mattress while the light melted between the treetops and spanned the window frame. The thin hours disappeared without her noticing, the blink of an eye, the seconds, no way to keep up with them, the traitorous soft skin, everywhere unresisting. The creek burbled far away, flies bounced off the windowpane. She heard reins snapping somewhere in front of the house as harnesses were tightened under horses’ warm bellies. The days always started like this, all by themselves, sweaty and warm and alone with a sound from the farthest corner of the world. The sound got louder and louder and before she knew it she had to get up and make breakfast and coffee for the masters. Brynhild did it all, so quiet, seventeen, glowing, no one would know what she’d done in the late hours of the night. She wiped down the kitchen counter as fast as she could, gave the floor a quick sweep, put the coffee on, took out cups and plates, set out sausage and eggs, cheese and bread. Her stomach lurched. She was filled with this melting hot world. The dishwater burning hot between her fingers, everything so smooth and scalding on her skin. Seventeen years old with a hot mouth open wide in the middle of the nothingness, seventeen and in a total panic, Brynhild blinked but the colors only pushed deeper into her eyes. Every cell in her body wanted him. There was no doubt about it, happiness and heat filled every crack in her body, Brynhild felt almost drunk as she stood there at the kitchen counter, pulse pounding and rebounding off the walls. She looked out at the pasture. Butterflies flickered just above the ground. She watched them, tracked the wings, tried to count the wing beats but they were fluttering too fast. Time was a heavy pulse behind her eyes. Everything piled up, layer on layer behind her eyes, skinny little legs stabbing right through her irises. It was a mess. Brynhild was seventeen, face-first, open all the way down. __________________________________ From My Men by Victoria Kielland (trans. Damion Searls). Used with permission of the publisher, Astra House Publishing. Copyright © 2023 by Victoria Kielland/Damion Searls. View the full article

It’s hard out there for the discerning true crime fan. Amid a glut of superficial rehashes of famous cases, or bloated limited series on run-of-the-mill murders, it’s hard to find anything truly new and juicy. You’re always on the lookout for an interesting, underexposed case, told with a good amount of access and a bit of flair. There’s something special, however, in Lanon van Soest’s The Jewel Thief, which premiered on Hulu last week. It’s the literally incredible tale of a stunningly brilliant, staggeringly arrogant, thief, who managed to pull off a series of stunning heists through a mixture of cunning and no small measure of compulsion. As a young kid, the slightly dweebish Gerald Blanchard found a place for himself in school by wowing his fellow students with his inventive electronic contraptions. As a teen, he won a kind of respect from his peers through his audacious shoplifting (first cartons of cigarettes from gas stations, then gold chains and designer shirts from the mall.) Blanchard captured all these incidents on a then-state-of-the-art camcorder. There’s a lot of twerpy swagger in these videos, and when he frames himself in the camera and gazes into the lens there’s something disconcerting there, too — a naked, hungry need for attention and self-regard for his own felonious daring. We also see Blanchard learning some early lessons: if you watch and plan–-figuring out the security cop’s route and when he takes a break–then it’s easy to take things in plain sight. Even if you’ve got a giant camcorder in your face while you’re doing it, and three teenage girls giggling on the sidelines. But soon, whatever itch it is that Gerald needs to scratch gets a lot itchier. Once he graduates from lifting cell phones from RadioShack to stealing a whole RadioShack (boosting the store’s entire inventory on an Easter Sunday), his life of crime begins in earnest. There’s a sadness as his ties with his classmates begin to dissolve, as they move on from casual juvenile delinquency, and they realize that Gerald is incapable of moving on too. One of his friends notes matter-of-factly that he got to a point where he just assumed that Gerald “wasn’t going to be around” much longer. After he’s deported to Canada after a prison stint in the US, Blanchard begins to spread his wings, crime-wise, and begins an equally storied history of nose-thumbing at law enforcement. After a brief stint making a living by lifting electronic goods and returning them with phony receipts, Blanchard drives by a bank one day and thinks it looks crackable. This is just the beginning of Blanchard’s spree of bank heists across Canada, each netting hundreds of thousands of dollars. All the best heist stories provide the great pleasure of watching plans skillfully are watching a plan skillfully executed. Say whatever else you will about him (and there’s a lot you could), Blanchard is willing to put the work in, and through an incredible amount of surveillance, low-tech engineering, and time spent in air ducts, he’s able to beat alarms and clear out entire ATM machines with ease. The astounded and delightfully Canadian cops become major and winning characters in themselves, especially as they admit that matching wits with Blanchard is as fun for them as it is for him. Blanchard, for his part, grows cockier and cockier once they get a wiretap on him. At one point, he tells an associate he’s not getting involved in any caper that nets him any less than 300k. He also likes to taunt them with pictures of him around the world flaunting piles of cash. The title The Jewel Thief is a bit of a misnomer, since the bank heists were really Gerald’s bread and butter, but it alludes to maybe the most glamorous, and definitely the most mysterious episode, in Blanchard’s life of crime. Sometime in 1998, he swiped the Sisi Star—a diamond-and-pearl pin belonging to the former Empress of Austria–from an exhibit in a museum from a palace in Vienna. He somehow managed to get past high-security locks and replace the jewel with a replica from the gift shop. It was probably weeks before the swap was discovered. It seems that Blanchard may still face some legal jeopardy from the Austrian government, so he’s uncharacteristically cagey on the details here. This leaves tantalizing possibilities—did he parachute down into the palace? Scale up a wall? The motive for the theft, however, is not in doubt, and very indicative of Blanchard’s wily character: he knew that having something of such cultural significance could be a persuasive bargaining chip if he were ever to get caught. The story of Blanchard’s downfall is still pretty wild but also sadder and more predictable–-as he gets more money and his globetrotting more pro forma, the videos take on a kind of sad, empty quality. And, of course, as you chase bigger and bigger scores, you throw your lot in with badder and badder dudes. You can’t fault Blanchard’s hustle though: it’s not every thief who’d have the nerve to tell a major international bad dude that he can’t take his call because you’re in an air conditioning duct planning to rob another bank. The story would be a great and wild one in any event, but what makes The Jewel Thief a particularly gripping and revealing story is its access to Blanchard himself. Now released from prison, Blanchard is, of course, an unreliable narrator, but still in many ways a revealing one. Strait-laced and occasionally stuffy (“He looks like my doctor,” one of his ex-accomplices notes), he’s matter-of-fact but still clearly motivated by an adolescent sense not only of acquisitiveness, but also of sticking it to everyone (cops very much included) who have underestimated or insulted him. The immense amount of documentation left of all his crimes seems less foolish than a kind of compulsion, an endless tease or provocation. More than ever before in my years of true crime consumption did I have the sense that I was watching someone who couldn’t help talking about his crimes, but couldn’t help but keep committing them. It is this portrait of a truly, disturbingly compulsive personality, as much as the audacity of that person’s crimes, that makes The Jewel Thief a great watch. View the full article

The horror renaissance continues! And the second half of the year brings plenty of new standout titles to add to your TBR. The works below twist, shatter, and reinvent gothic and horror tropes, bringing old forms together with new issues, and do not attempt to separate the social from the personal when it comes to understanding fear and and its bringers. There are gruesome body horrors, cackling dark comedies, surreal metaphorical structures, and (like earlier in the year) so many haunted houses. From old favorites, to new voices, teen slasher heroines to Eldritch-fighting grannies, here are Ayesha Manazir Siddiqi, The Centre (Gillian Flynn Books, July 11) What would you do to be part of the most elite language academy ever established? And what would you be willing to keep secret? The Centre follows a struggling translator who learns of a place where people can go to become completely fluent in a new language in mere days of effort. She is determined to reap the rewards, but shocked when she begins to find out the dark secrets underpinning the secretive institution. A vicious and entertaining speculative satire of late-stage capitalism. John Milas, The Militia House (Henry Holt, July 11) In this military horror novel, a rare but hopefully growing subgenre, American soldiers stationed near the ruins of an old Soviet outpost in Afghanistan find themselves in the midst of strange happenings, unexplained disappearances, and disturbing visitors. Milas is a wordsmith, and this novel is as haunting as it is impressive. Chuck Tingle, Camp Damascus (Tor Nightfire, July 18) So, what if there was a Christian Conversion Camp that always worked…but only via performing some seriously dark magic? And what can a queer kid do to fight back? Chuck Tingle’s new novel, aside from having an awesome tagline (“They’ll scare you straight to hell.”), is a well-crafted and surprisingly moving novel. And certainly quite different from Chuck Tingle’s previous work… Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Silver Nitrate (Random House, July 18) Both of Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s parents worked in radio, so perhaps that’s part of the inspiration behind this bonkers ode to sound engineering and the (literal magical) power of the human voice. Silver Nitrate features a sound editor and a has-been actor as they befriend an elderly icon from the Golden Age of Mexican cinema, only to find themselves drawn into a vast conspiracy to harness the magic of the silver screen and bring an occult-obsessed Nazi back from the dead. This book has everything, and I could not recommend it enough! Nick Cutter, Andrew F. Sullivan, The Handyman Method : A Story of Terror (Saga, August 8) Surreal and disturbing, The Handyman Method is a diabolical tale of toxic masculinity gone awry, narrated by a set of youtube videos featuring an evil handyman. Cutter and Sullivan clearly had a lot of fun writing this together, and I’d declare it a collaborative triumph (as well as a hilarious send up of Home Depot guys. You know the ones). Lauren Beukes, Bridge (Mulholland, August 8) There’s a lot of books out there already about husbands trying to save their wives via other dimensions, but this is the first time I’ve seen a daughter go into other worlds to find her mother. This isn’t just mind-bending scifi; it’s a thriller driven by a frenetic search for both love and answers. Beukes’ trademark balance between horror and thriller, with a focus on character, is on full display in Bridge. –MO Jennifer Dugan, The Last Girls Standing (Putnam, August 15) Sloan and Cherry are the only two counselors to make it out alive from a brutal massacre at a summer camp, bonding in their fight for survival and embarking on a romance for the ages. But now Sloan is starting to wonder about if her girlfriend did more at that sleepaway camp than just survive. Campy, queer, and perfect for the doldrums of summer! Keith Rosson, Fever House (Random House, August 15) What if Courtney Love and her son suddenly came into possession of a demonic severed hand that inspired violent thoughts in all who are near it? That’s the amazingly left-field set-up of Keith Rosson’s Fever House, which, in addition to the aging rocker and her son, features the viewpoints of two enforcers for a crime boss, two feds who work for a secretive government agency studying the occult, and government reports on the esoteric visions of the Angel Michael, held in captivity and slowly declining. The search for the severed hand has several folks on the musician’s trail, but she and her son are ready to get as badass as her lyrics in the 90s in order to defeat them. Isabel Cañas, Vampires of El Norte (Berkley, August 15) I loved Isabel Cañas’ lush, gothic debut, The Hacienda, and I’m psyched for her follow-up, set on the Texas-Mexico border during the 1840s, and featuring two childhood friends (and perhaps soon-to-be lovers) reunited in a battle against the undead. Jamison Shea, I Feed Her to the Beast and the Beast Is Me (Henry Holt, August 29) 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. Carissa Orlando, The September House (Berkley, September 5) Carissa Orlando’s The September House uses hauntings as a brilliant metaphor for abuse, and what people can get used to, as well as a prescient comment on the tight housing market. Orlando’s narrator loves her home, and if she needs to ignore some ghostly children, be served tea by a taciturn housekeeper with a gaping face wound, and scrub the blood off the walls once a season, then so be it. Her husband isn’t so good at tolerating the house, but then, she’s learned how to tolerate much more from his treatment of her than she ever expected. When her daughter comes to stay, and her husband goes missing, it’s up to Orlando to continue saying “everything’s fine” for far too long. But the ghost in the basement may finally spur her to action…I found myself cheering at the end of this book, and I really hope it gets picked up as a Ryan Murphy production (post-writers’ strike, that is). Lisa Springer, There’s No Way I’d Die First (Delacorte Press, September 5) Influencers! Halloween games! And a KILLER CLOWN!!!! There’s no way the narrator won’t make it to the end of this book, with all her Final Girl brilliance, which means there’s no way that you, the reader, will not also make it to the end of the very fun, very campy slasher novel. Springer’s heroine is trying to get attention for her horror film club and invites her prep school’s most influential students to an exclusive Halloween party at her parent’s mansion. Unfortunately, the party entertainment she’s hired has their own agenda, and it’ll take all her knowledge of horror tropes and household chemistry to outwit the clown’s righteous fury and grotesque gags. Laura Picklesimer, Kill For Love (Unnamed Press, September 5) The bored college fifth-year narrating Kill For Love has always been good at suppressing her appetites—you can see it in her carefully counted calories, svelte figure, and attempts to mask her sociopathy from her sisters. But when she kills a man in the act of coitus one night—then devours a meal of greasy meat for the first time in years—she realizes she’s found the one hunger impossible to ignore. Of particular note is how Picklesimer’s language reverses the male gaze as her killer objectifies the frat bros around her and tries to keep from mauling their drunken flesh. Adam Sass, Your Lonely Nights Are Over (Viking Young Readers, September 5) In this delightful YA homage to the slasher, a serial killer is a targeting a school’s queer club, and two besties find themselves ostracized from the club after suspicion falls on them for the murders. They must clear their names, in between going to drive-in movies, settling scores, and occasionally hooking up. Will they solve the murders? Will they end up together? Do I even care who the murderer is when I’m desperate for these two to smash? Anyway, file this one under, Very Fun and Not at All Scary (at least, compared to other slashers). Clay McLeod Chapman, What Kind of Mother (Quirk, September 12) I was shattered by Clay McLeod Chapman’s grief horror Ghost Eaters, and in What Kind of Mother, Chapman revisits some of the same themes of loss and absence, this time in the guise of a domestic thriller with supernatural overtones. A palm reader heads back to her hometown with her teenage daughter, only to reconnect with an old flame who is struggling with the loss of his young son. After reading his palm, Chapman’s heroine finds herself convinced her lover’s son is still alive. But where could he be, and who could have taken him? Kaori Fujino, Nails and Eyes Translated by Kendall Heitzman (Pushkin Press, September 12) I’m so looking forward to reading this literary Japanese horror that has earned comparisons to The Vegetarian and Tender is the Flesh (hint, hint). Narrated by a young girl with sinister intentions toward her stepmother, Nails and Eyes is a taught and entrancing novella, with additional disturbing stories rounding out the page count, all feeling very 90s-era Tartan video. The volume is part of a new series of Japanese short classics being issued by Pushkin Press, known on CrimeReads for their excellent Pushkin Vertigo series of classic detective fiction. Rachel Harrison, Black Sheep (Berkley, September 19) It’s hard coming home to your estranged family to celebrate the wedding of your ex to your childhood best friend. It’s even harder when your family, your ex’s family, and your best friend are all part of an insular Satanist cult. And when Satan himself decides to show up at the celebration, well, that’s when all hell breaks loose (get it?). An excellent addition to the “weddings-gone-awry” genre, and just as funny as it is creepy. Melissa Lozada-Oliva, Candelaria (Astra House, September 19) A badass Guatemalan grandma battles her way across a disaster-fallen city to find her granddaughters, fighting otherworldly creatures and strangely fixated on reaching the Watertown Mall Old Country Buffet. I can’t wait to read this bizarre, Lovecraftian take on disaster fiction. Alicia Elliott, And Then She Fell (Dutton, September 26) A young indigenous woman is going stir-crazy at home after giving birth, and her husband, a white professor of Native American studies, seems so supportive. But her husband keeps succeeding at her expense, the neighbors are beyond suspicious, her impostor syndrome is overwhelming, and it’s up to Elliott’s heroine to listen to the warnings of her ancestors and find the key to survival in the Haudenosaunee creation story. Creepy, thoughtful, and immersive! Tomi Oyemakinde, The Changing Man (Feiwel & Friends, September 26) Get Out meets Ace of Spades in this boarding-school horror. A young scholarship student at an elite academy notices some of her classmates of color have been exhibiting remarkable, and unnatural, changes in behavior. What does the school want? And what is it willing to take? An excellent horror thriller that you’ll speed through in less than a day. Gustavo Eduardo Abrevaya, The Sanctuary Translated by Andrea G. Labinger (Schaffner Press, October 3) In what reads as a David Lynch take on Red Harvest, a couple is on their way to a remote cabin when their car breaks down, stranding them in the middle of nowhere. In a quest to find assistance, they find themselves in a sinister village ruled by a despotic mayor, a fire-and-brimstone priest, an insidious, lewd, police squad, and more strange denizens. Soon, the wife goes missing. None of the townspeople are interesting in finding her. And her husband must search far and wide for any allies… Elizabeth Hand, A Haunting on the Hill (Mulholland, October 3) Elizabeth Hand is one of the coolest writers around, and I’m psyched to dive into A Haunting on the Hill, a Shirley-Jackson-estate approved continuation of The Haunting of Hill House (This time with more hauntings! And more hills! Actually probably just the one hill). Playwright Holly Sherwin and her girlfriend Nisa head upstate with a troupe of actors to stage and rehearse a new play. Sherwin is confident that the crumbling gothic manor of Hill House will bring out their creative sides, but instead, they are joined by their hauntings. I love a play-gone-wrong story and Hand’s promises to be one of the best. Jo Nesbø, The Night House Translated by Neil Smith (Knopf, October 3) Jo Nesbo’s upcoming horror novel is a delightful contrast with the author’s usual work; in The Night House, classic horror tropes are reinvented as an unreliable narrator tries to block out terrible, knowing voices. One by one, his schoolmates begin to vanish, and he’s quickly pegged as the suspicious, angry outsider who must be behind the killings. Will he lose the girl he loves next? And is he, perhaps, the real danger? There are some wickedly clever reveals that I will not talk about here but you must read this book so you, too, can be properly surprised. Sam Rebelein, Edenville (William Morrow, October 3) A novelist has a very vivid dream. He wakes up and writes a novel. That novel comes across the desk of a mysterious researcher who curses her discovery. She doesn’t want to kill the author—perhaps, she can hire him as an adjunct creative writing teacher instead? And so the author and his girlfriend head to a small liberal arts college where the English department has a strangely otherworldly agenda. This book was a wild ride from start to finish, with a heavy dose of humor thrown into the mix. Caitlin Starling, Last to Leave the Room (St. Martin’s, October 10) A scientist is performing dangerous experiments deep inside the earth that appear to be warping the very geography of her city. Meanwhile, her basement keeps getting deeper….and deeper…until one day, a door appears where there was once a blank wall. On the other side of the door is the scientist’s doppelgänger, and her perfect complement—cheerful when she is morose, friendly when she needs solitude. This book has brought me a delicious sense of unease, and Starling’s signature intricate world-building is once again on full display. Anna Biller, Bluebeard’s Castle (Verso, October 10) Anna Biller’s sly feminist dissection of gothic tropes is as lush and layered as her cinema (Biller is the director of the cult classic The Love Witch). A young romance writer is seduced by a handsome ne’er-do-well who makes himself out to be a wealthy gentleman. Soon, he shows himself to be a brutal lover and more concerned with borrowing from her dwindling savings than making any money of his own. And yet, she has fallen in love with him…or so she tells herself, but Biller skillfully portrays the gaslighting and abuse that reduce her heroine to making excuses for her boorish husband. Aden Polydoros, Wrath Becomes Her (Inkyard, October 10) In this gorgeously written, brutally powerful take on the Golem legend, a teenage girl is killed in the Holocaust and brought back by her father as a clay creature, seeking vengeance. Her violence is effective, but soon channeled for more than vengeance, and she must take a stand against those who would exploit her for evil. Nat Cassidy, Nestlings (Tor Nightfire, October 31) A couple with a baby gains access to the perfect two-bedroom in Nat Cassidy’s ode to creepy New York legacy apartment buildings. Ana and Reid are struggling after birth leaves Ana paralyzed, and they worry about moving to a higher floor in terms of emergencies and accessibility, but the apartment is just too nice to say no to. There’s a reason they’re being welcoming into the building, however: their neighbors have sinister motivations. Of note is the novel’s take on antisemitism as horror, in the guise of a hateful former landlord echoing currently rising prejudices. Tananarive Due, The Reformatory (Saga, October 31) Tananarive Due is one of the greatest living horror writers, and her new book blends her signature style with an exploration into a very personal trauma: Due’s great-uncle was one of many Black children harmed by the Florida reform school known as the Dozier School for Boys, and The Reformatory takes readers into the nightmare that was the school circa 1950. Sure to be as powerful as it is haunting. Linda Cheng, Gorgeous Gruesome Faces (Roaring Brook Press, November 7) In this high-concept horror, Cheng’s narrator Sunny is a disgraced former member of a manufactured girl group that was meant for K-pop stardom—at least, until one of the members killed herself, and the other cuts off all contact with Sunny. When Sunny finds a chance to reconnect with her bandmate, and finally understand what went wrong, she leaps in without hesitation: there’s a new contest to become to the next big pop idol, and she’ll stay in the program until she discovers the truth, no matter how dangerous. View the full article

Romcom mystery is a genre that perfectly blends whodunit, wit, grit, romance and laugh-out-loud moments. With quirky female protagonists desperately trying to navigate life’s complexities, these stories come alive with characters you can’t help but cheer for as they come up against extraordinary events in their ordinary lives. Whether they are waitresses, actresses, nurses, lawyers, or food anthropologists, they manage to keep their humor in situations that are often far from laughable. Lighter on crime and heavier on humor, romcom mysteries can sometimes border on madcap but still deliver the same rollercoaster ride of thrills, spills, red herrings, twists and turns of the most satisfying crime novel. The genre’s signature traits include compelling and relatable female leads, close-knit family and friend dynamics, zany antics, swoon-worthy romantic interests, fast-paced action and graphic crimes that make us gasp. But what happens when you infuse this genre with diverse voices and narratives? The storytelling transcends traditional confines, presenting readers with a panorama of rich, varied experiences and perspectives that move beyond the classic crime story to incorporate cultural nuances, familial dynamics, historic contexts, and social commentaries. Here are seven romcom mystery novels by diverse authors that serve up crime with quirky characters, a heaping side of humor, a pinch of romance and the occasional dash of bananas, enriching the genre with their distinct narratives and voices. Dial A for Aunties, by Jesse Q. Sutanto This unconventional mystery with a romcom subplot follows Meddelin Chan, who accidentally kills her blind date and turns to her mother and meddlesome aunts to help dispose of the body, all while managing a massive wedding at their family-run business. To complicate matters, her first love, Nathan, makes a surprise appearance during the wedding chaos. A vibrant mix of humor and crime, this is an utterly engaging story about family loyalty, cursed generations, second chances and accidental murder. Arsenic and Adobo, by Mia P. Manansala In this culinary mystery, Lila Macapagal moves back to her small Midwestern town to help save her Tita Rosie’s failing restaurant, only to find herself a prime suspect when a nasty food critic who was also her ex-boyfriend drops dead in their restaurant. Alongside her eccentric family, matchmaking aunties, and her old high school sweetheart-turned-detective, Lila must find the real murderer. Manansala expertly seasons this mystery with delicious food, laugh-out-loud humor, and a healthy serving of crime. Don’t read hungry! Death by Dumpling, by Vivien Chien (Noodle Shop Mystery Series) After losing her job, Lana Lee ends up working at her parents’ noodle house in Cleveland’s Asia Village. When the owner of a nearby shopping mall is poisoned by dumplings from their restaurant, Lana finds herself at the center of murder investigation. To save the family restaurant, Lana and her ride-or-die bestie are quickly on the case, juggling family drama, a grumpy-but-handsome police detective, and enough suspects to keep readers turning the pages. A savory blend of humor, romance, and suspense. Hollywood Homicide, by Kellye Garrett (Detective by Day Series) This book had me laughing out loud. Dayna Anderson is a mega-broke actress whose claim to fame is a corny catch phrase from a fast-food commercial. After witnessing a deadly hit-and-run, she decides to take on the deadliest role of her life: Homicide Detective, and gets caught up in a world of paparazzi, crime, romance, and hilarious antics in an attempt to solve the case and collect the reward money to save her parents’ house from foreclosure. I loved her caustic sense of humor! My Sister, the Serial Killer, by Oyinkan Braithwaite Set in Nigeria, this smart, sardonic and darkly comedic novel centers on Korede, an antisocial nurse whose younger sister can’t stop murdering her boyfriends. Poor Korede is left to clean up the mess and pretend she believes her sister’s justifications. When her sister sets her sights on Korede’s long-time crush, she must confront her sister, their dysfunctional relationship and her own feelings. Although not strictly a romcom mystery, this wickedly entertaining story utilizes dark humor and elements of romance to explore themes of family and morality. Mango, Mambo, and Murder, by Raquel V. Reyes (Caribbean Kitchen Mystery) Food anthropologist and Caribbean cook Dr. Miriam Quiñones-Smith relocates to Miami with her husband and their four-year-old son but has problems adjusting to her new home, her suddenly-distant husband and her meddling mother-in-law. When a woman drops dead at a country club right next to Miriam, and her best friend is suspected of murder, Miriam gets involved to clear her friend’s name. Prepare for humor, delicious cooking, shrewd sleuthing and a mom who can do it all. The Zoya Factor, by Anuja Chauhan and more… Zoya Singh Solanki is an advertising executive who becomes a lucky charm for the Indian cricket team and eventually falls for the team’s handsome captain. When her personal life becomes public gossip and she gets tangled up in a scandal, Zoya sets out to figure out who is behind it. Although it leans more towards romance and comedy, the book has a mystery element that adds to the intrigue. For a South Asian mystery that is more procedure-based, The Widows of Malabar Hill by Sujata Massey is a richly woven tale of culture, crime and charm. My new novel To Have and To Heist falls between the two, mixing love, laughter, mystery and felonious endeavors when a candy store clerk pulls off a heist at wedding to save her best friend. With their strong female leads, humorous plotlines, intricate crimes, and endearing support characters, these seven novels by diverse authors strike the perfect balance between humor and serious crime-solving. When we read the final pages, we are left not only with the satisfaction of a mystery solved but also with the appreciation of a narrative experienced through a diverse lens. So here’s to love that sets hearts racing, mysteries that get the brain ticking, laughs that echo across pages and diverse voices that enrich our literary journey—all served up with a side of unexpected twists and turns. * View the full article

In an earlier article, I had written about the lack of Indian crime fiction when I was growing up. We had plugged that gap by turning to western authors – Christie, Conan Doyle, Edgar Wallace, Erle Stanley Gardner, and other giants of crime fiction. The lacuna had kept gnawing at the back of my mind, and had eventually pushed me to write crime fiction set in India. That paucity of local crime fiction had continued until a decade ago. How much has that changed now? In this article, I’ll try to offer a glimpse of today’s Indian crime fiction space. Huge Potential Before I do that, let me step back and look at India as a setting for fiction. The first thing that hits you between the eyes is the unparalleled diversity. Rich, multi-dimensional heterogeneity that stems from a multitude of old cultures and kingdoms that had once dotted the subcontinent. Take languages for instance. The 2018 census found that the country had 19,569 mother tongues (languages and dialects). After eliminating regional variations, this came down to 121 languages that were spoken by 10,000 people or more. This rivals Europe in its entirety, which has 24 official languages against India’s 22. Language is but one aspect of diversity. When we start considering multiple religions, castes, climates, beliefs, prejudices, cuisines, customs, festivals, clothing, social mores, music, art and architecture, the complexity grows even more interesting. With variations aplenty, each state has its own peculiarities. Add to this the wide economic spectrum (from slums to opulent mansions coexisting side-by-side), access to education (from the illiterate to Nobel Laureates), politics (heaven knows how many parties we have), the impact of globalization, soaring aspirations and prosperity, a vibrant corporate world, unbridled greed and what not, and the mosaic becomes truly fascinating. But how relevant is this to crime fiction? I believe it adds to the richness and complexity. Let me illustrate. Take an imaginary household in an Indian city and make it the subject of a fictional murder mystery. Apart from the usual suspects in friends and relatives, we have a slew of other “persons of interest”. There is a whole bunch of helpers who legitimately enter the house – the maid (or two), the driver, the gardener, the man who irons clothes, the boy who cleans the car, the woman who delivers milk, the man who delivers drinking water, the grocer, the vegetable-seller, the postman, and maybe a few more. Not to mention the inquisitive busybody next door and the nosy parker’s kids who have a free run of the neighbourhood. Add the music teacher and the yoga instructor who come home thrice a week. Put these characters into the story and imagine the varied milieus a writer can generate with them! Then consider the conflicts and the range of motives that can arise from the diversity mentioned above – financial, religious, social, cultural, and so on. The writer can dream up so many reasons to kill! Further, add murder weapons – from crude rat poison (freely available) to venomous snakes (if you know where to get them), from machetes (also freely available) to hacked cars, from dangerous prescription drugs (often dispensed without a prescription) to tampered electricity wiring, to name a few. There was a true case last year wherein a man tried to kill his wife with a deadly Russell’s viper. When she survived after a 52-day battle at a hospital, he used an even more lethal cobra and succeeded. In court, the police demonstrated the difference between a natural snakebite and an induced one! Brilliant! Finally, consider the locale. What if we move the setting from a city to the sparsely populated hills (A Will to Kill) or a forest or a riverside in the hinterland (A Dire Isle)? Or to a castle or resort in the Himalayas (Praying Mantis)? Or to a poverty-stricken village? To a temple or mosque? To any of the myriad festivals that dot our calendar? On Holi, for instance, when revellers splash vivid colours on each other, fresh blood would go unnoticed. Gunshots would be missed among the firecracker blasts on Diwali. The possibilities are endless and are limited by only the writer’s imagination. This is the promise that Indian crime fiction holds, and it’s up to us writers to exploit it. Now, with this background, let us take a look at the nascent crime fiction scene here. We’ll do that by visiting a bookstore. Imagine you are visiting it after several years. Changing Landscape The first thing you notice is a change in how the fiction shelves are organised. There is a large, new shelf that wasn’t there a few years ago. It is labelled “Indian Writing” and offers a variety of genres. Its pride of place signifies its importance among the shelves. A bookstore near my house in Chennai even has a sub-shelf titled “Chennai Authors”. The last decade has witnessed an explosion of sorts in Indian writing. Large numbers have taken to writing all sorts of fiction. Ours is an old civilization with a very long history of storytelling. What is new now is that people are writing in English. So, what are they writing? Mostly romance and mythological fiction. Romance is a staple the world over and India is no different – it sells in large numbers. However, mythological fiction is an Indian peculiarity. India’s rich and sprawling mythology provides endless source material and thousands of characters to be exploited, reimagined and recast for the modern audience. Thereafter, each tale can be retold from yet another character’s viewpoint. With Indians’ enduring love for their mythology, this is not an opportunity that writers are letting pass by. Crime fiction, unfortunately, comes a distant third after these two genres. Writers and publishers alike find it a tough sale compared to the two larger genres. Even so, the numbers are not insignificant. With no reliable public statistics about Indian fiction, one must rely on anecdotal evidence. In the last few years, I have sampled over a hundred Indian crime writers. Even so, I have read but a minority of the new writers. It is on this sample (and on some conversations) that I base my impressions. The leading subgenre in crime is the thriller. There is a distinct bias for overt action. Gangland crime, political rivalries, terrorism and espionage offer different flavours in addition to the general crime thriller. Legal, medical or corporate thrillers are far fewer. That’s because there aren’t many writers who have the requisite background. Merely setting a story in the business or medical world doesn’t make it a corporate or a medical thriller. The crime must be specific to that area and there must be some specialist depth. The big-city, violent thriller is popular not just among readers, but also with filmmakers. These stories seem to satisfy the demand for fictional violence in familiar urban surroundings (which is where most of our writers and readers live). They are often set in metropolises like Mumbai and Delhi, tend to be dark and sordid, and frequently explore the underbelly of these cities. They often involve organised crime and politics. The recent success of one such story on Netflix has spawned a new wave of violent thrillers. Unsurprisingly, a certain sameness has now crept in. “There is fatigue now,” says Sid Jain of Story Ink, who helps bring books to the screen. “We are getting more and more of the same stuff. We must go beyond stereotypes and write stories that take the audience to new, inaccessible worlds. We need more insight into these worlds.” I concur. However, my experience of writing corporate thrillers brought out multiple challenges. Firstly, how do I make a complex white-collar crime accessible to the lay reader who doesn’t understand finance, stocks, technology or fraud? I can’t oversimplify it and put off the savvy corporate citizen. It’s indeed a difficult balance. Secondly, how do I make the book profitable for the publisher when not many readers are keen on complex crimes that requires them to concentrate? After thrillers, the other major subgenre is the murder mystery. This is what I have turned to with my Harith Athreya series. I must say that we have some delightful whodunnits set in India. Some are set in the Mughal or British period and offer an additional layer of charm. There are several murder mysteries set in contemporary India too, and some of them are set in fictional or real small towns. But unfortunately, whodunnits aren’t very profitable in India (low sale volumes), and that is putting the brakes on this subgenre. The third subgenre, which seems to have more demand than supply, is true crime. “Stories based on true crime seem to be the way to go,” says Premnath Rajagopalan of Blue Monkey Films. “Films about scams are also gaining in popularity.” He expects this trend to continue for the next 3-4 years. So, that was a glimpse of the Indian Writing shelf in a bookstore. Stepping back from the shelf and glancing around the bookstore, you see that the advent of the Indian Writing shelf has been at the expense of other shelves. They are fewer now. Then comes the realisation that the overall number of bookshelves has also fallen. The shop now sells more of other items than before – gift articles, stationery, toys, etc. Why? A quiet chat with the store manager suggests that selling books is no longer very profitable. Both offtake and margins have dipped. Is it because of the Amazon phenomenon that has moved a large part of the sales online? Partly. There’s a deeper problem as well. Lack of Demand “A woeful lack of demand for fiction in India makes it very difficult for publishers to break out writers regardless of genre,” says Priya Doraswamy of Lotus Lane Literary. “And by extension this applies to crime fiction as well. Because of this, with remorse, I decline representation to many aspiring crime writers.” “Crime fiction has also suffered due to bookshops shutting down and the consequent fall in discoverability,” adds Prerna Vohra, Associate Publisher, Bloomsbury India. “People still want to read crime fiction, but they end up reading either global bestsellers or whatever is top on Amazon’s lists. Debut authors especially find it hard to break out in such a crowded market.” The lack of demand doesn’t hit new writers alone. Even established ones are affected. One popular mystery writer who was earlier published by a large, global publisher has now self-published his latest mystery. This is indeed sad as he is one of those who crafts original mysteries. One can’t blame the publishers either – the volumes are just not there. While we have far more writers than before, few of them sell any significant number of copies. With low margins and lower sales, publishers’ economics just don’t work out, unless film rights are optioned. Consequently, traditional publishers end up declining crime fiction submissions. Into this gap have stepped in a slew of vanity publishers. These firms make their money by charging writers, and not by selling books to readers. They earn their profit even before the first copy is sold. There is no barrier to entry for the writer who is willing to pay their fees. So, this is sketch of the nascent crime fiction scene in India. Stories and writers are not in short supply. Nor are publishers. But readers are. We are lamentably short of readers. For the Indian crime fiction scene to flourish, we need more people to read for pleasure. However, we do have a silver lining: there is fresh interest from overseas publishers for Indian mysteries. How much that will help remains to be seen. With luck, the new readers who currently consume romance and mythological fiction will expand their patronage to crime fiction and provide the genre the necessary boost. Just as British mysteries and Scandinavian noir have carved niches of their own, we might see Indian noir carving one for itself in the coming years. * View the full article

Earlier this year, Winnie M Li and Jordan Harper sat down at the legendary BookSoup in Los Angeles, to discuss their recent novels Complicit and Everybody Knows, which are both mysteries set in Hollywood. The following are amended extracts from their conversation. Jordan Harper: So we met at the Edgar awards. Five years ago, we were both nominated for Best First Novel. Winnie Li: Jordan won. (laughs) It was well deserved. JH: Five years later, I was working on a novel that became Everybody Knows. The working title was ‘Hollywood Sickos.’ When Winnie posted about her novel Complicit, I got very excited because I knew from her description of that book that we were circling this kind of same area. But knowing Winnie’s work and knowing mine, I knew we were going to come at it from completely different reasons. Where did this book come from, for you? WL: So [my first novel] Dark Chapter came out in 2017, and then suddenly, the Weinstein allegations happened. Having worked in the film industry, I wasn’t surprised when Weinstein was accused of doing these things to young women. I found it interesting how a lot of people just didn’t really understand the way the industry works, why this was happening, and why Weinstein was able to get away with it for so long. So I was like, ‘Maybe I can write a book that tries to capture what it’s actually like to work in the industry as a young woman, but told from a different perspective, from what we normally see in all the iterations of #MeToo.’ So that was it for me: can we structure the story in a way where a woman who left the industry ten years ago is forced to confront what she had done in the past, working for somebody like Weinstein, when a journalist approaches her? And is she complicit in what might have happened in the past or not? So Jordan, your take on Everybody Knows… how did you come up with the idea?.. Obviously, your book is brilliant. But it’s a very, very different style [from mine]. And the perspective is what’s really interesting, because the main character May is a ‘black-bag publicist,’ right? Meaning… what’s her job? JH: The pocket definition is she doesn’t get the good news out, she keeps the bad news in. And so I’ve worked in television for 14 or 15 years now. And around the time of Harvey Weinstein, I got a chance to adapt James Ellroy’s LA Confidential into a TV show. We did it for CBS. And I created a scene that is not in the novel LA Confidential, where a young actress is on a casting couch, and the producer slides over and makes his move. And she manages to burn him with a cigarette and escape. And that show did not become a series because a man named Les Moonves decided not to make it a TV show. And while he was viewing that show with that scene, and he was currently under investigation for his eventual takedown [as an abuser]. So I had this weird brush with [#MeToo], but in a very specific way as a functionary in this world, who had seen how the sausage gets made. And that is the part that appealed to me. And I also had all this leftover James Ellroy energy because I didn’t get to make the TV show. So I knew I wanted to do an Ellroy-esque big epic story. And I knew I wanted to set it in Los Angeles. ..And going through that experience, as somebody who was part of the machine, I wanted to take my feelings about working in Hollywood and put them in a more exciting candy-coated shell.. I’m interested in power dynamics and the way power and money operate in this town. And while there is like sexual violence in my novel, I actually told my publicists and publisher: ‘I never wanted this referred to as a #MeToo novel, because I don’t think that that’s particularly my story to tell.’ I knew books like yours were coming and I wanted to position myself in a different place. My book is about the intermediaries, as opposed to either the victims or the perpetrators… So it’s really much more about the world of Los Angeles, and the way that power and corruption and police brutality and all that go through. But again, you can’t talk about those things, unfortunately, without talking about sexual violence. WL: Whereas I guess I’m a crime writer now, but that was never what I set out to be. My interest in writing about sexual violence clearly comes from my own experience. If I’d never been raped, I wouldn’t be writing about sexual violence, or maybe even crime. [My rape] opened my eyes to how prevalent sexual violence is in this world, how it impacts lives, how it’s protected within certain systems or even condoned. JH: There is a genre that, to me, Complicit fits very neatly into. It’s a film genre called halogen core. It’s about office politics and industry [settings]. The Assistant [2020 film] is a version of halogen core…. She Said [the 2022 film] is halogen core. It’s these very close to the bone, very realistic attempts to display how these stories happen in the real world. [In Complicit], your description of Hollywood is so accurate and so detailed. And then, the more dangerous details creep in on the side and bubble to the surface. But it’s so grounded… That is one of the biggest differences between us: you write this very grounded story. And I write what I think is a very pulpy ,outrageous version of Los Angeles…. [With] that pulpy Ellroy style… I feel I can tell the truth better when I’m doing something that actually is loud and a little unreal, that captures the energy underneath everything. WL: [My realism] probably stems from my experience as a survivor. where I’m going through life working in the film industry, and then suddenly, I am raped… How can I compare my actual lived experience with all the versions of rape that you’ve seen on screen?… Is it really like that in real life? When I came to actually writing my novels, I’m like ‘No, it has to be 100% realistic.’ Because otherwise, I’m doing a disservice to the lived experience, right? I don’t want to have the woman screaming as she’s pinned down, I don’t want to have all the slow motion shots. It needs to be realistic in its portrayal of trauma and the impact on an individual. So with Complicit, this material needs to be believable. Especially when you’re dealing with stories of young women who want to be actresses or Weinstein-like characters, it’s already so exaggerated by the media. It needs to be understandable why a young woman would act like this. And why she wouldn’t talk about it. So for me, it was like: portray it as accurately as you can. And then hopefully, you can get people to understand the situation better. But [Jordan], let’s talk about your pulp roots! You come from the Ozarks… JH: I was raised in a culture and in a family and a tradition where violence was just a part of the story. You know, I grew up in the world of Jesse James and Bonnie and Clyde. I had a grandfather who fed me these stories from my own family about police officers who were killed in the line of duty… So I grew up with ‘This is how you tell stories. This is what’s important, these matters of life and death.’ And so everything I’ve ever written has always existed in in that realm. It’s a way of telling really deep human truths with this kind of shell… Violence when done appropriately is thrilling in fiction, and I don’t run away from that. And I don’t deny that. And I think that allows you to get into these very unsafe spaces… I come from a noir tradition where you want to get in the head of people who do bad things. [Everybody Knows] is about May and her boyfriend Chris, who is a former corrupt cop, who was as bad as they come and now is working for a lawyer to cover up things using muscle instead of PR. These are people making bad choices, and you have to put them in a world where..you can deal with whatever the bad things are inside you. I think that is where noir really excels… A pulp setting introduces this dialectic of violence and wrongdoing and goodness that is important for people to explore. And you can do it without being preachy, by throwing in hammer parties and the Chateau Marmont, which you have in your book as well… My book starts right here on Sunset Boulevard with May standing outside the secret entrance to the Chateau Marmont. You guys all know, there’s a green cloth door on the wall over there that if you slash it with a razor (it’s just made of cloth), you could go and be in the private grottos, which is where, since the 1930s, the best, weirdest, darkest, most awful parties in the world have taken place. And all that’s ever stopping you from going in there is a cloth door. So nobody ever goes. And I find that so fascinating. WL: But that’s such a metaphor for the flimsy facade between the darkness that you don’t normally see, and the bright, shiny ‘This is what Hollywood is supposed to be [image], because this is how it’s portrayed.’ For me, that kind of image, the façade — that’s central to Complicit…. I went to the Oscars, and it was completely underwhelming and also ridiculous, at the same time. You have to run around and you have to borrow this dress [to walk the red carpet] and you have to borrow this jewelry, just to actually be allowed to be in the space. And then you have to give it back the next day. The borrowed nature of everything, the facade that exists in this industry. In this town. So that’s what I wanted to look at with Complicit: how everything’s a construction. The glamour is manufactured. You don’t have a film that just wins an award. There’s a massive campaign that happens behind that. So this sense of the machinery, which is hidden behind this glossy façade. Then you’re dealing with experiences of sexual violence, the nasty, unpleasant side of the film industry, all the inequalities hidden behind this myth that you can make it out in Hollywood. ‘You can head out there as a bright-eyed, eager individual and have your shining career, right?’ And that’s the opposite for so many people. JH: The facade is a big part of what [my protagonist] May does, but it is also so weird to say the lie is so true. But the lie is so true…. I read an article in Deadline about a TV show I used to work on. And it was news, but [for] every sentence that I had direct knowledge of whether or not it was true or false? It was false. Every single thing that I read that I could verify was either spun or a lie or covering up the truth. WL: [With Complicit] I didn’t want the straightforward story of a pretty young white actress who meets her demise… For me, as an Asian-American woman, it was important that my protagonist had to be Asian American, because you don’t see that so often. .. So [my protagonist] Sarah has no interest in being on screen. She’s interested in the behind the scenes elements of putting a film together. And that came from my own experience as an aspiring producer back in the day. In some way, she’s got a certain attitude towards these pretty young white actresses that want to be stars, which is maybe a little dismissive of them. And so she herself has her own set of judgments. But then she’s obviously operating in a system where there’s a very powerful man, this financier who shows up and says he’s gonna foot the bill for the production…. My experience working for an independent film production company in London was that you were constantly looking for money. Here’s the script. And here’s the director. And here’s a great project, but we need $3 million to make it happen… If somebody had just showed up and said, ‘I’ll write the check,’ of course, you’d go for that, right? This Faustian pact that you make, because you literally need the money to make a film. JH: The Faustian bargain is a lot of what I think about. My book is very much me trying to wrestle with the idea of: is it really possible to ethically work in Hollywood at all?… [In my research], I sat down with real black bag publicists, who worked for a very, very bad man. And they said things to me in that meeting that I could not believe they said, some of which are in the book. They said to me, the line that’s in the book: ‘I’m not saying the truth isn’t important. It just doesn’t matter.’ And then they said to me: ‘So he was accused of rape. Everybody rapes.’ WL: But it’s that casualness… by having that kind of attitude, aren’t we all being complicit? *** Winnie Li is the author of Complicit, now available in paperback. Jordan Harper is the author of Everybody Knows. View the full article

Ah, summer. There’s just something about these months of sun-soaked, sun-dappled, sunscreened sunniness that makes me long for the dark and drizzly days of autumn. I live for the rare thunderstorms, rejoice in the occasional foggy morning, and generally spend my afternoons pretending I’m curled under a quilt and not hugging the nearest AC vent like a well-placed comma. It’s little surprise that I save my darkest, eeriest reads for this season of heat and humidity, escaping into the tall grasses of ill-maintained estates, wandering through long corridors of questionably sentient shadows, and basking in the perilous angst of another gaslit heroine. I was around ten years old when I first discovered the thrill of the gothic novel. I remember studying the cover of Elizabeth Von Armin’s Vera—a towering house ominously angled to best showcase the nightgown-clad main character—with rapt interest. I’d sneak-read pages of it while my mother was at work, devouring whole chapters with greedy glee. I riffled through her other paperbacks, delighted with each handsome but distant husband, every possibly dead first wife. Each story oozed atmosphere. The houses were both friend and foe. The heroines’ clothing was impractical but brilliantly perfect for a chase through moon-soaked forests and windswept peaks. In short, readers, I was hooked. Here are some of my favorite gothic novels, guaranteed to give you goosebumps no matter how high the temperatures might get. Wylding Hall—Elizabeth Hand If you found yourself wishing that Daisy Jones and the Six had a little bit more murder and a whole lot more weird, Wylding Hall is for you. This novella details a British folk band as they spend a summer at an old country estate, recording their most infamous—and final—album. I legitimately gasped aloud in the final chapter. Hand also has one of my favorite reads of the year coming out October 3—A Haunting on the Hill, the first book ever authorized by Shirley Jackson’s estate, bringing readers back into the world of Hill House. The Silent Companions—Laura Purcell This gothic tale has it all—a young and newly widowed bride trapped at her husband’s crumbling manor with only unfriendly servants to keep her company, until she discovers a collection of life-sized wooden figures who don’t stay as stationary as they should. . . . Strands of Bronze and Gold—Jane Nickerson It’s no secret that I adore fairy tales, and the most gothic one of them all is the story of Bluebeard and his hidden hoard of dead brides. Nickerson’s version of this classic unwinds in the backwater bayous of Mississippi. Wyndriven Abbey’s atmosphere drips from the pages, and the spirits that haunt the damned parish are every bit as eerie as the claustrophobia-inducing Spanish moss and kudzu. The Only One Left—Riley Sager A disgraced caregiver finds herself assigned to the enigmatic and infamous owner of Hope House. Decades ago, the Hope family was murdered, leaving oldest sister Lenora as the only survivor. Though many believe she orchestrated the massacre, she was never found guilty. After suffering a stroke, Lenora is unable to speak but finds a way to tell her story, word by unnerving word. Malice House—Megan Shepherd The daughter of a celebrated novelist must return to her childhood manor to deal with her late father’s estate. There, she uncovers a collection of terrifying fairy tales and a whole lot of dark secrets. An added bonus—Midnight Showing, the second novel in the Malice Compendium, comes out October 3, just in time for spooky season! The Spite House—Johnny Compton A spite house is a structure built for the sole purpose of irritation—usually squeezed onto a parcel of land too small, towering high enough to block views and serve as a constant reminder of the owner who commissioned it. Masson House—billed as the most haunted place in Texas—brings gruesome and unexpected twists to many gothic horror tropes and will linger with you long after the last page. The Death of Jane Lawrence—Caitlin Starling Going into this book, I thought I knew everything to expect—a young woman who marries an aloof man she knows little about, a house with a spotty history, and enough rainstorms to soak an entire countryside. I was delightfully mistaken! Starling turns every gothic trope on its head and weaves a tale of dark magic and science most terrible. Within These Wicked Walls—Lauren Blackwood This fresh take on Jane Eyre tells the tale of Andromeda, an almost-licensed debtera—Ethiopian exorcist—who has been called to the house of a wealthy young man in the hopes that she might cleanse the estate from the wicked spirits that haunt it. Even the house’s malevolence cannot dampen the attraction Andromeda feels for her new patron, giving readers a heated, aching romance to root for. A Multitude of Dreams—Mara Rutherford Rutherford pens a brilliant twist on Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death.” Three years ago, the kingdom of Goslind was struck by a ruthless and bloody plague, prompting the king and all his court to wall themselves within the castle as their ruler slowly goes mad. In an unexpected twist, Imogen, the youngest princess, is not who she says she is, and when rumors of the plague’s end begin to whisper through their boarded corridors, she must face terrors most unexpected and grim. *** View the full article

The Record Shop Mysteries aren’t food cozies per se, but main character Juni Jessup freely admits that food is the way to her heart, as she eats her way through the tasty food vendors at the annual Cedar River Bluebonnet Festival in A Fatal Groove, all while solving the mayor’s murder. Juni knows her way around a cappuccino maker and has an exceptional knowledge of music from working at her family vinyl records shop/coffee café, Sip & Spin Records, but one thing Juni has never been good at is making up her mind—not when it comes to making the hard choice between two suitors, and especially not when her stomach is hungry. In honor of summertime, and Juni’s indecisiveness, here’s a delicious picnic menu made of cozy mystery treats, with plenty of options to choose from! First up, we need some cocktails to set the mood. If you’re a wine drinker, you’re going to want to pour yourself a big glass of Kate Lansing’s Till Death Do Us Port, where Colorado vintner Parker Valentine provides the wine—and her sleuthing services—when her cousin’s wedding planner drops dead before the I-dos. If you’re in the mood for a little sand and sun, check out Sherry Harris’ Rum and Choke, where Florida bartender Chloe Jackson dives into adventure and finds a dead body instead of pirate treasure. If you’re the adventurous sort, Diane Kelly has you covered in Fiddling with Fate, with moonshiner Hattie Hayes’ famous homebrew cocktails pairing perfectly with the disappearance of a local bluegrass musician. Every picnic needs a fun and easy main dish (especially after those appetizing drinks!) Korina Moss carves up a cheese platter in Curds of Prey, as cheese monger Willa Bauer navigates a summer wedding disaster. Mindy Quigley dishes the pizza in Ashes to Ashes, Crust to Crust, where pizzeria owner Delilah O’Leary learns that baking competitions can be murder. And for that special summer feeling, Nicole Asselin has all-American hot dogs, perfect for a picnic or the ballpark, in Concession Stand Crimes, where Madeline Boucher finds a dead body instead of the Cracker-Jack surprise. Everybody’s favorite part of a meal is desert (or is that just me?). Mia P. Manansala’s Blackmail and Bibingka is serving up all the sweets from baker Lila Macapagal’s café (I can’t get enough of her ube crinkles), while solving the case of the dead-beat cousin. Craving something deadly? Misha Popp’s piemaker Daisy Ellery has to put a little extra magic in her crust in A Good Day to Pie if she’s going to figure out whodunit at the bakeoff. In Fatal Fudge Swirl, Meri Allen’s Riley Rhodes scoops up a delicious ice cream cake while bringing the killer to justice. And if you’re worried about it melting, no one will judge you if you eat your ice cream before the meal! After all this decadence, you probably can’t eat another bite, but there’s always room for coffee. In CJ Connor’s Board to Death, Ben Rosencrantz has his hands full running the family game shop/café where they boast the best selection of games, along with a charming tea and coffee shop…and an occasional murder investigation. Raquel V. Reyes’ Cuban-American cooking show star Miriam Quiñones-Smith has the recipe for sleuthing in Calypso, Corpses, and Cooking, along with the best Cuban coffee in Miami. Or, if you’re in the mood for something musical, pop on into A Fatal Groove’s Sip & Spin Records, where vinyl records aficionado/barista Juni Jessup and her sisters are always serving up special caffeinated treats—until the mayor drops dead holding one of their take-out coffees. When the Frappuccino hits the fan, Juni and her sisters will be in hot water if they can’t solve this murder! * Olivia Blacke’s newest cozy mystery, A Fatal Groove, is in bookstores July 25, 2023. View the full article

T.S. Eliot had it right. “Good writers borrow,” he said. “Great writers steal.” What he meant was that a writer aspiring to greatness should be reading critically (always) to learn the boundaries of the craft from better writers and to then apply their triumphs in their own work, organically. I’m not a great writer but I try to get better with each book. And I certainly look to other authors (both in fiction and nonfiction) for inspiration on how best to construct a true crime mystery into a compelling narrative. My next book, Little, Crazy Children, arrives June 27. It’s the real-life story of a teenage girl who was stabbed to death behind a mansion in Shaker Heights, Ohio in 1990 and the ensuing investigation to find her killer. When considering the structure and pacing of my narrative I returned to a few favorite reads for help. These five books contain different tools you might find helpful if you are ever compelled to write a true crime story of your own. But keep in mind—the story you’re writing about involves real people in tragic situations. What comes across as a compelling story is often the worst day of a person’s life. The following writers never lose sight of the victim and their purpose in putting pen to paper is firstly to solve a mystery and bring closure where possible. The Shadow of Death, By Philip Ginsburg How do you write a compelling story about a mystery that has not yet been solved? Journalist Philip Ginsburg shows us how in this compelling search for the Connecticut River Valley Killer, who remains at large to this day. It’s a complicated case, with six victims discovered in various locations throughout New Hampshire and Vermont. But Ginsburg takes his time, vividly painting the scenery and telling us about each woman, in turn. And while there is no final resolution, it does present hope for closure one day. The Wrong Man, by James Neff If you’re writing a book about a miscarriage of justice and hoping to present a better theory of murder than any civil-servant prosecutor, you should study this book. It’s the story how Dr. Sam Sheppard was found guilty of murdering his wife, Marilyn —the crime that inspired The Fugitive television series. The narrative methodically builds a defense for Sam while revealing the real, likely killer. Neff, an accomplished journalist, shows the responsibility a reporter has to dig deeper and to find the truth in a mess of media and drama. Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, by John Berendt How do you make a murder story “fun?” By delving deeply into the eccentricities and histories of the people involved. Berendt has a knack for bringing out the humanity of the unique real-life characters surrounding this tale of an antiques dealer on trial for murdering a male prostitute. Take note of how he presents the town of Savannah, which becomes a character of its own. Couple Found Slain, by Mikita Brottman This true crime book breaks every convention of the genre and somehow still works. In fact I think it’s probably the best true crime book of the last five years. The murders presented in Couple Found Slain are not the central mystery. The mystery is this – what happens when a legitimately insane killer is sentenced to serve to time at a psychiatric hospital and then actually becomes sane? Brottman’s book triggers deeper ruminations on the nature of free will and the punitive bent of our justice system. If you want to learn how to include important themes in your writing, this is a master class for you. The Colorado Kid, by Stephen King Wait, what is Stephen King doing on this list? I’ll tell you a secret, King is a master of structure and I look to his books frequently to figure out how to construct a good yarn, even if it’s true crime. For instance, my book on the unsolved murder of Amy Mihaljevic shares the same narrative structure as King’s novel It, of all things. I think a story cries out for a certain, specific structure and when you find it, it quickly tells itself. Anyway, The Colorado Kid presents a compelling, unsolved mystery that may not actually have any logical conclusion. I thought about this one often while writing True Crime Addict. *** View the full article

Of all the subgenres of crime fiction, the one I know the least about is the spy novel. I will happily watch almost any Bond movie (especially if it has Daniel Craig in it), but my only familiarity with his novelistic counterparts comes from the one John le Carré novel I picked up in college. If you’d asked me why I avoided reading about espionage, I would have said that while it’s fun to watch beautiful people zooming around exotic locations with outlandish gadgets, I prefer even the most high-concept novels to have a heavy dose of realism. The spy novel is, I would have argued, unrealistic by definition. But Chris Pavone changed my mind. In his novel The Expats, the protagonist is a woman named Kate Moore who has moved to Luxembourg with her husband Dexter and two young sons. Unbeknownst to her husband, who believed that she worked for the State Department, Kate has also recently left the C.I.A. In Luxembourg, where Dexter works as a financial security consultant. Kate finds herself at loose ends until she meets Julia and Bill, two fellow expats who might or might not be concealing ulterior motives behind their gregarious exteriors as they attempt to befriend Kate or Dexter. Now Kate must figure out what Julia and Bill are really doing in Luxembourg while keeping her investigations—and her past—secret from her husband. It’s an incredibly satisfying but also unconventional novel, and Danielle Trussoni knows something about unconventional takes on familiar genres. She’s the author of two memoirs and four published novels: Angelology (2010), Angelopolis (2012), The Ancestor (2020), and The Puzzle Master (2023), as well as its forthcoming sequel The Puzzle Box. She has served as a Pulitzer Prize jurist and for five years wrote the “Dark Matters” review column for the New York Times. Kirkus said of The Puzzle Master that “[Trussoni] is at the top of her game in involving the reader in the puzzle-solving process, making the most of historic settings, including the Pierpont Morgan Library, and making the book’s Da Vinci Code–like trappings pay off.” What appealed to you most about The Expats? I really love untraditionally structured thrillers. The writer makes some choices that you just don’t necessarily expect to see in this genre. For instance, there’s all this attention to detail from Kate’s point of view. The book opens with her standing in front of a shop window in Paris, looking at home décor. It’s just really not the place that most thrillers begin. Then, too, the differentiation between her job, which is quite dangerous and violent at some points, and her home life, is laid out in such a beautiful way. I like that Chris Pavone took the time to pause, and to let the consciousness of these characters seep in between the cracks, so the novel doesn’t just depend on plot. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I love plot, but I love books that also have air: great dialogue, descriptions of setting, internal moments with the characters. You see this internal struggle that on the most basic level is between career and kids, which is familiar to a lot of women, even in very different situations. And I love that it’s a man writing this character that I feel very close to. I think he does all of that so well. That’s such a good point about the beginning. This novel is definitely a page turner, but for me too what was most compelling was Kate’s character. The tension between her job and her family is woven in so seamlessly that you don’t really notice passing from one to the other. And you believe it, right? There’s never a point where you’re like, I just don’t think that this woman could be both of these people. I really believe it the whole time. And with her husband Dexter too, we know early on that something’s going on with him. Everybody’s lying to each other. Yes, and yet the relationship feels really authentic. I feel like I’ve seen a million thrillers with a tagline like, How well do you really know the person you’re married to? And it’s usually that they’re a serial killer or they’re pretending to be somebody else or whatever. But in this novel, it’s more the kind of distrust that is part of a lot of marriages, where you’re not necessarily revealing your entire self all the time. Exactly. It’s a little bit like Mr. and Mrs. Smith in a way, if you want to be really reductive. In another way, though, it’s like a metaphor for a normal marriage. My husband, who is not a writer, asked me the other day how writers come up with names for characters. Do you have any thoughts about the names in this novel? Well, Dexter and Kate and Julia are very nondescript names in a way, and I think that’s purposeful. They seem relatable and kind of average-seeming on the exterior, and then when you get inside their heads you find out there’s so much more going on. Let’s talk about the plot. It seems like the reveals and twists really build on each other as the narrative progresses. I love how he constructed the plot. It almost feels like a nested box. I don’t want to give too much away, but there’s one scene in flashback where Kate does something kind of unthinkable, or something that’s previously been unthinkable to her. It happens in a hotel room, and it’s like she doesn’t ever quite leave that hotel room, like one part of herself dies there. I saw that scene as the center of the book, and all the other subplots are like larger and larger boxes coming out from that center. I love that structure. We know early on that something bad happened to her, or she did something bad, and you want to know what it was, but you’re also tracking how it has affected her marriage and other elements of her life. The way I read it, the other twists and reveals were secondary to that one central revelation. I really liked that, because I have to say I’m getting tired of twists that really throw you for a loop. I’ve definitely read a few where I just felt like the twist totally destroyed the book. Like sometimes writers feel so compelled to get a twist in there that the character is sacrificed for the plot device. There seems to be a perception that the market demands more and more twists, and the more outlandish the better. And a lot of writers might feel that that puts them in a bad position. And I don’t even know if it’s true. I don’t know if readers do demand twists. I think after Gone Girl, a lot of writers may have thought, “Oh my god, I have to surprise people, I have to completely shock them. There has to be a twist that makes their jaws drop.” But in the books in this genre that I really love, that’s not necessarily true. This is nineteenth century, of course, but with someone like Wilkie Collins, it’s all about character, revelation, pacing. In The Moonstone, they’re looking for an object, and in The Woman in White, they’re looking for a person. It’s all about the hunt for information, and I love that form. I don’t think that there’s anything wrong with a novel that doesn’t have a twist. I’m teaching a class on Wilkie Collins and Dickens in the fall, and I love that era too. Are you suggesting that maybe the genre would be well-served by a return to suspense through detection rather than through twists? Well, just speaking for myself, that’s what I like. In my most recent novel, The Puzzle Master, the main character is basically a detective. He’s not a police officer or a private investigator, but he has a brain injury that gave him something called savant syndrome, and it made him very good at solving puzzles. I want to construct a novel with information that the reader needs to find in a way that will be interesting to them. In this novel, it’s done with puzzles—I have puzzles actually in the book—but for Pavone, a lot of it has to do with memory. Sometimes we learn things through flashbacks, and at other times Kate goes to an office and digs through some drawers and it’s more of that Classic Detective Story trope. This is a novel with a European setting, and a lot of your novels are set internationally as well. Do you have any thoughts on the advantages of an international setting, particularly in this genre? I love that he’s unrepentantly an international thriller writer. And it’s true, all of my books have an international setting. I find that there’s something quintessentially dramatic about it, maybe because I’m an American who grew up in the Midwest and didn’t start traveling until later in life. For me there’s always something sort of mysterious and promising and hopeful about travel, and there’s also something really alluring about writing about a foreign culture. And I think that it’s exciting when you can’t travel to have a book that takes you someplace far away. And of course we associate the spy novel with international settings. Do you know much about that genre? No, I don’t, because I sort of came from a different tradition. I’ve been very interested in literary fiction for most of my writing career, and then I was a columnist who reviewed horror fiction and really dark suspense for the New York Times for five years. I think what’s really exciting for me personally is bringing the tropes and conventions of genre—whether it’s horror, or thrillers, or crime fiction—together with the technique of literary fiction. For me, bringing all of those elements together is what makes a great book. We have a common love for nineteenth-century fiction, which was published before these genre distinctions meant anything. Sometimes I’d like to go back to that time! Exactly. No one was saying to Marry Shelley, “Oh, you’re a horror writer.” For the most part, those genre conventions are twentieth-century inventions. But I think the most demanding readers still demand both story and literary quality. View the full article

Like Dark Lover, the book that kickstarted my Black Dagger Brotherhood series, The St. Ambrose School for Girls is one of those “book of my heart” projects that had to be written. But it was not something I anticipated. I was going along, writing about vampires quite happily, with a full schedule of releases (thank you, Gallery!) when from out of the blue, Sarah M. Taylor came to me in a dream. I had a vivid vision of a fifteen-year-old girl with dyed black hair, black baggy clothes, and a tense look on her face. She was staring at me, as if she were trying to tell me something, and as I bolted out of sleep and sat up in bed, all I could think was… Who the hell was that? As I said, my “day job” involves writing about the Black Dagger Brotherhood, a group of vampires who fight to protect their kind against undead lessers. Think leathers. Sh*tkickers. Grey Goose and paranormal things that go bump in the night. This girl did not fit into that world at all, but I knew she had a story worth telling. I also knew, if I was patient, that she would show me what she chose to of her situation. My job as an author is to record, as faithfully as I can, the pictures in my head. If I do it right, the reader can approximate what I’m shown and thereby experience what I do as I watch these people who do not technically exist—but in fact feel very real to me—live their lives. Sarah did not waste time. Within a day, I saw the prep school at which she was feeling very out of place. I saw all those rolling lawns, the brick buildings, the early nineties setting. And after that? Greta showed up: blond, beautiful…and a nasty piece of work who put a target on Sarah from the moment they met. With Sarah in the forefront, and Greta in her background, I thought, I’ve got to find out where this goes. So, just like I did when the great Blind King Wrath appeared in my head, I set my alarm every day two hours earlier, sat down at my keyboard, and set about laying out the first chapter on the page. The book opens right when Sarah arrives at school as a new student. As Greta comes out of the dorm and they’re introduced, I knew in my gut that one of them wouldn’t make it to the end of the school year—maybe not even to the end of the semester. But I didn’t know who died—or how. Okay, we’re writing a suspense story here, I thought to myself. I was totally excited to keep going because I just wanted to know who the victim and the murderer would be. And then Sarah’s inner life came forward. Writing her story from the first person meant I was submerged in all of her thoughts, and it didn’t take long for me to comprehend that the places she went in her mind were unusually vivid. In fact, her mind was able to alter the world around her and her experience of it. I remember the first of episode of disorientation she went through, and how I actually sat back and wondered whether I was going to keep going with the book. Sarah has a bipolar diagnosis, and as her story goes on, her mental illness plays a role in a lot of what happens, particularly with regard to the suspense elements. But as an author, when you’re dealing with a very real and serious condition that affects many people’s lives, it would be disrespectful and ignorant to reduce it to a mere plot device. I had an immediate concern, as someone who hasn’t had any personal experience with the diagnosis, whether I should—and how I could—handle this particular part of the book. I started by researching the symptoms, diagnosis, and treatment of bipolar disorder, and I also focused on how it was treated in the nineties in children. It became clear that I had to understand how lithium was used in patients back then, what the side effects of the drug are, and how the dosage works to mediate the symptoms. I then went on a deep dive into firsthand accounts of people living with bipolar disorder. I spent three years writing and refining the book. A lot of that time was spent making sure that what was in the manuscript reflected—as accurately as I could, as an outsider—what someone goes through when they are bipolar. When I felt like I had taken the content as far as I could, I had the manuscript read by people who have the disorder or who have loved ones who suffer from it. I felt it was really important to make sure that in all my academic research, I didn’t inadvertently misrepresent something or commit a gaffe out of ignorance. Throughout St. Ambrose, Sarah’s unreliable mind is almost a character in and of itself. She certainly experiences her thoughts as something other than her, and they’re tormentors just like her nemesis, Greta. As with Greta’s pranks, Sarah’s ideations feel stronger and more in control than she is, and they target her day and night. The end result is that sometimes, Sarah doesn’t know whether what she is experiencing is real or not. In this aspect, her relationship with the world added to the suspense of the story because the reader, like Sarah, has no idea what to believe as all they have to go on is through her eyes and interpretation. During the first draft, when I had no idea what the ending of the story was going to be and was really just functioning as the first reader, I truly felt for Sarah. Navigating the world as she does is incredibly unsettling and dangerous at times. Although the disorder is perhaps better understood now, and certainly there are new drugs to treat it, there remains a lot that must be endured, and the isolation is real. Sarah is very much an outsider, and I think we all go through periods in our lives where we feel apart from everyone else around us. Whether it’s from a diagnosis, a loss, or a confusion over what we want or what’s good for us, to feel alone is part of the human condition. What I love about St. Ambrose is how Sarah finds her way and her footing. And can I just say that her roommate, Strots, is one my favorite people ever? St. Ambrose is certainly a departure for me, and I am really grateful to my publisher for all their support for this project. I’m also especially thankful to those who helped me so much by sharing their lived experiences with bipolar disorder. Their openness, courage, and willingness to teach me are the backbone of this book—and of Sarah, whom I love as if she were real. I sure am glad that that dream came to me back in 2020. *** View the full article

Standing alone at the front of a Chicago courtroom, Guadalupe Fernández Valencia wore orange prison coveralls. Her long light-brown hair, streaked with gray, was pulled back into a tight ponytail at the nape of her neck. She wore no makeup. She was sixty years old. “I want to take advantage of this opportunity to ask forgiveness from my children and from my family,” said Guadalupe. It was August 2021, and she was about to be sentenced for a sobering litany of drug trafficking charges, including conspiracy to transport and distribute, and money laundering. Guadalupe spent more than three decades in the drug business, working for Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, the world’s most famous drug lord, and his Sinaloa Cartel. She is, to date, the highest-ranking female Sinaloa Cartel operative to emerge into the public eye. When El Chapo was convicted by a court in New York in February 2019, it was the climax of the highest-profile organized crime case of my generation. During his trial, news reporters had to arrive at three or four in the morning to get a seat for the day. El Chapo’s adventures—and those of other male traffickers—have inspired Hollywood movies, Netflix series, and countless books and novels. Few women have. So when I looked at the indictment that sent El Chapo down, an indictment on which Guadalupe was the only woman, I was struck by how unknown her story is to the world. Some superficial Googling revealed coverage of the guilty plea she made and not much else. In the history of the drug trade, public focus is nearly always on the male protagonists. Yet Guadalupe, known as “La Patrona” (a Spanish term for a female boss), had a criminal career that ran parallel to that of El Chapo. She was arrested in Mexico just a month after his final capture. I wondered, as she awaited her sentence in the dock, if she had calmed herself by picturing the green mountains and remembering the soft air of home. The smell of woodsmoke in the mornings. Did memories of Michoacán, the humid southern Mexican state where she was born, soothe her in that difficult moment? Any happy childhood memories had no doubt been sullied when the crime lords moved into her home state when she was a teenager. They plundered the heroin poppy and marijuana plantations in the picturesque mountains, holding humble farmers to ransom by controlling the price for poppy paste that the farmers had no choice but to accept. Those who spoke up in self-defense were either silenced or co-opted. Eventually, the drug gangs took over entire villages like hers, often abusing the communities’ younger women. They would grow to dominate not just the lucrative production of heroin and crystal meth but the mineral and gold mines dotted around the state, as well as the avocado and lime industries. Guadalupe escaped them for a time by coming to the United States, like millions of her countrymen and women before her. But now here she was—one of them. The bosses she had worked for fronted a billion-dollar multinational operation that had tentacles reaching around the globe. They didn’t just dominate a single Mexican state. They were the biggest criminal organization in the world. “I wish I could find the words to convince you of how sorry I am,” Guadalupe told Judge Sharon Johnson Coleman in court in Chicago. She was handed down a ten-year sentence, seven years of which she had already served. But El Chapo got life. Some of the “substantial” evidence, according to US prosecutors, that eventually put him behind bars after a criminal career spanning more than four decades, came from Guadalupe. During her time working with the Sinaloa Cartel, Guadalupe worked closely with Jesús Alfredo Guzmán Salazar, known as Alfredillo, one of El Chapo’s sons. His name is on the same charge sheet as both Guadalupe’s and his father’s, but he remains at large. Court documents describe Guadalupe as Jesús’s “lieutenant.” They worked together on the entire drug distribution process, from start to finish, and she was a fundamental part of the organization, prosecutors say. Her crucial role in the cartel makes it even more interesting that she is so unknown. When I, a dedicated narco nerd, first learned about her, my curiosity was piqued. By then, I had been reporting from Latin America for more than a decade, with my main focus on organized crime. I had become part of a growing group of women who are documenting the drug trade—its dynamics and its protagonists. A lot of the coverage of narco issues in general has been dominated by male writers and macho narratives. The way these stories have been told—men as victimizers and women as victims—feels excessively based on gender tropes, as well as an unconscious inability to see those dynamics as anything but. When Guadalupe Fernández Valencia’s story inspired the idea for this book, I had a hunch that this way of viewing the trade was so one-dimensional that it was untrue, but I knew that I had to dig deeper to prove it. I wasn’t interested in finding female versions of the male cabrones (hard macho bastards) that we constantly see in media representations of the cartels. Rather, I wanted to understand how women’s power manifests in this context beyond its juxtaposition with men’s. On a visit to the Mob Museum in Las Vegas to give a talk on the investigative work for this book in June 2022, I stood in front of a wall adorned with the faces of the “100 Years of Made Men and Their Associates.” There must have been a hundred men and just four women hanging on that wall. It was a stunning reminder of how broadly invisible female faces have been in organized crime over the years. Friends of mine who have written books about the drug trade have told me unabashedly that there are barely any women in their work, admitting that they might have missed something there. I also remember being told on numerous occasions in the field, while covering some of the violence waged on communities by drug cartels—a few of them while I was quite pregnant—that I should probably be at home. Now seems the right time to talk about the real, gritty, unexpected part women play in organized crime. Characters such as Wendy Byrde, Ruth Langmore, and Darlene Snell in the Netflix series Ozark and Polly Gray in Peaky Blinders are changing the narratives about women working in criminal businesses, adding nuance and color that contradict clichés. Women such as Megan Rapinoe have emerged in traditionally male sports as icons and advocates. The #MeToo movement is in the process of ending decades of accepted abuse of women by men in the corridors of power, via the voices of women who continue to step out of the shadows. All of these dynamics feel connected to what I’ve discovered about women in the ranks of organized crime. Most of the women who have been visible in the drug trade are highly sexualized narco wives or girlfriends. The little coverage they have received tends to focus on their sexual attractiveness and attachments to male narcos, rather than their business power, the message being that if they’re not attractive, they don’t warrant investigation or attention. Emma Coronel, Guzmán’s much younger, infinitely more glamorous wife, epitomizes this dynamic. She was a constant presence at her husband’s trial and also appeared on VH1’s Cartel Crew, where she chatted with the family members of other drug traffickers over glasses of champagne about how to create a brand from her husband’s criminal legacy. She was eventually taken into custody on a visit to Washington, DC, in early 2021. Prosecutors alleged that she was part of a plan to break her husband out of prison for a third time before he was extradited to the United States to face trial. They also claimed that she knew about his drug trafficking activities and the origin of the proceeds. She was an enabler, the classic gangster’s moll. Emma eventually turned herself in and was given a relatively light sentence despite her alleged offenses. The romantic or family attachments of women in the drug trade are often used to minimize or marginalize them as protagonists. Emma’s role as El Chapo’s wife is a great example. The logic seems to be that women are there because they are someone’s wife or lover or sister or daughter. But men also enter the trade by virtue of their family connections—most organized crime business is also family business—and yet their influence is assumed to be larger or more important, a virtue of their maleness rather than their familial connections. Those blood or love ties are never used to explain their presence in the way they are for women. Then there are the other women most visible in organized crime: the victims. Impoverished single mothers obliged to sell or smuggle drugs to support their families, or women coerced to entrap and kill. Women trafficked into undesirable trades. Prisons across the region are home to thousands of women like this, who are serving long sentences for relatively small crimes. But within the binary of characterizing narco women as either wives or victims, I started to see so much more. I saw women as protagonists and decision-makers in the criminal underworld and the drug trade. I saw them in roles in which their romantic or family connections were a sidebar. Women like Guadalupe and the other protagonists in this book. Women in gangs in Central America. Women operating extortion rackets. Women involved in narcomenudeo (street-level drug crime). Across Latin America, the female population behind bars for offenses related to organized crime has doubled in the last decade. In Mexico and Colombia—major drug trade hubs in the region—the increase in female prisoners has been especially high. I began to wonder if women were somehow becoming more empowered in the shadows of the drug trade, even within a regional culture that does its best to hold them down. Maybe some of them see a chance to rise through a hierarchy, despite the murky morality of the drug business. Maybe women in organized crime are rising up to give orders instead of just taking them. I also wondered if the trends I was seeing were new—or if media coverage of the drug trade has been unable, or unwilling, to see them. I know from my reporting that the context of women’s involvement in the Latin American drug trade has been changing, in pace with the growing participation of women in economic and social life. Some women see an opportunity to participate in criminal activities as a way to a potential career, the potential of money, power, influence, and status. For many women in the region, the obstacles to professional success remain daunting. Some of the women that I profile in this book come from humble, impoverished backgrounds. That they had to break the law to achieve their career goals reflects many things—from their own personality characteristics to their limited array of options for advancement and power in the mainstream professional sphere. But to view their role as a simple reflection of necessity is to rob women of their agency, reducing them to mere pawns in a man’s game. The patriarchy of the cartels seems very real, but to assume women don’t have a capacity for violence or a thirst for power and status is just another narrow gender stereotype that grossly misunderstands and underestimates women and their role in the social order. “Brenda” was serving a fifty-year sentence when we met in the Pavón prison in Guatemala City. She told me she enjoyed running a kidnapping ring that eventually landed her behind bars. She assured me that she didn’t have to get involved in the criminal enterprise out of economic need. Her husband was a drug transporter before he was killed, leaving her plenty of money to care for herself and their three children. “It was curiosity,” she said. “I wanted to know how it felt. I wanted to feel that my life was at risk. I liked the danger.” When we talked, she was fifty-four years old and twenty years into her prison term. She was hoping to get out within the next five years for good behavior. One of Brenda’s fellow inmates in Pavón also spoke to me. Her story was very different. Gloria, age forty-six, told me that one day a man brought an elderly blindfolded woman to her house, where she rented out rooms. He paid for a room for the woman, who he said was his mother-in-law, and asked Gloria to look after her. The “son-in-law” told Gloria that the woman had recently undergone eye surgery. Gloria fed and bathed the woman, who never took off the blindfold. Within days, the police came knocking. They rescued what turned out to be a human hostage and accused Gloria of kidnapping. “I used to bathe her and feed her, but she never told me anything, because she thought I was one of them,” said Gloria, who claimed she had no idea her guest was a hostage. Gloria’s story fits the stereotype of women who can be tricked or forced into organized crime by men. But Brenda’s story feels equally striking and real—and like a new narrative. Brenda was owning her decision to get into kidnapping—she wasn’t telling herself or anyone else that she had no choice. “I think that most of us here know what we were doing,” she said about the women in prison with her. “I’ve never blamed anyone but myself. I own my bad acts.” Then there was Maria, whom I met via a mutual friend in the working-class barrio of Tepito, Mexico City. As we spoke, men in a nearby open-air gym lifted weights and showed off their muscles to each other. Maria told me she began trafficking weapons as a young woman. One day, her mother, the boss of their gunrunning enterprise, was sick and couldn’t make the drive to pick up guns that had been bought in the US and were being smuggled over the border to Mexico. So she sent Maria, who said she has now been selling weapons to the cartels as well as to local residents for the better part of twenty years. She’s grooming her sixteen-year-old daughter to do the same. “I loved the adrenaline. I loved looking over my shoulder,” Maria told me about the first time she went to pick up weapons in the northern state of Tamaulipas, across the border from Texas. Her son, she said, wasn’t keen on joining the matriarchal network of gunrunners. Early on a Sunday morning in May 2021, Abel Jacobo Miller took me to the outskirts of the city of Culiacán, the capital of Sinaloa, in the already searing sun. He put a Glock pistol in my hand and told me to shoot. As someone who grew up in the UK, where most guns are illegal for most people, I had never fired a weapon. When I did, my arms and hands trembled under the force of the discharge. But I knew that the more I did it, the better I would get. The ubiquity of firearms as the weapon of choice in the criminal underworld has contributed to a leveling of the playing field for the sexes. Battles are rarely fought with fists but with military weaponry and skills that can be mastered equally by all genders. “A sixty-kilo [132-pound] woman can’t confront a ninety-kilo [198-pound]) man with her fists. But with a gun, with a gun we’re equals,” said Jacobo Miller, who teaches women self-defense and shooting in his home city. He was addressing the other women on the shooting range that day, who seemed able to handle a gun a lot better than I did. “I work with them to remove the chip that [tells them] they’re vulnerable. That they’re victims,” the father of three daughters told me later. “Women are as threatening as men. They just have to un- derstand that about themselves.” One of the women under his tutelage that day was forty-five- year-old accountant Tessa, a lifelong resident of Culiacán. It was the first time she had fired a gun too. “It felt good,” she told me. “At first, I was nervous about what it would feel like in my body, but then it felt good to shoot, and it got easier and easier. “I wanted to have the confidence to do it,” she said. “With things the way they are, with so much violence, there’s no room for terror. Now, it’s about security and keeping us safe.” On my reporting trips over the last decade, investigating every- thing from gang violence and extortion to the fentanyl trade, it has become increasingly common to have women sitting across from me during interviews. And their stories are incredibly nuanced. Women are stepping around the frontiers of gender expectations to estab- lish their own place in organized crime, one of their own making. I learned from US prosecutors who have charged women in the drug trade and from lawyers who have defended them that women often use the shroud of gender stereotypes to go undetected. Women are hiding behind the stereotype of the good girl incapable of doing bad to do just that. They become drug transporters, money launderers, and killers. Street drug vendors and packers. Weapons traffickers. Kidnappers. Extortionists. Many of the women I’ve interviewed are also current or former law enforcement officers or elected officials. Both of those types of actors can be fundamental enablers of drug trafficking groups and organized crime across Latin America, even when they may appear to be fighting the illegal narcotics business. They’re involved in a spectrum of ways, from taking bribes for protecting and enabling criminal actors, to taxing drug traffickers for operating in their territory, to even taking part in the drug trade themselves. In every single country in Latin America, officials at all levels collude with the drug trade. For the women featured in this book, relationships with powerful officials serve as a fundamental aspect of their drug trafficking operations and the organizations they work with. There are some commonalities among the patronas whom I document here. Most of them came into the business later in life. Their organizations are often clan-based, involving husbands, children, cousins, and other members of the extended family. Many come from poor backgrounds and have little formal education and few legal job opportunities. Some grew up in violent circumstances and were often violent actors themselves. As participants in the drug trade, if they are not doing the killing, they have others to do it for them. And many of them enjoy the power and thrill that the business affords. Crucially, these women are connected to each other. Some of them have personal relationships, often working together to traffic drugs and move the cash proceeds. Others are linked because of relationships between the organizations they work for. And the more I looked, the more women I found working within the ranks of organized crime. Like men, they are present at all parts of the chain. But contemporary research on women’s role in the drug trade is woefully lacking. I often wonder if this reflects a particular lens through which many of those documenting organized crime view the subject, both in academia and in the media. Most of them are men, and I wonder, do they pay more attention to the men in the room as a virtue of their own reporting biases? When they don’t ask about women and their role in the drug trade, it suggests they’re assuming that role is minimal. Through this lens, drug traffickers are, by definition, male. Pablo Escobar. El Chapo. John Gotti. Al Capone. As I researched Guadalupe’s life and the court case that ended with her prison sentence, I found that the role she played certainly bears a resemblance more to what are traditionally male decision-making roles in the drug trade, rather than to the role played by women like Chapo’s wife, Emma Coronel. The lack of media attention on her and her criminal life didn’t reflect her lack of importance or power within the Sinaloa Cartel, but instead her failure to fulfill the gender stereotypes at work in the drug trade. By the time she was detained, she was in her late fifties, and she didn’t tick the “babe” or “victim” boxes that the spotlight seems to demand from women in the business. It’s true that Guadalupe may have started out as a victim. I learned about her five children and the husband who fathered them, a man who is referred to as abusive in court documents. According to her criminal lawyer, Ruben Oliva, “Over the course of her life she has had the great misfortune of . . . crossing paths with men who have only seen her as a means to an end.”13 But by the time I began reading about her, she had already served nearly ten years in an American prison after being convicted in California for drug dealing back in the late 1990s. The case I was researching wasn’t her first rodeo—she knew what she was doing when she willingly got involved with the Sinaloans. As I researched women in the drug trade, it became increasingly obvious that there were many women involved who, like Guadalupe, did not fit the accepted tropes. High-ranking, powerful, and some- times violent women in drug organizations were not a novelty or an exception. El Chapo’s Sinaloa Cartel, born out of the Guadalajara Cartel in the late 1980s, started out moving cocaine up from producers in Colombia, Bolivia, and Peru to Mexico and over the border into the United States, alongside tons of weed and heroin. Nowadays these drugs have been joined by large quantities of methamphetamine and fentanyl. The Sinaloans defined the modus operandi for the proliferation of trafficking groups that thrive today: clandestine landing strips in the jungle that accommodate small planes packed to the roof with product; speedboats filled with dope ripping up the seas; drugs disguised as other goods concealed in container trucks and cars. El Chapo famously attempted to ship half a million dollars’ worth of cocaine into the United States from Mexico packed in jalapeño cans. The drug trafficking world and its culture has been documented and portrayed as viscerally male and patriarchal. The ostentatious use of brutal violence has become a defining feature of Mexico’s crime wars, as has the sexual objectification of women by elements of narco culture such as narcoccorido (a genre of ballads and songs dedicated to drug lords) and plastic surgery. Women are accessories, another sign of male success. Emma Coronel, Chapo’s wife, has come to exemplify an aspiration lifestyle and a “look” for women involved with drug traffickers in Culiacán, who are known as buchonas. The macho nature of the drug trade and its surrounding culture also serves to hide women from view. In Honduras, the violent Valle family drug trafficking organization was for years controlled in part by one of our protagonists, Digna Valle. A former local government official in Honduras told me that Digna’s brothers, who worked alongside her, tried to hide her power for fear it would make them seem weak in the context of a male-dominated culture. “Really, for the Valles, the people at the front were Arnulfo Valle and Luis Valle [Digna’s younger brothers], but they made sure Digna Valle never appeared to be a major protagonist in media coverage here. Later it was shown that it was she who managed their finances and was the brain behind a lot of their operations,” said the official, whom I spoke to in Santa Rosa de Copán. The small city is close to Honduras’s border with Guatemala, which makes up a major part of the cocaine smuggling route from south to north and the Valle’s former domain. “Digna’s brothers [Luis and Arnulfo] were dedicated to sowing fear and terror here in this region, and in this northern region in general,” said the former official. “It was only when [Digna] was captured and taken to the United States that it started to come out how powerful she had been within the organization.” Some argue that there is a fundamental difference between how men and women behave in the crime business. “There’s not going to be a show and a gunfight—they [women] don’t need to make a show of it like [male] cartel leaders have done in the past,” criminologist Mónica Ramírez Cano told me. Cano has interviewed dozens of notorious figures from Mexico’s criminal underworld, both male and female. She profiled El Chapo after his final capture in Mexico and before he was extradited to the United States. But some criminal lawyers who have defended female drug bosses in the US disagree with Cano. They told me that women crave fame and power in the drug world as much as men do. I have found that both claims are true. Guadalupe’s relatively light sentence means that by the time you’re reading this, it won’t be long before she is released from prison. But she’s unlikely to want to go home. Her former captain, El Chapo’s son Jesús, aka Alfredillo, remains at large south of the border. Alongside the Guzmáns, there are six other men named in the indictment who are no doubt displeased by her cooperation with US prosecutors. One of them, Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada, cofounder of the Sinaloa Cartel and a legendary Mexican trafficker, has never set foot in a jail cell and is one of the most-wanted criminals on the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) radar. Guadalupe has already said too much. If she manages to avoid deportation—which is usually the next step authorities take against foreign drug offenders like her—and remains in the US after she leaves prison, she will have to spend the rest of her life looking over her shoulder. She will have to blend in and become invisible to survive. I’m fascinated by Guadalupe and all of the other women featured in this book. As a journalist and writer, I do my best to tread the fine line between describing their exploits and the complexities of their stories without celebrating their criminal achievements. As a woman surrounded mostly by men investigating organized crime, I’m used to seeing women either underestimated or ignored. And that feels like an attitude shaped more by gender stereotypes and assumptions than by facts. Overlooking women is a mistake, and these women’s stories prove that. To be clear, this book is not about finding the female version of El Chapo, because that would be trying to squeeze women into a male trope. The challenge is to identify and recognize women’s power for what it is within the context of organized crime. The power they wield is often not the same as that of men, but we need to see it if we’re to better understand the criminal shadows in which they move. ___________________________________ Excerpted from Narcas: The Secret Rise of Women in Latin America’s Cartels by Deborah Bonello (Beacon Press, 2023). Reprinted with permission from Beacon Press. View the full article

Strange Murders: “The Hatchet Killer” Transcript of the original episode, four years ago Host Wesley Steele: Joy, Montana, a sleepy mountain town with scenic views, quaint shops and lively bars, seemed like the perfect place to either take a break and cut loose before college classes started or to celebrate after the rigors of college. During the summer of 2014, three women, unknown to each other, two who were recent high school graduates and another who had just finished her nursing degree came to Joy to do just that. Samantha Brodie, Emily Lynn, and Abby Marshal traveled here from different parts of the country to hike the trails, swim in the glacier-fed lakes, and take part in the local party scene. But each mysteriously disappeared. And unfortunately, what should have been a normal rite of passage became a bloodbath of terror for these three innocent young women. Adam Nash It’s Monday morning and still dark outside when I slip from bed and creep away from my sleeping wife to hide in the attic and watch, for the umpteenth time, my favorite episode of Strange Murders. Lucas Yates, “the Hatchet Killer.” Three bloody murders, all in one summer. The year was 2014, and back then the story was a blip on my radar, news lost amid bigger headlines: ISIS, Robin Williams’s suicide, the Ebola outbreak . . . a dreary year in the news, but I paid little attention to any of it. At twenty-two, I lived a self-absorbed life thousands of miles away in Chicago, on break from my college classes, partying, and hanging with Miranda, my then girlfriend, now wife. What did Lucas Yates and the women he murdered in Joy, Montana, have to do with me? Nothing. Until the story became an episode on Strange Murders. A remnant of my childhood when I was weaned on episodes of true crime television, seated on the sofa next to Mother while ash dwindled on cigarette after cigarette, her eyeballs bulging and lower lip gnawed raw as she ferreted clues from the show, and then squawked, “Adam!” “Get me that phone and punch in 1-800-CrimeTV. I need to tell those idiots a thing or two about investigating crime.” Her claim to her authority resulted from the day she called in a tip that led to the capture of Wayne Cox, wanted for the murder of two store clerks in Skokie. She’d recognized his profile in line at the local Gas Mart—“I’d know that birth- mark anywhere”—and when he left, she’d followed him to the parking lot of a cheap motel down the street and called the cops. Turns out, she was right. He was holed up there, hidden in plain sight. The story exploded in the news: Local Woman Helps Bring Killer to Justice. Reporters came to the house to interview Mother. I warm at the memory of the frenzy of activity, photos, and questions, and the man from the local news channel with a mic in his hand. We recorded the news that night on our VCR, and in the days that followed, I replayed the tape over and over, rewatching the part where Mama mentioned me on camera. “My little armchair detective,” she called me, like we were a team, like I’d helped somehow, and I was hooked. Obsessed, more like it. Mother never had much gumption, not enough to abuse me, nor enough to neglect me; we simply existed together, two bumps on the sofa, until that single moment when she’d coupled us in that public glory, sparking our relationship, the flame growing until a burning desire to please her raged inside me. Anything to recapture that fleeting gleam of pride in her eye. It’s the reason I became a cop. And the reason I eventually left the force, but that’s another story. Not a happy one, either. But in the end, when the cancer had about eaten up both of my mother’s lungs, I spent as much time as I could with her, watching another one of our favorite shows, Strange Murders. “The Hatchet Killer” was the final episode we saw together. I’ll never forget what she said that evening as she coughed and wheezed, every breath an effort: “Oh, Adam, what I wouldn’t give for us to be the ones to find that damn killer.” She died the next day. Since then, I’ve spent my free time collecting information on the case. Just like this most current news article I found on a late-night internet dive into the life of Lucas Yates. A tabloid piece about his wife, Kerry, written to generate clicks as it ruins lives. Trash reporting, and I feel slimy reading it, let alone printing it so I can reread it later, but finding Lucas Yates was Mama’s dying wish. And now it’s part of my new job. Weird News Online Your Source for Strange Stories Wife of Notorious Serial Killer Left Holding the Bag Accused Montana serial killer Lucas Yates is suspected of murdering at least three women during the summer of 2014, dismantling their corpses with a hatchet, and spreading their body parts across the Kootenai Forest. But before he was dubbed the Hatchet Killer, he was thought to be just a normal hard-working husband and father, married to Kerry Yates, a young waitress in Joy, Montana. Although Kerry claims she had no idea of her husband’s penchant for murder, the severed finger of his third victim was found inside a shopping bag in the back seat of her vehicle. With Lucas long-gone, Mrs. Yates was left holding the bag with this damning evidence, yet she still maintained her ignorance and her husband’s innocence. The court of law, however, sentenced her to six years for felony Accessory After the Fact. In a cruel twist of fate, Mrs. Yates is currently serving prison time, while her notorious husband has disappeared. He sure gave his wife “the finger” . . . in more ways than one. Six years in Montana Woman’s Prison (MWP), four years served, and now for two years she’ll be on parole. And I’m to be her parole officer. I fold the paper, cram it into my pocket, and feel a pulse of anticipation. The thought of meeting Kerry gives me a rush like I haven’t felt for years. Something intensely cerebral yet primal. I can’t wait to get inside her head, pick apart her brain, see what makes her tick. How could you not know your husband was a monster, Kerry? Did you watch as he hacked away at their bodies? Did you help? ______________________ Excerpted from The Killer’s Wife by Susan Furlong. US copyright © 2023. Published by Seventh Street Books, an imprint of Start Midnight, LLC, New Jersey. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher. View the full article

By Chris Stewart As someone who organizes readings and a large literary arts festival with workshops, author appearances, and exhibitors, I have developed a list of writers who I will not work with again. And rest assured, I’m not the only one who does this. Why? Because they didn’t follow directions. It’s that simple. Who's on it? Writers who acted like the organizer/staff were their personal assistant/manager. Take note of the following ways to avoid this blacklist and be a true professional! KNOW YOUR OWN SCHEDULE Double booking is such a big no-no we can’t believe you’re not aware of this already yourself. Whatever you have to do to make sure you know the days you are already booked: DO IT. Back out of our event at the last minute because you “forgot” you already had a gig? You’re on the list. SEND THE REQUIRED INFORMATION It should be no surprise to you that we need your bio and right away—possibly a short one and a long one. We also need a high resolution digital photo of the appropriate size with good lighting, not a selfie taken in the bathroom with your cell phone or with the light behind you. We need ordering information for your book. Possibly your dietary restrictions or lunch/dinner order. Special seating or parking needs. Have that at the ready to send right away. Don’t have them? Get them together and email them to yourself now so you will. Have a publicity team? Great! They are usually more organized than authors. But pick only ONE person for us to work with. SEND THE REQUIRED INFORMATION AS REQUESTED If we ask for your short bio, we mean about 100 words. Not half a page, a full page, or two pages. Put your current, key publications, awards, job in there and include your website so people can find out more. You should not send a link to your website or write back “it’s on my website which is in my signature block.” You will be asked again to send the bio and if you again don’t comply, you won’t have a bio listed. Same with the photo and book order info. If we give you the format in which we want these and you send a link to your book on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or your publisher’s website you will be asked again, etc. If you're a "famous writer" we will chase you for the info but you'll go on the list. MEET THE DEADLINE When we tell you the deadline by which we need the information we are not picking a random date. We have a deadline for ordering your book and/or getting it to the host so he/she can read it before your reading or interview. We are collecting information to layout and send to the printer for marketing materials: brochures, programs, postcards. For posting on the website and social media. Decided at the last minute you want to change or send your picture now that it’s too late? Yeah, no. Not changing the program which is already at the printer and would incur fees. PUBLICIZE! Organizers count on participants publicizing the event they are part of, which helps extend the organization’s reach and hopefully means high attendance on the day/evening. Post our event on your website, your Facebook/Twitter/Tumblr/wherever pages. Follow our social media pages and share info from them. Let people know about your part, but also share the info about other writers, exhibitors, etc. if it’s a larger event or festival. DON’T EMAIL WITH 101 QUESTIONS We are aware of our own schedule. We know when we want to release final details to authors, etc. Don't stalk us for weeks before asking where you’re parking, what building/room you’re in, or asking if your book has arrived yet. We will send out the logistics email when everything is finalized and in plenty of time. Please don’t “check in.” If we wanted to check in we would have. Basic information is, by now, on the organization’s website: location, day, time, parking. Do your own homework until you hear from us. That’s what websites are for. If it’s a few days before and no email, check your spam folder, then call. How a reading works or an interview or a Q&A is not rocket science. You shouldn’t need a minute by minute breakdown of what is expected. BE ON TIME—NOT EARLY AND NOT LATE On the day of the event, don’t show up two hours before your reading if you’re part of an event that runs for several hours, or a festival, wanting to check in or with questions. Check in at the appointed time—an hour before is best. Wait until the session before yours has started so it’s quieter and we can focus on you. Don’t wander off to other sessions, to lunch, whatever, and not be there on time for the start of your event. Keep track of the time and return at least fifteen minutes before your part starts. CHECK IN Always check in! Otherwise, you are considered a “no show” and we are scrambling to figure out what to do without you, sending people to look for you, spending time calling/texting you when there are ten other things requiring our attention. NO TEXTS/CALLS WITH QUESTIONS ON THE DAY We simply do not have time to take your call. The ringer on our cell is mostly likely turned off. If you want to reach us because you’re going to be late due to traffic or a car breakdown, text us and give us your name and ETA. If there is a host for your session, text them as well. Don’t text us and ask us to tell them. We may not see them in time and guess what? We have ten other things requiring our attention. What? You don’t have their phone number? You know my response to that. DON’T GO ROGUE If we didn’t offer or ask about your tech needs then please don't email asking if you can show a short film the day before the event. Or even weeks before. Tech has already been decided. We’ve had the final walk-though. We would have to hire a tech person at the venue which is not in our budget. You also may not call the venue yourself and ask for them to do this for you. We have a contract with them and you are not part of it. Put whatever you want to show on your website and have people view it on their smartphones during or after the session. STICK TO YOUR TIME LIMITS We probably gave you a time limit for your reading or, if you’re a host of a reading/session at a festival for us, how long your session is. If you’re a writer, choose appropriate material and practice reading it to make sure you are just under your time. So if we said seven minutes that’s what you prepare. Not three minutes. Not nine minutes. Your running under/over screws up the schedule. Minutes add up. If you’re a host, don’t run over. Manage/track your time. If the host of the session before you didn’t do that and their session ran into yours, let us know later (they will go on the list!), but that doesn’t mean you can do the same to the session’s host and authors after you. STAY THE WHOLE TIME – PARTICIPATE! Go to other sessions if you’re at a festival. Stay the whole evening if it’s a larger event/reading. Take pictures. Post on social media using the event hashtag and quote writers/speakers. Tag people. Share other people’s posts. If you just do your part and leave you were not really a participant making a contribution to our event and community. IF SOMETHING GOES WRONG, BE GRACIOUS Organizers are juggling more than you know depending on the size of the event: partners and their expectations, venues, catering, audio/visual recording, marketing, publicity, security, tech, tables, chairs, signage, exhibitors, book orders, the schedule, volunteers, parking, transportation/hotel for visiting writers, walk-throughs, last minute changes. We are horrified that your name was spelled wrong or the parking lot was closed or someone else took your vegan lunchbox. We didn’t do it on purpose and we can’t fix it now. Don’t call/text us asking for restaurant recommendations or the nearest parking lot. These are all accessible to you via your own phone. BOTTOM LINE We are doing our best to make everyone comfortable and happy while dealing with the banner falling off of the front of the building, microphones with dead batteries, a famous writer needing directions over the phone instead of using their GPS, volunteers who didn’t show up, the session room that’s locked so no one can get in, obvious questions from people who could answer them by simply opening and reading the program or checking the map. There are plenty of people ready to criticize every aspect of an event with massive amounts of know-it-all disdain. People who have never organized anything in their life but who think they’d be geniuses at it. Don’t be that person. You have no idea what was discussed, promised by venue/partners/caterers/etc., not allowed or not available, or didn’t work on the day. Be a help, not a hindrance. How? Remember that the event is not about you (unless you’re the headliner, in which case, still be gracious, not a diva). Do your homework. Do your prep. Bring your own water and a granola bar, just in case. Leave early, map out additional parking, check in, tweet about how much fun you’re having, smile. We are excited to have you at our event! We think you’re fantastic! But be responsible for yourself. If you can’t be, hire someone who will be able to handle your needs/details or risk not being invited back and word getting around that you are not a professional or too much work. Your call. _______________________ Chris Stewart is Editor-in-Chief of Del Sol Press (@DelSolPressBks). Find tips, tools, information, and inspiration on her website: The Real Writer. ________________________________[url={url}]View the full article[/url]

In a recent article for CrimeReads, Kelly J. Ford asserted that when asked about their favorite Southern writers, most cishet white men often ramble off “the same old white guys everyone mentions,” and then, at the very end, add Flannery O’Connor. The article is a beautiful, thought-provoking piece of writing, and I hope you’ll give it a read. But the reason I mention it here is to tell you a story. Kelly and I are both from Arkansas. Shortly after that article came out, we were doing an event together at Bookish in Fort Smith. At some point, somebody asked me about my influences, and I rambled off a few names, the last of which was Flannery O’Connor. I shit you not. Kelly gave me the side eye and the event moved on, but I say all of this to say Kelly Jo Ford is shaking up Southern fiction in the best way possible. Her debut Cottonmouths was named a best book of 2017 by the Los Angeles Review. She collected an Anthony nomination for Real Bad Things. And her latest novel, The Hunt, comes out today, which makes this the perfect time to stop and talk some shop. Eli Cranor: Let’s start with Arkansas: How does The Natural State figure into your work? And more specifically, when did you start writing about Arkansas? Has it been scary? I know it has been for me… Kelly J. Ford: The Natural State infects every single story I write. I didn’t leave Arkansas until after college. It’s where I grew up and came of age. Even if I’m writing about Boston, there’s a little bit of Arkansas there because I’m deeply proud of where I came from, even if at times I’m deeply disappointed in it as well. My first forays into writing were with Angie, one of my best friends in junior high. We wrote pages and pages of terrible poetry while eating Frito Pies and watching MTV. We’d write poems and then read them aloud to each other. I continued to pursue this poetry passion even after I moved to Boston in the mid-nineties. I was sending poetry over the work fax machine to another friend back in Arkansas like a big nerd, watching the machine to ensure no one else caught me or saw my writing. The horror… I didn’t feel scared so much as nervous with the publication of my debut, Cottonmouths. I had these annoying thoughts like, who am I to write about a place where I no longer live? What if all your story facts are based around memory and that’s not what it’s like anymore? So I try not to focus on things like fact but the truth of Arkansas for my characters. I have lived outside of Arkansas now longer than I lived in it, but setting has always been at the forefront of my stories. It’s a place I return to every day when I text my dad or on our Sunday phone calls or during my annual visits. It’s a weird-ass place, and I don’t want to write about any place more than that. EC: Do you write every day? KJF: Yes, because I have a full-time job that requires me to communicate with clients, subcontractors, and coworkers in a professional and clear manner. It’s exhausting. But do I write fiction every day? Absolutely not, because I have a full-time job. I have enough pressure on me without adding the unnecessary pressure of mantras like, “Write every day!” I think that can be damaging to aspiring writers because the flip side is, if you don’t write every day, you’re somehow less hungry, dedicated, serious, etc. I used to beat myself up so bad because of sayings like that and really ran myself down physically and emotionally trying to complete my first novel (which took me, all told, about 20 years). My guess is that people who tell other people to “write every day” never had to hold down two to three jobs to pay the bills. Good on them. I wish I didn’t. The only time I get testy about it is when it’s presented as a dictum because it’s divorced from reality for so many writers. Like, no, man. I’m legitimately tired and can’t form a sentence, let alone a paragraph or chapter, at the end of the day-job work day. There’s more than one way to write a book. And I can’t write if I’m worried about the electric bill or food in the fridge. EC: When you are working, do you aim for a daily word count? KJF: My brilliant mentor and talented author, Michelle Hoover, routinely quotes Goethe to her writing students: “Do not hurry. Do not rest.” That advice has really stuck with me since I first heard her say it in 2010. I absolutely look at word counts during first drafts, but I don’t freak out about what I’m writing or what I mean. For first drafts, I “write hot,” just get it down as quickly as possible. The first draft phase is strictly for creating the medium with which I’ll work. It’s like extracting granite from the earth. For me, the magic is in revision, when I slow down and corral the wild-ass, hot turds from the first draft. Sharing the work is also where the magic happens. I’m nothing without my brilliant writing partners. I’ve had so many great ones over the years, but my ride-or-die is Elizabeth Chiles-Shelburne. Her debut Holding Onto Nothing is one of the best damn books to come out of the South in recent years. She nails toxic masculinity and inherited trauma like no one else I’ve read. The story is done when it’s done. If I try to make something perfect, I’ll go into analysis paralysis and never complete a book. EC: What are the tools of your trade? KJF: It’s 2023, and I work in technology for my day job. Of course, I’m using a laptop, Eli! I was required to take typing classes in junior high. I’m not about that one-page-at-a-time/inky fingers/literal heavy-lifting life. And writing longhand hurts my hand. I don’t have that kind of time, and I don’t like unnecessary pain. However, I like to use a notebook and/or my whiteboard to make lists for story ideas, research topics, first draft ‘parking lot’ items, and other revision needs. Thanks to those typing classes and my day job, I type very fast and that allows me to not break my concentration and go into that wonderful trance-like state I get when writing. EC: When do you write? Time of day? Maybe even time of year, if there’s a season that works best for you. KJF: Over the years, I’ve developed this pattern of writing and revising in chunks of the year: September-ish through December are typically for first drafts or new drafts that require major developmental changes. I like to finish novels on December 31 so I have a built-in item to celebrate at the end of the year. Then I let my book “cool” for about a month before picking it up again in February for revisions before sending it to Elizabeth or other beta readers in April (at which point I myself “cool.”). Lots of revision after that before I send it to my agent, Chris Bucci, in June-ish. Then July through August are for hard revision. Once September hits, I assess and go forth with another revision or I start another book. This doesn’t mean I complete a book a year. I’m a slow revisionist. I just like the cycle. As for time of day, honestly just whenever I can grab time. For my debut, Cottonmouths, I wrote on the beaches of Ptown and in conference rooms at work, on planes and in my bedroom late at night. Everyone’s all, you can’t wait for the muse! But I actually can. I think because I’ve been writing long enough at this point (not necessarily publishing, which is different) that I can trust the words will come when I need them to. I don’t force it because anytime I do that, it’s just trash. EC: Do you have any rituals you return to that get you in the mood to write? KJF: More than anything else, daydreaming is the primary way I can get back to writing after busy or depressive episodes. Housework, painting walls, rowing in place–anything that is rote and boring is one hundred percent good for my creativity. In junior high (my poetry phase), I would spend hours in the yard weeding and raking and building rock walls–my parents were like, uh, okaaaay–while listening to music on my little busted, yellow Walkman. Music and manual labor put me into a meditative state, where I’m not thinking or worrying about anything. And then, eventually, my little stories and characters peek out and start pinging around my brain. EC: Do you outline your novels? Just dive straight in? Or do some combination of the two? KFJ: I met YA author (and Superstar actress!) Emmy Laybourne at the Southern Kentucky Book Festival. She’s so warm and funny. She said “the outline is where the magic happens.” I love that so much. I live that now. Still, sometimes I outline, sometimes I don’t. It all depends on what the story needs. I primarily work on novels, so I outline after the first draft. (First drafts are free-for-alls, as noted above.) My forthcoming novel, The Hunt, required a ton of outlining because it features a serial killer as well as various “Greek chorus” sections to detail victim stories and townspeople perspectives. Outlines make it easier to keep track of who’s who and what’s where. Sometimes, I’ll outline the major plot points of my book in a notebook over and over again, removing things or tweaking things I hadn’t thought of. It’s a way I can “sink” the story into my memory as well as note where the characters are acting in ways that don’t make sense. Reviewing it outside of the manuscript helps me to see beyond my darlings to what the story really needs. EC: When you’re done with the first draft, what does your revision process look like? KJF: I always, always let my writing “cool,” as noted above. I do this with everything I write, not just novels. I always do better with at least a 24-hour waiting period before going back to the page. For novels, I allow myself at least a month because I write in short, intense spurts. I need a mental break. Plus, it helps that I don’t have a great memory. I can come back to the story and not feel precious about certain words, sentences, and even characters. Like, if I barely remember that paragraph, then I can kill it. I don’t share first drafts, as a personal rule. They’re too wild. But beta readers are critical to me. One thing I started with author PJ Vernon is talking about the plot rather than just sharing drafts. It was such a valuable shift in my process because it forces me to communicate the basic plot points in a coherent manner. And if it’s not coherent, then I know it needs work. I’ve done this with a few writer friends now, where we just talk it through and go down a rabbit hole of What Ifs for our stories. It’s fun and brings a different perspective into the mix, one that can see story opportunities I can’t because I’m too close to the material. EC: Do you read certain books for inspiration prior to writing? If so, what are they? Do they change from manuscript to manuscript? KJF: I’ve always considered myself a reader before a writer, so everything I read is an inspiration to me. When I was first learning how to wrangle the novel I’d accidentally written (I feel like many authors started out this way), I sought out novels that did certain things well, such as multiple points of view (I absolutely love Jami Attenberg’s The Middlesteins for this). I still do this. If you’re struggling with a craft element, it’s great to find books that do it well and then learn from it for your own novel. Plus, comps (or comparative novels) are necessary in publishing. Agents and editors want to be able to point to other books to help booksellers and readers “situate” your book on the shelf and in their brains. For example, my work in progress is Secret Identity meets Bath Haus. I’ve long had this idea of Frankenstein meets Fatal Attraction, but after reading Alex and PJ’s novels, it helped me to clarify my vision for the story. So yeah, read a lot. Inside your genre, outside your genre. Outside your gender and race and sexuality and country of origin. There’s definitely a difference between reading for pleasure and reading as a writer. When you’re reading as a writer, you’re gonna pick up a lot of skills for your toolbox from folks who have already figured it out. EC: Best advice for writers just starting out, especially when it comes to the actual act of writing/developing the habits necessary to craft a novel-length manuscript. KJF: It sounds cliché and cheesy, but it’s a hundred percent useful: just have fun! There’s so much about publishing that is not fun. And there will a hundred percent be times when writing is not fun. Practice patience. Practice sitting with your disappointment and discouragement. It’s so hard. I know. I allow myself 24 hours to be a big baby about something and then I get back to the page. It used to be longer, but I’ve gotten older and can move on more quickly these days. Writing is such a solitary pursuit, but it doesn’t have to be. One of the most useful things I did was to find my people. Many of them I met at writing classes, others at book readings, and others online. Gather writer friends around you. Share the ups and downs. Eventually you’ll get to a point where you can weather the hills and valleys more easily. Friends help. EC: Finally, WHY do you write? KJF: A therapist would probably say it’s because I was neglected by my mother as a child and my maladaptive daydreaming was the outlet I chose to cope. That therapist would not be wrong! I always joke with my non-writer friends that it’s an affliction. Some of my writer friends nod and agree with me. I think more than the act of writing, I like the act of storytelling. For me, it’s the sharing of stories that’s the most enjoyable part of it. I grew up in a storyteller culture, around the fire with my family in my grandparents’ dirt driveway, listening to ghost stories and ridiculous tales about the youthful exploits of elders. I never told any stories of my own. I was too shy, even around my own family. I never felt like I could form the words or create those moments of tension or comedy that others, especially my dad, do so well. But their stories ignited that spark in me to create and to share. It’s the best transaction in the world, writing and sharing. It reminds me of those southern nights, when I didn’t want the stories to end. Now, I’m able to share stories in a way I couldn’t then. Truly, nothing has been more gratifying than to hear my dad tell me how much he loved my book. It took me a while, but I was finally able to sit in the role of storyteller. View the full article

Before I became a full-time writer, I spent a decade working as a criminal defense attorney. It was rewarding, exhausting, heart-breaking work. I’m glad not to be practicing any longer, but I also feel lucky to have had the experiences I did during those years. They shaped me into a better, more empathetic person, one who is able to look past a stark black-and-white perspective and see all the subtle gray space in between the extremes. Given my background, writing a legal thriller might seem like the obvious choice, but so far setting a book inside a courtroom hasn’t appealed to me. Keeping the courtroom out of my novels doesn’t mean that each of my books isn’t informed by my time as a defense attorney, and I Did It For You is no exception. Every experience I had during those years as a defense attorney bleeds into my writing. The men and women I defended, most of whom weren’t horrible people, but simply people who had made a horrible choice. The system that is so blatantly stacked against defendants. The understanding that even people who have committed crimes often still have something worth contributing to the world. When I sat down to write I Did It For You, there were two lessons I’d learned from my time as a defense attorney that I wanted to bring to the story. The first is the knowledge that most people who commit crimes are not simply evil, with no other facets to their personalities. The vast majority of criminal defendants don’t fit the stereotype, so often portrayed in the media, of a monster with no redeeming qualities. During my years as a defense attorney, I never represented a single person whom I thought was beyond hope. They all had someone who loved them; they all loved someone in return; they cried, and laughed, and told stories. And many of them expressed remorse for the crimes they’d committed. I think there is a tendency to write off anyone convicted of a crime, especially a crime of violence. To assume such a person is disposable. But in doing so, we risk losing a bit of our own humanity in the process. It’s a hard thing to extend mercy, to do the work of recognizing someone’s humanity after they’ve done something terrible. But mercy is a gift we can offer that benefits both the giver and the receiver. It doesn’t take the place of punishment, which has a vital role in civilized society. But mercy can live alongside consequence. They don’t have to be mutually exclusive. But mercy can live alongside consequence. They don’t have to be mutually exclusive. The second issue I wanted to highlight with this book is the ways in which violent crime and the death penalty impact not only the family of the victim, but also the family of the perpetrator. During my years as a lawyer, I worked on a variety of cases—embezzlement, health care fraud, drug trafficking, federal hate crimes, and one death penalty murder. When I think back on all the cases I worked on, it’s the death penalty trial that sticks with me the most. It wasn’t just the grueling, relentless hours of work or the frustration with the way death penalty trials are conducted in this country. It wasn’t even knowing that a few exhausted, over-worked lawyers were all that stood between a man and death. It was the impact the trial had on our client’s family that I can never forget. I still vividly remember the moment the jury announced a sentence of life in prison rather than the death penalty. I watched my generally poker-faced colleagues burst into tears, all of us sobbing as we hugged one another and our client. But what I remember most clearly are the faces of our client’s family, the sheer relief that his life had been spared, tempered with the knowledge that they would never again see him outside of prison walls. In the years since that trial, it is those family members my thoughts have turned to again and again. It’s their stories, their existence, that thread through my latest novel. They had done nothing wrong. Their only crime was raising and loving a man who would one day be involved in a criminal conspiracy that would end in murder. They weren’t guilty of any crime, but they were treated as an extension of the perpetrator, painted with the same broad brush. The family of the victim was treated with empathy and kindness, as they should have been. But the family of our client was looked at with scorn, their pain ignored by almost everyone in that courtroom. As if being related to someone on trial automatically meant their heartbreak wasn’t real or valid. When thinking about violent crime, we tend to only consider the victim and their family. The family of the accused is, at best, forgotten and, at worst, branded as guilty along with the defendant. I think it is easier for us that way. Viewing people in black and white, good and evil, right and wrong, is so much simpler than diving into the nuances, of forcing ourselves to confront all the murky grayness of real life. Even though, I’m no longer a criminal defense attorney, the people I defended, and their families, will always be a part of me. It’s impossible to sit next to someone day after day in a courtroom, especially when their life is on the line, and walk away unchanged. You can’t be a part of our justice system and not recognize the flaws and inequalities inherent in its design. Every time I write a book, my primary goal is to tell a good story. I want readers to be immersed in both the plot and the characters. But if, while entertaining readers, I can also guide them into the gray areas, allow them to see in a new light a part of society we usually avoid, then I’m hopefully helping to give a voice to those who are so often ignored or forgotten. *** View the full article

There’s a story in the Mahabharata: a young prince wants to become an expert archer, so he begs a guru to train him. Over and over, the prince is rebuffed. Eventually, he builds a clay statue of the guru with his bare hands. Under the gaze of this idol, he begins to study and practice. This is how he teaches himself. That’s one way in which a writer can find their own book. You collage your influences into a sort of constellation, and this map of symbolic coordinates comes to orient your entire project, allowing you to conjure up the destination to which your writing journey is heading. At least, that’s how it was for me. I have no formal training in creative writing. I learned about story, character, voice, etc. from being profoundly affected by certain fictions – novels, short stories, TV series, films – and thinking seriously about the way their effects were achieved. These influences acted as the guiding lights by which I was able to find my debut novel, Kala. Kala is set in Kinlough, a fictional seaside town in the West of Ireland. The novel tells the story of a group of friends who we follow as teenagers and as adults. As teenagers, we’re following them over the course of the summer of their lives – this heightened period full of thresholds through which they’re feverishly passing: their first love, their first kiss, their first time getting drunk. All that giddy hormonal magic. And at the centre of this group is Kala Lanann, a 15-year-old girl who’s the leader of the group, their emotional core, their heartbeat. But beneath every smiling surface in this tourist town, there’s a broiling darkness that’s constantly threatening to swallow the characters, and over the course of this summer they’re getting closer and closer to that darkness. By the end of the summer, Kala goes missing. 15 years later, three of the surviving members of this original group of teenagers are thrown back together when human remains are found in the woods, and the past and the present begin to dramatically and violently collide. Kala has many literary influences – the dark teenage thrills of The Secret History; the polyphonic storytelling of A Brief History of Seven Killings; the hazy swelter of The Girls; and the haunted intensities of Cat’s Eye. However, most of the major influences on Kala are in TV and film. As someone with no background in creative writing, I sometimes feel embarrassed by this. Then I remember something the great Irish writer Kevin Barry once said, “All the great TV shows steal a great deal from the novel, in terms of how they’re structured and put together. I think it’s time for novelists to start stealing things back.” So here are a few of the works from which I stole: Blue Velvet (1986) The iconic opening sequence of Blue Velvet provided the thematic motif of the entire book. The film begins with a dreamlike montage of an eerily perfect suburbia. Slowly, as an ominous drone begins to overwhelm the soundtrack, the camera pushes beneath the sunlit surface of the world into the jungle-like grass teeming beneath the idyllic white picket-fence, and we’re plunged into a nightmarish realm of insects orgiastically feasting on one another. Kala, like Blue Velvet, juxtaposes the dark underbelly of small-town life with the darkness its baby-faced heroes discover within themselves. These are themes that have become synonymous with David Lynch, largely thanks to … Twin Peaks (1990-1991), Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992), and Twin Peaks: The Return (2017) There are so many ways in which Twin Peaks influenced Kala – but if I had to pick one, it would be the character of Laura Palmer. Amidst many worthwhile and legitimate critiques of some crime fiction in recent years, a number of critics have disingenuously attempted to characterise Laura Palmer as just another example of the ‘dead girl’ trope (as though David Lynch were churning out lurid episodes of CSI). This critique betrays a lack of engagement with the emotional heft and complexity of Laura Palmer herself: I don’t know how anyone could watch Twin Peaks and not feel its maker’s genuine love and grief for her. Laura is a fully-rounded character – a flawed, furious human being who never truly dies (“I am dead,” she says, backwards, “yet I live”), forever returning to haunt the community that was complicit in the horrors of her life and death. This idea of the multidimensional individual being caught in the jaws of a corrupt society is also key to Chinatown (1974) Robert Towne’s screenplay is a masterclass. What begins as a small-time private investigation into infidelity gradually reveals an evil whose roots coil from the summits of society down into the most intimate spheres of life. Chinatown maintains a strictly subjective point-of-view: the film pulses with tension because we only ever know what our protagonist, Jake, knows; there’s always something awful just beyond the frame. When Jake learns something, we learn it; when Jake is knocked out, the film goes blank; when Jake realises just how deep and dark the evil goes, it is a genuinely frightening moment. While Chinatown is restricted to one point-of-view, Kala has three narrators: Helen, Joe and Mush. In this, I was influenced by the structure of L.A. Confidential (1997) One of the most enjoyable things about L.A. Confidential is the manner in which the labyrinthine plot gradually converges into a ferocious crescendo. We follow three investigations, led by three detectives with wildly different temperaments and priorities. Slowly, we become aware that each detective is uncovering pieces of a puzzle that only make sense when combined with those of the other detectives. What’s key here is that, as in so much crime fiction, it’s often the antagonisms within and between the detectives that power (and hobble) the drive towards the truth. This was something I wanted to work with in Kala, and that granular focus on character dynamics can also be found in True Detective: Season 1 (2014) I watched this long before I ever began writing fiction. What kicked open a door in my mind was the ingenious juxtaposition of different timeframes to illuminate character shifts and create tension. How did Rust end up this wrecked? What happened to Marty’s family? Why are these interviewers asking such pointed questions? What really happened back then? There’s something so generous in the temporal lacunae of such storytelling – all these fertile spaces into which you, as an audience, can enter and become a participant in the narrative’s drive and meaning. * Writing a novel is a long, often jangly journey. It’s full of euphoria and doubt. No one else can make that journey for you, but your guiding lights will make the journey with you. The works I’ve listed above – the books, the TV, the movies – are all part of the vast collage of influences that helped me write Kala. These works didn’t take me all the way through the book, but they did give me a position from which I could creatively move. If you’re working on a novel right now, I hope you find the guiding lights for your own material, whatever they might be. I hope to read the work to which they’re lighting the way. View the full article

__________________________________ I hated her too. I wanted her dead. And I know I’m not the only one. But now that leading lady Vanessa Hargreaves, celebrity starlet, lies spent and lifeless on the stage of the glorious Royal Ruby Theatre, I have to ask myself: How did it come to this? I know one thing for sure: I didn’t kill Vanessa. But if I didn’t do it, who did? The audience is confused. I can hear them whispering in their seats. What’s going on? Why is the star of the show dead in the very first scene? They don’t realize this isn’t part of the play. And who can blame them? At the Royal Ruby, we’re known for our stage illusions, for a show that changes with every performance, that adds wild, death-defying effects, and where it turns out to be a different killer every night. It’s because of this that audiences return over and over again to watch The Fox Hunt, the longest-running murder mystery in Broadway history and the most unpredictable too. I am just an usher, no one special, at least not yet. But mark my words: one day, I’m going to be a star. I have seen this show literally hundreds of times from the safety of my usher’s stool, tucked discreetly in the back corner of the main- floor rows. Nestled in the dark like a mushroom, I mouth along to every line of the script. I know all the actors’ parts by heart, every bit of stage business, every prop and illusion that appear from the rise of the curtain to its fall. It’s because I know every beat of this play that I’m keenly aware of when things go wrong. And things have just gone very, very wrong. Moments ago, the curtain went up. Vanessa—gorgeous, flawless it-girl—pranced onto the stage in her formfitting emerald gown. She stood under the antler chandelier and pronounced the opening line of the play: “What a perfect day for a fox hunt.” I heard an unusual creaking sound in the catwalk far above, and then, out of nowhere, the chandelier came crashing down onto the stage. One of its decorative antlers, honed to a razor point, skewered our celebrity starlet right in the jugular and rendered her immobile, affixed to the very boards she’s walked on six nights a week for the last two years. I ran down the center aisle and jumped onto the stage. Now, I’m kneeling beside Vanessa as the cast and crew members slowly trickle out from the wings, dumbstruck with shock. It’s as though everything is happening in slow motion. I’ve dreamed of being a leading lady for my entire life, but I didn’t want it to happen like this. I’m just an usher, but I find myself under the spotlight for the very first time, and yet this is no act. This is not a performance—it’s real. “Vanessa, hold on!” I say, grabbing her perfectly manicured hand. “Call emergency!” I yell out to the crowd. “Quick!” Vanessa’s grip is weak. Her lips are moving. I bend closer to her mouth as she struggles to speak. That’s when I hear them—her last words. They gurgle out of her mouth with a frothy, blood-tinged foam. “The ghost of the Royal Ruby . . . did this,” she says. She looks away from me then, out at her adoring audience, the hundreds of fans who’ve paid an exorbitant ticket price just for a live glimpse of her. I follow her gaze to where it lands in the mezzanine above. When I look back at Vanessa, her eyes are glazed and vacant. She’s dead. It’s funny, isn’t it? How you can look at someone a thousand times and never really see them—until suddenly, one day, you do. I gaze back up to where Vanessa was staring in the mezzanine. There. Front-row center, a figure looks down on us from above. That’s when I know who did it and that Vanessa was right. The ghost of the Royal Ruby killed her. *** Earlier that day . . . I don’t believe in ghosts. Or magic. Or superstition. Never have. But let me just say that whatever puts bums in seats is good for everyone. The rumors about there being a ghost in the theater started up again a couple of months ago after a series of weird accidents. First, Scooter, our fun-loving stagehand, got tangled in the ropes backstage and broke his leg in three places. We all figured he was goofing around in the dark, but he insists that’s not the case, that someone pushed him. Then it was Stuart, the props master of the show. He was burned while handling one of the show’s pyrotechnic props. And more recently, there was the incident of urine magically appearing in Donald’s cup during the banquet scene. Obviously, something’s up at the Royal Ruby, and whatever’s going on, it will all become clear eventually. That’s the way it works in the theater—wait long enough, and the truth steps into the spotlight. I’ve worked here as an usher for over two years as part of a mentorship program for young upcoming talent. I love this theater. The Royal Ruby is an Edwardian-era beauty built in honor of the maven of mystery herself, the most popular female playwright of all time, Eleanor Ruby. The marquee out front says as much about the theater as it does about its deceased namesake—pitch-black letters in Baskerville font, lit by a single bulb, the edges cast in shadow. The Ruby knows everything and yet divulges nothing. That’s what draws people in, keeps them coming back to our show year after year. As for my actual job, being an usher is pretty easy. I hand out playbills; I help patrons find their seats. During performances, I make sure no house doors are opened. It’s up to me to minimize interruptions, to preserve the careful illusions conjured onstage—because that’s what the theater is all about, isn’t it? Shadows, magic, and mystery. Being an usher isn’t exactly a dream job, but it is a stepping stone to becoming a performer. There are cool perks to being in the mentorship program too. I get to liaise with the actors. I get to know them personally, hear their tips and tricks of the trade. For the last four years, I’ve been taking private acting classes—and not just the cattle-call kind led by Mr. Community Theater Nobody, but private one-on-ones with coaches recommended to me by cast members from The Fox Hunt. This is how you learn the craft. This is how you get ahead. I’ll tell you right now: one day, you’re going to see my name in lights. And this face of mine? Yes, this one, with the giant purple birthmark on my cheek the size and shape of Australia—one day, this unlikely face is going to be world famous. I may not be beautiful like Vanessa Hargreaves, but I’m going to be a star. A few years ago, when I told my parents I wanted to study acting after high school, my dad nearly spat out his dinner at the table. “That’s impossible,” he said. “Not with . . . that.” He pointed his fork at the blemish on my face, as if I didn’t know exactly where it was, as if I didn’t suffer it every day of my life. My mother stepped in, smoothing things over. “A girl has a right to dream,” she said as she poked at the peas on her plate. “Not with my money,” my father replied, thereby ending the conversation. After graduating from high school, I enrolled in university in a “proper program,” as my father called it, prep for law school, but I barely went to class. My father found out at midterm and disowned me. Now, I live in a closet-size room in a shared apartment near the theater. I survive on ramen noodles and rice. Every few weeks, my mother calls me to check in, but I haven’t talked to my father since my Great Educational Defection. I’m alone in this city, working overtime at the theater to pay for rent and acting classes . . . and you know what? I’m happier than I’ve ever been before. I’ve even managed to squirrel away some of my usher’s money. It’s in a savings fund I’ll use to pay for tuition to the Ruby Acting Academy, the best theater school in the country, one that’s affiliated with the Royal Ruby Theater mentorship program. I’ve now made it through three rounds of auditions for the Academy, competed against countless other hopefuls vying for a coveted spot in the elite performance school. There’s only one step left before I’m officially accepted—getting written endorsements from all four lead actors in The Fox Hunt. It’s an old-school rule that comes from the times before theater schools, when acting was a pure apprenticeship, an art form passed from one performer to the next. Anyone can do one good audition piece, but a true actor has to inhabit the full range of human experience, and who better to judge who has that ability than actors themselves? If all four lead cast members in The Fox Hunt say I have “it” and I’ve paid my dues behind the scenes, I’m in, accepted into the Academy. I’ve done everything I can to ingratiate myself with the cast. I’ve been their gofer. I’ve fetched them coffee and bobby pins and Ativan. I’ve devoured their advice, hung off their every word, and I’ve learned so much about what it takes to make it as an actor. Maureen Withers plays the elderly dowager in The Fox Hunt. When I asked her to sign for me, she did so instantly, though she was quick to challenge my career choice. “If the screen doesn’t kill you, the stage will. But if this is what you want, I support you.” Next, I approached Dirk Cleeves, the impossibly good- looking TV star with a face that looks chiseled from marble. “Is this your way of getting my autograph?” he asked, then winked at me and signed my letter. The wink meant nothing. Dirk would flirt with a one-eyed chicken if it were his only option, which it’s definitely not. Every now and then, a girl in the audience faints when he takes the stage. As an usher, it’s my job to text a “Code Cleeves” to the stagehands, who haul the starstruck fan out to the lobby to recover. I was never worried about approaching Donald Kingsley for his endorsement—yes, that Donald Kingsley, two-time Oscar winner, seven-time Tony winner, and one of the nation’s most beloved older stars. It’s Donald who helped me prepare my audition for the Academy. Dressed in his trademark velvet waistcoat and black cravat, he watched me perform my monologue over and over again in the privacy of his dressing room. “Stop flapping about. You lose all your power that way,” he advised. “I don’t know what you mean,” I said, my hands gesticulating wildly. “Containment—an old actors’ trick. Arms by your sides. Put all that energy into your voice and eyes. Don’t move a muscle.” It took me a while, but eventually, I could feel it—how stillness distills everything, how feelings and motivations can lie in wait, supercharged under the surface. The sensation was incredible—like being superhuman. “There,” Donald said, clapping slowly at the end of my monologue. “That’s it. That’s the ghost. It moved in you. Master that one skill, and you’ll be a star.” He signed my letter after that. His sweeping, elegant signature was the best endorsement I could ever hope for. But it isn’t the last one I require. I still need superdiva Vanessa to sign for me. Vanessa, the grade A bitch. Sometimes I think she’s the grandest illusion of our show—beautiful on the outside yet rotten to the core. No one in the cast and crew likes her. She’s vicious and cruel, a stage hog in every possible way. She’s gotten to the top of the industry by pushing everyone to the bottom and then rubbing their faces in the mud. Not that her fans realize this. They worship the ground she walks on. Vanessa proves what Hamlet always knew: you really can smile and smile and still be a villain. Do you know Vanessa once threw scalding coffee at our stagehand Scooter because he was “staring at her cleavage”? Here’s the thing: Scooter can’t see shit without his glasses on, and he’d lost them earlier that day. Then there was the time she threw a hissy fit because Donald got a standing ovation at the end of the show. “It’s only because he’s old,” she said in the wings after the show, loud enough for everyone to hear. The next night, during the banquet scene, Donald’s goblet was mysteriously filled with piss. “Must have been the ghost of the Royal Ruby,” Vanessa said afterward with a shrug. But we all know exactly who was behind the piss in the goblet. Only Vanessa would stoop so low. Once, I worked up the nerve to ask her if she could recommend an acting coach. “For who?” she asked as she looked over my shoulder. “For me,” I said. She stared at me then, her feline eyes ice cold. “I can think of no one I’d recommend. No one at all,” she said, spitting out the words. I was shocked. I couldn’t speak or move. Why is she always so mean? Eventually, I stumbled my way out of the greenroom and vowed never to approach her again. But here’s the thing: I need her signature. And I swear, I’ll do just about anything to get it. If I had to kill for it, I wouldn’t think twice. But there is good news. A few days ago, I made progress. I wrote Vanessa a gushing fangirl letter and asked her if she’d sign for me. I delivered the note to her dressing room with a bouquet of white lilies, her favorite flower. Vanessa reluctantly agreed to talk to me today about lending her endorsement for the Academy. I’m to meet her in her dressing room before the show, which is why I’m on my way to the theater early today. If I’m successful in getting her to sign, I’ll be the first aspiring actor to win her over. I push through the gleaming brass doors of the Royal Ruby Theater. God, I love the smell of this place, the mineral crispness emanating from the antique marble floors, the hints of metallic tang from the brass details, and that other scent, too, a mix of perfumes and colognes and anticipation from the decades of theatergoers who’ve visited this hallowed place. I head through the lobby and stand below the winding marble staircase that leads to the mezzanine. On the wall in front of me in a gilded frame is the famous portrait in oil of the theater’s namesake, world-renowned playwright Eleanor Ruby. Her silver hair is pinned up, with just a few wild tendrils loosely framing her face. She wears a scarlet V-neck dress that shows off her cleavage. A strand of pearls loosely encircles her neck, and in her hands she holds a plain black notebook. I love to amaze new theatergoers by shining my flashlight on that notebook. Underneath the first layer of paint is a hidden message written in Latin that’s magically revealed under bright light—Homicidium meum secretum. “Murder is my secret.” It is said that when Eleanor didn’t like certain actors, they’d mysteriously drop dead midseason. To this day, the question remains: Did Eleanor have something to do with it? Many people believe Eleanor’s ghost haunts the theater, that she appears exactly as she does in this portrait, walking the boards at night. What a load of superstitious crap, just another tall tale to attract tourists. Still, I’ve never liked the way Eleanor’s eyes in this portrait follow you around the lobby, like she’s watching your every move, like she knows something you don’t. “Talking to the ghost again?” I hear, right in my ear. I jump and turn around. Alice, our stage manager, is standing behind me. In her late fifties, she’s worked here for decades, seen stars and audiences come and go. Her gray hair is piled high on her head, held together by bobby pins and a mechanical pencil. She wears the same red sweater over her outfit every day. From time to time, she plucks the pencil from her head to write notes in the black binder she calls her Stage Bible. I swear I’ve never seen it leave her hands. Now, she dons her glasses, which she wears on a beaded string around her neck, to admire the portrait in front of us. “She wasn’t a beauty, but Eleanor was a force of nature,” Alice says. “She reminds me of you.” Alice eyes me over her glasses, a grin forming on her lips. “Big day today, Grace. The final signature.” “I can’t stop shaking,” I say. “What if Vanessa refuses to sign?” “Then the cast and crew will strangle her. Do you know she once told me I should follow her juice diet to help me lose weight and achieve the ‘Hargreaves glow’? And repair my cellulite, too, according to her. Nice, right?” “Classic Vanessa,” I reply. “This stage needs a young actor like you, Grace, someone different. We’ve had enough Vanessas over the years, all those pretty nitwits with an overweening sense of entitlement. It’s your turn to shine.” She reaches out and touches a hand to my cheek. I know it’s no accident that her palm rests against the purple blot on my face. I’m grateful when she takes it away because if she held it any longer, I’d burst into tears. “Is it true you once wanted to be an actor?” I ask Alice. “It is,” she replies. “But I apparently lacked ‘star quality.’” “Ah. The famous euphemism for ‘not pretty enough,’” I say. Alice nods. “I’m used to it now, being behind the scenes, I mean. And I’m a bit of a control freak, as you know, so this job suits me.” She raps her knuckles against her black book. “I was honored when the board gave me a vote over which students to admit into the Academy. It felt like they finally valued the opinion of someone in the backstage crew. But that’s over now.” “What do you mean?” I ask. “Vanessa objected,” she replies. “She said crew members aren’t qualified to be voting members of the board because we don’t understand performers. The board revoked my vote shortly after.” “Unbelievable,” I say. “Remember,” Alice says as she lays a hand on my arm, “the whole crew wants this for you, more than you can possibly know. I better get going.” She pulls away from me. “I’ve got to talk to Stuart about the wonky fog machine. And the chandelier pulleys are squeaking again. Must fix those.” She turns to leave but then stops. “If you’re heading backstage, beware that Eleanor’s ghost is up to her tricks again.” “What happened this time?” “The gold star on Vanessa’s dressing room door has ‘magically disappeared.’ Let’s just say she’s not happy about it. Proceed with caution.” I sigh. “She’s going to be in a worse mood than usual.” “Stop fretting,” Alice says. “Also, Scooter’s looking for you. Says he has something of yours.” “Where is he?” I ask. “Catwalk.” She turns and walks away. “Break a leg today, Grace,” she calls over her shoulder, “preferably one of Vanessa’s!” It’s the last I hear before she disappears into the box office in the lobby. Once she’s gone, I touch the gilded frame of Eleanor’s portrait to make a silent wish for good luck—not that I believe in good luck charms or ghosts. But at this point, I need all the help I can get. __________________________________ Excerpted from MURDER AT THE ROYAL RUBY by Nita Prose with permission from the publisher, Amazon Original Stories. Copyright © 2023 by Nita Prose Inc. All rights reserved. View the full article

When I was a little girl, my parents rented a lakeside cottage. The owners would be out of town for a year, and they needed someone to keep an eye on their property, so they rented it to us cheap. My sisters and I were excited about living next to a cool blue lake with tiny islands to explore. Down the hill from our house was a small beach with a private dock. My father bought an old rowboat and patched up the holes in the hull, while painted turtles sunned themselves on the shore and king snakes curled up in the grass like warm inner tubes. That summer, I dangled my feet over the end of the wooden dock and searched the water for sunfish or bluegills. Sometimes I’d catch a glint of something bigger, an eel or a whiskery trout gliding past my toes and disappearing into darkness. As much as I loved it there, I was secretly terrified of the cold blue depths of the lake. That summer, I’d read a paperback mystery about a camp counselor who was killed and dumped in a lake, and I couldn’t get the horror out of my head. I refused to go swimming unless my father was watching over us. I hated that I couldn’t see the bottom. Whenever I walked barefoot into the murky water, I could feel my toes squishing through matted patches of pondweed, while slippery quillwort tangled around my ankles. Living things lurked in the slimy undergrowth—worms, tadpoles, eels, snails, fish, hermit crabs. I dreaded stepping on something sharp and cutting my foot. Worst of all, I imagined that one of these days, a skeletal hand would reach out of the primordial ooze and pull me under. I thought about dead bodies a lot, probably more than a little girl should. One day when I was playing on the dock, an old knotted plastic bag drifted ashore. Inside was a waterlogged napkin from a local diner, a pink barrette, a bottle of crimson nail polish, and a laminated nametag that said “Rita.” I waited around all afternoon, but nothing else washed ashore. No dead bodies, no waitresses named Rita. I didn’t tell anyone what I’d found. Instead I hid the nametag and other stuff in a shoebox under my bed and invented a story about how Rita came to rest at the cold still bottom of the lake. In my story, there was a jealous man—a line cook at the diner—who’d fallen in love with Rita and her crimson nails, but one night after closing, when she rejected his advances, he flew into a rage and killed her. He got rid of the body by weighing it down with a cement block and rowing out to the middle of the lake, where he pushed her overboard. It was gruesome, and I loved it. In my imagination, Rita sank to the cold, still bottom of the lake and remained there in her watery grave, while far above the seasons passed. In the summer, the sun blazed and the wind danced on the surface of the water, but not a single beam or ripple reached down into the depths of the lake. In the fall, lightning crashed and thunderstorms riled the choppy waves, but the bottom of the lake remained cold, dark, inert and silent. I wasn’t sure how my story would end. But then, real life provided one possibility. It was early September when a terrifyingly loud noise shook me and my sisters out of bed. As we huddled together in the living room, my mother explained, “The dam broke, girls. That sound was the lake whooshing away. We’re lucky it happened in the middle of the night when no one was swimming in it.” She shuddered to think about her three daughters getting sucked away. Since we were on high ground, we were safe from the flood waters, but the people who lived down below were almost dragged away. Trees crashed into their roofs and smashed through their windows, and muddy water flooded their basements. Fortunately, no one was killed. The next day, my sisters and I hurried down the hill to see what was left of the lake. We couldn’t believe it—the whole thing was gone. Our little dock extended out into nothing. The drop was deep into water-speckled mud. The dock’s legs were covered in slime, and small fish splashed around the remaining puddles. It was sunny out—a beautiful September day. We climbed down the wooden ladder onto the lake bottom, where the mudflats bore our weight like sandbars at the beach. Everywhere you looked, trash mucked the lake bottom—tar-colored fishing poles, plastic buckets, half-buried flip-flops, boards with rusty nails sticking out. Dead fish floated belly-up, while a few still-living fish twitched their fins and snapped their gills, trying to wriggle away into the deeper pools. Everything smelled rotten in the strong sun. My sisters and I explored for hours. We found a wine bottle filled with mud, a weed-covered diving fin, a capsized rowboat, a crooked golf club, and more than a few rotten oars. I looked around for Rita’s body. My feverish imagination had convinced me that she would be there, half-buried in the mud, her long silky hair turned to seaweed, her waitress uniform the color of algae, her skeletal waist tied to a cement block by a length of water-logged rope. Needless to say, we didn’t find any dead bodies that day. For weeks afterwards, I checked the news, but there were no reports of any Rita’s being retrieved from the lake. I suppose I should’ve been relieved, but that didn’t explain the plastic bag and its contents that had floated toward me like a ghostly plea for help. I was a little girl with a big imagination, and I needed an ending for my story. So I figured the lake must’ve swallowed her up completely. It had claimed her as its own. My fascination with eerie, murderous small town lakes eventually took shape in my Burning Lake mystery series, where terrible secrets lie dormant just underneath the placid surface of the lake. It all started back in 1712, when three innocent woman were condemned as witches and burned at the stake. Before Abigail Stuart died, she cursed the town forever. Now, in “The Shadow Girls,” Detective Natalie Lockhart finds herself in the middle of a gruesome murder case where, with the help of Lieutenant Luke Pittman, she must fit the pieces together and link up the strange and violent events that have threatened to destroy her idyllic lakeside hometown. Here are five more mysteries involving murderous lakes that I highly recommend: The House Across the Lake, by Riley Sager This twisty psychological thriller is about a widowed actress named Casey Fletcher who seeks solace in a peaceful lakeside house in Vermont after her husband has drowned in this very lake. Now Casey spends her time grieving, drinking too much, and snooping on an attractive couple, Katherine and Tom, who live across the lake. When Katherine suddenly vanishes, Casey discovers things aren’t what they seem—and she suspects there’s something evil in the lake. It’s an updated Rear Window with lots of surprising turns. Just when you think you’ve figured it out—you haven’t. Iron Lake, by William Kent Krueger Cork O’Connor is a former sheriff living in Aurora, Minnesota. Recently separated from his wife and kids, he inadvertently becomes embroiled in a web of corruption and crime during a blizzard in this hardscrabble, lakeside town. When a judge is murdered and a young boy is reported missing, the part Irish and part Anishinaabe former law man must deal with local superstitions along with a wealth of fascinating characters to get to the bottom of this case, where all is not what it seems. Stillhouse Lake, by Rachel Caine In this psychological thriller, Gina Royal shouldn’t be in this position, but she’s forced to remake her entire life when she finds out—to her complete and utter shock—that her husband’s a serial killer. Now her ex-husband is in prison, and internet trolls are blaming her for the murders. So she changes her name to Gwen Proctor and moves to remote Stillhouse Lake with her two children in order to live in peace and have a normal life. But then, a dead body turns up at the lake, and her world is turned upside-down when she becomes a suspect. As the threats against her mount, she’s forced to realize somebody has it out for her, and she must find the courage to keep her children safe from an evil predator. Cold Lake, by Jeff Carson In this fast-paced thriller, Sheriff David Wolf answers a call from a fisherman who has just reeled in a human head from Cold Lake, Colorado. When other dismembered bodies are retrieved from the lake, Wolf discovers they’re connected to a missing teenager case over 20 years ago—an unsolved case that Wolf’s lawman father couldn’t solve. Soon it becomes obvious that a serial killer lives among them. A complex web of unsolved murders unfolds over the backdrop of Wolf’s troubles with his wife and son, and his impending election, but the question remains—just how many bodies are at the bottom of Cold Lake? Lady in the Lake, by Laura Lippman Who killed the lady in the lake? The year is 1966, in the city of Baltimore. Flawed main character, Maddie Schwartz, is an unhappy housewife who finally leaves her husband after 20 awful years to find meaning in her life by working for a city newspaper. When a woman is found dead in a city park lake, Maddie attempts to discover who she was and who killed her. As she goes about solving the crime, she puts everyone she loves in danger in this kaleidoscopic historical mystery. *** View the full article

Beware this amateurish type of advice. It needs a critical scrub.

Amen to this!

They just never go away and never learn. It's not about a commitment to good critique, it's about politics and egos. Connie

This month’s international thriller releases showcase authors at the top of their game, split fairly evenly between Latin America and Scandinavia (with one Swiss author thrown into the mix). What’s remarkable about this month’s selection is the incredible diversity of genre forms—whether you’re looking for a chilling psychological thriller, a fast-paced tale of international intrigue, a thrilling cat-and-mouse chase, or a moody consideration of how a killer comes to be, there’s a book on this list sure to satisfy. 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. 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. Rodrigo Rey Rosa, The Country of Toó Translated by Stephen Henighan (Biblioasis) The Cobra is a reluctant would-be assassin recruited to take care of a troublesome environmental activist. When he finds himself on the run and presumed dead, he joins the Mayan struggle against the violence of developers, but will he ever see his young child, held hostage by his spymasters, again? Juan Goméz Barcena, Not Even the Dead Translated by Katie Whittemore (Open Letter) Goméz Barcena’s Not Even the Dead is a hallucinatory trip through the frontier days of northern Mexico, as a soldier who agrees to the proverbial ‘one last job’ finds himself on the heels of a supposed heretic who may just be a prophet. The story travels through a vivid, haunting landscape that seems to transcend time. This is a deeply imagined novel and one you won’t soon forget. –Dwyer Murphy, CrimeReads editor-in-chief Hansjörg Schneider, The Murder of Anton Livius Translated by Astrid Freuler (Bitter Lemon Press) Schneider’s series featuring Inspector Peter Hunkeler is kind of the most Swiss thing ever—it takes place in a border city, and a jumble of languages plus the frequent need for cross-border cooperation make for a fascinating farrago of crime-solving. In his latest to be translated into English, the inspector is confronted with a brutal killing that somehow connects to events in an Alsatian village during the Second World War. Lars Kepler, The Spider Translated by Alice Menzies (Knopf) The married couple behind the pen name Lars Kepler delivers another fiendishly clever thriller, this time featuring a serial killer who sends riddles to the police before each killing. Brutal and chilling, The Spider delivers everything you’ve come to expect from a Scandinavian thriller. View the full article

James Lee Burke, the modern master of all literature crime and noir, returns to shelves with his new novel, Flags On the Bayou. Continuing his recent exploration of American history through riveting stories, replete with his poetic and electric prose, Flags On the Bayou places readers in the violent upheaval, political chaos, and moral crucible of the Civil War. Burke’s deft narrative touch features the voices of several characters, including a runaway slave, a diabolical military leader, and a colorful cast of rebels and union loyalists navigating conflicted philosophies and emotions. Burke’s work provides Americans with an opportunity to inspect the mythic properties of their historical conceptions, the generational trauma of injustice, and the perpetual collision between idealism and iniquity in the shaping of society. More broadly, it casts a searchlight on the eternal tangle between good and evil in the human heart. I recently spoke with James Lee Burke over the phone, continuing an interview series I’ve conducted for CrimeReads. David Masciotra: Your recent work deals heavily with American history. What is the reason for shifting from contemporary stories to those that more closely scrutinize American history? James Lee Burke: That’s a very good observation you make. My compulsion throughout my entire life has always been historical. I think that the past, as Faulkner said, is not even the past. We’re still in it. To try to block it from our lives, as we have a way of doing in this country, because we’re still a young Republic, is an invitation for disaster. American history is extraordinary. Much of it is beautiful, but much of it is horrible, and we try to deceive ourselves about the latter. Writing now, it is clear that we’ve recreated the 1840s. We’ve brought back the era of nativism. The Republican Party has become the Know Nothing Party. Donald Trump is just a vulgarian who has stumbled his way into darkness with the help of very angry people. Writing about history makes sense, because it is the same group. David Masciotra: Let me preface our conversation about the excellent new novel with this: Steve Phillips, a brilliant political thinker, has a recent book, How to Win the Civil War: Securing a Multiracial Democracy. A great historian, Heather Cox Richardson, has a book, How the South Won the Civil War. While reading your novel, I couldn’t help but put you in their company, because it seems as if you are attempting to make us consider how the Civil War never ended. James Lee Burke: That is absolutely correct. I have not read the work of these scholars, but I would certainly agree. It was never over. The joke down South is, once in awhile, someone will shout out, “Those damn Yankees are spreading rumors that they won the war.” David Masciotra: Do you have a research process when writing historical fiction? James Lee Burke: No, I don’t research. As I go along, I might check small things. This may sound grandiose, but I think if you have to research a subject to write a novel about it, maybe you should choose a different subject. You have to be a player. You have to go back into time to discover yourself, in your position in that time, because it is there. You see, human beings have never changed. One of the most influential historical books that I read is The History of the Church by Eusebius. It is the hands-on story of the Roman Empire in the Fourth Century. It is extraordinary, and as you read it, you realize that it is here. We have the same players, the same arguments. Nothing has changed. David Masciotra: I find it quite interesting that you write this new novel with rotating narration, each chapter has a different narrator. How did you decide on that structure? James Lee Burke: That comes from William Faulkner’s beautiful book, As I Lay Dying – one of his best books. Faulkner’s great gift was not only the substance of the stories, but his devices. I always told students that if they want to learn how to read and write novels, read As I Lay Dying and The Sound and the Fury. Those two books have no peer – nothing comes close. David Masciotra: Faulkner’s inspiration was often similar to yours – Southern Reconstruction, race, oppression and idealism. Did the substance of his novels and short stories influence your treatments of these topics? James Lee Burke: That is correct about Faulkner, but no, the substance of his novels did not influence the way I tell these stories. That comes from my father. My father was an amateur historian, and he wrote very good prose. He was an engineer who always wanted to be a journalist. The stories in Flags On the Bayou were real. That’s the way it was. I heard them over and over again when growing up. When I was young, I said something about the rebel yell, and my father told me, it’s not what you think. His grandfather was with Lee and Jackson through the entirety of the Shenandoah campaign. It was a fox call, not a scream. It was a light, “woo.” But you’d have twenty thousand guys doing that coming over a hill. It would scare the heck out of everyone. My great grandfather was at Gettysburg. His name was Robert Perry. He was a lieutenant in the eighth Louisiana Volunteers. He was in two invasions going uphill into Yankee fire in three days. A very low percentage of those involved in the Civil War on the Southern side had anything to do with slavery. In fact, most of the men who enlisted were poor. So, the story is more complicated than “the bad guys were slavers, and the Union guys were angelic.” David Masciotra: Flags On the Bayou explores the atrocities of the Union army. The historical record is quite clear that these atrocities happened, but it is almost never acknowledged. Is that why you wanted to insert those into the novel? James Lee Burke: Yes, absolutely. In reality, the Civil War, as it was orchestrated, was a testing ground for a genocidal policy that destroyed 50 million bison, and wiped out the American Indians. It was calculated, and the leaders were open about it. William Sherman was a terrorist, and he was proud of it. Grant supported Sherman. They declared war on civilians. Lee did the same thing, one time, in Chambersburg. He turned his troops loose on the civilian population. They took freeborn Black men and women, and forced them into slave auctions. It was a disgrace. It was a Louisiana unit that did it, and I hope it wasn’t my great grandfather’s. The American terror against the indigenous population continued, of course, long after the Civil War. David Masciotra: Speaking of slavery, you write richly in the voice of a slave, Hannah. I don’t feel this way, but there are some who would object that it is inappropriate for a white author to write in the voice of a Black woman. Are you aware of that objection, and did you have it mind when you wrote this novel? James Lee Burke: I am aware of it. In terms of logic, the people who have this point of view need to reevaluate the implications. So, a man cannot write in the voice, or maybe even about, any women. He can’t write about his pet dog. If he hasn’t had a child, he should not write in the voice of a parent. If a person has never suffered poison ivy, he cannot write in the voice of someone who has suffered poison ivy. And Michelangelo – what gave him the authority to paint that ceiling? He’s knew nothing about being God. David Masciotra: It must feel like an odd time to be a writer, because simultaneous with the growth of that restrictive mentality on the left, there is a right wing effort to ban books, like yours, that depict issues of injustice and crimes of our history. What is your reaction? James Lee Burke: It is fear, just like always. The poor, Southern white man was taught to fear and hate the Black man. Did you ever read the John Grisham book, The Chamber? In the story, a Klansman is about to be put to death. The warden asks him for his last words before going to the gas chamber. He says, “There are many men in my life that I hate, and the one I hate the most is myself.” What a line. That is what the oligarchic leadership taught the poor whites – that the Black men and women, the Latino immigrants, the Native Americans are their enemy. And that their intrinsic worth derives from their persecution of the other. As I said earlier, the people trying to deny history are making a disastrous mistake. David Masciotra: Flags of the Bayou is a violent novel, but the violence is never gratuitous. It acts as a predicate for an exploration of history within the context of your characters. Do you have a philosophy for using violence in storytelling, because you do it quite well? James Lee Burke: Thank you. Most of the time the violence is off camera. A passage should allude to the violence, but not describe it in detail. Also, the violence that I’ve written about is not simply that of morally impaired people. It is something worse. It is a cancer on the soul. It is something that they bear inside them. They are pathological in their hatred. The South is full of these people, but now it is no longer regional. It has gone national. Trump did that. It also has a twisted theological dimension in that derives from a belief that their God is the enemy of their enemies. So, the violence should point to something much larger, as you say. David Masciotra: I see that you have quite an itinerary. You have a new short story collection coming out in 2024, as well as a new novel. You also have another new novel coming out in 2025. How do you remain so prolific? James Lee Burke: It’s one of the advantages of neuroses. It never fails you. It is always there. The energy goes night and day, and it’s free! More seriously, it is just a compulsion. I’ve never wanted to do anything else. When I was in the fifth grade, my cousin and I tried to write a story for the Saturday Evening Post. I published my first story when I was 19, and finished my first novel when I was 23. View the full article

Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. Colin Walsh, Kala (Doubleday) “[A] gritty heartbreaker of a thriller…Part heartfelt coming-of-age tale, part brutal Irish noir, this is a spectacular read for Donna Tartt and Tana French fans.” –Kirkus Michael Koryta, An Honest Man (Mulholland Books) “This is Koryta’s best book. It grabbed me hard and wouldn’t let go. A wonderful suspense novel with good writing and lots of texture. It feels like it came straight from the heart.” –Stephen King Lars Kepler (transl. Alice Menzies), The Spider (Knopf) “The Spider is shocking and exhilarating in a way only Lars Kepler could accomplish.” –Bookreporter Kelly J. Ford, The Hunt (Thomas and Mercer) “Truly absorbing…Ford renders the town of Presley, Ark., as a living entity swirling with resentments and loyalties, and governed by fear, thanks to wild rumors that a serial murderer stalks prey at the town’s famous ‘Hunt for the Golden Egg’ each Easter…You won’t find any tidy narratives or simple judgments here.” –New York Times Book Review Shari Lapena, Everyone Here Is Lying (Pamela Dorman) “The most addictive book I’ve read in ages—so slick and disquieting and clever. Just brilliant.” –Lisa Jewell Joe Kenda, All is Not Forgiven (Blackstone) “All Is Not Forgiven hums with brutal authenticity—Kenda the author and Kenda the character both deliver big procedural thrills that will keep readers guessing. I don’t remember a debut novel this assured—Kenda is the real deal.” –Tod Goldberg Amy Engel, I Did It For You (Dutton) “In this stellar standalone…Engel elevates the already tantalizing mystery with an uncommonly raw portrayal of Greer’s grief—her palpable inner struggles form the backbone of the novel. Mysteries don’t come much better than this.” –Publishers Weekly Paula Rodriguez (transl. Sarah Moses), Urgent Matters (Pushkin Vertigo) “Part thriller, part telenovela, a well-wrought tango noir.” –The Times UK Alice Blanchard, The Shadow Girls (Minotaur) “Just when this police-driven story seems to wind down, there’s a bonus mystery on top.” –Kirkus Spencer Quinn, Mrs. Plansky’s Revenge (Forge) “Mrs. Plansky is a wonderfully memorable heroine, full of wit and equally plausible as an ace tennis player and a motorcycle-driving detective with Romanian gangsters hot on her tail. Readers will be eager to see what Mrs. Plansky gets up to next.” –Publishers Weekly View the full article