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In TV, film, and books, both on our screens and on our bedside tables, con artists are rife. This year alone, four novels (“The Guest,” “Counterfeit,” “Scammer,” and my own “Sun Damage”) feature grifters as central characters. A slew of new TV shows, such as “The Dropout,” “Fyre,” “Inventing Anna,” and “The Tindler Swindler,” have emerged. Even the second season of “White Lotus” centres around a scammer. What is it about con artists that consistently captivates us? And how has our perception of grifters evolved in the realm of social media? From “The Sting” via David Mamet’s “House of Games” to the long-running BBC drama “Hustle,” it’s the tradecraft that draws us in. The bluffs, double-bluffs, tricks, and twists, along with the ‘in’ language, “the mark”, “the set up”, “the tats” and “smacks”, turn crime into a theatrical spectacle. Observing a con artist is like watching a magician perform, clever and audacious, fun and intellectually satisfying. (See Sandra Bullock shamelessly navigating Bergdorf Goodman’s makeup department in “Ocean’s 8.”) The more intricate the scheme and the greater the display of manipulative skill, the more the viewer is on the edge of their seat, trying to anticipate the next move. In “Hustle,” a complex scam executed by a mismatched London gang often appears to go awry, only for the final scenes to reveal that the apparent misstep was part of the plan. This double twist adds to the relief as the viewer realises they, too, were conned. Vera Tobin, a professor of cognitive science, suggests that real-life scammer Samantha Azzopardi, who deceitfully gained entry into Cambridge, worked like “a human page-turner.” She would lure people in with small confidences, test their vulnerability with bigger ones, and continue to surprise with twists and turns. If this is how it unfolds in reality, it is even more compelling in literature, where the con artist serves as an ideal unreliable narrator. In the early pages of Graham Winston’s “Marnie” (1961) or Emma Cline’s “The Guest” (2023), it’s the peculiarities that catch your attention (from the former: “everything I put on was new”). Moral ambiguity is evoked, as we encounter someone who may seem charming, sexy, or charismatic on the surface, but through their internal monologue, we know to be manipulative. It becomes a dual game of cat and mouse, where the con uses psychological tricks to exploit their victims’ weaknesses and vanities, while the reader is constantly trying to “read into things” to navigate their own path. Can the main character ever be trusted? Are they conning me too? In “The Guest,” written in the third person, we piece together Alex’s unravelling from the reactions of others. Winston takes a slower and more intricate approach, delving deep into the title character’s damaged perspective on men and sex. In a world where we negotiate the possibility of cyber-cons on a regular basis, it’s a cathartic process. The fascination surrounding Anna Delvey, the fake heiress, who has become the subject of memoirs, documentaries, art, and pop shows, reveals much about our collective psyche. She appeared to be living the high life, frequenting top-tier restaurants and luxurious hotels, projecting an image of a perfect existence. However, when it was revealed to be smoke and mirrors (in the art show, one work, titled “Send Bitcoin,” portrays her in a red dress with her back turned to us in front of a computer), the discovery is both shocking and satisfying. On a daily basis, flicking through Instagram, say, we deal with a million tiny issues of trust and deception. Are they really that happy? Is there a filter? Is that picture faked? Life is uncertain these days. We seem to know so much about people – news and images at the touch of a button – and yet also less than we ever did. The rich heiress who it turns out is nothing of the sort, is like a snake in the grass, slipping into the places we might dream about – the posh hotels and best restaurants and most exclusive bars – and by doing so reveals them as somehow shallow. It turns out, if we are clever enough, they can be all ours for the taking. *** View the full article

It’s a small bugbear of mine that gothic and horror are so often lumped together as the same genre. Many would argue that gothic is a subgenre of horror, but as a reader and writer of gothic fiction, I would have to disagree. There is, of course, a blurring of the lines between the two, as is the case in most genres, but they are quite distinct in the reaction they instill in the reader. According to the Cambridge University Dictionary the definition of horror is to ‘create a strong feeling of fear and shock,’ for gothic—once you get past all the bits about Gothic architecture and Gothic tribes of yore—it says ‘writing or films in which strange things happen in frightening places.’ Neither definition is terribly helpful. Both genres have a long and varied history in literature. Horror has been around since the year dot, setting its roots down in folklore around the world. And for centuries, horror was at its purest, feeding into our human fears of monsters, that shiver in the dark, and all those nasty things that preyed on us that we couldn’t explain. There isn’t a culture or civilization that doesn’t have dark and nasty creatures that steal out of the night to terrify clawless, fangless humans. But as we advanced and started explaining away our fears with science and new technologies, and we no longer lived cheek-by-jowl with the monsters of the night, we never truly lost our fears of the unknown. It was in the eighteenth century, in the age of Romanticism, that the lines of horror began to blur. Now that we no longer truly believed in vampires and werewolves, writers began to explore what we still didn’t know, what we couldn’t explain, drawing on our past fears to create fears for the more assured, modern humans who still wanted that oddly perverse human trait: to be frightened. These new stories set out to make us feel the horror we’d lost with the advances of civilization, framing our new fears of the unexplainable within a social scaffold, to toy with our obsessions of death – the one real great unknown left – but with a touch of romance to shock and titillate the more jaded sensibilities of the modern reader of the eighteenth and nineteenth century. And so a new subgenre was born, gothic horror. In its infancy, gothic literature was seen almost as satire, extravagant and indulgent, that appealed largely to women and was therefore considered inferior. These stories were often written by women for women, who used the supernatural to reveal their frustration of their enforced domestic role in society, their second-class status, their enforced subservience in a world built by men for men. It’s therefore not surprising that gothic books in the form of penny dreadfuls were seen as less than, an inferior second to male-written horror. Roll on a couple of hundred years to the present, and the boundaries between gothic and horror, while still blurred, have firmed into distinct genres. Yet horror is still primarily written by men, and gothic is still written largely by women. More recently, and to my delight, there has been a slight shift in gothic to modern gothic. It still isn’t a term used as often as I’d like to describe the works of gothic writers today, but it is appropriate for our age of readers that still loves the gothic genre with its gloom and romance, but brings stories with a modern twist that’s more in keeping with our modern lived experiences, providing a more relevant social commentary. As I delved deeper and looked hard at the books of horror and gothic I’ve read, it came to me that perhaps the divide is still more gender-based than I’d realized. Look at the most famous horror writers of more recent times—Stephen King, Grady Hendrix, HP Lovecraft, Dean Koontz with only a couple of woman authors to even things marginally, such as Anne Rice and Shirley Jackson (although I personally think Jackson fits very firmly in the gothic mould – again those blurring of lines). Yet when we look at the gothic authors, we get a more varied view of the authors of the past couple of centuries: Ann Radcliffe, Emily Bronte, Daphne du Maurier, Henry James, Lord Byron, Oscar Wilde and Edgar Allen Poe. A number of these authors fall into both categories. Interestingly, Shirley Jackson doesn’t feature often on gothic lists, considered primarily horror. But I was more interested in gothic written today and was not very surprised that they were almost all exclusively written by women such as Diane Setterfield, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Laura Purcell, Kate Morton, Catriona Ward and more. Again, not surprisingly, all these authors are still more likely to be classified as horror. Like all genres horror and gothic have tropes. For horror it’s supernatural, terrifying monsters of all forms who are, of course, super evil and hard to kill, isolated settings, a sinister castle, manor or similar, a brave but stupid hero/heroine who will definitely go into that dark room with echoing noises, cults and ancient curses that have terrified the local population for centuries, technology that suddenly and mysteriously stops working, suspicious, invariably creepy neighbors, and most importantly, the requirement to scare the shit out of the reader with shocking twists and turns, life and death situations where there can only be one survivor. Additionally, in horror there is always a resolution at the end of the story when the monster is destroyed and the horror is resolved. Gothic fiction tropes are more nuanced with some overlap: the isolated setting with a dilapidated castle or similar, an antisocial character who stubbornly remains in said dilapidated castle or similar, a long-suffering, but loyal servant who walks the dark halls and keeps their master/mistress’ secrets, atmospheric writing, unsolved mysteries that still touch the living, the suggestion of something supernatural that is often never seen but felt, foreboding suspense, intense emotion, a damsel in distress and the reclusive hero who will save her or needs to be saved which always leads to romance. Furthermore, in gothic fiction, while the mystery is resolved by the end, it is often not the end of the story but assumes a lingering emotional impact for the characters’ lives for years to come. Interestingly, the only clear overlap of the tropes is the isolated setting, often with a dilapidated castle or similar, the rest is a blurring of the lines once again. For me, what really defines horror from gothic is the style of writing and the atmosphere, the way the writing makes me feel. Horror’s main objective is to disturb the reader, to scare, and to repulse. Ann Radcliffe put it quite perfectly, when in 1826, she said, ‘Whereas terror is a feeling of dread that takes place before an event happens, horror is a feeling of revulsion or disgust after the event has happened.’ The horror writer wants to provoke emotion or a physical, toe-curling, fearful reaction in the reader. The monsters are often physical manifestations that are a genuine threat to life, a fight between good and evil (humans always being the good guys). The language is often graphic and gory, it does not generally dabble in purple prose and pretty imagery but goes for the visceral punch in the gut with baldly painted narratives. Gothic is subtler, it doesn’t grab you by the throat to terrify you. Gothic is a gentle creep of dread. It uses supernatural monsters as a device, shining a light on the monster within, the monsters humans, sadly, so often are. Often the supernatural elements are ambiguous, more a suggestion, a superstition, a claustrophobic alertness, that prickle of the nape that something is watching. It focuses more on the domestic scene, dealing with the tragedies and unsolved mysteries of the past that still haunt the living. It frequently highlights male abuse and control women have endured that still resonate in today’s society. The language used is quite different to horror, liberally sprinkled with purple prose, and dark, moody imagery (Gothic writers love mist!), the castles, manors etc. are often a personality in their own right, the tragedies of the past leaching from their walls. Gothic stories are often told in dual timelines, stories within stories, tragedies inherited, haunting each generation. So while there may be a blurring of the tropes of gothic and horror, they should be distinct genres because of the very different ways they make a reader feel. We do readers a disservice by placing gothic and horror in the same category. It leads to expectations that won’t be fulfilled and thereby damages the reader’s enjoyment of the book. There are readers of horror who will be disappointed when they read a book classified erroneously as horror that doesn’t give them the thrills and chills they’d expect of a horror, but the gentler menace of gothic. And there are those readers who hate horror, but would probably love the quieter creep, the more human element and atmospheric writing of gothic. *** View the full article

More than once, I’ve found myself sitting around with other parents of no-longer-small children, all of us telling stories in hushed voices about the times our kids went missing. It goes without saying that we only tell these stories because we are past the point where we might be tempting fate, because our children are older now and our fears for them are of a different sort. And of course we can only recount these tales because, in the end, they had happy endings; the children were returned to us. My husband and I once lost the oldest of our three children in a busy Washington, D.C. hotel during Barack Obama’s inauguration. Then an always-on-the-go three-year-old, our son sprinted ahead of us into a waiting elevator, threw us a devilish glance, and pushed a button. We watched in horror as the doors closed before we could reach him. Clutching our other son, an infant, and carrying the boys’ stroller, we ran down the stairs to the lobby, but when the elevator doors opened, our little explorer wasn’t there. For fifteen awful minutes, we couldn’t find him. Then suddenly, he appeared with a hotel security guard who’d found him on an upper floor. He’d been riding the elevators, having an adventure. As terrifying as that was, it was the disappearance of our younger son when he was two that still gives me chills. He had been playing quietly on his own in our rural backyard while I fed his infant sister and when I went to check on him a few minutes later, he wasn’t where I’d left him. At first, I walked calmly around the yard and then into the house, calling his name. I checked outside again. Inside again. I couldn’t find him anywhere. I called for my husband and our older son to search too but there was no sign of him in the yard or in our woods. After twenty minutes, I started to panic in earnest and rushed down to the swimming hole near our house. I was relieved to see the clear surface of the water unbroken and went back and checked our barns and outbuildings. He just . . . wasn’t anywhere. All the awful possibilities swirled in my head. Terrified, the minutes ticking by, we were about to call the police when my husband shouted to tell me he’d found our son. He’d crawled into the very back of a deep closet and fallen fast asleep. He woke up bewildered by our frantic voices and desperate hugs. Thirteen years later, my memories of that hour or so of dawning fear haven’t lost much of their sharpness. Until now, I had never written a mystery about a missing child. As crime writers, I think we are always exorcising our fears on the page, but I didn’t have enough distance to write about this one. As I got farther and farther from that stage of early parenthood though, I started to think about a missing toddler mystery for my series detective, homicide investigator and mother Maggie D’arcy, to solve. When she and her partner respond to a crime scene, it’s Maggie, with her parental intuition, who realizes that the young model found murdered in her Dublin apartment had a toddler — and that the little girl is missing. Maggie and her colleagues know they are racing against the clock to find the little girl, but her disappearance becomes more and more confounding the harder they look. I can’t say that writing a novel featuring the hunt for a missing child took away the power of some of my own worst moments as a parent, but I found it rewarding to mine this deep vein of love and pain and urgency for my fiction. Here are some of the richest and most chilling crime stories and novels about the disappearances of young children (I could have made an equally long list of novels featuring the disappearances of teenagers): The Adventure of Johnnie Waverly by Agatha Christie This early Hercule Poirot story has such a great set-up: a man named Marcus Waverly consults Poirot because he has received multiple anonymous warnings that his young child will be kidnapped. Despite layers of precautions, the child is taken and Poirot is called in to find out what happened. The solution is classic Christie, as is the circle of suspects in the Waverly house. Bunny Lake is Missing by Merriam Modell, writing as Evelyn Piper This 1957 novel was new to me and I was glad to have the chance to experience its surreal strangeness and mid-century paranoia. Single mother Blanche Lake goes to retrieve her three-year-old daughter, Felicia, nicknamed Bunny, from her first day of nursery school and discovers that not only is her daughter not there, but that the staff claim never to have seen her at all. Blanche’s odyssey around New York looking for Bunny is laced with anxiety and judgment about unwed mothers and women in the workplace. The novel has the feel of a noir film — it ended up being adapted for the screen by Otto Preminger in 1965 — and offers a Cold War-era spin on a thriller about a gaslit woman. Where Are the Children by Mary Higgins Clark The urtext of multiple point-of-view missing child thrillers, Mary Higgins Clark’s 1975 blockbuster both launched her crime fiction career and a subgenre. Re-reading this suspense classic after many years, I was struck by how many of the hallmarks of contemporary psychological suspense are here: the mother with a tragic past, the creepy abductor, his identity obscured and his point-of-view chapters creating rising dramatic tension; the true crime afficionado neighbor; the climactic final scene. The story of Nancy Harmon and her kidnapped children Missy and Michael recently got an update, with a sequel penned by bestselling thriller writer Alafair Burke called Where Are the Children Now? No More Dying Then by Ruth Rendell I’ve been re-reading from my Ruth Rendell/Barbara Vine shelf recently and I found this 1972 Inspector Wexford novel as dark and tense as I’d remembered. Wexford’s colleague Mike Burden is deep in grief for his dead wife when he becomes entangled with the mother of a missing five-year-old boy. The disappearance of another child looms in the background and Wexford diligently follows all the leads while a compromised Burden sets off on an increasingly disastrous path toward a solution. Gone Baby Gone by Dennis Lehane This gut punch of a novel is the fourth installment in Lehane’s Patrick Kenzie/Angie Gennaro noirish private eye series. When Kenzie and Gennaro are hired to look into the disappearance of four-year-old Amanda McCready, they find themselves in very dark places as they consider what might have happened to Amanda, and in very murky moral territory as they consider what to do with the information they find. It wasn’t the last time Lehane would write about missing children. In Mystic River, the kidnapping of eleven-year-old Dave Boyle in 1975 sets in motion a tragic series of events that Lehane explores on a tragic, Shakespearean scale. His excellent new novel, Small Mercies, is also about a missing daughter and the lengths to which a mother will go to find her. Heaven, My Home by Attica Locke I love everything Attica Locke has written and the two (so far) novels in her series featuring Black Texas Ranger Darren Mathews are both triumphs of characterization, setting, and plotting. In Heaven, My Home, Mathews is tasked with finding the missing son of a white supremacist. Locke draws Mathews as a conflicted, angry, skilled, and compassionate investigator, who wants to find the boy despite his father’s monstrousness. The solution is heartbreaking and surprising and as always, Locke makes you feel like you’ve been to her settings along Caddo Lake and breathed the humid, unsettled East Texas air. The Child Finder by Rene Denfeld Denfeld’s dreamy, icy tale of a woman who was herself a missing child and now uses her skill and intuition to find other lost children is suffused with fairy tale influences and atmosphere to spare. Years after a five-year-old child goes missing in the Oregon wilderness while looking for a Christmas tree with her family, Naomi Cottle is hired by the girl’s parents. As Naomi searches for the little girl, she is visited by her own confused memories of what happened to her while she was missing years before. I loved how Denfeld’s novel connects a missing child narrative to the many missing children in fairy tales and folklore. Rose Gold by Walter Mosley The central missing person in Mosley’s thirteenth Easy Rawlins mystery is actually a college student named Rosemary Goldsmith, the daughter of a weapons manufacturer. But in a strikingly affecting subplot, Mosley also tracks down a five-year-old boy abducted while his mother grieves her dead husband. Mosley’s depiction of the mother’s exhausted terror is especially well-done, and the answers he finds strike a satisfying note. No one Saw a Thing by Andrea Mara The premise of Irish crime writer Mara’s nail-biting new novel is a nightmare most parents have probably imagined once or twice. On a busy London train platform, Sive, visiting from her home in Dublin, is separated from her two young daughters when she looks down at her phone for a moment and the train doors close. (I felt this scenario vividly — see above.) She motions to them to get off at the next stop but when she gets there, the older girl isn’t there and no one has seen her. The plotting is twisty and puzzling and goes back to events in the past in Sive’s husband’s circle of housemates and friends. Mara captures Sive’s desperation so completely that you can’t put the book down until you find out what’s happened to the girl. *** View the full article

When it comes to fraught, intense bonds, it’s hard to top the twisted ties between some mothers and daughters. For my new thriller, Gone Tonight (On-sale August 1), I wrote about a mother and daughter who are isolated in their little family of two— which is just the way Ruth, the mother, likes it. She wants to keep 24-year-old Catherine by her side because a menace is closing in. But is the danger coming from the outside, or from one of them? A thin, jagged line separates maternal protection from unhealthy control. There are no blueprints or hard-and-fast rules for where it lies—every family gets to chart its own emotional topography—but when it is crossed, daughters immediately sense it. The deeper a mother travels into the territory of control, the more immense the repercussions on her relationship with her children, and it’s something I explore in Gone Tonight. Ruth has created a fortress around her and her daughter Catherine that no one can penetrate. She insists they move frequently. She has a tracking app on Catherine’s phone. But now, Catherine is ready to fly the nest, and begin a life that isn’t entwined with her mother’s. And Ruth will do anything to keep that from happening… If you’re like me and can’t get enough of creepy, scary or just plain strange mother-daughter stories, here are a few more I think you’ll love. Everything, Everything by Nicola Yoon Teenager Madeline Whittier has a terrifying, rare disease—she’s basically allergic to the world. She can’t leave her house or interact with anyone other than her mother and her nurse. Then one day, a new family moves in across the street. From her window, Madeline finds herself looking into the ocean-blue eyes of a boy who will change everything for her. But Madeline’s mother is desperate to keep her daughter locked in the safety of their home. She’ll do anything to protect her girl. The twists in this book are absolutely wild—I tore through the pages in a day. I’m Glad My Mom Died by Jeanette McCurdy Being a child actor seems hard enough. Add in an overbearing stage mom and it’s a perfect recipe for dysfunction. In her raw, shocking memoir, actress Jeanette McCurdy of iCarly fame reveals how her mother controlled her life, restricting her calories, giving her showers well into her teenage years, and reading her diaries. Part of what’s so stunning about this true story is how well McCurdy, a real survivor, has emerged from her disturbing upbringing. Baby Teeth by Zoje Stage This book kept me up at night – that’s right, I was completely terrified by the story of a little girl who wants more than anything to live alone with her father. And that means getting rid of her mother. Told from the points of view of both mother and child, you know something terrible is coming, because if seven-year-old Hannah has her way, one of them has to go. And her mother is starting to feel the same way. Tell Me Everything by Minka Kelly Minka Kelly starred on the hit show “Friday Night Lights,” playing a privileged cheerleader. But in real life, her story couldn’t be more different. In her memoir, Kelly reveals the dark underside of her seemingly glossy life: She was raised by a single mom who worked as a stripper and struggled with addiction, and Kelly lived in storage units and strange apartments, and sometimes endured watching her mother be abused. Their bond was complex, and part of what makes this book so riveting is the way Kelly describes it in unflinching detail. The Last Thing He Told Me by Laura Dave This isn’t your typical mother-daughter story, but I had to include it because the relationship is so beautifully crafted. Hannah Hall’s new husband Owen has a teenage daughter from a previous marriage—and despite Hannah’s best efforts, her stepdaughter completely rejects her. That is, until Owen goes missing and the two women who love him most team up together to find answers. The scare factor in this book comes from the outside, but the inner heart is the story of the slowly developing relationship between Hannah and her new stepdaughter, Baily. *** View the full article

Whether it’s Felix Unger and Oscar Madison or Mikael Blomkvist and Lisbeth Salander, we love a good odd couple. Watching two opposite personalities clash while they try to reach a common goal is one of life’s finer reading pleasures. Crime fiction lovers in particular have a banquet of unlikely teams to root for, whether they are law enforcement, private investigators, or amateur sleuths. The Lou Norton Series by Rachel Howzell Hall LAPD Homicide Detective Elouise ‘Lou’ Norton serves the ever-changing border of gentrifying Los Angeles. In the first book of this outstanding series, Land of Shadows, Lou is assigned a new partner, Colin Taggert, and the two couldn’t be more different. Colin is white, naïve, and fresh from the comparatively bucolic Colorado Springs police department. Black, street-smart native Angeleno Lou has no time for it. She tries to ignore her new partner, but soon realizes she’ll need every resource she can get to investigate the dark side of Los Angeles. The Ruth Galloway series by Elly Griffiths In Crossing Places, the first book in the series, forensic archeologist Dr. Ruth Galloway examines a skeleton suspected of being the body of a missing child. Galloway lives alone at the edge of the desolate Saltmarsh, her lifestyle and academic goals in complete opposition to brash, impatient DCI Harry Nelson. The one thing they have in common, though, is that their lives both revolve around death. Working together to solve the case of the missing child is awkward at first, but Galloway and Nelson’s differences make them a formidable investigative duo. Detective by Day Mysteries by Kellye Garrett Dayna Anderson doesn’t set out to solve a murder. All the semi-famous, mega-broke actress wants is to help her parents keep their house, and the reward money from a hit-and-run is too much to resist. Aubrey S. Adams-Parker, an eccentric ex-cop, represents the opposite of Hollywood types, and his passion for private investigation sets him up as Dayna’s rival to solve the hit-and-run. The two bump heads often enough for Dayna to realize that Aubrey might also make the perfect investigative partner. The Mace Reid K-9 Mysteries by Jeffrey B. Burton Mason “Mace” Reid is a down-to-earth guy with a quick sense of humor and an encyclopedic knowledge of all things canine. He’s a dog trainer who specializes in HRD—human remains detection—and at the beginning of The Finders, he meets his most gifted pupil imaginable. Vira, a golden retriever puppy, survived an attempt on her life and was rescued by the Chicago PD at nine weeks old. She quickly becomes a preternaturally talented cadaver dog, trained to smell death. Mace is shocked though, when he realizes that not only can Vira find a victim buried in the ground but also a killer lurking in the crowd. Dead Boy Detectives by the DC Comics Vertigo Imprint created by Neil Gaiman In 1916, Edwin Paine was murdered at his boarding school. After decades of torture he escaped hell and returned to earth, trying to protect student Charles Rowland from being murdered as well. He’s unsuccessful, but Rowland’s ghost decides to join Paine and the two become supernatural detectives in the afterlife. The unlikely duo turned into an unlikely trio when they meet Crystal, a girl with a gift for technology and a link to the undead. The Dead Boy Detectives originated in the Sandman comics, spun off into their own series, and are currently set to become a series on Netflix. The Lincoln Rhyme Series by Jeffrey Deaver Lincoln Rhyme was the premier criminologist in the New York City police department until an accident at a crime scene left him paralyzed. Three years later, he’s shut himself off from society and determined to end his life, until someone begins a killing spree around the city, leaving clues that only Rhyme can decipher. He recruits unwilling, temperamental Officer Amelia Sachs to be his crime scene technician. She’s transferring to a desk job and has no interest in forensics, but her growing concern for the victims draws her into the investigation and into the isolated Rhyme’s life. To Catch a Storm by Mindy Mejia When Jonah Kendrick, psychic detective, tells scientist Eve Roth, “I have certain parapsychological abilities to see things at a distance,” she promptly shoves him out of her house with a baseball bat and replies that the only way to see things at a distance is with a telescope. Eve is trained to measure the world in terms of concrete, replicable data, but her husband has gone missing and the police think she had something to do with it. She doesn’t believe Jonah when he claims to have dreamt about Eve’s husband, bound and bleeding in a barn, but Jonah might be the only person who can help Eve find him. Bonus entry: Odd Partners: An Anthology. Edited by Ann Perry. This Mystery Writers of America-sponsored anthology features nineteen original stories about unlikely detective duos solving intriguing cases. Edited by New York Times bestselling author Anne Perry, contributing authors include Jacqueline Winspear, Jeffery Deaver, Allison Brennan, Robert Dugoni, Charles Todd, and many more. The ultimate fix to satisfy all your unlikely partner reading needs! * View the full article

I have always wanted to be the Final Girl. I am the kind of person who delights in her own fear. There is something cathartic about the aftermath of terror, when you make your way to the end, and the credits roll. With a unique giddiness, I’d giggle, grinning into the screen until it went black. My skin would crawl and I the adrenaline of the jump scares would settle to a pleasant rush. I’d revel for a moment or two. This was excellent. This was everything. This…and then…I’d have notes. What would I have done differently? I’d think to myself. Never as the creator or the director, but as a character, placed into the world, dropped into the story. There was often an entire host of things I would’ve done differently. Don’t go in there, don’t separate from your friends, don’t turn your back to the open basement door, grab that knife-that baseball bat-that shovel while you still can. In my own mind, I would be the ultimate Final Girl, ready to triumph over the evil that had spent the entire movie terrorizing that tiny seaside town with nary a motive. And so I have always wanted to be her. The thing about being a child—a Black girl, at that—and loving horror movies is that you see very little of yourself on the screen. As an adult, I don’t always need to seek out representation of myself in the media I consume. But as a child, it is something I lived for. Every time, I saw someone that looked like me, living fantastical lives, I would feel an elation that was unmatched. But again, there have always been few Final Girls that look like me. When I conceptualized Their Vicious Games, I knew with immediacy what and who my Final Girl would be. Adina Walker, my Final Girl, is sometimes unlikable, sometimes stupid, and often stubborn to a fault. She is flawed in a way that Final Girls are only now allowed to be. She’s also Black. Adina exists in a story where the evil is the richest man in New England, and his motive is power he already retains. My Final Girl, for much of the novel, craved that power that he held. Adina Walker, at first, does not run away from the terror. She runs towards it. She’s a different sort of Final Girl. But, that doesn’t mean I shunned all of her predecessors. In fact, there are a few Final Girls that helped make my Adina the sum of her parts. While I have a special adoration for all Final Girls, there is one that has always stood above all the rest for me, and we’ll start with her: the incomparable Sidney Prescott. Sidney Prescott, the long-term protagonist of the Scream franchise, is a personal favorite of mine. Her arc throughout the franchise is consistent. She is someone who went from girlhood to womanhood during a time that was steeped in trauma, due to her mother’s untimely murder and her own subsequent torment at the hands of Ghostface. Rather than this being shied away from, within the narrative, both Sidney’s pain and triumph serve as the emotional backbone of the franchise. Each installment depicts this arc thoroughly, from Sidney retreating into herself during Scream 2 and Scream 3, and emerging into her own at the end of the third film and displaying it in both Scream 4 and Scream 5. This emotional arc is important to see. The consequences of what Ghostface does to Sidney is important to see. It is this idea of consequences that heavily features in Their Vicious Games. Every action causes a reaction, and while crafting Adina’s character, I thought heavily about the consequences of her own actions both before the start of the novel and by the end. No one remains unaffected by what occurs in the book. There is a mark left on everyone, even the tertiary characters, just as each Ghostface left a mark on Sydney—her very absence in Scream 6 speaks to not only the trauma she’s experienced but also the healing that she has done. (This hypothesis will of course be ruined when Neve Campbell is paid an acceptable rate for her talent and returns for Scream 7.) When continuing to craft the character arc for Adina Walker, my mind often went to the Final Girl at the center of one of my main inspirations for the novel, Ready or Not. The film is about a young woman named Grace with little outside support marrying into the extremely wealthy Le Domas family. As a newlywed and hungry to be accepted within their ranks, Grace is forced to play a deadly game of hide and seek. To win, she must survive until dawn. While Grace’s character is not rooted in suburbia like Adina, she is from the working class, which distinctly puts her in opposition of her wealthier in-laws, much like Adina and her potential in-laws. As I thought heavily about not only Adina’s character but also shaping the overall story, I thought about the well of untapped potential of the film. While Ready or Not deeply discusses class, I’ve always thought that it’s impossible to discuss class without discussing racism and gender. This is where Adina Walker lives—at the intersections of these topics—while still carrying at least a tiny bit of the tenacity and brittle rage that grows within Grace as the narrative carries her forward in the film. The final Final Girl that helped guide the growth and inspiration behind Adina Walker and the story at large, is much more rooted in reality than Sidney Prescott and Grace le Domas—Hannah Brown of The Bachelor franchise. Now, hear me out. You may be under the impression that The Bachelor franchise is simply reality television. You would be wrong. It is deeply rooted in a horrifying scenario—20-25 single women/men competing for the attentions of a single person, all while existing in the unbearable living conditions of the Bachelor Mansion, a residence that is notably and often in a state of disrepair. They are meant to endure group dates, one-on-one dates, hometown dates, and “Fantasy Suite” dates, all while performing a narrative for the camera and the supposed object of their affections. This alone sounds horrifying, but then one must take into account how heavily produced The Bachelor and its offshoots are. When I say ‘produced’, I mean this as a physical act. The drama and character arts are created (produced, remember) by people whose sole job is to generate good TV. In reality shows, good television means having contestants that typify to consistent archetypes (examples being the lawyer, the single mom, the Christian virgin, and the villain). Who these people are in real life doesn’t matter. All that matters is “the almighty edit”, and of these many, many people that have endured, few have risen above the character crafted in the edit. One such person is Hannah Brown. Hannah Brown, before her stint as the titular Bachelorette of The Bachelorette season 15, placed top seven in the 23rd season of The Bachelor. Her casting as the Bachelorette didn’t come as a surprise. After all, she had received the ultimate Bachelorette edit—depicted as a bubbly, kind, if placid young woman. Hannah rose from her season of The Bachelor and returned much like Sarah Connor in Terminator 2 as a different woman. Full of depth and pathos, Hannah Brown went through her season, battling misogyny and dodging kisses from multiple frogs at every turn. As Brown emerged from her cesspool of a season, she emerged as the most followed person in franchise history (as of July 16, Brown possesses 2.7 million followers on Instagram), commanding a beloved following of what is colloquially known as Bachelor Nation. Not only is she beloved, she emerged from the franchise beau-less and is dating someone privately. This is a win. She is the Final Girl of her franchise, emerging from the other side, without needing to reach back to the franchise for relevancy. This is the sort of ending that I wanted to create for Adina, an endurance that I find Hannah Brown embodies wholly. Adina Walker walks in the footsteps of her predecessors. She’s too stubborn to die, too furious to give up, and has heart that some of her companions lack. She falters, but never gives up. And when she looks past what’s in front of her, she’s smart and uses what she’s got to win. She doesn’t let her villains pass Go. She endures, and pain is part of her pathology. It is also her catharsis. In that way, she mirrors the Final Girls that came before her. In other ways, she differs. I have always wanted to be the Final Girl, but I have found few that look like me. I imagine that there are other Black girls that wish they had a Final Girl that feels like Sidney Prescott or Grace le Domas or even Hannah Brown. Now, I imagine that all they have to do is reads the words that I’ve written to find her. *** View the full article

After writing what many consider the most frightening book ever published and then scripting the scariest movie ever made, William Peter Blatty spent the rest of his life trying to convince people that The Exorcist was not a horror story but a supernatural detective thriller about the mystery of faith. The film enjoys its 50th anniversary this year. As a student at Washington, D.C.’s Georgetown University in the late 1940s, Blatty heard of a supposed possession that had taken place in nearby Mt. Rainier Maryland (actually Cottage City, Maryland) in which a young boy had been freed from the grip of the Devil by a local priest. “Here, at last,” Blatty would later write, “was tangible evidence of transcendence. If there were demons, there were angels and probably a God and a life everlasting.” Years later, as a Hollywood scribe (A Shot in the Dark, John Goldfarb Please Come Home), when the market for his comedy scripts dried up, he decided to sequester himself to produce a novel that would harken back to his Catholic upbringing about the existence of God. The result was The Exorcist (1971). The novel did not, of course, explode like pea soup from Blatty’s churning mind. It took time. He knew that his primary narrative was the possession and exorcism of a little girl–he made the victim a girl to differentiate her from the actual boy–by a priest who had lost his faith and would, by engaging the demon with God’s guidance, have it restored. But he needed something more worldly so the reader would have a story, not a pulpitry. Once he decided that the possessed girl would murder the obnoxious film director, Burke Dennings, it hit Blatty that the reader’s surrogate would be the detective investigating the crime. Now he had to invent one. Over the years he had made character sketches for a menschy police detective around whom he wanted to build a mystery. This was Lieutenant William Kinderman, long before Peter Falk’s Colombo, as Blatty was thereafter at pains to point out. Once, in the margins of a book called Satan by Frank Sheed, he had handwritten, “Detective—Mental Clearance Sale.” This gelled years later into Kinderman. “I think it was in 1963,” he would write in The Exorcist from Novel to Screen (1974), “the notion of possession as the basic subject matter of a novel crystallized and firmed.” Like all good mysteries there are several storylines running through The Exorcist: the murder, the possession, the nature of faith, the rivalry between the demon Pazuzu and his old enemy Father Merrin, and who will finish directing “Crash Course,” the movie Dennings was directing when he was killed (left unresolved). Kinderman, working both diligently and annoyingly, investigates how Dennings might have fallen or been pushed from the bedroom window and down the Hitchcock Steps, that 97-stair flight that runs from Prospect Street to Canal Road in Georgetown. He had to learn how paint chips from little Regan’s bird sculpture got to the base of the steps; where Karl, actress Chris MacNeil’s butler, was going late at night and why had he been exonerated after stealing drugs from his previous employer; who defaced the religious statues at Dahlgren Chapel in a matter akin to Satanists; why did Father Karras once write a paper on witchcraft; and might Reagan have used some of the marijuana he suspects Chris has been smoking? Blatty created enough red herrings to stock a fishmonger, yet kept all the threads in the air because exorcisms and homicide investigations are separate enterprises. Not all of the herrings made it into the 1973 movie. The two main plotlines don’t even come together until the very end of the story (by now it’s too late for a spoiler alert, so keep reading) when Kinderman knocks on the door of the MacNeill home just as Karras is daring the demon to “come into me” upstairs. Although his arrival looks like a coincidence, Kinderman is actually there to arrest Regan for the murder of Burke Dennings. He has no idea of all else that has been going on in the little girl’s life, and one can only imagine what he thinks when he ascends to Reagan’s bedroom to find Father Merrin dead, Reagan un-possessed and in tears, and then looks out the window to see Father Dyer giving Father Karras last rites on the cold pavement of Canal Street. The most profound mystery, however, is never solved: the existence of God. While Blatty posits that, if there’s a devil, there must be a god, a logician would argue that this is the same as saying if there are apples, there must be oranges. It’s a false equivalency. Perhaps Blatty pondered this when he wrote the sequel to The Exorcist, Legion, in 1983. In Legion, Lieutenant Kinderman has become friends with Father Dyer, just as he had been with Damien Karras. The two men discuss the existence of evil in the world; Kinderman is an agnostic Jew and Dyer, of course, is a faithful Catholic. When Dyer is murdered by a serial killer who, by all explanations, was executed years ago, Kinderman must discover not only the identity of the new killer but how the old dead killer is somehow reaching out from the grave. When Father Karris miraculously appears in the form of a jailed murderer, all of Kinderman’s bets are off, an so are the reader’s. The novel attracted attention but did not assume the same sales status as The Exorcist. The film that Blatty directed from it (The Exorcist III, 1990) suffered studio interference and was recut. But it already began with one strike against it: in the film The Exorcist Kinderman and Dyer never meet, so how could they be friends in The Exorcist III? In fact, Kinderman and Dyer had met in the original film, only it was in footage that never made it into the final cut: after Chris and Regan leave at the end of the story, Father Dyer watches them go and Kinderman approaches him as he once did Karras offering him free movie passes. This “Louie, this looks like the beginning of a beautiful friendship” Casablanca-like ending was nixed by director William Friedkin as being one story beat too many. When he gave in years later and sought to add it to a video re-release of The Exorcist, however, the Warner Bros. archivists couldn’t find the old dialogue tracks and, by then, actor Lee J. Cobb, who played Kinderman, had passed, so it couldn’t be restored. For Exorcist III, George C. Scott took over Kinderman. While the plot was not as linear as The Exorcist, Legion offers a more powerful argument for the existence of a god for whom self-sacrifice is a virtue of religious faith. (This theme is propounded more strongly in Blatty’s 1978 work The Ninth Configuration.) As with The Exorcist, much of the dialogue in Legion revolves around a restatement of philosopher David Hume’s test of logic summarized by asking, If God is all-powerful, then why does evil exist; if He is not all powerful, then why is he called God? In his many interviews over the years, William Peter Blatty spoke of “the mystery of faith.” It is a provocative, even challenging phrase. Mysteries either have a solution or they do not. Their solutions come from evidence and reason, but the evidence must be persuasive and the reasoning infallible. Using solid detective work, Blatty’s creation, Lt. Kinderman, solved two mysteries of the flesh only to remain baffled by the mysteries of the spirit. By gripping the minds of his readers and viewers, Blatty hoped to do more than capture their minds, he wanted to fill their souls. __________ Adapted from THE EXORCIST LEGACY: 50 YEARS OF FEAR by Nat Segaloff. Copyright ©2023 by Nat Segaloff. Reprinted by permission of the publisher, Citadel Press. All rights reserved. View the full article

I’ve always loved snakes. Don’t know why. My sisters didn’t. My sisters feared snakes. Which is irrational, as there aren’t any snakes in the UK. Well, that’s not entirely true—we do have the non-venomous grass snake (Natrix helvetica) and smooth snake (Coronella austriaca), and the ever-so-slightly venomous adder (Vipera berus), but they’re so rare and so secretive, you never see them. And on the odd occasions they do come out to bask, people crowd them like they’ve seen fucking Bigfoot. But I digress. For reasons unknown, ever since I can remember, I was obsessed with an animal I’d never seen. I had books on keeping them as pets (‘Never gonna happen,’ my mother said), I watched every documentary I could, and I talked about little else. In 1984 I joined the British Army (aged 16), and I still hadn’t seen a snake. Not even in a zoo. They were still this fascinating, almost mythical animal. I trained as an armourer for two and a half years (the military equivalent of a gunsmith), only because the army didn’t want snake handlers. I got posted to Germany (about the same number of snakes as the UK) and I did my army thing. But then, the most wonderful thing happened—during a posting back to the UK my unit was rotated to Belize for a tour. I was finally going to the same part of the world where snakes lived. And not just half a dozen snakes. Belize had sixty species. Sixty. Including my favorite at the time, the boa constrictor. I was off to Belize for six months. And what a six months I had. My unit was posted to Salamanca Camp, the smallest, most inaccessible military camp in the whole country. It was a twelve-hour drive from the airport, ten hours of which was along barely accessible mud roads. The camp itself was half a dozen huts, a helicopter landing zone (also the football pitch) and the mud road in and out. It was considered the worst place to be in Belize as there was nothing to do. No beaches, no idyllic islands, no interesting towns or villages to visit. It was a jungle camp in every sense of the word. I didn’t think it was the worst place to be, though. I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. Whenever I could, I was out in the jungle lifting rocks, rooting through leaf piles, climbing trees, annoying the shit out of the local flora and fauna. How I didn’t get bitten, I’ll never know. I don’t know what species the first snake I saw was. It was whip-thin and basking on an old dirt track I was jogging along. It figure-eighted its way back into the jungle as soon as it saw me, so I had no chance of catching it. I reckon it was a speckled racer (Drymobius margaritiferus) as it was black with blue and yellow markings, and they’re known for frequenting forest edges, even roads. Whatever it was, it was a huge moment in my life. A genuine thrill. Over the next six months I saw many snakes—boa constrictors by the dozen (and I never once got tired of them), eyelash vipers (look, don’t touch), milksnakes, coral snakes (another look, don’t touch snake), whip snakes, hog-nosed vipers, cat-eyed snakes, countless others I failed to identify. I even had a close encounter with the dreaded fer-de-lance (Bothrops asper), dubbed the ultimate pit viper due to its large size, large fangs, large venom yield and highly aggressive nature, and the only snake that had a page to itself in our pre-deployment briefing pack. It was entwined amongst the leg-press weights on the multigym, no doubt waiting to bite me on the ankles. Luckily, I was so used to watching out for snakes by then, I saw it immediately. Nice try, Mr Fer-de-lance. I returned to the UK, tired, tanned and happy, my obsession with snakes barely sated. I spent a few more years in the army then decided it was time to do something different—I chose social work, with specialisms in criminal justice and substance abuse (after qualifying I would go on to be a probation officer for 16 years). By this time, the UK market was wising up to the fact that there was money to be made from selling snakes as pets. And in even better news, there was brilliant reptile shop within walking distance of my student digs in Newcastle (a city in the far north of England). I walked into that reptile shop and immediately felt at home. Like I was Norm walking into Cheers. I could have stayed for hours talking to the customers and staff. I did stay and talk to the customers and staff for hours. Eventually, with the sun setting and the shop closing, I left with a handmade vivarium, a heat mat, a water bowl and other accessories, and, in an old pillowcase, a beautiful three-foot-long corn snake. Oh, and twenty frozen mice. Mustn’t forget about the frozen mice. I didn’t watch TV that week. I barely read. I tinkered with ‘Snakey’s’ (yeah, yeah, yeah, bite me) driftwood, I changed his substrate, and I freshened his water. And then, in what would become our Friday night ritual, I fed him a mouse. With me about six inches from his head, I watched as he unhooked his jaws and swallowed the thing whole. And the whole thing was kinda perfect. Everything I’d hoped it would be and more. Spin forwards a couple of years. I have a medium sized collection now. Nothing too difficult to keep, mainly North American colubrids—half a dozen corn snakes, a breeding pair of gopher snakes, a beautiful milksnake, some kingsnakes (I had a desert kingsnake which bit me every time I picked it up. Every. Single. Time.), a western hognose and a royal python. It was getting to be an expensive hobby, though. The snakes, their food, the substrate and the additional vivariums. Our heating bill increased. A hundred other little things that amounted to too much. I was still a student social worker. I barely had a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of. I had to make a decision: reduce or increase my collection. Reducing it would make my hobby affordable; increasing it might allow me to make a little money and offset the larger expenses. And if I scaled up, I might even make enough to afford my dream snake—which at the time was a green tree python. It didn’t seem like a hard decision at all. Three or four years pass. I’m a full-time probation officer. I have 100 breeding pairs of corn snakes. I understand snake genetics. I can predict what two snakes’ offspring will look like (there are charts) and I know how to exploit valuable mutations. I’m now one of the biggest private reptile breeders in the country. I supply hatchlings to most of the shops in the north of England and the south of Scotland. I’m selling surplus stock to the wholesalers, the guys who supply the big chains. I’m making more than enough money to pay for my hobby. It’s worked out exactly as I’d hoped. Until one Friday night (which is still feeding night) I realize something—I’m not enjoying it anymore. Probably haven’t for a while. Friday night feeding and Saturday morning cleaning has become a chore, not a joy. I’m beginning to resent it. Which is the exact opposite of what I set out to do. Even though I have the money to buy a green tree python, I no longer have the time or energy to care for a green tree python. So I did what I never thought I’d do—I sold every snake I had. Apart from Snakey; I couldn’t get rid of that guy. He was there at the start and he was there at the end, and by the time he shuffled off to that great vivarium in the sky, he’d reminded me why I’d loved snakes since I was a little boy. It’s because they’re perfectly evolved killing machines. They’re the great white sharks of the jungle. Of the deserts and plains. Of the woods and swamps. In many aspects, snakes are a lot like Ben Koenig. He’s an apex predator. He knows how to stay hidden. You won’t know he’s there, but . . . when it’s the right time to strike you sure will. And just like a snake, you’ll find he’s just as deadly, just as merciless. Just as fearless . . . *** View the full article

I knew when I gave my heroine, Junie Lagarde, a hearing loss, my secret would be out. It was going to be blatantly obvious that I knew exactly what hearing loss is like, because I live it. But I felt compelled to write about it. To dispel the notion that hearing tech is perfect—it’s not. To let the world know there is a reason people hate wearing hearing aids, which are about as comfortable as wearing baggy panty hose all day. I think we can all agree this is not comfortable at all. And I was simply fed up with the stigma of hearing loss, not to mention this would give me chance to deliver a sexy, daring, firing-on-all-cylinders character to the 48 million Americans who suffer from hearing loss. (There are even two times a year devoted to us: April is “Deaf History Month” and “Deaf Awareness Month” is September!) Giving my heroine a hearing loss also gave me several delicious opportunities to ramp up the tension. After all, I’ve written a thriller. Did she hear that? Does she know someone is stalking her? I live in the Distillery District of my southern city, and my favorite place to write is a Ukrainian coffee shop in an old bourbon warehouse. It was there I handed off my hereditary cookie bite hearing loss to Junie. Junie and I can hear acutely at the top and bottom frequencies of sound, and have severe to moderate issues with everything in between. Which is most conversations. Junie Lagarde handles her hearing loss with a matter of fact confidence and a lot of edge. If she needs help she asks for it. And it did not occur to me until I wrote it that … I could do the same. I had reason to worry. Every single person I know with a hearing loss gets told with great irritation they are loud. And when people said that to me it stirred up memories of old cartoons and sit coms where people with a hearing loss were feebleminded (not true) asked you to repeat things (true), wore giant hearing aids (nope, they’re invisible) said Ehhhhhh (never) and talked really loud (I’ve done that since I was born). The first time someone told Junie she was too loud, she gave them a menacing look. She asked them if they were the noise police and if so please show her their badge. I laughed out loud while I wrote it. Now I knew what to say. And so, like most toddlers, I learned to use my words, because nobody can read your mind. I let people know that turning up the volume of my hearing aids was unlikely to solve the problem — it only meant the refrigerator and the washing machine would be amplified for my hearing pleasure. Would they turn off the television or the music if they wanted me to hear what they said? They did. Nobody minded. Nobody cared. More than a few told me about their own hearing loss, and I advised them on what to do. I found the younger people were, the kinder. My coffee shop is full of college students, immigrants in expat huddles, and me at the wobbly table no one else wants. It is huge with a high ceiling and music playing and I could never hear when they said my order was up. So I told them I had a hearing loss, and here is the terrible thing that happened—the staff started bringing me my coffee because they knew there was no chance I’d hear them, and I would be so wrapped up in the writing I was likely to forget I ordered it anyway. And I realized that the stigma of hearing loss came from me. And once I got over it, so, it seemed, did the rest of the world. At the end of the day, Junie and I both savor the sudden quiet that settles when we take our hearing aids out, how the world goes peaceful and soft. June has her hearing dog Leo, and I have my hearing dog Leah, to howl sweetly and alert to the sound of sirens or alarms, people at the door or walking up behind us, packages delivered, strangers lurking around the house . . . and to guard us fiercely through the night. And now that Junie has brought me out in the open . . . I have given my Leah her own service dog vest. She is very proud. Like Junie, the first thing I hear in the morning is birdsong, so loud it wakes me up before the sun. And like Junie, I fall asleep to the sound of trains barreling along the tracks, and the thrilling forlorn wail of their horns that makes me want to pack a bag and my dog and go with them. We’ll do that in the sequel. *** View the full article

My mother was a private eye. She was petite and elegant, she could shoot and drive, and she was a crack investigator. She was born in Paris in 1933 to an American banker and a Connecticut socialite and lived there until the Germans drove them out. She arrived in Manhattan speaking only French, and all she wanted to do was return to France and fight in the French Resistance. She was seven. Everywhere she went in New York City she would listen to groups of people talking and try to make out from their tone and gestures who was a Nazi spy. She had the investigative bent early on. Once she had kids she got her P.I. license. About a week later the FBI called. They wondered if she could help them track down the perpetrator of a large fraud on the Bank of New York. They thought they knew with whom he kept contact, and they didn’t have an agent who could mix with the silk stocking set in Greenwich, Connecticut. Mom was thrilled. It took her about an hour and a half to track him down. She thought she recognized the surname and she pulled out the Social Register to confirm and called her aunt. It turned out that Aunt Maribel played tennis with his aunt in Woodstock, Vermont. So my mother called the old dowager. Mom had done her research and she said she was an old flame of Franklin’s and had his 10th Mountain Division dog tags and she thought he might want them back. Could mom send them? The aunt tittered and said that she had had a beau like that once, too—”Every girl should have one, shouldn’t they?”—and she gave mom the address where he was staying. Mom climbed into her fifteen year old Volvo wagon and drove up to southern Connecticut. She parked on a hill above a fancy horse property with white rail fences and a big clapboard house and pulled out her opera glasses. (Later she would use Swarovski compact binoculars but these worked just fine.) After a while a man came out of the back door. He matched the description and he climbed into a gold-colored Mercedes coup and drove up the road. Mom tailed him and she claims they had a car chase through the back roads of Darien. She was a very skilled driver so I don’t doubt her. After about twenty minutes the man pulled over. It was a lonely country road and I guess his curiosity got the better of him: who was this little woman in a beat up wagon who could barely see over the steering wheel but seemed, in silhouette, well-coiffed? Mom pulled up behind him and got out. Click click on the pavement went her Italian pumps, jingle jingle went the gold bangles on her wrists. Warily he rolled down his window. “Franklin,” my mom said, “What you’re doing is wrong. It’s not good for you, it’s not good for your family, and you need make this right. What we’re going to do is: I’m going to follow you back to where you’re staying, and then we’re both going to drive together down to the Bank of New York and you’re going to settle this thing.” And he did! My mother’s moral authority is inarguable. They called the bank and drove down to Manhattan and Mom said that when the special agents put the cuffs on him, Franklin looked so crestfallen and brokenhearted that she never wanted to do perp cases again. She decided she would reunite birth families. Caro Watkins Heller and her partner Pete Beveridge reunited over a hundred birth families. These are mostly very cold cases, and often the names and places given are wrong, and so the investigative work is tough. They did it pro bono for people who could never afford a P.I. But I often wonder if she completely gave up that other life. She was gone a lot. The bookshelf above her bed was not only stuffed with Dick Francis and Agatha Christie novels, there were manuals on surveillance, firearms, breaking and entering. I know she had developed another identity—she said it was for fun—complete with credit cards and driver’s license, and when we opened her safe after she died we found eight handguns, speed loaders, ankle holsters, pen recorders, and wigs. My little mother was a certified badass. I miss her a lot. I grew up and became an author and wrote a novel based on her life called Celine. Mom is in there, as written. I write in a lot of genres, but if sometimes I write crime thrillers you can see why. *** View the full article

The CrimeReads editors make their picks for the best new fiction in crime, mystery, and thrillers. Naomi Hirahara, Evergreen (Soho) Hirahara’s Clark and Division was one of the more accomplished crime novels in recent memory, and this year she’s following it up with Evergreen, following Aki Ito and her family as they make the journey from Chicago back to California, where they find the Japanese-American community in distress. Evergreen dives into the shadows of Boyle Heights and Little Tokyo to tell a story about one of the darker chapters of American history. With these books focused on the Japanese-American experience of post-WWII America, Hirahara has found a pivotal subject and brought her immense talents to bear. –DM Catherine Chidgey, Pet (Europa) Damn this book is good. Pet is at once a brilliant coming-of-age thriller and a sharp dissection of racism and misogyny in 1980s New Zealand (apologies, a previous version of this post had the setting as Australia). When a new teacher comes to town, every girl in class is swooning over her glamor and vying to be her favorite, even when the competition for affection tears lifelong friendships apart. Meanwhile, someone’s been stealing things in the classroom. Little things, but they’re greatly missed. And someone will have to take the blame, because for every pet, there’s a scapegoat. –MO Mindy Mejia, To Catch a Storm (Atlantic Monthly Press) In Mejia’s latest (the launch of a new series), an atmospheric physicist with a husband gone missing teams up with an unlikely partner—a self-declared psychic detective. The pair begin a mad dash around Iowa, fighting the elements, fleeing authorities, and wrestling with doubt and skepticism along the way. Mejia brings out the tension perfectly and crafts a thriller that will drive readers barreling forward. –DM Denise Mina, The Second Murderer: A Philip Marlowe Novel (Mulholland) The Second Murderer is the latest in the strange afterlife of one Philip Marlowe, and it represents a return to form for the series, the most interesting iteration since Lawrence Osborne took a crack at it with Only to Sleep. Mina has obviously made a close study of Chandler’s particular brand of poetics, while still bringing her own enviable style to the story, which traverses high and low Los Angeles of the period. Mina also brings a critical eye to Marlowe in the best sense possible: understanding him in his core. His weaknesses are on display, but so is the deep strain of romanticism underpinning this seemingly immortal literary character. –DM Christine Mangan, The Continental Affair (Flatiron) Mangan has quickly made a name for herself as a purveyor of international mystery with a dash of glamor. Sure enough, The Continental Affair brings us onto a train from Belgrade to Istanbul and into a story that will hop from one lushly recreated locale to the next. A woman on that train is holding a good sum of money; a man on the same train has been sent to collect it. Their stories will take readers down a gauntlet of rich settings and haunting back stories. –DM Jesse Q. Sutanto, I’m Not Done With You Yet (Berkley) Man, does Jesse Q. Sutano know how to plot a novel! By God. You know when novels start out by showing how their protagonists have it all: great career, attractive and successful spouses, beautiful homes? This starts out with the complete opposite premise! Jane’s books don’t really sell, she’s got a bland marriage, and she’s stuck paying a mortgage for a house she barely likes. She misses Thalia, a friend from her past; her best friend, her soulmate, whom she hasn’t seen since the horrible, bloody night one decade earlier. Now, though, Thalia has written a book–a book that seems like it could be about that fateful moment, a book that is poised to rocket to #1. And so Jane heads to the book launch, to see her old friend again. Because she’s not done with Thalia. And Thalia, clearly, is not done with her. I told you! What a premise! –OR Jamison Shea, I Feed Her to the Beast and the Beast Is Me (Henry Holt) In this ballet horror novel, a young ballerina is given a chance at power after a star of the company takes her under her wing. But all power comes at a cost, and this power derives from an ancient source with its own agenda. I’m not sure what it is about dance that lends itself so well to horror—think Black Swan or Suspiria—but add this one to the list of stories that take the bloody feet and brutal precision of the dance world and turn them into visceral horror. –MO David Joy, Those We Thought We Know (Putnam) Joy is back this year with a new novel about a small mountain town in North Carolina and a pair of crimes that resonate through the community. The story follows an artist from Atlanta looking to explore her family roots and the investigation into a presumed vagrant who turns out to be a Klansman on a mission. Joy weaves the stories together and comes out the other side with a richly-layered vision of a small town living through the broader crises of a divided nation increasingly enamored with violence. –DM Stephen Kearse, Liquid Snakes (Soft Skull) This book has the best tagline: “What if toxic pollutants traveled up the socioeconomic ladder rather than down it?” Kearse weaves together two main stories: a Black biochemist-turned-coffee-shop-owner in mourning for his stillborn daughter, dead because of toxic chemicals leaking into Black neighborhoods, and crafting a toxic revenge plan, and two Black epidemiologists investigating the mysterious death of a high school girl. Liquid Snakes is a compelling dystopian novel that rewards careful reading and uses the structure of a criminal investigation to channel righteous anger and explore weighty questions. –MO Ken Jaworowski, Small Town Sins (Henry Holt) In a tough Pennsylvania town on the precipice, three lives and three stories barrel toward calamity in this debut novel from Ken Jaworowski. Small Town Sins gives us a portrait of modern America in all its dark complexity, as Jaworowski brings insight and empathy to his characters’ struggles, while always maintaining the story’s strong momentum. –DM View the full article

Sometimes secret codes can be the poignant echoes of languages that have been suppressed by conquering powers. There are words and phrases and cadences that have been smothered by oppressors and, as such, can be used by their original speakers in the spirit of defiance. This was the case for the languages spoken by the many tribes of the Native Americans in the early years of the twentieth century, whose lives and cultures had been decimated by the swarming colonialists taking over the whole of North America. The new rulers of the west decreed that the children of Native Americans should be turned away from the old tongues. They were enrolled in boarding schools far from their own homes to be educated out of old family ways. Yet somehow the languages survived. And out of this cruelly implacable conquest came a rather beautiful cryptography development in the Second World War. Languages such as Navajo and Comanche were suddenly called into fresh life during the war years when they were needed to communicate secrets. These were tongues that the Japanese would not have the first idea about. The languages were used in substitution ciphers, one word standing for a particular letter. And in faster moving theatres of war, the languages would be spoken as they were when they were formed – a swift and brilliant means of conveying messages and intelligence. Sometimes the poetry of these crushed languages even found fresh flowering. The men who became the ‘code talkers’ found themselves at the heart of the conflict and their contribution was invaluable. The idea had been around since the Great War. And indeed, in the inter-war years, as the Nazis ascended to power in Germany, they too took an interest in the possibility that the languages of the Native Americans offered (there is a suggestion that Goebbels considered these peoples ‘Aryan’). A few German linguists were assigned the task of immersing themselves in Comanche, both to get a feel for it and also to see what code possibilities presented themselves. Some, posing as graduate students, came specifically to the States to try to discreetly find ways of studying it. Yet with bitter irony, it turned out that there was little written material for them to draw from. The nineteenth- and twentieth-century erasure of these native languages was so thorough that there was no literature to be found on them. The Comanche people had, among themselves, managed to keep the traditions and the language alive, but there was little for the outside world to see. A further bitter irony was that the American government had good reason to be grateful that these and other native tongues had not been so thoroughly exterminated as intended. And fortunately, some of the young Native Americans who had been through those obligatory government boarding schools to turn them away from their old traditions were perfectly enthusiastic about throwing their skills into the conflict that was coming. Some of the traditions that the US authorities had sought to stamp out were warrior rites of passage. The young Comanches and other Native Americans had never forgotten them and here was an opportunity to offer their courage on their own terms, with skills that only they possessed. When America was finally pulled into the war in December 1941, following the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, the code talkers were swiftly assembled. Indeed, some had been brought together a year earlier. As an example, a company of two dozen Choctaw speakers from Oklahoma had been mustered and they had been put through the rigorous training of signals intelligence. Together they worked to contrive a brand-new code that would employ the Choctaw language, while at the same time keeping the meanings opaque. Because of new modern technology, there were some English terms that had no equivalent in Choctaw – and the result was an outbreak of delightful (and cryptic) similes. For instance, they would make references to ‘sewing machine guns’, and mighty ‘turtles’, all under the direction of ‘Crazy White Man’. Even if enemy interceptors picked up these terms unencoded and managed to translate them from the Choctaw, what could they have made of them in any event? ‘Turtles’ referred to tanks and ‘sewing machine guns’ were in fact machine guns. And Hitler would have been displeased to hear that he was the ‘Crazy White Man’. The brilliance of the code talkers was to reach its height in the summer of 1944, and in the bitter final battles beyond as the Nazis were finally vanquished. Teams of Choctaw speakers, Comanche speakers and Hopi speakers were among the thousands who, with grace and courage, crossed from England to France on 6 June 1944 – D-Day. At the start of the desperate battle for the soul of Europe, the code talkers proved brilliantly agile and dexterous in getting vital intelligence over to units moving across all sorts of terrain. With radios, headphones and field transmitters, these signals operatives were on those deadly beaches as the landing parties were attacked, moving through countryside infested with a still venomous enemy, and as they spread out through France, Luxembourg and Belgium, their exquisite languages formed an indispensable web of unbreakable communication. The hazards all these men faced were akin to those that the agents of the Special Operations Executive were also challenged with. There were gun battles, mortar attacks and the constant threat of injure, capture or death. Even so, through all of this, the code talkers provided incredibly fast, on-the-ground intelligence. The commanding officers in several platoons were profoundly impressed with their lateral-thinking recruits. As with all matters cryptanalytical, the tragedy of the story of the code talkers is that the brilliant work they did, and the courageous feats they pulled off, had to remain a secret for many years afterwards. Who knew if such secret codes might be needed again? Therefore many of the code talkers had to wait a great many years before they got the full public recognition and the praise that they deserved. There were post-war instances where Comanche men, now demobilised and back in the US, took part in traditional celebration dances where the cloud of war could be ceremonially dispelled from their heads. Happily, their story could finally be told and even now there are branches of the US military that periodically honour this brave fleet of code-carriers. After all the bitter years of violence and suppression in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as Native Americans were harried and dispossessed, this at least is a small recognition of the richness of the culture that the United States had once sought to wipe from the land. ___________________________________ Excerpted from The Hidden History of Code Breaking: The Secret World of Cyphers, Uncrackable Codes, and Elusive Encryptions by Sinclair McKay. Published by Pegasus Books, August 2023. View the full article

The whistleblower cuts a lonely figure. Disruptive by definition, the whistleblower is the ultimate outsider – a shadowy player who ignores not only the rules, but the very team itself. The whistleblower’s motivations are often misunderstood, and their habit of exposing difficult truths means they are easily smeared by their detractors as troublemakers, fantasists and traitors. All of these qualities make the whistleblower an excellent character in crime fiction. My novel, The Messenger, follows the journey of Alex, a young man who has just been released on parole for the crime of killing his father. Alex claims he was wrongly convicted, is desperate to prove his innocence and to find his father’s real killer. Eddy, his father, was an investigative journalist in Paris, where the novel is set, and in his quest to reveal the truth about Eddy’s murder, Alex uncovers secrets his father died trying to expose. As Alex investigates Eddy’s death, he discovers a ring of corruption with a stranglehold on the city, a conspiracy whose deep roots are entwined in the civil unrest Paris is famous for. As the novel progresses, Alex draws close to Eddy’s enemies and comes to know his father in a way he never did when he was alive. Like his father before him, the more Alex uncovers, the more isolated he becomes, and the more he is pursued for what he knows. The novel has as its focus the insidious pull of corruption: how it drags people into its orbit whether they choose to get involved or not. The novel explores the dangers of staying silent and the even more risky act of speaking out. In developing the characters and plot of The Messenger, I drew upon my own experience as a whistleblower in London’s financial sector. At the time, I was working as a lawyer in a fast-moving, niche area where cutting corners was the norm. The deals were at the sharp end of the law, but they were legal: nothing out of the ordinary in an era of freewheeling, light touch regulation. There was one high-value transaction, however, that went beyond that, pushing into the realm of fraud. When I expressed my reluctance to participate in the deal, my bosses said they would make it worth my while. It was not immediately clear what that meant, but the proposition held a vague, unlimited promise. No figure was mentioned, but my imagination bloomed. The deal was in the hundreds of millions of pounds so the sky was the limit. My bosses were asking me to name my price. I was stunned, and in that moment of disorientation I have to admit, I considered it. Not out of greed, but because going along with their scam was easier than speaking out. The best crime stories come from insiders, but as we know from crime fiction, being an insider is a dangerous game. Faced with the prospect of speaking up or staying silent, most people keep their mouths shut. If they don’t then they are dealt with. The clock starts ticking; their days are numbered. In real life too, whistleblowers are intimidated, victimised and harassed. Sometimes they are killed before their message gets out. That’s why the most serious crimes are the ones we never hear about. That invitation from my employers also held within it, of course, a vague, unlimited threat. Was it really worth my while to refuse? I considered pursuing a middle course – staying silent while backing away quietly, watching from the sidelines and not playing an active part. But I was fixed with knowledge of what they were up to and if the deal went ahead, I knew I would be dragged into it one way or another. I had no choice but to speak out, to try and stop the transaction. But what would happen to me if I did, I wondered? I would lose my job for sure, but what other risks was I taking? These are the dilemmas all whistleblowers face as they consider stepping forward into lonely and dangerous territory. How will they be treated once they refuse to play ball? Turning against the team is precarious, particularly when you get between people and their money. I soon found out what it meant for me. Within an hour of refusing my bosses’ offer, my access to the computer network was denied, security card cancelled and I was escorted from the building like a criminal. To this day I still don’t know what my colleagues were told about my sudden disappearance from the office. No doubt word got around that I had done something terribly wrong. And indeed it felt like it. Suddenly the tables were turned and my employers created trumped up charges against me that I was forced to defend with expensive lawyers. My bosses combed through my employment history, emails, documents and correspondence looking for evidence that would cast doubt on my judgement, skills and character. They had to neutralise me now I had gone rogue. They had to shoot the messenger before the message got out and that meant bullying and intimidating me, undermining everything I said. If they couldn’t find anything substantial against me, then they would wear me down with false allegations and legal fees. Remarkably, there are lawyers who specialise in intimidating whistleblowers and the lawyers my employers engaged were experts in their field. They knew exactly how to scare me, sending motorcycle couriers regularly to my home to deliver intimidating documents. Once I was even served when I was in the playground with my kids. The message was clear from the helmeted, leather-clad messenger: not only did they know where I lived they knew my routine. So I stayed indoors, watching my legal bills rack up as I tried to make sense of the mess I was in. The blueprint for this kind of treatment could have been plucked from the pages of a noir thriller: shatter the protagonist’s worldview; destroy their identity, mission and purpose. Alone and isolated, their mind becomes warped. Gaslighting activates paranoia and intrusive thoughts. Nightmares lean into suicidal ideation. My employers didn’t find anything to hang me with and the charges they brought were baseless, but the process they instigated was frightening and deliberately drawn out, continuing for well over a year. I hung in there, found another job while I fought the allegations and then finally, it was over. I received a settlement and critically, the transaction collapsed when financiers took flight at the adverse publicity. I had disrupted the deal, but at what cost to my health, family, career and sanity? I will probably never really know, but the experience certainly disrupted my view of the world and human nature. Sometimes, the information revealed by whistleblowers is so disruptive it causes a seismic shift in our understanding of how society works. This happened in 2016 with the Panama Papers, history’s biggest ever data leak. The information disclosed to journalists from an insider at the Panamanian law firm, Mossack Fonseca, showed the real workings of the global financial system. The Panama Papers revealed how the secret off shore industry was ‘not as had been previously thought a minor part of our economic system, rather, it was the system’. The Panama Papers exposed the role of off shore structures in the increasingly aggressive accumulation of wealth by a rich and often criminal élite. “Making the decision to compile the data available to me at Mossack Fonseca took days and felt like looking down the barrel of a loaded gun, but ultimately I had to do it,” the Panama Papers whistleblower has said. Another massive shift in public perception occurred in 2013 when NSA whistleblower, Edward Snowden, exposed the extent of global mass surveillance, including the extent to which the US and UK governments spy on their own citizens. Whistleblowers who expose the secret machinations of the State are in even more danger than those who expose financial wrongdoing because national security legislation often trumps whistleblower protection laws. This leads to uncomfortable questions regarding the safeguards that are meant to be in place to stop a government overreaching its legally mandated authority. No other whistleblower more exemplifies our conflicting attitudes towards whistleblowers than Edward Snowden. He has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, and also vilified as a traitor deserving of the death penalty. A month after Snowden’s revelations, the US Department of Justice charged Snowden with violating the Espionage Act and stealing government property, following which The Department of State revoked his passport. Ironically, Snowden finally found refuge in Russia, a regime that itself treats whistleblowers and journalists as traitors. I have never regretted blowing the whistle, but I often wonder whether I would do it again. Many whistleblowers say the same thing. Upsetting the herd requires the kind of recklessness you can really only do once, when you don’t know the ramifications. Although the ending of my story was a satisfying one, the journey itself was harrowing. All whistleblowers subject themselves to the kind of treatment you wouldn’t wish upon your worst enemy. In their mission to reveal the truth they are forced to take the kind risks we wouldn’t dream of, and mostly they do this not out of choice, but necessity. * View the full article

“All the world loves a lover,” said someone (not Shakespeare, it turns out) expressing the universal appeal of romance and that enraptured state of attraction that often leads to procreation and the perpetuation of our species. And then there are those cases, fictional and non, where the lovers’ chemical infatuation leads to the inverse of reproduction: the murder of their fellow Homo sapiens. Yes, we’re talking about Mickey and Mallory in the Oliver Stone-Quentin Tarantino collaboration Natural Born Killers; Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate the real-life spree killers from the 1950s; Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow who shot to death policemen and civilians during the Depression; Karla Homolka and Paul Bernardo who abducted and murdered several young women in Canada during the 1980s. What are the twisted dynamics of a romantic affair that transforms partners in love into partners in homicide? The world may be in love with lovers, but the world abhors killers. Let’s look at the psychological, emotional, and narrative factors that go into portraying how falling in love can expose the sometimes thin line between romantic coupling and murderous complicity. “Folie à deux is defined as shared psychotic disorder in leading medical and psychiatric journals. It’s a relatively rare clinical syndrome, and its characteristic feature is the transmission of delusions from an inducer, or primary, to another person, or secondary.” So declares our podcasting crime journalist, Ryanna Raines, at the top of Episode 40 in our new crime novel, With a Kiss We Die. In extreme cases, folie à deux can lead a pair of intimates to plot and commit murder. We modeled our fictional crime story on a real-life double homicide that goes back to the mid-1980s. A retired married couple, Nancy and Derek Haysom, were found savagely stabbed to death at home in their quiet, family-friendly suburb of Boonsboro, Virginia. In this case, the adverb “savagely” is apt. Derek had been stabbed more than thirty times and Nancy at least six. Both had their throats slit and had been nearly decapitated. “To me, it was like a slaughterhouse,” said Chuck Reid, a Bedford County investigator who was one of the first detectives on the scene. There was no sign of breaking-and-entering. Nothing was stolen. In fact, there had been a place setting for a third person at the Haysom’s dining table. And there was evidence that whoever instigated this brutal bloodbath had rinsed off in the family shower before taking their leave. Six months later, Elizabeth, the Haysom’s 21-year-old daughter, and her boyfriend, 19-year-old Jens Soering, were in police custody and would eventually be charged with murdering her parents. Several investigators, journalists, and criminal psychology experts believed the root cause of their actions was the psychiatric syndrome known as folie à deux. The term comes from the French and translates in English as “madness for two.” * Stories of couples driven by passion and lust to commit crimes should be familiar to fans of hardboiled fiction and film noir. Lovers-turned-killers like Phyllis Dietrichson and Walter Neff, Matty Walker and Ned Racine, and Cora Smith and Frank Chambers have become enshrined in the darker veins of pop culture. “Double Indemnity,” the novella by James M. Cain that was adapted into a screenplay by Billy Wilder and Raymond Chandler, was based on the sensational real-life case of Ruth Snyder and Judd Gray whose hot-blooded extramarital affair led to the cold-blooded murder of Snyder’s husband. What was the stronger influence that drove Ruth into this murderous conspiracy, the love she felt for her new partner or the hate she felt for her husband? It’s a question the public found endlessly fascinating and helped spawn the “black widow” sub-genre in books and movies. Then there are the spree killers, couples who commit multiple acts of indiscriminate violence during a compressed period of time. These lovers are often fueled by such extremes of emotional stimulation that their moral compasses go haywire. Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate were the real-life models for this type of folie à deux in the 1950s. During an era of conformity to conservative family values, their destructive path was seen as the darkest kind of social rebellion. Their troubled personas then morphed into the film characters Kit and Holly in Terence Malick’s Badlands (1973) and again into Mickey and Mallory in the Quentin Tarantino-written, Oliver Stone-directed Natural Born Killers (1994). The common throughline here is two young people for whom the combination of social alienation and an overdose of oxytocin (the “love hormone”) triggers a mutual homicidal rage. Bonnie and Clyde are another subset of lovers whose romantic attraction is the spark that sets off a murderous combustion. The crime this pair set out to commit was robbing banks, not murdering people. Their first killings were committed during the act of robbery against the bank guards and lawmen who tried to stop them. The pair seemed to grow more desensitized to the act of killing as their number of victims rose and at the same time were spurred on by the tabloid infamy they achieved between the springs of 1932 and 1934. Their co-dependency descended to the point they made a pact to go down together in a hail of gunfire rather than be forced apart by the law. Whether they were actually caught in the grip of a shared psychosis is debatable, but their killings became increasingly ruthless and by the time they met their famously violent end the couple had left a trail of thirteen bodies across Texas and Louisiana. Karla Homolka and Paul Bernardo fall into an even more problematic category—kidnap-torture-kill perpetrators. Dubbed in the press as the “Ken and Barbie Killers” because of their outward normality and physical attractiveness, this married couple committed acts together that pushed the boundaries of aberrant behavior. Their entanglement was dominated and propelled by intense sexual lust. The psycho-dynamics between this couple were so toxically complex that it’s hard for most of us to imagine. Or so repellent that our imaginations automatically reject going there in fear of beholding a darkness we can never un-behold. Certainly each had experienced their own psychological trauma by the time they fell into each other’s orbit. But the chemical reaction set off by their conjugation led to the most disturbing kinds of acts one human being – let alone two – can inflict on another. Which brings us back to Elizabeth Haysom and Jens Soering, who authorities believed conceived, planned, and committed the hyper-violent murders of her parents. When we came upon this case through a documentary film “Killing for Love,” a nonfiction crime book “Beyond Reason: The True Story of a Shocking Double Murder, a Brilliant Virginia Socialite and a Deadly Psychotic Obsession,” and multiple true crime podcasts, we were baffled. How could these two intelligent, privileged, seemingly well-adjusted college students have committed such a horrific crime, not just of parricide but of double parricide? Writing With a Kiss We Die and creating the characters of Jordan De Carlo and Victoria Berne was a way to work through our bafflement by constructing an up-close look at “madness for two”—and how it manifests in a love story that takes a terribly wrong turn. *** View the full article

Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Megan Davis, The Messenger (Pegasus Crime) “An intelligent, gripping, and stylish literary thriller—I couldn’t put it down. Megan Davis is a major new talent.” –Sophie Hannah Mindy Mejia, To Catch a Storm (Atlantic Monthly Press) “[P]ropulsive . . . Mejia sets things up nicely for further teamwork and conflict between Jonah and Eve, at the nexus point of what we can — and choose to — believe in.” –New York Times David Joy, Those We Thought We Knew (Putnam) “[A] searing stunner of a book…It’s like a Nina Simone song that contains ‘an infinite sort of sadness,’ yet closes with a promise of hope.” –Minneapolis Star Tribune Naomi Hirahara, Evergreen (Soho) “Hirahara humanizes the struggles of Japanese Americans rebuilding their lives from scratch. Her evocation of Little Tokyo haunts will bring a flood of memories for some Angelenos while introducing a new generation of readers to a pivotal period in L.A. history.” –Paula Woods, The Los Angeles Times Kyle Dillon Hertz, The Lookback Window (Simon and Schuster) “The prose is remarkable, alternating from lush sensuality to unsparing brutality to quick cutting asides. This marks the arrival of a vital new talent.” –Publishers Weekly Peter Heller, The Last Ranger (Knopf) “Heller offers an immersive story of a dedicated Yellowstone park ranger and the threats he faces down….Strong characterizations, a vivid sense of place, enough wolf lore to fill several NatGeo specials, and a Boy Scout Handbook’s worth of wood-crafting tips. Fans of fiction about the outdoors are well served.” –Publisher’s Weekly Sabine Durrant, Sun Damage (Harper) “Claustrophobic and suspenseful, with an engaging narrator and a satisfying twist: perfect poolside reading.” –The Guardian (UK) Gillian McAllister, Just Another Missing Person (William Morrow) “A twisty exploration of professional and familial responsibility, the anonymity of the internet, and the slippery slope to criminality.” ºKirkus Reviews Yepoka Yeebo, Anansi’s Gold (Bloomsbury) “For two decades, a Ghanaian con man surfed a wave of lies and luck, living large on multiple continents while swindling ‘millions upon millions of dollars’ … Even as [Yeebo] catches readers up in what often reads like a breathless caper, the author takes care to ground them in what matters most: Ghana and its sadly ‘fragile’ history … Utterly absorbing.” –Kirkus Reviews Catherine Ryan Howard, The Trap (Blackstone) “Howard’s propulsive new thriller is inspired by a spate of unsolved disappearances in Ireland in the 1990s…This scary, twisting, and psychologically incisive commentary on the recent increase in missing and murdered women in Ireland will leave readers guessing until the gut-punching reveal.” –Library Journal Lynn Hightower, The Beautiful Risk (Severn House) “Sensitive characterizations match the imaginative plot. Readers will compulsively turn the pages to see how it all ends.” –Publishers Weekly View the full article

Tanzania in East Africa has a complicated history. Sitting there on the Indian Ocean bordering Uganda, Kenya, Mozambique, Malawi, Zambia, Rwanda, Burundi, and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) – that’s a lot of neighbours. Once part of German East Africa, then ruled over by the British as Tanganyika (first as a League of Nations mandate and then as a United Nations trust territory until the 1960s and independence as Tanzania. You’d be forgiven for thinking the capital is Dar es Salaam, “Dar” to those that know it, right there on the coast. And Dar is the financial capital and most populous city of the country with six million people (out of a total population of over 60 million). But since the mid-1970s the capital has actually been Dodoma, with just 400,000 people. So in this Crime and the City we’re looking at all crime writing across the country. You might not expect Regency romance and detective fiction writer Georgette Heyer to be included in Crime and the City Tanzania, but she qualifies. Heyer married a mining engineer and they lived in the old Tanganyika for several years in the 1920s. Apparently they lived deep in the bush where her husband was surveying for minerals. She wrote a couple historical romances while there and tells Tanganyika tales in her memoir but didn’t really get into detective fiction for another decade with her series of books featuring Superintendent Hannasyde and Sergeant (later Inspector) Hemingway. There are some criminal elements in Beauvallet (1929), a novel of Elizabethan pirates that she started work on while in Africa. As far as I know Jean Scholey only wrote one crime novel – The Dead Past (1961) – but it happens to take place in colonial Tanganyika, and it is assumed (though little is known of the author) that Scholey was living there as a colonialist. The book features a murder investigation led by District Commissioner Geoffrey Hallden. The Saturday Review critic, back in the 60s, explains why The Dead Past might be worthy of a mention here, “setting is beautifully authentic … story is rather weak”. And they were right – there are lots of local insights – pombe shops and the local Indian community. An African policeman assists Hallden, a bit of Swahili is thrown in for good measure. It’s the rainy season, the police in Dar es Salaam cannot get to the murder site in Kilimani and so the colonial District Commissioner is the best they’ve got. A historical curiosity perhaps, but an apparently fairly faithful rendering of rural Tanzania at the time from a colonial perspective. The writer PA Roberts, author of White Kings Corrupt Asians in Tanganyika (2016), apparently grew up in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam in the decades just before independence. It’s an historical crime novel set in the colonial era with Ray Silcock, police chief of Tanganyika on the trail of corrupt cops, missing Indian diamonds and an illicit affair with the governor’s wife. And Chris Bohjalian, of The Flight Attendant (2018) fame, has been back to colonial Tanzania too – at least on the page. The Lioness (2022) sees a Hollywood actress, her producer husband and a bunch of A-listers holidaying in the Serengeti with a few G&Ts and some gazelle meat on the BBQ. Then a kidnapping gone wrong, some Russian mercenaries and a whole of trouble in Tanganyika. Bohjalian has written that he researched the book on a safari in the Serengeti in December 2019 and that, writing during covid, ‘the Serengeti fifty years ago helped keep me sane when I was alone in my library in Vermont.’ And some other crime novels set in Tanzania… Mario Bolduc’s Max O’Brien mystery series heads to Tanzania in The Tanzania Conspiracy (2018). Following the murder of Tanzanian lawyer and ex-lover Valéria Michieka and her daughter Sophie, Max O’Brien travels to Tanzania to track down those responsible. There he finds human traffickers and endangered lawyers. This is the third of three Max O’Brien novels, originally published in French by the Montreal-born writer Bolduc. Cape Town writer Irma Venter has launched the “Rogue” book series set in Tanzania and originally written in Afrikaans. Hard Rain (2020) is the first with journalist Alex Derksen’s starting his new assignment in Tanzania. an IT billionaire washes up onshore after seasonal flooding and Ranna, a beautiful photographer Alex knows, is the prime suspect. Book two in the series is Man Down (2021), again featuring Derkson and Ranna, moves the action to South Africa. And fans of Clive Custler will not be surprised to know that he has also spent some time in Tanzania in Lost Empire (2012) featuring his popular husband-and-wife treasure-hunting team Sam and Remi Fargo. This time scuba diving off the Tanzanian coast, discovering a former Confederate ship that sank off the African coast, and whose contents is claimed by the Mexican government somehow uncovering a conspiracy that connects the 1883 Krakatoa explosion with an attempt to resurrect the fallen Aztec empire. Really for fans of Custler’s oeuvre only to be honest. Sometimes in this column it is hard to find local crime writers who’ve been translated into English. Asking around just about everyone mentions Ben Mtobwa, who has written a series of popular detective novels featuring detective Joram Kiango. But they’re in Swahili and the books are yet to find a translator. Similar so (I believe) the Zanzibar writer MS Abdulla who published six detective novels between the mid-1960s and mid-1980s featuring a kind of Tanzanian Sherlock Homes, Bwana Mesa, complete with smoking pipe and deductive skills. One can only hope for translators and publishers to discover these writers. Still, we do have S Ndunguru, a Tanzanian author of Young Adult mystery and detective books published by Mkuki na Nyota Publishers, a book company founded in 1981 in response to a general absence of independent scholarly publishing in Tanzania. Spared (2015) introduces two Tanzanian officials, Tom and Chris, heading to Sweden. While there Linda, daughter of a Swedish billionaire, and Tom’s friend, is abducted. Much action involving snipers, lots of money and power and some thrilling set pieces. In Divine Providence (2012), a world-renowned scientist is saved from drowning by a young doctor before the same scientist is saved from kidnappers by the daring action of a young nurse. In A Wreath for Fr. Mayer (2016), Ndunguru introduces us to the Tanzanian district of Masasi where a cholera epidemic and a murder see a local priest determined to get to the bottom of it all. And finally, we started with a writer, Georgette Heyer, you might never had associated with Tanzania, and we end with another, more contemporary one, Ann Cleves. Best known for the rugged northeast English coast in her Vera Stanhope novels or the island of Shetland in her Jimmy Perez series, Cleeves went to Tanzania for her 40th wedding anniversary. Out of that trip to the Serengeti came a short story – Moses and The Locked Tent Mystery included in the collection Ten Year Stretch: Celebrating a Decade of Crime Fiction at Crimefest (edited by Crimereads regular Martin Edwards, 2018). In this column we focus on crime but it’s worth mentioning that while we have only a couple of local author mentioned here Tanzania has no shortage of writing talent. Tanzanian novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah won the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature – and a tradition of crime novels, often incorporating local beliefs and traditions, but sadly very little in translation. Aside from crime, the novels of Gurnah are well worth reading, as are those of Tanzania-raised author M G Vassanji, particularly Uhuru Street (19910, collection of stories set in the Asian community of Dar es Salaam, and the often simultaneously hilarious and poignant short stories of Sandra Aikaruwa Mushi in her collection Stains on my Khanga (2014). View the full article

Molly Odintz: What did you want to explore in your novel about the experience of occupation? Kemi Ashing-Giwa: The aspect of occupation I most wanted to explore was the contradictory nature of the imperialistic machine. Across history, the most “successful” empires grew in no small part via assimilation. (How we determine the metrics by which the success of nations is measured is a complicated question well worth delving into, but that’s for another time, and for those more knowledgeable than I). These empires not only forced their own way of life upon peoples they viewed as “lesser”—they also absorbed and sometimes even adopted the cultures of the defeated. Empires are hungry creatures; they survive only by devouring others. True occupation merely begins with land. In The Splinter in the Sky, even as the Holy Vaalbaran Empire crushes Koriko beneath its boot, it steals Korikese artifacts for its most prestigious institutions to study, mimics Korikese customs, and appropriates Korikese dress. It goes without saying that these practices were drawn from reality. I am from a family of multigenerational immigrants; my mother is from Trinidad, her mother is from Grenada, her father is from China, and my father is from Nigeria. All of these countries suffered (and, in many ways, continue to suffer) at the hands of colonialism and imperialism; my parents were both alive when their homelands declared independence from British rule. Exploring that ongoing history, along with the strength and ingenuity it took (and takes) to fight oppression, was a way for me to explore my own family’s history. MO: What makes genre fiction so good as a medium for exploring social issues? KAG: The speculative aspect of science fiction (and fantasy) constructs a sort of distance between real world issues and the issues the genre tackles. For me, at least, this distance offers a sense of safety, as well as flexibility—one can explore the human condition and critique society without the necessary constraints of historical or contemporary fiction. Science fiction can also present extremes to really drive a point home; dystopian and utopian fiction are incredibly powerful—and popular—subgenres. MO: What are some of your influences? KAG: They change from project to project, since I try to challenge myself and write something new with every story. That being said, N.K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season was, by far, my biggest influence for The Splinter in the Sky. If it hadn’t convinced me there could be a place for my stories on shelves, I doubt I would’ve ever pursued publishing. Other significant influences for my debut novel include Rivers Solomon’s An Unkindness of Ghosts, Ann Leckie’s Imperial Radch series, Arkady Martine’s A Memory Called Empire, and Nghi Vo’s The Empress of Salt and Fortune. MO: How did you balance between the grand nature of Space Opera and the quiet plotting of intrigue? KAG: The setting of The Splinter in the Sky spans a solar system, but most of the plot takes place in the shadows. Although the story is technically a Grand Space Opera, the main characters are deeply invested in avoiding Grand Space Opera Events (i.e., interstellar war), and work to do so via relatively subtle (but often nevertheless bloody) methods. I can’t say much more without spoilers! MO: Who are some writers you want to recommend to our audience ? KAG: I wholeheartedly recommend reading any of the stories I mentioned earlier. One upcoming book I’d suggest keeping an eye out for is Hana Lee’s Road to Ruin, a high-octane science fantasy tale that’s pretty much a sapphic Mad Max: Fury Road with magic. It comes out in 2024, and though I’m only a few chapters in, I can assure you that it involves a whole lot of delicious intrigue. MO: What does genre fiction provide when it comes to telling queer stories? KAG: Genre fiction has the ability not to only explore or critique societal ills but also to illustrate how ridiculous bigotry is. Many works of science fiction and fantasy take prevalent contemporary biases for granted, despite the fact that those stories often take place a thousand years in the future or in another universe entirely. This can inadvertently suggest that such prejudice is only natural. Not every setting has to have the same problems ours does—after all, not every society in real human history has had the same problems we do. One can, for example, build a diverse, queernorm world and still criticize homophobia (or any other -phobia or -ism) through metaphor. There is, of course, a difference between unexamined bigotry and an analysis of that bigotry. Stories that explicitly deconstruct and condemn intolerance are important and necessary, but I don’t think there will ever be enough stories of unabashed, uncomplicated queer joy too. *** View the full article

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