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It’s another great year for historical fiction, as many of my favorite trends from the past few years continue; in the list below, you’ll find con artists and queens, spies and spiritualists, nurses and ne’er-do-wells, vagabonds and vigilantes, and marginal characters of all kinds fighting to stay afloat in a cruel and inconsiderate world. The works below have a bit of a 19th and 20th century bias, in particular focusing on the mid-1800s and the Interwar Period, as well as several set just after the end of WWII. You’ll find the familiar within the strange, and the strange within the familiar, in each of these works, for the job of the historical novelist is to walk the tightrope between universal human truths and particular period details. I do not envy this Sisyphean task, but I do celebrate all those who accomplish it. Joel H. Morris, All Our Yesterdays (Putnam) Setting: Scotland, 12th Century In this rich historical reimagining of the lead-up to Macbeth, Morris asks, what if the Lady MacBeth had a son? And what if her new relationship with the thane MacBeth after the death of her brutal first husband was predicated on equality and respect, as opposed to the beaten-down womanhood of others in 11th century Scotland? Thoughtful, eerie, and full of medieval magic, Morris’ take on the much-maligned lady will perhaps have you rooting for her and her partner, or at least, feeling some sympathy for her quest of vengeance. Briony Cameron, The Ballad of Jacquotte Delahaye (Atria) Setting: Caribbean, 17th Century This is a fascinating take on a rumored real-life figure, the swashbuckling Jacquotte Delahaye, but one which takes plenty of narrative license to fill out the gaps in her amazing tale. Jacquotte begins the novel as a shipbuilder, but through no fault of her own, soon becomes an outlaw, and must take to the high seas to preserve her own life and those of her companions. She quickly grows her crew through enlisting some nontraditional sailors, and finds herself on a path towards safety and autonomy—if she can keep herself from a showdown with her nemesis, of course. Joyce Carol Oates, Butcher (Knopf) Setting: New Jersey, 19th Century This well-researched historical tale of medical experiments gone haywire looks to be a perfect match with Joyce Carol Oates’ visceral style and violent explorations of American sins. Set in the 19th century, Butcher follows a disgraced surgeon sent into exile at a “Asylum for Female Lunatics,” where he finds himself surrounded by vulnerable patients and with few potential consequences for wrong-doing. This is sure to be one of her best yet, and I don’t say that lightly. Amanda Jayatissa, Island Witch (Berkley) Setting: Sri Lanka, 19th Century Another gothic tale helping to decolonize the genre! Set in 19th-century Sri Lanka, Amanda Jayatissa’s Island Witch follows the outcast daughter of the local demon-priest as she tries to find answers in a series of a disappearances rocking her small community. Jayatissa’s novel is steeped in folkloric traditions and sumptuous landscapes for thrilling, feverish read. Carmella Lowkis, Spitting Gold (Atria) Setting: Paris, 1866 Another Atria title on the list! And another one concerned with mystical frauds—this time, two spiritualist sisters, famed in their teen years for their convincing seances, held in the most prestigious salons and parlors of Paris. The elder sister must be coaxed out of her comfortable retirement married to a baron so the two can pull off one last con, but all is not what it seems in this lush and twist-filled tale. Spitting Gold is carefully plotted, fully characterized, and incredibly satisfying, so I must apologize to all for telling you how great it is so many months before you can actually read it. Elizabeth Gonzalez James, The Bullet Swallower (Simon & Schuster) Setting: Texas and Mexico, 1895 This new novel about family secrets and living landscapes takes on epic proportions, jumping between mid-century Mexico and the final days of the old West, turn of the century, unlocking a cache of sins passed down through one family and reverberating across the generations. Gonzalez writes with great skill and imagination. –DM Katherine Arden, The Warm Hands of Ghosts (Del Rey) Setting: Flanders, 1918 Two soldiers are lost in no man’s land when they find a mysterious h iome of revelers waiting to take them in, but not quite ready to let them leave. Meanwhile, the sister of one, a combat nurse, returns from Canada to seek her brother in the mud and muck of the front lines. Katherine Arden’s haunting gothic delves deeply into the emotional and physical landscape of WWI for an enthralling and heartbreaking read. Kirsten Bakis, King Nyx (Liveright) Setting: New England, 1918 The first novel from Kirsten Bakis in 25 years! In King Nyx, set during the height of the Spanish Influenza, a sensible woman of a certain age and her flighty yet devoted husband head to a remote island. They’re looking forwards to a stay at the manse of an eccentric robber baron; her husband is hoping to finish his magnum opus on meteorological anomalies (rains of fish, frogs, blood, etc), and Bakis’ narrator simply wishes to get some rest. Upon arrival, however, they find out that multiple girls have gone missing from the rehabilitation home/workhouse also located on the island, and they must isolate in quarantine for at least two weeks before they even meet with their mysterious benefactor. There are neighbors in quarantine as well, also on the island for an intellectual retreat, and Bakis’ narrator soon teams up with the kindred spirit next door to understand what’s going on. Bakis’ symbolism is particularly on point, with a creepy garden, a beautiful set of parakeets, and automata aplenty. Future students will highlight the crap out of this book. Lee Mandelo, The Woods All Black (Tordotcom) Setting: Appalachia, 1920s Leslie is a battle-hardened nurse for the Frontier Nursing Service, where he’s often sent to outposts so remote they don’t care about his gender-non-conforming ways, but his latest posting seems bound to endanger him from the get-go. He’s ready to perform a certain amount of femininity to get the townsfolk to at least agree to get their children vaccinated, but he’s soon out on a limb trying to rescue another gender outlaw as the small village joins forces against both, fueled by their preacher’s hatred and his angry god. This book was so good. And sexy. Very, very sexy. Don’t read that ending in public. Chris Harding Thornton, Little Underworld (MCD) Setting: Omaha, 1930s Chris Harding Thornton is a seventh-generation Nebraskan, so you know that this tale of underworld greed and vengeance set in 1930s Omaha is going to be authentic AF. Thornton’s language captures the pulp era perfectly, and her sharp metaphors and quick action sequences poetically dictate the disastrous lives of her ne’er-do-wells as they struggle on the margins. A must-read from a writer to watch. Vanessa Chan, The Storm We Made (S&S/Marysue Ricci Books) Setting: Malaya, 1945 In one of the best espionage novels I’ve ever come across, a bored Malaya housewife lets a Japanese spy charm her into giving up the secrets necessary for her nation to be invaded; later, as the war continues, her guilt grows monstrous as her children suffer. Clare Beams, The Garden (Doubleday) Setting: New England, 1948 Clare Beams’ luminous and disturbing new novel is set in a grand old home built by a robber baron and then turned into a hospital for women having difficulty bringing their pregnancies to term. The house is more prison than shelter, and the doctors are more interested in experimentation than care. Irene, the headstrong heroine of the novel, finds herself in need of a backup plan to secure the safe delivery of her infant, and that’s when things get really weird. While this book is well-grounded in its historical setting, the way the book explores medical and societal control over women’s bodies feels incredibly contemporary. John Copenhaver, Hall of Mirrors (Pegasus) Setting: Washington, D.C., 1954 In the midst of the Lavender Scare, a mystery novelist is murdered, killed in an arson attack on the apartment he shared with his lover and writing partner. The grieving writer is hell-bent on finding the cause of his partner’s death, but Copenhaver’s teenage sleuths-turned-lovers from The Savage Kind are alternately helping and hindering in the investigation, as they continue to pursue their old nemesis, now wreaking havoc in the State Department. An excellent continuation of Copenhaver’s series, richly detailed and with convincingly realized characterizations. Maxim Loskutoff, Old King (Liveright) Setting: Montana, 1970s Maxim Loskutoff’s Old King is as majestic and foreboding as the old growth forest featured so heavily in its pages. The setting is Lincoln, Montana, where, in the wake of America’s bicentennial, an angry recluse named Ted Kazinski (the Unabomber) is preparing to spread chaos through the US mail system, convinced that his acts of random violence will spark an uprising against the era of the machines. Loskutoff spends only small sections of the book immersed in Kazinski’s disturbing perspective, peopling the rest of his pages with a well-sketched cast of characters strongly divided on a host of questions: do they protect the forest or exploit it? Is modernity an evil? Is it inevitable? And can it be stopped? Bret Anthony Johnston, We Burn Daylight (Random House) Setting: Waco, 1993 That setting tells you straightaway what this one’s going to be about: the Branch Davidians, the Waco siege, and the ordinary lives caught up in a flash-point moment that will reverberate for a generation to come. We Burn Daylight uses the perspectives of two star-crossed lovers—the sheriff’s son and the unbelieving daughter of a cult member—to navigate the complexities of the showdown, for a moving and epic tale. I would expect no less from Johnston. View the full article

At my desk in the office at the bottom of the garden, under a jacaranda tree, in one of the most violent countries in the world, I write a murder mystery series set in a pretty village in the Cotswolds, in England. In real life, the Cotswolds is a place where the murder rate is close to zero. A local news article “Rise in violent crime in Cotswolds” tells us that there was one homicide – a category which includes both murder and manslaughter – in the year 2022. In the previous 12 months, there had been none. In our books, life in the Cotswolds is far more perilous. Under the pen name Katie Gayle, my co-author Gail Schimmel and I have killed off a dozen or so people in six books and counting, in a popular genre called “cozy mystery”. Think Murder She Wrote, or the books of Agatha Christie or Richard Osman. A defining characteristic of this genre is the absence of graphic violence, grit and gore. When bad things happen, they happen off-page, out of sight, and with a certain delicacy. The victims are more often than not pushed off hilltop walking paths, or drowned in picturesque lakes, or bonked on the head in the heat of the moment with heavy domestic objects (a frying pan, a doorstop). When readers meet them, the violence is over. Some of the victims are long dead, but recently discovered. The crime is solved not by the police, but by an amateur sleuth – in our case, Julia Bird, a practical, wise woman of 60+ – using instinct and good old common sense. Thanks to her efforts, justice is served. I forget exactly what I was writing that morning, a year ago – perhaps Julia was taking a walk through the soft green of the spring woods with her chocolate labrador, or on her way to her volunteer job at the local Charity Shop where she might happen upon a useful clue – when a man appeared at the door of my office with a gun. I had heard the garage door open, and my son’s footsteps, and his voice: “My mom’s in there.” When I looked up, he was standing at my door with another man, who I took for a friend until I saw that he was older, and he was holding my son’s arm tightly, and he had a gun. Three more men jostled nervously behind him. Because I don’t live in a village in the Cotswolds, but in suburban Johannesburg, I said to myself, quite rationally, “Ah, okay, so this is how it goes down. An armed robbery. It’s finally happening to us.” I know dozens of people who have been robbed, carjacked, mugged, scammed, and held up, but other than the cellphones pickpocketed from my kids at clubs and festivals over the years, we have largely dodged the odds for decades. The man cut to the chase: “Do you love this boy?” I assured him in a voice so calm I didn’t recognise it, that yes, I love the boy. “Where are the guns… the safe… the money?” We own neither guns nor a safe full of cash – I wondered briefly if everyone else had such things, and if our oversight in this matter made things better or worse for us – but I assured him that I would give him whatever else he wanted. And I did. I gave him the wedding ring off my finger. All my “good” jewelry, my mother’s and my grandmothers’, none of which I ever wore, because who, in Johannesburg, would be so foolish as to wander about in gran’s amethysts? Instead, I tucked the little sack of treasure into the corner of a high up cupboard in my bedroom, and when the moment came, I climbed on a stool and handed it over at gunpoint. I feel there’s an edifying lesson there, or an inspiring meme about wearing your good bra and lighting the Jo Malone candles, but that’s not the point I’m here to make. They took phones and laptops. Passports and bank cards. A crappy television. My RayBans. The saxophone my husband has played in dozens of bands since he was 17. Oh, and our car, which the boy had been driving when they followed him into the garage and held him up. Because we were mostly face down on the carpet while the men ransacked the place, other absences went unnoticed, and months later, when we’d ask each other, “Have you seen my black coat… my torch… the backgammon set…” (That last, in a smart leather case, was a disappointment, I’m sure). The third person The trauma counselor had me look at a point on the wall next to her and give a brief account of what happened on that day. I was to tell it fast, without dwelling on details, and I was to tell it in the third person, as if it had happened to someone else. This intrigued me. One of the most defining choices you make as a novelist is that of the narrative voice, or point of view. It’s the perspective from which the story is told. Each narrative position brings with it its own problems and possibilities. The voice that comes most naturally to me as a writer is the close third person. The best way to describe it is as if the protagonist has a camera on her shoulder, showing the reader the action. It’s not the protagonist herself talking (that would be first person), but it is the protagonist’s view of the world. The close third person is, in many respects, a terrible choice of narrative voice. It’s one that causes me no end of trouble. It has all the disadvantages of the first person narrator – you can only see what your protagonist sees, think what she thinks. It means your protagonist has to be in every scene, and has to find out anything that happens “off stage” through investigation, conversation or some other means. The close third person also lacks the advantages of the more traditional omniscient third person narrator, who resides outside of the action, who can travel through space and time, who can get into anyone’s head, who knows what everyone in the story knows – and sometimes more. I’m not cut out for all-knowing omniscience. Or for the constant spotlight of the “I”. The close third’s slanted intimacy, the feeling of being almost inside the protagonist’s head, but a little detached, works for me. And now here I was in the trauma counselor’s room, telling my robbery story in some therapised version of the close third person, speaking fast, as instructed, without explanation or elaboration. She walked into the house with him behind her… They took the boy… He told her to lie down… I offered none of the details that a novelist would ordinarily linger over and polish, or work for effect. The way the robbers stepped politely over the sleeping dog on their way into the house. The peculiar feeling of a shared objective with my captor, working together to get this thing done quickly. His heavy work boots – all I saw of him, as I kept my head down to avoid seeing his face. The heft of the little drawstring velvet pouch of rings and necklaces in my palm. The weird sense of time, and the wondering – are we halfway through this yet, maybe even three quarters? The hyper-vigilant listening, the gratitude for every minute without the sound of a gunshot. He pointed… She nodded… They left… In a couple of minutes, the tale was told. It sounds kooky, but I’m not averse to a bit of kooky in extremis, and it seemed to sort of work. My words raced, relating the events, but for the first time, my heart did not. I was detached from my own story. Gradually, we begin to feel calmer. Family, friends and neighbors hold us with their bountiful love, care and food (even in trauma, a young man welcomes a lasagne). We go again to the trauma counselor. We sleep a little better. There’s less weeping. Less forgetting of words, appointments, pots on the stove. I no longer feel as if my veins run thick with cortisol soup. You might call it healing. The second body In a murder mystery story, the discovery of a second body brings new information. It provides fresh clues and opens up the investigation in surprising new ways. It discounts certain potential suspects and brings others to the fore. It tells our sleuth something she didn’t previously know. Two months after our robbery, on a warm summer evening, I returned home from a poetry club meeting, buoyed by words and friendship and a glass of champagne, to find my husband standing outside on the veranda waiting and pacing. “J is dead.” I knew from his face that there was more. “He was killed. In a home robbery.” Not far from where we live, in a suburban home on a tree-lined street, a gentle, brilliant man, a poet, a writer, a husband and father, had been stabbed. The cortisol soup came sloshing back. My son sat with me on the step. We hugged each other and sobbed, my boy and I. All the holding-it-together, and the could-have-been worse, was revealed as naïveté, as foolishness. Something in us broke, possibly forever. If the second body tells our fictional sleuth something useful that she didn’t know before, this second, devastating real world crime told us something horrifying, something intolerable – that we are not safe. That no one is. It told us that the world is even more terrible than we had imagined. What we had tried to pass off as a random, isolated incident, was in fact one stitch in a great fabric of violence. This was the way the world was – vile and brutal and not to be trusted. It told us that the close third person recounting was wishful thinking. There is no safe distance at which to observe. This was, and always would be, a first person encounter. I was held up. They pointed a gun at me, and worse, much worse, at my beloved child. J was killed. His children lost their father. The same is true of every one of the too many victims of violence. Each one, the I in their story. Each someone else’s beloved my. I write this on the one year anniversary of the robbery. My boy is studying in Amsterdam. I miss him like a phantom limb, but I am pleased he’s there. I’m still here in the ‘burbs, in the peculiar middle class South African space of being both comfortable and deeply uncomfortable. I walk the parks and pavements daily with the elderly stepped-over dog, feeling mostly safe, always vigilant. I no longer work in the little office in the garden, with its window overlooking the bird table where crested barbets eat papaya. It had been my haven since the busy days of a house full of children, a place where I’ve written hundreds of articles and books, but since the men with the guns, I haven’t felt calm there. I hope to go back one day. In the meantime, I work as an itinerant, in the tv room, or at the kitchen table, sometimes in another city, writing improbable tales of death in the Cotswolds, for a British publisher, for English and American readers. It’s only because of their sheer implausibility that we can invent these curiously delicate yet alarmingly regular deaths in fictional country villages (let alone the successful investigations by a woman of a certain age). Readers and writers know it’s a set-up, a trope, a fantasy. In real life, those people are safe. Where I live, no one is truly safe and violence is never off-page. It’s in your own car or house, or on the street, or in the park. It’s in your head. A clever elderly lady and her labrador are not going to solve a crime, or prevent the next one, and neither, in all likelihood, will the police. I live with a deep sense of vulnerability, and an intimate knowledge of danger. Many people in my country live much closer to that knowledge than I do. There’s nothing cozy about violence in the real world. Perhaps packaging up the unthinkable as such is a way of acknowledging the horror of the world, while keeping it at a distance – the distance we experience in the third person, or the trauma counselor’s office. The inevitable tragedy of life is wreathed in natural beauty, and community, with a cat on its knee and a cream scone at hand. Someone does come to save the day. Bad people are punished, or repent. Good people are rewarded. Order is restored and justice is served. Our deepest, primal longings are fulfilled. On the page, at least. View the full article

“You have a magic lamp,” Bunny began, taking a pull on her cigarette. She exhaled and squinted through a ribbon of smoke. “And you have one wish. What is it?” “One wish?” Amanda’s gaze swept across the moon-bathed rooftops in contemplation. She laughed mirthlessly. “Just the one?” “Not easy, is it? See, most people would say they want to be rich, but you already know what that’s like. Or someone might say they want to be famous, but you already know what that’s like too, don’t you?” “Not anymore,” Amanda said, turning to face her. “There,” Bunny pointed her cigarette at Amanda. “That’s it. Money is money, it comes and goes, and it never really makes anyone happier. Don’t get me wrong, being rich is a lot easier than being broke, nobody is going to argue about that. But being famous? Having people recognize you, adoring you, going out of their mind at the mere sight of you? God, it must be the best feeling in the world.” She dragged on her cigarette, and when Amanda didn’t say anything, Bunny asked, “Is it?” “Yeah,” Amanda said in a very small voice, and then she fell silent a moment, dizzied by the nostalgia. An image slipped out of her memory: eating sushi at an expensive restaurant and ordering wine that cost more than her outfit, before having the entire bill waived by the manager in exchange for a photo. Then, stepping outside only to see a gang of over twenty people waiting in the freezing December rain for autographs. One girl crying with joy, unable to speak through trembling lips because Amanda had hugged her. She could feel pressure building behind her eyeballs, the sting of tears threatening to blur her vision. The champagne was making her maudlin, but if she was honest with herself, it was more than that. She hadn’t spoken to anyone about the death of her career since the label dropped her. She’d had a window of opportunity to vent – offers streaming in from magazines and trashy tabloids – but the pain had been too raw, and she had been too distracted. “Why am I here, Bunny?” “Something has come up that you might find interesting. A company contacted me to enquire about your services. I had to explain that I no longer represented you, but that seemed like a great way for us to get back in touch. Perhaps we can work together again if you find everything agreeable.” “Who was the company?” “They’re called The Midori Media Group. You won’t have heard of them; they’re new.” “They want me to sing?” “Ah, now here’s where it gets interesting,” Bunny said, funnelling smoke from the side of her mouth before crushing her cigarette out on the balcony and flicking the butt over the edge. “No, it’s not that kind of gig. They’re interested in you, your story.” “Story? What story?” “Hold on,” Bunny began calmly. “There’s a little bit to unwrap here, but in essence, they want you to take part in a social experiment of sorts.” “Oh brother,” Amanda groaned. “Don’t fly off yet, just hear me out. It’s not some tacky reality TV show. In fact, it’s not even TV. It’s all completely private, and you stand to make two hundred and fifty thousand pounds. Tax free.” “What?” Amanda thought she had misheard. “That’s what they want to pay you. One week’s work. Quarter of a million pounds. And it gets better. Midori Media are hugely influential behind the scenes. They can put you back in the spotlight if you decide you want to make more music. I could negotiate a great deal for you.” She spoke with a flat earnestness that completely contradicted her previous, easy tone. Her expression became placid and all those emotional subtleties – the friendly smile, the wide, understanding eyes – dissolved. A cavalcade of questions clogged Amanda’s brain. She stuttered before she could get any of them out, and then shook her head, trying to sift away the sludge. “Wh–what would I be… um, doing?” “They have designed a social experiment, and they believe that your input would be invaluable. Your experience, combined with your personality, make you an extremely attractive candidate for the role.” “That doesn’t tell me anything, Bunny. For god’s sake, will you stop with all this mumbo jumbo and just say what you mean?” Amanda said, aware of how hard she was breathing, wisps of vapour trailing from her lips. “In theory, you and five other candidates would live in a secluded mansion for a week. Every day, you will be required to take a pill.” “Pill? What pill? I thought this was a… what did you say? A social experiment. You didn’t say anything about a pill.” Bunny’s hands came up and patted the air between them in a calm-down gesture. “It is a social experiment but there is an element of medical research involved. But don’t worry. I have it in writing that the pill is completely harmless and has no adverse side effects.” “This sounds fucking insane, you know that? I can’t believe what I’m listening to right now.” Raising a hand to hush her, Bunny continued. “Each of you will be given a pill, but five of you will be taking a placebo. You won’t know who is taking what, or what the pill does.” Excerpt continues below cover reveal. Amanda shook her head. “Is that all the business you wanted to discuss? Because if it is, you can have my answer now: I’m not interested.” “Even though I have a contract that says the pill is completely harmless with no side effects?” “I don’t care if you have a written note from the Pope. You want to let them drug me? Is that what you brought me here for? You want to use me for medical testing?” The confusion made her head throb. She gulped in air, but couldn’t seem to get enough to take a deep breath. “There’s only a one in six chance that you would be taking anything at all.” “I still don’t like those odds, Bunny. This has nothing to do with my music, does it? This is about turning me into some kind of guinea pig.” “Amanda, think about what I’ve just told you,” Bunny said patiently. “This is a legitimate business offer; a lot of money for no work at all. It’s a gig, nothing more.” “And I suppose you get a cut, do you?” “Naturally.” Bunny nodded. “But not from you. If you sign, I settle with Midori. Your quarter mil has nothing to do with me. You and I wouldn’t even need to have a contract between us… that is, unless you want me to manage you again when the experiment is done. What do you think? Amanda Pearson rises from the ashes. A new look, a new sound, a new album. It’s got a great publicity spin already.” Amanda gripped the guardrail surrounding the balcony ledge and stared out at the skyline, her brain working overtime to process the information while simultaneously calculating the percentage of truth in Bunny’s proposal. “So, let me get this straight, just so I have it all clear in my head,” Amanda said, the cool night air kissing her hot face. “A few years ago, you and the label decide to throw me on the scrap heap because you think I’m a fucking drug-addled mess.” “Nobody called you that, Amanda.” “Nobody called me at all. I just get a letter saying, Thanks very much but you’re a stupid little cokehead, so your career’s over. That about right?” When Bunny refused to meet her eyes, Amanda continued. “And now you have the nerve to contact me out of the blue as though you didn’t just abandon me, and… the punchline is, you want to pay me to take more drugs.” A snort of laughter left her then, and she turned away, seeing the cityscape through tear-blurred eyes. Bunny placed a palm on Amanda’s shoulders and said, “It was business. That’s all. And now it’s water under the bridge.” “Not to me it isn’t.” She swallowed down a rising sob, adding, “I was only a kid, Bunny, for fuck’s sake.” She blotted her eyes with her index finger. “I needed your help. You were like a big sister to me. I trusted you.” Passing Amanda a tissue from her purse, Bunny said, “I know that. But believe me, cutting you loose was a blessing in disguise. You might not see that now, but the truth is, you were just too young for that kind of pressure.” Bunny picked a loose strand of hair from her mouth and gripped the guardrail. “Mental health wasn’t top of the list of priorities back then. Now we have psychologists on hand at the show, and at the label. It would be much different for you if it were today.” “Yeah,” Amanda said dryly. “Too bad I don’t have a magic wand to turn back time.” “No, but this might be a second chance.” “Really? Because it doesn’t sound like much of a second chance to me. It sounds like you want to pump me full of drugs, film it to make me look like a fool, and then push it on the public.” “Not at all.” Bunny’s voice was eerily calm, as though she were trying to lull her into a meditative trance. “There will be cameras in the house, but that’s to monitor the six candidates. The footage will not be made public. That’s all in the contract, and before you ask, I’ve had our solicitors go through it with a fine-tooth comb. It’s legit, and it’s watertight.” “Yeah?” Amanda made a small spitting sound. “That contract won’t be too much use to me when I go blind or my arms drop off, will it?” “The pill has no–” “No side effects? Yeah. You must think I’m some kind of fucking idiot. You expect me to believe that they’re going to pay me all that money to take a drug that doesn’t do anything?” “Yes, that’s what the contract says.” Amanda was momentarily lost for words. This proposition had stirred up a confusing cocktail of emotions, and she felt both giddy with frustration and sick with anger. Biting back the encroaching bitterness, Amanda thought very carefully about what to say next. She settled for: “It was nice seeing you again, Bunny. Take care of yourself.” Amanda opened the fire exit door to step back inside. Bunny touched her arm, delicate as a lover. “They’re extremely influential.” She pointed through the window at a young woman who was crossing the room, waving and smiling at the other partygoers. “They’ve helped build and rebuild numerous careers. You want to get back to the top of the mountain, don’t you? Fortunately, there’s always more than one path.” Amanda watched the woman, who couldn’t have been older than twenty but looked as young as sixteen, approach the piano. She wore a billowy gold dress that was almost as bright as her perfect smile, her long hair cascading like a black waterfall over her shoulders. The room hushed to silence as the woman straightened up and began to sing. She didn’t need a microphone; a large, captivating voice left her petite body, raising the fine hairs on the nape of Amanda’s neck. The woman’s voice was honey on toast; a sweet thickness flowing with coarse emotion. “She’s good isn’t she,” Bunny whispered in Amanda’s ear. “Maybe not as good as you were. Still, her debut single drops first week of December. Christmas it’ll be number one. Album platinum by February. By summer she’s headlining the O2.” Amanda opened her mouth to respond, but for a second, she forgot how to breathe. The jealousy held her lungs hostage, and the throb in her head turned into a steady, rhythmic beating. That uneasy sense of familiarity shivered through her as she watched the performance, picking up all the little vocal nuances. She was incredible. “Does she remind you of anyone, Amanda?” __________________________________ Excerpted from Honeycomb by S.B. Caves. Copyright © 2024 by S.B. Caves. Reprinted with permission from Datura Books, an imprint of Angry Robot Books. All rights reserved. View the full article

Summer is coming. I promise. It’s right around the corner. If you’re anything like me, summer means the beach. And the beach means getting in some uninterrupted reading. That’s a luxury for most of us. One year, I took a beach vacation with just a girlfriend and myself, with no children and husbands—it was complete heaven. We ate when we wanted, slept when we wanted, and read uninterrupted. At one point I turned to my friend and said, “The only thing that would make this beach better is a bookstore.” Voila! My Beach Reads series was born. The third book in my series A Killer Romance, takes place during the off-season. Have you ever wondered what becomes of those little towns when the tourists aren’t around? Well, in my fictional St. Brigid, they create events to continue to draw people in like the Romance by the Sea Valentine’s week event. A big-time romance author visits the bookstore to read from her new book. Brigid’s Bakery crafts special Valentine’s-themed baked goods, like honey cakes, they only make once a year. And let’s not forget about the new chocolate shop, holding a chocolate and wine tasting evening. (My character Summer was the first one to buy a ticket for that!) Of course with all this celebration romance and love, nobody expects a murder. This is one of the curious facets to any cozy mystery, most of them taking place in charming small towns, places you’d never really imagine something like a murder taking place. Murders only happen in big cities, right? Nope. I have a list. Quaint small towns. Charming rural areas. And yes, lovely little beach towns. Granted, reading about the beach is not as much fun as being at the beach. But I’ve found that in the cold and dark days, reading a light-filled cozy mystery can help to warm your bones. Here some of my favorite cozies with beaches in them. The Maine Clam Bake Series by Barbara Ross. Even though this is not the kind of beach a lot of people think about when thinking beach mystery, you can’t get better in terms of the sharp, witty writing and slice of Maine culture though out this series. It offers a different kind of beach vibe. I adore this series main character, Julia Snowden, who is a woman after my own heart. At the last count I had, there are 11 books in this series, so you better get started now. An oldie but a goodie for me is the Books by the Bay series by Ellery Adams. It’s one to the first cozy mystery series I became addicted to. Full of fleshed-out characters, interesting mysteries, and a slow-burn romance, I couldn’t stop reading this series and eagerly awaited each new book. Judging from the success of this series and author, I think it’s safe to say I’m not the only one. Since my series is a bookstore on the beach, I’ve taken a keen interest in other businesses set on the beach in the cozy mystery world. One of my favorites is Tara Lush’s Coffee Lover’s Mysteries, set at a coffee shop on an island off the coast of Florida. The series is full of Florida quirkiness. Lush lives in the state and she knows it well, after working as a reporter there for many years. This is a fun and well-written series that will make you long for just one more cup of coffee. For a slice of another kind of beach business, check out prolific Kathi Daley’s Resort at Castaway Bay Mystery Series, where the main character, Sydney Whitmore, is a forensic psychologist, returned back to Shipwreck island to help run the family business—a resort. The series manages to ooze charm through some twisty, serious mysteries. Another charming series is the Enchanted Bay series by Esme Addison. If you like a more than a little mystical woo-woo, combined with lyrical writing, then this is your beach series. Think mermaids, legends, and herbal healing combined with murder and family drama. Set in a coastal town in North Carolina, the series offers another kind of beach vibe. Whether you’re into mermaids, clambakes, or bookstores, beachy cozy mysteries might just be your answer in the middle of long cold winter. After all, when the snow is piling up outside, who couldn’t use a little slice of beach? *** View the full article

The rise of the unreliable narrator in fiction has made huge success of bestsellers like The Girl on the Train, Gone Girl, and Fight Club. The narrators of these stories have compelling tales to share, but what makes them even more exciting and keeps us turning those pages is not what they’re telling us…but rather, what they aren’t. I first listened to The Girl on the Train and was immediately drawn in by the weaving stories of several different main points of view. It’s Rachel, though, who’s telling a story we simply can’t be expected to believe. Her drinking means that she can’t really trust her memories (or rather, those big blank spots in them) and therefore, neither can we. Similarly, the heroine of The Woman in the Window struggles with alcohol and drug abuse, which makes the story we see through her eyes a patchwork of assumptions. Other popular books with unreliable narrators rely on mental illness, or the passage of time, or amnesia, or other explanations for why the person telling us this story shouldn’t be believed. When the main point of view character is lying to us, the reader, we learn not to believe what they have to say and start looking for clues to what’s going on in what’s happening around them. It might take us a while to understand the narrator can’t be trusted, but once we do, every word they say, every action they take, is ripe for dissection. In the very best stories with unreliable narrators, we get to the end of the story breathing as hard as if we just ran a race, or maybe shouting out a triumphant “I knew they weren’t telling the truth!” But what about stories that don’t have an unreliable narrator and instead feature unreliable secondary characters? What if the main character is revealing everything she knows to be true all along, and yet nothing about the story is actually happening the way we think it is? For this to work, we have to be deep inside that main character’s head. First or third person point of view, it doesn’t matter, so long as all we know is what they know…because when everyone around them is filling in the pieces of the puzzle that turns out to be of a picture that doesn’t match the front of the box, who do we point the fingers at? Unreliable narrators hide their truth with evasion, amnesia, passing out drunk, or careful literary sleight of hand. When the secondary characters are doing all the misleading, though, they can just straight up…lie. Yep, I said it. They lie. They lie to the main character, which leads to misunderstandings, bad choices or tragedy. They lie to the reader, too, through that narrator we’re rooting for. Are you the sort of person who reads a book or watches a movie and screams “no, you fool! Don’t go into that dark basement alone!” If so, you might be the sort of reader who likes books with untrustworthy secondary characters. When everyone’s lying to your heroine, she’s bound to do some stuff you think is pretty dumb. But how can you blame her, when the people who are supposed to love and take care of her are deviously and purposefully leading her astray? Unreliable narrators get themselves in that hot water, but leading characters surrounded by dastardly, lying secondaries end up in the boiling pot no matter what they try. A few of my favorite books with unreliable narrators: American Psycho by Brett Easton Ellis: You can’t trust a word Patrick Bateman says, because he’s clearly unhinged. Or is he? Maybe he’s just a horrible person. Or maybe he’s imagining it all. Who knows? (Easton Ellis’ more recent book, Shards, gave me an unreliable narrator vibe for a totally different reason. The author is the main character. But he’s not. But he sort of is…) Never Lie by Frieda McFadden: This book should be called Nothing but Lies, and I mean that in the best way. I suspected something was up but couldn’t figure out who was telling the lies. It kept me riveted and shouting out my warnings to the point-of-view characters. Behind Her Eyes by Sarah Pinborough: This was my first read from Pinborough, and I had no idea there even was an unreliable narrator, that’s how unreliable the narrator was…except it was really a secondary character pulling that wool over the reader’s eyes. Or was it? I’m still not sure who to trust. Probably nobody! Another riveting read! Of course, The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins was one of the first of more recent releases to set the unreliable narrator train on the tracks. It’s a classic choice if you want to dive deeply into a story told in part by someone who literally cannot remember huge chunks of what she needs to know in order to put all the pieces together. I’ve written a few unreliable narrators myself, so in my most recent release from Crooked Lane Books, Like A Mother, I didn’t want the readers to feel like the main character, Sarah, wasn’t to be trusted. I hoped the readers would connect with her and her story with an understanding that she felt forced into the choices she has to make. Told in third person point of view, Sarah’s is the only perspective we have, so although it’s not a first-person story, we only ever know what Sarah knows. And what Sarah knows is not always the truth. In fact, I’d say that the only person in the whole book that doesn’t lie is Sarah, herself. Everyone else? Utterly unreliable! Sometimes, the best parts of the book are the parts that simply didn’t happen the way we’re told they did. *** View the full article

It’s that season again—the time to plan summer vacations. How about touring small towns and visiting some occasionally wacky, but always fun, festivals? In Wisconsin, for instance, where the Deputy Donut Mystery series is set, provides a wealth of summer fairs, festivals, and family-fun weekends. At one gem and mineral show, kids can dig for treasures in an agate pit! Three different festivals provide sawdust piles where kids can grub around looking for things. At least one of these sawdust piles is stocked with money. And speaking of not exactly staying pristine, you could participate in, or merely watch (maybe from a distance), a cow chip hurling competition. There are also festivals featuring cheese, butter, fish, beef, bacon, or beer. There are arts and craft shows, concerts, and gatherings of airplanes and classic cars. In real life, you can expect these small-town festivities to go well. In cozy mysteries, however, festivals can be another story. Amateur sleuths suddenly find their hands full of things like magnifying glasses, binoculars, and cameras. These intrepid sleuths have to struggle to stay ahead of killers and their deadly secrets. In Double Grudge Donuts, Fallingbrook, Wisconsin is celebrating the first (annual, they hope) Fallingbrook Arts Festival. During the afternoons, performers tour the town, showcasing their talent on sidewalks in front if businesses, including Emily Westhill’s Deputy Donut coffee and donut shop. In the evenings, the day’s performers compete for prizes. With its Musical Monday, Troubadour Tuesday, Wee Wonders Wednesday, Theatrical Thursday, Funny Friday, and Skit Saturday, The Fallingbrook Arts Festival should be among the tamer Wisconsin festivals. It doesn’t work out that way. Partly because of his bagpipe’s squawking during another performance, Kirk MacLean wins the Musical Monday competition. That night, sleepers are annoyed at being awakened by the skirl of the pipes. On Troubadour Tuesday, Kirk struts around town blasting his bagpipe while hapless singers try to ignore him. Kirk is making enemies fast. And then, early on Wee Wonders Wednesday, Emily’s cat Dep leads Emily to Kirk’s body near his bagpipe—and also near a piece broken from a Deputy Donut mug. Emily needs to do some investigating, or she or her parents, who are judges for some of the competitions, might be arrested, and Emily and the town detective’s wedding might be postponed, perhaps permanently. If your summer vacation plans involve more reading in chairs than riding in cars, visit some quirky events by reading cozy mysteries, nibbling delicious snacks, and trying to solve crimes along with amateur sleuths. As an added bonus, you should be safe from clinging sawdust or flying cow chips. Murder at a Scottish Castle by Traci Hall This festival season is a bad one for bagpipers! Paislee Shaw sells cashmere sweaters in her shop in Nairn, Scotland. The local dowager countess wants to feature Paislee’s sweaters in the castle’s gift shop—an honor and an opportunity for Paislee. To top it off, the dowager countess invites Paislee to the annual bagpiping competition on the castle grounds. Paislee brings Grandpa, her son, and her Scottish terrier Wallace. Jory, the previous year’s bagpiping champion brags that he will, for the second year in a row, trounce the previous champion, the dowager countess’s son, who has won for many years. However, when Jory begins playing his bagpipe, he keels over. Rescuers rush to his aid. In the panic, his bagpipe disappears. The investigation into Jory’s collapse becomes a murder investigation. Because of Paislee’s previous successes in fingering criminals, the dowager countess insists that Paislee should clear the laird’s name. For the sake of her sweaters, Paislee doesn’t dare refuse. Snack suggestion: Scottish oatcakes drizzled with honey Claret and Present Danger by Sarah Fox And pipers aren’t the only performers whose careers end suddenly and tragically during these cozy mystery festivals. Sadie Coleman, the owner of the literary pub, The Inkwell, is happy when the Trueheart Renaissance Faire and Circus comes to Shady Creek, Vermont. A flirtatious illusionist’s show is sold out, but he gives Sadie tickets when he visits The Inkwell. During this “wizard’s” performance, Sadie’s excitement turns to horror. The man collapses on stage, and it’s not an illusion. As if that isn’t bad enough, the police suspect one of Sadie’s employees of the wizard’s murder. And then another performer dies. . . . Can Sadie, with the help of her boyfriend, a former PI turned craft brewer, clear her employee’s name and bring justice to a killer? Snack suggestion: Brie baked in phyllo pastry and topped with claret jelly Murder at the Blueberry Festival by Darci Hannah Lindsey Bakewell’s Beacon Bakery, in a lighthouse on the shores of Lake Michigan, is to be the site of a pie-eating contest during the Blueberry Festival in Beacon Harbor, Michigan. At first, people laugh at what appear to be mere pranks. But things go from amusing to bad to worse . . . to deadly. Why is a boat floating near the lighthouse, and why are its only occupants a live goat and a dead man dressed as a Viking? Luckily, Lindsey has help in her search for answers—including her ex-SEAL boyfriend and her Newfoundland dog Wellington. And then there are the goats, each with its own agenda, which, to Lindsey’s dismay, might include attempting to win the pie-eating contest. Snack suggestion: Blueberry muffins! A Twinkle of Trouble by Daryl Wood Gerber Courtney Kelly owns a fairy garden shop, Open Your Imagination, in Carmel-by-the-Sea, California. Courtney can also see fairies, who help her (or not) in various ways. As Courtney is preparing to look after her booth at the Summer Blooms Festival, Genevieve, an influencer who was not invited to participate, writes nasty things about the festival and some of Courtney’s friends. But then, right outside the festival, one of Courtney’s maligned friends is found standing over Genevieve’s body. Courtney is certain that the friend cannot have murdered Genevieve. While growing her own plants for her fairy gardens, teaching people how to create the miniature displays, interacting with her fairy sidekicks, and trying not to annoy law enforcement, Courtney will need to investigate. Snack suggestion: Gingersnap brownies—the recipe is in the back of the book Deep Fried Death by Maddie Day After just one look at the cover of DEEP FRIED DEATH by Maddie Day, you know you’re in for a wild ride. Robbie Jordan, owner of Pans ‘N Pancakes, reluctantly plans for her restaurant to sponsor an entry in the Abe Martin Festival’s annual outhouse race on Memorial Day. Before Pans ‘N Pancakes can attempt to push their replica outhouse toward the finish line, a body tumbles out, along with the murder weapon—a cast iron skillet from Pans ‘N Pancakes. Robbie, her restaurant, and even her brother-in-law are implicated. Robbie will need to set the police on the right course, or by next year’s festival, she might be visiting the courthouse, not racing an outhouse. Snack suggestion: pancakes slathered in butter and maple syrup *** View the full article

Whether it’s whispered around a campfire, or passed down across generations, folk tales have often been the spark that ignited much of our love for stories. They give us brief glimpses into different times and different cultures, and it’s always a treat for me to find these threads woven into works of fiction today. It has even inspired me to reimagine my favourite Sri Lankan folktale in my latest book, Island Witch. In my new novel, set in 1880s Ceylon, Amara, the daughter of the local demon priest, is caught in the cross currents of her traditional beliefs and the new colonial ideas that have been brought into her coastal town, while being bullied and called a “witch” herself. When a series of attacks starts plaguing the men in her village, she must figure out who is behind them before her father is accused of these crimes. However, she’s been having dreams which eerily predict these attacks, and can’t shake the feeling that all this is tied into to when she woke up, dazed and confused, to the sound of her mother’s mysterious cries. Island Witch is a reimagining of Mohini, Sri Lanka’s most popular ghost, famously depicted as the local Woman in White. This list of books spans across many genres and hails from different corners of the world, but they all draw inspiration from popular myths, lore, and folk tales. Midnight is The Darkest Hour, by Ashley Winstead In the religious town of Bottom Springs Louisiana, the Low Man, a vampiric figure, is attacking residents, leaving the townsfolk afraid that they would be next. Ruth Cornier, the daughter of the local preacher, finds herself at crossroads when a battered skull is discovered in Starry Swamp, surrounded by mysterious carved symbols. Along with her best friend, Everett, a boy from the wrong side of the tracks, Ruth delves deep into the town’s secrets in attempt to solve the crime, a feat that will garner them many enemies along the way. Atmospheric and creepy, with lush imagery of swamps and the ever present undertone of religious panic, Ashley Winstead effortlessly weaves lore into a page turning mystery. Gods of Jade and Shadow, by Silvia Moreno Garcia Set in Mexico in the 1920s, the story follows Cassiopeia Tun, the granddaughter of a small town patriarch. Cassiopeia’s mother eloped with Cassiopeia’s dark-skinned father, disgracing the family, but had to return to home when her husband died. Cassiopeia is ordered to work as the family maid, and her future seems bleak until she opens a locked chest in her grandfather’s bedroom, and releases an imprisoned Mayan god of death, Hun-Kamé. Hun-Kamé sends Cassiopeia on a life-changing quest— one which features demons, evil spirits, sorcerers and flappers dancing the Charleston. The Nesting, by CJ Cooke Despite his wife, Aurelia, committing suicide in the very same place, Architect Tom Faraday resolute in his decision to finish the high-concept, environmentally friendly home he’s building in Norway. When Lexi Ellis takes the job as nanny to Tom’s daughters, she falls in love with the picturesque landscape and the two young girls. But she can’t shake the feeling that something feels off in the isolated house nestled in the forest along the fjord— unexplained, muddy footprints inside the house, Aurelia’s diary appearing in Lexi’s room, but most disturbingly, one of the girls keeps telling Lexi about how she sees the Sad Lady. Lexi starts to believe that Aurelia didn’t kill herself after all, and that perhaps her death was the result of a sinister spirit in the fjord. Sistersong, by Lucy Holland Based on the traditional folk ballad of ‘The Two Sisters,’ this story takes place in magical ancient Britain in a time where Saxons battle with individual holdings, and a new religion is competing with old magic. The three siblings, Riva, Keyne and Sinne, each possesses their own form of magic as they take on diverging paths, all while the Saxons draw near. American Gods, by Neil Gaiman A classic in it’s own right, American Gods is a fantastic interpretation of what gods spanning various myths and lore would look like in modern society. The story starts with the main character, Shadow’s, wife dying in a mysterious car crash days before his release from prison. On his way back home, he meets Mr Wednesday, who introduces him to a world quite unlike he has ever seen, while they embark on a journey through the heart of America. The Witch’s Heart, by Genevive Gornichec This reimagining of norse myth features the witch, Angrboda, who possesses the power to divine the future. But when Odin, the highest of the Norse gods, demands her power for himself, she turns him down. In return, he punishes her by burning her three times on the pyre. Thankfully, Angrboda escapes, leaving her smoldering heart behind. She takes refuge in the forest, when a man shows up and offers her heart back—so igniting the love story between Angrboda and Loki, the son of the very god who tried to kill her. *** View the full article

My initial exposure to Juanita Sheridan was harrowing: I’d just sent my publisher my first Hawaiʻi murder mystery when a friend asked, “Have you read the Hawaiʻi mysteries of Juanita Sheridan?” Unsettled, I scrambled to find Sheridan’s books – all out of print, so it wasn’t easy. When they finally arrived, I opened The Kahuna Killer at random and found to my consternation that Sheridan had ended a chapter this way: “Pilikia. That word means trouble.” I’d ended a chapter of my book nearly identically: “Pilikia. Trouble.” Yikes! I snapped her book shut and resolved not to read another word until I’d completed at least my second Hawaiʻi murder mystery. I didn’t want my books influenced by hers, much less did I wish to be thought a plagiarist. I stuck to my resolution, so two years passed before I picked up Juanita Sheridan’s books again. But wow, I’m glad I finally did. For those unfamiliar with Sheridan – which seems to include practically everyone who reads or writes about murder mysteries, although this may soon change (see below) – she was once, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, a best-selling writer of detective fiction. That says a lot, because back then, according to David Bordwell in Perplexing Plots: Popular Storytelling and the Poetics of Murder (2022), fully twenty-five percent of all works of fiction and most radio plays were murder mysteries. Then as now, it was a crowded field. Sheridan managed to thrive in it. Four of Sheridan’s books feature her Chinese American amateur detective Lily Wu and also Janice Cameron, who serves as Lily’s sidekick and Sheridan’s narrator. The first volume, The Chinese Chop (1949), is set in New York, immediately after the Second World War. It’s the book in which Lily and Janice, two young women who happen to hail from Hawaiʻi, meet for the first time. Janice is the white roommate Lily needs in order to secure a room in Washington Square; at the time no one there would rent to the Chinese, even a Chinese-American like Lily. Lily has an undisclosed reason for choosing one rooming house in particular. And almost immediately, the building superintendent turns up dead. That’s unnerving for Janice, who’s initially unsure whether Lily committed the crime or intends to solve it. But Lily herself, we learn, is never unnerved – not in this book, and not in the three set in Hawaiʻi after Lily and Janice return there. Sadly, no book-length biography of Juanita Sheridan exists. But the basics of her colorful life – which, she acknowledged, would not be credible if they appeared in fiction – are well summarized in the late Todd and Enid Schantz’s introduction to their Rue Morgue Press edition of The Chinese Chop (2000). Sheridan was born in Oklahoma in 1906. She spent the last years of her life in Guadalajara with her final husband, who may have been her eighth or ninth. She died in 1974. What a lot she packed into sixty-eight years! Most notably, after youthful attempts to write short stories in New York and California, she left her toddler son in 1935 and sailed to Hawaiʻi so she could concentrate on writing murder mysteries. She stayed until 1941, getting back to New York just before Pearl Harbor. Sheridan’s six-year island sojourn provided the material for three Lily Wu mysteries set in Hawaiʻi a decade later: The Kahuna Killer (1951), The Mamo Murders (1952), and The Waikiki Widow (1953). The latter, widely hailed, was distilled into a 1959 episode for “Hawaiian Eye,” a TV series that made actress Connie Stevens a teenage idol. Sheridan worked on screenplays for the first episodes, then quit Hollywood in disgust, perhaps over her intricate novel getting mutilated for the small screen. Largely forgotten today, Sheridan is fortunate in the devotion of those who do remember – or belatedly discover – her. Rue Morgue Press re-issued the Lily Wu quartet more than two decades ago, before going out of business; some of those editions can still be found. And – great news! – Maggie Topkis of Felony & Mayhem Press plans to re-issue the entire quartet herself, beginning with The Chinese Chop in June 2024. So what makes the Lily Wu quartet, and particularly the three volumes set in Hawaiʻi, so impressive, once one’s been exposed to them? Their timeless features include excellent writing, compelling plots, and a gratifyingly warm relationship between two talented and forceful women, Janice Cameron (as Watson to Lily’s Holmes) and Lily Wu, the sleuth Anthony Boucher of the New York Times declared the best female detective of the era, and with whom he confessed to be in love. But the time-specific aspects of Sheridan’s Hawaiʻi tales distinguish them too. She entered adulthood during the Golden Age of Detective Fiction in the 1920s and 1930s, when female sleuths tended to be inoffensive older white women such as Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple. Yet Lily Wu is the precise opposite: a forceful young Chinese-American woman prepared to use her fists and feet and any other weapon available – along with her exceptionally shrewd mind – not just to defeat evildoers but to clobber them. She’s an undeniably unique creation; there was no detective like her in the Golden Age, or even later when Sheridan’s books appeared. Then there’s Sheridan’s generous and affectionate treatment of Hawaiian and Asian characters, at a time when real world treatment of them, even in Hawaiʻi, was anything but. The Hawaiʻi of which Sheridan wrote is, fortunately, a vanished one, but she offers a fascinating and diamond-hard glimpse of it for her readers. In the Honolulu of Sheridan’s books, white matrons as society queens preside over sprawling mansions and provide fancy evenings with lace, crystal, and silver for white luminaries of island society. These formidable hostesses can stage a traditional luau with Hawaiian musicians or a formal recital of Mozart by a string quartet, but for help they rely on ill-paid Hawaiians or Asians who speak little (except to Lily Wu), and even then imperfectly and with a good deal of pidgin. There’s no doubt where Sheridan’s sympathies lie. Although patronized and treated as insignificant by Honolulu grandees, Hawaiians and Asians are the characters Sheridan imbues with sagacity and dignity. That might seem unremarkable today. But consider Sheridan’s times – times when Native Hawaiians were called “kanakas,” an offensive slur nowadays, and when Linda Dela Cruz, the most popular Hawaiian singer of her day, could include these lyrics in her hit song, “Come My House,” and be considered funny: You come my house for one big luau, that’s the Kanaka style. You eat and eat ‘til the food all pau, that’s the Kanaka style. You drink and drink till you just one wreck, that’s the Kanaka style. Then you stop until the next welfare check, that’s the Kanaka style. Sheridan was ahead of her time, too, in getting Hawaiʻi right more broadly. She learned a variety of Hawaiian words and used them sparingly but always to good effect. She studied and accurately portrayed certain practices of the ancient Hawaiians, including human sacrifice. Joyce Carol Oates recently observed on social media that when a murder mystery tries to combine the supernatural with a detective story, it’s the detective story that suffers. Sheridan avoided that problem by attributing belief in Hawaiʻi’s pervasive supernatural world to her more credulous characters, never to Lily Wu or Janice Cameron. Like the racism of Hawai’i in her time, belief in the supernatural among Native Hawaiians was something Sheridan observed carefully and could describe deftly without ever relying on it to solve a mystery. If anything’s missing from the Lily Wu tales, it’s that although Janice Cameron matures and changes throughout the four books – it’s easy to read Janice, a novelist, as Sheridan’s doppelganger – Lily Wu never does. In Hawaiʻi she’s the same Lily she was in New York: elegant (we see a lot of women’s clothing in Sheridan’s books), mysterious, infinitely resourceful, and unfailingly brilliant, yet always patient with the slightly less brilliant Janice. This constancy is hardly a failing. It’s Sheridan reaching back well before the Golden Age of Detective Fiction to find a kindred spirit for Lily Wu: Sherlock Holmes himself, another amateur sleuth who throughout his adventures remains, in personality and psychology, a finished creation, a constant. Fortunately for us, the constancy of Lily Wu is merely an intriguing foundation, one on which Juanita Sheridan proceeded to construct her sophisticated, detailed, and engrossing quartet of mysteries. Kudos to Felony & Mayhem Press for republishing them, seventy-five years after they first appeared, for a prospective new era of admirers. *** View the full article

I am eight years old. The bullies are waiting for me outside the girls’ bathroom. I race down the school hall as fast as my young legs can carry me, but the bullies are faster. They pounce, pushing me down, and I hit the floor hard, the air slamming out of my lungs. You’re a killer. A boy yells. Like your mom. Killer, killer. I tell myself not to look at them. That gloating stretch of their mouths. The shadows lengthening over me. The front door bursts open, and Mimi appears, her eyes spitting black fire. My cousin, only a year older, but her rage fills the hall. The bullies scatter like frantic ants, but this time, she is faster. A well-aimed punch and the leader flees, his nose bloodied. She helps me up and hugs me tightly. If anyone ever tries to hurt you again, let me know and I’ll destroy them. She promises me. Don’t worry, Tanvi. I’ll always watch out for you. She promises me that, too. Back then, I didn’t know promises were just words. As lightweight as ash scattered by the wind. Brittle like shattered glass. Excerpt continues below cover reveal. Even after summer break, Orin High still smells of damp clothes left too long in the washer. The sweat from so many fourteen to eighteen year olds must be baked into the hundred year old brick building and its many moldy crevices and dusty corners. But mixing with that musty cloth smell is the scent of softeners, of sloppy joes and baked cinnamon bread, of conversations and laughter, of rushing footsteps and slamming locker doors. So it’s not all bad. At least that’s what I tell myself. And as I take in the quiet of the last week of summer vacation, I can almost believe it. Stillness pervades every hallway, every bathroom, every classroom and even the desks and chairs quiet, holding their breaths. It’s the last day to register for junior year and I managed to make it. Barely. The office secretary wasn’t too happy, judging from her frequent glances at the clock, whose minute hand hovered at three minutes to three. But I came in right before the office closed for a reason. All the registrants were done and gone. I take a deep breath and start toward the exit to the parking lot. It wasn’t always like this. I never dread the start of school year. True, elementary school was hell—kids could be particularly brutal to newly minted orphans adopted and brought to Orin by their aunts. But the bullying subsided in middle school after I ceased to remain interesting, when I displayed none of the characteristics of what they thought a killer’s daughter should have, when I faded into the grimy school walls and became invisible. By the time high school came around, my latent nerdiness had kicked in and I fell in love with organic chemistry and calculus, much to my cousin and fellow nerd Mimi’s joy, and my best friend Krista’s annoyance. But things changed last fall, the start of my sophomore year, when the invisibility cloak fell off and I was recognized again. And the shadows returned, solidifying into a new threat, a new bully. I shake off that familiar prickling of dread and push open the front doors to walk onto the school’s sprawling portico, where the soft glow of the midafternoon August sun turns the tiles a sparkling white. The oaks and maples scattered around the schoolyard have taken on shades of orange and red and form a startling contrast against a backdrop of green lawn and smooth blue cloudless expanse of sky. Fall is on its way to southeastern Michigan. It’s my cousin Mimi’s favorite season and therefore mine, too. My fingers tingle, anticipating the feel of the smooth, velvety leaves turned crinkly and multicolored by a lack of chlorophyll. I imagine the satisfying bounce of throwing myself into a pile of dead foliage, scattering it, creating chaos. Of laughing with Mimi for hours over cider and Bollywood gossip. But this fall will be different. Because she, my once best friend, my rock, the reason I could outrun the shadows from my past, has betrayed me to those shadows instead. I spot her leaning against an oak, her pink halter top and faded denim shorts visible all the way across the parking lot. Looking at us, no one would think we’re related. Her skin is several shades lighter than my dark brown, and her features, her aquiline nose and wide forehead, take after her white dad. Her thick black hair and dark eyes though are as Indian as mine. Those eyes fall on me and she straightens. I start to lift my hand, hoping to wave, hoping she’ll wave back. Hoping the widening distance between us in the last several months suddenly vanishes, like her coldness was nothing but my imagination. But then her gaze shifts to something behind me. My spine stiffens with the instinctive reaction of a hunted animal. I made a mistake; the school wasn’t as empty as I thought. And I know who it is before I turn and meet baby blue eyes narrowing with derision, the minuscule curl of lips painted a deep scarlet. Beth Grant. She’s a senior and Mimi’s classmate and the unquestioned leader of Orin High’s popular clique. I chose the last possible minute before registration closed so I could avoid her, and yet she still managed to find me. She allows the large front doors to swing shut behind her and strolls across the portico. Each click of her heels tightens the vise around my chest, my heart thudding with the same question I’ve asked myself a gazillion times. Why the hell did she target me? She displaced me as Mimi’s best friend last year and decided to scorch the earth behind me, judging from the way Mimi froze me out. She’s not just a frontrunner in the race for Mimi’s affections, she’s won the damn thing, and should fear no competition from me. I edge toward the banister, creating a wide berth for her to pass, and lower my eyes, shame burning fire across my cheekbones, hating my fear. My breath hitches, counting the seconds as she lingers beside me. Then she swishes past, leaving the air scented with vanilla but not enough to muffle the tinge of something sharp and metallic. I look up. Sunlight glints gold on her hair, turning blonde strands into a fiery tiara. Turning her into a queen. She has everything: a castle for a home, reigning power at school—and my cousin’s undivided devotion, judging from the way Mimi hurries toward her. I bet it’ll be fun to be Beth Grant, Mimi told me months before she slid into Beth’s circle. To be taken care of and waited on hand and foot. To have all the money in the world and never have to worry about stuff like college and a job and shit. I’ll take care of you, I tried telling Mimi, but she already had that look in her eye. That determined look she gets before a track competition she desperately wants to win. Beth’s footsteps change from the clicking of heels on concrete to the muffled scrape on grass. Then they fade into the parking lot and the roar of an engine. I stare after her blue Porsche with a bitter rage that’s as intense as it’s helpless. I know bullies and I know what it feels like to be bullied. After all, I was exposed to my first dose at the age of eight. They punched me, knocked me down, called me a freak and a psycho. But what Beth did destroyed me. When she lit my mom’s candles—the candles that destroyed my life—and made me eight again, watching my mom turn into a monster. Dark wisps of smoke creep into the corners of my vision, veiling the sunlight, filling my nose with an acrid scent. And above it rises the sound of Beth laughing as she recorded my meltdown on her phone, while Mimi stood by, watching me throw up all over the pristine white carpet in Beth’s house. Killer, killer. I shake off the memory, but the fact lingers, making my head spin: Beth has that video. It’s all she needs to remind everyone of who I am, who my mother was—the killer who took her husband’s life. Then it’ll be back to square one. It’ll be like when I was in elementary school. But Mimi won’t be there to fight for me this time. She betrayed my secrets to Beth. She stole my mom’s candles and showed them to her new best friend. Why did you do that? I screamed at her after waking up in a pool of my own vomit. You knew what I went through. You promised you’d protect me! But she didn’t care. Like she didn’t care when she got into Beth’s car just now and drove away without another glance at me. The grass blurs under my feet, changes to tar, and then I’m on my bike, my face wet with tears. I try to tell myself I’m paranoid, but the words fall flat. What else did Mimi tell Beth about me, about my past, that made Beth decide to come after me? And what if she doesn’t stop? Why would Beth record me if she wasn’t going to show someone—everyone? I can’t leave Orin and run away. Where can I go? My house in Detroit, once filled with Mom and Dad’s laughter, is now an empty shell, occupied by strangers. The only family I have left is my aunt and cousin. Auntie… She has stayed by my side for eight years, cried with me when the nightmares came, held my hand through every therapy session, “You’re my daughter, honey, just like Mimi. We’re your family, and we’ll always be there for you.” I can’t leave her. I can’t lose her. I blink hard, then wipe my face on my sleeve. For Mimi, always is over. If Beth wants to ruin my life, Mimi won’t do anything to stop her. __________________________________ Excerpt from When Mimi Went Missing © 2024 Suja Sukumar, published by Soho Teen. Cover art by Colin Verdi and cover design by Janine Agro. View the full article

There is a famous image of a ballet dancer’s feet—one clad in pale tights and a pristine pink pointe shoe, ribbons neatly tied, while the other foot is bare. Band-Aids, blackened toenails. Blisters and bunions. The contrast is stark, the statement obvious: in ballet, there is the illusion and there is the reality. There is beauty, but underlying that beauty is pain. As the mother of a professional ballet dancer, this image resonates with me. And when I began writing my most recent novel, The Still Point, about a group of pre-professional ballet dancers in their final year of high school and their ambitious mothers, I wanted to offer both sides of this world. I wanted to explore both the dream and the darkness of this particular art. Ballet books have become popular lately, especially when the world of ballet is facing scrutiny for its often-archaic views of femininity, race, and power. Here are four books—two novels and two non-fiction—which seek to peel back the satin and reveal the tender pain beneath. Girl Through Glass by Sari Wilson I read this novel several years ago when it first came out—drawn to both the ballet storyline (which follows a young student at the School of American Ballet) and the 1970s time period. A haunting portrait of a young dancer caught in the spell of a much older male mentor as well as Mr. Balanchine himself, Girl Through Glass is in some ways a #metoo story set in the rarefied world of the New York City Ballet. They’re Going to Love You by Meg Howrey Like Girl Through Glass, Meg Howrey’s novel, They’re Going to Love You is about a former SAB student, though this novel is a dual timeline novel set in the present and in the 1980s. Howrey, a former professional ballerina herself, is at the top of her game in this novel about the futility of ambition in a world which rejects anyone who does not fit ballet’s physical ideal. I have read this book twice—and the second time I took note of the sadness underlying the story. Carlisle’s love of dance, in the end, is no match for the narrow definitions of what make a “ballet body.” The novel is about much more than this, of course; it is not only about art and ambition but also about family secrets and legacy. But Howrey truly captures the exclusiveness of the ballet world, and the pain of one dancer’s exclusion. Don’t Think, Dear: On Loving and Leaving Ballet by Alice Robb What I found so interesting about this book was the delicate balance that Robb manages between critique and homage of the ballet world. Like the other authors I have mentioned, Robb is an insider as well—a former student at the School of American Ballet. And this positions her to speak both from inside the bubble and outside of it. She tackles the power dynamics at play in ballet companies and the unrealistic demands on female dancers without ever losing sight of the ballet world’s magnetic pull. Turning Pointe: How a New Generation of Dancers Is Saving Ballet from Itself by Chloe Angyal Journalist, Angyl, takes on the darker side of ballet in this meticulous exploration of an artform that is only now beginning to reinvent itself. A keen examination of a world that demands so very much of the dancers who embrace it, Turning Pointe is a must read for all ballerinas and consumers of dance. However, it is particularly informative for young dancers pursuing careers in the dance world—and those hoping to be agents of change within it. *** View the full article

When I set out to write my second novel, A Step Part Darkness, I knew it was a lot more ambitious than my debut had been. Several elements made it more complicated: it has a dual-timeline with a separate but related mystery in each and it had an ensemble cast. Specifically, it had six main characters, each of whom would have their own POV in both timelines. When ensemble casts are good, they are so satisfying to readers, but when they are bad, they feel quite hollow, often because they’re rendered somewhat lifelessly—we’re simply told that this is the gang and that they’re bonded rather than this sentiment being earned through elbow grease. A Step Past Darkness is very deliberately an homage to Stephen King’s It—I’m a King fan and like many King fans, it’s my favorite of his books. I studied it—its structure, what worked about it, and what didn’t. One of the things I deeply admire about the book is that despite there being seven main characters, each of them felt fully realized. I used to reread that book every year when I was in high school, but a couple years ago I returned to it for more of a craft study. The way he does this is by introducing you to each character in chapters devoted to them in the first timeline in the 1950s. Yes, you are seeing how the Losers Club gets together, and the start of scary things happening, but each of those introductory chapters has deep interiority to them. You see each kid’s internal state, what they care about and what they fear, how they occupy their time and what their families are like. King naysayers, say your nays, but people who know his writing know that he cares about his characters. Particularly in It, you can feel the compassion he has for them, the tenderness with which he treats them, though this does not mean that they won’t face peril or even death. How could I do that? And how could I do that—meaning a newer author who doesn’t have the gravitas and extended publishing record to get away with a 1,000 plus page novel the way King did? I had a vague sense of what the plot of my novel would be, and I’m a strict believer in plotting out books almost to their entirety (particularly when one is under deadline), but before I even started doing that, I spent a solid month working on character. I did not write a single line of prose. Effectively forming a cast of fully realized characters and then understanding them as a group required two thorough steps. Effectively forming a cast of fully realized characters and then understanding them as a group required two thorough steps. The first was answering the question, “Who are they?” I like to think of character creation as me as the artist looking at an iceberg covered with fog. The more examine it, the more the fog rolls back. When it’s more or less completely uncovered, some of the ice is beneath the surface and some is above; I’ve done more preparatory work than what will be shown to the reader, but that works still matters. I’m a visual person—I basically see scenes of my books in my head before I write them down. I can’t “see” a person if they don’t have a face. I start by poking around the internet to find a picture of someone that feels right to me. Then for each character I go through two extensive questionnaires. One is a basic one—you could find one of these easily on the internet—that has questions like, “what are their hobbies?” and “how do they dress?” Some of these questions focus on inner psychology where some are more surface level, but in either case, I answer them in detail. Too often we are told “Jane had blonde hair and blue eyes and was beautiful.” But that doesn’t really tell us anything about what she actually seems like when she’s in a room with us. The Jane I described above could be beautiful, but painfully awkward, always walking with turned-in shoulders and her head bowed. Or she could be other worldly, a Galadriel in human form. Or she could be a down-home farmgirl with massive hands and a bawdy sense of humor you can see in her eyes. Too often we’re told “he’s the hot star quarterback.” I kind of have this character in my book: the uber-popular football player. Except I didn’t make him a quarterback because too often it seems like writers just pick quarterback because they don’t know anything about football and associate “quarterback” with “good” (the same way they use Harvard to signal smart). I researched a lot of things about football. I read books and watched documentaries. I saw how hard these kids work, often from young ages. I started to think of this character—Casey—and what it would take to be that good at football to get to the potential of being recruited by colleges. How devoted he is, how obsessed with football, but also how self-conscious, how badly he wants the approval of others. The second questionnaire I fill out is the Proust Questionnaire, which you can find online. These questions get more at philosophical questions, things like, “What is your idea of happiness?” People might even find these questions hard to answer for themselves. Sometimes I just don’t know the answer for the character, so I make it up on the spot. This is why character creation feels like an uncovering to me: I’m moving the fog away from the iceberg, making up things that feel “right” to me. This forms a sort of three-dimensional sense of them in my head that, even after I finish the questionnaire, gets increasingly more detailed as I start writing. This doesn’t mean that anything is written in stone: recently I went back to these questionnaires for A Step Past Darkness—which I initially filled out in 2021, and saw that I wrote that one character had on the floor of his bedroom both a Robert Jordan book and The Anarchist Cookbook. I laughed because that was so wrong—he would have the second book but not the first. I didn’t know that then, but I know it now. The next important thing for an ensemble cast was to consider group dynamics. We can’t just be told “they are all besties, except one is the smart one, one is the athletic one, etc.” Well, because one, we’ve just established these people as three dimensional, and two, within any group of people there are multiple different sets of tensions and minigroups. We can’t, and shouldn’t, always be given the ensemble in its entirety. One scene I loved in It was when Bev spends an afternoon hanging out with Ben, Eddie, and Stan. We don’t need all the characters there, and the dynamic changes depending on the mini-group. Say what you will about LOST, but the first season is an incredible depiction of an ensemble cast, and over the course of the show, it’s pleasing to see pairings, mini-groups, and dynamic things happening across the cast. There’s a love triangle with Jack, Kate, and Sawyer. Sawyer and Sayid have an antagonistic relationship. Kate has a natural affinity with other women on the island like Claire and Sun. If looking for successful depictions of ensemble casts and their dynamics in novels, there are a few good starting points: highly rated war novels (because they often focus on a unit of people), multigenerational sagas (with the family functioning as a unit), or epic fantasies (which often have a band of people working together). The last thing I did was consider how these two things—character and group dynamics—shift as a function of time. When I was coming up with characters, I literally drew an arc. How would this person change over time? What was their primary psychological struggle as a child, and how would that manifest in adulthood? How were they affected by the trauma of the first time point of the novel? What do they think of who they were and who they have become? I wanted the reader to feel like they went on a journey of following this group of people from teenagers to adulthood, and to feel as if they had traveled on a satisfying arc. In the best case scenario, the reader closes the book with a sad little sigh and misses the friend group they are leaving behind. *** Vera Kurian is a writer and scientist based in Washington DC. Her debut novel, NEVER SAW ME COMING (Park Row Books, 2021 was an Edgar Award nominee and was named one of the New York Times’ Best Thrillers of 2021. Her short fiction has been published in magazines such as Glimmer Train, Day One, and The Pinch. She has a PhD in Social Psychology, where she studied intergroup relations, ideology, and quantitative methods. She blogs irregularly about writing, horror movies and pop culture/terrible TV. Her new novel, A Step Past Darkness, is now available. She has extended craft articles on her Substack. View the full article

Gothic novels, those strange, melancholy reads that drip with atmosphere, have been around for over 250 years. Ever since Horace Walpole’s gloomy Castle of Otranto, readers have reveled in morbid delight when turning the pages of these books. Safe and tucked away under the eaves reading our hearts out—far from the gloomy moors, haunted castles, and asylums that often figure large in these stories—we dare to be transported to mysterious places, the unexplained, the hidden, the lost, and yes, the supernatural. Why? Because we know Things That Go Bump in the Night are imaginary. Or are they? Perhaps the best thing about these dark stories is that they might have elements of truth. I would argue that the best Gothics teach us something of ourselves. That we, too, have a dark side. In the wildly successful Netflix series Stranger Things, the dark side is called the Upside Down. It’s where the fog is thick, monsters lurk, and nightmares come to life. A creepy alternate dimension that runs parallel to the known world. Sometimes the stories are more mundane. Less horror and more, well, earthly. Yet even these tales have an inherent murkiness that makes it difficult to separate the truth from the lies, the good from the bad, the real from the imagined. In my novel The Arsenic Eater’s Wife, inspired by a real 1889 case, a young woman is accused of murdering her husband with arsenic. The protagonist, Constance Sullivan, is surrounded by people in the house who aren’t what they seem. Who can she trust? Who’s telling the truth? Adding to this stifled atmosphere is the house itself—a malevolent mansion with murky cells of rooms and corridors that disappear into darkness. Even its exterior is the color of a corpse gone cold. At one point, mold begins to grow on the ceiling of the servants’ quarters and it’s all Constance can do to not go mad. At the crux of the story is a woman who may or may not hang for murder, who may or may not be guilty. But the other players have as many secrets as Constance does and that’s where the dysphoria comes in. Who are we when we are alone with ourselves? What evil lurks around us versus what we create on our own? Here are 10 new Gothic novels that explore that darkness, a mashup of historical and contemporary, young adult and adult, debut and bestselling authors. All with that otherworldly, haunting quality that keeps Gothic readers coming back for more. A Place for Vanishing by Ann Fraistat What happens when a teen and her family move into her mother’s childhood home and the house is menacing to say the least? There are the odd stained-glass windows with depictions of strange insects and roses that bloom unusually blue. And then there are the rumors. Libby’s shocked to learn that macabre seances took place on the grounds a century before. This novel is about masks—Libby’s own and the ones she discovers in the house. Ultimately, she must reveal her true self, faults and all, if she’s to survive the sinister happenings going on around her. A modern, young adult horror with plenty of Gothic elements. The Beholders by Hester Musson An ominous house is at the heart of this novel, too. This time, it’s haunted not by the dead who’ve passed, but the living. Young Harriet arrives at Finton Hall as a new maid and soon meets her employers: the reclusive master, a politician; and his wife, the angelic-voiced Clara. Yet, there’s something not quite right about Clara, and Harriet soon begins to feel isolated with only her diary to record her frantic thoughts. What works so well in this late 19th century historical is the building sense of dread. Most sinister of all, Musson entices the reader with an opening glimpse of what’s coming: the body of a young boy being fished from the Thames with a link to Finton Hall. The Clinic by Cate Quinn As modern thrillers go, this one has it all: a remote cliffside rehab, a mysterious death, a drug addicted sister desperate to find the truth. Meg checks herself in and can’t quite believe the whispers—that her successful actress sister took her life. But can a pill popping alcoholic find out what happened? Lots of windy twists will keep the pages turning with elements of childhood trauma, lies, and paranoia mixed in to make things all the murkier. A Pair of Sharp Eyes by Kat Armstrong Fresh from the country, young Coronation arrives in Bristol looking for work. She finds instead a slave port teaming with filth, poverty, and crime. Worst still, several boys have had their throats slit. Corrie, inquisitive and strong willed, endeavors to find out who the culprit is and why. This early 18th-century-set historical novel has heady themes of racial inequality and religious injustice, sprinkled with lighter tones of romance and empathy. A debut with all the hallmarks of a series. The Devil and Mrs. Davenport by Paulette Kennedy The first day of autumn brought the fever, and with the fever came the voices. So begins Kennedy’s 1950s tale of a woman who begins to see visions when a local girl is murdered. While a parapsychologist comes to Loretta’s aid, her husband, Pete—a professor at a Bible college—refuses to believe Loretta’s fever dreams are a gift. He sees it as something far more threatening: the Devil’s work. Elements of the supernatural swim throughout the novel, bringing disquiet to a once-tranquil marriage in a small Missouri town. The Warm Hands of Ghosts by Katherine Arden In 1918 Irene Iven, a wounded field nurse, receives word that her brother has died fighting in Flanders. After attending a séance in which she receives an otherworldly message that her brother isn’t dead, she returns to the continent to learn what she can of his disappearance. The horrors of war are as real here as the fantastical elements: haunted trenches and an enigmatic violinist with an elixir which may keep soldiers from the brink of madness. The Road from Belhaven by Margot Livesey Lizzie Craig, growing up in her grandparents’ home in 19th century Scotland, has the gift of second sight. But these premonitions are often frightening and fail to warn her of her own rocky future. The arrival of her sister and a tumultuous first love will change Lizzie’s life forever and she must learn to navigate a world fraught with betrayals, mistakes, and treachery if she’s to survive. The Bone Hunters by Joanne Burn When young genius Ada Winters finds a set of unusual fossils buried on a hill in Lyme Regis, it’s the answer to her prayers. The discovery may just save her family from financial ruin and solidify her in the field of geology, a relatively new field in 1824. Enter Dr. Edwin Moyle, a geologist himself who finds Ada appealing but very much in the way of his own success. But just what is it Ada has unearthed, and will it bring her and Edwin fame or ruin? Never Leave, Never Lie by Thea Verdone Inside a dilapidated Victorian mansion, secrets lurk. Alek is a pianist with a haunted past who composes music with the gift of synesthesia—he can see sounds and hear colors. His partner, Ian, is a gifted contractor who sees possibilities in the grim, crumbling estate they cohabitate. For Alek, the truth about his history is far worse than his lies but disclosing it to Ian could send him packing—and Alek will never let him leave. A dark MM romance about tortured souls. The Household by Stacey Halls Urania Cottage, a home for unfortunate women (co-founded by Charles Dickens who features as a secondary character), is the center of this murky, mid-19th century historical. Its inhabitants are women who’ve fallen, been incarcerated, maltreated, or orphaned. Meanwhile, in a mansion nearby in Piccadilly, the home’s other founder, Angela Burdett-Coutts learns distressing news: her stalker of ten years has been released from prison. As the two worlds merge in unexpected ways, it’s clear freedom comes at a price. *** View the full article

It was at a small writer’s workshop in New York City when one of the instructors, Paula Munier (senior agent for Talcott Notch Literary Services and the USA Today bestselling author of the Mercy Carr mystery series) introduced a literary agent to our group of twenty. The idea was to pitch our work to the agent in hopes he might want to represent one of us. I think of pitches like the Hunger Games of publishing—survival depends on slashing your competition to bits with just a few short sentences that you hope are lethal enough to convince an agent that your book is better than the rest and worthy of publishing. Midway into my pitch, the guest agent, Adam Chromy, President of Movable Type Management interrupted and said, “No-one likes Luke.” Luke was my protagonist, an online reporter and quite frankly, as I came to learn–boring. Chromy then said that if I would write my secondary character, an obituary writer, as the protagonist, he would sign me on the spot. My jaw would have dropped if my mouth hadn’t been uttering the words, “Don’t you want to see if I can write first?” My future agent had done his homework and already knew I had made a career as a freelance writer so he was less worried about my skill than he was about my willingness to change my entire book. From the moment I began rewriting my Deadly Deadlines series about an obituary writer who solves mysteries in her Hallmark worthy small town, I recognized the opportunity my character’s profession offered. Who would be better positioned to stumble upon murder than Winter Snow, an obituary writer with deadly skills. That experience led me to take stock of some of my favorite books and I began to see a pattern in the novels I liked to read. The most memorable characters had jobs I knew little or nothing about. Whether I’m reading about a crossword puzzle author, a bookbinder, a forensic anthropologist, a bartender, or a psychiatrist, I tend to lean toward stories whose protagonists lead me down new and interesting paths. These books have main characters who are positioned to come across mystery and murder. And these are books with characters driven by their unique personalities and use their distinctive skills to solve a crime. Take A Death in Door County and Death in the Dark Woods, the first two Monster Hunter mysteries in an exciting series by Annelise Ryan, as an example. When her contract for her Maddie Winston and Helping Hands series was not renewed, Ryan wanted to find a character to write about who would give readers a taste of something they probably wouldn’t sample in their daily lives. The idea for cryptozoologist Morgan Carter was born during a conversation with her agent who “loved the idea.” Reading Ryan’s book sent me straight to google to confirm that yes, cryptozoology is a real profession. In short it is the study of animals rumored to exist—think Big Foot or the Loch Ness Monster. You don’t need special education or training to start searching for “cryptids” as they are called. Ryan, however, loaded her character with scientific degrees, hands on training and a strange family history thereby giving her cryptozoologist plenty of opportunity to confirm or disprove the deaths pinned on the rumored beasts. There’s much to be learned about the not-so-unusual creatures in TM Dunn’s psychological thriller Her Father’s Daughter. It would be a spoiler to even hint at how Dunn’s loving father/daughter exterminating team use their special skills in this book. However, suffice to say, it is their interesting profession that allows them to move around in places most of us don’t usually go. Dunn came up with her idea because her father was an exterminator and she “loved listening to his stories about the people he met or the strange situations he encountered on the job.” Speaking of parents, my mother was a neat freak on steroids. When my sisters and I cleaned the room we shared, I would make them stand in the doorway with eyes closed and then the second they blinked open, they had to identify the first thing they saw. Often it was an offending hairbrush slightly askew or a crinkle in the bedspread that no-one but our mother would ever notice. Unless, of course, you are Molly Gray, the hyper-orderly housekeeper who lacks social skills in The Maid by Nina Prose. Molly’s profession, fed by her quirky personality puts her in a place where she notices everything that is amiss, whether it is an interrupted routine or a pillow out of place. Molly’s job as a maid at a large hotel positions her to notice the subtle clues a murderer has left behind. Each of the four main characters in Richard Osman’s The Thursday Murder Club series have interesting former careers. Joyce was a nurse who can identify a possible cause of death before the coroner even arrives. Elizabeth is a no-nonsense ex-spy. Ron is a former union activist and Ibrahim a psychiatrist. These characters are thrust together in Cooper’s Chase, a retirement home. Their often-peculiar personalities and varying backgrounds make the likelihood of repeatedly finding trouble more believable. Even better, their former careers take readers down a number of interesting paths while the characters bring a variety of crime-solving skills to the table. Protagonists with distinctive professions certainly keep Killers of a Certain Age by Deanna Raybourn moving at a fast clip. Four women assassins who’ve aged out of their jobs get forced back into it when their lives are threatened. InDeath Comes to Marlow by Robert Thorogood a crossword puzzle creator who likes to swim nude uses her puzzle solving skills to recognize a murder and identify the killer. The right profession creates memorable characters that readers love and can take a plot straight where it needs to go. Consider some of these additional favorites: the high-powered realtor and her single-mom daughter in Mother-Daughter Murder Night; the owner of a bar as in Cathi Stoler’s clever On the Rocks series; a forensic anthropologist in Kathy Reich’s Temperance Brennan thrillers; or a single mom struggling to make ends meet as a romance mystery writer in Elle Cosimano’s Finlay Donovan books. And hopefully an obituary writer named Winter Snow in my debut novel, The Last Word (February 2024) by Gerri Lewis. *** View the full article

We get by with a little help from our friends—right? But what if those friends don’t really have our best interests at heart? What happens when a friendship veers into enemy—or frenemy—territory, leading to secrets, betrayals, maybe even murder? My upcoming novel, Keep Your Friends Close, follows Mary and Willa, two moms who meet at a Brooklyn playground and become fast friends … for awhile, at least. Only then, Willa ghosts Mary, disappearing from her life without so much as a trace. It all comes to a head later that summer when Mary sees Willa up in the Catskills. Or she thinks she does: Willa is calling herself Annie now, and she’s got an entirely different family in tow. When Mary’s ex, George, turns up dead just a few days later and Mary becomes the prime suspect, she has no choice to turn to her former friend for help. But is Willa-slash-Annie friend or foe, confidant or just con? Mary must figure it out before she loses everything. Here are six slick thrillers that also portray the friends-to-frenemies relationship. The Other Black Girl Toiling away in the predominantly white publishing industry, of course twenty-six-year-old editorial assistant Nella Rogers is relieved to see another Black girl, Hazel, start at Wagner Books. But their friendship has hardly begun when Hazel becomes the office favorite and Nella is passed over—yet again. As Nella and Hazel grow closer, Nella begins to wonder if a series of threatening notes might be Hazel’s doing. Harris’s propulsive thriller, which reads as Get Out meets The Stepford Wives, examines themes of friendship, identity, community and white fragility like no other. Friends Like These Six college friends. One reunion weekend at a house in the Catskills. What could go wrong? When one friend goes missing and another turns up dead, the ties that bind these friends together are truly tested. Is it possible that one of them is responsible, or is someone outside of their group out to get them? McCreight’s twisty tome is an exploration of lifelong friendship and the love, history—and secrets—that holds a tight-knit group together. The Writing Retreat Imagine your favorite writer on earth, the famous and notoriously reclusive Roza Vallo, is hosting an exclusive month-long writer’s retreat at her sprawling estate. Now imagine that your former BFF and current rival, Wren, is going to be in attendance, too. Will the chance at winning a massive book contract make it worth it? Alex tells herself yes, but when one of the writers disappears in a snowstorm, she begins to realize something very evil is afoot. Is her former friend someone she can turn to as she tries to uncover the mystery, or is Wren a part of the evil at the center of this stunning tale of fame and desire? Yellowface Perhaps no modern book illustrates the danger of friends who don’t have our best interests at heart quite like R.F. Kuang’s captivating exploration of diversity, racism and cultural appropriation. June Hayward can’t get her writing career off the ground, but her pal, Athena Liu, is a literary darling. But when Athena dies choking on not-quite-cooked pancakes, June jumps at an opportunity to steal Athena’s next book and pass it off as her own. June’s every action—and excuse—will make readers gasp and cringe in equal measure, and waiting for her comeuppance keeps the pages turning in this fresh literary thriller. Age of Vice Deepti Kapoor’s crime thriller-meets-family saga set in contemporary India is lush, glamorous, corrupt and inherently readable. The main story focuses around a speeding Mercedes that jumps a curb in New Delhi leaving five people dead—and the coverup that serves to protect the rich men, and their corrupt families, at fault. But the most captivating elements of the novel are the relationships surrounding the enigmatic playboy Sunny Wadia and their descent into betrayal, from his friendship-slash-romance with journalist Neda, to his shifting loyalties to his servant Ajay, to the friends in his own social circle who he’ll happily sell out in the name of preserving his family. Delicate Condition A body-horror masterpiece and a much-needed update to Rosemary’s Baby, Delicate Condition follows Anna Alcott, an indie actress desperate to start a family. But her IVF journey is marred by strange happenings—swapped appointments and misplaced medicines, cryptic warnings and figures in the shadows. After a heartbreaking miscarriage, Anna becomes convinced that she’s actually still pregnant—but even as she feels the baby growing inside her, she begins to believe that someone is playing games with her, trying to prevent her from ever having a child—and that person might just be someone she once thought was the most trusted of friends. *** Featured image: From Rubens’ The Three Graces View the full article

It’s still early in the 2020s for number ten, so this partial list (incomplete and biased) looks at nine favorite filmed novels published across 90 years (1936 to 2016, one per decade). While the passage of time makes many movies seem historical (think Agatha Christie adaptations), I’ve stuck to a strict definition. All the novels are set years before their original publication dates. The books are still in print, and the films are available on DVD or streaming. In a sign of changing viewing habits, the last two novels are not theatrical releases but streamed series. In Murder by Lamplight, Dr. Julia Lewis and Inspector Richard Tennant meet in the 1860s, the same decade as the Victorian lovers in A.S. Byatt’s Possession (my novel/film pairing for the 1990s). Julia and Tennant are reluctant allies who put their misgivings aside to solve a series of vicious killings on London’s gaslit streets. Murder by Lamplight is published by Kensington Books and available on February 20, 2024. 1936: Jamaica Inn by Daphne du Maurier 1939 film directed by Alfred Hitchcock The novel: In early nineteenth-century Cornwall, the orphaned Mary Yellon arrives at the sinister Jamaica Inn to live with her aunt and uncle. Mary quickly realizes that nefarious doings are afoot. Is her uncle the leader of the wreckers who lure ships onto the rocky Cornish coast, killing the survivors who stagger ashore? Or is someone else the murderous mastermind? The film: Alfred Hitchcock plays fast and loose with Daphne Du Maurier’s plot, but his atmospherics match the source’s Gothic suspense. In the film’s perpetual nighttime, tides don’t roll; they roar. Winds don’t blow; they howl. The shipwreck scenes look as if Hitchcock shot them in a bathtub, but no matter. The film features a scenery-chewing performance by Charles Laughton, a teenage Maureen O’Hara in her first starring role, and a boatload of British character actors, seasoned pros all of them. Laughton drove Hitchcock mad with his odd, mincing villain. (No spoiler here: the viewer discovers his identity in the first fifteen minutes, and the bad guy is someone else in the book.) But the famed director couldn’t fire his star because Laughton co-produced the film. It was Hitchcock’s last British movie before moving on to Hollywood to shoot Du Maurier’s Rebecca, starring Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine. Look for the remastered 75th anniversary version of Jamaica Inn for best viewing. Footnote: A BBC remake ran in Britain in 2016 and streams in the US on Prime Video. Jessica Finlay Brown (Lady Sybil from Downton Abbey) stars in a three-part series that proves more can be less. In this version, the title inn looks seedy, not menacing, the pace is glacial, and an American viewer needs subtitles (unprovided) to understand the mumbling Cornish accents. 1944: Dragonwyck by Anya Seton 1946 film directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz The novel: The setting is New York’s Hudson Valley in the 1840s and the mostly forgotten “anti-rent wars” that raged against the landlords. The great landowning “patroons” were like latter-day medieval lords, and tenant farmers worked their lands like serfs. Seton’s Gothic melodrama has all the elements of the genre: a naïve young woman, Miranda Wells, Nicholas Van Ryn, the handsome, brooding lord of the manor, and Dragonwyck, the secret-filled, cliff-top mansion overlooking the Hudson River. Ghosts from the past, insanity, a poisonous plant, and possible murder season the stew. The film: Gene Tierney gets top billing, but the movie belongs to Vincent Price. His Nicholas Van Ryn, handsome, haughty, haunted, and menacing, dominates every scene he’s in. The stellar supporting cast includes Walter Huston, Jessica Tandy, and Spring Byington. Usually cast in wholesome, motherly roles, Byington does a creepy turn as the strange housekeeper who knows all the family secrets. The novel and the film differ most dramatically in their endings. But this is one instance when the movie seems more faithful to Van Ryn’s character than the book’s conclusion. Footnotes: Gene Tierney and Vincent Prince shared the screen four times, most memorably in the excellent mystery Laura (1944). It also stars Clifton Webb and Dana Andrews as the tough, cynical policeman who falls in love with a dead woman’s portrait. The movie features a knock-your-socks-off surprise. Director Mankiewicz ended his career with another mystery, the cat-and-mouse Sleuth (1972), starring Laurence Olivier and Michael Caine. 1951: The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey The Lost King (2022), directed by Stephen Frears The novel: A Daughter of Time turns up on nearly every mystery GOAT list, and Josephine Tey was a master of the British “Golden Age.” Her recurring police detective, Inspector Alan Grant, tries to solve a pair of 400-year-old murders by investigating from his hospital bed. Laid up with a broken leg and bored, Grant is persuaded by a friend to tackle one of history’s coldest cases. Did the evil King Richard III murder his young nephews to seize the crown? The novel breathed new life into “The Richard III Society,” swelling the number of “Ricardians” dedicated to proving the king’s innocence. The film: I’m cheating here. The Lost King is not a filmed version of The Daughter of Time. Instead, it tells the true story of the stubborn Ricardian who led the effort that located Richard III’s body under a Yorkshire parking lot. It stars an excellent Sally Hawkins as the dogged amateur historian Phillipa Langley. She’s determined to prove her theory in the face of scholarly skepticism. Infuriatingly, academia’s lack of cooperation doesn’t stop it from taking credit for unearthing Richard. You can stream The Lost King on Acorn and other services. Footnotes: Several other Josephine Tey novels were filmed. Alfred Hitchcock turned A Shilling for Candles (1936) into the film Young and Innocent (1937). It’s a suspenseful and charming man-on-the-run story. Stream it on Prime Video and watch for Hitchcock’s masterful tracking shot in the dance hall scene at the film’s end. And Tey’s intriguing The Franchise Affair made it onto film twice. The 1951 movie is just OK; the 1988 mini-series with Patrick Malahide and Joanna McCallum is far superior. (You can find it on YouTube.) The Franchise Affair is the only time Tey’s brilliant Inspector Grant got it wrong. 1969: The French Lieutenant’s Woman by John Fowles 1981 film directed by Karel Reisz The novel: Is it a mystery novel? Well, the reader confronts many enigmas in its pages. Who is Sarah Woodson, the “French lieutenant’s woman?” Why does she remain in Lyme Regis, staring out to sea and lingering amid the wild landscape of the undercliff? She certainly baffles and disturbs the tranquility of the newly engaged scientist, Charles Smithson. But Sarah has lied to the world about herself—and lies to Charles. Why? Where does she go after she vanishes? And what is the story’s end? Fowles wrote more than one conclusion. The film: Playwright Harold Pinter won an Academy Award for the screenplay. The movie stars Meryl Streep in the title role and Jeremy Irons as Charles Smithson. In a plot layer absent in the novel, they play modern actors Mike and Anna, the leads in a parallel story about filming the book. Watch for this “doubleness” right from the opening shot when Streep walks out of the set and into the story. The movie is gorgeous to look at, and the stars are excellent. Streep won the Academy Award for her Sarah/Anna performance, the first of three as a leading actor. Footnotes: Other works by Fowles were filmed. William Wyler directed the 1965 movie of the author’s debut novel, The Collector (1963), a thriller about a man who kidnaps an art student and holds her captive. Director William Wyler received an Academy Award nomination, his twelfth. (That’s an Academy record. He’s tied with Frank Capra for most directing wins at three.) Fowles’ second published novel also made it to film. The Magus (1968), a critical failure, stars Michael Caine and Anthony Quinn. 1978: Eye of the Needle by Ken Follett 1981 film directed by Richard Marquand The novel: This was Ken Follett’s first international bestseller. The “needle” in the title is Henry Faber, the code name of the Nazi spy in England who flashes a deadly stiletto. The reader first meets him at the start of the war, radioing troop movements back to Germany. Four years later, his story intersects with that of David and Lucy Rose, living unhappily and remotely on an island off Scotland. Faber possesses a secret vital to D-Day’s success; it’s up to Lucy to stop him from taking it to Germany. The film: Donald Sutherland nails the cold, ruthless Faber as utterly ordinary yet menacing. He may be less convincing sweeping Kate Nelligan’s Lucy off her feet. (Although four years trapped on a lonely island with her self-pitying pilot husband—sidelined after an accident—might do the trick.) The viewer must accept a reasonable quotient of hokum. For example, would one of the greatest secrets of D-Day really be guarded by a single soldier with a dog? It doesn’t matter. Once we’re on that island, the tension mounts. Watch Nelligan with Sutherland after she’s figured things out and look for the light-socket scene. Footnote: Two books later, Follett published The Key to Rebecca. In it, another Nazi spy is on the loose. This time, he’s in Egypt, and thwarting General Rommel’s conquest of North Africa is at stake. The “Rebecca” in the title—and the key to it all—is the Daphne Du Maurier novel. The story has a factual basis, and the novel was a popular and critical success. (In 1985, a great story got middling treatment in a two-part TV production.) 1980: The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco 1986 film directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud The novel: First published In Italy, Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose was a surprise US bestseller, a book by an Italian professor of semiotics—a discipline hard to define let alone explain. It takes place in a fourteenth-century abbey and involves accusations of heresy, a debate over the worldly vs. spiritual powers of the Church, conflicts of faith and reason, a missing Greek manuscript, and the murders of seven monks. And that’s just for starters. The plot is as complex as the monastery library’s labyrinth. Yet, the story draws you in. You follow Brother William of Baskerville, the wry and tolerant monk charged with solving the grisly murders, as he parses symbols and peels back the mystery’s layers. He even has a Dr. Watson at his side, a young novice named Adso of Melk. Brother William’s weapon in a world of superstition and fanaticism is reason. He applies logic and his powers of deduction to uncover the murderer. The film: Reviewers liked it less than viewers (a 76% Rotten Tomatoes score vs. an audience score of 85%). Sean Connery plays Brother William of Baskerville, visiting monk and Medieval Sherlock Holmes. (At one point, he tells Christian Slater’s Brother Adso that a conclusion is “elementary.”) The cinematography is excellent, and so is the monastery set. In the opening shot, it looms like a fortress in the desolate landscape, isolated and forbidding. F. Murray Abraham is memorable in the smaller role of Brother William’s nasty Vatican nemesis. But watch for Ron Perlman’s performance as the childlike ogre Brother Salvatore and the scene near the end where he sings a lullaby. Footnote: Reviewers weren’t kind to the 2019 television series starring John Turturro. The critics’ consensus on Rotten Tomatoes: “The Name of the Rose boasts fine performances, but the drama floating around its hallowed halls often feels like more work than it’s worth” (53% score). 1990: Possession by A.S. Byatt 2002 film directed by Neil LaBute The novel: This is the literary mystery on the list. Researcher Roland Michell finds two letters written to a mysterious woman by the Victorian poet Randolph Ash. Michell is seized by a desire to uncover her identity and steals the letters from the British Museum, the first of many forms of possession explored in the novel. Then he teams with a fellow scholar, Maud Bailey, an expert on the poet Christabel LaMotte, whom Roland suspects was Ash’s lover. Maud and Roland trace more letters, poems, and journals and follow the suspected lovers’ trail from London to Yorkshire and to France. Along the way, envious academics determined to possess the evidence pursue them. Were Ash and LaMotte lovers? Was there a child? If so, what happened to the baby? Is the critical evidence buried in a box in Ash’s grave? In a gentle epilogue, another mystery is solved. Possession is a witty, romantic, intellectual puzzler. The film: Director Neil LaBute cast Gwyneth Paltrow and Aaron Eckhart as the modern scholars and Jeremy Northam and Jennifer Ehle as the Victorian poets. The director streamlines the complex novel, but he follows the story’s throughline. Possibly the biggest change is Roland Michell, who was transformed from an Englishman into a brash American. Watch for the Yorkshire scenes where the film crosscuts between the historical lovers on the way to their tryst and the modern researchers on the hunt. Their car passes under a railway trestle. Seconds later, a steam engine carrying the Victorian lovers rattles overhead. And the final, poignant epilogue is lovely. The film received mixed critical reception, but what can I say? Sometimes, the critics get it wrong. Footnote: Gwyneth Paltrow and Jeremy Northam share the screen in another film adaptation of an English novel: Jane Austen’s Emma (1996). Of course, it’s not a mystery, but the plot turns on hidden identities and a secret’s revelation. 2008: The Spies of Warsaw by Alan Furst 2013 TV-series with multiple directors The novel: Alan Furst’s The Spies of Warsaw is set in Europe in the late 1930s, a familiar Furst milieu. Intelligence officer Lt. Colonel Jean-Francois Mercier poses as a French military attaché in Warsaw, where he operates an active spy network. Undercover, Mercier observes the German military buildup at the border and struggles to awaken his superiors in Paris to the growing Nazi menace. The novel handles the obligatory genre elements well: nail-biting, cross-border journeys, shady intelligence operatives, and informants—some idealists, others blackmailed into service. It has a classic Furst hero in Mercier: a pensive man on the right side of history who still feels the taint of moral compromise. As always, there is a touch of romance: the widowed Mercier, like all Furst heroes, is very attractive to women. Best of all, the novel has the feel of its time and place. As one critic noted, it’s a world “infused with the melancholy romanticism of Casablanca.” The Spies of Warsaw recreates a moody, tension-filled Europe teetering on the brink of war. The mini-series: A line of dialog between David Tennant’s Mercier and a Polish officer-friend nails the novel’s physical and moral environments. The Pole laments the simpler world they inhabited as young army officers before the Great War. He says, “Now, everything is gray, shadows, secrets.” (When we first see Mercier dressing for a formal dinner, his uniform’s bright blue tunic and red trousers pop after scenes drained of color.) Later, we witness the adroit spy master Mercier neatly extract a pair of Soviet defectors, although not all his agents survive the double games they play. David Tennant, perfect as Mercier, receives fine support from familiar faces to watchers of British TV productions. Allan Corduner and Linda Bassett play the fleeing Russian agents. Anton Lesser is a possible anti-Nazi spy, and Julian Glover plays Mercier’s one clear-sighted ally in a mostly benighted French military. No fireworks, no melodrama, The Spies of Warsaw is excellent, old-fashioned storytelling. Footnote: The Spies of Warsaw is the tenth of fifteen books in Furst’s “Night Soldiers” series, beginning with the 1988 novel of the same name. To date, it’s the only film of a Furst novel. His most recent book is Under Occupation, published in 2019. 2016: Belgravia by Julian Fellowes 2020 series, John Alexander, Director The novel: This is the guilty pleasure pairing on my list. Julian Fellowes, better known for his screen and teleplays (Gosford Park, Downton Abbey, The Gilded Age), wrote the novel set in early Victorian England. The plot begins a generation earlier at the famous Duchess of Richmond’s ball, held on the eve of the Battle of Waterloo. Many young officers danced their last quadrilles that evening. Two families, one aristocratic and one up-and-coming middle class, share a family tragedy linked to that gathering. The full scope of their loss is unknown to both and is at the mystery’s core. The mini-series: It’s unsurprising that the production is a faithful adaptation of the novel: Julian Fellowes wrote the script. One of the series’ great pleasure is the cast of old British pros. Among them are Tom Wilkinson, Harriet Walter, Tara Fitzgerald, and Philip Glenister. A second pleasure in any mystery: the viewers think they’re in on the story’s secret, but Fellowes adds one great surprise toward the end. Footnote: Julian Fellowes’ adaptation of Anthony Trollope’s novel Doctor Thorne is another story in which the mystery of a child’s identity is the key. It will either sink or save a family’s fortune. *** View the full article

Fairy tales have always been rather grim and murderous, even before the Brothers Grimm complied their collection in 1812. “Fairytale” was a term coined by Marie-Catharine Le Jumel de Barneville, Baroness d’Aulnoy. Also known as Comtesse d’Aulnoy. She published in French many fairytales including Finette Cindron, or Cunning Cinders (1697). A tale that is better known as Cinderella. In this rendition, Finette Cindron’s royal parents attempt to abandon their three daughters so that they cannot find their way home. Luckily, Finette Cindron’s fairy godmother has given her a string that helps the princesses find their way home. Undeterred, their mother decides to take them on an even longer journey and abandons them again. And then again until they are lost in a far off land with ogres. The Ogre and Ogress decide to use the princesses as servants until they are ready to eat them. Clever Finette manages to burn the Ogre in the oven, cut off the Ogress’s head, and escape with her two sisters. Charles Perrault’s famous, Tales and Stories of the Past with Morals: Tales of My Mother Goose was published that same year in French (1697). It included the stories: Cinderella, or the Little Glass Slipper, The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood, Little Thumb, The Master Cat, or Puss in Boots, Riquet of the Tuft, Blue Beard, The Fairy, and Little Red Riding Hood. In the story of “Blue Beard”, he forbids his wife to open a closet door while he is gone, but her curiosity overcomes her and opens it with a key and sees that “the floor was all covered over with clotted blood, on which lay the bodies of several dead women, ranged against the walls.” His wife realizes that these were her husband’s previous wives that he married and then murdered. Despite the fact that fairy tales were grim and often violent, they were read to children in the eighteenth century to teach morals. In “Little Red Riding Hood” by Charles Perrault, Mother Goose explains that: “The Wolf, I say, for Wolves too sure there are / Of every sort, and every character.” Young ladies are warned not to trust wolfish young men who are “artful, tho’ their true designs they hide.” In Once Upon a Murder, set in 1785, Miss Tiffany Woodall is now the official librarian for the Duchess of Beaufort. She is also tasked with teaching the young duke until a suitable governess is found. A true librarian, she purchases children’s books for charge, including fairy tales. However, Tiffany is horrified to find herself in a real-life fairy tale when she discovers a dead body in front of her cottage in the woods. View the full article

I’m far from being the first ex-lawyer to turn fiction writing. While my book Prima Facie is a book of fiction that definitely focuses on the law, other lawyers don’t always deal with the law specifically. Lawyers do, however, tend to interrogate ideas and systems in their work. What is it that an ex-lawyer brings to their writing that feels so exciting? All writers are unique in their preoccupations and stories, but to my mind they seem to incorporate into their work the way lawyers are trained to think about story and information. All lawyers (and specifically criminal lawyers) are trained to go beneath the story on the surface and to reflect on how and when social systems have played roles in a story or a person’s life. Something has been either exposed or repressed—and lawyers often consider whether that is based on a cultural or social structure, or rooted in an economic or political system. It seems that ex-lawyer writers consider that ideas are for interrogation and characters should be multifaceted and real. I think one shared aspect, whether conscious or not, is the dispassionate manner in which ex-lawyers unravel strands of story and aspects of character in order to explore an overall theme or question something. As trained and practicing lawyers we were all expected to view words as powerful, persuasive and capable of changing the narrative of a person, history or even a country. I think when lawyers approach writing for fiction or non-fiction, they are completely aware of how significant their choices of worlds, words and characters are. Anna Funder, Stasiland One of my favorite lawyers-turned-writers is Anna Funder—an Australian writer who wrote an amazing book some time ago called Stasiland. She ventured into East Germany post the unification of Germany and spoke with friends, interviewed ex-Stasi officers and those who were their victims, and weaved together a non-fiction book of her journey. It was a clear unveiling of real stories of those who had endured the oppression of Eastern Germany, and also about the motivations and collusion of the Stasi officers, but so too did it include her own musings throughout of living and wandering around Germany. More recently and in a similar style Funder completed Wifedom that looks at how a famous male writer—Orwell—left his wife out of his life story and failed to credit her for the ways she assisted him in his political actions and his writing works. This book was a great read not only for the story but to see a masterful unravelling of an invisible woman’s story alongside the one that we have always been told is the main one. Georgia Blain, Between a Dog and a Wolf Another favorite and much loved Australian lawyer-turned-writer is Georgia Blain. Blain wrote both fiction and non-fiction, and while her work did not specifically look at the legal system, she also looked outside the usual stories and found voices in the spaces in between stories to elaborate on and bring to life. Suzanne Leal, The Watchful Wife Suzanne Leal, another Australia ex lawyer, writes fiction. Her latest work, The Watchful Wife, is a crime story with strong characters in which the question is posed: ‘She loves and trusts her husband, but does she know him?’ Pascal Janovjak, The Rome Zoo Translated by Stephanie Smee Stephanie Smee is an Australian ex-lawyer who has mastered the translation of books from French to English. The book she has most recently translated (to perfection) is The Rome Zoo by Pascal Janovjak. It inspires me to think that an ex-lawyer has worked so beautifully with the ideas of another writer. Chris Nyst, Millen For a book that has been inspired by a real-life by a real lawyer, try Millen by Chris Nyst. It features a flashy lawyer Eddie Moran and is inspired by a real murder case the author worked on. It’s set in outback Queensland in the aftermath of a brutal government enquiry into police corruption. *** View the full article

Just weeks after I moved from my hometown of New York City to the California Bay Area in fall 2017, I woke up to smoky skies. On my way to work at HuffPost’s office in downtown San Francisco, I passed people with scarves clenched over their mouths, N95 masks on, years before the pandemic would make this a common sight. At my desk, my throat scratching oddly, a headache blossoming between my eyes, I saw the latest reports come in: a historic blaze had torn through Sonoma and Napa, leaving fields of ash where neighborhoods once deemed at low risk for fire used to stand. I got into my car and drove north, toward a thickening cloud of ash. As I pulled into the town of Santa Rosa, two-story houses and pristine lawns slowly turned dusty and gray, trees went from leafy green to spindly, black and bare. And then: a field of black ash, as far as the eye could see. The only things that were recognizable: hollowed-out car frames, brick chimneys standing like soldiers at attention over a massacre. A few people walked around, stepping gingerly through still-hot metal. They had fled the fire in the night and come back to check on their houses, finding everything gone. One young woman called out for her cat. Another told me: “Everything that we had is charcoal.” I thanked them for sharing their stories with me, and on the drive home, I cried. I sent five hundred words to my editor, feeling inadequate, knowing I had witnessed just a fraction of the grief survivors now had to live with for the rest of their lives. And this was only one fire, in one year, in an increasingly expanding season of worsening heat, fires, storms and floods. It was a brutal introduction to the deepening climate crisis I would cover over the years for HuffPost, tracing the worsening emergency in a state I would come to love and call home. It would also plant the seeds of what would later become my first novel, A Fire So Wild. In late 2020, after covering the aftermath of the state’s deadliest fire in Paradise in 2018, the state’s largest fire in Mendocino in 2020, speaking to survivors caught between the rock of the housing crisis and the hard place of our boiling planet, a story started to take shape: Three families in Berkeley. One in a house up in the hills. Another in affordable housing down in the flats. And a couple living in their van by the shore. A wildfire slowly growing in the distance. I wrote A Fire So Wild, my new novel, as a love letter to California and a questioning of how we build meaningful lives in a world on fire. And I am far from the only author reckoning with how our human-made, greed-fueled climate crisis is shaping our lives. Here are five gut-wrenching books that will haunt and transform your perspective on our planet: Eleanor Catton, Birnam Wood In this thriller, a young crew of guerrilla gardeners are trying to build an anti-capitalist community when their passionate leader Mira meets a billionaire ready to finance the operation. We follow Mira and the increasingly sketchy billionaire, as well as Mira’s friends who start to doubt her motives, as they all get entangled on a plot of land that is hiding something in its soil. C Pam Zhang, Land of Milk and Honey The world’s crops are failing and rich, delicious food is becoming a rarity. An up-and-coming chef is offered a position in a colony of the wealthy, with ingredients she hasn’t come by in years, in an opportunity that feels impossible to pass up. As she becomes embedded with the elite family running the place, she is forced to face the limits of her ethics in a degenerating world. Charlotte McConaghy, Once There Were Wolves In this tense mystery, a woman arrives in rural Scotland on an important environmental mission to repopulate its land with long-gone wolves. As her team works to convince the locals that the wolves are not a danger to them, and in fact will help their land thrive, a farmer is killed. Tensions mount to a fever pitch as she tries to figure out what happened, and save the wolves. Rumaan Alam, Leave The World Behind In this short, haunting story, a family heads out of town to spend a relaxing weekend at a beach house, when a widespread blackout engulfs the city and the home’s owners arrive at the door asking to come in. As the mystery of what is happening in the broader world expands, the two families have to face their existential fears, and how much we can trust one another in a crisis. Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower In this classic of the apocalypse genre, a young climate refugee journeys north in California, fleeing the dangers of a deeply unequal society falling apart. Using her powers to feel others’ pain, she introduces people to a new religion, Earthseed, in which God is change. *** View the full article

Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Sarah Ruiz-Grossman, A Fire So Wide (Harper) “Ruiz-Grossman’s captivating debut chronicles a wildfire’s impact on a diverse set of residents of Berkeley. . . . It’s a gripping page-turner with a surprising twist, as a set of disgruntled survivors form an unlikely alliance and take drastic action. The complex characterizations and realistic scenarios converge to deliver a satisfying punch.” –Publishers Weekly Leah Konen, Keep Your Friends Close (Putnam) “[A] fast-paced, plot-driven novel that manages to poke fun at millennial parenting and the culture of wealthy Brooklynites . . . A thrilling and unpredictable hunt for answers that pays off.” –Kirkus Reviews Jørn Lier Horst, Thomas Enger, (transl. Megan Turney), Stigma (Orenda) “Blix suffers a series of vicious assaults in Stigma, the new novel by the stellar Norwegian crime-writing duo Jorn Lier Horst and Thomas Enger … tense, brutal and fast-moving.” –Sunday Times Pascale Robert-Diard (transl. Adriana Hunter), The Little Liar (Other Press) “In a story that addresses the many different kinds of truth available for the telling, even as it asks to what purposes those truths should be used, Robert-Diard writes a fast, tight, character-driven tale that refuses the easy answers so readily available in an era of social media activism in favor of the complexity of the all-too-human natures that motivate us all. Complex, provocative, and timely.” Vera Kurian, A Step Past Darkness (Park Row) “Through flashbacks and the gang’s emotionally powerful reunion, Kurian draws readers in, invoking strong Goonies vibes. Here, as in her debut, Never Saw Me Coming, Kurian creates unforgettable characters, breathless suspense, and original plotting. A must-read for fans of C. J. Tudor and Jennifer McMahon.” –Booklist A. J. Finn, End of Story (William Morrow) “Literary magic – a mystery lover’s delight . . . Absorbing, stylish, and sparkling with quick wit . . . reminds you of something so utterly essential about a truly masterful mystery – that the end is just the beginning.” — Nita Prose Cara Hunter, All the Rage (William Morrow) “Hunter’s fourth outing with Fawley is a well-written, richly detailed fly-on-the-wall procedural; highly recommended.” –Booklist Melissa Albert, The Bad Ones (Flatiron Books) “The supernatural creep factor is extreme, and there are secrets aplenty in this compelling and eerie tale.” –Booklist Sara Shepard, Nowhere Like Home (Dutton) “Twisted friendships, toxic pasts and tangled motives—this is Sara Shepard doing what she does best!” –Ruth Ware Tammy Greenwood, The Still Point (Kensington) “A gifted storyteller, Tammy Greenwood instantly transports you to the cutthroat, brutally competitive, and beautiful world of ballet in this richly-detailed, expertly-plotted, absorbing tale of friendship, motherhood, passion, and dreams, found, lost, and found again.” –Heather Gudenkauf View the full article

Sitting majestically on the Garonne River in southwestern France, capital of the country’s Nouvelle-Aquitaine region, with approximately a million “Bordelais” (masculine) or “Bordelaises” (feminine) in its metropolitan region. A city and region of castles and wine, that likes to think of itself as the world capital of wine. And wine also happens to appear in rather a lot of Bordeaux crime novels too… So let’s start with that most Bordelais of crime fighters – the winemaker –detective. Jean-Pierre Alaux and Noël Balen’s Bordeaux region set series of crime novels now numbers 22 books (14, and counting, of which are available in English). They all feature the world-renowned winemaker turned gentleman detective Benjamin Cooker and his assistant Virgile Lanssien. While wine is a luxury to be savoured and appreciated it is also a world, so Alaux and Balen’s novels suggest, of dodgy money, deceit, death, crime, inheritance, and jealousy. The books are massively successful in France and spawned a series hit TV show too. The opening book of the series is Treachery in Bordeaux (2014). When some barrels turn at the prestigious grand cru Moniales Haut-Brion wine estate, Cooker and Virgile start to investigate. Is it negligence or sabotage? Moving through the series Cooker and Virgile encounter ingenious heists of Grand Cru, a serial killer stalking Bordeaux leaving clues that relate back to wine, feuding over inheritance of a Cognac dynasty, sabotaged vineyards. Though mostly set in Bordeaux there are side trips to Sauternes, Paris and Gascony but it’s all wine all the time with Cooker and Virgile. Read the series and you could easily qualify to be a sommelier. Patrick Hilyer’s Broke the Grape’s Joy (2012) is a little cosy crime trip into Bordeaux viticulture too. English widow, Jean Valeix, is the owner of a fabulous vineyard in the French wine village of Saint-Emilion. But her cherished chateau is struggling to sell its produce. All she needs to do to save the vineyard from bankruptcy is solve a murder. Wine is rationed and kept hidden away in cellars in Alan Massie’s terrific (I devoured them all in a long weekend) World War Two set tetralogy. Massie was a Scottish journalist who spent time in Bordeaux and wrote of its wartime history before launching into his crime-espionage blend tetralogy. The series starts with Death in Bordeaux (2010). In the spring of 1940, the mutilated body of a gay man is discovered in a street near the Bordeaux railway station. The case goes to Superintendent Lannes who sees a political motive for the murder. But the authorities are not keen he investigate it. More bodies appear as Lannes deals with the fact that his eldest son, Dominique, is at the Front, his wife, Marguerite, is depressed, and when the Battle of France breaks out, Bordeaux is filled with refugees fleeing the war. Soon Bordeaux becomes an occupied city and Lannes’ chief suspect is untouchable, protected by a relative in the Vichy government. Dark Summer in Bordeaux (2012) is set amid the grim reality of Vichy France and a series of unexplained murders. Cold Winter in Bordeaux (2013) see Lannes still trying to balance finding murderers with not being seen to collaborate too closely with the Vichy Government and occupying Germans. The tetralogy ends with End Games in Bordeaux (2015). By now it is the summer of 1944, France is in turmoil, D-Day has occurred, the Vichy regime is in its death throes. The revenge against collaborators is beginning, the Resistance on the march. Atrocities are committed on both sides, and justice is blind. Lannes searches unofficially for a missing girl and investigates cases of historic sexual abuse in Bordeaux as the war comes to its final end, Franc is liberated and all accounts must be settled. I should also mention some great Bordeaux-written and set crime that hasn’t yet been translated from French into English. It’s always frustrating to know that there are best-selling writers out there who have hit series that haven’t been translated. Bordelais Emmanuel Moynot is a graphic artist who has authored more than forty graphic novels published in France since the 1980s, including several featuring detective Nestor Burma, and based on the crime novels of Léo Malet. The stories are great and the graphic images wonderful and he’s much loved in France, Spain and Germany but nobody has picked his work up yet in English. Similarly so with the original Nestor Burma novels by Léo Malet, a popular French crime writer (he sadly died in 1996) originally from Montpelier and with a distinctly surrealist bent. Nestor Burma is a cynical anti-hero in a dozen or more novels that have become, as above, graphic novels and a couple of movies. But Malet doesn’t have an English translator. Neither does Alexander Oetker, a German writer who created Luc Verlain in a series of novels set in the Aquitaine region around Bordeaux and among the region’s beaches and vineyards. Verlain fled Bordeaux as a young man for the bright lights of Paris, but now he’s back in his hometown. There are seven Luc Verlain books, but sadly none in English (only French and German). Still, if you’re lucky, you can find the TV show Mongeville created by Jacques Santamaria. Santamaria is a prolific French radio and TV dramatist with a penchant for crime. He adapted several Guy de Maupassant and Patrick Modiano novels for French TV and created the popular French TV detective show, Mongevile. Antoine Mongeville is a former investigating judge turned investigator who works with a young police judiciaire detective on cases in and around Bordeaux. It’s on DVD or, if you’re in America, via Amazon Prime. And finally, as ever, something a little different and special, Marie NDiaye’s Vengence is Mine (2023). NDiaye is a French novelist, playwright and screenwriter with French-Senegalese heritage, a Prix Goncourt (France’s most prestigious literary prize) winner who grew up in Paris. She has written novels, short stories and, when she was just 21, Comédie classique, a 200-page novel made up of a single sentence. She left France to live in Berlin in the Sarkozy years finding him and his administration ‘monstrous’. Praise in France was fulsome for La vengeance m’appartient (originally published in French in 2021) and has also been strong for the English translation. The New York Times wrote that ‘In Vengeance Is Mine, NDiaye circles a familiar configuration of ideas: trauma and memory, class anxiety, isolation and otherness, the warped savagery of domestic life, the rupture between parents and their children.’ The heroine of the novel is Maître Susane, a quiet middle-aged lawyer living a modest existence in Bordeaux, known to all as a consummate and unflappable professional. But when Gilles Principaux shows up at her office asking her to defend his wife, who is accused of a horrific crime, Maître Susane begins to crack. One critic called the novel a blend of Elena Ferrante and Patricia Highsmith. It is definitely rather unsettling and Bordeaux provides a fantastic background. And as the rather and predictable end to this column – why not pour yourself a glass of good Bordeaux, sit by the fire and read one of the novels above? View the full article

The path from Sherlock Holmes to modern baking cozies may not seem like a direct route, but there are plenty of ways that Sherlock set the stage for our current iterations of beloved bakeshop heroines. The moment John Watson meets Sherlock Holmes in A Study in Scarlet, the famous detective has taken over a university lab and is perfecting a chemical concoction for identifying the presence of blood. Holmes, a master observer, understands clearly that some results require careful composition and attention to detail. This scene being the point where we, as readers, first meet Holmes alongside Watson is important in that it shows us there is more to Holmes than simply a sharp eye and a propensity for mood swings. Sherlock respects science and chemistry, things that require sensitive balance and precision. Most aficionados of the modern whodunnit appreciate the part Sherlock Holmes played in developing the genre—even if Sir Arthur Conan Doyle probably wasn’t expecting his most popular character to spawn a whole subgenre of female amateur sleuths. It is, of course, the amateur title we often forget when we think about Holmes. He was not a police officer or doctor or psychologist. He was merely a keen observer who paid attention and noticed things. One who very much fancied himself smarter than the so-called professionals. This brings us to our modern heroines, who have plenty in common with Sherlock even if it isn’t an intentional homage. The modern cozy heroine is almost always an amateur investigator, who finds herself immersed in an investigation, usually at odds with the police. Unlike Holmes, they are typically pushed into these experiences against their will—or better judgement—whereas Holmes would lower himself to assist the police just to amuse himself. He was rarely the suspect at the center of an investigation as many of the more modern heroines find themselves to be. Modern cozy heroines, especially cozy heroines who bake, are great counterparts to the Baker Street detective. Bakers are scientists in their own right. A delightfully charming saying goes that “baking is science for hungry people” and it’s a wonderful truism. Baking, more than cooking, is a very precise process that requires focus, attention to detail, and a careful hand in mixing various concoctions. Sounds a lot like a certain sleuth wiling away his time in a university lab. Bakers are modern day magicians, much like scientists, using things as simple as flour and water to create life (if you don’t think sourdough is magical, then think again). A baker must also be able to solve mysteries in the kitchen. Why didn’t the bread rise enough? Why were the cookies flat? Why did the pie crust turn out too tough? The answer is usually as simple as a half teaspoon of baking soda, or the temperature of a room, but these seemingly unimportant details are what can make a delicious final product, or cause your baking to fall flat. Literally. A baker—much like Sherlock Holmes at a crime scene—must see what others do not, what the average eye passes over. A baker needs focus and a massive repertoire of knowledge just living in the back of their mind. Once, Holmes told Watson that he simply chose to forget things that had no importance to him, because there was only so much room in his memory, so why waste it? One must wonder if bakers simply discard their memories of historical factoids or names of presidents to better remember measuring conversions or acceptable substitutions for eggs. Another thing bakers have in common with Holmes is the remarkable allowance of time to think. Holmes lounges around his apartment with seemingly nothing to do but mull over his current cases. Bakers, meanwhile, have the freedom to let their minds wander while stand mixers whir or dough gets folded under their knuckles. There is plenty of time to consider the finer details of a murder investigation while bread is proofing or pie dough is setting in the fridge. That kind of freedom to be able to work while also letting your mind work things out certainly helps make baking one of the most ideal professions for an amateur sleuth. Of course, their hands-on access to food also explains who they are so frequently considered potential murderers when someone happens to die from poisoning. That’s just how the cookie crumbles. So while it may not seem like a natural evolution, I think it’s safe to say that our Baker Street detective would have probably enjoyed spending time in a bakery, and would certainly appreciate the way his modern amateur successors have turned their own expertise and attention towards assisting a poor police force who can’t seem to manage it on their own. There are plenty of wonderful options in the bakery cozy subgenre to delight reader’s looking for a sumptuous mystery and even more delicious food—something Doyle’s books were severely lacking. The most natural starting point is Joanne Fluke’s Hannah Swensen mysteries, and of course Ellie Alexander’s wonderful Bakeshop Mysteries have plenty of books to choose from. Jenn McKinlay’s Cupcake Bakery Mysteries, and Valerie Burns’ Baker Street Mysteries are also wonderful additions to the genre. And then for more of a twist on the expected, there’s Misha Popp’s Pies Before Guys series where our heroine Daisy might actually be doling out something a little deadly with her baked goods… but it’s okay, these guys deserve it. Certainly Sherlock Holmes, a noted master of poisons, couldn’t help but be impressed with such ingenuity. And I think he’d agree that there was room for more than one amateur sleuth to lend a measuring spoon and a sharp mind over at Baker Street if the need struck. *** View the full article

“Didn’t you once cause quite a stir by challenging heavyweight boxing champion Muhammad Ali to a fight?” Black Belt magazine asked Jim Kelly in an interview. It was even more unbelievable than that! On December 16, 1973, UPI reported that the stars of the upcoming feature Three the Hard Way—Jim Brown, Fred Williamson, and Kelly—had challenged Ali, George Forman, and Joe Frazier to a fight. This wasn’t a publicity stunt for the still-shooting movie, nor was it a staged event for charity. This appeared to be a good, old-fashioned street challenge, woof tickets being sold to three boxing champions by two former football players and a karate expert. And what woof tickets they sold! “I just think that we’re as tough as those three dudes,” said Brown, who was being interviewed alongside Williamson and Kelly. “All [the boxers] do is talk about fighting in the ring. But how tough are they out of it?” Perhaps they’d forgotten that Ali came from Kelly’s tough hometown of Louisville, Foreman grew up in Houston’s Fifth Ward, and Frazier was a South Carolina sharecropper’s kid who moved to Philly when he was fifteen. Brown offered to fight Ali, because in the 1960s, the two sparred in practice. “He wasn’t as strong as I am,” he revealed. Kelly would fight Joe Frazier. “Fred’s got the hardest assignment with Foreman,” said Brown. “But I have no doubt we can handle ’em.” The fight never happened. Three the Hard Way did happen, however, becoming the first of three films the trio would make together. Directed by Gordon Parks Jr. and written by Eric Bercovici and Jerrold L. Ludwig, it told the story of a racist plan to put some kind of plague in the water that kills only Black people. There’s some mention of sickle cell anemia to keep things legit. It’s up to the heroes to stop this racist group whose leader looks a lot like Howard Cosell. “It took God seven days to make the earth,” says the head baddie. “It’ll take us three days to cleanse it.” The plot sounds crazy enough, but even more shocking is that the film was shot by veteran cinematographer Lucien Ballard. In his five-decade career, Ballard worked with some of the greatest directors. Josef von Sternberg used him as a camera operator on 1930’s Morocco, and he got his first cinematography credit working with von Sternberg on Crime and Punishment. Ballard also worked with Henry Hathaway (whose last film was a Blaxploitation quickie called Super Dude), Sam Peckinpah, Stanley Kubrick, and Budd Boetticher. Except for Kubrick, these directors used him multiple times. Three the Hard Way was Parks Jr.’s second collaboration with Ballard, after 1974’s Thomasine and Bushrod, Max Julien’s intriguing take on Bonnie and Clyde. Like Gordon Willis, he was hated by the cinematography branch of the Oscars. Ballard was nominated only once, for a Joan Crawford film called The Caretakers. He shot 130 films in his career, mostly made in the days when there were two chances to be nominated (black & white and color), yet the Academy repeatedly snubbed him. This despite his invention of the Obie, a light he created to hide the facial scars his then wife, Merle Oberon, received in a car accident, and his work with legend Gregg Toland on how best to shoot Jane Russell’s cleavage in Howard Hughes’s The Outlaw. Three the Hard Way was a fixture on New York City independent channels during the mid-1970s. On TV, it looked like hot garbage and was edited down to a PG-rated version. Comparatively, on the big screen, Ballard’s widescreen compositions and his ability to light different shades of Black skin correctly made the film look better than its budget suggested. Some of it is still too dark to be effective, but the old master still has an impressive trick or two up his sleeve. That plot about putting Black death in the water supplies of Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and Detroit is merely an excuse for Kelly, Washington, and Brown to shoot, stab, and karate-chop hundreds of people. Record producer Jimmy Lait (Brown) is in LA producing the soul group who provide the film’s soundtrack, the Impressions. An old friend who was being experimented on by White supremacists escapes from the compound where he was imprisoned. The guy seems delusional, so Jimmy doesn’t believe him. Then his friend is murdered and Jimmy’s main squeeze, Wendy (Sheila Frazier), is kidnapped. After he barely avoids being killed, Lait heads to Chicago to see his friend, Jagger Daniels (Williamson). The villains try to kill him, too. Sensing that three is a magic number, at least where heroes are concerned, the duo head to New York City to recruit Mister Keyes (Kelly), a sabom who runs a tae kwon do studio. Mister is not an honorific, it’s literally Keyes’s first name. Keyes is introduced in Kelly’s most famous scene, the one every fan fondly remembers. After crooked cops plant cocaine in the red velvet interior of his car, an angry Mister asks, “Gonna set me up?” Then he dispenses a ridiculous and exciting slow-motion ass kicking on numerous cops, none of whom are quick enough to shoot him. The trio is now complete. To get some nudity into the picture, Jagger also calls in three dominatrices, one Black, one White, and one Asian, to interrogate a witness. Three the Hard Way is too afraid to show their methods, but whatever they are, they’re fatal. Mister asks for their phone number. After much violence, the racist evil plan is foiled and Three the Hard Way ends on a freeze frame of an exploding Cadillac, as if the filmmakers suddenly ran out of money. That wouldn’t be a surprise, considering that Allied Artists, the studio that made the film, was once a Poverty Row studio called Monogram back in the days of film noir. The budget was so low that Brown did his own dangerous stunts, the most impressive of which involved using a gun that never needed to be reloaded. When Three the Hard Way opened at the DeMille in New York City on June 26, 1974, it was universally panned. Donald Mayerson of Cue magazine said, “The plot . . . is simply awful.” The Calgary Herald called it a “comic strip gone berserk” where “several white enemies catch on fire and burn picturesquely to death.” Williamson brushed off the criticism: “Most of my fans are kids in the ghetto areas and they relate to the characters I play.” Those kids weren’t writing reviews, but they were buying tickets. Three the Hard Way opened in eighth place, on its way to making $3 million at the box office, a million-dollar return on its $2 million budget. ___________________________ From BLACK CEASARS AND FOXY CLEOPATRAS: A HISTORY OF BLAXPLOITATION CINEMA. Copyright ©2024 by ODIE HENDERSON. Reprinted by permission of the publisher, ABRAMS. View the full article

During my three-year quest to rediscover a “lost lady” of detective fiction, Carolyn Wells, another mysterious woman appeared in the margins of Carolyn’s backstory. She is referred to as the “Unknown Woman,” the unidentified victim of a Victorian murder in Rahway, New Jersey, where both women are buried within walking distance of each other. Wells never wrote about her, but I have a hunch the cold case inspired Wells’s decades-long career as a mystery author. In May of 2021, I took a field trip to Wells’s hometown, checking out her former home, the building where she had once worked as a librarian, and her gravesite. It was less “research” and more communion with spirits, especially at the cemetery, where I paused in front of Wells’s austere tombstone and asked forgiveness for the biography I was then planning to undertake. Wells “always hated biography,” as she wrote in her memoir. “The writer invariably finds it necessary to plaster the subject with praises, flattery and adulation and to invest him with all the Christian graces.” My guide that day was Al Shipley, director of The Merchants and Drovers Tavern Museum, a local history museum that borders the leafy burial ground that contains Revolutionary War heroes, Declaration of Independence signer Abraham Clark, Carolyn Wells, and … the Unknown Woman. Museum programs honor and celebrate all of them, but the Unknown Woman, as one of the town’s great mysteries, is by far the most popular, Shipley told me. Every five years on the first Sunday in October, the museum presents an interactive tour led by costumed interpreters who portray the ghosts of the coroner, the undertaker, the mayor, and others involved in the story. It attracts hundreds of attendees. (The next one is in 2027.) Shipley has also written a riveting account of the unsolved murder, The Case of the Unknown Woman. So, as we left Wells’s plot, I asked him where she was – in the “back” of the cemetery, I had read, since at the time no one knew if she was “virtuous” enough to be allowed to rest among the others. We made our way to a small gravestone that reads “An Unknown Woman Found Dead.” The gravesite was decorated with a simple white cross and garish plastic flowers. It wasn’t tacky, though. It felt almost devotional in nature, a reminder not to forget this dreadful story. Photo Credit: Rebecca Rego Barry On the chilly morning on March 26, 1887, the body of a woman was found on Central Avenue, which, despite its name, was a “lonely, desolate, rarely frequented thoroughfare,” writes Shipley in his book. Her face had been pressed into the ground, her neck slit from ear to ear. Her belongings—a fur cape, an umbrella, a hat, and a basket of eggs—had been scattered about, ruling out theft, and there was no evidence of sexual assault, ruling out rape that had escalated into murder. Stranger still, no one recognized the victim. By the time someone located a bloody knife nearby, dozens of onlookers had compromised the crime scene. The police bungled around quite a bit, although, to be fair, they “had never been confronted with such a brutal crime.” Because of the nature of this grisly, Ripper-esque murder—which occurred a year and a half before Jack the Ripper’s first known crime, prompting some to later correlate them—it attracted the national news media. Rahway was overrun with reporters, detectives, and literally thousands of people who believed they would recognize the woman, or merely wanted a glimpse at the body. Many theories about the murder were advanced over several months, and still, no satisfactory conclusion was reached as to the identity of either the victim or the killer. On May 3, the town buried the woman and laid the matter to rest. As I lingered over the Unknown Woman’s grave, I did some quick math and figured that Wells would have been about twenty-five when the violence occurred—the same estimated age of the victim. Moreover, the slaying occurred only a few blocks away from the Wells home on Elm Avenue. During the investigation, a railroad agent claimed he saw a young woman leave the station and head towards Elm on the night in question, an eerie coincidence. There can be no doubt that Wells followed the news of the murder. Since she left no diary or correspondence recording her thoughts on the matter, I can only assume she felt chilled by it, particularly by her proximity, and certainly by the fact that the crime went unsolved. Is this one of the reasons she turned to writing murder mysteries? Was there something in her subconscious that drove her to write stories in which the detective always prevails? Click to view slideshow. Before she tried her hand at mysteries, Carolyn had written in several genres–children’s, poetry, young adult, humor, and anthologies–with much success, but it was the 82 detective novels she wrote between 1909 and her death in 1942 that made her a household name. She excelled at writing country house and locked-room mysteries for a decade before Agatha Christie entered the scene, before the so-called Golden Age began. By the mid-1920s, she was churning out three or more books annually. One newspaper wrote, “It would be perfectly reasonable for Carolyn Wells to claim the title of all-round literary champion of America, if not the world.” Throughout her career, Wells projected an image of herself as light, amusing, and clever, and there was certainly truth to that. But her darker thoughts manifested in the mysteries that dominated the final three decades of her life: macabre settings, bizarre deaths, and baffling crimes. She spent a lot of time thinking about clues, weapons, and crime scenes, less about character motivation (howdunits vs. whodunits). She felt the main element of a good mystery was the puzzle at its heart, “a stirring mental exercise, with just enough of the complex background of life to distinguish it from a problem in mathematics,” she wrote in The Technique of the Mystery Story (1913), an early history and how-to of the genre. Of course, the puzzle had to be solved, and that was Wells’s favorite part. Could that have been a deep-rooted psychological response to the Unknown Woman case? I suspect so. ____________________________ From THE VANISHING OF CAROLYN WELLS: INVESTIGATIONS INTO A FORGOTTEN MYSTERY AUTHOR. Reprinted by permission of the publisher, POST HILL PRESS. Copyright © 2024 by the author, REBECCA REGO BARRY. 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CrimeReads editors make their selections for the month’s best debut novels in crime, mystery, and thrillers. * Jenny Hollander, Everyone Who Can Forgive Me Is Dead (Minotaur) A young woman with an enviable media job and a seemingly perfect relationship goes into survival mode when an old classmate reappears, making a big movie about events that she would rather not be dredged up again. Hollander parcels out the truth about what really happened in their grad school days with a perfect sense of pacing and enough twists to keep readers on the edge of their seats. –DM Sarah Ruiz-Grossman, A Fire So Wild (Harper) Ruiz-Grossman’s ambitious debut is set in Berkeley, California, a city of stark divides and outsize pressure points, as a wildfire approaches. Our narrative moves between citizens on all points of the socioeconomic spectrum, tied together by themes of housing and shelter–and what it means when our most basic needs are under threat. Ruiz-Grossman brings this insightful story into focus with deft character sketches and atmospheric prose. –DM Kobby Ben Ben, No One Dies Yet (Europa) In 2019, Ghana declared a “Year of Return” and welcomed tourists from across the diaspora to visit the country. That is the backdrop for Kobby Ben Ben’s psychological thriller featuring four American tourists and their competing guides—one religious and humorless, hired to take the Americans around the official sites, and the other queer and cynical, brought in through a dating app to give the tourists a taste of Ghana’s gay underground. This may be one of my favorite novels ever. It’s so funny. It’s like Patricia Highsmith traded her self-loathing for a decent sense of humor. –MO Tracy Sierra, Nightwatching (Pamela Dorman Books/Viking) Tracy Sierra has done the impossible: changed my mind about the home invasion thriller. In Nightwatching, a young widow is shocked one night to find an intruder in her home, and spends several desperate hours using all her wit and wiles to protect her children and find a way to seek help. While much of the story is about the night itself, just as gripping is what happens afterwards. –MO Jahmal Mayfield, Smoke Kings (Melville House) This book has such a great set-up. In Mayfield’s self-assured and righteously furious debut, a group of Black vigilantes is determined to exact vengeance on those who never received punishment by kidnapping their descendants and making them contribute reparations. When one of their targets turns out to be a white supremacist leader, they must martial all their cunning and resources to defeat him, and in the process, find a way to preserve their mission despite growing doubts. Mayfield’s tough, muscular prose infuses the novel with a beautiful darkness as the characters struggle in ways that will hopefully have the reader thinking too. –MO Sarah Ochs, The Resort (Sourcebooks Landmark) The dark underbelly of a renowned Thai beach resort (and party island) is explored in Ochs’ debut thriller, centered on an expat community that guards its place on the island carefully, but is soon rocked by a series of killings. Ochs brings the island party scene to vivid life, but also shows readers the other side of paradise and the cost of preserving a dream. –DM View the full article

Like little wreaths of funeral flowers, death crowns mark the passing of a loved one. But death crowns – seen as comforting to some, ominous and otherworldly to others – are not ordered up from a florist shop. Just where death crowns do come from is a mystery, and an unsettling one at that. If you’ve never seen a death crown, or angel crown for the more religiously inclined … well, that tracks. I’ve only ever seen a few and those were behind glass in an exhibit of death and funeral folklore at the Museum of Appalachia north of Knoxville. There’s no entry for death crowns in the Encyclopedia of Appalachia, which at 1,864 pages is the most authoritative source on Appalachian culture and society. Death crowns figure into my obsession with death and dying, burials and cemeteries and what happens after we give up the ghost. What are death crowns? To put it succinctly, they are tightly woven laurels of feathers, three or so inches around, that would be found in the feather pillows of the recently deceased. Sometimes they would be discovered when a survivor fluffed and smoothed the pillow of someone who had just died and felt a lump inside it. Sometimes death crowns were found when survivors cut open a feather pillow for reassurance that their loved one was heaven-bound. Hence the “angel crown” terminology. Death crowns have been reported for more than a century and a little-known belief system exists around them. Sometimes they marked a mournful celebration of a person who passed away. Other times, they were a harbinger of death. ‘As though woven by delicate gremlins’ In January 1944. the Dayton Daily News reached into the past to explore the world of death lore in an article that began by citing witches’ hexes and voodoo dolls but quickly segued to death crowns. “Mrs. Susie McIntosh, way up in the hills of Kentucky, near Irvin, decided to put a fresh tick (cover) on a pillow. The feathers floated around her as she reached her hand inside the old case. Her fingers touched something hard. Prickles of fear ran up her spine. She raked out the hard substance with a stick. “There, in her hand, as though woven by delicate gremlins, round and solid, lay a Death Crown.” Three people had died sleeping on the pillow, the woman said. In the 1950s in Knoxville, newspaper columnist Bert Vincent featured recurring items in his column in the News-Sentinel. After he wrote about death crowns or angel crowns a couple of times, people would contact him after finding others in pillows. “TWO MORE ANGEL CROWNS FOUND IN PILLOWS,” Vincent’s column reported. A woman from Big Stone Gap, Virginia, had found two angel crowns in pillows her recently deceased mother-in-law had used. Vincent was still writing about death crowns in 1963, in a column item right above a report on a 52-inch squash. “Of course, now, if you must be hard and so practical that you demand a practical explanation, it is that feathers in a pillow tend to mat when rolled on and pressed for a length of time,” he wrote. “But really, when you examine one of these crowns closely, you wonder how it could just sort of accidentally happen. The feathers are put together so perfectly that you can pick it up and handle it without losing a feather.” ‘This person would soon die’ Death folklore, although not about angel crows, is its own section of the Encyclopedia of Appalachia. From the death watch, when family and friends would stand by as a loved one approached the end of life, to the ringing of a bell and hanging of a black wreath on the door, people would prepare for death and react to death. Even the wake, which the encyclopedia credits to the Scots-Irish, my forebears, was considered a folkloric practice meant to “wake” the dead. But the wake had practical purposes as well, not only to host a gathering of loved ones but to ward off “cats, rats and insects” from getting at the corpse. But death crowns are largely unacknowledged. In the Museum of Appalachia, founded by John Rice Irwin and now a Smithsonian institution, Irwin’s collection of death crowns – alternately called angel crowns or even angel of death crowns – are alongside such grim collectibles as a horse-drawn funeral carriage and child-sized coffin. A long explanation, signed by Irwin – who died in January 2022 – noted that a death crown “indicated that the deceased person, in whose pillow it was found, had gone to heaven. Others believe that if such an object was found in the pillow of a sick person, it meant that this person would soon die.” Irwin noted that when a friend had shown him a death crown, he was embarrassed to admit he’d never heard of one. “But I found that no one else had heard of it either.” “I do not assume that this was a commonly held belief in Appalachia (although it might have been), nor do I assume that such a belief is peculiar to this region. Indeed, I’m informed that one branch of the National Museum of Wales in Cardiff has a display of angel crowns. Many people from this area, including this writer, can claim a Welsh ancestry,” he wrote. Among the several angel crowns on display at the museum is one from the pillow of William H. Rule, who died in 1968. Rule’s angel crown was the museum’s artifact of the week in August 2022. New death crowns ‘almost every night?’ Although death crowns seem like a natural folklore artifact to include in a book, especially a novel, I’ve been unable to find references to the phenomena there. There is a long-standing reference to feather crowns in news reporting. The University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Dictionary of American Regional English cites the angel crown or angel wreath going as far back as 1891 editions of the Ottawa Daily Republican newspaper, which recounted a man who was “taken sick and could always hear the witches singing about him … He did not dare to sleep on a bed because he found his bed and pillows full of feather crowns.” Another man noted that feather crowns were being placed in his wife’s pillows “almost every night.” In 1964, the (Nashville) Tennessean quoted a woman who noted that in 1941, her husband had pneumonia. “But after he recovered I found a perfect feather crown in the pillow he had used during his illness. Yet this man is living and hasn’t been sick since.” The dimming of death folklore – not to mention less frequent use of feather pillows – has drastically reduced reports of death crowns. The Old Farmer’s Almanac noted that while death crowns had been interpreted as signs of impending death and an indicator that the deceased had gone to heaven, the almanac had a theory as to why angel crows were found much less frequently in modern times: fewer people were going on to their heavenly reward. View the full article