Admin_99

“What a rotten writer of detective stories Life is!” By the time he wrote these words, Nathan Leopold, Jr. was middle-aged and balding. But in the American consciousness, he was forever immortalized as the sullen teenager he had been in the sweltering Chicago summer of 1924, infamously linked—in name and in deed—with his partner in crime, Richard Loeb. Leopold and Loeb were nineteen and eighteen respectively when they committed the “crime of the century.” On May 21, the two boys, driving a blue Willys-Knight rented under a pseudonym, picked up fourteen-year-old Bobby Franks as he walked home from school. They had planned carefully for months, orchestrating what they thought would be the perfect crime. They would kidnap a young boy and get a ransom payment from his father, but to be certain they couldn’t be identified as the abductors, they would kill the boy, too. The victim was chosen at random. Bobby happened to be walking alone that day, just a few blocks from home. Loeb knew the Franks family was wealthy—certainly Mr. Franks would pay the $10,000 ransom demand. Once Bobby was in the car, either Leopold or Loeb bludgeoned him with the blunt end of a chisel (each pointed a finger at the other during their otherwise corroboratory confessions, although evidence suggests it was Loeb who attacked, while Leopold drove) before gagging the young boy with a cloth in the back seat of the vehicle, where he suffocated to death. With the body in the car, Leopold and Loeb stopped to pick up two hotdogs and two bottles of root beer. After nightfall, the pair stripped off the boy’s clothes, poured acid on his face and genitals in an effort to conceal his identity, and left Bobby Franks’ body hidden in a remote spot Leopold knew of from bird-watching trips. Unbeknownst to either of them, Leopold’s eyeglasses slipped from his jacket pocket, landing near the body. Loeb phoned the Franks household to inform the boy’s mother that her son had been kidnapped and a ransom note would soon follow. The letter arrived the next morning, but shortly thereafter, their plan was foiled when the body was discovered alongside a pair of eyeglasses which the Franks family confirmed did not belong to Bobby. A unique hinge on the frames allowed the police to match them to Nathan Leopold, whose alibi quickly crumbled. At four o’clock in the morning on May 31, 1924 both Richard Loeb and Nathan Leopold confessed separately to the murder of Bobby Franks. “The Franks murder mystery has been solved,” State’s Attorney Robert Crowe announced to a dozen reporters who had waited overnight for a break in the case. Leopold and Loeb instantly became household names, as the case garnered national media attention. Who was no longer the mystery in the Franks murder case. The question then, and still today, was why? In the ten days between the murder and the confessions, there had been much speculation about the murder of Bobby Franks. The body had been found naked, so it was widely assumed that the crime had been sexually motivated. The day the boys confessed, the Chicago Tribune published a censored version of a letter Leopold had written to Loeb after a fight, which insinuated that their relationship had been sexual. The coverage of the case captured the spirit of the Roaring Twenties with all its talk of sex, money, and violence. The famed Clarence Darrow, who the following year would serve as the defense in the Scopes Monkey Trial, pleaded the boys guilty to avoid a jury trial, which he believed would result in a death sentence. Using testimony from forensic psychiatrists (which was not yet standard practice in the courtroom) Darrow did not argue that Leopold and Loeb were insane, but that certain mental “abnormalities” were mitigating factors in their guilt. The judge ultimately ruled that the boys were too young to be executed and sentenced each to life in prison for the murder and an additional ninety-nine years for the kidnapping of Bobby Franks. The nation watched as the courtroom drama unfolded. A litany of explanations for the crime covered front pages of newspapers across the country, spinning into a web of competing and often contradictory narratives and laying bare the cultural anxieties that plagued Americans in 1924. It was a lack of parental supervision, some claimed, as more and more women left the home and entered the workforce. Or perhaps it was the extravagant wealth of both the Leopold and Loeb families, or alcohol, or “overeducation.” Leopold and Loeb were indeed both well-educated—at the time of the crime, both had already completed their undergraduate studies. At fifteen, Loeb was the youngest graduate of the University of Michigan. Leopold was a respected amateur ornithologist studying law at the University of Chicago, with plans to attend Harvard in the fall. As the dominant narrative of the pair took shape in the press, reporters zeroed in on Leopold’s fascination with the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. In Leopold’s eyes, Loeb embodied the Nietzschean concept of the Übermensch, or superman, which, according to Leopold, meant that he was “exempted from the ordinary laws which govern ordinary men.” This complemented Loeb’s long-held desire to become a master criminal who would commit the “perfect crime”—a fantasy borne from his love for crime fiction and detective stories. In their report for the defense, the psychiatrists wrote that Loeb experienced an “abnormal mixing of phantasy with real life.” But if Richard Loeb had trouble distinguishing reality from crime fiction, then so did the rest of America—then and now. if Richard Loeb had trouble distinguishing reality from crime fiction, then so did the rest of America—then and now. The lines between truth and legend in the Leopold and Loeb case were blurred from the very start. In the days following the confession, the press latched onto one quote that ostensibly addressed the motive. “It was just an experiment,” the June 2 edition of the Chicago Tribune quoted Leopold as stating, “It is as easy for us to justify that experiment as it is to justify an entomologist in impaling a beetle on a pin.” This was damning evidence of the two cold-blooded killers’ callousness. But in his autobiography, Life Plus 99 Years (1958), Leopold maintained what he had also claimed in 1924—that his words had been misconstrued by the reporters. “What I said was, ‘I suppose you can justify this as easily as an entomologist can justify sticking a bug on a pin. Or a bacteriologist putting a microbe under his microscope.’” He wasn’t the scientist, and he wasn’t experimenting. Under a barrage of questioning from the reporters, he was their specimen. “I was being sarcastic,” he wrote, “I was telling them that they were showing me, a human being—and a human being in a tough spot—no more consideration than a scientist showed an insect or a microbe.” Reporters were eager to portray Leopold and Loeb as self-aware, evil thrill-killers who didn’t just fail to comprehend the value of human life, but actively rejected that value. It’s a tempting portrait; Leopold was, by all accounts, a smug and haughty teenager. But this narrative is so seductive in part because it is so reductive. Leopold’s motive, as he recalled it in his autobiography, was far more banal. “My motive,” he wrote, “so far as I can be said to have had one, was to please Dick. Just that—incredible as it sounds. I thought so much of the guy that I was willing to do anything—even commit murder—if he wanted it bad enough.” “How,” Leopold asked, “Can anyone hope to enumerate the components in human motivation in real life? Isn’t it only in fiction that jealousy, or revenge, or hatred, or greed is found, simple and unadulterated, as the wellspring of human action?” In contrast to the fictional motivations that drive the tidy narrative arcs of detective stories, real life motives are messy and often deeply unsatisfying—the kind that would be totally unconvincing in a work of fiction. Real motives—like real people—often don’t make sense. But clear-cut motives, however manufactured, can help us to make sense of otherwise senseless acts of violence, like the murder of Bobby Franks. If, rather than foolish, immature teenagers, the perpetrators were conscious evil-doers who saw themselves as unconstrained by the moral standards of ordinary humans, then any punishment was justified. Scholar Mark Seltzer has described the true crime genre as “crime fact that looks like crime fiction.” As such, Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (1966) is often credited as the first modern true crime text. The book purports to depict, as its subtitle suggests, “a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences.” Capote himself claimed that he had invented a new literary genre—the nonfiction novel, “a narrative form that employed all the techniques of fictional art but was nevertheless immaculately factual.” Later that year in a piece for Esquire, Phillip K. Tompkins noted numerous inaccuracies in In Cold Blood, including significant discrepancies between dialogue and transcript records and a concluding scene that was entirely fabricated. Capote had molded the real people he wrote about into literary characters, grafting the true story of murder onto the prescriptive narrative structure of detective novels. Fiction has thus, paradoxically, become baked into modern true crime. In Cold Blood undoubtedly played an important role in shaping the genre, but Capote’s work—despite his assertions that he had conceived of a new literary form—built heavily on conventions developed by earlier writers, including Meyer Levin’s 1956 novel Compulsion. A former classmate of Leopold and Loeb, Levin was a budding journalist in 1924 and a strong advocate for Leopold’s parole in the 1950s. Compulsion was his heavily researched interpretation of the case, which he referred to in the foreword as a “contemporary historical novel or a documentary novel.” Capote scathingly critiqued Compulsion as “a fictional novel suggested by fact, but in no way bound to it.” Unlike Capote, Levin never claimed that it was. Levin changed the names of the characters and noted explicitly that “some scenes are … total interpolations, and some of my personages have no correspondence to persons in the case in question.” Capote tends to get a lot of credit for shaping the modern true-crime genre, but the case of Leopold and Loeb has made considerable contributions to the genre as well—and not just in the form of the many pop culture depictions of the case, from Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope (1948) to the twenty-first century musical rendition, Thrill Me: The Leopold and Loeb Story (2003). Beyond this preponderance of portrayals of the case, representations of Leopold and Loeb also helped to popularize the generic convention of adopting fictional techniques to tell a true story—or at least, one that purports to be. [R]epresentations of Leopold and Loeb also helped to popularize the generic convention of adopting fictional techniques to tell a true story… The preface of Simon Baatz’s For the Thrill of It: Leopold, Loeb, and the Murder that Shocked Chicago (2008), the most popular book on the case, begins with the words “This is a true story.” The book’s opening scene in the Franks household depicts the family sitting down for dinner, awaiting the arrival of Bobby, who will never come home. As Erik Rebain, author of Arrested Adolescence: The Secret Life of Nathan Leopold, has pointed out, “From a narrative standpoint it makes perfect sense to start the book with this scene … yet this dinner scene is completely fictional.” Though Baatz is a historian, these fabricated scenes appear throughout the book, and in so doing contribute to, rather than circumvent, the mythologizing of Leopold and Loeb. A more recent retelling of the case, Nothing But the Night: Leopold and Loeb and the Truth behind the Murder that Shocked 1920’s America (2018) by Greg King and Penny Wilson attempts a revisionist approach. King and Wilson refute the accepted narrative of Richard Loeb as the instigator and turn it on its head, presenting Leopold— on the basis of very little evidence—as a volatile and dominant serial killer in the making. The authors are careful to hedge, making it clear that much of their analysis is speculative, but the book’s subtitle implies more than mere conjecture. In crime fiction, when the audience knows the identity of the killer from the start, this sort of plot twist works well (think Psycho). But real cases rarely lend themselves well to such tropes. A century after their crime, the story of Nathan Leopold’s and Richard Loeb’s crime has assumed the status of American folklore. The story, with its larger than life characters and salacious details, has many of the features that make for compelling true crime narratives, in part because our understanding of violent crime is so often heavily mediated through crime fiction. The many representations of Leopold and Loeb demonstrate the pitfalls of narrativizing violent crime in ways that mirror fiction; flattening real people into a cast of familiar character archetypes collapses the complex realities of violent crime in favor of a digestible narrative. View the full article

Here is a short list of things that are easy: –Brunch. –Turning on the television for your children instead of reading to them. –Looking at your phone and checking some vacuous app some deem crucial. –Sleeping in. –Eating too much. –Making love. And so on and so on. The “easy” list is extensive and if done in excess becomes boring. As the saying goes: everything in moderation. Here is a slightly longer list of things that are not easy: –Going to brunch and pretending to enjoy yourself. –Turning off the television and convincing your children that reading is better. –Not looking at your phone for an hour (try it, prove me wrong). –Awaking early to be productive. –Eating less red meat. –Making love. –And, of course, with a bullet, writing well. I’m not an essayist, so forgive me if this essay isn’t that good. I’m trying to enter into this subject lightly. The subject of conveying menace in literature. Sustaining the malevolent. Delving into the places one does not like to find themselves within. With an amount of irreverence however, and hopefully levity, I can come to some kind of conclusion. Or at least a palatable commencement. When I was writing Stag my mother-in-law was dying. I loved her very much as everyone in her world did. She was the kind of woman most women want to be. My wife and I and our very young sons went to Colorado for Christmas that year. And during that Christmas we watched her deteriorate and when my wife told me she was going to stay with our newborn son, to be with her mother in those final terrible days, I said of course. The day Tor (he was three at the time) and I left, mom staggered from her chair, looked at my wife, her only daughter, and in a tone so clairvoyant it was almost incoherent, said: That’s the last time I am ever going to see them. For the next month and a half Tor and I went through life together. It was January in northwest Washington. It was dark and it was cold and it was wet. We spent most of our free time skiing. But to get to the mountains you have to travel a stretch of road where people lived in squalor amongst the vines and moss and tin shacks with woodsmoke leeching from bent stovepipes. It’s a stretch of road that terrified me and still does. Having Tor in my custody, being the one to keep him from harm, I’d dwell on the macabre at night after I’d put him to bed. We’d pass those ruinous little places tucked into the woods and I’d think about the fear a little boy might feel being left there and the horror a father would comprehend having left him behind, and all the evil things that often befall the truly innocent. Stag has nothing to do with that dynamic though. Nothing to do with a father and a son. But it was a vivid emotion that prevailed within me till the book’s conclusion, and every morning when I sat down to write and I had to reenter that morbid place where there seemed nothing left of hope, where evil reincarnate was allowed to move freely, haunting what it will, it brought me pause. I have never felt such consternation while working on a book. It’s a novel I’m still fearful to read aloud. Which is all to say, in anything I write, I’m examining my fears in an attempt to bring about some levity. Not to the work itself, but my own life. To make everything that scares me easier to face. It’s not cathartic, exactly. It might not even be healthy. But to obsess over a story and the characters and the prose and the struggle, getting the dialogue and the lighting and the smells and the sounds, takes a generous amount of empathy. And that, I think, is healthy. I envy the brunch crowd sometimes. I too like to laugh. But sometimes you have to climb deeper to avoid the darkest places. Sometimes that void beyond reach or reason glows brighter than one might think. *** View the full article

Divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived. That’s the easy way to remember what happened to Henry VIII’s six wives, and even though four of them died natural deaths, he’s most known for executing two of them—both for treason and adultery, although only one was guilty. By the time he was searching for a fourth wife, eligible royal women throughout Europe were making excuses as to why marriage to the king was out of the question. Christina of Denmark allegedly made the comment that she would need two heads, one for disposal by the king of England. It was this minefield I stepped into when deciding to write a modern retelling, with sixth wife Kate Parker (Catherine Parr) at its center. Why would a woman marry a man who’d had five previous wives? Catherine Parr—and all of the others, save for the first, Catherine of Aragon—hadn’t had any choice; Henry VIII was king and you didn’t say no when he wanted to marry you. But Kate Parker, in today’s world? She would be in a different position altogether. And then, of course, there was a headless body—or two. Being a crime novelist, I was on steadier ground with this. I’ve written about murder, which was commonplace in Tudor England. Executions weren’t only for inconvenient wives; Henry VIII also had men who’d held high positions in his government beheaded, like Thomas More, who served as Lord High Chancellor, and Thomas Cromwell, who was his right-hand man for years. Moore’s crime was not denouncing Henry’s first marriage to Catherine of Aragon and acknowledging Anne Boleyn as queen. Cromwell made the mistake of convincing Henry that marrying Anne of Cleves would solidify a necessary alliance with Germany, which turned out to be wrong—and it didn’t help that it was hate at first sight for Henry and Anne. If the people closest to him weren’t safe from the axe, it’s not a surprise that he also killed those he considered heretics like Elizabeth Barton and Anne Askew, as well as anyone who refused to take the oath of supremacy or who rose up in rebellion. The Tudor court was a dangerous place, full of political machinations. Families elbowing their way to power and using whatever means they could to achieve it. Executions, including beheadings, hangings, drawing and quartering—it was all incredibly gruesome. A greedy, tyrannical king with a colossal ego who couldn’t possibly believe that a daughter would be able to rule—ironic, since his daughters proved to be more than up to the task. It all sounds like a season of Succession. Tudor England has held a fascination that’s resonated for more than 500 years. Books, movies, TV shows, and even a Broadway show feed the public’s curiosity—regardless of historical accuracy. We dive into the pages of Philippa Gregory, Alison Weir, and Hilary Mantel. Richard Burton and Genevieve Bujold brought Henry and Anne Boleyn to life in Anne of a Thousand Days. Scarlett Johannsen is The Other Boleyn Girl. Jonathan Rhys Myers is a dashing Henry VIII in The Tudors—a far cry from the obese, gout-ridden king he became. All the wives have a pop concert-style sing-off on stage in the musical SIX. And while the king is at the center of the stories, the Tudor women are the ones who continue to intrigue us the most. Six wives. Two daughters. A nine-day queen. A Scottish queen. I wasn’t writing historical fiction, but I could work with and manipulate the history to bring these women into the present. Catherine of Aragon was the daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, and while Henry was off fighting the French, Catherine served as regent, directing an army against Scotland and was victorious. Her tenacity and warrior instincts would serve her well during the years Henry was seeking a divorce. If it weren’t for Anne Boleyn, we wouldn’t have seen the Reformation and the Church of England wouldn’t exist. Catherine Parr took it even further by befriending known “heretics” and writing religious reflections. She was the first woman to publish in English under her own name. Anne of Cleves was the real survivor; she never married again, but lived as an independent woman with a generous income and several homes, including Hever Castle. It wasn’t difficult to tease out modernity, to reimagine these strong women who managed to make their own marks during a time when their sex was considered inferior—despite being the wives of a king who had no qualms about killing. Ironically, by remembering them, by telling their stories over centuries, they’ve all survived. *** View the full article

In my teenaged years, when I traveled to my parents’ native Greece for the summers, I brought with me an entire duffel bag full of books. In high school, and taking myself seriously (too seriously) as a future novelist, I packed this second bag with entire bodies of work by authors I felt were Important. Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Faulkner: I knew these were the writers of the Great American Novels, and so I stuffed their paperbacks into my bag. As a first-generation Greek/American, I didn’t exactly know what the literary canon was in English, the language I learned second while speaking Greek at home. I found my reading list through a combination of hearsay, high-school syllabi, and the serendipitous selections my father had made from his subscription to the Book of the Month Club. And so, among the Importants in my summer reading, I also included John Dos Passos and William Saroyan—whom I admire, but who are not often mentioned in the same breath as the others. One year I packed something by Thurber, a hardback copy of The Years With Ross about the famous editor of the New Yorker, which my father had selected from the Club brochure. I pored over Thurber’s tales of life at the magazine with dedication and reverence. Because of that Club and my father’s surely mistaken impressions of its title, I knew that Joyce’s Ulysses was Important. But it would be many years of trying before I could pull it off our bookshelf in the States and understand it. I never brought that book with me to Greece. Since our time with family in Greece lasted the entire summer, I usually finished all the books I had brought with me before our return to the States. I could read in Greek, so I could have simply gone to any one of the local bookstores and purchased a Great Greek Novel. Instead, I went—year after year—to another one of my father’s literary collections: detective and crime paperbacks in English. On the landing of my grandmother’s house in Athens was a small storage closet. Just to the left of the door was a two-shelf bookcase full of paperbacks my father had bought from Pantelides book store, purveyor of foreign-language literature in downtown Athens, and sadly now closed after decades in operation. In the way that we remember clearest the beloved spaces that are lost to us, I could reconstruct that closet for you now inch by inch. (My parents had the house torn down to make way for a new building—a common practice in Greece, but a loss I still mourn.) The closet was narrow and long, and held rolled-up rugs that were taken up each spring and re-laid again in autumn, an old sewing machine, an armoire, and an icon with a perpetually-lit votive. The jumble of these things held its own charm for me. It was a tiny Narnia, a place of strange disorder in my grandmother’s otherwise proper home. On the shelves of that bookcase were my father’s paperbacks by Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Erle Stanley Gardner, Eric Ambler, Agatha Christie, Leslie Charteris, with a Glenway Westcott thrown in too. The Westcott had earned its place by virtue of its title: Apartment in Athens. Many of these volumes were Pocket Books, with the message on the back that you could send the copy to “a boy in the armed forces” anywhere in the U.S. for only 4 cents. My father had written his name inside most of them. Lazaros Lazaridis, written in a tidy English cursive. The adult handwriting of his that I came to know was spiky and alive, not the careful lettering with which he claimed his teenaged purchases. Every summer, I began my reading with what I believed to be the canonical works of American literature and finished up with mysteries and crime novels and thrillers. I loved those books. I loved the DeSotos and Duesenbergs and Pierce-Arrows that Simon Templar drove—the very names of the cars singing of glamor. I loved the adventure and urgency of crimes that needed to be solved. I loved the way that I had to slip inside the closet’s space, a space that was somehow extra to the daily living we did in my grandmother’s house. I never saw anyone else go in there all summer except me. It wouldn’t surprise me to know that, but for my visits, the door only opened when the rugs had to go in or come out. I loved that these books had been—were—my father’s and that he had bought them when he had been roughly my age. And that he had bought a few of them before the war, before the German Occupation, and the famine of 1941. My father’s many stories of his experience during the war were tales of daring exploits, like the time he snuck into a German airbase and removed the chain from the steering mechanism of a Stuka, or the time he hid a camera inside his coat to photograph the German tanks as they first entered Athens. When I read his thrillers and espionage books decades after these reckless adventures, I could slide into that other era, into the daring and the danger, and I could imagine that I, too, lived in a time when what I did and saw carried enormous significance. The paperbacks on that two-shelf bookcase shaped my tastes as a reader, I think, more than the suitcase full of Great American Novels I lugged with me over the years. I have a Ph.D. in English Literature, and I taught the subject for ten years to college students, so I have spent my fair share of reading time with the “fine” literature of the English language. But what I most enjoy is a novel that puts its fine-ness in service of a mystery, or a spy story, or a crime. Tana French, Mick Herron, Kate Atkinson’s Jackson Brodie books: these are the novels I hold to my heart when I have finished them. McEwan, too, whose plotlines are sometimes faulted for being almost grand guignol with obsessions and violence and danger lurking and then breaking through. I find works like this comforting, and it is surely because as I turn their pages I am transported to the wonders of that closet in my grandmother’s house. The way a duck imprints on its first living creature, I feel as though I imprinted on my father’s books. I hunger for language that works artistic marvels, but only if it’s making me desperate to see what happens next. I have a recurring dream in which the architecture of a home that is supposed to be my home (but looks nothing like it) suddenly reveals itself to be more, bigger, wider than I knew it to be. My dream self will open a door to discover an entire wing, or a staircase to another story. I used to find these dreams troubling, even disappointing, as I woke to what now felt like a diminished reality. But I’ve come to see them for the creative reassurance I think they are. Through the door or up the stairs or down the new hallway is the extra space, the place full of surprise and wonderment. It’s the closet where the extra books are kept, with their hard-boiled detectives and their glamorous cars and their danger. *** View the full article

One night in 1970, Rena Pederson, a young wire-service reporter organizing news bulletins printed by the Dallas office’s teletype machines, came across a dispatch about an audacious crime. The so-called King of Diamonds was at it again, absconding from a local mansion with jewels worth an estimated $60,000. “That,” Pederson recalls, “was ten times what I made a year at UPI.” The clever crook, it seemed, had been active for years, stealing from dozens of homes owned by Texas tycoons whose new money came from oil wells and retail empires. Pederson would spend the next several decades amassing an impressive journalistic resume, but even as she climbed The Dallas Morning News’ masthead and published several books, she didn’t forget the never-caught thief. In the mid-2010s, Pederson realized she finally had time to write about the “king,” as the press dubbed him six decades ago. The product of interviews with more than 200 people and countless hours spent digging through newspaper archives, her new book—The King of Diamonds: The Search for the Elusive Texas Jewel Thief—is informative and entertaining, a game effort to solve a batch of sensational crimes that coincided with Dallas’ midcentury economic boom and the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Speaking from her home in Austin, Pederson discussed the thief’s intriguing crime spree, which, she calculates, netted jewels that would be worth $6 million today. By 1970, how long had the thief been active? I would say that the thefts were going on for at least a decade by then. Once I checked the records, I realized that they probably started in the mid-50s. Who was the thief stealing from? It was a very special time in Dallas, I guess you would say. Oil money brought incredible riches pouring into what was basically a very rural, poor state. Dallas was full of Gatsbys, because that’s where the bankers were, and they would take a risk on a well for a share of the profit. Dallas was essentially a small city, with rich people who were like sparklers on the cake. That aspect of the book makes it a portrait of Dallas becoming the place we know today. Did you realize from the start that you writing a sort of history of the city in the 20th century? At first, I didn’t. I thought, well, this guy was so good, he had to be a pro, and he probably ended up in some other jurisdiction. But the more I got into it—and the more the police got into it—I realized it was someone living in Dallas, because it went on for so long in a very contained space. It had to have been somebody who knew these rich people, because the thief was so intimately familiar with their houses. You had to look at the culture, because the culture created this moment, this perfect storm of money and glamour. The people whose homes were robbed belonged to swanky golf clubs and night spots. And you think that more than 20 had some sort of link to the Dallas Opera? When you have people who are newly rich, they want respectability, they want a place in society. So what they did was join the opera. They dressed up to go to the opera because that’s what rich people in New York and Boston did. How exactly did the thief work? Usually, a burglar will come when people are out of town and there are no lights on, and papers are piled up in the yard. That’s the thing that was confounding to the police—he would come into people’s homes while they were in their beds, walk by their beds, sometimes hide in their closets. That was my favorite detail from the book, that he seems to have wanted people to be at home, because if they were, their jewels would be there too. Correct, and the burglaries were happening in a finite area, two-and-a-quarter square miles. When the police made a spreadsheet, they realized that most of the crimes occurred between October and March. Well, that happens to be social season in Dallas, when people have their jewels at home—you don’t want to be running back and forth to the safe at the bank. If the jewelry-owners wanted to be seen looking fancy at the opera, the thief also seems to have had something to prove. He only went after the best jewelry. He only took women’s jewelry. He would leave thousands of thousands of dollars in jewels if they weren’t the best. Some men, just to prove how much money they had, wore these big gold Rolex watches with diamonds. He wasn’t interested in those. And none of these items ever turned up for sale anywhere? No, and that added another layer to the investigation. The only people who might be able to get the jewels out of town, to Europe or wherever, would be organized crime. You think you might’ve figured out the identity of the thief. I won’t spoil the ending here, but I was wondering if you can talk about narrowing down your suspects. I found that as it went on, and as their neighbors were being hit, people suspected their neighbors, they suspected someone dancing next to them who looked like they were wearing expensive jewels that they couldn’t afford. Everybody’s suspected everyone else, so that gave me more suspects. I had to pare it down, and what I did is, if somebody’s name came up at least 10 times, then I would look more intensely and in more detail at them. I ended up with about five lead suspects, and I could have made a good case for any one of them. And that’s one reason it took longer than expected to finish the book, because I wasn’t investigating just one burglary—there were over 60 that I could document, and I suspect there were at least 100. Some people didn’t report them, because they didn’t want their neighbors to know that they had been burgled or how much jewelry they had. Though the crimes happened decades ago, you were able to interview a lot of people who lived through this, including cops and reporters. I’m so glad I started when I did. I would say at least a third of the people I interviewed have died since then. I feel so fortunate that I got to them in time to get their oral histories. Some people were eager to talk about it because it felt like it had just happened yesterday. It was still very real to them. As you say in the book, you can’t talk about Dallas in the 1960s without discussing JFK. How did that affect the pace of the crimes and the investigation into them? Dallas police were pulled away from the case, of course, to deal with the catastrophe that the Kennedy assassination was. They pulled one officer to reinvestigate what had gone wrong in the protection of Lee Harvey Oswald, and how Jack Ruby (who shot Oswald on live TV) got into the police station. But two weeks after the assassination, jewels were taken from an architect’s home that was only a couple blocks from the police station. So the King of Diamonds wasn’t in shock. He wasn’t mourning. He was doing what he did—he wanted things, so he took them. View the full article

A better world is a near future story told through the perspective of a doctor, mother, and wife, who moves with her family to a protected company town where she thinks they’ll all be safe. She soon discovers that this town is hiding secrets about how it was founded, and upon whose backs that safety is won. It was great fun to write, inspired by Atwood, Jackson, and Levin. It looks ahead while nodding to those fun stories from the 1970s that were both more mainstream and more jaundiced, because of the era that made them popular. The nascent idea for A Better World was founded on an unwelcome repetitive thought I developed as a new mom and it was that thought that informs my novel’s inciting incident. As the youngest in my family, I’d had little exposure to infants (or babies, toddlers, or children, for that matter). Though my mom and I were close, she suffered from a lot of health problems and wasn’t able to bestow advice. My husband and I had bought a house in Crown Heights, Brooklyn where I had no local friends. I remember going to a nearby store called Nairobi Knapsack for a meet-up with expectant mothers. I was the only person who showed up. I had no idea what I was doing when I brought my daughter home from the hospital. Truly. No idea. I don’t think every parent has this, but until my kids were around three years old, I clocked every item in a room, every subway ride and music class and library, for its potential to rise up like a house alive, and commit harm. My daughters might pull the hot coffee from the table and burn themselves. They might trip and fall into a hard corner. That kitchen shears needed, not just to be put away, but locked in a drawer. I remember the heat going out one winter night. I was afraid my daughter would be too cold. I slept in her room without a blanket, so I’d be her coal mine canary. Even at the time, I knew this was nuts. I was nuts. But parenthood can do that to you. As soon as my kids reached the age of reason, that overdrive protection instinct subsided. They were fine. They knew not to eat poison, dump their heads in half-filled buckets of mop water, pull coffee off tables and douse themselves with it. I calmed down. My entire immune system relaxed. Once it was over, I was able to address a deeper fear I’d had during that time more clearly. During those early years, I’d had a persistent worry that someone might break into the house during the night and hurt them. I never told people about this worry. It was too weird—too incriminating. It reeked of post partum depression, of madness, of the possibility that I was unfit. My husband traveled a lot. I was often home alone at night. It was at these times that the worry apparated like an unwanted guest: what if someone cut the glass so I didn’t wake? What if they did it so surreptitiously that they left no trace? … What if I not only had to discover the awful evidence, but was blamed? Before writing this piece, I asked some friends if they’d ever experienced this fear. They looked at me like I was nuts. So I’m willing to believe I’m alone. But it’s a big world. Probably, I’m not. Immune systems are good at fighting enemies that mean harm to the human body. I’ve got an especially overactive one. I’m the most allergic person I know. For instance, right now I’m recovering from poison oak, for which I’m taking antihistamines, steroids, and this cream that soothes the inflammation for like, five seconds and then it’s itchy again. My system has always been good at fighting bacteria and viruses, but once it gets excited, it likes to keep going. With no more enemies left to fight, it turns on itself. I think of this fear I had, as a kind of protection instinct gone rogue. In other words, if the enemy wasn’t visible—if it wasn’t hot coffee or heavy furniture, maybe it was something unseen, like an intruder. And if it wasn’t an intruder… maybe it was me? Yes, I would think, while lying in bed at night. What would happen if I woke up in the morning, and my children had been harmed, but there was no evidence of break-in? Would it be like that guy who got blamed for killing his wife, only she’d been attacked by an owl (This really happened! A guy went to jail for killing his wife and subsequent evidence proved an owl did it!)? …Or would it be something even more sinister? What if it wasn’t an intruder at all? What if it was me? But this was impossible! I’d never do that! …But what if I had multiple personality disorder and didn’t know it? What if I was Sybil!?!?! Did you read that book? Sybil was so crazy! I’d go down the rabbit hole: was reality even real? What if a different me existed in a different reality, and she punched through into this world and took my place, only she was super awful?? To be fair, I didn’t think these thoughts very often. Just sometimes, late at night, wheels spinning, because my formerly active life had suddenly become an island. It’s also just a hazard of the job: my mind is always asking: What if? The worry speaks to the enormous responsibility of parenthood, which some people are ready for, and others, not so much (oops!). It also speaks to the world we now inhabit, which seems so fraught and untrustworthy. Half the news is apparently fake, but which half? History isn’t history but narrative. Everyone is angry. Psychotic drug dealers are lacing drugs with fentanyl and selling them to middle schoolers (What the hell? Why would they do that?). It turns out that if any of us dig deep enough, we’ll discover that we’re not good people after all. We’re bad guys. But we should probably keep that secret. Because if we’re outed on social media, we won’t be met with any kindness or generosity; only righteous rage like a house, a world, on fire. About a third of the way through A Better World, I get to the plot point where a mom is accused of endangering her children. My main character, a compassionate woman, investigates what this mom did and why she did it, exposing all kinds of secrets along the way. Much of the original idea for the book – a mom is accused of harming her own kids late one night – metamorphosed into a larger theme about rogue emotions, particularly fear. My main character has chosen to live in a protected town with high walls and now has to get along with the kinds of people who build walls. But the thing about people like that, in absence of obvious enemies, their fear has no place to go. They begin to attack one another. *** View the full article

Most of us have experienced a bad neighbor or two in our lifetimes. From dorm life to 20-something apartment life, I remember a lot of neighbors with loud music, pot wafting through the halls, wild parties, and some squeaky bed frames I’d like to forget, but those were simply slight annoyances compared to the bad neighbors in these spine tingling thrillers. In my new novel, The Vacancy in Room 10, I had loads of fun creating sinister neighbors keeping dangerous secrets. So if you’re also a fan of scary neighbors you won’t want to miss these. From gaslighting, kidnapping, betrayal of all kinds, and even murder, this list of thrillers is guaranteed to give you the chills and keep you up all night. City Under One Roof by Iris Yamashita In a small Alaskan town every resident lives in a single, highrise building. The setting is already incredibly unique and haunting, but when body parts wash up ashore, a chain of events are set into motion that will change the life of Cara Kennedy, an Anchorage detective, who is sent to look into the case. This book is written by an Academy Award nominated screenwriter, and you will be able to see why when you read it because the setting really gets into your bones and it feels cinematic and gritty yet somehow unrelatable and eerie all at the same time. This thought-provoking, clever, and devastating story is one you’ll be telling your friends about and thinking about long after you’ve read the last page. Quiet in Her Bones by Nalini Singh What could be more delicious than a thriller set in a cul-de-sac full of secrets and gossip and danger? A woman disappears along with a mountain of cash, but that was ten years ago and it was written off as a trophy wife getting out from under her wealthy husband. Now, her bones are found in the forest surrounding the neighborhood and when her son, Aarav, decides to stop at nothing to find out what happened to her, he unearths secrets and horrors that the well-to-do residents have gone to great lengths to keep hidden. I love a neighborhood drama. What sets this one apart is the Hindu culture as a backdrop and the male protagonist which seems a rarity in these sorts of thrillers, but it made for a really unique perspective and I was here for it. The author expertly sets up red herrings and page-turning, pulse-pounding moments. Aarav comes off as a bit unhinged and you don’t know if you can trust all that he says because of the memory problems he’s suffering, but all of this combined, sets the stage for a really different and outstanding thriller. The Woman in the Window by AJ Finn A reclusive woman spends her days in her New York apartments, drinking wine, hiding from life, and spying on her neighbors when she witnesses what she thinks is a murder, but nobody seems to believe her. The lines between real and imaginary blur as the deeper she digs, the more of her own secrets surface. I listened to this one on audio, and it was a few years ago, but for the simple fact that I remember where I was when the shocking twist came, I have to add it to the list. I was pulling into my garage and I stopped the car with a screech and yelled “no way” out loud. I don’t recall audibly emoting over a book before, so it was powerful enough to make me remember how much I loved it, even though I have probably read two hundred thrillers since that moment. The Woman in the Window is reminiscent of Hitchcock’s Rear Window, and deserves a spot on everyone’s thriller shelf. Perfectly Nice Neighbors by Kia Abdullah When Salma Khatun moves into a new, upscale development, she is excited and hopeful, but when a neighbor is caught ripping out an anti-racism sign she put up, battle lines are drawn and a slew of misunderstandings, prejudice, and self reflection on both sides which is well handled by the author and forces the reader to really weigh all sides of the difficult topic. This is a story that you could, sadly, see ripped from the headlines on the nightly news. Two neighbors grappling with racial tension that escalates that meets a tragic end. The author explores the human condition and creates unforgettable, multi-layered characters, with unique voices, and hard topics. Stranger In The Lake by Kimberly Belle Charlotte has escaped her troubled past and impoverished childhood and now lives her dream life, in her dream house, with a loving husband and seemingly no problems…except that everyone talks. Did she get pregnant to trap him, did the trailer park girl marry him for his money? That all seems like petty gossip when a body washes up by the dock behind their house and she’s faced with real, life altering problems. Does she really know the man she married? Can she trust his friends who are all suspect and seem to be hiding secrets themselves? Is she in danger? This story was immediately gripping and atmospheric. Belle breathes fresh life into a familiar storyline and creates a truly page-turning and spellbinding mystery. The Couple Next Door by Shari Lapena Something will always go wrong when the baby is left sleeping and the parents go next door to party, thinking the baby monitor will alert them if anything is wrong. It’s a chilling start to a story you already know can only snowball into trauma and chaos from there. And that’s how Lapena starts this rollercoaster of a book, which doesn’t slow down until the shocking end. When the baby is snatched, and the police get involved, just about everyone is a suspect, and nothing is quite as it seems. Parents Anne and Marco are beside themselves and desperately search for answers to find their infant daughter. Everyone is pointing the finger at someone else…and there is more than enough blame to go around. Can you trust your spouse, your in-laws, your friends, your neighbors…or nobody? The lies, betrayals, and cover-ups in this one will have your head spinning in the best way. *** View the full article

On August 10th, 2023 I was given a small metal chip to celebrate a year of sobriety. It was the first full year of sobriety I’d experienced since 1977. I’d gotten high for the first when I was ten, courtesy of a lung-busting hit off a device called The Neutron Bong. Despite that name, it was not Cheech and Chong who served up the opportunity. An older cousin and my big brother were the ones who turned the matching keys that armed the aforesaid nuclear bong. In this situation, both “older” and “big” are relative terms. My cousin was in high school and my brother was only two-and-a-half years older than myself. While some months shy of his thirteenth birthday, my brother was already an experienced stoner, and our cousin was working on his teenage Master degree in all things pot related. Indeed, we were parked near his secret weed patch off a twisting country road when I joined their club. I don’t recall that it was a club I was looking to join. Neither do I remember being bullied or in anyway peer pressured. I knew my cousin and brother were getting high, and I was offered the chance to join in. I wanted to by cool, I suppose. A desire that would earn me no end of trouble and self-humiliation over the next thirty-odd years before it began to taper off. Though truth be told, the appetite to be cool still afflicts me. A toxic addiction that I can admit to, but for which there seems to be no twelve-step program. I imagined back then that getting high would make me cooler, but I can’t know what my cousin and my brother were thinking when they instructed me in the art of bong-hitting. At their ages, I don’t expect that they were thinking much at all. In a few years I’d be at a friend’s house blowing weed smoke directly into his dog’s muzzle so we could watch the poor animal get high. We thought that was hilarious. My cousin and my brother may have been of a similar mind regarding my first high. What is most clear in my memories of getting stoned for the first time is that it worked. It was an unequivocal success. I got baked out of my skull, laughed uncontrollably, and felt wonderful. For years to come I’d hear people tell stories about the first time they tried pot. How they didn’t really get high or got too high and felt nauseous or paranoid or had some other bummer experience that effectively turned them off. Not so me. What a lucky boy. I would get high no more than perhaps another twenty times in the next year or two. It’s tough to score in 6th grade, but the the pace would pick up by 8th. I’d be fourteen before I got drunk for the first time. From there, the constancy of my drinking and use would ramp up more or less gradually and constantly until 2022. What was most firmly established from that first high onward was a pattern that would come to dictate how I lived my life. The pattern of using drugs and alcohol to feel better about myself. Using drugs and booze to feel cooler dovetailed with using them to feel more at ease in social situations. This in turn mated with using them to feel better about my life as a whole. Eventually, I’d be using them to feel better about simply existing in the world. Until the last ten or so years of my life, in which I used alcohol to help make me feel better about having to be alive at all. During the forty-five years that I drank and drugged, I was what is sometimes called a “high functioning” alcoholic. This is understood to mean that I managed the basic mechanics of my life without booze and dope utterly derailing me. There were aimless years, but over time I built a career, writing several novels and TV shows, while also, more importantly, partnering in a healthy marriage and forging a strong relationship with our daughter. But my ability to maintain a career was in many ways a byproduct of my drinking. As much as I wanted to write, what I wanted more was to get to my free hours at the end of the day when I could drink with the peace of mind that I’d gotten my work done. Drinking without that peace of mind was a special kind of torture. This is why I find it challenging to embrace the concept of “high functioning.” Despite appearances, I was malfunctioning all over the place. When I bottomed out, it was very much with an external whimper, but internally I was blown to smithereens. None of my drinking had been done in secret. Friends and loved ones had seen me reeling drunk when I was younger, but that had been typical of our crowd. We’d all partied hard, and most all of us still drank, but we’d been mellowed by time and experience. No one knew how I structured my days, how my entire inner life, my approach to work, marriage, and parenting, revolved around getting to the evening hours when I could drink. When I could file off the edges of the world and of myself. When I’d stop feeling at the verge of tears, stop having to fight the physical urge to crawl under furniture and hide, stop hearing the constant inner refrains of self-loathing, stop the cataloging of resentments; when I could stop my daily battle with being myself in a horrible world and be cushioned for a few hours by the blur of alcohol. Despair is deeply entangled with alcoholism and addiction. The most common despair I hear spoken of by fellow alcoholics is the one I experienced; the despair of being hopeless. Suffering from alcoholism means living under a pall that puts hope and optimism out of reach. A shockingly toxic atmosphere breathed second by second every day of your life. Now, with eighteen months of sobriety, I am beginning to scratch the surface of the wall that stands between me and a full understanding of why I drank and drugged for those forty-five years. Most days I manage to make another scratch mark in that wall, but it is never less than terrifying, never less than painful, even when the results are truly wonderful. The most painful day of that scratching came when I fully realized that I am renewing my life in a way that my brother was never able to. He died at thirty-two, still struggling with his multiple addictions. How I felt when I stopped drinking is very likely how he felt when he died. It is impossible for me to know if I have spared myself from that fate, but at least I know now that it is possible. My magical time travel wish is that I could go back twenty-seven years to the last day I was with my brother, and instead of getting drunk and high with him I would ask him if he would get sober with me. One of the tools I have for understanding my alcoholism is my writing. Both the act of it and the works I’ve produced in the twenty-something years of my career. All my books, including my newest, were written while I was drinking and/or using. My characters are a catalogue of bar-tending alcoholics, teen stoner delinquents, addict vampires, doping cops, and emotionally crippled adult-children. Looking back over those works is helping me to see myself with a sometimes horrifying and sometimes hilarious degree of increased clarity. Similarly, my current writing is a form of personal revelation. I am learning, at this very moment, what it is to be a sober writer. For example, I have never before had as many sober days behind me when writing a piece of this length. These are quite literally the most sober words I have ever written. These two words right here are my most sober words: I hope. *** View the full article

In the late 1960s, the screenwriter Jack Whittingham, who had collaborated on the writing of Thunderball, started to write a screenplay based on the life of Ian Fleming. Whittingham’s daughter Sylvan says: ‘He had Fleming as a Reuters correspondent travelling on that train across Russia. Fleming was sitting in a compartment, and this alter ego like a ghost came out of him, and this whole adventure took place. That was how Dad played it – that Fleming had this other life that was Bond.’ The project was aborted, yet it reveals something of Whittingham’s perception of Bond that he saw his origins in Ian’s first important foreign assignment. During his fortnight in Moscow, Ian confronted a system that crystallised in his twenty-four-year-old mind the kind of enemy Bond would take on in the 1950s and 60s. Ian had been forewarned from reading Leo Perutz that ‘Russia is ruled by an army of executioners’ with the Lubyanka as ‘the headquarters of death’. He understood the truth behind these remarks as he sat for six days in the packed Moscow courtroom and observed from a few feet away ‘the implacable working of the soulless machinery of Soviet Justice’. In July 1956, after delivering From Russia, with Love, Ian told his editor how it was based on what he had witnessed personally, ‘a picture of rather drab grimness, which is what Russia is like’, and a portrait of state intimidation on a scale that he could never have imagined in Carmelite Street. During his time in Moscow, Ian formed a hostile picture of the Soviet state that, twenty years later in the context of the Cold War, the rest of the world was ready to gobble up. A system built on fear, routine arrests, the terrorising of innocent men and women in a show trial dominated by a pitiless Stalinist prosecutor, who, in his appetite to break and dehumanise the accused, compared them to ‘stinking carrion’ and ‘mad dogs’. *** At 9.45 a.m. on 8 April 1933, Ian’s ornate Victorian-style carriage pulled into Belorussky station. On the platform on this cool morning in late spring was Robin Kinkead. The twenty-seven-year-old Stanford graduate had booked them both into the National and he brought Ian up to speed on their drive to the hotel. The streets they raced through were in grey contrast to Kinkead’s rented Lincoln. The unpainted and weather-stained houses reminded Ian of the Gorbals neighbourhood in Glasgow. He agreed with one of the British journalists whom he met for lunch at the National, Arthur Cummings, that Moscow was ‘as depressing as a pauper’s funeral’, with long queues outside the bakeries ‘as if the unemployed of half a dozen industrial towns in the north of England had been dumped here and ordered to keep moving’. The faces of the people had the pinched, dead look that came from the malnutrition that had already claimed an estimated five million lives and was provoking tales of cannibalism out in the grain belts. There was nothing in the shops, only busts of Stalin and what Kinkead told Ian were perpetual signs: ‘No Lamps’, ‘No Bulbs’, ‘No Shoes’, ‘No Dresses’, ‘No Cigarettes’, ‘No Vodka’. The National was situated near the Trades Union Hall, which the Soviet government had chosen as the venue for the trial. Several seasoned hands were among those journalists downing sixteen-rouble Martinis at the hotel’s American bar. In addition to Cummings, political editor of the News Chronicle, there was Walter Duranty, the one-legged Pulitzer winner from the New York Times who had denied the famine; A. T. Cholerton of the Daily Telegraph; Linton Wells of the International News Service; and Kinkead’s secretary-interpreter, Zachariah Mikhailov, ‘a dapper little man of fifty odd’ with a cane and a grey hat, who had a temporary job with Reuters’ rival agency, Central News of London. Ian was the baby of the pack, the least experienced, yet here he was covering a trial that Cummings told him might prove to be ‘the most spectacular event of its kind in recent years – if not since the trial of Dreyfus’. The Times did not have a man in Moscow, nor the Manchester Guardian (Malcolm Muggeridge had left a few days before, ‘in a frenzy of frustration’). This meant that a large part of the world was relying on its Russian news from one young man of twenty-four. The pressure on Ian to come first with the story was exhilarating. He was back on the athletics track. Twelve years later, when Ian became responsible for news from Russia for the Sunday Times, he privileged ‘the man from headquarters’ over the local bureau chief. ‘The clear eye and perspective of the special correspondent from London can translate the foreign scene in sharper, simpler colours than the man-on-the-spot who by long residence and experience has become part of that scene.’ The ‘so-called “trial”’, as The Times, relying on Ian’s cables, put it, opened at noon on Wednesday 12 April in a building with Greek-style columns that had once been a gentleman’s club like White’s. Ian had done a recce on Rickatson-Hatt’s advice. He set the scene in a paragraph cabled the night before that The Times reprinted. ‘As the famous clock in the Kremlin Tower strikes twelve, the six Metropolitan-Vickers English employees will enter a room which has been daubed with blue in the Trades Union Hall and thronged with silent multitudes in order to hear an impassive Russian voice read for 4 or 5 hours the massive indictment which may mean death or exile.’ Militia patrolled the streets outside to prevent crowds. Two soldiers with bayonets inspected Ian’s press pass. A short flight of red-carpeted steps led him into a high-ceilinged chamber ‘hung with crystal chandeliers, expensive damask and all the trappings of Czarist days’. The massive electric chandeliers lit up the platform with the prosecutor’s small scarlet-draped table and the boxed-in, low wooden dock with chairs for the seventeen prisoners. The place had a queer, fusty, charnel smell, thought Arthur Cummings, squeezed in beside Ian on the press bench. Next to Ian sat his translator. Ian was fortunate to rely on Aleksei Brobinsky, son of a former count, with a big nose and curly hair, who had learned his English from an Irish governess. Cummings, by contrast, had ‘a most perfidious police-woman as interpreter who whispered in his ear what she thought best.’ Bullard wrote in his diary: ‘England is humming with sympathy for the imprisoned engineers.’ In London, two hours behind Moscow, the morning had begun with the BBC offering prayers for the six British prisoners. Ian watched five of them enter in single file – the technicians who had been released on bail. Minutes later, the sixth and last, a club-footed engineer called William MacDonald, limped to his seat in the front row. His fingers twitched over the dark goatee beard he had grown in the Lubyanka, where he had been in solitary confinement for four weeks. MacDonald’s deposition formed the bulk of the Soviet Government’s case against the British company. MacDonald was joined in the dock by eleven of the Russians accused, including Anna Kutuzova, Thornton’s secretary and his whispered mistress. Peter Fleming, passing through Moscow two years earlier, had reported to his brother on the ‘startling and universal ugliness of the women’. Yet the abiding memory of Hilary Bray, who had grown up in Russia, ‘was of girls with bright smiling eyes looking at him out of enormous furs’. According to Alaric Jacob, Ian picked up a Jewish woman from Odessa, ‘and then discovered that she was supposed to be keeping tabs on him’. Rickatson-Hatt formed the idea that ‘he got preferential treatment by flirting with the secretary of the chief interpreter.’ If so, the evidence has not survived. The only Russian woman Ian wrote about was Anna Kutuzova. She sat directly opposite him for six days, attractive, lively, strong-minded. In her impossible predicament can be glimpsed the first outline of Tatiana in From Russia, with Love. She took her place between MacDonald and Thornton and gazed around at the columned walls, the elaborate cornices, with what Cummings described as a look of birdlike intelligence. ‘She wore a dainty black costume with a broad and spotless white collar, and elegant shoes and stockings and her glossy hair was beautifully waved.’ Kutuzova was the prosecution’s star witness. Andrei Vyshinsky, the thickset state prosecutor, emerged briskly through a low curtained doorway. Pince-nez, blond moustache, tight-lipped, fifty years old, wearing a blue suit and tie. In 1908, he shared a cell with Stalin, and in 1917 he ordered the arrest of Lenin. His catchphrase: ‘Give me the man and I will find the crime.’ After the Second World War, Vyshinsky would gain fame as a prosecutor in the Nuremberg Trials and then as Russia’s Foreign Minister. In April 1933, his name was synonymous with Stalin’s show trials. A clerk in a droning voice read out into a microphone the seventy-seven pages of charges. Ian reported two bombshells on the opening day. The first occurred at 3 p.m. when MacDonald was asked if he pleaded guilty. A sensation was caused by his haggard reply. ‘Yes, I do.’ The audience gasped. ‘To all the charges?’ These included disabling motors by chucking bolts and stones into them, and paying Russian employees to gather military information for British Intelligence. MacDonald muttered, ‘Yes.’ Vyshinsky rubbed his hands. The court was adjourned. Ian dashed out to write his report in the press room on the floor below. It needed to be submitted to one of the three Soviet censors in a room upstairs and signed and red-stamped before Ian could take it to the central telegraph office two blocks away. He picked up on the general feeling that MacDonald’s confession had been ‘extracted by OGPU methods’, and was ‘not entirely unexpected: he had been in prison longer than the others’. Even so, Bullard wrote in his diary, ‘MacD’s “confession” was a terrible blow, not merely to the British government but to all of us who believe that British engineers of that type would not commit sabotage . . . it was saddening to think that any pressure could make a man perjure himself so grossly.’ The case was ‘pure fake’. ‘I wish to repudiate this document entirely.’ The second bombshell occurred in the evening session when Leslie Thornton retracted his confession. In a clear voice, he added, ‘I always built and never destroyed.’ When the judge asked him why then he had signed the deposition, he fumbled angrily with his copy of the indictment: ‘Because I was nervous. I lost my courage.’ ‘When did your courage return?’ Thornton replied firmly. On 4 April at 6 p.m., the hour he was released from prison. Duranty was a veteran reporter of these trials. ‘This created the greatest sensation the writer has ever seen in a Soviet courtroom.’ The second day exceeded the first for unexpected drama. The court opened at 10 a.m. when Ian witnessed a further ‘astonishing development’. Having pleaded guilty the afternoon before, William MacDonald rose stiffly to his feet and said in a loud voice that he was changing his plea. ‘I am not really guilty of these crimes. I declare this emphatically.’ Ian wrote: ‘Standing upright despite a lame left leg, MacDonald denounced in cold and calculated tones the statements contained both in the indictment and the written statement.’ His depositions against himself, against Thornton, ‘were a tissue of lies, signed “under the pressure of circumstances” on the premises of the OGPU’. This ‘sudden turning of the tables’ produced ‘the profoundest sensation . . . in the midst of which the microphones “broke down”.’ The court was adjourned and MacDonald escorted away by uniformed OGPU guards. When he reappeared for the evening session, pinched and hollow-eyed, Ian was shocked by his ‘remarkably changed demeanour’. Instead of defiantly maintaining his innocence, MacDonald spoke in a low, almost inaudible voice and admitted to further charges, answering ‘yes’ to every question put to him about wrecking activities. What could have happened to him in the interval? Ian listened to the press room speculation. Torture was one theory, hypnotism another – the OGPU had possibly resorted to drugs prepared by Tibetans from herbs and administered in the prisoners’ food to place them in the psychic power of their gaolers. The view of the British embassy in Moscow, wrote Bullard, ‘was that MacDonald made his “confession” to save the families of various Russian friends.’ Ian reported that Anna Kutuzova had been broken like this, ‘by the usual threats in regard to her relatives’. But the censors would never have let him cable the actual details: how she had been kidnapped for twenty-four hours and come home battered; how the OGPU had sat her down back-to- back with Thornton; how the chief interrogator had then said to Thornton, ‘If you deny what she asserts we will believe you, but citizeness Kutuzova will be shot for perjury.’ Thornton had crumpled. After that, the trial followed a predictable course. Thornton’s statement that there was not a word of truth in his deposition was supported by his boss, Allan Monkhouse, who was then forced to listen to Anna Kutuzova repeating to Thornton, her lover, after an initial hesitation, ‘mechanically, in an unnatural voice, as if by heart’, how she remembered Thornton explaining to her that ‘if a piece of metal were thrown into a turbine, a turbine would fly into bits through the ceiling.’ In her weary sing-song tone, she made the claim, which sounded improbable even to the many Russians in the hall, that her lover had plotted in her presence. She said the Moscow embassy had provided 50,000 roubles to hire wreckers. One after another, the Russian prisoners in the dock stood up to testify in the same nervous manner: yes, they had received bribes to throw iron into the machinery, also a fur coat, and in two instances, a bottle of eau de cologne and a pair of trousers. To all this, the state prosecutor listened with grim detachment, playing noughts and crosses with a stubby pencil, and sipping from glasses of hot tea. Vyshinsky’s winding-up took place over two days, lasted six and a half hours, and resembled, in its exorbitant length, bombastic tone and trumpeting of his world-beating system, not merely the tirades of Sam Slater, Uncle Phil and Eve putting young master Ian in his place, but the speech of virtually every James Bond villain. Ian wrote in You Only Live Twice: ‘It was pleasant, reassuring to the executioner, to deliver his apologia – purge the sin he was about to commit.’ ___________________________________ Excerpted from Ian Fleming: The Complete Man, by Nicholas Shakespeare. Copyright 2024. Published by Harper. Reprinted with permission. All rights reserved. View the full article

Some books take longer than others. In my case, I first heard about Dr. Paul Volkman – a med-school classmate of my dad who was charged with a massive prescription drug-dealing scheme that led to the deaths of numerous patients – in 2009, about a month before my 24th birthday. I knew instantly that there was a story to tell there, but…well, it took a while to tell it. Fifteen years, to be exact. My book about Volkman, Prescription for Pain: How a Once-Promising Doctor Became the “Pill Mill Killer,“ comes out next month, just a few days before I turn 39. A lot has happened in the years that I worked on this project. I spent 18 months as the news editor of my local alt-weekly paper before it closed in 2014. I taught writing and literature courses at a handful of different colleges. I took detours to write about mental health, Walt Whitman, and Joni Mitchell, among other subjects. And I sued the federal government under the Freedom of Information Act. I also consumed a lot of true crime. Some of what I watched, read, and listened to was highly-celebrated fare. These are the stories that many people have heard of – and for good reason. Season 1 of Serial. OJ: Made in America. The Paradise Lost trilogy. The Executioner’s Song. Columbine. Know My Name. Other stories never became household names or inspired SNL skits. But they are worthy of celebration just the same. And, today, as my long-awaited publication day approaches, I wanted to give these storytellers some of the praise they deserve. The following stories all made a tremendous impact on me. Each one expanded my idea of what true crime could do. Each one avoided the worst impulses of the genre: sensationalism, glibness, dehumanization. Each one takes the raw facts of awful events and turns them into something more. “The Color of Blood” (published in the New Yorker), by Calvin Trillin On an August night in 2006, a teenager was shot and killed on a cul-de-sac in Long Island. The victim, 17-year-old Daniel Cicciaro, was white. The man who shot him, 53-year-old John White, was black. Trillin’s story about the incident is packed with explosive American subjects: race, class, guns, the justice system, the American Dream. And yet he navigates this material with a dancer’s grace and control. The story is a marvel of concise, lyrical storytelling, and a reminder that Trilling – whose crime reportage is collected in the book Killings – is a master of the form. Happy Valley directed by Amir-Bar Lev Bar-Lev’s 2014 documentary isn’t a straightforward account of Penn State football coach Jerry Sandusky’s serial sexual abuse. It’s something far more interesting: a portrait of how the football-worshiping community around the crimes wrestled with them, and the complicity of revered-to-the-point-of-sainthood head football coach, Joe Paterno. Over the course of the film, public murals featuring Sandusky and Paterno are re-painted. A statue of Paterno is removed. Students watch tearfully as the NCAA announces sanctions against the football program. At one point, a lawyer for Sandusky’s victims says that, for people in the region, convicting Sandusky was the easy part. “The tougher stuff is the self-examination,” he says. The themes of this film – sports, power, institutions, and group psychology – resonate far beyond one Pennsylvania town. “The Final, Terrible Voyage of the Nautilus” (published in WIRED), by May Jeong. How do you write about the gruesome murder of a friend? May Jeong offers an answer in this dazzling piece on Kim Wall, the 30-year old freelance journalist who was killed while interviewing a Danish inventor during a trip in his self-made submarine in 2017. (The inventor, Peter Madsen, was later convicted of her murder and sentenced to life in prison.) Jeong’s article isn’t just a riveting crime narrative. It’s also an exploration of grief, a tribute to a friend, and a meditation on what it means to practice journalism as a woman. At one point, Jeong describes how her editor made her promise that she wouldn’t put herself in harm’s way. “But much of reporting is just that—routinely putting yourself in uncomfortable positions,” she writes. “In the four months I spent on this story, I did things that in other circumstances might have seemed foolish. I went on long drives at night with sources. I met strangers on their doorsteps and entered their homes. In stepping onto that submarine, Kim was doing what any reporter onto a good story would have done.” Tower, directed by Keith Maitland Long before Sandy Hook, Virginia Tech, and Columbine, there was the University of Texas, where, on a sweltering August day in 1966, a gunman shot indiscriminately from the school’s clock tower, killing 15 and wounding 31 others. Keith Maitland’s 2016 film depicts those events with various methods: archival video and audio footage, photographs, animation, contemporary documentary footage, and scripted scenes with actors that were then rotoscoped. It’s an experimental film that never feels hokey or disrespectful. And perhaps its boldest choice is an unwavering focus on the day’s victims and heroes – civilians and law enforcement, alike – instead of the crime’s perpetrator. Every time I re-watch the film, I’m amazed by its emotional power. I Will Find You: A Reporter Investigates the Life of the Man Who Raped Her, by Joanna Connors In 2008, the Cleveland Plain Dealer published a five-part series by reporter Joanna Connors. “​​Almost every six minutes, a woman reports being raped in the United States,” read an Editor’s Note at the start of the series. “We’ll never know for certain how many women were raped in 1984, but one of them was Plain Dealer reporter Joanna Connors, who was then our theater critic. She was attacked on a deserted stage at Eldred Theater, on the campus of Case Western Reserve University.” Connors’ 2016 book, which expands on that newspaper series, is a searing chronicle of her ordeal, told with a poet’s pen and a reporter’s precision. Of her experiences at the hospital after the crime, she writes, “In the silent, chilled room, naked under the gown, I feel like a forgotten corpse, awaiting my own autopsy.” Later, when describing the criminal justice process, she observes, “‘My’ rape case isn’t mine at all – it’s the state’s…The prosecutor works for the people of Ohio. I am just a witness.” The Blood of Emmett Till by Timothy B. Tyson Tyson’s book is perhaps the best-known work on this list. It was a New York Times bestseller, a Washington Post notable book for 2017, and longlist-finalist for a National Book Award. But at a time when presidential candidates still proclaim, “We’ve never been a racist country,” no audience is too big for this account of one of the nation’s most notorious hate crimes. A masterful work of research and storytelling, The Blood of Emmett Till is also a rebuke to historical revisionism. “The bloody and unjust arc of our history will not bend upward if we merely pretend that history did not happen here,” Tyson writes. “We cannot transcend our past without confronting it.” *** View the full article

I’ve always loved reading books set in mysterious houses. A great mystery is filled with ambiance, and some of my favorite novels are ones where the setting sets the tone for the book. When I was writing my new novel The House on Biscayne Bay, I wanted to honor the rich tradition of suspenseful novels set at enigmatic estates while also exploring the fascinating history and architecture of South Florida. In designing Marbrisa, a home filled with secrets and a deadly history, I thought about what I loved most about these novels and the places that define them. These houses create the perfect setting to transport the reader to a time and place where anything feels possible as the reader finds themself walking down eerie hallways, navigating treacherous mazes, and wondering what hidden dangers—and secrets—lurk behind every corner. If you’re like me and you love reading about mysterious homes, I’ve created a list of some of my favorite novels featuring grand estates that are filled with secrets. Whether you’re in the mood to travel to a contemporary gothic estate in the Scottish Highlands or a haunted mansion in Mexico, these larger-than-life houses will immerse you in their atmospheric settings. The Turn of the Key by Ruth Ware Heatherbrae House in the Scottish Highlands is the setting of Ruth Ware’s The Turn of the Key. When Rowan Caine accepts a position as a live-in nanny at the grand estate, she thinks she’s found the perfect place to work. But her idyllic job soon becomes a nightmare that ultimately ends in death. Brimming with tension and forcing the reader to question everything right alongside Rowan, The Turn of the Key is a twisty and chilling delight. Home Before Dark by Riley Sager In Home Before Dark, Baneberry Hall is a home with a dark history and legacy that rivals that of The Amityville Horror. When Maggie Holt returns to the Victorian mansion where she lived as a child with her parents, her goal is to renovate the estate so that she can sell it. But as secrets from the past come back with a vengeance, Maggie is thrust into the ultimate fight for survival. Riley Sager’s thrilling novel is a page-turner that will keep readers guessing until the very end. Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia Set in 1950s Mexico, Mexican Gothic is a gripping gothic thriller. In High Place, Silvia Moreno-Garcia has created a terrifying mansion where the impossible becomes possible. Alongside the heroine Noemí, readers are thrust into the dangerous machinations of a secretive family where you no longer know who you can trust. As High Place comes alive, Noemí must navigate an insidious threat determined to consume her. The Family Upstairs by Lisa Jewell An abandoned mansion in a trendy neighborhood in London is the setting for Lisa Jewell’s page-turning thriller about the rise and fall of an enigmatic family. Jewell invites readers to 16 Cheyne Walk where they’re instantly immersed in the lives of the home’s inhabitants—and their mysterious guests. Told in alternating timelines, The Family Upstairs is a domestic thriller and family saga ripe with twists and turns that will leave readers guessing until the very end. When No One is Watching by Alyssa Cole A rapidly gentrifying Brooklyn neighborhood filled with historic brownstones is the setting for Alyssa Cole’s taut thriller When No One is Watching, pitched as Rear Window meets Get Out. As Cole’s heroine Sydney Green begins exploring the history of her neighborhood and the impact that racism and greed are having on its residents, she’s plunged into a sinister reality that threatens her life and that of those around her. Readers will be gripped as the novel races toward its stunning conclusion. The Last Mrs. Summers by Rhys Bowen Rhys Bowen has a knack for immersing her readers in the fascinating life of her effervescent heroine Lady Georgiana as she traverses 1930s Europe solving mysteries. In The Last Mrs. Summers Georgie’s adventures take her to Trewoma Hall, a gothic estate in Cornwall. When a member of the household is murdered, Georgie must put her legendary sleuthing talents to the test as she uncovers the secrets of Trewoma Hall. The Missing Years by Lexie Elliott When Alicia Calder inherits half of a manor house in the Scottish Highlands, she’s transported back in time to face her childhood secrets. Her father disappeared twenty-seven years ago, and alongside the half-sister who is practically a stranger to her, Alicia is forced to confront both the house’s past and her own. There’s something treacherous about the home and the surrounding grounds, and this atmospheric thriller will keep readers guessing until the end. The Stranger Upstairs by Lisa Matlin Sarah Slade buys Black Wood House, a Victorian home with a deadly past, with the intent to renovate the home and post about it on her blog. But as soon as she starts the renovations, it seems like the house is fighting back as mysterious and threatening events begin to take over Sarah’s life threatening all she holds dear. This twisty, unpredictable novel will have you questioning everything you think you know about Black Wood House. The Hacienda by Isabel Cañas In The Hacienda, a young woman named Beatriz travels to Hacienda San Isidro hoping to find sanctuary from her troubles following the Mexican War of Independence. But a dangerous presence is haunting the remote hacienda and Beatriz must rely on the assistance of a priest to help her survive. This gothic, page-turning read will keep you up late at night as it brings the supernatural to life. *** View the full article

Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Sarah Langan, A Better World (Atria) “An apocalyptic thriller that becomes more terrifying with every turn of the page.” –Booklist Megan Miranda, Daughter of Mine (S&S/MarySue Ricci) “Miranda, a consummate professional when it comes to exposing the small community tensions that naturally arise when people live in close proximity for generations, exposes revelation after twisty revelation… Small-town claustrophobia and intimacies alike propel this twist-filled psychological thriller.” –Kirkus Reviews CJ Tudor, The Gathering (Ballantine) “Vampires, or ‘vampyrs,’ roam the earth—and provoke heated political debate—in this wildly imaginative supernatural thriller from Tudor . . . This frostbitten procedural is a bloody good time.” –Publishers Weekly Seraphina Nova Glass, The Vacancy in Room 10 (Graydon House) “Weaves an interesting plot that keeps readers intrigued until the end. Recommended for fans of murder mysteries.” –Booklist Dane Bahr, Stag (Counterpoint) “Once you’re in the novel’s grip, it’s difficult to break free. A predator thriller with a difference, by a rising star in the field.” –Kirkus Reviews Lindy Ryan, Bless Your Heart (Minotaur) “Ryan melds mystery, horror, and family drama in her sharp solo debut… This has bite.” –Publishers Weekly Robert Dugoni, A Killing on the Hill (Thomas & Mercer) “Dugoni scores a decisive win with this tale of greed, lust, and bloodshed: it’s chock-full of expertly drawn characters and plenty of historical lore, and its note-perfect noir atmosphere could accommodate James Cagney. Here’s hoping this gets the series treatment.” –Publishers Weekly Rena Pederson, The King of Diamonds (Pegasus) “With a novelist’s gift for description and a detective’s keen eye for evidence, Pederson considers suspects ranging from gigolos to interior designers and jewelers. It’s a pleasure to watch her cross them off her list one by one until she resurrects a convincing theory that the case’s original investigators were unable to pursue. This is a must-read for any true crime buff.” –Publishers Weekly Nicholas Shakespeare, Ian Fleming: The Complete Man (Harper) “Monumental . . . . Mr. Shakespeare is so adept . . . at distilling complex history and conjuring cinematic images.” –Wall Street Journal James Patterson and Matt Eversmann, The Secret Lives of Booksellers and Librarians 9Little Brown) “A celebration of the world of books. … and the deep satisfaction of creating a vibrant community for readers. A compendium of warm recollections.” –Kirkus Reviews View the full article

McKenna Jordan is the owner of Murder By The Book in Houston, Texas, and a consultant for Minotaur Books at Macmillan Publishers. ___________________________________ Bookselling is this weird world where it’s kind of like rainbows and unicorns and magic, but it’s also a business. My job is to discover new authors. To find amazing new voices and to put those books into as many hands as I can. Customers know about the number one New York Times bestsellers. What they don’t know about is the brand-new historical mystery set in India that they’re going to absolutely love because of the charming characters. So those are the books that I seek out as the proprietor of Murder By The Book, one of the oldest and largest mystery specialty bookstores in the country. I read Paula Hawkins’s The Girl on the Train six months before it comes out and just keep nagging the publicist, “This book is amazing. We want to order hundreds of copies. You have to bring her over for a tour.” We hand-sell 600 or 800 copies of The Girl on the Train before it becomes The Girl on the Train. It’s so fun to be able to do that and make a difference very, very early on in an author’s career. I love doing this. I love reading a great book and recommending something that people haven’t heard of before, getting to have interesting conversations with customers. And once they’ve read and loved it, they come back. They’re so happy that you found something new for them. I first came to the store as a customer, a college kid finishing up an English literature degree and shopping on weekends for cheap finds in the used-book section. Every time I come in, I ask if there are any openings on staff. The answer is always the same. No, because no one ever leaves. ___________________________________ Excerpted from The Secret Lives of Booksellers and Librarians: Their Stories Are Better Than the Bestsellers, by James Patterson and Matt Eversmann. ___________________________________ Finally, they change up the Saturday schedule. Four hours a week become available. I’m hired. My first day of work is January 11, 2003. That same day, an abandoned Rottweiler puppy finds its way to the store. Soon the whole staff is out back watching a manager named David coax the frightened dog to eat a few bites of his sandwich. I’m at the register all alone, answering customers’ questions by myself on my first day. I learn right away that working at this store is going to take some hustle. By the summer, I’m covering people’s vacations and basically working full-time. David and I become fast friends. He takes the puppy home and names him Travis. We go out after work for drinks—cosmos for me, margaritas on the rocks with salt for David—and talk about our days at the store. And books. Always books. Though it takes a few years for us to notice and then do something about it, David and I fall in love. We marry in 2008 at Dryburgh Abbey in Scotland. The Houston Chronicle does a great piece on us, “A Storybook Marriage.” The original owner of Murder By The Book, who started the store in 1980, is making her retirement plans. She’s always wanted to leave the store to David but sees that he doesn’t have any kind of business sense. And that I do. In January 2009, I purchase the store from her. I’m twenty-six. David and I are married, and happy here together at Murder By The Book. He has his own publishing company, Busted Flush, and I have the store. That kind of team effort seems like a good plan. Then David dies unexpectedly on September 13, 2010. He’s thirty-eight. Life takes us in some weird directions, right? David was a force of nature, and very well loved by all the authors and customers. Six hundred people attend his memorial service. People fly in from all over the country, all over the world. Lee Child flies in from the UK. People in the crime fiction community are very supportive. “Read a book in his honor,” the publisher of Mystery Scene magazine suggests. In 2011, Bouchercon, the annual World Mystery Convention, establishes the David Thompson Memorial Special Service Award for basically being a good guy or woman in the field of mystery. I have to very quickly figure out, Okay, here we are. I’ve got staff that depend on me. Everything has to go on. It’s my store and I need to make it work. Let me figure it out. My staff is wonderful, but it’s not easy. It takes a really long time before the store finds its way. Still, I remain its sole owner. I’m just now over forty. So the store’s been a big part of my life for more than twenty years. We’re in a new era. We’re constantly trying to hand-sell books to people who want more great books. We keep databases of everything that our customers buy. We hustle. We’re a New York Times reporting bookstore. That matters to publishers. In short, we sell a lot of books. But we also develop relationships with people. We know the names of our customers, their children, and what’s happening in their lives. And in among those conversations, we recommend books that we know they’re going to love. It is definitely a community. We have a well-run, well-oiled machine for author events, from the presale signing to how we do the line afterward. And we try very hard to make sure we sell a lot of books, make sure that the experience is good all around, both for our customers and for the authors. The crowd is happy and the author signs a lot of books and sells a lot of books, consistently some of the highest figures on tour. Authors want to come back, and they’ll tell their publicists. We push for a long time to get one particular author to the store. “Can we get James Patterson? Can we get James Patterson?” And finally we get to host James Patterson. As you would imagine, we have a huge turnout, with people lined up for a good while. It was all very smooth and organized. He was a delight. Everyone was happy. So that was an amazing night. Book signings so often are. When people come in to meet their favorite author, we stress to them, “If you want to keep seeing authors come through here, support us so that we can stay around and keep doing this. Come to the store, have a good time—and buy the book.” The best is when customers leave with a stack of books, saying, “This is the most wonderful talk I’ve ever heard and thank you so much for hosting it.” ___________________________________ Excerpted from The Secret Lives of Booksellers and Librarians: Their Stories Are Better Than the Bestsellers, by James Patterson and Matt Eversmann. Copyright 2024. Published by Little Brown and Co. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission. View the full article

When I first started writing Bless Your Heart and the Evans women, it was a goodbye letter, not the start of a new series. I’d recently lost my grandmother to a brief but brutal sickness, and not long before that, my great-grandmother in one of those sudden-but-expected sorts of ways. With my mother battling a chronic illness and my once-strong matriarchal family scattered to the wind, I found myself in an existential free-fall: I’d grown up on the wings of these strong, capable, passionate women, and suddenly they were all gone. Craving one more adventure with those grandmothers I’d loved so much, I decided to bring them back. Unfortunately, my powers of necromancy are tragically limited, and so I did the next best thing a horror girl like me could do, and took to the page to write a story about four generations of women who did their best to keep their town’s dead—and their own family secrets—buried. Coming up with the idea for a horror story baked through with blood-drenched humor, monster-fighting grannies, and a trip back through the millennial heyday of the late-nineties? That part was easy. But figuring out how to build a world big enough to home a fictional small-town that blended mystery and monsters with Southern charm and girl power, and to then invite everyone in town to help tell the tale? Different story. Enter that old adage: “Write what you know.” I’ve never really liked those four limiting little words, though I remain a fan of Ursula K. Le Guin’s take on them. She said, “As for ‘Write what you know,’ I was regularly told this as a beginner. I think it’s a very good rule and have always obeyed it. I write about imaginary countries, alien societies on other planets, dragons, wizards, the Napa Valley in 22002. I know these things. I know them better than anybody else possibly could, so it’s my duty to testify about them. I got my knowledge of them, as I got whatever knowledge I have of the hearts and minds of human beings, through imagination working on observation. Like any other novelist. All this rule needs is a good definition of ‘know.’” While alien societies are one of many things that I don’t know anything about, I do know a thing or two about surrounding myself with women who’d fight to the teeth for one another, blood or not, about growing up in a once-upon-a-boomtown in the late-nineties rural South, and about finding myself in that family, in that town, at that time. And so, bless my heart, I started by writing what I knew. Not that it was easy, mind you. Several elements made introducing the Evanses’ world difficult: a multi-POV cast, a mythology rooted in really old and unkempt folklore, and tragic, centuries-old events in both my real hometown’s history as well as those that made worldwide headlines in 1999. Add a mystery, and writing a Big Story in a Small Town became a Tall Order. I knew I wanted to make each of the four Evans women a Big character with her own POV. A good ensemble can be so satisfying and dynamic, giving readers multiple characters to connect with and layers of rich story texture—but it’s hard to get right. Each Evans woman needed her voice, her own quirks, and each needed to have a clear role in the family’s legacy. Beyond the main characters, everyone in the world needed to be fully realized. In a series, those secondary and tertiary characters have a habit of finding their way into major plot lines sooner or later. I’m a sucker for Small Stuff, and I wanted to infuse the Evans women with glimpses of my real family. Luckily, I had a lot of memories to build out Ducey, Lenore, Grace, and Luna. My great-grandmother was never without a dog-eared Harlequin novel and a pocket full of butterscotch candies; my clock-collecting nana could often be found wandering her own home, forever winding; and my terribly clumsy mother, well, our “Grace” really does have that silver scar on her wrist. With the littlest Evans an amalgamation of my closest childhood friends in our teenage glory days, Luna became a Frankengirl of her own. I tucked into my arsenal of favorite characters from literature and film, studied what I loved most about them, and let them inspire the world too: Olympia Dukakis’s brilliant portrayal of Chinquapin Parish’s Clairee Belcher (Steel Magnolias) mixed with the canonical horsepower of Bram Stoker’s Mina Harker (Dracula) helped bring Mina Jean Murphy back from the dead; Edgar Allan Poe’s “Lenore” gave Lenore Evans her name while a character study of Toni Collette’s filmography informed her personality; and, because I’m a professor and enjoy poking fun at fellow pedagogues, Washington Irving’s willowy Ichabod Crane (“The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”) coupled with British comedian Noel Fielding’s affable weirdness made me giggle every time I wrote a scene with this town’s newest student, Crane Campbell. With the characters in place, I needed a world to put them in, and there’s no hometown I know better to write about than my own. Though I’ve left the familial nest, like many Southern families, the rest of us Evanses have lived in Southeast Texas ever since my great-great-whatever-grandparents came to America. Along with long genealogies, small rural towns on the Texas-Louisiana border are a gumbo of people and ideas. I wrote about as much of it as I knew, and then some. Some of the book’s settings are based on real locations, while others blend inspiration and imagination. My grandfather, like Bless Your Heart’s Edwin Boone, once worked at the Fair Store. When I was in high school, my mom and I lived in a garage apartment, but not over a laundromat. We went to the same high school too, but it wasn’t called Forest Park when I went there like it was when she did. And you can’t write a book in Southeast Texas without mentioning Blue Bell Ice Cream, and my favorite discontinued flavor, Fruit Special. All those Small details added up to build a Big small-town—and I “knew” every one. In addition to the place, there’s also the timing to consider, and what a year was 1999! The music! The movies! The eyeliner! 1999 saw the birth of the Chanel Vamp urban legends, the apocalyptic fears of Y2K. If you were alive in 1999, you lived through those small moments, just like you remember the many big bleak events that ended the nineties grungy crime streak. The Columbine High School massacre. The Clinton impeachment trials. Shakespeare in Love won the Academy Award, but the rest of the world was gunfire and natural disaster. And so was my tiny little sliver of real life. Social mores of late-nineties Texas were social mores of late-nineties Texas, and I was a weird goth kid with all the scars to prove it. A friend committed suicide after coming out of the closet that year, another got killed by a drunk driver. Bi-polar meds were shoved down rebellious teenage throats. I spent an entire day in the principal’s office because all of us who wore Hot Topic clothing found death threats in our lockers. The KKK still carried a known presence. Billboards lined a ten-mile stretch of highway, bullet-pointing the details of a local cold case of a murdered woman. And as much as I know late-nineties Southeast Texas, I know monsters. Enter the strigoi. When I’m asked about my love of monsters, a favorite story to tell is the one about how I dusted a copy of Interview with the Vampire off a flea market bookstore as a kid and fell in love. But it’s never been the romance, the fangs, or even the glitz, glamour, and sometimes even glitter of these fanged heartthrobs that’s called to me—it’s the history, and it’s the sadness, and it’s the othering. It’s all well and good to sleep away the day in cozy coffins and skulk around in capes at night, but doing it year after year, decade after decade, century after century, watching everything you know and love perish and rot, only to become a solitary predator in the darkness of your own never-ending monstrousness? Yikes. Blood drinking aside, that’s some horror, right there. Being in academia has taught me the merits of good research, which served me well both in researching the real history of my actual hometown to tangle it all up with that of the Evanses’ family lore, and in digging into undead myths of the past. Before Dracula, before Carmilla, other types of blood drinkers gorged themselves in folklore—roaming, mindless, restless things, like strigoi. A primitive predecessor to the more modern vampire, strigoi, like those the Evans women face, are risen dead. Most rise from improper burials, but some rise from trauma or contagion and others for no good reason at all, other than hunger. In these old myths, the restless strigoi is less a fanged charmer than it is a ghoul eager to sink its teeth into whatever part of its victim it can. And if there’s anything undead I love more than vampires, it might be zombies. In the end, all those things I knew, both Big and Small, became Bless Your Heart. I’ve had a heck of a last adventure with my grandmothers, and now, I hope readers will make some good old-fashioned guts and glory memories with the Evans Women. So, my advice: follow Ursula’s lead. Write what you know—especially if you know monsters. *** View the full article

Nothing keeps me flipping pages late into the night like a twisty who-done-it mystery or a fast-paced thriller, but my absolute favorite genre mash up is when those elements are mixed with a little bit of magic. There’s something about the addition of magical elements that adds a new layer of tension, intrigue and excitement to the pages. Perhaps that’s why I not only read, but write, speculative thrillers. The Darkness Rises, my latest speculative thriller releasing April 9, follows Whitney, a high school student who sees dark clouds hovering over people when they are in danger. She’s always tried to save people when she sees the warnings ghosting over their heads. But after she saves a boy from her school who goes on to do something horrible, she’s wracked with guilt and not sure if it’s her place to interfere. Then she receives an ominous note in her locker and realizes someone knows her secret about her role in last year’s tragedy. They want revenge, and as the threats escalate, she has to figure out who’s behind the messages before it’s too late. In The Darkness Rises, the magical component of the dark clouds adds an ominous element to the danger surrounding Whitney because it clues the reader into the moments of imminent peril while also providing an additional motivation for Whitney’s stalker. Do they want revenge because she saved the boy from her school, because of her power, or both? If you’re like me and you enjoy your crime with a speculative twist, here’s a list of five fantastic reads that are guaranteed to scratch that itch. And don’t forget to check out The Darkness Rises on April 9! Dark and Shallow Lies by Ginny Meyers Sain Seventeen-year-old Grey spends her summers in the small and secret-laden town of La Cachette, Louisiana, which also happens to be the self-proclaimed Psychic Capital of the world. After the disappearance of her best friend, Grey sets out to find out the truth behind what happened. But she soon begins to realize that everyone in town has something to hide, and with a murderer on the loose Gray has to be careful who she trusts, or else she could end up becoming another of her towns buried secrets. This speculative who-done-it is wrought with page turning tension and set in a wonderfully atmospheric Louisiana small town that almost reads like another character in the book. When by Victoria Laurie High School Junior Maddie Flynn can see the day when someone will die in the form of mysterious digits that hover over their foreheads. Her mother forces her to use her ability to make monkey, and when Maddie’s ability identifies the death date of one client’s young son and he goes missing on the exact same day, law enforcement takes notice. More and more young people disappear only to be found murdered days later, and Maddie quicky finds herself at the center of a police investigation as both a suspect and a potential target. With a twist you won’t see coming, this is a must read for fans of magical crime. The Name of the Star by Maureen Johnson For those interested in the story of Jack the Ripper, The Name of the Star is a unique spin on one of the most notorious murderers. Louisiana-native Rory Deveaux arrives in London to start a new life at boarding school just as a series of brutal murders mimicking the horrific Jack the Ripper killing spree of more than a century ago has broken out across the city. The police are left with few leads and no witnesses. Except one. Rory spotted the man believed to be the prime suspect. But she is the only one who saw him—the only one who can see him. And now Rory has become his next target…unless she can tap her previously unknown abilities to turn the tables. The Walls Around Us by Nova Ren Suma Told from multiple perspectives, the story follows Violet, an eighteen-year-old dancer, and Amber, a girl stuck inside the walls of the Aurora Hills Juvenile Detention Center. Connecting the two together is Orianna who holds the key to unlocking the mystery of what really happened to each of the two girls and the horrible fate befell the other inmates at Aurora Hills. With a twist you have to read to believe, this supernatural tale keeps you guessing as it weaves together a story of guilt, innocence and what happens when the two become intertwined. How to Survive Your Murder By Danielle Valentine Alice Lawrence is the sole witness in her sister’s murder trial. On the first day in court, as Alice prepares to give her testimony, she is knocked out by a Sidney Prescott look-alike in the courthouse bathroom. When she wakes up, it is Halloween night a year earlier, the same day Claire was murdered. Alice has until midnight to save her sister and find the real killer before he claims another victim. This is a wonderfully creepy take on the Groundhog’s Day concept with subtle speculative elements that finally take shape when the truth is revealed. *** View the full article

The thing about the new Ripley limited series, which premiered on Netflix this week, is that its leading actor, Andrew Scott, is incredibly good. He’s incredibly good in it, and he’s incredibly good in everything. I might even say that he’s the best actor working today. We don’t really need another adaptation of The Talented Mr. Ripley, since we already have Anthony Minghella’s masterpiece from 1999 and René Clément’s Purple Noon from 1960 (not to mention Wim Wenders’s superb 1977 film The American Friend, an adaptation of Ripley’s Game, and two other films, a 2002 Ripley’s Game and a 2005 Ripley Under Ground). All of these have brought us generally excellent Ripleys in the forms of Matt Damon, Alain Delon, Dennis Hopper, John Malkovich, and Barry Pepper, which is to say that, if the new Netflix series hadn’t cast Andrew Scott, I might not have felt such a desperate need to watch. Developed, written, and directed by Steven Zaillian, Ripley unfolds as a noir, in punchy, digital black-and-white. In the first shot of Andrew Scott’s face, his dark eyes look black and cold, like pools of crude oil. In Ripley, Scott has managed to evacuate almost all humanity and feeling from his body; he embodies the sharp contrast of a body which appears to be human but lacks a human’s soul. That’s the thing about Scott, who many of us discovered from his turn as the taunting psychopath Moriarty in the BBC Sherlock series, then discovered again as a young priest in crisis, fighting romantic attraction to a woman in Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag; not only is he an actor with intense charisma, but he is also uniquely able to command a wide gamut of emotions. Whenever I watch him, I think of those sliding adjustment scales in photo editing software—how one drag of a toggle to the right or left can take the same image and drain it or fill it up with warmth—and I like to imagine, visually, the settings he’s using for that particular performance. In Ripley, that imaginary cursor lies at its farthest axis. This mode of characterization makes for a compelling antihero, but also feels rather like an intervention in the Ripley canon. Minghella’s The Talented Mr. Ripley is nothing if not emotional; it stars Matt Damon as a young, giddy and thoroughly disturbed interloper who falls in love with a beautiful man and a beautiful lifestyle, and then does whatever he can to preserve whatever he can have of it. It is as heartbreaking as it’s terrifying, a study in explosive pathos and even, maybe, how the pursuit of community only results in greater loneliness. But the novel, written in 1955 by Patricia Highsmith, offers us a slicker, slimier sociopath. We’ve seen an unfeeling Ripley before, but not in a while, and not as well as the one Andrew Scott offers to us, which is an awkward but conniving lizard-man. The series begins in New York, in the 1960s, where Tom Ripley works daily as a small-time con man; running a faux collection agency designed to defraud ordinary folks of small amounts. He’s tracked down by a private detective (Bokeem Woodbine) hired by the shipping magnate Herbert Greenleaf (Kenneth Lonergan), who has heard that he knows his wayward son Dickie (Johnny Flynn). Dickie has been on a permanent vacation in Italy for years, spending money, lying on the beach, and “working” as a “painter,” and his father thinks it’s high time he returns to face his responsibilities. He sends Tom, all expenses paid, to Italy to retrieve him. But, of course, when Ripley arrives there and gets a taste of Dickie’s lifestyle, he decides to stay indefinitely, at whatever cost. It’s not exactly that he loves the coastal Italian village that Dickie lives in, or feels any particular fondness for the quirky Italian denizens; if anything, he seems more annoyed and inconvenienced by everything around him. He’d almost seem motivationless in his clear evil if it weren’t for the ways his darting eyes catch objects he likes, things he wants. Maybe Ripley doesn’t think Dickie deserves such objects. Maybe Dickie is one of those objects. Dickie is a little put-off by Tom’s weird vibe—over-serious, graceless, a bit gauche—but Dickie’s American writer companion, his sort-of-girlfriend Marge Sherwood (Dakota Fanning), is both suspicious and disapproving of the new addition to their group. And Ripley is jealous of Freddy Miles (Eliot Sumner), a wealthy friend of Dickie’s who starts to crash their outings. The more people enter the picture, the more tense things become. If you know anything about the character, you know that Ripley will become a serial killer, slowly and systematically getting rid of anyone who stands in his way as he climbs towards the things he desires. Ripley is extremely paranoid, another of the extant themes from Highsmith’s novel, but rather than that being some indication of repressed morality or a cosmic punishment for his sins, it feels more like simply another facet of his chemical makeup, one that always prioritizes his own interests. Just because he’s aware of his own criminality doesn’t mean he has any regrets or hesitations. At all. I like the cinematography and overall production style of Ripley. For a story that spends so much time on aesthetics, from Dickie’s art hobby to the natural, rugged beauty of the locations, it’s striking that it’s all in such crisp black, white, and gray. But it makes sense; it’s a reduced, focused, gelid lens. It’s how Ripley sees the world. The sharpness of the contrast around material objects emphasizes the things that are important to him, while the azure waves and empyrean skies of Southern Italy melt into uninteresting grayscale. More than that, though, the show plays great attention to the right kinds of details, particularly “systems.” For example, there’s a difference between the pristine machinations of the post-office, the place where Ripley feels at home scheming, and the chipping, endless stairs of Italy, where Ripley must get his bearings to mount his gambit. Watching him do all this isn’t so much thrilling as it is riveting; there’s no emotional reason to connect to the character, which in some ways almost makes him more watchable. He’s something of a riddle, rather than a surrogate; he’s a living black hole, an unknowable entity, mesmeric for his impersonal capacity for dismantling and swallowing the world around him. View the full article

April is the cruelest month, so perhaps that’s why all the thrillers coming out this month are so delightfully vicious. In the list below, you’ll find new works from top writers in the genre and some rising voices to round out the mix. You’ll also find the adage “hell is other people” split rather evenly between “hell is other people who you are related to” and “hell is other people that you are not related to but still have a weird amount of control over your life.” Without further ado, behold, the best psychologicals of the month. Sara Koffi, While We Were Burning (Putnam) In this well-plotted cat-and-mouse thriller, a surburban white woman still reeling from the death of her best friend hires a Black personal assistant to help her with day-to-day tasks. Little does she suspect that her new employee only took the gig so she can keep investigating the circumstances surrounding her son’s death, and figure out which “concerned citizen” was the person who called the cops and put her beloved child in their cross-hairs. The looming, inevitable confrontation between the two is forceful and stunning. Koffi has used the thriller genre with great effect for a prescient critique on the petty resentments and deliberate ignorance that underpin our racist power structure. K.T. Nguyen, You Know What You Did (Dutton) In this propulsive psychological thriller, artist Annie “Anh Le” Shaw is sent spiraling when her mother dies suddenly, and long-repressed memories begin to crowd their way to the surface to destabilize her further. When a local art patron disappears, and Annie finds herself waking up in a hotel room next to a dead body with no idea how she got there, things really get unhinged. Although this is Nguyen’s debut, her voice is already self-assured and powerful, and I can’t wait to see what she does next. Laura McHugh, Safe and Sound (Random House) Laura McHugh has been one of the major forces in bringing women’s stories into the rural noir genre, and Safe and Sound looks to be another well-plotted and furious examination of small-town misogyny. Two sisters decide to look into the disappearance of their cousin, taken from the home in which she was babysitting them and leaving only blood and unanswered questions behind. As determined as the sisters are to find the truth, there are other voices just as determined to keep them in the dark. Kellye Garrett, Missing White Woman (Mulholland) When Kellye Garrett publishes a new book, you KNOW you’re going to be in for an amazing read. Our heroine is Bree, whose new boyfriend, Ty, has taken her away on a romantic trip to New York City. But on the final night of her stay, she comes downstairs in their rented Jersey City townhouse and finds a dead body. And not just any dead body, the body of a missing white woman whose disappearance has been virally covered. Oh, and Ty is missing. Bree’s aware that, as a Black woman, her situation is really precarious right now. And she has no choice but to figure the truth out, herself. I’m counting the MINUTES. –Olivia Rutigliano, CrimeReads Editor Alyssa Cole, One of Us Knows (William Morrow) In One of Us Knows, a woman recovering from a debilitating mental illness gets a new position as caretaker of a historic estate, only to be trapped with several visitors during a fierce storm. When one of the motley crew is found murdered, Cole’s heroine must solve the crime or face accusation, despite her own difficulty trusting her mind. Megan Miranda, Daughter of Mine (S&S/Marysue Ricci Books) In Daughter of Mine, a woman inherits her childhood home and heads back to the secretive community she abandoned years before. As she reluctantly reacquaints herself with those she’d rather have left in the rearview mirror, a drought is causing the water in the nearby lake to drop, and there are secrets hiding beneath the waters. Sarah Langan, A Better World (Atria) In Sarah Langan’s chilling take on the classic Stepford Wives, set in the dystopian near-future, a family is invited to join an exclusive neighborhood in which only the most talented or wealthy can secure a spot. As the family moves in and gets closer to learning the community’s secrets, they become ever-more doubtful that this place is where they want to be (and increasingly certain that their new neighbors feel the same way). View the full article

Doug Liman’s “Road House” remake spends most of its runtime keeping things as sunny and breezy as its Florida Keys setting. Elwood Dalton (Jake Gyllenhaal, replacing the original’s Patrick Swayze) is chief bouncer for the eponymous establishment, the kind of happy warrior who’ll drive a bunch of miscreants to the hospital after politely slapping them senseless in a parking lot. But near the film’s climax, Dalton’s character sidesteps in a darker, decidedly unpleasant direction—and places himself firmly in Gyllenhaal’s growing pantheon of warped noir characters. During the scene in question, Dalton suffers a series of setbacks severe enough to seemingly crack his psyche in two. He responds by crushing an unarmed dude’s throat, then desecrating that dude’s corpse by shooting it full of bullets, then using the corpse as leverage against a corrupt cop. Things are getting deranged, and yet Dalton maintains his aw-shucks attitude throughout, his eyes gleaming with brutal good cheer; for a few minutes, he’s more of a serial killer than a fighting monk. And then the film, as if startled by its own twist, abruptly shifts back into traditional action-movie mode, with Dalton reverting to clichéd tasks such as Saving the Girl and Beating Up the Bad Guy. That scene alone places “Road House” in the same category as “Nightcrawler,” “Ambulance,” and other neo-noir films in which Gyllenhaal plays some variation of a twitchy psycho, subverting his movie-star image. He’s the latest in a long line of extremely photogenic actors who use noir to toy with the dichotomy between a beatific exterior and a horrifying interior life, and he’s good at it. “Nightcrawler” (2014) is perhaps the most famous iteration of these noir-centric roles. Gyllenhaal plays Lou Bloom, an L.A.-based news stringer who cruises the night for accidents and murders to film, then sells the footage to local news stations. Lou manipulates and lies his way to success, with an utter willingness to set up situations that result in death. Gyllenhaal lost extreme weight for the role, giving him the hungry countenance of a vulture, and the character has no redeeming features unless you count murderous ambition as a positive. The “Nightcrawler” role wasn’t an outlier among his morally depraved roles. Take “Ambulance” (2022), which is every inch a Michael Bay joint: even before Gyllenhaal’s Daniel Sharp and his adopted brother Will (played by Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, who panics nicely as the action accelerates) rob a bank and hijack the titular vehicle as part of their getaway, the pace is frenetic, the camera swooping like a meth-addled crow through the action, every character shot at epic angles. In contrast to the funny, generally upstanding protagonists of other Bay films, Gyllenhaal is a genuinely bad man, the type who can disarm with a kind word but jam a rifle in an EMT’s face a few minutes later. As the movie’s crises accelerate, Gyllenhaal’s glibness tips into pure sociopathy; hints of his later performance in “Road House,” along with a hefty dose of Cagney’s climactic screaming in “White Heat”: Not all of his characters are warped in quite the same way, even if they’re barely repressing something dark. In “Prisoners,” he plays a detective who begins to snap under the pressure of solving a kidnapping case, alternating between explosive interrogations and shuddery implosions, as in the latter scene: If we imagine the intensity of Gyllenhaal’s noir performances as a scale, with “Nightcrawler” pegging the needle at a 10 (Maximum Dark) and his cop in “Prisoners” jittering at around a 5 (Typical Twisted Noir Anti-Hero), then his role in David Fincher’s serial-killer flick “Zodiac” probably rates a 1 or 2. Amidst the sprawling investigation into Northern California’s most famous murderer, Gyllenhaal’s Robert Graysmith—a cartoonist who finds himself hunting the Zodiac in parallel with the police and reporters—largely serves as the audience’s avatar. In this instance, the twitchy fireworks largely come from Robert Downey Jr. as Paul Avery: Gyllenhaal isn’t the first actor to use noir to show his range, along with a dark side; that tradition goes back to the genre’s golden age, where every heartthrob from Kirk Douglas to Fred MacMurray crawled the underside in a few titles. (That’s in addition to the women who played femmes fatales, a role that can veer between misogynistic and empowering, sometimes in the same movie.) The difference is, at least in a contemporary context, most stars seem to keep these journeys limited. Witness Tom Cruise in “Collateral,” doing an excellent job of playing a sociopathic hitman teetering on nervous collapse—and, having shown the world he could do it, opted to never portray that kind of character again. But Gyllenhaal can’t seem to help himself. Even in a movie like “Road House,” where another star might have demanded a script that made them unambiguously heroic, he’s inclined to infuse at least some moral ambiguity into it, if not psychopathy. In some ways, he’s closer to Michael Shannon than Tom Cruise—and his willingness to explore those depths perhaps makes him noir films’ unsung MVP. View the full article

There is no stronger bond in this world than family, and a caring, loving parent will do just about anything to keep his or her loved ones safe. Dive into a lake to save a drowning child, or step in front of a train to rescue a toddler who’s fallen onto the tracks. Go up against a gang of human traffickers, escape from an abusive spouse, track down a band of ruthless kidnappers. As a mystery and thriller writer I’ve always been drawn to stories in which an innocent person encounters some sort of evil entity or force that causes him or her to risk life and limb in order to rescue a daughter or son, husband or wife. In my new novel Beyond All Doubt, a grieving widower/single stumbles onto a secret that exposes a dark secret about the recent death of his wife and places him and his young daughter in the middle of a deadly criminal enterprise. While I’d like to believe the story emerged as whole cloth from my creative mind, I’d be foolish not to admit that countless family-oriented suspense novels and movies dripped elements of suspense, tension, plot, and character onto each printed page. With that in mind, here are 12 thriller films—some better, some worse—that undoubtedly contributed to my love of this sub-sub-genre, and which I will never tire of watching. Taken (2008): I will look for you, I will find you and I will kill you. Every fan of the thriller genre knows this line by heart, appropriately snarled by Liam Neeson to uber-bad Albanian gangster Marko Hoxha [Arben Bajraktaraj] in the 2008 film Taken. The set-up: Devoted dad Bryan Mills [Neeson] is frantically searching for his daughter, Kim [Maggie Grace], and her friend after they’ve been abducted by sex traffickers shortly after arriving in Paris. He has just 96 hours to find them before she’s scheduled to be sold at auction, and the former government operative needs to reach deep into his bag of black ops tricks in order to come to the rescue. Frantic (1988): While on a business trip attending a medical conference in Paris, Dr. Richard Walker [Harrison Ford] becomes understandably frantic when his wife, Sondra [Betty Buckley], is abducted from their hotel room after picking up the wrong suitcase at the airport. Limited by his thin knowledge of French language and culture, he stumbles through his interactions with the Parisian police and eventually encounters a streetwise drug smuggler named Michelle [Emmanuelle Seigner], who accidentally selected Sondra’s bag from the luggage conveyor. Self-exiled director Roman Polanski brings an intriguing mix of noire, mystery, darkness, and even a touch of comedy, causing viewers to [almost] forgive some of the glaring plot holes. Panic Room (2002): Newly divorced mom Meg Altman [Jodie Foster] and her young daughter Sarah [Kristen Stewart] are forced to lock themselves in a concrete-and-steel panic room when three thieves break into their New York brownstone. Unbeknownst to mother and child, a fortune in bearer bonds is stashed under the floor of the impenetrable vault. [Note: these financial instruments make for a great plot device, but have been outlawed in the U.S. since the 1980s.] Foster is at the top of her game in this well-crafted women-in-jeopardy picture directed by David Fincher, whose focus on a deliberate single-setting premise delivers results in a gripping tale that builds tension one frame at a time. Enough (2002): Based on the 1998 bestselling novel Black and Blue by Anna Quindlen, Enough stars Jennifer Lopez as Slim, an abused wife who decides to go on the run in an attempt to elude her increasing obsessive husband, Mitch [Billy Campbell], and his murderous henchmen. Desperate to get away she goes into hiding with her daughter, eventually taking self-defense classes in order to eventually exact bloody revenge. Initially panned by critics, the #MeToo movement helped to revive the movie as a statement that abused women—and their abused children—have had enough. Last Seen Alive (2022): The plot of this film—originally known as Chase—is simple enough: When a man’s wife suddenly disappears at a gas station, his desperate search to locate her propels him down a sinister path and ultimately forces him to run from authorities and take the law into his own hands. Directed by Brian Goodman and written by Marc Frydman, it stars Gerard Butler as real estate agent Will Spann, who stops to fill up while his estranged wife Lisa [Jaimie Alexander] vanishes after she heads inside to purchase a bottle of water. It’s a good, if predictable, premise, but the story is hamstrung by trying to be both a psychological thriller and an action flick. Critics initially gave it mixed reviews but fans loved it, and when it was released on Netflix in late 2022 it instantly became the most-streamed film in the U.S. Kidnap (2017): This film is like one of those energy shots you buy at the grocery store. At just 81 minutes long, the adrenaline surges within seconds as every parent’s worst nightmare comes true. Single working mom Karla Dyson [Halle Berry] brings her young son Frankie [Sage Correa] to a local carnival, but loses sight of him while speaking with her divorce attorney. When she spots him being dragged into a green Mustang she gives chase, first on foot and then in her own car. In a heart-thumping race against the clock, Karla pushes herself to the limit to save her son’s life. Retribution (2023): Matt Turner [Liam Neeson again] is a man with a problem. Several, in fact. He’s in over his head at work, his kids seem to loathe him, and while he’s driving them to school one morning in Berlin, he learns from a mysterious caller that a bomb in his car will explode if they get out of the car. What typically would be a normal [albeit angst-filled] commute turns into a nerve shredding race of life vs. death, as Turner et al are sent all over the city in a twisted thrill ride of retribution while he tries to keep his kids alive. Sleepless (2017): Set not in Seattle but Las Vegas, police officers Vincent Downs [Jamie Foxx] and his partner rob a shipment of cocaine belonging to a drug kingpin, who intended to sell it to the son of a powerful mob boss. The two cops volunteer to investigate the robbery in order to cover up their involvement, pitting them in a battle against internal affairs investigators and homicidal gangsters. Making matters worse, the gangsters kidnap Downs’ son, placing Downs in a frantic race against time to save him and bring the criminals to justice. Based on the 2011 French picture Sleepless Nights, the film is 95 minutes of kick-ass entertainment. Peppermint (2018) The last thing Riley North [Jennifer Garner] remembers when she awakens from a coma is the brutal attack that wounded her and killed her husband and daughter. Bucking a system that’s shielding the killers from the law, the young widow transitions from an ordinary citizen to urban guerrilla. Patient and determined, she sharpens her mind, tones her spirit, and strengthens her body in order to take down those who robbed her of everything she loved. The film is both exceptionally violent and exceptionally dynamic, with little-to-none gratuitous blood or guts. Double Jeopardy (1999): In this female-powered ‘90s action film, Libby Parsons (Ashley Judd) is wrongly convicted of killing her abusive husband, Nick. While enduring the long years behind bars she dreams of just two things: reuniting with her son and solving the mystery that took Nick’s life. When she learns that he actually faked his own death, she goes after him with impunity, knowing that double jeopardy clause in the U.S. Constitution prohibits convicting someone for the same crime twice. That questionable legal argument aside, conflict arises in the person of Travis Lehman (Tommy Lee Jones), Libby’s parole officer who dogs her frame-by-frame as she pursues Nick and tracks down her son. Nobody (2021): What happens when a nobody becomes a somebody? That’s the story of Hutch Mansel [Bob Odenkirk], an underestimated and overlooked family man who’s mostly ignored by his emotionally estranged wife Becca [Connie Nielsen] and two children. One night, when two thieves break into the house with a gun and steal his daughter’s favorite bracelet, his long-dormant temper is triggered, propelling him down a path of dark secrets, brutal skills, and explosive revenge. Suffused with the same DNA as John Wick [screenwriter Derek Kolstad penned both], Hutch takes it upon himself to save his family from a dangerous criminal organization—and make sure no one will ever again view him as a nobody. The Call (2013): A veteran operator for an emergency 9-1-1 dispatch center, Jordan [Halle Berry] blames herself for failing to protect a young girl during a home invasion. Six months later she fields a call from a kidnapped teen [Abigail Breslin], and forces herself to take charge of the situation and help save her life. While lacking the blood-is-thicker-than-water premise, this film is both intelligent and gripping, with only a few moments—mostly toward the end—when the storyline begins to fray. Still, it’s an intense and nerve-shredding tale of quick thinking, improvisation, and the drive to never give up. *** View the full article

As a society we are not just interested in jewelry heists: you might even say we are obsessed with them. Books, films, TV shows abound decade after decade from Robin Hood to Lupin. From the Moonstone to the Oceans franchise. We love jewelry robberies the point that we seem to even admire the professional criminals who carry out these robberies. Think Cary Grant in To Catch a Thief. Yes, we’re relieved to know he’s given up his thievery, but would we really be that upset if we’d discovered every once in a while, he still pocketed a diamond bauble or two. As a writer who has been telling stories that revolve around jewelry for over a decade, I’ve often wondered at the meanings behind this fascination. Is it that we are impressed with the thieves who manage to carry out these jobs almost always without harm to anyone? Is it the vicarious thrill? Is it that we covet the gems ourselves? Or is that that, as Carl Jung suspected, many of us have a shadow self with a perpetually present “inner thief”. He said that like diamonds, we are multi-faceted—with many of our facets in our unconscious. Gems are objects of desire for so many of us not just for their beauty and mystery, not just for their value, but because of the stories connected to them. Each gem was created hundreds of thousands if not millions of years ago. They contain all of time. They were excavated, cut, and polished, designed and set by human hands; then each one was bought, given to, and then worn by someone with a story to tell. History certainly proves that we have always been obsessed with precious gems. Romans believed diamonds were splinters of falling stars. Ancient Greeks thought they were tears of the gods. Over the years I’ve kept a journal of stolen gems, lost gems and jewelry robberies that have held particular fascination for me. One lost Romanov treasure inspired my 2022 historical novel The Last Tiara. And a robbery of an opal and diamond Lover’s Eye brooch from a private collection, inspired my March 2024 novel, Forgetting to Remember which is a time travel tale of romantic suspense. If you’re as fascinated as I am by stolen gems, here are some of the most outrageous, successful, and simply stunning thefts of the last hundred years. The Great Pearl Robbery of 1913. The “Mona Lisa of Pearls” a necklace of 61 flawless pink pearls was sent from Paris to a London. But upon receipt, jeweler Max Mayer found the pearls were missing and instead he’d been sent lumps of sugar. The thief, Joseph Grizzard, was eventually captured and the pearls found—by chance—when a piano-maker walking on the street saw a man drop something and then suspiciously hurry way. Examining the refuse, the piano play found a broken string of pearls. He took them to the police and received a large reward. The InterContinental Carlton, Cannes. One of the most famous hotels on the on the French Riviera, the Carlton was featured Alfred Hitchcock’s, To Catch a Thief. The hotel’s first robbery occurred in 1944. Thieves burst into the hotel’s jewelry store firing machine guns walked out with gems worth between $43 and $77 million. In 2013, the hotel hosted an “Extraordinary Diamonds” exhibit. A single gunman, in less than a minute, walked away with $136 million in precious stones. He escaped through a window. Antwerp Diamond Centre, Belgium. Often called “the heist of the century.” In 2003 over $100 million worth of diamonds, gold, silver was taken. The thief Notarbartolo was arrested for heading a ring of Italian thieves known as the School of Turin, but the items were never found. Harry Winston, Paris. In 2008 a group of thieves, some disguised as women, robbed the famous house of Winston of $102 million. They addressed the employees by name, showed off a hand grenade and a gun. A car waited for them, and they made a clean escape. But only for a time. The eight men were eventually caught and convicted, one of them having once been a security guard at the store. American Museum of Natural History, New York. Being a New Yorker, this has always been one of my favorites. In 1964, two men scaled a fence and snuck into the J.P. Morgan Hall of Gems and Minerals where they gathered up their loot. In all they took 24 gems, including the Star of India (the world’s biggest sapphire, weighing 563.35 carats); the DeLong Star Ruby (100.32 carats, and considered the world’s most perfect), and the Midnight Star (the largest black sapphire, at 116 carats). They got away in regular yellow cabs with $410,000 worth of gems, which today would be worth more than $3 million. After a long investigation nine of the gems were discovered in a locker at a bus terminal in Florida. 14 of the gems are still missing. The Damiani Showroom, Milan. Thieves dressed in police uniforms arrived at the not yet open showroom asking the staff for store records. Using electrical cables they tied the staff up, sealing their mouths shut with tape, and then locked them in a bathroom. Millions of dollars were stolen during the robbery which took 40 minutes. Luckily, some of the firm’s most valuable jewels were not in the showroom as they were being lent out to celebrities for award shows in Los Angeles. *** View the full article

Over the past few years, there’s been quite a few novels popping up featuring translators solving crimes. Some of the books are by authors who themselves have experience in translation, and reward readers with their turns of phrase and tricks of prose lifted from the cadences of other languages. I try to keep abreast of trends in the genre, especially ones difficult to google (if you search for crime fiction about translators, you’re likely to find works of fiction in translation instead), and I’ve found the mother-lode with this one (or perhaps, the mother tongue?). In particular, I put together this list because two books this year demanded it: Jennifer Croft, the award-winning translator of Olga Togarczuk, published her first novel in March, and one of April’s standout releases is The Translator, by Harriet Crawley, a novel of the “new Cold War” by a writer with decades of experience in Russia under her belt with the linguistic skills to match. While authenticity is not always a reasonable demand in our genre (we wouldn’t want actual murderers writing crime fiction), the authors below all appear to be nearly as multi-lingual as their characters. Jennifer Croft, The Extinction of Irena Ray (Bloomsbury) Jennifer Croft is the renowned translator of Olga Tokarczuk and this debut takes full advantage of her background in the best way possible. In this complex and metaphysical mystery, eight translators arrive at a sprawling home in the Polish forest, only to find their author has gone missing. Where is Irena Ray? What secrets has she been keeping from her devoted fans? And what’s with all the slime mold? I should add that this title is quickly becoming a favorite of all of us here at CrimeReads! Harriet Crawley, The Translator (Bitter Lemon) Harriet Crawley was married to a Russian, lived and worked in Russia for decades, and is a fluent Russian speaker, so it’s no surprise that her 2017-set novel feels as authentic as a le Carre tale when it comes to underhanded deeds and doomed romance. Crawley’s narrator is a skilled translator called up by the British government to help negotiate an important trade deal. His mission soon goes off-course when he encounters another translator, his former lover, who needs his help: her surrogate son, a hacker who got on the wrong side of the FSB, has died suspiciously, with few interested in a thorough investigation. Eddie Robson, Drunk on All Your Strange New Words (Tordotcom) This book is so strange! In the distant scifi future, the bumbling interpreter to an erudite alien attaché must solve a locked-room mystery or find her employment jeopardized. The act of translating the alien tongue makes her feel a bit tipsy, but that’s just the start of her problems in this wildly creative scifi/mystery mashup. Ann Leckie, Translation State (Orbit) Ann Leckie’s Translation State is part space opera, part murder mystery, and all entertaining. The set-up is compelling: two seekers converge in their quest to solve the mysterious disappearance of a skilled, but rebellious, translator, the key to avoiding a clash between titans as their political overlords prepare to renegotiate a controversial arrangement. R. F. Kuang, Babel, Or, An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Rebellion (Harper Voyager) One of my go-to recommendations at parties! In R. F. Kuang’s anti-colonialist powerhouse, magic comes from the meaning lost or gained in a word’s translation, and the more used the language, the less power it provides. In the early 19th century, the Oxford Dons have recruited speakers of many tongues from across the empire to keep magic plentiful, gathering them from the periphery to the center. While these students are initially enamored of academia, they eventually begin a costly rebellion against those who would exploit their talents and their people. I know, it’s not crime fiction, but it does contain some subterfuge. Ayesha Manazir Siddiqi, The Centre (Zando) I can’t give away too much about this bizarre take on how the rich get ahead, but it’s got a killer twist! In The Centre, a woman learns of an exclusive language school promising near-instantaneous fluency in a variety of difficult tongues. She heads to the facility’s remote, spa-like location and bonds quickly with the woman in charge of the complex operation while throwing herself wholeheartedly into the center’s immersive process. Her commitments will be tested, however, when she finally understands the true cost behind the school’s innovations. View the full article

What makes an academic institution the perfect setting for fictional crime? Perhaps it’s because there is so much at stake when a child or young adult is exposed to a crime. A campus, whether primary, secondary or tertiary, offers the potential for a juicy closed-room thriller – not to mention a substantial roll of suspects from a pool of pupils, teachers and parents. When I wrote my third novel The School Run, I chose a fictional private high school for my sinister goings-on. St Ignatius Boys’ Grammar was an institution so hallowed and revered that mothers would do anything to get an admissions offer for their sons – including commit murder. It was so intriguing to me, the idea of this wealthy battlefield: a prestigious, academic and historic place, with lawns and cricket pavilions ripe for murder and corridors that were ominous and threatening after dark. I was inspired, in part, by my son starting high school, and also the aftermath of the 2019 college admissions scandal – the now infamous criminal conspiracy by celebrities and college officials to influence undergraduate admissions. It made me think: if a mother will commit this kind of a crime for her child, what else would she do? How far would she go? I’m a huge fan of campus novels purely for the intrigue and the fruitful platter of suspects. When I was making this list there were so many gritty stories that sprang to mind. Here are six of my favourites. The Secret History, by Donna Tartt This has to be the ultimate in campus crime novels, and it is certainly my favourite. Richard is recounting his years at an elite university in Vermont, and straight away we learn he and a group of fellow students – under the influence of their cult-like Ancient Greek professor – killed an unlikeable student named Bunny. I read this novel in a tent in Kenya on safari several years ago and the eeriness was real as I flipped the pages. It is not so much an action-packed whodunnit but an intellectual thriller that will give you the chills as much for its creepiness as its outstanding cleverness. What Was She Thinking? (Notes on a Scandal), by Zoe Heller Barbara Covett is a lonely and introverted school teacher who attaches herself to the new art teacher at St George’s School in north London, the whimsical and childlike Sheba Hart. When Sheba begins an illicit affair with a fifteen-year-old male pupil, Barbara uses the situation to her own advantage, claiming a sort of ‘ownership’ over Sheba. The crime in this story (nominated for the 2003 Man Booker Prize and later made in to a film starring Cate Blanchett and Dame Judi Dench) is obviously Sheba’s sexual relationship with a minor, which makes for uncomfortable reading. But so does Barbara. A gritty psychological thriller that touches on obsession, victimhood and regret. Anatomy of a Scandal, by Sarah Vaughan Politicians who believe themselves above the law, a drunken night at Oxford University that sees a man killed and a woman left deeply traumatised, and a court case with an almighty twist. This story, which was recently adapted for Netflix, is told in current day London, and also via flashbacks to our protagonists are at Oxford University swilling booze and behaving badly. One night it all goes horribly wrong and a woman’s life is destroyed forever due to an horrific sexual assault, and so she seeks her lawful revenge in the present day. Oxford holds its own as a character in this novel, the university as debauched and unscrupulous as its campus inhabitants. The Scholar, by Dervla McTiernan Irish-Australian author McTiernan is well known for her gritty crime novels, and this, her second, is set at Ireland’s Galway University. It centres around the hit and run of a young woman who is the daughter of the head of a pharmaceutical giant, Darcy Therapeutics. The company’s influence is vast, from government to philanthropy, and so when the evidence begins to point towards a Darcy laboratory, the stakes for those involved become terrifyingly high. The second in McTiernan’s Detective Cormac Reilly series, this novel is propulsive, twisty and perfect for those who love a tense police procedural. Who We Were, by B.M. Carroll The tagline for this story is: ‘It’s been twenty years, but all is not forgiven.’ A tantalising story split between the current day with a school reunion in the planning, and back at Macquarie High when there was an adored (and hated) queen bee, a cruel bully and a hapless victim. Friends and enemies are brought back together as adults, reunited for the first time in two decades, and they bring with them the grudges they have each held on to since their teens. Not a knife-wielding, hold-your-breath-for-the-murder crime novel, but rather a clever campus noir with a good deal of focus on character and motive. Liane Moriarty called it ‘addictive’ for a reason. Cat Among the Pigeons, by Agatha Christie Agatha Christie fed and watered my love of crime stories as a teenager. This novel, first published in 1959, is set at exclusive girls’ school called Meadowbank where the body of the games mistress at is found in the sports pavilion among the lacrosse sticks. She has been shot through the heart, and now there is a cat among the pigeons. Enter Christie’s most famous character, Belgian detective Hercule Poirot, to investigate. The story is typical Christie with a somehow more light-hearted tone, although as one reviewer puts it ‘there is a shocking lack of cats and pigeons in this book’. *** View the full article

Last Seen in Havana, a suspenseful addition to Teresa Dovalpage’s Havana Mystery series, was released by Soho Press in February 2024. The novel, which takes place in Havana poignantly captures the perspectives and experiences of Sarah Lee Nelson, a young woman from San Diego who remains in Cuba in 1986, after falling in love with a Cuban man, and Mercedes Spivey, a Cuban-born professional baker, who returns to Havana from the U.S. in 2019 to help the ailing grandmother who raised her. In alternating chapters, Last Seen in Havana leaps from the mid-1980s to a time that just precedes the pandemic in unspooling a powerfully moving mystery, one that will stay with readers long after the last page has been turned. I have had the great good fortune of knowing Teresa Dovalpage for more than twenty years, as a friend and a fan of her books. I’m thrilled to have the chance to discuss with her this latest addition to her estimable oeuvre. Lorraine Lopez: In Last Seen in Havana, you present dual narratives from two main characters, capturing the first-person perspective of Mercedes and the third-person limited POV of Sarah. How did you manage to braid both strands so well, transitioning from one character to the other in such a clear and seamless way? And what were some of the challenges you faced in telling the story this way? Teresa Dovalpage: This was the first time I’ve tried a dual narrative so I am happy to know it reads fine. The idea of a novel about Mercedes’ search for her mother was in the back of my mind since I wrote Death under the Perseids. But I realized I needed more of a background story for it to be compelling. If readers didn’t know much about Mercedes’ mother, Sarah, why would they care about her? The biggest challenge was writing Sarah’s chapters. At first, they were letters she wrote to her friend Rob, but they sounded a bit off—I couldn’t get a young, surf-loving San Diegan’s voice right. So, I shifted to the third-person limited narrator and it worked much better. LL: John Gardner calls compelling concrete details “proofs.” In presenting two time periods, you provide convincing temporal and place “proofs.” By what means—research, experience, memory—did you mine information for such significant detail? TD: Getting the “proofs” was a walk down memory lane. I lived for my first thirty years in Cuba so it wasn’t hard to remember the details: the May First celebrations, the Russian presence (of course, in the 80s we called Russians “our Soviet comrades”), the diplotiendas (dollar stores), all that… But I also asked my mother and friends about the “good old bad old times,” and watched Cuban documentaries from those years, so I felt I was living in the 80s while writing the book. It was fun to go back in time in search of the “proofs!” LL: In an essay in An Angle of Vision, wherein you describe cleaning an old and decrepit refrigerator, you mention determination to be apolitical in your writing. I believe you achieve this quite well, especially in this novel, where you observe circumstances without passing judgment on political contexts, allowing readers to draw their own conclusions. Why is this important to you as an author? TD: I remember An Angle of Vision! So does my mother, who loves to remind me that I seldom cleaned the cabrón refrigerador. Anyway, growing up in Cuba, I had to read too many socialist realism novels. Thankfully, most of them are forgotten now! The sad part is that not all the authors were bad writers—I actually liked Manuel Cofiño’s work, without the politics. But the fact that politics were shoved down the readers’ throats made me hate its inclusion in my own work. Too much blablablá, political or otherwise, and readers will close the book and start playing with their phones. LL: Friendship between women factors into the novel in an important way. Mercedes travels to Cuba supported by her friend Candela who accompanies her. Sarah forges connections with Dolores and Valentina, who offer her practical help and guidance. What is your view of these relationships? Do they enable the protagonists or provide genuine resources? TD: I don’t know what I would do without my amigas! You are one of them! Friends provide so much needed support in life and literature…The reason why female friendships appear so often in my books is because they are part of my own experience. As a narrative resource, Candela gave me a chance to present Cuba as seen through American eyes—the questions she asks Mercedes are those that my American friends have about Cuba. The connections that Sarah forges with Dolores and Valentina are a way to showcase two ways of looking at the Cuban reality of the 80s: a Russian woman married to a Cuban man (which was quite common then), aware of the changes happening in Eastern Europe in the late 80s, and a committed Cuban revolutionary who has no idea of what was going on in the world at that time. LL: In terms of characterization, Villa Santa Marta, the house where Mamina lives and where Mercedes grew up, emerges as an antagonist, one that poses physical threat to its occupants. At one point, Mercedes observes, “[T]he fact is, we lived in an angry house.” What was your idea behind casting Villa Santa Marta as a villain the novel? TD: Places are fun characters to write about, more so when they are bad or scary, like Villa Santa Marta. I used to visit a house in Miramar, which I used as a model for the story, that had such a bad vibe that it gave me the creeps every time I went there. The fact that two people were killed in that house (in real life) reinforced the impression. I knew I would use it in a story someday. LL: As an avid fan of the Havana Mystery Series, I’m eager to know what lies ahead for you. Can we expect another novel in the series? What are you working on now? TD: In the book I am working now, Teresita is a woman in her fifties who lives in the US and writes mystery novels. Her journey as a writer started with an unsolved case she witnessed as a teenager: a teacher and a student who died in a suspected murder-suicide case at the middle school she attended. When her best friend is accused of committing that forty-year-old crime, Teresita goes back to Havana in an attempt to figure out what really happened on that April 1980 day. I loved turning myself into a character! *** View the full article

Cozy mysteries are having a moment. The sub-genre is expanding and has resulted in a surge of popularity. Modern cozies maintain the core elements including a light-hearted tone, an amateur sleuth, and no graphic sex or violence. Yet they’ve become more inclusive and expanded their boundaries to embrace current technology as well as the use of contemporary verbiage. The shift has infused a new energy into the category, bringing with it themes and humor that resonate with a broader readership. When writing my new cozy, Peril in Pink, I was inspired by the modern mysteries I’d been reading. Without a doubt, I knew I wanted my book to be in that lane, too, particularly when it came to the humor. The relatable quips and fun banter between characters felt fresh. Here is a list of some of the modern cozies coming out in 2024 to keep on your radar. The first in the heart-warming and deliciously mysterious Magical Fortune Cookie series from Lefty Award-nominee Jennifer J. Chow. Readers are introduced to Felicity Jin and her family’s magical bakery in the quaint town of Pixie, California. Her mother’s enchanted baked goods bring instant joy to anyone who eats them. After some failed attempts, Felicity creates a fortune cookie recipe that becomes a huge hit. Things are going well until one of her customers is murdered. The personalized prediction draws suspicion from the police and she becomes a prime suspect. Felicity has no choice but to get involved. She must clear her name and turn her luck around. The second book in the Hayden & Friends Mystery series, readers are treated to some daring excitement! Dating blogger Hayden McCall and his best friend Hollister are once again drawn into a murder mystery after attending an upscale circus arts show. It’s a fundraiser featuring magic, acrobatics, and a Michelin-star dinner. Things start to go wrong when the celebrity performer is a no-show. Then Hayden’s frenemy, Sarah Lee, finds the missing star dead in her hotel suite. Sarah Lee turns to Hayden for help. With a cast that includes a trapeze artist, a cowgirl comedian sharp-shooter, and a sexy troop of Romanian male acrobats, there’s no shortage of suspects to choose from. Hayden and Hollister need to act fast before Sarah Lee is charged with murder and the real killer performs a disappearing act. The rhythm is gonna get you. What a fun tag line! Rhythm and Clues is the third book in the Record Shop Mystery series. It features Juni Jessup and her two sisters, Tansy and Maggie. Together they own Sip & Spin Records. The sisters are under pressure from predatory investors and the struggling vinyl record/coffee shop is in trouble. Things go from bad to worse when a sketchy financier is found dead outside their shop during a thunderstorm. Then the nearby river spits out an unexpected surprise and Detective Beau Russell, Juni’s ex, asks for her help. With washed out roads and the whole town on alert, Juni must hurry before someone else gets hurt. Influencer Maddy Montgomery is at it again in A Cup of Flour, A Pinch of Death… Maddy Montgomery has turned Baby Cakes Bakery into a huge success after inheriting it from her great aunt Octavia. But not all the attention she’s drawn to the bakery is good. Her former nemesis, Brandy Denton, shows up and disrupts a vlog Maddy is making. Their argument snags the attention of viewers and the video goes viral. Then Brandy is found dead and Maddy becomes a murder suspect. With the help of her aunt’s friends, the Baker Street Irregulars and her English mastiff Baby, Maddy digs into the case. She must unearth some secrets and find the truth. Time to tune into Peter Penwell and JP Broadway’s HGTV hit reality show Domestic Partners for a Halloween themed mystery. Peter Penwell and JP Broadway are excited to kick off season three of their hit show with a fixer-upper that’s rumored to be a haunted house. Twenty-five years ago automotive heiress and beauty queen Emma Wheeler-Woods fell from a third-floor balcony to her death at a Halloween night party inside a lavish manor home in the Detroit suburb of Pleasant Woods. Fiona Forrest, who recently inherited the home after learning she is Emma’s daughter, hires Domestic Partners to restore the property. But ghostly sightings, deep secrets, and sabotage have Peter and JP wondering if the place is haunted and if Fiona’s mother was actually murdered. They hustle to finish the project by Halloween—the anniversary of Emma’s death. Can they finish the work, shoot the finale, and solve a cold case before someone else ends up dead? It’s Autumn in Shady Palms and Lila Macapagal and her Brew-ha Café crew are at it again. It’s the annual Corn Festival, a big deal in Shady Palms. Lila is happy to participate and have some fun. She and her friends at the Brew-ha Café even put a wager on who can make it through the fastest. Then a dead body is found in the middle of the corn maze, and Adeena Awan, one of the Brew-ha crew, is found unconscious next to the body. Even worse? She’s holding a bloody knife. Lila knows Adeena is no killer so she gears up to find the real culprit and prove her friend is innocent. The lazy, hazy, dairy days of summer are coming to a close in the Sonoma Valley… and so is someone’s life. Willa Bauer is at it again! Willa, owner of the Curds and Whey Cheese Shop in Yarrow Glen, is gearing up for the annual Labor Day weekend bash: Dairy Days, in neighboring Lockwood. Willa is thrilled to celebrate her favorite things—she is a cheesemonger after all—and this festival goes all out: butter sculptures, goat races, cheese wheel relays, even a Miss Dairy pageant. Too bad the pageant runner, Nadine, is treating Dairy Days prep like it’s fondue or die and is putting everyone around her on edge. When Willa finds Nadine’s dead body under years’ worth of ceramic milk jugs, the police are slow to want to call the death anything but an accident. But fingers are pointing at Willa’s employee, Mrs. Schultz, who stepped in to help the pageant after Nadine’s death. Someone wanted Nadine out of the whey, and Willa is going to find out who. *** View the full article

During the early years of the pandemic, I escaped into horror movies and books. There is something soothing about sitting at home alone in the dark, hiding from the outside world. There is a cool control to be found watching fictional evil on my computer screen, or falling asleep reading a well-worn horror paperback for a story whose ending I already knew. At the end of the day I can shut off the screen, close the book, push the horror away. Fictional horror is often my escape from the horrors of the real world, a place to practice survival strategies and map out escape routes. As a Black woman who loves horror, fictional horror is often my escape from the horrors of the real world, a place to practice survival strategies and map out escape routes. At moments when my life has felt out of control, I’ve outlined and started half a dozen horror novels. I’ve written my fears and anxieties into the plotlines of short stories. I’ve written about Black women and girls and Black families escaping monsters because sometimes it’s so hard to escape them in our real lives. It felt necessary to write Black people surviving and winning against insurmountable evil during years filled with so much Black death. COVID-19 steamrolled through Black communities in the last four years, making us one of the hardest hit in terms of illness and death. Police violence against Black bodies continues to splash across our social media. All this while right-wing attacks against racial progress have resulted in the end of affirmative action, the pullback from DEI, the banning of Black books, and the exclusion of Black history in schools. When so much is out to erase your very existence, fear becomes a constant part of your life. In horror I see my fear and terror at a world beyond my control reflected back at me. For Black people, horror can provide a safe environment to process the trauma from our daily lives. Horror can offer us a powerful space to imagine fighting back and making it out. To imagine survival. The Monstrous Other Emerges Horror is one of the oldest storytelling genres, with its roots in our oral storytelling traditions, myths, folktales, and fairytales, all of which have always contained elements of the unknown, the grotesque, and the supernatural. Most mainstream Western horror traces its roots to the Gothic tales of the late 18th century. In these Gothic novels, ghosts, soulless monsters, and unsettling terrains filled readers with feelings of foreboding, unease, terror, and fear, the defining characteristics of the modern horror genre. What is specific to this time period in the birth of modern horror is its connection to European colonialism. Western horror has long been obsessed with otherness, because it sits at the juncture of Western imperialism and the creation of a racialized “Monstrous Other” as an integral feature of 18th and 19th century Western speculative fiction. Much of this fiction would become a site in which white European’s fears, desires, cultural anxieties, and fantasies played out. European colonialism and racism needed to create “monsters” out of the people being colonized so that Europe could justify destroying and enslaving those populations. When one is positioned as the “Monstrous Other” by the dominant culture one is considered completely unassimilable, making it easier for these groups to be marked for destruction and death. Equating Blackness with monstrosity, and darkness with evil in the popular imagination was one of the largest enactments of racialization in Western literature. This racialization would continue into the 20th century, which meant Black characters would be mostly non-existent, or sidelined and marginalized in horror film and literature. Often we were the monsters, or the monsters were a stand-in for Black people and other people of color. And if we did exist beyond monsterdom, Black characters fulfilled stereotypical roles or tropes, never receiving the development or depth given to white characters. Black characters often showed up as background or side characters in three specific ways: as the token Black sidekick or best friend to the white protagonist; as the “Magical Negro” with special wisdom or powers that can be used to assist the white protagonist; and as the notorious “First to Die” or Sacrificial Negro, where the Black character either died first, or existed only to save a white character and is killed off soon after. Horror reinforced the slave-era idea that Black bodies should only exist in service to whiteness, and that Black people were worth less than the white people who got to survive to the end. Enter Black Horror A decade ago the Black Lives Matter movement first spread across the country, spurring massive conversations about anti-Black racism in the United States and its institutions. As a social movement it inspired a renaissance in all Black artforms, including the literary world. For years the lack of diversity in publishing translated to a lack of Black authors being published across all genres. Fortunately, the push for greater diversity in publishing has brought more Black writers to our bookshelves over the past few years, seeding a Black literary renaissance. In the realm of SFFH, two critical cinematic moments also helped to increase visibility. The success of Jordan Peele’s 2017 Oscar-winning directorial debut Get Out did for Black horror what Black Panther did for Black science fiction a year later, amplifying interest in the often under-resourced and overlooked work Black writers have been doing in these speculative genres. In the years since, Black horror storytellers have had more freedom to talk back to the genre, inserting Black characters front and center as heroes and survivors. Nia DaCosta’s reimagined Candyman broke pandemic-box office records in 2021. HBO’s 2020 hit series from showrunner Misha Green, Lovecraft Country, still remains a talked about series despite its contentious cancellation. Black horror anthology TV series such as Amazon Prime’s Them and Shudder’s Horror Noire, offered Black writers and directors a chance to see their stories come to life on screen. At long last, we’re beginning to get Black horror book adaptations. In 2022 the long-awaited television adaptation of Octavia E. Butler’s genre-blending time travel classic Kindred premiered. This past year saw the adaptation of Zakiya Dalila Harris’s social horror The Other Black Girl and Victor LaValle’s dark fairy-tale The Changeling. During this Black horror renaissance, Black actors were cast as leads in several horror movies, including Master, Nanny, His House, The Invitation, Bad Hair, Antebellum, Vampires vs. The Bronx, The Blackening, Talk to Me, and The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster. Black actors also landed lead roles in several horror TV series. Among my favorite performances include Saniyya Sidney in The Passage; Harold Perrineau in From; Dominique Fishback in Swarm; André Holland in Castle Rock; Leslie Odom Jr. in The Exorcist: Believer; and Mamoudou Athie in Archive 81. We also saw Black and interracial families leading horror shows like Netflix’ The October Faction, and in movies like Disney’s 2023 Haunted Mansion and Netflix’ We Have a Ghost. For Generation Xers and Millenials who gorged our love of horror via 90’s pulp teen horror paperbacks, we were treated to diverse castings in recent television adaptations. We saw Black leads in Netflix’ 2022 The Midnight Club, based on the book by Christopher Pike, and Black leads in two series set in the worlds of R.L. Stine — 2021’s Fear Street Trilogy and 2023’s Goosebumps series. We’ve seen more Black Final Girls in the past few years as well. Some of my recent favorites include Georgina Campbell’s Tess in Barbarian, Kiersey Clemons’ Jenn in Sweetheart, Taylor Russel’s Zoey in Escape Room, and Keke Palmer’s Emerald in Nope. We’ve Always Loved Horror Even before Peele, Black horror had a rich literary lineage going back to the folklore of Africa and its Diaspora. Stories of haints, witches, curses, and magic of all kinds can be found in the folktales collected by author and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston and in the folktales retold by acclaimed children’s book author Virginia Hamilton. One of my earliest childhood literary memories is being entranced by Hamilton’s The House of Dies Drear and Patricia McKissack’s children’s book classic The Dark-Thirty: Southern Tales of the Supernatural, both examples of the ways Black authors have tapped into Black history along with our rich ghostlore. I’ve taught Black Speculative Fiction at the university level, and I always include a section on Black horror. This past year I taught short stories like Eden Royce’s “The Choking Kind,” P. Djèlí Clark’s “The Secret Lives of the Nine Negro Teeth of George Washington,” Nalo Hopkinson’s “Greedy Choke Puppy,” Kai Ashante Wilson’s “The Devil in America,” and Tananarive Due’s “Free Jim’s Mine.” I try to introduce students to a range of what Black SFFH can do in the hands of Black writers writing from our own cultural folklore and specific histories, from our own traumas and realities. Our lens on the world is unique, and our horror writing speaks to that. Even before Peele, Black horror had a rich literary lineage going back to the folklore of Africa and its Diaspora. Black horror can be clever and subversive, allowing Black writers to move against racist tropes, to reconfigure who stands at the center of a story, and to shift the focus from the dominant narrative to that which is hidden, submerged. To ask: what happens when the group that was Othered, gets to tell their side of the story? Black horror allows us to ask questions about the unique role Blackness plays in allowing us to rethink almost every piece of speculative worldbuilding—how does the meaning of vampirism and immortality shift as it intersects with race in books such as Fledgling by Octavia E. Butler, The Gilda Stories by Jewelle Gomez, the African Immortals series by Tananarive Due, and the Vampire Huntress Legend series by the late L.A. Banks? Yes, I do love vampire fiction. Black horror gives Black writers the chance to talk back to and critique icons in the genre like H. P. Lovecraft, something we see in P. Djèlí Clark’s Ring Shout, Victor LaValle’s The Ballad of Black Tom, and N. K. Jemisin’s The City We Became. Black horror situates Toni Morrison’s Beloved as a classic work of Gothic horror that uses genre tropes to showcase the real-life horrors of slavery and racism. Some of the richest writing in Black horror follows this Black Gothic footprint, or what AfroSpeculative comic artist John Jennings calls an “ethnogothic” framework, where supernatural and gothic tropes are used to distill ideas around the horrors of racist oppression. Black horror allows Black writers to claim our place as architects of the Southern Gothic as well, bringing attention to a distinctly Black Southern Gothic. No one better represents this subgenre today than two-time National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward. Her last two novels, Sing, Unburied, Sing and Let Us Descend beautifully blend the supernatural and the real-world horrors of the rural Southern Black poor, while also showing how Black ancestral folkways and traditions can be tapped as resources for a character’s transformation and empowerment. Her work sits alongside Black women-helmed Southern Gothic classics such as Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust, Kasi Lemmons’ Eve’s Bayou, and Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day. In this rich Black Southern Gothic landscape, many amazing books have emerged, including Tananarive Due’s The Reformatory, LaTanya McQueen’s When the Reckoning Comes, Johnny Compton’s The Spite House, and Monica Brashears’ House of Cotton. Outside of the Southern setting, gothic tension winds cleverly through Rivers Solomon’s Sorrowland, Alexis Henderson’s The Year of the Witching, and Elisabeth Thomas’s Catherine House. Horror-tinged thrillers like Jackal by Erin E. Adams and When No One Is Watching by Alyssa Cole have shown how real-world Black experiences can be powerful forces in building mystery and suspense. The Black horror boom has traversed age categories as well, resulting in more Black horror in young-adult and middle-grade fiction. Justina Ireland is a predecessor in Black YA horror, and her books like Dread Nation stand out for their unique blending of historical settings with the fantastic. Black YA horror continues to span the horror subgenres, from ghostly hauntings to urban legends to zombies. Several examples include: The Taking of Jake Livingston by Ryan Douglass, The Weight Of Blood by Tiffany D. Jackson, Burn Down, Rise Up by Vincent Tirado, The Getaway by Lamar Giles, The Undead Truth of Us by Britney Lewis, The Forest Demands Its Due by Kosoko Jackson, and Delicious Monsters by Liselle Sambury. The Final Girl is Black The YA Black horror anthology I co-edit with Saraciea J. Fennell, The Black Girl Survives in This One, came out this month, and it finds company with recent Black Horror anthologies like Jordan Peele’s Out There Screaming, Circe Moskowitz’ All These Sunken Souls, and Terry J. Benton-Walker’s forthcoming The White Guy Dies First. It also makes itself at home next to recent books featuring Black Final Girls, such as There’s No Way I’d Die First by Lisa Springer, Their Vicious Games by Joelle Wellington, You’re Not Supposed to Die Tonight by Kalynn Bayron, and Dead Girls Walking by Sami Ellis. In The Black Girl Survives in This One, we purposely subvert the idea of the Final Girl, which has typically been that of a virtuous white teen girl or white woman in her 20s who defeats the powerful villain and lives to tell the tale. We wanted to move Black teen girls from their conventional sidekick role of “sassy best friend” to the very center of the story. Doing so provides a healing moment for us as Black writers and Black readers. It is so vital to see narratives of Black women and girls surviving, in a world where anti-Black violence and violence against Black women and girls is still a true life horror story. My story in the collection, The Brides of Devil’s Bayou, explores how trauma is passed down in Black families. Aja, my Final Girl, is caught in a powerful family curse. I was interested in the idea of the curses we inherit, and how the horrors of the past manifest in the present. I was also interested in the ways Black woman not only carry our own demons, but our mother’s demons, and our grandmother’s demons, without even knowing it. I wanted to use the supernatural to illustrate generational trauma made manifest. Many of the stories in the anthology hint at the underlying terror of Black girlhood, the psychological trauma and the hyper-vigilance Black women and girls face on a daily basis, in just fighting to be heard, seen, or believed. There is a natural survival instinct underlying how Black women and girls already move through the world that gives depth to our roles as final girls. It’s powerful to see yourself survive in a world that has not always valued your life. In this way, Black final girls are revolutionary. Something poet Lucille Clifton once wrote about Black womanhood rings true here: “Come celebrate with me that everyday something has tried to kill me and has failed.” *** View the full article