UNDER THE SHADOWS Story Statement: Ann Agnew must convince doctors at the mental asylum her husband has committed to that she is sane, so she can go home to her three children.

Photo Credit: Slashfilm Welcome to “Wait, What?,” a recurring column in which we examine confusing or incoherent details in crime movies. I just saw The Dark Knight Rises (2012) for the first time. Yes, this year. I know some of you will want to dwell on the temporal aspect, but it’s not important. The important thing is that I have seen The Dark Knight Rises (2012) and I have a question. It was strange to put on this film—with its clear plot arc about a grotesque madman hellbent on destroying as much of society’s infrastructure as he can—at this time of year, which is to say, during the weekend of Donald Trump’s second presidential inauguration. Suddenly, I understand the escapist pleasures of the comic book movie, one in which there is a hero who can do something hands-on about the civically-inimical evildoers who revel in kneecapping the institutions that uphold modern civilization. But, rather than grandiosely dwell on comparison or metaphor right now, I want to talk about something very specific that I noticed, and that has haunted me in the few days since I completed my viewing. I don’t know if my focusing on this trivial detail is a way to distract myself from my malaise or my feelings of futility at the state of the world. But I can tell you this… I think I may just have found a plot hole that can upend the entire film, let alone maybe the whole DC comic book tradition. It concerns Bane (Tom Hardy), the enormous, bald supervillain with a bizarre gas mask strapped to his face. If he takes it off, or (more realistically in scenarios of hand-to-hand combat) its tiny pipes become dislodged, then he will collapse in terrible pain. Is he suffocating? Not exactly. The film’s director Christopher Nolan said that the mask “dispenses an anesthetic that keeps Bane’s pain controlled.” You see, he lives in debilitating chronic pain (there’s a backstory, but I won’t spoil it). So, Bane cuts a striking figure… a large, bulbously-muscular man in army fatigues from the waist down and a bulletproof vest, with a black, muzzle-like apparatus squishing his glabrous, smooth head and cheeks, completly obstructing his nose and mouth from view. But, okay… my question is… if Bane can’t take off his mask, then how does he shave? He’s clean-shaven. There’s no beard there. How does he shave? HOW DOES HE SHAVE? Does he take the mask off and simply suffer complete, mind-blowing agony while he slaps some shaving cream on his cheeks and chin and runs a razor over them? Does he have an assistant shave him, in case the pain is too great that his hand would be shaking to such a degree that it would be too dangerous for him to run a blade around his jugular and then some? But he has to take it off, to get that level of cheek-smoothness! He just has to! Okay, let’s walk it back for a moment. Now, a few of you might say, maybe he has a beard under the mask. For this to be the case, he to have a beard that only covers his upper lip-and-chin region (the region of his face covered fully by the mask) and not his cheeks or neck. Which, sure, maybe he does. Having a little mustache and goatee under that thing seems itchy and uncomfortably warm, but sure, maybe he does. But still… that beard would grow! Sooner or later, he’d have tufts of beard puffing their way out of the crevices in that mask, and he’d have to at least remove the mask to TRIM the beard! But that’s a pretty far-fetched scenario. Occam’s Razor suggests to us that there’s no way for him to make himself so clean-shaven without simply taking the mask off and shaving. So does he? I never thought I’d be demanding the skincare-and-grooming routine of a Batman villain, but here we are. I’m pretty sure Bane can take off his mask… and when he does, he does it for self-care. Kind of. Is it still self-care if you’re hurting while you’re doing it? “Beauty is pain,” the old adage says to us. Billy Crystal as Fernando Lamas on SNL says “it’s better to look good than feel good.” I think Bane just might agree. View the full article

Big Ben Strikes Eleven, originally published in 1934, was the first of three detective novels written by a remarkable man who later earned renown as a translator. David Magarshack boldly gave the sub-title A Murder Story for Grown-Up People to the original printing of this story about the death of the rich and (naturally) unpleasant Sir Robert Boniface, who is found shot in his blue limousine. At first it seems possible that he committed suicide, although so far as the reader is concerned, the sub-title kills off that explanation for his death. We are introduced to a fairly narrow range of suspects, and the detective work is undertaken not by a brilliant amateur but by two Scotland Yard men, Superintendent Mooney and Inspector Beckett. Dorothy L. Sayers gave the novel a warm reception in a review for the Sunday Times: “a very jolly book, with sound plot, some good characterisation, and everything handsome about it.” She thought his sub-title meant “that the motives and behaviours of his characters are such as the adult mind can reasonably accept” and judged the novel to be the best of the week. The Times was equally enthusiastic: “A first rate detective story…all sound, quick and exciting.” The Manchester Evening Chronicle was also impressed: “A detective story that will rank amongst the finest of the year. The story is extremely complicated, but so skilfully is the material handled and so cleverly are the main points brought out that one never realises it while reading. Mr. Magarshack makes his characters all real and convincing. His psychology is as good as his deduction.” No doubt much encouraged, Magarshack quickly followed up his debut with Death Cuts a Caper in 1935. But it is one thing to write a good mystery novel, quite another to produce high-calibre crime fiction time and again. Sayers was less enthusiastic about the second book: “the creaking of the machinery is not sufficiently compensated by the undoubted cleverness of its morbid psychology.” A third mystery, Three Dead, soon appeared in 1937, but then Magarshack abandoned crime writing and concentrated on the work that was to make his name. In my introductions to British Library Crime Classics, I have often mentioned the help that I receive, sometimes from complete strangers, in working on this series. This novel offers a good illustration of the serendipitous way in which things can develop, often over a period of several years. While researching Peter Shaffer’s The Woman in the Wardrobe, published in the series a few years ago, I had the pleasure of meeting Peter’s brother Brian and sister-in-law Elinor. Elinor Shaffer, an eminent academic, introduced me to Professor Muireann Maguire of Exeter University, a fan of the series who asked if I might consider recommending the detective novels of David Magarshack to the British Library. Muireann in turn introduced me to Dr. Cathy McAteer, the leading expert on Magarshack’s work, which she discusses in depth in Translating Great Russian Literature: The Penguin Russian Classics. I am indebted to Cathy and Muireann for the information and help they have kindly provided to me in order that I could compile a detailed account of Magarshack and his crime fiction. Without their encouragement and enthusiasm, I doubt this rare book would be making a fresh appearance in the twenty-first century. David Magarshack was a Jewish intellectual, born in 1899 in Riga, now the capital of Latvia but then part of the Russian Empire. After the Russian Revolution, he feared that repressive regulations targeted at Jewish people would make it difficult for him to pursue his educational ambitions, and he moved to England in 1920. His arrival in the UK coincided with the tail-end of the so-called “Russian craze”, that is, the Edwardian readership’s fascination with Russian literature spanning 1885 to 1920. Interestingly, various biographical details connect Dostoevsky and Magarshack. Both men, for instance, turned to writing as route in part as a response to financial pressures. For Dostoevsky, writing became a means for recovering gambling losses. For Magarshack, writing offered a potential route out of the “tight corner” (as he explained to the editor of the Manchester Guardian) in which he found himself at the end of the 1920s and throughout the 1930s. Financial need not only dictated the fast pace at which Dostoevsky and Magarshack both worked, but also resulted in less-than-standard rates of payment to which they each agreed; Magarshack agreed to a much-reduced rate of royalty for his Penguin translation of Crime and Punishment on the understanding that Penguin would proceed with high-volume print runs. Both men were helped by capable wives; Elsie Magarshack, a Yorkshire-born Cambridge graduate of English corrected and proof-read each of Magarshack’s publications and continued to chase royalties and publicity after Magarshack’s death in 1977. And both writers recognized the benefits of recycling previously successful literary formulae, applying them to their own works. Magarshack was aware of the parallels. He said in his notes that a “good” translator must possess the ability to “crawl into the mind of his author”, and it seems he made a con- scious attempt to work in the Dostoevskian tradition when writing detective fiction. As Penguin’s first translator of all the key works by Dostoevsky between 1951 and 1958 and Dostoevsky’s first biographer in English, Magarshack owed much of his later literary success and reputation to the great Russian author. His three detective novels failed to provide Magarshack with the literary breakthrough he longed for, but they suggest a literary link with Dostoevsky as a crime writer. In her essay “Crime and Publishing: How Dostoevskii Changed the British Murder”, Muireann Maguire acknowledges a critical reluctance to celebrate Dostoevsky specifically as a crime writer, pointing out that Leonid Grossman’s description of Crime and Punishment as “a philosophical novel with a criminal setting” neatly emphasises the extent to which Dostoevsky’s interest in crime has been perceived as playing second fiddle to his philosophy. Magarshack’s novels attempt to capture both the philosophical and the crime elements of Dostoevsky’s writing. He recycles key themes such as overdue rent, murder, and close police surveillance; thus, Porfiry Petrovich finds new life in Inspector Beckett and Superintendent Mooney. As Cathy McAteer argues, for Magarshack, these motifs are reworked for a British readership. Magarshack also experiments with Dostoevskian philosophizing, description, and characterization, as in his exploration of genius in this novel. His musings about whether it is a burden or blessing for a person to have genius bestowed upon them and whether genius impacts upon an individual’s actions are reminiscent of the self-obsessed narrative of Dostoevsky’s Underground Man and of Raskolnikov, the protagonist of Crime and Punishment. In this story, Magarshack’s debt to Dostoevsky is evident, in the way he transposes Raskolnikov’s imagined Napoleon to the culturally-modified context of British commerce: “Sir Robert had justly been called a Napoleon of Industry. The question was whether civilisation, which had made such tre- mendous strides since Napoleon on the perilous road of self-realization, could survive another Napoleon?… The time was coming when the civilized world would have seriously to consider the alternative of either putting its Napoleons to death or of perishing by their swords.” Right from the start of this novel, there are echoes of Dostoevsky. The first sentence evokes, if distantly, the style and mood of the opening lines of Crime and Punishment. Dostoevsky gave distinctive voices to characters play- ing minor roles in his novels, and so did Magarshack. It is impressive that Big Ben Strikes Eleven was published only a decade after Magarshack graduated from University College, London, having arrived in the country with scarcely any English. After his third novel was published, however, he found that translation work was more remunerative. For all its merits, his fiction didn’t yield the financial or reputational rewards he’d hoped for. Magarshack was one of a large number of people better known for their achievements in other fields, who tried their hand at detective fiction during the “Golden Age of Murder” between the wars. Examples range from A. A. Milne and Billie Houston to Ronald Knox, J. C. Masterman, and C. P. Snow. They were drawn to the genre for a variety of reasons, including its perceived intellectual rigour and, no doubt, the prospect of commercial reward. Sustaining a career as a crime writer, however, presents serious challenges and is hardly a guarantee of easy money. Most of the dabblers fell by the way- side, at least so far as the genre is concerned. But their work is often interesting and enjoyable, and Magarshack’s debut novel certainly deserves this fresh life as a British Library Crime Classic. *** View the full article

London in the 1950s was briefly home to Marilyn Monroe, shooting The Prince and the Showgirl with Laurence Olivier. Crowds lined the streets for Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation and flocked to the Festival of Britain on the South Bank and the first performances of The Mousetrap in the West End. The city had its glamour, but it was a pale shadow of the cultural powerhouse it would become in the Swinging Sixties. There was a seediness to it, with war bomb damage still visible in the streets and the last of the dangerous ‘pea souper’ fogs, until the Clean Air Act was passed in 1956. Setting my fourth crime novel in 1957, I wanted the time and place to feel as authentic as possible. For the location, I chose the street containing Agatha Christie’s mews house in Chelsea, the setting for Murder in the Mews. The crime scene in my fictional mews house involves a call girl and her client. My research inevitably took me to the real murders that took place in central London, and three cases encapsulated the period for me. These were: the serial killer, the stalker and the unknown assailant. All the victims were women and all, in some way, illustrated the themes that were on my mind at the time, namely, the lack of justice for women, and the contrast between the courage that was asked of them during the war, and the small, domestic lives they were expected to lead after it. The first case is the most famous: that of 10 Rillington Place, Notting Hill. This was fifty years before Hugh Grant and Julia Roberts. The case tends to be known by the address because two different men were hanged for murders that took place there. First, Timothy Evans, was convicted of murdering his wife and baby daughter in 1950, largely on the evidence of the main prosecution witness, his downstairs neighbour, John Christie. The police trusted Christie in part because he had once worked as a reserve constable, even though he had a criminal record. However, when Christie moved out of his flat in 1953, the police discovered the bodies of six women there, including his wife. Four of them had been gassed, strangled, raped and murdered. The other two were skeletons, but had probably been killed the same way. Needless to say, Christie almost certainly killed Evans’s wife and daughter, too. Although Christie knew the women in various ways, none of their disappearances had been investigated hard enough to lead to him, until the new tenant in his flat found a false wall in a kitchen alcove, where three of the bodies had been hidden. I honestly believe the police did their best, given their prejudices at the time. The officers in my novel aren’t idiots or misogynists. They work hard to get to the truth. But they tend not to take the word of callgirls seriously, and they’re reluctant to follow up when one of their number is accused of molesting them. It’s not that they don’t believe the women, exactly, but they’re sure a stern word in the right ear will fix the problem. I’d love to think how far we’ve come in sixty-five years … but, as recent cases regarding Met Police officers show, there’s still a long way to go. The second case involves the death of a woman called Christine Granville, who was stabbed to death by her stalker in the lobby of a cheap Kensington hotel in 1952. Christine had been working on a cruise ship, after a series of menial jobs. Her killer was an obsessed fellow steward, and one story is that he had defended her on board after she was teased for wearing her war medals, which the cruise line required staff to do. The thing about Christine was that for her, these medals included the George Cross, the OBE, and the Croix de Guerre. She was born in Poland, as Maria Krystyna Skarbek, and had earned them as the longest-serving, and one of the bravest and most successful, female secret operatives in the war. Working for MI6, her early exploits included many sorties into occupied Poland to smuggle out arms, explosives and information. Later, she was trained by the Special Operations Executive and dropped behind enemy lines in France, taking the name of Christine Granville. She worked for, and managed to rescue, the man responsible for the resistance in the east of the country. Her life story puts James Bond to shame. When the war was over, she found herself stateless when the Red Army invaded Poland, and was at first denied a passport by the British. Eventually, she was naturalised as a British citizen and legally took the Granville name. But she was penniless, and too proud to ask for help – and so she took whatever jobs she could to survive, including, fatally, the cruise ship role. Long after she died in poverty and obscurity, her trunk of personal possessions was found, with her SOE dagger among them. Since then, Polish groups have fought to restore her reputation. I’ve proudly stood next to a bronze bust of her at the Polish Hearth Club and there is a blue plaque commemorating her on the building where she died. In a strange twist of fate, there is now a Christine Granville suite at the new Raffles Hotel in London. The luxury five-star hotel is based in the Old War Office on Whitehall, where Churchill’s war plans were enacted. I wonder what the real Christine, who was known as ‘Churchill’s favourite spy’, would make of that. The third case is sadly and strangely connected to the second. Teresa Lubienska was a Polish countess who knew Granville well, and had attended her funeral. She, too, had worked heroically in Polish resistance in the war. She was captured by the Nazis and sent first to Auschwitz and then Ravensbruck concentration camp. She survived but, like Christine’s, her London existence was hard. For the next dozen years, she lived in a modest apartment and continued to advocate for survivors of the camps, trying to get them compensation. On May 24 1957, Teresa was found alone, dying of knife wounds, on the platform of Gloucester Road Station, less than half a mile from where Granville had been stabbed. Was she killed by a wartime collaborator, fearful of exposure? Or by a gang of hooligans on the platform? Her last word was ‘Banditi!’ Either way, the police conducted 18,000 interviews, and yet her murder remains one of the unsolved cases of the 1950s. Here were two women whose wartime bravery should have marked them out as heroes, but who struggled in a society that simply saw them as ‘foreign’, and had moved on. By sheer coincidence, their work with various resistance groups resonated strongly with the death of my ‘tart in the tiara’, whose backstory was inspired by another resistance fighter caught by the Gestapo and sent to Ravensbruck: Christian Dior’s sister, Catherine. Justine Picardie’s book on Catherine Dior is well worth a read. Almost unrecognisable when she returned to Paris, ‘Ginette’ survived as her brother’s much-loved muse. He died in 1957, but she lived on until 2008 and grew roses for his perfumes. Her story is a strange and unique mixture of torture and couture. In my books, it’s Queen Elizabeth II who secretly solves the crimes. When I first set out to create the Queen as a detective, it was her queen-ness that gave her a special insight into each mystery. By nature of her role, she had knowledge and access that nobody could match. But in practice, it is usually her woman-ness that gives her the insight she needs. She’s looking where the men in her life aren’t looking; she can see what they can’t see. I try and imagine the Queen as we knew her – dedicated, well-travelled, busy, privileged – but also as a fictional Golden Age detective, a moral figure stepping in where the police are stumped. In A Death in Diamonds, she pays attention, and unlike in the real case of Lubienska, justice can be done. *** View the full article

Who doesn’t love a secret society? We’ve had the Illuminati, Skull and Bones, the Stonecutters from “The Simpsons” and the Merry Marvel Marching Society – OK, the latter admittedly not a truly secretive society. Who doesn’t love a ridiculous journalism practice, one with fewer consequences than the political journalism of recent years? In fact, no consequences at all if you don’t count a 1970s-era Chicago newspaper reader calling out to his wife in the kitchen, “Hey Marge, Royko is writing about this ‘occult hand’ business again!” Once in my decades in newsrooms, I even tried to join the Order of the Occult Hand. And failed because of that foil of all journalism conspiracies, editing to fit the column inches available. But what is – or was – the Order of the Occult Hand? My introduction to the Order You won’t find a recounting of the Occult Hand in journalism school textbooks – at least I don’t believe so, anyway – or in movies about journalism, from “Citizen Kane” to “All the President’s Men” to “The Paper.” Those films were straightforward stories of journalists crusading against corruption and secrecy, or in the instance of Charles Foster Kane, in favor of it. No, to find about the Order of the Occult Hand, it helped to be a newspaper reporter or editor or someone who paid an unhealthy amount of attention to the news industry. I found out about the Occult Hand in the 1980s, when I was a freelancer and, beginning in 1984, an employee of an afternoon paper in Indiana. I always said that one of the best things about working in journalism back then was unfiltered access to the Associated Press wire. The AP moved every kind of story, originating from news operations of every type, across the wire for use by its member newsrooms. It was like having access to the biggest and broadest newspaper of all time. Along with those stories came a weekly feature that was written by an old newspaperman – of course it was a man – that provided an irreverent look at the business. It was a column not intended for public consumption; it was far too inside baseball. I no longer remember the name of the writer or the name of that weekly column. (If anyone remembers, please let me know.) He included along with bits of news about the business all kinds of frivolous stuff, including the adventures of an intrepid newshound named Speed Graphic, the name itself a reference to the 20th century Speed Graphic camera. It was in that column that I learned about the Occult Hand. What I did with that information I’ll tell you, as best as I recollect, in a moment. The origins of the secret society The Order of the Occult Hand got its start on August 25, 1965 in an otherwise somber article by Joe Flanders in the Charlotte News. In an article headlined “His First Break Ended with Death,” Flanders writes about an 18-year-old who was shot to death. “It was as if some occult hand had moved pawn after pawn until they were in the right place and then – tragedy,” Flanders wrote in the third paragraph of his story about the killing of young Freddie Lee Harr. As was so often the case with newspaper reporters and editors, Flanders’ colleagues and competitors, hunkered down over drinks after the paper was published, admired the very purple prose. They decided to try to work the phrase into their own pieces. Flanders’ work led to the Order of the Occult Hand, but it wasn’t the first usage of the “occult hand” phrase. A newspaper search shows it turned up in the Manchester (England) Guardian on April 12, 1848. “Some occult hand, hitherto kept in darkness and secrecy,” begins a paragraph in an article about France. References continued through the rest of the 19th century and into the 20th in newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic. In 1946, the Bradenton (Florida) Herald noted about vintage movies, “Back in the 1930s, the Orient reached out with occult hands …” “Autumn’s occult hand converts the rolling slope to fairy land,” J. Corson Miller wrote in a poem published in the Sunday Oregonian in October 1957. In the modern era – meaning since Flanders’ use of the phrase in 1965 – the “occult hand” was quite busy, showing up in newspapers around the country as reporters signed up for the Order. A simple search for the phrase “occult hand” in the Newspapers dot com archive turns up over 1.100 uses, but some of those can be dismissed as inaccurate results. Some of the accurate results are doozies, however. And while the North Carolina papers are well-represented in the use of the phrase, it eventually showed up everywhere. In a 2010 piece, the Los Angeles Times used the phrase in coverage of a reopened bar that was supposedly haunted. The bar’s new owner – the writer paraphrases here – said the woman’s effort “was almost as if she were guided by an occult hand.” (I think a piece about a bar with a ghost should get a pass for using the phrase.) In a 1974 story in the New York Times about the United Nations, Paul Hofmann used the phrase. Likewise, it showed up in the Washington Times and in many articles from the Associated Press. In a 2003 column about ice fishing in the Green Bay Press-Gazette, Ed Culhane wrote about a sturgeon that got away. “It was as if an occult hand …” In 2000 in the Springfield News-Leader, Alison Parker, writing about Chocolate Hazelnut Truffles, used the phrase not once, not twice, but three times. Almost as plentiful, by the 1990s and 2000s, were newspaper stories and columns blowing the whistle on the practice. In 2004 in a piece published in the Clarion-Ledger of Jackson, Mississippi, Paul Greenberg of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette wrote a piece headlined, “That old ‘occult hand’ simply getting too visible these days.” A 1975 Associated Press article recapped how the Boston Globe had revealed the existence of the Order of the Occult Hand and traced its history back to those North Carolina newsrooms. That article quoted sportswriter John Powers, who had used the phrase in a story of a Yale-Dartmouth football game, as saying it had passed beyond the purview of news reporters and into the realm of sportswriters like him. “I’m not sure I want to belong to any club that would accept a sportswriter as a member,” Powers said. Bad luck with the occult hand My experience with the Order of the Occult Hand was over before it began. My first few years in journalism, as a freelancer from the late 1970s to 1984, was during the pre-tech era. I typed my articles, columns and reviews at home, on paper, and brought them to the newsroom. By the time I started full-time in 1984, the newspaper’s IT guys had built a word-processing system that not only processed copy but eventually allowed us to connect online. It would be years before we had email at individual desks, for example, but every terminal could see the wire services and that’s where I learned about the Occult Hand folderol. I decided to try it. I don’t remember what type of story I inserted “as if by an occult hand” into. It was certainly not in a serious story, but in one of the many entertainment features I wrote at the time. This was during a period when the newspaper had a composing room staffed with gruff but good-hearted old newspaper professionals who literally “cut in” our articles, cutting printouts of the stories with an exacto knife. Sometimes I was sent by my editors to make those cuts myself. One day when I was not given that task was one when I had tried to sneak in the “occult hand” reference. But my story was too long for the column inches available, and the editor doing the cutting had the good sense to cut a couple of paragraphs that included “as if by an occult hand.” My bid to be included in the secret society was over. I didn’t try it again. The time had passed. Little did I know that the silly stealth practice would continue for additional decades, even in the wake of articles – one as recently as 2004 in the Chicago Tribune – exposing the scheme. I turned up one in a question-and-answer column in 2001 in the Charlotte Observer, a newspaper in the same city where the silly business had begun in 1965. The Order of the Occult Hand lived into the 21st century. Who says journalism doesn’t have traditions anymore? * Keith Roysdon is a Tennessee writer who worked in the newspaper business for 40 years. He’s now a writer of true crime, fiction and pop culture. CrimeReads has published more than 60 of his articles and he’s never tried to sneak any secret messages past his editors. Honest. View the full article

Can you name the five canonical victims of Jack the Ripper? What about the women killed by Ted Bundy? What were Barb from Stranger Things’ hopes and dreams? What did Ashley (the dead girl from Courtney Summers’ I’m the Girl) wish for in her quietest moments? A true crime aficionado or #JusticeForBarb crusader might have the answers, but most of us don’t. Most of us can name the killer more easily than their victims. Most of us can tell you more about the character hell-bent on avenging a woman or girl’s death than we can about the woman or girl who passed. Barb is a catalyst for Nancy. Ashley is a foil for Georgia. The victims of serial killers disappear so easily into the background of the stories. Because the story isn’t about them. Whether they’re catalyst or collateral damage, the girls are not the point. Even in books and movies where we women and girls are the main characters, we’re still so often walking over the corpses of our fellows to get to our triumphant (or not-so-triumphant) endings. This is the media landscape in which I first learned about the unsolved mystery of the Beast of Gevaudan—an unidentified creature that stalked the French countryside in the early modern period, killing and maiming hundreds. A certified history nerd, long-time true crime reader, and newly-minted horror author, I, like so many before me, was drawn in by the tale. Was the creature a dog? A pack of wolves? A serial killer in disguise? What was it like to have your region suddenly thrust into fear of a monster in the woods? And how could they have killed the creature but not documented what it was? I wanted to explore it. I wanted to write about it. But there was a big problem. A dead girl problem. The same problem that unsettles me about the stories we have been telling in western media for so long. I was wary of the dead shepherdesses. I didn’t want to sensationalize them, forget them, use them. I didn’t want the beast to be beastly and worth talking about because of a hundred unnamed girls it stole from history. So I sat on the story for years, thinking I’d probably never write it. Until an aha moment came for me: What if this was a monster story about saving girls not killing them? What if the beast wasn’t the villain, but the (accidental) savior? This was the genesis of We Are the Beasts—a story about two teen shepherdesses who see the beast’s terrifying arrival in their region not as a curse but as an opportunity. To stage the deaths of the girls in their village who have been enduring abuse at the hands of the real beasts of our story: bad men. There is still the (historically accurate) beast stalking a countryside on a killing spree. There are still the unavoidable touches of death upon our horror story. But ultimately it is a tale about the power, humanity, and solidarity of girls against every type of violence. In the end, our girls must face off with the Beast of Gevaudan, but first they address the violence closer to home. And after coming face-to-fangs with the creature itself, they also address the ways that their close-to-home violence created the beastly threat. It is—in other words—a story about violence against women and girls, but we are not props, not catalysts, not collateral damage. We are the point. We are the heroes. We are the center of our stories. I am obviously not the only person pushing back against our culture’s dead girl problem. Especially in the world of YA horror and thriller, things are changing—slowly, surely—for what seems like the better. In recent years, increasingly more female protagonists who don’t fit the final girl trope have appeared and lived through their stories (like the fabulously furious Laure of I Feed Her to the Beast and the Beast Is Me and Temple of Dead Girls Walking by Sami Ellis). More than ever, girls are allowed to be angry and messy and downright villainous—and still be the character we’re rooting for. (It’s worth noting that both the characters mentioned above are Black girls—a group historically even more harmed via our cultural dead girl problem—and many of the authors leading the pushback are, as usual, Black or from other marginalized communities.) Perhaps even more heartening, as we turn toward instead of away from stories about messy, pissed-off girls, their motivations no longer require a body. Maude of Wendy Heard’s Dead End Girls, for example, is driven by a longing for freedom (and more than a little desire to upset her parents). Latavia of Monstrous by Jessica Lewis craves vengeance on the town that tried to kill her. And Bad Witch Burning’s Katrell wants to get rich quick. Don’t get me wrong: most of these books have body counts. But those body counts aren’t throwaway setup for a character arc. Even some of the books that do kick off with a female corpse are doing so with more care recently. Like the aforementioned I’m the Girl, whose less-than-explored dead girl feels like more of a commentary on society’s lack of care than of the author’s. Ultimately, like my journey into the horror genre, my struggle with the dead girl problem is about hope. Hope that we can continue fighting for nuance, humanization, and fewer girls and women used as building blocks for someone else’s story. Give me girls who live. Give me girls who are remembered when they do not. Give me girls fully human, fully messy, fully mad. So when you stumble upon a story like The Beast of Gevaudan and your writer heart says yes, give me something our culture would never expect: Girls who survive. Girls who fight. Girls who use the monster to re-write their own stories. That’s what I’m trying to do with We Are the Beasts. And it’s what I hope we’ll all keep trying to do with the stories that come next. *** View the full article

Story statement: Ethan Wallin, civil rights attorney, has to end racism in his lifetime to save his own soul. No big deal. Primary Antagonist: Ethan’s antagonist is conventional thinking embodied by several characters - his boss, his colleagues, and his community. Despite being on his side, they resist his unconventional ideas and question his motivations. They’ve been doing this work longer, they’ve seen how it plays out, and they are the true believers in progressive values. It’s hard to tell if they represent sticks in the mud or the voices of reason, in light of Ethan’s fanaticism. They react to Ethan’s actions by putting up barriers, getting him fired, and ultimately threatening his license to practice law. Working Titles: I Think That Song is About me The Ally Comparables: I Think That Song is About me mixes the benevolent satire of Less by Andrew Sean Greer with the critical social perspective of R.F. Kuang’s Yellowface. Hook: A white civil rights lawyer, after stretching himself to the limit only to fail at helping the cause, decides he will atone for the sins of his racist ancestors by walking into downtown Boston wearing a homemade t-shirt that says “I’m racist.” Inner Conflict: Ethan’s inner conflict is about the value of his own life. He feels like nothing he does is earned because he’s a privileged white male, and if he’s not earning his keep what good is he. He still strives and pushes, but he doubts any of it will do any good, that it’s truly worth anything. He won’t feel worthy of love unless he can prove to himself and to the rest of the world he, alone, did something truly extraordinary. Hypothetical: Ethan comes home on a cold evening in late February, not long after the first anniversary of his job at a corporate firm. Ethan’s wife, Rachel, has a friend over, Robyn, who works at a nonprofit organization. They’re having a glass of wine in the living room, while Ethan is doing the dishes in the other room. Ethan hears Rachel mention to Robyn that Ethan’s w2 shows he earned more this past year than either of them earned combined in prior years. He hears Robyn say wow. Ethan stops washing dishes and enters the living room. Robyn asks how his new job is going. He asks Robyn if he’s told her yet about the pro bono case he’s working on, working hard to humble brag about how much time he spends on it. Later Ethan chides Rachel for embarrassing him in front of Robyn. Robyn is annoyed because she meant to be complimenting him. They descend in a fight about whether Rachel pushed Ethan into taking this job at the corporate firm. They wake up the baby. Ethan goes down to change her using the organize compostable diapers they can only afford because of his new job. Setting: Boston provides the cultural setting for Ethan’s external and inner conflicts to play out. It’s a city with deep-seeded racism but a facade of dominant progressive culture. There are plenty of leftist fundamentalists with whom Ethan works, in the media, and in his friend circles to act as comic and dramatic foils. Ethan interacts with the historic public spaces in Boston, that provide context for his sense of civic purpose. The transitions from suburbs to city also provides a setting for the work he and his colleagues do. Ethan lives in a comfortable suburban home outside of Boston in a gentrifying neighborhood that emphasizes his privilege and his guilt about it.

High-school is Twin Peaks. All the cool girls are Audrey for Halloween, eerily twisting in pencil skirts. Unless they’re the Log Lady. Every cup of coffee is “damn good.” College is Blue Velvet country. At every party, some bro will parrot Dennis Hopper when the keg runs dry. (“Heineken? F*ck that sh*t. Pabst. Blue. Ribbon!”) Before any of that we get the OG Paul Atreides, soiling his space suit as Frank Herbert intended. And though the maestro disowned this edit, your mother still jokes you have “Mentat eyebrows” certain mornings. David Lynch, the inimitable auteur, has died at 78. Known for psychosexual, dreamy masterpieces like Mulholland Drive, he was a peerless weirdo. A precise bard of the American uncanny, as fun to interpret as he was to be unsettled by. Praising his canon, peers and former colleagues have called him wizard, friend, and “imagination voyager.” In a moving Instagram tribute, Lynch’s longtime collaborator Kyle MacLachlan said “he was in touch with something the rest of us wish we could get to.” Today I’m struck by the length of the director’s shadow. For as long as I’ve know of it, Lynch’s work has felt immortal. Those images and characters (fire) walk with you from room to room and dream to dream. They existed long before you moved to the suburbs. They’re hiding in the closet still, determined to outlive you. And as Patryk Chlastawa put it in a 2010 essay for The Point, the indelibility of, say, this scene is as much about theme as mood. “Lynch’s work confronts its audience with their own sense of helplessness and victimization,” he wrote. Which analysis helps explain how Lynch’s work, which is so often alarming or grotesque, managed to smack us teenagers sideways. As in high school, nobody in a Lynch film ever knows exactly where, why, or who they’re supposed to be. * In one of many nice remembrances this morning, John Semley of The New Republic recalled one of Lynch’s last screen appearances: a mega-meta cameo in Steven Spielberg’s self-mythologizing 2022 biopic, The Fabelmans. In a penultimate scene, Lynch chomps scenery—I mean, a cigar—behind an eye patch, cosplaying another great American director: John Ford. As Semley has it, here is “a master of American cinema playing a master of American cinema, in a film by another master of American cinema, about the genesis of his own cinematic mastery. A seemingly random, throwaway role, it typified Lynch’s approach to art and creativity… eccentric and unexpected.” It’s true that one could hardly imagine an apter career cap. Exit, pursued by a legacy. And on observing the explosion of a(n unmanned) SpaceX Starship shuttle yesterday, one brilliant BlueSky scout theorized that this could be the auteur’s true last will and testament. An uncanny and violent shock, “shot down from heaven.” Something to make you laugh. To freak you out. To wake you up. Image via View the full article

Horror has (unsurprisingly) become of the best metrics for understanding the world around us, which is, indisputably, Getting Worse. Here are 25 dark, disturbing, and demented tales to help get through what is sure to feel like a very long year. As always, thanks to my CrimeReads colleagues for their contributions to the list below. January Dennis Mahoney, Our Winter Monster (Hell’s Hundred) A couple on a road trip to fix their marriage instead find themselves stranded in a snowstorm and facing a supernatural threat of epic proportions. This one has the same vibes as cult classic I’m Thinking of Ending Things, but with a snowstorm ratcheting the tension waaay up. Susan Barker, Old Soul (Putnam) This book is THE MOOD, and the mood is dark. Old Soul feels like if Thomas Pynchon’s V was a Georgia O’Keefe painting. At the start of Barker’s latest, two strangers who miss their flight discover a strange supernatural mystery in common: each lost a loved one suddenly and inexplicably, and each of their objects of grief had encountered an unsettling woman just before their untimely demise: a woman who appears never to age and who insists on taking photographs of her chosen victims. What follows is an epic chase around the world to track down evidence of a malevolent killer in hopes of eventually finding the woman herself. Clay McLeod Chapman, Wake Up and Open Your Eyes (Quirk) Clay McLeod Chapman’s upcoming horror novel is the perfect post-Election read: namely, in that it features demonic forces taking possession of their viewers through the TV network Fax News (Just the Fax!) The ways in which the story evolves take the plot in directions that make all of us understand our complicity in the toxicity of today. Grady Hendrix, Witchcraft for Wayward Girls (Berkley) You tell me that this book doesn’t sound like a hell of a good time, exactly the sort of thing to curl up with during the January doldrums! It takes place at a home for pregnant, single young girls—an institution where they can secretly have their babies, outside of public scrutiny. But then one of them gets an occult book… and things ramp up from there. –Olivia Rutigliano, Lit Hub and CrimeReads Editor February Kat Dunn, Hungerstone (Zando) Before the very gay Dracula was ever conceived, there was the much gayer Carmilla—a queer-coded novella of female desire and insatiable hunger. Kat Dunn has taken that original inspiration and made it much stranger (and hotter), as we follow the journey of an unhappy aristocratic wife slowly coming to embrace her unholy appetites, under the guidance of an extremely sexy vampire/chaos queen. *fans self* Nick Newman, The Garden (Putnam) If Emily Bronte had written On the Beach, it might have read something like this. Two aging sisters, safe behind a high wall and forgotten by the disintegrating world, find their small kingdom upended by the arrival of a young boy. Will they accept him into the fold, or will he lead them out of the garden? Or will a darker series of events come to pass? I found myself haunted by this dark fable and impressed with the balance between archetype and story. Virginia Feito, Victorian Psycho (Liveright) Victorian Psycho is buckets of macabre fun, the story of a young governess stuck in the home of a twisted, wealthy family—and how she attempts to keep her violent fantasies of revenge, retribution, and good, old-fashioned cruelty at bay. That is, of course, until Christmas, when she’ll finally be able to give her employers the gifts that they so dearly deserve. It’s a real… “sleigh ride.” I’m so sorry. But not for telling you to go read it. –OR Neena Viel, Listen to Your Sister (St. Martin’s Griffin) Neena Viel’s well-titled debut takes us into a loving but dysfunctional group of siblings at moment of crisis, then turns the tension up to the max. Mid-twenties Calla Williams is burdened by her role as her youngest brother’s guardian, and resentful of the middle child for his ability to get out of care-giving, but she’s also so terrified of losing her closest family that she’s tortured each night by visions of her siblings dying. When her teenage charge gets in trouble for actions at a protest, she takes the three of them on the road to a rented cabin to let the air clear—bringing along her nightmares, and the potential to destroy not only the tight-knit family, but reality itself. Lucy Rose, The Lamb (Harper) The Lamb is a dark fairy tale in which a young girl tries to help satisfy her mother’s insatiable craving for human flesh, culled from those they call “strays”—most hikers and homeless people lost in the dense forest surrounding their little home. When a new arrival ingratiates herself to the family and romances the girl’s mother, she threatens to disrupt the family’s careful balance, and spurs Rose’s child narrator to drastic efforts in restoring their lives to a semblance of normality. Sapphic cannibals for the win! Also, I gave my copy of this book to my favorite restaurant server and I think this is what we should all do with cannibal books. March Erika T. Wurth, The Haunting of Room 904 (Flatiron) Erika T. Wurth, who wrote 2022’s splendid White Horse, is back with a wonderful, wholly inventive new horror novel, about a young woman who (following the death of her clairvoyant sister), finds herself able to commune with spirits—and is called to investigate a phenomenon in a Denver Hotel, where, every few years, a girl is found dead in the same hotel room, no matter what room she checked into. (I love this premise.) What follows is a simmering, sinister, and transportive journey through a kaleidoscopic, metaphysical and memorial world. –OR Alex Gonzalez, rekt (Erewhon) Alex Gonzalez has perfectly captured the horrors of the dark web in this disturbing exploration of grief, trauma, and violence. After Sammy loses his girlfriend of almost a decade to a shocking car accident, he finds himself drawn to the worst possible content online, trying to numb himself to personal misery through dedicated consumption of public tragedies. When he finds himself on a site that appears to show not just how someone died, but all the ways they could have died, he can’t look away. Who are the people responsible for such a sick exercise in creativity? And does he want to stop them, or join them? Stephen Graham Jones, The Buffalo Hunter Hunter (S&S/Saga Press) Sit up, everyone: Stephen Graham Jones has a new novel! It’s about the discovery of a diary written by a white Lutheran pastor in 1912—a diary which chronicles, over several visits, an interview with a Blackfeet vampire named Good Stab in which he explains his lifelong quest for revenge. –OR April Jenni Howell, Boys with Sharp Teeth (Roaring Brook Press) In this dark academic mystery, a working-class girl tricks her way into attending an elite private school after her beloved cousin, a security guard, is found dead there. She blames the undisputed rulers of the class for colluding in her cousin’s demise, but finds herself drawn to their amoral magnetism and otherworldly beauty despite her suspicions. Jane Flett, Freakslaw (Zando) THIS BOOK IS EVERYTHING. In an ode to Tod Browning’s Freaks, Kathryn Dunn’s Geek Love, and Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes, a carnival with sinister intentions arrives in a town with a terrible past, ready to unleash chaos on the conforming while liberating the weird. Grotesque, creepy, and celebratory, Freakslaw is sure to be one biggest books of the year (and possibly, one of the defining novels of the century). Yigit Turhan, Their Monstrous Hearts (MIRA) Butterfly horror!! In the English-language debut from Turkish-Italian writer Yigit Turhan, a young novelist beset by mounting bills and stymied by writer’s block heads to Milan, where he has inherited his grandmother’s luxurious estate. When he finds a notebook hidden in the walls purporting to tell his grandmother’s life story, he begins to understand the weirder implications of her meteoric rise, and strange demise. A well-crafted and rather moving parable about dark bargains and cruel sacrifices. And butterflies. Sarah Maria Griffin, Eat the Ones You Love (Tor) What’s even scarier than butterflies? Plants! In this sapphic ode to the Little Shop of Horrors, a graphic designer laid off from her well-paying job gets a new gig at a plant shop, hidden in the corner of a decaying Irish mall and run by the fey woman of her dreams. Unfortunately, she’s not the only one obsessing over Hot Plant Lady—the greenery itself has its own plans for the shop’s beloved pruner. Nat Cassidy, When the Wolf Comes Home (Tor Nightfire) When FDR said “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” he could never have imagined someone would take that thought to so logical—and extreme—a conclusion as this, and yet Cassidy’s latest works well on every level. Cassidy’s protagonist is a struggling improv comedian working graveyard shifts at the local diner and wondering how she’ll make rent. Within the first few pages, she’s transformed into the protector of a lost little boy with terrifying enemies & even more terrifying powers. The conclusion feels shattering, inevitable, and completely of our time—by which I mean, very bleak indeed. Collin Armstrong, Polybius (Gallery) Video game horror! For those who loved 28 Days Later, here’s a new horror novel featuring a rage-inducing arcade game that’s infected an entire town. As the residents give in to their furious anger, bubbling resentment, and a growing enthusiasm for brutality, the few remaining level-headed locals try to stop their community from imploding, and the contagion from spreading. May and Beyond David Demchuk and Corinne Leigh Clark, The Butcher’s Daughter (Hell’s Hundred) While 2025 is simply flooded with cannibals in fiction,there’s only one featuring the maker of meat pies herself: Mrs. Lovett. How ever did the mysterious matron of Sweeney Todd get her gruesome start in the world? Perhaps it began with her happy childhood in a butcher shop, a happiness ending abruptly upon the death of her father and the newly dangerous circum­stances of her life—first as a maid to a dangerous master, and later as a prisoner in a convent determined to tell her sorry tale to any and all sympathetic listeners. Matt Serafini, Feeders (Gallery) One of several books out this year that interrogates how far people are willing to go in the name of social media views, but by far the most graphically disturbing (yes, the dog does die). When a wannabe influencer gains access to an exclusive new social media site, she soon discovers that to go viral with viewers, she needs to go extreme with her content. Truly vicious and not for the faint of heart—just like the social media metrics that inspired it. Caitlin Starling, The Starving Saints (Harper Voyager) A castle under siege and about to run out of food is the setting for Starling’s latest. When mysterious strangers arrive promising victory and sustenance, the defenders let them in, but at what cost? And what bargains must be struck to be rid of them? This book was messed up (in the best way). Silvia Moreno-Garcia, The Bewitching (Del Rey) In Moreno-Garcia’s chilling new novel, a graduate student researching a horror novelist delves into a life-altering mystery and the strange forces surrounding a certain manuscript that ties it all together. Witchcraft and the power of narrative intersect to yield this evocative, powerful tale. –DM Joshua Hull, 8114 (Clash) After receiving a bout of well-deserved public criticism, a podcaster turns inward for his next subject: his cursed childhood home, and the many strange occurrences therein. Terrifying scenes of horror are interspersed with a knowing, cynical take on the ever-growing podcast industry, resulting in a rather snarky and highly enjoyable gorefest. Hailey Piper, A Game in Yellow (Saga) The King in Yellow, but make it kinky! So I guess…the kink in yellow? Anyhoo, Hailey Piper is a freaking badass and I can’t wait for her bizarre take on the horror masterpiece, in which a couple looking to spice things up gets ahold of a disturbing text that can amp up their sex life in small doses, or drive them mad if they consume too much. A perfect follow-up to Michael Seidlinger’s disturbingly on the nose disease horror, The Body Harvest. Catherine Deng, What Hunger (Simon & Schuster) Most of us will do—and eat—whatever is necessary for survival. But what if you develop a taste for that which was once consumed without choice? Yes, this book is about cannibalism…but what kind? And how disturbing (and salivating) will the descriptions get? View the full article

Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Trisha Sakhlecha, The Inheritance (Pamela Dorman) “A peek behind the velvet curtain of extreme wealth and privilege, Sakhlecha’s glamorous thriller portrays a dysfunctional family doing despicable things in the name of love.” –The Washington Post Cynthia Weinberg, A Gorgeous Excitement (Crown) “Terrific debut . . . the book recalls another excellent true crime–inspired novel, Emma Cline’s The Girls. Carefully paced and beautifully written, this edgy coming-of-age novel succeeds on all counts.” –Kirkus Reviews Jenny Elder Moke, She Doesn’t Have a Clue (Minotaur) “The perfect blend of cozy mystery and steamy romance with a flawed, frenetic amateur sleuth readers will root for. Here’s hoping that this is the beginning of a series.” –Booklist Isabella Maldonado, A Killer’s Code (Thomas & Mercer) “As in the previous books, Maldonado leverages her law enforcement background to lend the proceedings weight and authenticity, while flashbacks predating Toro’s death ratchet up the suspense. This series continues to impress.” –Publishers Weekly Ava Burke, Haunting and Homicide (Crooked Lane Books) ““Fans of Ellen Byron’s cozies will appreciate this new series centered on an atmospheric, haunted New Orleans.” —Library Journal SJ Bennett, A Death in Diamonds (Crooked Lane Books) “Cleverly combines the queen’s investigations with a police procedural . . . Anglophiles and fans of historical mysteries will enjoy.” –Library Journal Alex Hay, The Queen of Fives (Graydon House) “Bridgerton meets The Sting in this effervescent offering from Hay…. Hay has conceived of a wholly original take on Victorian London and populated it with a gallery of colorful underworld types. The plotting will have readers on the edges of their seats as one twist after another sets the stage for a series of jaw-dropping revelations. This literary confection is a delectable treat.” –Publishers Weekly Kemper Donovan, Loose Lips (Kensington) “Murder strikes—and strikes and strikes—the Get Lit Cruise, which has attracted 275 aspiring female authors, including one killer.” –Kirkus Reviews Ellen Yardley, Eleanor and the Cold War (Kensington) “The pseudonymous Yardley debuts with an exciting historical series launch featuring former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt.” –Publishers Weekly Nicholas George, A Lethal Walk in Lakeland (Kensington Cozies) “An atmospheric mystery with delightful descriptions of the countryside in the Lake District.” –Library Journal View the full article

When the setting of a story is done right, it feels like a character in its own right – dark and moody, bright and sandy, gothic and eerie. Think of The Shining without the Stanley Hotel, or Rebecca without Manderley. The setting literally sets the tone for a novel, creating a world so immersive that readers won’t even know what decade it is, much less where they are when they’re reading. When I set out to create the world of Hempstead Island in my rom-com mystery, She Doesn’t Have A Clue, I wanted to evoke a remote and mysterious manor, full of the oddities of an old money family and the (sometimes literal) skeletons in their closet. I knew I had to fit in every inspiration I could – the creepy Victorian house, secret passageways, the inaccessible location, a raging storm, and a shocking body drop. I took my inspiration from cult-classic movies like Clue, as well as novels like Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None. And because the story also has a comedic tone, I knew I had to pack the place with quirky characters, odd decorations, and delightfully macabre surprises. In these five selections that range from haunting thrillers to whip-smart homages to detective novels of a bygone era, setting plays a critical role in the execution of the story. The stories are worth reading not only to solve the murder, but to lose yourself in their immersive worlds. The Sun Down Motel by Sierra St. Simone When Carly Kirk arrives in Fell, New York seeking a job at the Sun Down Motel, she’s there for more than just the vending machine snacks. She’s investigating the disappearance of her aunt, Viv, from the same hotel nearly twenty years ago. What follows is a haunting thriller (in more ways than one) that will keep you guessing. And while you wouldn’t think a motel would be a compelling setting, in St. Simone’s hands the rural dive spot turns downright menacing as the building takes on a life of its own. Haunting, obsessive, and completely engrossing, you’ll want to draw those curtains tight for this one. A Midnight Puzzle by Gigi Pandian The Secret Staircase series introduces Tempest Raj’s delightful family, along with their unique line of work – using their backgrounds in stage magic to create reality-defying interior designs for their customers. In this third book in the series, Tempest has purchased the local derelict theater in hopes of reviving her former magic career. But what happens instead seems impossible – a door that spouts knives, killing her dear friend and mentor. Is the theater haunted? Or is the Raj family curse coming for Tempest? The set designs are as elaborate as the mysteries, and fans of a classic cozy locked room mystery will adore this series for the dedicated work that Pandian puts into the set piece solutions. Night Film by Marisha Pessl An expert blend of mystery, thriller, and horror, Night Film is a meticulous look at the lengths obsessive creatives will go to achieve their visions. When disgraced former journalist Scott McGrath reads about the death of a cult film director’s daughter, he immediately knows foul play was involved. After all, the director, Stanislaus Cordova, was the engineer of Scott’s professional downfall after Scott’s obsession with him went too far. The investigation into the daughter’s death is anything but by the book, as elements of the occult and stories of Cordova’s extreme directing methods begin surfacing. Pessl has written an absolute masterpiece, the culmination of which takes place at Cordova’s remote ranch/filming stage. What follows is a mind-bending chase through film sets, puzzle boxes, and even an abandoned pool that will make you question everything you know and trust. Fans of cult films and underground directors will appreciate Pessl’s detailed dedication to creating Cordova’s world. Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie The queen of the locked room mystery, Christie’s seminal novel that takes place on the overnight express train set the standard for settings that inspire the story. It’s got all the elements we love in a classic whodunnit – a luxurious sleeper train, a murdered American tycoon, a host of eclectic suspects, and a setting so claustrophobic you can feel the knife pressing close. Even if you think you know the ending, it’s worth visiting Christie’s masterpiece to study her deft handling of the reveal. Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone by Benjamin Stevenson Another entry in the “snowed in with a murderer” category, but not like any you’ve read before. Stevenson pledges to follow the ten commandments of detective fiction in this Golden Era nod to a true whodunnit by telling you up front that everyone in Ernie Cunningham’s family has killed someone (hence the title). Ernie figures he’s joining his family for a celebration weekend at a ski resort, welcoming back their prodigal son in the form of his older brother, just released from prison. But as a major snow storm hits the resort and the bodies start piling up, the clues and reveals get as dramatic as the snowdrifts. The 70s vibe of the cozy ski resort lends to the locked room atmosphere of the piece, and Stevenson’s witty descriptions and cultural references (like calling one of the murder victims “green boots” after the famous hiker on Everest) makes the whole place come alive. *** View the full article

When I set out to write No One Can Know, I started with the image of three sisters—the girls who would become Emma, Juliette, and Daphne Palmers—living under the same roof, with the same parents, experiencing the same events, but each of them in their own world. It’s always fascinated me, how siblings can grow up in the same family, and have completely different experiences of it—rules loosen up for younger children, finances change, marriages end, and favorites are anointed. The book opens with the murder of the girls’ parents, and middle sister Emma instructing her siblings on what to do. She takes control of the situation, and she never tells a soul what she saw that night, even when she was accused of the crime. But when Emma and her husband return to the house where the murders occurred, she realizes it’s time to uncover the truth—which means digging into her sisters’ lives, and the worlds they lived in that she never glimpsed. I wanted to tell a story in which each sister had experienced one version of the events of that night, but could never see the full picture until they were finally able to put those overlapping images together. I loved writing about the relationships between the sisters and the complex decisions that they made—torn between love and fear, loyalty and self-preservation. Maybe it’s because I’m a middle child myself, but I’ve always been drawn to stories of sisters. The ones that would help cover up a murder—and the ones who might end up murdering each other. Here are six of my favorite stories featuring sisters—the good, the bad, and the complicated. My Sister the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite I couldn’t resist including Oyinkan Braithwaite’s compulsively readable story of Korede, whose sister Ayoola is either deeply unlucky in love or maybe (probably) a cold-blooded serial killer. She’s always got a perfectly reasonable excuse for why her latest boyfriend had to go. Korede is always there to clean up her sister’s mess, moral qualms or no, but when Ayoola starts cozying up to the man Korede is in love with, Korede has to decide if it’s time to put an end to her sister’s bad habits. Blood Will Tell by Heather Chavez Another tale of a woman deciding how far she’ll go to conceal her sister’s misdeeds, Blood Will Tell concerns the disappearance of two girls years apart. Five years ago, Frankie helped cover up her sister Izzy’s involvement in the first girl’s presumed death. Now, another girl has gone missing, and Frankie’s car, which Izzy has access to, was seen at the scene of the abduction. In order to protect her sister, Frankie has to find out what exactly Izzy is up to—and face the truth of what both of them did that night all those years ago. Frankie’s protective instincts are at odds with Izzy’s rebellious nature, and the tension between the sisters is painfully convincing and deeply compelling. The Turnout by Megan Abbott Not for the faint of heart, this unsettling and at times uncomfortable book takes a long, dark dive into the world of ballet. Sisters Marie and Dara, along with Dara’s husband Charlie, run a ballet studio once owned by their mother. Their claustrophobic world is disrupted when a fire damages the school, necessitating repairs. The contractor the three hire proves a corrosive, dangerous force. This book oozes atmosphere and dread, creating a fascinating portrait of the sisters and their deeply intertwined lives. Sadie by Courtney Summers Though the sister in question is dead before the story begins, her fate and Sadie’s love for her drive the entire narrative. Told partially in podcast transcripts, the book tails the titular Sadie as she hunts down the man who killed her sister; meanwhile, West McCray attempts to track her down and uncover her story. McCray’s pursuit of Sadie and Sadie’s pursuit of her sister’s killer allow us to glimpse her story from within and without, as layers of her tragic upbringing are revealed. Everyone has failed Sadie; she refuses to fail her sister. We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson A well-deserved classic, We Have Always Lived in the Castle comes alive thanks to the distinctive and curious voice of its narrator, young Merricat Blackwood, who lives with her sister Constance in the house where their family died. Merricat’s peculiar perspective on the world and the way she dances around what, exactly, occurred on that fateful day drive the story as the refuge she and Constance have created is tested, threatened, and transformed. Girl Waits With Gun by Amy Stewart For a more lighthearted take on sisterly mysteries, try the Kopp Sisters series by Amy Stewart. These fast-paced historical mysteries, inspired by a true story, feature one of America’s first female deputy sheriffs, Constance Kopp, along with her sisters Norma and Fleurette. When the family farm is threatened by a silk factory owner, Constance and her sisters have to step up to put him behind bars. Luckily, Constance is up to the task. *** View the full article