The invitation letter came twenty years to the day after the kidnappings. In 1999, guerrilla combatants from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia kidnapped my partner Terence Unity Freitas and two fellow land rights defenders. They were exiting Indigenous territory in Colombia—near land then coveted by a US oil company. Terence was a white environmental and Indigenous rights advocate from Los Angeles. He traveled with Ingrid Washinawatok El-Issa—native to the Menominee Nation in Wisconsin and executive director of the Fund for the Four Directions,—and Lahe’ena’e Gay—Native Hawaiian and the founder and president of Pacific Cultural Conservancy International. The three were working with the Colombian Indigenous U’wa pueblo. Eight days later, a farmer found their bound, hooded, and bullet-riddled bodies in his rainy cow field just across the Venezuelan border. The timing was uncomfortable. The 2019 letter invited the families of the slain into Colombia’s post-civil war transitional justice process to participate as victims in Case 001, a cluster of cases involving thousands of victims of kidnapping. In the original Spanish text, they sought our demandas de la verdad, our truth demands. The letter communicated that: They wanted to know our stories. They wanted to know our questions. They wanted to put the voice of the victims in the center of the process. They wanted to discern how to attribute criminal responsibility. They wanted to give ex-combatants the chance to officially tell the truth or not. They wanted us to use our rights to truth, justice, and non-repetition. In the years following the murders, I felt pressed up against the machinery of fossil fuel extraction, tied there by the murders’ known and unknown dismal facts. I held fragments of stories for two decades, awaiting resolution that never came. To enter the Chamber, I needed to write them down. I wrote Truth Demands. Shaping the fragments into this book changed my understanding of resolution. Questions about the murders may always remain unaddressed. Some stories may never be told. And the future will remain unknowable. To offer this telling, I had to acquiesce to these truths. Acquiescence led to acceptance, which stirred my memory of agency. Finding agency in the telling led to my freedom, for it opened a back door to resolution. Questions about the murders may always remain unaddressed. Some stories may never be told. And the future will remain unknowable. As I wrapped up a draft of my memoir, I tackled the one remaining box in my closet. This box was the repository for documents that I tagged as important to revisit. Post-It notes scribbled with marginal insights, related articles, truth and recognition documentation, Terence’s papers, court filings—any document that remained untreated or that I feared I would forget. I made my way through the box swiftly, lifting helpful citations, details, and corrections into this text. I hummed through the work. I watched for the familiar dissociative fog to begin. It didn’t. I marveled at its absence, thinking I perhaps had made it solidly to the other side, to freedom. I have. This is how I know. The box contained a letter Terence wrote to me during a prior trip to the Indigenous territory, a letter within the pages of his journal. A letter he had never sent or given to me. In this letter, he stated his belief that the guerrillas had gone full-bore in support of oil development and that he felt that he faced threats because of it. Over the past twenty-five years, in any forum possible, we have woven Terence’s posthumous observations into our questions about what happened. I was familiar with the letter. But when I picked it up again from the box, I couldn’t access my memory of those details. Instead, I experienced shock as though reading the letter for the first time. I was flooded with worry as though in a recurrent nightmare, one in which a missing key is revealed too late. That is how far my mind has buried pieces of this story that are the most threatening. In my shock, I called our legal team, worried that I had a new finding. They assured me that, yes, they knew this letter and had already integrated it into our work. I have no clear recollection of sharing the letter with them. Some past version of myself did, probably several times. After talking to the legal team, I felt relief and gratitude. My nervous system started to re-regulate. With balance restored, I reread the letter. I observed something in Terence’s writing. He wrote that even though he didn’t plan to send me this letter, he had “all of these thoughts wanting to come out, to be written so that I can rest”: Unfinished ideas that are screaming to become more whole. There, they are written. The way that I would say them if you were here. The way that I am saying them aloud to you now, so that you will comfort me in my sleep.. . . It feels strange saying that. I don’t often feel the need to have someone else help me feel safe, moreover there are not many who could. You, your strength, makes me feel safe. I was struck that Terence turned to writing to unlock rest. I was familiar with choosing this pathway for myself, but I hadn’t ever noticed that he did, too. A measure of the inadequacy of our support systems during those early years of walking alongside the U’wa, Terence, in essence, turned to his journal to stabilize his daily life on the ground. His writing invited me to hold his words so that he could rest. In the normal course of things, this exchange—of words for rest— would be symbiotic. It would be an exchange that could expand into a community conversation. The burden would be shared. But our lives did not follow the normal course of things. He thought we had time. We did not. The murders stole time from us. I could see now that because this exchange happened only after he was already dead, it would go on to become, unbeknownst to Terence, the source of my own inability to rest for years to come. The clarity smarted. I gasped. Here was the source. I felt outraged. As was my practice, I turned to the woods to walk it out. I turned to the waters to dissipate, dissipate. I have grappled with Terence’s words since I was twenty-five years old. To share the burden, I reshaped them into our truth demands and into this book. I have examined with care the exchange between words and rest. In writing my memoir, I have told the story of our truth demands as a way of learning how to stand on this wretched shore. Doing so taught me how to navigate home. In the telling, I saw glimmers of how we navigate our collective hearts back home, too. I am clear that I do not stand on the shore alone. It is now twenty-five years later. I let go of the words and I choose rest. ___________ Adapted from TRUTH DEMANDS: A MEMOIR OF MURDER, OIL WARS, AND THE RISE OF CLIMATE JUSTICE by Abby Reyes. Excerpted by permission of the publisher, NORTH ATLANTIC BOOKS. Copyright © 2025 by Abby Reyes. All rights reserved. View the full article

When my family moved into a new home in the Chicagoland area around fifteen years ago, I was informed the day we moved in that the house had been previously foreclosed a while back in the depths of the recession. This house had been presented in a state of disrepair: the banisters were ripped out by the previous owner when he left. The windowpanes were missing. Upon meeting one of my neighbors, a girl my same age, she leaned in close and whispered that the home had been abandoned for some time, to the point where the neighborhood kids thought it was haunted and dared each other to go in there. When I was writing The Manor of Dreams, a story about an inheritance battle over a Chinese Hollywood star-turned recluse’s lavish, formerly grand estate, I was obsessed with the homes of the Gilded Age, a period of prosperity for America in the late nineteenth century due to technological improvements and the acquisition of coveted resources. Each of these houses had an origin of wealth, concentrated around titans who dominated industries of copper, railroads, guns, news media. They built houses with dozens of rooms and teeming with excess, homes so meticulously constructed in beloved architectural styles: Italianate, Beaux-Arts, Queen Anne Gothic. These homes now stand cavernous and empty, sometimes renovated into museums, sometimes left abandoned, hollowed of the promise which once possessed them, crumbling into the earth. What does the home mean? The home represents safety, security, shelter from all the uncertain unknowns and the outside elements. It represents rest and leisure. The concept of the home as an American ideal cemented itself in the nineteenth century, as a privilege to have a space to cultivate a private life and a family life. The opportunity to own a home was also a right that was wielded as a weapon against, withheld from, and brutally seized from historically marginalized people: Black, Chinese, and Native American communities, for example. Women were not allowed to own property in most states until 1900 and did not have equal access to credit to do so until the 1970s. To this day homes are both practical investments of personal capital but also keystones of personal identity and history. They are tangible representations of something one worked towards for their whole lives. To own a home, to get to renovate and decorate it, was to have made it; to have succeeded, perhaps in spite of the marginalizing forces, in achieving the American Dream. But what happens when the home becomes an unsafe place? The haunted house trope has long been an establishment of gothic fiction. There are many books with all kinds of creative spins on this trope—I point to favorites of mine such as Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, or more recently, Rivers Solomon’s Model Home or Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Mexican Gothic—but the essence is this: the main character, or the main character’s family enters a home intending on staying there for a period of time, maybe forever. The house seems ominously sentient, strange things happen in the night, and some terrifying history about the house is revealed. The characters, at some point, might receive a warning about what has happened in the house. Still the main characters stay, until something truly cataclysmic and irreversible happens, and by then, it’s too late to leave. Why don’t they leave? It’s a question that is often asked of the main characters. Why not go at the first sign of unease, at the first hint that something might not be right with the place? I feel a sympathetic fear but also a deep, furious disappointment at the characters for choosing to stay and put everyone’s lives in danger. But I think it’s easy, from our omniscient perspective as a reader or viewer, to write off the main characters for being clueless and arrogant. It’s important to consider the context of the house as well. Maybe the house dazzled with a sense of promise, maybe it was a prized inheritance. Maybe this house was the culmination of their savings and everything they had. However they came into contact, the characters have staked their lives on this place to provide them exactly what they need, whether it be shelter, status, safety, clarity, or community. This is why the haunted house trope is so compelling every time; to see that place of promise turn into a place of terror is a betrayal on the deepest level. And this is why the cycle of the haunted house repeats: each set of people move into the house thinking that they could overwrite the past and avoid whatever pitfalls the previous inhabitants fell prey to. That they are different. And isn’t it a human condition, to think you could beat the odds? Isn’t it natural to think that if only you worked hard enough; if you only loved something enough, you could change it? The emotional heart of these stakes and this personal betrayal were what propelled me throughout the writing of The Manor of Dreams. In the book, Chinese actress Vivian Yin moves into her new husband’s home, a beautiful, decaying California Gilded Age era mansion that she is determined to rebuild and renovate for her young daughters. Eventually she learns that the house has a compromised history. It was built on railroad wealth, which involved the exploitation of Chinese immigrant labor. But she doesn’t let this stop her. With this house, she’s officially made it and secured the future for her family and herself, big enough to contain her Hollywood aspirations and everything she’s ever wanted for her children. This house is too important to her. Everything else is just ancient history, she thinks. To her, America is the land of reinvention; this all could be smoothed over and built anew. She is sorely mistaken. *** View the full article

I have always been fascinated with creatures, and I have wished to invite them into my life for as long as I can think—ill-fated early attempts at trying to hatch chicks from un-incubated eggs and breeding racing snails can attest to that. But while chicks are cute and racing snails are ambitious, there was one companion I coveted more than any other: I cannot remember a time when I didn’t want a dog. Unfortunately, my parents were a sensible lot, and so I spent a large portion of my childhood being bribed with low-maintenance hamsters and fobbed off with annoyingly reasonable arguments. Who is going to walk him? Who is going to train him? Who is going to clean up after him? I! I! And yet again, I! By the time I had finally achieved freedom from parental rules, some of their arguments had managed to seep into my own mindset. Of course, taking in a dog is a huge responsibly. Of course, they require not only love, but time, training, walks and ideally a garden. Of course, you can’t expect them to sit at home all day waiting for your return from uni. I spent my student years responsible and dogless. Time passed. Life unfolded. One sunny day I found myself an author, living in the verdant English countryside, in possession of a house. I was working from home. I had a garden. Surely, now, if ever, was the time to invite a waggy, sharp-toothed muse into my life! I could already picture myself typing away on my computer, my faithful hound snoozing at my feet. I can honestly say that the day I brought home my first dog, Fyodor, an impossibly soft pup the colour of smoke, was one of the happiest in my life. The subsequent night, however, turned out to be an entirely different story. Just how many times could a tiny puppy need to go out in a single night? I didn’t sleep a wink. The next morning found me bleary eyed and the pup exuberant, ready to dig his needle teeth into anything that moved—and quite a few things that didn’t. I couldn’t even glance at my computer, let alone work on my novel. Overnight, I had turned from author-with-a-deadline to full-time dog-police. Don’t bite! Don’t chew! Don’t dig! Don’t bark! And above all: Do not pee on the blasted kitchen floor! This was hell! How was I supposed to think? How was I supposed to write? The truth is: a puppy is the very opposite of a muse. They don’t inspire—they distract, absorb every last little stray bit of your attention and energy. * One of the things that kept me going during these taxing first months was the odd stolen glance at other authors. Being a dog owner and being a writer were not mutually exclusive. Others before me had brought pen to paper in the presence of a canine, hadn’t they? World literature is full of dogs, described in touching and accurate ways that show their creators had some firsthand experience in the matter. There is Argos, Odysseus’ faithful old hound, recognizing his master when no one else does (and tragically suffering a heart attack in the process). There’s Jack London’s White Fang, Virginia Woolf’s cocker spaniel Flush—all splendid fusions of fiction and dogginess. Apparently, the top dog in Virgina Woolf’s own life was her mongrel Grizzle. He even makes a surprise appearance in her diaries: “As for the soul . . . the truth is, one can’t write directly about the soul. Looked at, it vanishes; but look [. . .] at Grizzle, [. . .] and the soul slips in.” Yes! Obviously, I was neither Homer nor London nor Virginia Woolf, just a writer of mystery stories, but this was what I was ambitiously hoping for: a slippery shard of soul! Naturally, over time, things improved on the domestic front. There still were days when I couldn’t write, but there was never a day when I didn’t laugh, didn’t feel my existence was richer and more complex than before. Our lives fell in step and trot and what had started out as outright canine sabotage, slowly morphed into something best described as a gentle and rather random inspiration. It seemed like a miracle at the time, but of course there were good reasons. A lot of my writing has always been about exploring the world from different angles, and few things help you shift your point of view like looking after a dog. Their world is fundamentally different from ours, full of scents and sound and speed and big big feelings. Understanding this world is crucial for interspecies bliss—in short, I was treated to the crash course in empathy I didn’t think I needed. A dog in the house will also help you to put things in perspective, recalibrate your sense of self-importance as a writer (and a human being). Nobody in your home is going to care more about you than your dog. And absolutely nobody is going to care less about your literary achievements. A book is a chew toy in the making, that is all. To me, this approach is quite refreshing and by no means trivial. I have always felt that writing a novel is in part a disappearing act. The goal is to become transparent as an author, allowing the reader the best possible view of the story beyond. It is not about you—it is about the world. I can attest that Fyodor helped me quite a bit to hone this transparency. Looking back, it almost surprises me to see how many dogs have found their way into my books. There has never been a dedicated canine protagonist—maybe because this feels too close to home and dangerously non-fictional. But the dogs on the sidelines matter. There is Tess, George’s old sheep in Three Bags Full. She barely makes an appearance, but her absence speaks all the louder. Brexit, the wolfhound in the Agnes Sharp series, is a chaotic and reassuring presence in the house share, providing my senior detectives with warmth, protection and dog hairs alike. Yet, the highest density of dogs is found in Big Bad Wool, my second sheep detective story. The situation is tense. My sheep protagonists are facing a series of mysterious killings and need all the help they can get. We finally get to spend some time with Tess; a lonely, heart-wrenching howling foreshadows dark things to come and Vidocq, the Hungarian livestock-guardian dog comes to the rescue. Even the perpetrator might or might not be a canine of sorts. * None of these stories are about the dogs, and yet the books are richer for them. Maybe their presence does imbue the works with a soul. There is a flipside to all of this, of course: the utter lack of inspiration that follows the death of your dog. When Fyodor died shockingly young, I was lost, devastated, desperate for the feeling of a wet nose nuzzling into my hand. Nothing worthwhile was written for over half a year. The pain was just stunning. Was it worth it? Yes. Without any question. I am writing these lines with my dog Ezra snoozing at my feet—and I wouldn’t have it any other way. *** View the full article

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As funding gets cut off and climate change gets worse, all our cultural treasures are at risk of being stolen by kleptocrats, sold off by bankrupt cities, or at the very least, environmentally damaged in heat waves. So while we still have museums, why not read some museum-based mysteries and thrillers! here are four excellent recent and upcoming novels featuring cultural institutions and plenty of crimes. Heather McGowan, Friends of the Museum (Washington Square Press) Aside from having the best title in this list, Heather McGowan’s novel is laugh-to-keep-from-crying levels of funny, a biting satire of the compromises we make to keep the things we believe in going, and how we lose ourselves along the way (and also, why we should all be able to have FEDERAL FUNDING FOR CULTURE instead of relying on donors. RIP, NEA grants.) Maha Khan Phillips, The Museum Detective (Soho) This book is so cool! As The Museum Detective begins, an archaeologist gets a call from the police to identify a body—specifically, a mummy preserved in a highly unusual sarcophagus that just about everyone would like to get their hands on, for profit or for politics. Poupeh Missaghi, Sound Museum (Coffee House) Why should male torturers get all the credit? In Poupeh Missaghi’s parody of corporate feminism and the misplaced morality of professionalism, the women holding up a brutal regime would like their contributions acknowledged, too, thank you very much. And one has created a strange new archive dedicated to analyzing the sounds of torture, which she would love to tell you all about. Humorous enough to avoid feeling heavy-handed, Sound Museum may challenge the squeamish, but even if it takes several sessions to get through Poupeh Missaghi’s Kafka-esque tone poem, it’s well worth the effort. Kosoko Jackson, The Macabre (Harper Voyager) This book is batshit, in the best way. When Jackson’s artist protagonist heads to London to take up a prestigious residency, he has no idea that the British Museum plans to use his talents towards a rather different end: he must work with the Museum’s eccentric (and super hot) staff to locate and destroy nine malevolent paintings first created by his distant ancestor, and potentially able to destroy the entire world. I really enjoyed Kosoko Jackson’s Disneyland-set post-apocalyptic thriller Survive the Dome, and his new book promises just as immersive a storytelling environment, this time with a unique magic system that would lend itself easily towards being adapted *cough cough*. View the full article

Len Deighton published thirty-one novels over the same number of years, making him one of the most – if not the most – productive spy novelist of the twentieth century. Equally remarkable, given the speed of his writing, several of his novels occupy the pantheon of the genre’s best works. Tim Shipman, chief political commentator at the Sunday Times (UK), and a connoisseur of espionage fiction, has ranked pretty much every author who has written in the genre, and he puts Deighton at #2, behind Le Carré, but ahead of the spy fiction written by Graham Greene, Eric Ambler, Joseph Kanon, and Ian Fleming. Shipman has written: “Deighton’s importance was two-fold. Firstly, while Ambler moved the genre from superhero secret agents to amateurs, Len made his professional spies rugged working-class men in temperamental opposition to their upper middle-class bosses, which added another dimension…Len’s second great achievement was to take us into the office and explore the kind of dynamics recognizable to anyone working in that environment.” Shipman also credits Deighton’s “wonderfully pointed writing.” I have chosen six novels to highlight Deighton’s considerable talent, and while some readers might pick a different six, the following novels ably represent his best work. While several were written over forty years ago, they indelibly capture a lost time and make it urgent again. Malcolm Gladwell has written: “Len Deighton’s spy novels are so good, they make me sad the Cold War is over.” 1. The Ipcress File The Ipcress File (1962), Deighton’s debut novel, had an initial print run of 4,000 copies, and his UK publisher had no indication of its impending success. The sardonic narrative voice, and globe-trotting story line, grabbed world-wide attention, and it entered best seller lists in the UK, the US, and France, selling more than 2.5 million books. The plot, as described on the publisher’s website, is simple enough: “A high-ranking scientist has been kidnapped, and a secret British intelligence agency has just recruited Deighton’s iconic unnamed protagonist—later christened Harry Palmer in the film version that stars Michael Caine—to find out why. His search begins in a grimy Soho club and brings him to the other side of the world. When he ends up amongst the Soviets in Beirut, what seemed a straightforward mission turns into something far more sinister.” The popularity of The Ipcress File came in part because it offered a more realistic image of espionage and intelligence agents. The spy genre at the time was dominated by Ian Fleming’s novels, and the first Bond movie, “Dr. No,” had been released a few months before the novel was released. Deighton’s hero is a bespectacled, slightly overweight junior employee in the War Office who has none of James Bond’s heroic conceits. The protagonist’s ironic voice, and its setting in London’s swinging London social milieu, makes it the “ultimate sixties spy book (more so than A Spy Who Came from the Cold),” says Shipman. The Guardian has called it ‟A stone-cold Cold War classic.” 2. Funeral in Berlin Funeral in Berlin (1964), Deighton’s third novel, was published in 1964 and quickly became a bestseller. It stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for six months. Its success led to a 1966 film version also starring Michael Caine. This novel, like The Ipcress File, features an unnamed British intelligence agent who is charged with arranging the East Berlin defection of a Soviet scientist being put together with the help of Russia’s Red Army Berlin security chief. The Red Army security chief is prepared to sell an important Russian scientist to the West – for a price. British intelligence is willing to pay, providing their own top-secret agent, Samson, acts as go-between. But it soon becomes apparent that behind the facade of an elaborate mock funeral lies a game of deadly maneuvers and ruthless tactics. The brutal legacy of Nazi Germany is a shadow hanging over the intricate behavior of cold war espionage. Funeral in Berlin was the first of many novels that Deighton set in Berlin. He wrote in his introduction to the novel’s 2011 reprinted edition that he became obsessed with Berlin after traveling from Prague to East Berlin in 1962. He was captivated by the city. He wrote: “I studied its history and collected old photographs of its streets, street life, and architecture. I talked to many who had served and many who had suffered under the Third Reich.” Deighton sidestepped the Cold War in his second book – Horse Under Water – but he returned to the conflict with Funeral in Berlin. He was finding his footing as a writer, and the encouragement of critics helped him understand the sort of books he wanted to write. He said in the 2011 introduction: “I’d never had any childhood ambition to be a writer, so I was not tempted to write ‘serious literature’. My feelings have never changed. This is not because I think that serious literature it too serious. It’s because I think most serious literature is not serious at all.” 3. Bomber Bomber (1970), Deighton’s masterful portrait of war, follows the progress of an Allied air raid through a period of 24 hours in the summer of 1943, portraying all the participants in a terrifying drama, both in the air and on the ground. Malcolm Gladwell, who wrote the forward to the new Grove Atlantic reissue, said: Bomber is first-class mid-century realism. Deighton sets up his story slowly and carefully. One half of the novel is set at an air force base in England and the other half set in a German town that lies in the path of one of Harri’s bombing runs. We meet people on both sides, described with equal amounts of care and generosity.” Anthony Burgess named Bomber one of the top 100 English-language novels of the postwar period, putting Deighton in the same company as Graham Greene, Naipaul, Vladimir Nabokov, Somerset Maugham, Phillp Roth, and Joseph Heller, author of Catch 22. Unlike Catch 22, which is a comedy that happens to be during wartime, Bomber is about war and its human costs. True to Deighton’s interest in airplanes, it provides a meticulous and detailed description of aerial combat and military aviation. 4. Berlin Game Berlin Game (1983) is the first novel in the first of three trilogies that feature the protagonist, Bernard Samson, a middle-aged intelligence officer working for the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6). Berlin Game is succeeded by Mexico Set and London Match. Samson, the first-person narrator, is 40-ish, a soldier’s son, Berlin-raised, non-Oxbridge–a sardonic veteran who has recently moved from the field to a desk. He is married with two children to his independently wealthy wife, Fiona, who also works for MI6. Samson is tasked to exfiltrate from East Berlin a British asset, known as Brahms Four, who fears that his life because he believes he’s been compromised by a Russian penetration agent inside MI6’s London headquarters. There are several likely candidates upon whom suspicion falls. The novel gains its literary momentum from the accumulating details of Samson and Fiona’s London life, and the atmospheric Berlin setting. Deighton has a way of giving his characters interesting things to do while they’re out and about consumed by spy business. While speaking with his oldest friend from boyhood days in Berlin, the German makes tiny paper airplanes from sugar cub wrappings as he warns Samson about treachery in London Central. Samson’s first-person narration is funny and often misleading. Years after the book’s publication, Deighton wrote that the novel is told in the highly subjective voice of an unreliable narrator “who is inclined to complain and exaggerate so that we have to interpret the world around him.” Deighton aficionados invariably recommend Berlin Game as the starting point for readers interested in Deighton’s oeuvre. At the time of release, The Observer wrote: ”Deighton’s best novel to date – sharp, witty and sour, like Raymond Chandler adapted to British gloom and the multiple betrayals of the spy.” 5 (and6). Mexico Set and London Match Mexico Set (1984) and London Match (1985) complete the first Bernard Samsom trilogy, and anyone who has enjoyed Berlin Game will want to read these two novels. Mexico Set picks up where Berlin Game left off. When disaffected KGB major Erich Stinnes is spotted in Mexico City, Samson is sent to entice him to take the final step and defect. Samson’s personal life with his wife Fiona is in shambles and his career is heading towards disaster, so Samson needs to prove his reliability. Samson knows Stinnes well already, having been interrogated by him in East Berlin, but now their roles are reversed and Samson risks being entangled in a dangerous web of old loyalties and old betrayals. London Match concludes the story begun in Berlin Game. The novel follows Samson after he’s persuaded the KGB’s spy Erich Stinnes to defect to England but, since Samson’s wife Fiona has gone over to the Russians, Samson isn’t entirely trusted by his colleagues. Now suspicions that another mole has been planted among the operatives in London exacerbate Samson’s fears, mostly for his small children, if he is accused. Determined to protect himself from his own fellow workers and the wily plots of Fiona and the KGB, Samson plunges into harrowing situations, climaxing in a bloody battle which both sides claim they’ve won. But, as Samson reveals, everyone loses in the deadly game of espionage. Paul Vidich’s new novel is The Poet’s Game (May 6, 2025, Pegasus). View the full article

There’s a war going on outside no teenager is safe from—and it’s not just in the streets. It’s in their pockets. It’s in their group chats. It’s on TikTok, YouTube, Twitch, Discord, and whatever app got hot yesterday. The battle for attention is real, with the amounts of reels, and let’s be… real—books are losing. But here’s the twist: some books are fighting back. Some books are adapting, transforming, and meeting kids where they’re at. And those books, more often than not, are YA. Specifically, YA crime thrillers and mysteries. That genre has quietly—maybe even accidentally—become the front line for revolutionary storytelling. Yeah, I said it. Not sci-fi. Not literary fiction. Not adult crime or historical epics. Right now, if you’re trying to plant seeds of rebellion, if you’re trying to talk about injustice, oppression, identity, violence, class, power, systems—and still actually get read—YA thrillers are where it’s at. And here are 5 reasons why: The Hook Is the Weapon First things first: you’ve gotta get them to open the book. We live in the attention economy, and kids today are savages when it comes to content. If you don’t grab them by the throat on page one, they’re out. They’re back to scrolling, gaming, streaming, or scheming. So what do YA thrillers do better than anybody else? They hook you. A body drops. A kid disappears. A secret gets whispered. The principal’s found dead or like my new novel, UP IN SMOKE, there’s a murder at a protest. That’s how you get them in the door. YA thrillers understand that plot is the delivery system. The message? That’s what you sneak in once they’re already invested. Once they care. Once they’re suspicious. You don’t start with the lecture. You start with the lie. You start with the missing girl, the bloodstain, the text messages that don’t add up—and then you go to work. Peel it all back. Use the thrills to unearth the real. And what you find underneath is often a system rotting from the inside. YA Thrillers Say the Quiet Part Out Loud You can just say more in YA thrillers. There’s a subversiveness built into the genre. You’ve got kids poking around, asking the questions adults won’t. They’re disobedient by design. They’re solving crimes, but they’re also solving systems. Bringing down a “big bad”. Exposing the school-to-prison pipeline, pulling back the curtain on privilege and police corruption. They’re asking why the same Black and brown kids keep disappearing. Why the rich kids never pay the price. Why the rules only apply to some of us. Why justice always feels so damn fragile. YA thrillers are Trojan horses. They’re putting real talk in kids’ hands and letting them carry it into schools, libraries, bedrooms, and detention halls. And because it’s wrapped in a whodunit, it gets past the gatekeepers. By the time a parent realizes the book is talking about abolition or decolonization, the kid’s already three chapters deep, rooting for the vigilante hacker trying to burn the whole system down. And guess what? That’s the point. Teens See the World Is Broken—They Want to Know How to Fix It On tour for my last YA Thriller, PROMISE BOYS, a young lady asked me a shocking yet very important question. She stood up in an auditorium full of her peers and asked loud and proud, “how do we fight systemic oppression?” It told me all I needed to know. We need to stop pretending these kids don’t know what time it is. They watched their schools turn into active shooter drills. They saw George Floyd get murdered on their phones. They know the climate is collapsing. They can see capitalism is cannibalizing their future. So when they pick up a book, they can tell immediately if an author “gets it”. And they’re looking for clues on how to fix a broken system. YA thrillers, at their best, get it. They reflect back the chaos teens live in and offer solutions. They show kids fighting back, even when it’s messy. They show them taking control of the narrative, uncovering the truth, finding allies, risking everything just to be heard. They give teens power on the page, which makes it a little easier to imagine having power off the page too. And that’s revolutionary. Critical Thinking Is a Survival Skill Now—YA Thrillers Teach It Best We’re living in an age of deepfakes, bots, propaganda, algorithmic rabbit holes, and TikTok “truthers” with massive followings and no fact-checks. Disinformation is everywhere. And the wildest part? Most adults can’t even tell what’s real anymore—so how do we expect kids to? That’s what makes mystery and thriller stories so perfect. It’s participatory. The reader becomes the detective. They pick up on clues. They question the characters. They doubt the narrator. That’s what critical thinking is. YA thrillers teach that without ever stepping into a classroom. They’re learning how to ask the right questions, spot inconsistencies, read between the lines, and sniff out the truth even when it’s buried under ten layers of lies. And once you get used to questioning a story’s logic… you start questioning the world’s logic. That’s when the real learning begins. We Owe Them More Than Escapism I hear people say sometimes, “Let the kids have fun. Don’t make everything political. Don’t burden them with all this real-world stuff.” And I get that. Kids deserve joy. They deserve fantasy, romance, escape. But what they don’t deserve is silence. Or worse—lies. The truth is, kids are living revolutionary lives every day just by surviving. Black Kids, Brown Kids, Queer Kids, Undocumented Kids, Disabled Kids, and the list goes on—they wake up every day fighting battles the world doesn’t even see. They deserve stories that acknowledge that fight. Stories that say: “You’re not crazy. You’re not alone. And yes, this sh*t is rigged.” YA thrillers don’t shy away from that. They double down on it. They create spaces where justice might actually be possible. Even if it’s just for a few hundred pages. So Now What? If you’re a writer, write them. If you’re a teacher, assign them. If you’re a parent, recommend them. If you’re a publisher, elevate them. And if you’re a reader? Pass them on. Talk about them. Build with them. Maybe even start with UP IN SMOKE. Because YA thrillers aren’t just books. When done with intention, they’re blueprints. They’re resistance manuals disguised as murder mysteries. They’re survival guides smuggled into backpacks and lockers. They’re stories of rage, truth, transformation and revolution. And the kids are reading. *** View the full article

In 2017, I became fascinated by the notion that my hometown—Greenfield, Massachusetts, population 17,000—had joined a national lawsuit against the pharmaceutical companies that got so many people hooked on pain pills. Greenfield was taking a stand, and suddenly I was writing a legal thriller inspired by the town. Or trying to. I dove into research. I sifted through court filings and news articles describing how a pharmaceutical company trained its sales team to mislead doctors, and how doctors enjoyed all-expenses-paid trips to Boca Raton to hear about the wonderful benefits of opioid painkillers. I interviewed lawyers and Greenfield’s mayor. I printed my research notes on extra-long legal paper (lol). A story began to take shape, and I felt a zing of energy from the novel itself, as it started to come alive. “The story teaches you how to write it” is an expression that’s attributed to Aristotle (a paraphrase from The Poetics—allegedly, at least). In my own experience, the story definitely teaches you how to write it, and the writer’s job is to listen. In attempting to write a legal thriller, I was slowly learning that the story wasn’t about a lawsuit and the hero was no lawyer. The hero was a waitress, single mom, and recreational boxer named Casch Abbey, and the secondary hero was her new romantic interest, a prodigious cannabis grower and former U.S. Army infantryman. Yet, even as a member of my writing group explicitly told me that Casch was the heart of this book (and if you’re reading this, Bob Saul, thank you), I continued for some time to avoid what was plainly in front of me: that virtually every sentence I had written about the lawsuit, and the lawyer with his office in downtown Greenfield, could be deleted. Wiped cleaned. Erased. At that time I couldn’t have told you the central question that I was attempting to answer, because I was deep in the weeds just trying to see what the story was. But now I understand I was grappling with a fairly provocative question: How do you write the everyday villainy that’s all around us—the people exploited, the earth pillaged—and distill it down to a handful of characters whose pain and misadventures keep the reader on edge till the last page? I discovered the answer only by writing and rewriting The Untended, a book that revealed itself to be a psychological thriller about the opioid crisis set in a fictional town called Greenfield, Vermont. According to The Untended, the answer is nested stories. Casch is just trying to scrap together enough money to raise her kids and go to nursing school when her foot is crushed under the wheel of a station wagon. Her doctor prescribes pain medicine, and it turns out that a small yellow pill gives her the feeling she’s needed her entire life: relief. The incredible sensation that everything is just going to be all right. But the medicine is soon recalled amid a deluge of reports that people are becoming addicted; lawsuits are in the offing. Meanwhile, on the ground in Greenfield, the pharmacy won’t dispense Casch’s meds and she’s met with a cold look at the doctor’s office when she asks for more. But Casch is a resourceful broad. She finds someone to sell her those meds. Casch is the quivering core of this book; at the same time, her story is nested within other stories: Casch’s nested story Casch is a single mom who waitresses at a corporate chain restaurant until a station wagon rolls over her foot. ↑ A doctor with a gold watch writes her a ’script for a powerful and addictive medicine. ↑ The medicine is patented and produced by a wildly profitable and privately owned pharmaceutical company in Connecticut, just a hundred miles south of Greenfield. ↑ American capitalism In the first scene of The Untended, Casch meets Topher, who secretly grows pot for commercial purposes on a rich man’s land somewhere in the Green Mountains. (The book is set in the recent yet distant era when weed was illegal in most every state.) Topher was raised by his beloved grandma, “Gram,” the only parent he ever knew; after she passed away, and the cabin where he grew up was repossessed by the bank, he joined the service. His story is also nested within other stories: Topher’s nested story Topher grows and sells illicit cannabis after returning from Afghanistan. ↑ The U.S. war in Afghanistan ↑ The U.S. war on drugs ↑ The Opium Wars ↑ Empire But how do you write nested stories? Well, the story teaches you how to write it, and the characters are the heart of the story. Follow the yarn from their pain to what happened to them to the circumstances of the people and systems that caused them harm—and then keep going, from their local world, to their regional world, all the way to the historic, political, and economic forces of the larger gruesome world, which all together set the action in motion before the characters were even born. And when that task feels absurd or impossible or both, keep writing, and then cut most of what you’ve written. Pretty much no one enjoys cutting their work. But my favorite word for this process is subtraction, and I think using the mathematical term helps me remember that there’s nothing bad about taking words out, just as there’s nothing inherently good about adding words. It all depends on what the story needs now. And when I perform subtraction, I’m often amazed at the results. (Actually I think it’s the tool that can make me seem much smarter than I am.) I cut away pages of heavy-handed stuff—for instance, explaining just how nested these characters’ stories really are!—and what remains are a few sentences that gesture at much larger, and much darker, context. In order to understand what I was trying to write, I also interviewed people who had gone through the very arc of addiction that Casch experiences. This involved going inside the county jail, first as a journalist and later as a teacher to facilitate a class for incarcerated women. I learned a lot. Virtually every woman I encountered in that correctional facility had experienced significant trauma in her life; had become addicted to a substance that eased her emotional pain; had been criminalized for things she’d done while experiencing addiction; was now a convicted criminal and therefore culturally stigmatized; and judged herself harshly, as if this string of events was her very own fault. In The Untended, Casch is pulled downward into chemical dependence and pursues ever riskier strategies to make money. At the same time, through sex and weed and empathy, she and Topher grow closer, and he tells her things he’s never spoken aloud about his experience in the service, revealing why he now chooses to spend his days growing cannabis and driving it to New York with a Glock under his seat. Meanwhile, if not for nested stories, Casch’s own substance use probably would read as a personal failing, because our predominant cultural narrative about people who struggle with drugs is one of judgment. But it gets harder to judge after you’ve glimpsed what got her here, while she is also up against powerful interests that have all the force of the law on their side. In our nonfictional world, powerful interests continually invite us to venerate the rich while blaming the powerless for their problems and our own. But something else is accessible in fiction, where the reader can see all at once how everyday exploitation undertaken for the purposes of accumulating great wealth for the few ravages the many, while those doing the ravaging enjoy impunity. In a scene smack in the middle of the book, when she is watching cartoons while snuggled in bed with her kids, Casch’s eight-year-old son asks, “What if the bad guys think they’re good guys?” Nested stories can help us solve that question, which feels timelier than ever in 2025. *** View the full article

I can't figure out any other way to submit my pre-conference "homework" assignment (the seven writing exercises), so I'm doing it this way. I tried clicking the submission link that said "Algonkian and New York Write To Pitch Prep Forum," but that link is not working, at least on my PC. Write To Pitch homework.docx

Opening scene.docx