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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

Write to Pitch Conference June 2025 PreWork Maria Miller Silvert Assignment 1: Story Statement Leilani Drew, a Hawaiian beauty and grand niece of famed detective Nancy Drew, upholds her family legacy by investigating the double mysteries of Turtle Cove, a violent murder and a fabled buried treasure. Assignment 2: The Antagonist(s) Mike Campbell: Treasurer of the HomeOwners Association at Turtle Cove and retired lawyer, Mike Campbell becomes increasingly suspicious, desperate and threatening as Leilani investigates the murder and buried treasure. A gambling addiction threatens to ruin his life, as do his ties with The Palaoa, a dangerous drug running gang on Maui. Mr. A.: Rumored to be the ruthless leader of the Palaoa gang on the Hawaiian islands, A stands for anonymous, because no one knows his true identity and anyone who did discover it met their demise soon after. Mr. A. is introduced in this book, and his presence will continue in the planned series. Maud and John Finkley: Flamboyant Maud, president of the HomeOwners Association, and mild mannered husband John, are a senior couple living at Turtle Cove resort. But appearances aren’t all they seem and these tragic antagonists create life threatening problems for Leilani. Assignment 3: Breakout Title Mystery of Turtle Cove, a Leilani Drew Mystery Murder at Turtle Cove, a Leilani Drew Mystery Secrets of Turtle Cove, a Leilani Drew Mystery Assignment 4: Comparables Enola Holmes Mysteries, by Nancy Springer Because the series is a spin off of Sherlock Holmes, set in historical London, and the appealing younger sister, Enola, solves the mysteries, it has some characteristics similar to Mystery of Turtle Cove. Leilani Drew is an appealing and complex young woman, grand niece to Nancy Drew, and the first murder is set on contemporary Maui. Leilani relies on her two siblings for help in making her investigations. A parallel setting related to the buried treasure takes place on Maui in the mid 1800s to early 1900s. The Lei Crime Series, by Toby Neal Like the Mystery of Turtle Cove, the Lei Crime series portrays a female multi racial protagonist compelled to solve crimes amidst stunning island settings, showcasing the contrast between paradise and a seamy criminal underbelly that infests the islands, framed by a strong Hawaiian cultural context. Assignment 5: Core Wound and the Primary Conflict A chilling murder and an ancient buried treasure draw Polynesian beauty Leilani Drew, grand niece of famed detective Nancy Drew, into the dual mysteries of Turtle Cove, an oceanfront resort on the island paradise of Maui. Despite tragic personal losses, an inner ear imbalance that hampers her dreams, and the disapproval of her older brother, Leilani follows her family legacy, compelled to prove her own worth as a detective even as a dangerous investigation threatens her life. Assignment 6: Other Conflicts Inner Conflict: She sat for a moment, thinking about her conversation with Keke. She had lied to her about falling off the cliff. And she was hiding information from Kai. A denseness squeezed her chest, and razor-like wires of guilt wrapped themselves around her gut. Even as she acknowledged her deceitfulness, she knew she couldn’t, and wouldn’t, stop her investigations. At eleven, after her mother’s death, Leilani realized she couldn’t control anything, so she lost herself in Aunt Nancy’s books. Reading about Aunt Nancy’s adventures, she felt she too could solve mysteries, and that maybe, it was something she could be good at. Perhaps even be a hero like her Aunt Nancy, and have something of value to offer others. As time went on, she discovered solving mysteries took her out of herself and helped her feel in control. The rest of her life was so messy. Her depresssion, fueled by grief, fear, and loneliness, she numbed by drinking. Then her father died and she was driven to discover what happened, even though it remained a desolate mystery. She was afraid to get too close to anyone because she didn’t want to go through the hurt of losing them, like her parents. Solving mysteries gave her a purpose, and when she felt shy and awkward, it helped her talk with people. Secondary conflict: (Leilani has broken into the house of the murdered man at night to search for evidence.) She took out her phone and snapped photos of the back and front of the painting. Then she gently pressed the frame closed and carefully hung the painting back in its place on the wall. The sound of a motor alerted her. It was a car, creeping up the street. An urgent necessity to leave exploded in her gut. Turning off the flashlight, she walked out of the house, locking the door behind her. She jumped down to the ground and ran to the side yard. From her vantage point behind a bush, she saw the radiating blue light of a patrol car. It stopped in front of the house. She hoped the officer wouldn’t do a physical check of the grounds. Holding her breath, she moved into the shadow of a Japanese silk tree. The officer slowly got out of the car. Suddenly, the police radio cackled and the dispatcher’s voice came through. The officer got back into the car and answered. The cruiser's blue lights flashed and the car took off. Leilani breathed a sigh of relief. That was too close. Imaging Kai’s reaction if she had been caught took her breath away and she forced herself to not think. Assignment 7: Setting Maui, an iconic paradise that conjures images of sun filled days spent lazing on butter colored sand beaches, swimming glittering turquoise waters, and snorkeling with sea turtles and kaleidoscopic fish. Drinking pina coladas from a beach side lanai while watching humpback whales breaching next to toned surfers catching waves, muscles glistening in the sun. It’s a massive sandbox and playground for sports lovers and hedonists alike offering an array of water sports, whale watching, volcano climbing, MaiTai drinking, world class golfing, ukulele playing, karaoke singing, hula dancing, horseback riding, polo playing panoply of delights. And yet, beneath the stunning natural beauty of the island, its tranquil aquamarine waters, plumeria scented breezes, melodic bird song, and lush emerald colored valleys and peaks of neighboring islands, for all its outward celebration of life and living, lies a seductive lull from deep beneath the earth, a pulsing from the heart of the island, a sepulchral whisper that says “one day soon you will be mine too.” For evidence of Death’s mark is everywhere for the awakened eye to see. On the islands, shark attacks are more common than being shot, hit by a drunk driver, drowning in the ocean, goring by wild boar, or dying from a falling coconut. But these dangers, and more, lurk everywhere - from razor sharp black lava rocks that line the coastline, to sea mangos (the suicide fruit) that look similar to the delicious sweet and tangy lilikoi to fiery red monster centipedes. And then there are the human dangers - gun violence, gangs, meth labs, pot fields, drunk drivers, pissed off islanders, steep pali trails covered in vines that grab at the ankles of naive tourists, throwing them headlong down a thousand foot drop, and the jungle itself, breathing, heaving, sweating, devouring all that enter, well, the list does go on.

In Liann Zhang’s debut thriller, Julie Chan is Dead, an impulsive identity swap unleashes dark secrets and plenty of trouble, against the backdrop of social media influencing. Separated at a young age, identical twins Julie Chan and Chloe VanHuusen grow up to live disparate lives: Julie scraping by as a supermarket cashier dominated by her abusive aunt, Chloe thriving as a beauty influencer after being raised by wealthy adoptive parents. After Chloe mysteriously contacts her, Julie discovers her twin’s dead body and, with nothing to lose, decides to assume her identity. But Julie soon discovers that the life of her online-darling sister was anything but picture-perfect. Problems abound and soon spiral out of control to threaten her own life. Fast-paced and bitingly funny, Julie Chan Is Dead skewers our online habits, power structures, and even gender roles, while exploring themes of authenticity, grief, and belonging. Liann Zhang is a second-generation Chinese Canadian with a degree in psychology and criminology and some insightful experiences as a social media content creator. She splits her time between Vancouver, British Columbia and Toronto, Ontario. I connected with the author over Zoom to discuss her sharp debut. This interview has been edited for clarity and length. Jenny Bartoy: I would love to know how you came up with the idea for this novel. Liann Zhang: I feel like there was so much going in my head, but a lot of it was inspired by my own time as a skincare influencer back when I was a teenager. I got to see behind the scenes and experience the dynamics of the different people [in that world]. But also just being a teenager and a child that’s always been chronically online, I’ve seen every single piece of drama and internet scandal that someone could consume. And there’s just so much content there that I knew I needed to put it into a book. Once I found out how to frame the story, it kind of just went from there. JB: Twins are at the center of this novel. Twins have always fascinated us culturally, and there seems to be a resurgence in recent years. What appealed to you about the mystique of twins for this story? LZ: Originally, the identity swap came from another novel that I wrote, a fantasy book, but it never went anywhere. But in terms of the twins, I studied psychology at university, and there were studies following twins that had been separated—which would be kind of an unethical study these days, you don’t really see that anymore—and they were trying to determine nature versus nurture, that type of thing. And that always fascinated me. For this story, I really wanted to be with the character that’s kind of thrust into this [different] world. You don’t see her slow growth, you’re right in the middle of it with her. And what a better way than to do a little twin swap? That’s just a fun way to throw the character right into the middle of everything. JB: It feels like a clever play on the “evil twin” trope from soap operas, but that allows for exploration of significant, deeper themes. One of the big ones is the nature versus nurture theme that you mentioned. Specifically this book examines the haves versus the have-nots and the power of money and privilege in deciding who sets the narrative. Why did that interest you and how does social media play into this? LZ: This came up very naturally while I was writing, just because it was something that I [experienced] personally. While I was in the influencer scene, it wasn’t based on personality, it wasn’t because I was funny or charismatic — I was in the skincare world. So in order to review and take pictures of skincare, you had to own items. You couldn’t just own one Neutrogena face wash and make a blog out of it. You needed to have several items, which of course cost money, which in itself is a privilege. When I was coming up and entering these group chats, I noticed that a lot of these people were very privileged people who already owned a lot and continued to get a lot. I counted myself lucky too, because my mom was very supportive. I also had a part time job, and I lived at home, so it’s not like I had expenses. I just went to Sephora and bought stuff with my bakery money I earned. But a lot of people aren’t able to do that, and you do see a concentration of privilege within these influencer communities, specifically beauty and the type of niches that require you to have items. So that theme came up very naturally. JB: You touch upon the question of authenticity quite a bit. What is authentic? I feel like that’s the real mystery that your book strives to answer. LZ: I often see big words [like “authenticity”] floating around the influencer space. But as more people become influencers, and more time has passed in the context of this influencer world, we’re starting to discover that a lot of them are not who they are [online]. And you even get major news stories about influencers being awful behind the screen. Personally, I have the belief that these social media platforms, and the big techno feudalistic overlords that control everything, like Google and Meta, really do not care about authenticity and real connection. They just want to scale their data and get ad revenue. So really, these platforms are there for entertainment, and there’s a lot you can try to be authentic, but at the end of the day, you can only show so much of yourself online, and anything you do show is something you actively curate, [for] an audience watching. And when you consider an audience, how authentic is it really? These days, I treat social media as kind of a new age reality TV show. I don’t even want to try to believe that these people are being real, I’m just going to consume them [as entertainment.] JB: Your novel is part of an exciting trend that I like to describe as “flipping the narrative on villainy”—subverting the dominant sociopolitical (ahem, white and patriarchal) narrative that likes to point the finger at minorities, people of color, people who are poor or marginalized in any way, as the “villain” for pretty much anything. In our current times especially, what do you think is the power of writers, specifically in fiction, to change those deeply ingrained — and problematic — narratives? LZ: We’re seeing more and more stories pop up by different types of authors who are not the traditional white male, or female even, writers. More and more we’re getting [perspectives] that acknowledge the power dynamic that’s there and provide an outside viewpoint. And I think reading is one of those ways that you can truly empathize with a different position, because you’re literally reading from their point of view and putting yourself in their shoes. Fiction is an avenue toward understanding that feels a little bit less preachy, or [less boring than] like, reading a news report. It forces people to acknowledge what’s going on, but in a fun, entertaining way where it’s not like you’re reading a textbook. Fiction is a fun way to engage with those types of [challenging] ideas. JB: Throughout the novel, you call out how rigged and riddled with problems a lot of our systems are — the police and its issues with mental illness, the judicial system, etc. Why was it important for you to write about this? LZ: I did study psychology and was on the track to go into my master’s, and part of that was gaining work experience. So for two or three years, I worked at a suicide crisis line, and I did see a lot of these types of stories that Julie goes through in the book, where people who are having a really tough time get the police called on them or EMTs, and it is not a positive experience at all. And it gets to the point where we become scared to call them, even though it’s kind of the only resource, because on a crisis line, how much can I really do from miles away? That was something that was top of mind for me, because I was still working there while I was writing this book. It felt very important to acknowledge that resources exist, but they do not work as they’re supposed to, and a lot needs to be fixed. JB: This book is a wild ride—funny, poignant, fast-paced, unabashedly political, and at its heart is a mystery—but I’m not sure I would categorize it as a “mystery” per se. I would love to know your intentions in terms of what you were writing. Did you want to write a murder mystery? LZ: What you’re verbalizing was very much like my own brain, especially when I was querying agents. At the time I was like, what is this really? Is it a thriller, or is it mystery, or is it horror? I feel like there’s so many things that it could be categorized as. I did end up going with thriller, just because I feel like it was a safe catch-all and one of the better selling, more commercial genres that would guarantee me some kind of success, hopefully. And I feel like in any thriller, there’s always mystery. It’s so deeply intertwined that you can’t really have one without the other. JB: This story feels satirical and critical of the beauty influencer world, but also a little bit like a love letter to it. I feel like I could definitely sense both. Would you agree? LZ: Yeah. I myself have a huge love-hate relationship with the internet and with influencers. Because, on one hand, I can recognize the awful things that it’s doing to society, to my mind, to the people that I know. I can very clearly recognize this and put it into words, and yet I don’t see a future where I’m going to give up my social media. I’m stuck to it, and I’m addicted. And not only that, it’s not even a negative addiction. I’m getting a lot of joy from it, even though it’s probably not doing great things to me in the end. But [the book] does reflect my brief time as an influencer, what I kind of went through on a small scale. What Julie does, where she’s receiving all these free things and getting paid for a picture — it’s such a novelty. When I was in high school and working part-time at a bakery, I would post one photo and it would [earn] more than I made that whole month. And I got to connect with lots of interesting people and lots of brands. But eventually I started to get bored of it. I started to look at, oh my God, all these things I’m receiving, it’s just piling up, it’s turning into garbage. Like, I have one face, how am I supposed to use all these things? And then I would recognize the messaging of these brands that claim to be eco friendly and they’re sending you giant boxes full of packing peanuts and styrofoam. And it was one of those moments where I [thought], okay, everybody is lying, nothing is real. I got sick of that whole world along with posting on social media. It’s so nice getting a lot of likes on a post. It is an endorphin rush—it’s a great feeling. But then this one post got 1000 likes, and the next one gets 200, and then you’re stuck there figuring out what happened between this and that, and it becomes this awful, agonizing feeling that just grows and grows. At the end of the day, I hate everything about it, but at the same time, I can never put it away. It’s like a toxic relationship. JB: The theme of family is at the forefront of this story, and it’s interesting how social media provides this sort of parallel to the dynamics of family that Julie and Chloe experience. There’s your biological family, your adoptive family, and then your chosen family, each of whom might be wonderful or completely toxic. You explore all those layers in the book. Was that parallel organic or intentional? LZ: It was very purposeful. I don’t know if you watch a lot of these bloggers or influencers, but they’re always calling their fans their family. Like, you guys are my family; I love you guys; thank you so much for supporting me. It’s a rhetoric that a lot of influencers use, and I think I fall for it too. Sometimes I get really attached to these people, because I feel like I know them. They show me so much, but also nothing at all. And in a way, it does feel like you’re part of the family. Sometimes you watch these people grow up from children to full grown adults, and you feel like you’re there on the journey, like they’re your friend. So that does play into that online family dynamic. But also, I feel like a lot of people my age have found genuine friends online. JB: We talked earlier about authenticity and what that really means when, by default, what you’re doing online is not really authentic, but social media has sort of co-opted that term. You write about this quite a bit: has it really happened if you’re not posting about it, and on the flip side, is it made real if you create content about it? Can you manufacture your reality simply by posting and putting it out in the world? LZ: Yeah, that question, “Did it really happen if you didn’t post it?” I think a lot of people these days don’t think so. I’m seeing people every day posting every meal—the camera eats first, as they say. Every time they go on a walk, they have to post. [And this question of reality and authenticity] is definitely one of the central themes of the book. The main character, in itself, is kind of an exaggerated example of that. She literally looks identical to the person she says she is, but she’s an entirely other person, which in a way could potentially be every influencer—they look like this, but who knows, behind the screen, who are they really? That’s kind of the question that I’m posing. I feel like the whole story in itself is a characterization of online culture and how we all want to be something. We’re so desperate to cling on to this thing, metaphorically, that we will do anything. We’ll lose parts of ourselves to attain that, even though, like, what are we even trying to attain? *** View the full article

I confess that I wasn’t a fan of The Great Gatsby the first time I read it, which, surprisingly for many, wasn’t in school. I grew up in Canada, where American novels aren’t often taught, and my English class at university started with Chaucer and ended somewhere around Romanticism. When I moved to the US, I went about correcting my appalling lack of knowledge of American literature by systematically reading through the classics. Moby Dick proved too much for me, but I zipped through mercifully shorter and more eventful books, including the very slim The Great Gatsby. Gatsby seemed silly to me. A poor farm kid sails on a millionaire’s yacht learning to be posh, experiences love at first sight, gets stupid rich through criminal enterprises with a cartoonish Shylock character, stalks his ex, gets blamed when his love interest accidentally runs over her husband’s mistress, is hunted down and shot by the dead woman’s hapless husband. Sorry for the spoilers. I did appreciate the pretty, pretty words, but at the time, they weren’t enough to make up for what I considered a lame plot. (I read more recently that Fitzgerald resented criticisms of the novel’s plot as implausible as he had never intended for the story to be realistic.) I might have appreciated the book more if an enthusiastic professor had lectured to me about the American Dream, the decline of morality, the destructive nature of greed, and the elusive nature of happiness. As it was, I shelved the novel with a shrug and moved on to The Sun Also Rises. Many years later, I heard the story of a Gilded Age female con artist named Cassie Chadwick on a history podcast, and Jay Gatsby floated up from the murky depths of my memory. Chadwick, like Gatsby, was born to poor farmers, and aspired to better her position in life; and like Gastby, turned to crime to amass her fortune. Chadwick’s life before she turned to bank fraud is not well documented, but from what I gathered, she was a despicable person who preyed on vulnerable people and felt no remorse for ruining their lives. Gatsby, on the other hand, is a romantic dreamer who is motivated by love. I thought that a Chadwick/Gatsby mashup would make an interesting story, and this brought me back to Fitzgerald’s novel for a closer reading. What struck me first in carefully rereading the novel is that while the broad brushstrokes of the plot are unsubtle, the writing itself is understated. I had blown past moments like Nick Carraway imagining a bus conductor’s lover or standing beside the bed of an underwear clad man. I had also missed some of the references to Jay Gatsby’s criminality and con artistry, like this passage in which Tom tells Gatsby that he knows about his illegal activities: “Plenty of gas,” said Tom boisterously. He looked at the gauge. “And if it runs out I can stop at a drug-store. You can buy anything at a drug-store nowadays.” A pause followed this apparently pointless remark. Daisy looked at Tom frowning, and an indefinable expression, at once definitely unfamiliar and vaguely recognizable, as if I had only heard it described in words, passed over Gatsby’s face. The con artist and criminal elements of Gatsby are often downplayed or romanticised, but approaching the text from this angle, I saw the character in a new light. His hustling begins long before he meets Daisy and extends well beyond pretending that his ill-gotten gains are legitimate. As a youth, he is ashamed of his humble beginnings and doesn’t accept his parents as his own. He is described as “extravagantly ambitious” and has feverish dreams: “But his heart was in a constant, turbulent riot. The most grotesque and fantastic conceits haunted him in his bed at night. A universe of ineffable gaudiness spun itself out in his brain while the clock ticked on the washstand and the moon soaked with wet light his tangled clothes upon the floor.” This is a youth who is fixated on finding his way to wealth into the upper echelons of society, and he is impatient to get there. Nick Carraway goes so far as to call him a son of God who is acting “in service of a vast, vulgar and meretricious beauty.” In pursuit of his “future glory” he enrolls in college but can’t stand the school’s “ferocious indifference to the drums of his destiny” and having to do menial work to pay his way. Luckily for him, a mining mogul sails into his life and teaches him how to pass himself off as a member of high society under a patrician new name, Jay Gatsby. What stuck in my mind from my first reading was Nick Carraway admiring, even loving Gatsby. I didn’t remember him being aware of Gatsby’s self-absorption and mistreatment of others. I also came away from that original reading thinking that Gatsby’s illegal activities are limited to distributing moonshine, but on my second reading, I noted the “many young Englishmen” at Gatsby’s parties who are evidently trying to sell something to the guests and are “agonizingly aware of easy money in the vicinity,” which sounds a lot like organized fraud. Then there’s the phone call for Gatsby that Nick intercepts late in the novel indicating that Gatsby is involved in bond theft or forgery: “Young Parke’s in trouble,” he said rapidly. “They picked him up when he handed the bonds over the counter. They got a circular from New York giving ’em the numbers just five minutes before.” Jay Gatsby is as much a con artist as the real life Cassie Chadwick, I realized. He seeks cheat codes for acquiring wealth and takes on a false persona at a young age (and, notably, before he meets Daisy), and he displays many of the narcissistic and psychopathic features associated with con artists, including glib charm, grandiosity, need for admiration, impulsivity, egotism, manipulation, and of course, a willingness to lie. One could, in fact, view The Great Gatsby as a story of a psychopathic con artist who receives a narcissistic injury (rejection by Daisy) and becomes obsessed with trying to repair that injury…but that would be boring. A self-made millionaire who will do anything to reclaim the love he has lost and achieve his romantic ideals, now that’s a story for the ages. Even if some of the plot points are a bit janky. *** View the full article