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Christie’s portrayals of denizens of various parts of the world (as many of her British characters bluntly put it, “foreigners!”) take a wide variety of formats from over-the-top satire and stereotypes to relatively nuanced and neutral. One particular categorization that crops on frequently in her mysteries are her “Mittel European” – or rather, central European – characters, some of which are particularly memorable. A notable element that makes her “Mittel European” characters especially intriguing is that they tend to reflect recent (relative to a book’s publication) historical events quite vividly, sometimes more so than characters being portrayed from other parts of the world. Prior to World War I, there were two empires still in existence in central Europe, namely the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the German Empire. As such, some of Christie’s central European characters remind the reader of aristocratic members from former monarchies, like Hungarian nobleman Count Andrenyi from The Murder on the Orient Express. At times in Christie’s work, the central Europeans’ national identities are portrayed as rather vague due to all the upheaval. For instance, in Death on the Nile we are introduced to Dr. Bessner, who has a practice in Czechoslovakia but is also well-known throughout Austria – and the book’s characters think he is German. Confusing? To the modern reader, absolutely. However, from a historical perspective in the mid-30’s, it hadn’t been all that long since 1918 when the aforementioned countries had become independent republics. The drastic shift of empires and its ensuing chaos is also well-reflected via her characters who hail from the memorable fictional Herzoslovakia, such as Prince Obolovitch and Count Stylptich from The Secret of Chimneys or the Herzoslovakian setting for the blackmail-focused tale in the Poirot short story The Stymphalean Birds. Herzoslovakia is an obvious amalgamation of (what would be modern-day) countries like Serbia, Czechoslovakia and Slovenia. In this Christie-imagined land, its citizens experience events like regicide and revolution that essentially, albeit with exaggeration, mimicked a lot of what went on in much of central Europe in the early 20th century leading up to the first World War. Between the two World Wars, there were many drastic historical shifts throughout the European continent that obviously influenced the way Christie opted to write about central (and Eastern) Europe and its inhabitants. One of the most glaring ones is the formation of the Soviet Union and rise of Communism, a topic that Christie continued to revisit before as well as post-World War Two mysteries, notably in works such as The Big Four, Destination Unknown and Hickory Dickory Dock. She introduces characters implied to be Communist that try to push some revolutionary agenda on a rather grandiose scale. There’s also any number of Christie’s characters that are open about their “radical” beliefs: these characters do generally turn out to be rather harmless, such as the left-wing students in Hickory Dickory Dock and Mr. Ferguson in Death on the Nile. In some ways, as Christie was a master of satire and poking a bit of fun at anything and everyone, her pseudo-Marxist characters often talk the talk but don’t necessarily walk the walk – they’re not really as devoted to their beliefs as they might espouse. In Christie’s novels that take place during World War Two and post-war, she introduces some characters with implied Nazi or Fascist connections; one of the most extreme representations of that type of character is Countess Charlotte von Waldsausen in Passenger to Frankfurt. In a rather over-the-top style, this Bavarian former aristocrat attempts a “New World Older” with her “Young Siegfried” protégé in this ‘70s spy novel. A particularly memorable central European character written in a post-World War Two Christie mystery is Mitzi. “One of the few who isn’t altogether other than she appears is the cook Mitzi — referred to by the other characters as a “Mittel European,” which is Christie’s euphemism for “Jew” — and yet Mitzi is frequently referred to as a pathological liar,” notes humanities professor Alan Jacobs. Famed for her Delicious Death cake and portrayed as being completely paranoid about the police, Mitzi’s depiction can be controversial. “While it can certainly be argued that stereotypes are relatively common within the works of Agatha Christie, here we instead get a caricature and, given the background of her character, a most insensitive one. It is not often that one can say that Christie was cruel in her writing, but it seems difficult to make any other assumption in this case,” comments blogger Shane Brown. Another memorable central European refugee character is German emigre Carl von Deinim from the Tommy and Tuppence World War Two mystery N or M? Christie makes him a more nuanced figure with a twist reveal towards the end of the novel. There are still far more “Mitteleuropa” characters to explore and consider against their historic background in Christie’s work, so consider this your excuse to go back and re-read them all! View the full article

If I walked up to you and whispered, “Weasels Ripped My Flesh,” would you think: I was referring to the 1970 album of that name by Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention? I desperately needed medical assistance of some kind? I was referring to the classic men’s adventure magazines of the 1950s-70s, including the 1956 issue of Man’s Life that featured a story of the same name? Thanks to a small group of fans, collectors, preservationists and publishers led by Robert Deis, the recognition of and appreciation for men’s adventure magazines (MAMs for short, but also sometimes referred to as “sweat mags” and other colorful nicknames) is growing. Nearly a half-century after the last of those magazines disappeared from newsstands, Deis and like-minded devotees of this mostly forgotten media – which featured the hard-bitten writing of “Godfather” scribe Mario Puzo, crime writers like Lawrence Block, fantasists like Harlan Ellison, science fiction authors like Robert Silverberg and many others – are publishing periodicals and anthologies of the visceral stories and art that entertained millions while remaining below the radar of classic and so-called classy literature and publications. When I was a kid, I’d go to the grocery store with my dad, who did the shopping for the family. I don’t remember all that much about the grocery aisles, but I sure remember the magazine rack and the men’s adventure magazines on it. Tucked away not far from the elevated manager’s station, the rack that not only offered comic books, the Saturday Evening Post, Time and Newsweek, but dozens of these disreputable looking mags featuring vivid, full-color art of hitmen, soldiers, adventurers and women, who were often nearly as scantily clad as the bare-chested men. If you’re not old enough to remember the time of MAMs, they were a group of as many as 160 magazines, from publishers big and small, that printed gritty, titillating and outlandish “true” (but usually not) tales of manly men (and some heroic women) battling Nazis, bears, criminals, sharks, Bigfoot, rhinos and, yes, weasels. Along with a legion of other small, biting-prone animals. Zappa recognized the shock potential of MAMs. So did guys who read them as they sat in barber shops and hung out in their suburban garages. Shock value and camp value aside, the MAMs were a treasure trove of crime, war and action writing. Some of the authors’ names, including those cited here, are well known, while others are still masked by pen names. Writing and drawing and painting, editing too, I’d guess, for MAMs was not any more highly respected in some circles than working for comic book publishers like Marvel and DC. It’s possible the titles of the magazines helped relegate them to a niche: Man’s Life, Men Today, Man’s Story, Men in Conflict, Man’s Action, True Men … you get the idea. Deis notes that among the devotees of the MAMs was Ed Gein, who was a one-man lurid story all by himself. Gein was the grave-robber and killer who inspired author Robert Bloch to write “Psycho.” To be fair to the magazines, Gein wasn’t the only avid reader, and I’d bet that copies were stored in cardboard boxes under a lot of beds over the decades. Like 1950s horror comics from EC and other publishers, men’s adventure magazines have been enjoying renewed appreciation and attention in recent years, thanks to a couple of critical reappraisals, a series of publications including Men’s Adventure Quarterly magazine and anthologies that celebrate not only the wild writing and art but also the history and behind-the-scenes stories of the New York magazine publishing world. A formula – and it worked Although the old men’s magazines have won some renewed attention since the early 2000s, the publications reprinting vintage stories and art have grown in popularity in just the past decade. Deis and Wyatt Doyle of the New Texture indie publisher have produced handsome anthologies and art books. Deis and Doyle published the men’s adventure magazine anthology and overview “Weasels Ripped My Flesh” in 2013 with the contributions of Josh Alan Friedman, whose father Bruce Jay Friedman was a MAMs editor in the 1950s and 1960s. They’ve released 20 illustrated story anthologies and 12 issues so far of Men’s Adventure Quarterly, a thick, slick magazine from Deis and Bill Cunningham of Pulp 2.0 Press. Looking at the articles and covers reproduced by Deis and his cohorts, one can’t help but wonder if there were some kind of drawing of slips of paper from a hat that helped determine what headlines – and stories – would be written. Decades later, the headlines suggest a kind of Mad Libs or refrigerator-magnet poetry approach: MACHO PROTAGONIST who DESTROYED/ESCAPED from NAZI/RUSSIAN/JUNGLE DEATH CAMP to save SUBURBAN WIVES CAUGHT BY SEX TRAFFICKERS because, face it, they had to get the sex element in there. For example, I’ll cite one of several stories cited on the cover of True Action magazine’s June 1961 issue; “The Soldier of Fortune Who Rules Russia’s Camp of Banished Wives.” Plainly, these stories had it all. Newsstands and supermarket racks are mostly gone now, although there are magazine racks at bookstores like Barnes & Noble. But they’re a no-macho-man’s land, devoid of the non-stop action and cheesecake and beefcake of the MAMs. There’s a serious shortage of leering Nazi torturers and barely-clad women firing machine guns. Not to mention flesh-ripping weasels. The original “Weasels Ripped My Flesh,” what Deis calls the most famous men’s adventure magazine story ever, is a terse suspense story about a man defending his barn full of ducks from ravenous weasels. That might sound funny, but the story is anything but. “Then, like some poor demented animal, I began spearing everything that moved before me,” the protagonist says of trying to fend off the weasels with a pitchfork. “I saw the long, double-pronged steel gouge through squirming bodies … one … two … four! I was out of my mind with pain and grief, yet I didn’t stop skewering them even as I drove the pitchfork into my own leg to stop them.” Afterward, he looks back at the ordeal and what followed, including extensive surgery to try to heal his many, many bite wounds. “Plastic surgery and the best of care gave me a face that seemed strange to me.” What’s even more startling than the story itself and the fame that’s followed it over nearly 70 years? As Deis notes in the “Weasels” anthology, the name of the author who wrote the original story, Mike Kamens, is almost certainly a pen name. The real name of the writer who all but spawned a publishing concern that’s known to this day is himself unknown. Comic book parallels The stories in MAMs ran the gamut from westerns to war to tales of adventurers and people who were just in the wrong place at the wrong time – but managed to survive against the odds. The MAMs had a lot in common with pulp magazines and comic books, including the legions of writers, editors and artists who didn’t mind the money but longed to break out and get into what was considered more “legitimate” forms of art and writing, like the advertising industry or mass-circulation magazines. They also had in common Martin Goodman. If that name doesn’t ring a bell, consider that Goodman was a driving force in the New York periodical publishing world for decades. Goodman, who died in 1992, founded Magazine Management Company in the postwar years and the company distributed many men’s magazines. Goodman was also related by marriage to Stan Lee and hired him to run Timely Comics, which later became Marvel Comics and a pop culture touchstone. Deis said the comics comparison wasn’t obvious but, “Like the great horror comics of the 1950s, EC Comics, MAMs are getting more artistic appreciation now than they did at the time of publication.” Deis said he has about 6,000 original issues of the magazines, a collection put together over the decades. Some, like the issue featuring the notorious “Weasels,” are collector’s items. It’s fairly common to see individual issues offered for sale in online sites for $10 to $40 each, he said. The December 1961 issue of Argosy magazine “can cost hundreds,” he said. Why? It features a version of Ian Fleming’s James Bond adventure “Thunderball.” The “Weasels” issue of Man’s Life, if it can even be found, can sell for as much as $400, Deis said. ‘Even the rhinos were nymphos’ The people who created men’s adventure magazines and the people who have resurrected them are serious appreciators of the writers and artists whose work is within the pages, but they acknowledge the humor – some intentional, some not – in the magazines and the genre. There are few recountings of 1950s-1970s New York magazine publishing better than Bruce Jay Friedman’s appreciation, originally published in Rolling Stone in 1975 and reprinted in the “Weasels Ripped My Flesh” anthology and overview. It was also used in Friedman’s 2001 autobiography, also titled “Even the Rhinos Were Nymphos.” The title was a reference to two of the cliches of the men’s adventure magazines: wild animals and highly-sexed characters. Friedman writes about the foibles of the business in hilarious fashion. “It was at this point that the notion (occurred) of simply making up ‘true’ stories and publishing them with full documentation,” Friedman writes. Mario Puzo, years before he wrote “The Godfather,” was a master of creating decisive World War II raids and brutal campaigns that nobody had heard of. One feature for a magazine did actually draw from a real-life story about a Canadian “who died after a valiant death trek through Indochina.” The magazine’s writers spiced up the story with the addition of “jungle nymphos” who went along on the march. Then when the magazine hit newsstands, the magazine learned that not only was the Canadian real, but he was the most popular minister in the Toronto area. The staff scrambled to try to head off disaster – and lawsuits. This was many years before something could be looked up online, of course, and the scrambling included phone calls to Canada. Friedman called a reporter in Toronto and determined that the minister had subsequently died during a trek into the Canadian wilderness. “I hollered out, ‘He went bear hunting and he’s dead!’ “A great cheer rang out and everyone went happily back to work.” Asked if he believed men’s adventure magazines had transcended their original roles, Deis said, “For readers who bought them when they were published, all these various aspects of MAMs were both a source of escapist entertainment and a source of information about all kinds of topics, from history to current events to sex. For readers today, they are still a source of escapist entertainment, though many of the stories, covers and interior illustrations do seem unintentionally humorous. MAMs are also interesting in terms of what they reveal about mid-20th American culture.” View the full article

From the introduction to the essay: Grady Hendrix began his career as a horror novelist leaning into parody and humor, but over the years, while he has found ways to continue to incorporate humor, his novels have gotten progressively more serious and darker. Hendrix’s stories feature a strong, often nostalgic sense of place and even stronger female protagonists overcoming dangerous, supernatural events that arise from what readers can easily identify as mundane situations. Another interesting quirk about Hendrix is his insistence on not being pigeonholed. He has stated many times that he goes out of his way to make sure every novel examines a new horror subgenre or trope, thus introducing his legions of fans to the full breadth of the genre’s offerings. Finally, Hendrix is also a proud historian of the 1970s and ’80s era of pulp horror, as demonstrated in his Bram Stoker Award–winning nonfiction survey of the era, Paperbacks from Hell. I opened my dad’s freezer and found a child’s severed arm. Behind me, Amy Jordan said, “Is there a frozen pizza or something?” The arm had been cut off mid-biceps, and the raw tufted meat had frozen into a livid red scream against its gray skin. “Or we could have sardines?” Amy opened another cabinet. “Jesus, what’s up with your dad and sardines?” My family had ignored a secret stash of canned meat in the back of a kitchen cabinet for years, and then, when my dad moved out, for some reason he took every last, dusty one of them: Spam, clams in tomato sauce, anchovies, deviled ham. Sardines. They were the only actual food Amy and I had found when we started searching his beach house kitchen for breakfast. I mean, besides a black banana on the counter and half a jar of crunchy peanut butter he kept in the fridge. Then I’d opened the freezer. Amy and I always wound up together because she and her mom had moved in around the corner last year and we went to the same school. We weren’t best friends, but we were always giving each other rides, and that week we’d been out at Wallace Stoney’s graduation party at his parents’ beach house. We were juniors, but our school was grades one through twelve and the classes were small, so we’d all known one another forever. Wallace’s parents let him take over their beach house on Kiawah for a week, and seventy of us had been out there for days smoking Southern Magic (which was supposed to get you high but never did) and funneling Coors Light in the dunes. At night everyone who wasn’t hooking up in the beds passed out on the floors, and it all started over again in the morning. I’d slept under a beach towel in a deck chair out back and woke up with the sun. I’d gone into the kitchen and found Amy opening and closing empty Domino’s boxes. We were tired and sandy and had headaches, so we decided to take off in my van before anyone woke up. When my dad moved out he’d lived in a couple of clinically depressed apartments before realizing he was paying taxes on a perfectly good beach house out on Seabrook Island, so he packed up his clothes and his sardines and moved in. Seabrook was right next door to Kiawah, and it was 8:00 a.m. on a Saturday morning, which meant my dad would already be at the hospital, so I told Amy we could stop there to shower and get breakfast. It was too early for anything to be open except gas stations, and it was a long drive back into town. “There’s Bisquick,” Amy said, opening the cabinet over the stove. “And a can of PAM.” Excerpt continues below cover reveal. My dad had wrapped the child’s arm in Saran wrap that was peeling loose, and now it lay over it like a sci-fi shroud. Its fingernails were blue and its fingers had curled into its palm. This frozen monkey paw rested on top of a Lean Cuisine (linguine with clam sauce). “Why does your dad keep his peanut butter in the fridge?” Amy asked. I don’t know. Why does he keep a child’s arm in the freezer? Years later, Jim Jameson would get caught with a child’s severed foot in a crab trap. A tropical storm had come through Charleston and washed it up on Folly Beach, and the police started asking questions about, you know, a child’s severed foot in a crab trap, and Jim Jameson came forward and said it was his. He told them he was an orthopedic surgeon and the foot possessed an interesting bone deformity. After he’d amputated it, he’d asked the parents if he could keep it to use as a teaching tool. They’d said yes, and apparently the best way to get the meat off its bones was to let the crabs strip it. When I read this in the paper I called Amy, because we’d gone to high school with Chrissy Jameson, Jim’s daughter. “You know what they did after he said that?” Amy asked. “They gave it back to him.” I never asked Chrissy about it because we didn’t really keep up. I’d had such a crush on her, though. She was soft-spoken and beautiful and super into art, and after we went to prom together everyone headed out to her grandmother’s place in Meggett. Her grandmother had been dead forever and no one had touched a thing in that house. Even the cans in the kitchen were from the seventies. After a lot of Coors Light and a bit of Southern Magic, Chrissy asked me if I wanted to see something, and she took me into the big bedroom and I thought for sure we were going to hook up because we were standing right next to the bed, but instead she opened a drawer full of human hair. From back to front, from one side to the other, the drawer over-flowed with hair, shading from dark brown to light gray. “It’s my grandmother’s,” Chrissy said. “From her brush. She saved it all her life. She thought throwing part of herself away was wrong.” We didn’t hook up that night. The following year, her mom divorced her dad and moved out to the Meggett house and turned it into an ostrich ranch. Five years after that, Jim Jameson was putting a child’s severed foot in a crab trap. When I came home from New York that year I had Thanksgiving with my dad at his favorite restaurant, a hibachi place called Chow’s Steakhouse on Highway 17. While the chef turned a stack of onion slices into a volcano on the grill, I asked my dad about Jim Jameson’s foot. “Isn’t it unethical or something?” “Crabs are the best way to get the meat off the bone,” my dad said. “Everyone’s making a fuss over nothing.” I pointed out that people ate crab out of the harbor, and there was now a greater than zero chance that the crab they were eating had eaten human flesh. My dad shrugged. “You never ate a scab?” Suddenly, I was overwhelmed with an urge to ask him about the arm. Because my dad wasn’t an orthopedic surgeon, he was a cardiologist, and there was nothing he could teach his students with a child’s severed arm. Just then, the chef catapulted a shrimp into the mouth of the little girl sitting beside us, and the whole table burst into applause. “You know what’d happen if that got lodged in her trachea?” my dad asked. I didn’t answer, because he was already pulling a ballpoint pen out of his shirt pocket. “I’d lay her down on the floor and take this pen and jam it through her windpipe, right below her trachea. Then I’d pull out the ink cartridge and blow down it and give her mouth to mouth through the hollow body of this pen until the EMS arrived.” My dad loved the idea of performing emergency surgery. When we were on an airplane and the captain asked if there were any doctors on board, my dad hit his call button like he was on Family Feud. When I was a kid we’d gone to the ballet, and halfway through the first act someone in the front row started hollering if there was a doctor in the house, and my dad practically hurtled the rows to get to them. Turned out they’d only fainted. No one could cheer him up after that, and we left at intermission. I could never figure out if his urge to perform emergency surgery was because he loved the rush or because he wanted us to see what he did for a living. I saw what he did for a living. Once. We’d taken my sister to college outside Boston and were walking back across the parking lot after dinner when we heard that sickening hollow boom of a car hitting another car. Even if you’ve never heard that sound before, you instantly know what it is. We all stopped and looked over at the dark stretch of road at the far end of the lot. It was on a blind corner, and as we watched, another car flew around it and slammed into the two wrecked cars. Then another. Then another. There was a pause, then from far away we saw a big pickup truck coming, way over the speed limit, and people on the street started shouting at the guy to stop, but he didn’t hear. He plowed into that five-car pileup at full speed. There was silence for a moment, then the people trapped in the cars started to scream. My dad ran like he was coming off the starting blocks at the four-hundred-yard dash, cardiologist division, leaving my mom and me behind. He came back to the hotel room after eleven that night, covered in blood. It was smeared up to his elbows, it was slathered across his knuckles and neck, it stained his pants. There was half a handprint on the chest of his shirt. It was the first time I ever saw my dad covered in blood. It wouldn’t be the last. _________ Excerpted from WHY I LOVE HORROR: ESSAYS ON HORROR LITERATURE, edited by Becky Siegel Spratford, forthcoming from Saga Press in September 2025. Essay copyright © 2025 by Grady Hendrix. Reprinted by permission of the publisher. All rights reserved. View the full article

While many of us may never be welcomed in another nation again once this administration is done, we can always travel in our minds! And in our fiction, much of which is oddly spaced out this year, so I’ve combined forces‚ and voila, now have enough titles to bother making a list. Some of the books on this list may make you yearn for other shores, but others feel more familiar than foreign, in ways that shed light on the enormous forces transcending national experience despite growing isolationism. Tierno Monénembo, The Lives and Deaths of Véronique Bangoura Translated by Ryan Chamberlain (Schaeffner Press) In this epic tale of violence and vengeance, the young Véronique kills her father in self-defense, entering into a life of petty crime and prostitution with her eccentric found family, as all suffer together under a dictator’s oppressive regime. Much later in her life, she’s fled to France under an assumed name, but when a comrade recognizes her, she decides to finally recount, and process, the strange details of her long life. Jean Echenoz, Command Performance Translated by Mark Polizotti (NYRB) This book is very French, by which I mean a bizarre melange of genre tropes, literary tangents, and surreal cynicism. Perhaps the best way to describe this book is as the kind of existential detective novel that would have made a great indie film in the mid-aughts (Jason Schwartzman, are you reading this?). In Command Performance, a former flight attendant takes a turn as a PI; his gross ineptitude and a series of strange coincidences then lead him to a new career in politics, and eventually, a mission to assassinate the head of his own party. Ariel Dorfman, Allegro (Other Press) Could Johann Sebastian Bach have been murdered by an unscrupulous eye doctor? And could Mozart have put the pieces together and decided to investigate the unexpected death of his beloved mentor? That is the premise of Ariel Dorfman’s immersive new novel, Allegro, divided between Mozart’s precocious childhood and disillusioned adulthood. Geetanjali Shree, Our City That Year Translated by Daisy Rockwell (HarperVia) Written in 1998, Shree’s novel issues a prescient warning against rising nationalism and the slippery slope to unspeakable crimes, a subject that feels straight out of today’s headlines. Our City That Year takes place over a single year of steadily increasing tensions between communities and a growing likelihood of anti-Muslim atrocities, as three horrified intellectuals and one knowing old man try to make sense of the moment. Can they bear witness to its unfolding disasters, while retaining their sense of humanity? I highlighted just about every line in this book, and I can’t think of a better novel to make sense of our current era. Maud Ventura, Make Me Famous Translated by Gretchen Schmid (HarperVia) In this gripping saga of a pop star’s grueling rise to the top, fame is not for the faint-hearted. Maud Ventura blew me away with My Husband (especially that last page!) and Make Me Famous, a Highsmith-esque thriller following a singer’s brutal, callous efforts to become pop star royalty, should be just as viciously delightful. –MO Daniel Kehlmann, The Director Translated by Ross Benjamin (Simon and Schuster / Summit Books) The new novel from the internationally renowned Kehlmann centers on the turbulent life and art of G.W. Pabst, the Austrian screenwriter and director. Kehlmann’s novel traces Pabst’s journey fleeing from Nazi Germany, through the Hollywood doldrums, and back to Austria, where he’s soon recruited by Joseph Goebbels to produce propaganda films for the Reich. –DM Franck Bouysse, Clay Translated by Laura Vergnaud (Other Press) Franck Bouysse has done it again! By which I mean that Bouysse has written another truly disturbing noir exploration of the depths of human behavior. In Clay, a French farmhouse in the midst of WWI, bereft of its fighting-age men and plow-pulling horses, is the claustrophobic setting for a slow-burn psychological thriller. Bouysse examines the nature of conflict and the weight of history through a limited cast of characters, featuring a struggling mother, her adolescent son, and their resentful neighbor, spared from the draft but not from his own violence, as they grow ever closer to a devastating clash of personalities, ideals, and resentments. Yiğit Karaahmet, Summerhouse Translated by Nicholas Glastonbury (Soho) Yigit Karaahmet’s new novel is many things: a stunning love story, a thrilling mystery, and a luscious ode to a gorgeous landscape. As Summerhouse begins, we encounter an aging queer couple who have achieved the near-impossible: 40 years together, happy and free from persecution. Their private, luxurious home on a remote island is the key to their success as a couple, but when a family moves in next door for the summer with a rebellious, and gorgeous, teenage son in tow, all bets are off and the couple will have to fight harder than ever before to secure their future. View the full article

An important write-up - book marked it. One question though: "Agents getting axed by grinders is equally meaningless.". I Googled "what is a grinder in book industry" and from that felt amused yet uninformed. Thank you. David

Perhaps something like forge your plot in the fires of your (ensemble) characters' will? (enclosed image of key protagonist generated by David Wollover in Mid-Journey)

Now, more than ever, it’s crucial to read queer voices, and what better way than with a page-turning thriller, an ingenious mystery, an engrossing psychological suspense, or a charming quozy? Queer Crime Writers* has curated a winter-to-spring roundup, showcasing the genre’s vibrant diversity. From historical mysteries to sci-fi thrillers, these books span various subgenres and thrilling locations. In A Lethal Walk in Lakeland, Chase investigates a murder in England’s Lake District, while Waters of Destruction takes Val to stormy Hawaii for an investigation. Blood of Innocents follows NYPD detectives in a high-profile New York City murder case, and Buried Seeds delves into murder and corruption in Los Angeles. In Pride or Die, a high school LGBTQ+ club is framed for murder, while Academy of Unholy Boys explores toxic friendships at a summer camp. Small-town mysteries include Evil All Along, where Dash investigates a hometown murder, and A Long Time Gone, where Deputy Ben Packard reopens a cold case tied to his brother’s disappearance. Other highlights include The Lord’s Gambit, set in Victorian London, and Murder by Memory, which blends sci-fi and mystery aboard an interstellar ship. *Queer Crime Writers is an organization that advocates for LGBTQIA+ crime fiction authors and creates community for them. Winter Highlights A Lethal Walk in Lakeland, by Nicholas George, 1/21 Chase has two compelling reasons for returning to England: a group walk along the famed Coast to Coast trail in the picturesque Lake District, and a chance to deepen his relationship with Mike, the handso me Devonshire coroner he met on his last trip. But the journey turns rocky thanks to the Uptons—a wealthy family from Texas whose squabbling antics continually overshadow the scenic surroundings. Brock Upton, his pint-sized wife, three siblings, and a family friend each give a different reason for joining the tour, and Chase’s instincts tell him they’re all lying. When one of the Uptons is fatally poisoned, years of secrets and grudges emerge. In the second book of the A Walk Through England Mystery series, only Chase can uncover the killer in their midst before tragedy befalls the tour again. A Long Time Gone, by Joshua Moehling, 2/4 Decades after his brother disappeared into the cold Minnesota night, Deputy Ben Packard is pulled back into the mystery that has haunted him since childhood. On leave after a shooting and cut off from department resources, he follows a new lead that may finally reveal what happened all those years ago. But when a strange and unexplained death surfaces—one that may be connected to his brother’s disappearance—Packard is drawn even deeper. Set against the stark winter landscape of Sandy Lake, Where the Dead Sleep is the third novel in the Ben Packard series, featuring a complex, deeply human investigator who challenges expectations of both law enforcement and queer identity. Blood of the Innocents, by Catherine Maiorisi, 2/13 Catherine Maiorisi returns this year with the fifth installment of the Chiara Corelli mystery series. In this gripping police procedural, NYPD detectives Corelli and P.J. Parker investigate the high-profile murder of rising pop star Alessandra Moreau, found dead in the home of New York State Senator Leigh Drayman, a prominent trans woman activist. Moreau, however, harbors a closely guarded secret shared with only three people—the rising star was transgender—just like the senator. What begins as a focused investigation into three suspects expands when thirteen similar murders of trans women emerge, along with two cold cases from decades past. Corelli and Parker must unravel years of deception before another woman becomes the next victim. March The Lord’s Gambit, Neil Plakcy, 3/10 The fourth book in the Ormond Yard Romantic series—historical mystery novels that can each be read as a standalone—is set in Victorian London and follows penniless Jewish scholar Israel Kupersmit and gentleman Reed Lydney as they investigate the suspicious death of Reed’s brother-in-law. What appears to be a nobleman’s suicide linked to gambling debts soon reveals itself as part of a far-reaching conspiracy of international espionage. Israel’s gift for mathematics and Reed’s diplomatic connections reveal a web of blackmail and Russian spies at the heart of London society, drawing them into the shadows of the Great Game against Russia. Their shared love of poetry sparks a quiet romance as they peel back layers of deception and uncover treachery at the highest levels of power. Murder by Memory, by Olivia Waite 3/18 Near the top deck of the interstellar generation ship Fairweather, Dorothy Gentleman wakes up in a body that isn’t hers—just as a murder is discovered. As one of the ship’s detectives, she’s used to untangling complex schemes, but this time, someone is not only killing bodies—they’re erasing minds from the Library. In this sci-fi cozy, Dorothy suspects her brilliant but chaotic nephew Ruthie may be involved, or perhaps the sultry yarn shop owner—ex-girlfriend of the body Dorothy now inhabits—knows more than she lets on. With murder now a permanent possibility aboard the Fairweather, Dorothy must uncover the truth before the killer, who’s had 300 years to prepare, strikes again. April Academy of Unholy Boys, by David Fitzpatrick 4/1 In this debut novel, set in the affluent, idyllic shoreline town of Gently, quiet 16-year-old Jay Souther attends Football Summer Camp, where he’s quickly befriended by two seniors: the charismatic Foster Gold and Latino All-American Bear Santos. Drawn to their magnetic personalities and the promise of brotherhood, Jay becomes increasingly entangled in their hedonistic world—and cut off from his longtime friends, fellow sophomore Basil Sous and senior Tuck Reis. As Foster’s hold over Jay deepens, Basil and Tuck fear Jay may have bitten off more than he can chew, so they join forces to pull him back from the boy’s hypnotic, nearly cult-like sway before tragedy strikes. Waters of Destruction, by Leslie Karst 4/1 Retired caterer Valerie Corbin and her wife Kristen have settled permanently on the beautiful—but storm-prone—Big Island of Hawaii. As they enjoy island life with their new dog, Pua, they’ve made friends with local restaurant manager Sachiko and her partner Isaac, though they still feel a bit adrift. When Sachiko asks Val to fill in for a missing bartender, Val dusts off her cocktail shaker and happily agrees—it’s a chance to meet more locals and catch up on gossip. But things take a dark turn when the bartender, Hank, who vanished after a team-building retreat, is found dead at the bottom of a waterfall—and suspicion falls on Sachiko. In An Orchid Isle Mystery Book Two, Val plunges into the investigation to uncover the truth. Evil All Along, by Gregory Ashe 4/7 They say love makes fools of us all—and Dash Bannon is no exception. It’s his second Halloween in Hastings Rock, and he’s hoping for a low-key season filled with candy, friends, and quiet nights with a certain deputy. But when his friend Keme is arrested for murder, Dash is thrown into a chilling mystery. The evidence is damning, and the town is quick to turn on Keme, convinced he’s dangerous. Determined to clear his friend’s name, Dash sets out to uncover the truth. But the real killer may be watching. The Last Picks Series Book 8 brings murder, mistrust, and a Halloween no one will forget. No Time for Duplicity, by D.J. Ciccarello 4/8 This deeply disturbing psychological thriller is the third standalone novel by D.J. Ciccarello. It explores the line rarely crossed when humans commit murder. Parker Grant is a young therapist living in Atlanta. When a client from his couple’s therapy is killed in Parker’s condo, his life begins to crumble. Mysterious gifts begin to arrive at his office, which incriminate him in the murder of the client. Haunted by memories he can’t recall, manipulated by friends, Parker is thrown into a haze of mistrust and madness. Facing the realization that he may be the villain in this tale, he must protect his secrets at all costs. Pride or Die, by CL Montblanc 4/15 In Pride or Die, a satirical sapphic YA mystery, the LGBTQ+ club at a Texas high school is framed for attempting to murder the head cheerleader. Seventeen-year-old Eleanora Finkel, eager to finish her senior year and escape Texas, leads the group as they work to clear their names and find the real culprit. But Eleanora, riddled with anxiety and distracted by her growing attraction to the case’s cute victim, is far from a professional detective. Armed only with her trusty crochet hook, she and her unlikely sleuthing friends must face bullies, unwind the mystery, and ensure the survival of their club for future queer teens in their small town. Buried Seeds, by Verónica Gutiérrez 4/22 Verónica Gutiérrez returns with Buried Seeds, the second book in the Yolanda Ávila Mystery series. Former LAPD cop turned private investigator, Yolanda stumbles onto a bloody murder scene, thrusting her into a race to save two innocent men: Gamaliel Campamoche, an undocumented immigrant facing deportation, and his employer, Kinji Abe, a WWII American concentration camp survivor. The investigation pulls Yolanda and her diverse team into the dark corners of a changing city, where real estate sharks circle neighborhoods and activists harbor secrets of their own. As Yolanda peels back layers of deception, she uncovers how greed and desperation can turn neighbors into enemies—and enemies into killers. The protective spirits of Yolanda’s mother and uncle seem to be stirring again, sending warnings she can’t ignore. With the body count rising, Yolanda must separate truth from illusion before another life is claimed. View the full article

Stories about mothers and daughters are everywhere, but the endless nuances of this intense relationship are fertile ground for thriller writers. Many of my novels address different dynamics of this relationship, but in my new thriller When She Was Gone I look at the tricky role of the estranged mother. My protagonist Rose has been denied access to her child by the cruel actions of her ex-partner, however, she has taken up the cause for other women in similar scenarios and has worked as a police officer, a hostage negotiator and with domestic violence victims. So when Rose finds out that her grown-up daughter Louisa has vanished from a remote Australian beach with the two young children in her care, she knows it’s her moment to step up and push her way into the investigation, in the hopes of discovering what’s happened and recovering the missing trio. Researching this story made me think of other outstanding thrillers where different kinds of mothers have needed to fight for their daughters in order to keep them safe or to discover what has happened to them. Here are five of the best: What Happened to Nina by Dervla McTiernan In this ripper of a story, Nina’s hard-working mother Leanne is left desperate to discover what happened to her daughter when Nina suddenly goes missing after a weekend away with her boyfriend Simon. The problem is that Simon’s mother Jamie is just as determined to protect him, no matter what he did, and decides to employ a reputation management team to direct the attention back onto Nina’s parents. McTiernan cleverly plays with plot and reveals in this nail-biting story, which leaves Leanne struggling to keep her life together as she fights for answers, while trying to protect her younger daughter from the fallout too. The Push by Ashley Audrain In this brilliantly executed, chilling thriller, a struggling mother becomes increasingly convinced that her young daughter is displaying sociopathic behaviour. But is it all in Blythe’s head? Her husband Fox seems to think so, ensuring Blythe begins to question her own judgement – and her abilities as a mother – more and more. As her life enters freefall, things take an even darker turn when Violet’s behaviour worsens – and Audrain delivers both chills and heartrending scenes with an equally unforgettable punch. The Last Thing He Told Me by Laura Dave When Hannah Michael’s husband Owen suddenly disappears without warning, he leaves behind a cryptic message asking Hannah to protect her teenage stepdaughter Bailey. Although Bailey is initially wary and hostile to Hannah, it soon becomes clear that Owen isn’t who they’d thought he was, and the two women work together to uncover the reasons why the man they love has disappeared. The Crash by Freida McFadden Pregnancy is often used in thrillers to up the stakes around a character’s physical and mental vulnerability, but also because the fierce, primal urge a mother has to protect her child means she’ll fight back against every kind of danger. In The Crash, McFadden’s character Tegan is 8 months pregnant when she ends up having a car accident in a blizzard, which leaves her with a broken ankle. She’s rescued by a mysterious couple who take her to their cabin, and things only get worse from there. Wrong Place, Wrong Time by Gillian McAllister Right outside her front window, Jen witnesses her son Todd murder a total stranger on Halloween, but when she wakes the next day she has gone back in time and the murder has yet to happen. As she continues to wake up at different points in their past, she realizes that somewhere in these revisitings lies the trigger for Todd’s crime – and it becomes her mission to find it and stop these this terrible event from happening. I love this premise, and McAllister delivers a clever and unique read. Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng A young girl goes missing after a house fire, and the story travels back in time to flesh out the details of what happened. There are three centralized mother characters here, and more in the background, all fighting for their daughters in different ways – with their various states of prosperity playing a huge part in the choices available to them. This book is a beautifully fleshed out social commentary on status and wealth as well as an exceptional mystery. *** View the full article

I have high standards for vacation reads. I’ve never been one of those people who saw a trip to the beach as an excuse to read something that only required half my attention. Even if I’m reading on a plane or by the pool, I need a smart, well-written page-turner, and a couple of years ago, I realized that I could never go wrong with a novel by Alafair Burke. The New York Times-bestselling author of twenty novels, including two series and many standalones, she manages to combine characters I’m eager to learn more about with tightly-woven plots full of breathless twists. (Her latest, The Note, kept me up hours past my bedtime.) In this interview, she introduces me to another author I’ll be following from now on, Alison Gaylin. Why did you choose What Remains of Me by Alison Gaylin? I love Alison Gaylin’s work, and this is one of my favorite books of hers. I love a two-timeline mystery, where things that you thought were going to stay in the past creep into the present. And it’s a very complex and layered plot, with lots and lots of twists, and I think she handles it really masterfully. The main character is Kelly Lund, whom we meet in both timelines. In the first, she’s a teenager rebelling against her parents; in the second, she’s a convicted murderer who has recently been released after many years in prison. Part of what’s interesting about Kelly is how unremarkable she is: unlike her twin sister Catherine (who dies before the novel begins), she doesn’t have much interest in being a movie star. What do you think makes Kelly a compelling character? We know about the murder from the beginning, so Kelly has this mystery about her from the opening pages. Then you see her in the present as an adult, after she’s released from prison. She’s trying to live a normal life with her husband, but then she gets pulled back into the orbit of these Hollywood figures that she’d tried to leave in the past. That was one of my favorite parts of this book, this atmosphere of the Hollywood elite and these details about how their world works that I don’t think most of us are privy to. In the later timeline, Kelly is married to Shane Marshall, the son of a famous actor and the brother of Kelly’s best friend/arch-nemesis, Bellamy Marshall. Why and how is the Marshall family important to Kelly’s story? We learn early on that Kelly’s mother is very anti-Hollywood. She worked as a makeup artist, and Kelly’s father, who’s out of the picture, was a stuntman, so they were very much on the periphery of that world. When Kelly becomes friendly with the Marshalls, and eventually marries one of them, that family represents everything that was aspirational but also repellent. There’s something obviously appealing about glitz and glamor and fame, but the distrust of it was also ingrained in Kelly by her mother. It’s scary to her, but also kind of irresistible. Kelly was convicted of killing the director John McFadden, the father of one of her best friends. John is described as an auteur who is completely absorbed by his work, but there seems to be some kind of commentary about being so obsessed with making art that you don’t have time to care about other people. In a way, it’s an uncomfortable idea for writers– that caring too much about your work might give you an excuse to be a bad person. Is that how you read McFadden’s character, and do you think this is a risk for artists in real life? I think that’s a character that many of us recognize, right? Their talent or their commitment to their artistry can sometimes provide a cover or an excuse for some pretty inexcusable things. Like everyone will say, “Oh, he’s so brilliant, you can’t expect decent behavior from him.” We all like to think we’re dedicated to our work, and absorbed in our work, but if it takes away from your moral sense, that becomes a problem. And if there are enough of those people, you have a world where the usual rules just don’t seem to apply. When the Weinstein story came out, and then the floodgates opened, it became very clear that there were people in this industry getting away with horrendous behavior. We know now that it was an open secret and nobody complained, because the mindset seemed to be, “Well, this is Hollywood, so different rules apply.” It’s such a fantastic setting for a mystery, because the potential witnesses and the potential complainants may also have slightly skewed views of right and wrong. So the consequences of speaking up might be very different than they would be if you set that story in Kansas. I feel like I’ve been reading a lot of novels set in L.A. lately, and of course there have always been so many great crime writers there, from Raymond Chandler on. Is there some specific quality to L.A. crime novels that is unique to that setting? I’ve been setting novels in East Hampton recently, and it seems to me like a smaller version of the same phenomenon. Even if you’ve never been to the Hamptons, or to L.A., you feel like you know it. The reader knows what it stands for, and you can take advantage of that as a fiction writer. To the reader, it’s fun to feel like you’re getting a little glimpse behind the scenes, like you get to see what the parties are really like. Then Alison is able to expose the seamy underside—the paparazzi everywhere, and the kids who have been corrupted by their access to resources and to fame. And then to take an insecure girl like Kelly and drop her into that makes for a really good story. There are multiple twists and reveals in this story, and without giving any spoilers, I thought Gaylin handled them so well. What did you think? Alison is one of my good friends, and we talk a lot about process. I think our books read similarly. I’m not sure exactly how to explain that, but there’s kind of a humorous tone to them. There’s a lot of pop culture in there, and we like a multi-layered reveal, with lots of plot twists. Constructing a plot like that is almost like a little brain teaser. You’ve got to work out how you’re going to time all of those reveals. I haven’t talked to her specifically about how she constructed this novel, but because we’ve talked a lot generally about craft, I know that she’s always asking herself, “How can I twist this one more time? How can I put in one more thing that the reader won’t see coming?” And I think it pays off so well in this book. That suggests to me that she’s trying to surprise herself as well as the reader, right? Is that something you’re trying to do in your own work as well? I’m in the process of beating out my various plot reveals for the next book now, and sometimes I have to wonder, “Have I thought about it too much? Like, is it one too many turns of the Rubik’s cube?” But in the end, it’s really about the motivation, and about the characterization behind those motives. If you just take a plot and strip it down to its bones, and you don’t explain the dynamics behind the characters’ decisions, it’s not that interesting. But when you understand the reasons why people are doing what they’re doing, and the way it’s all interrelated, that’s the beauty of it. I always think about that line how Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did, and she did it backwards in high heels. Great crime writers do all the things that literary writers do, but with a plot that keeps readers turning pages. Yeah, things have to actually happen. People who don’t read a lot of mysteries might think that they all follow a standard linear plot line, where somebody finds a body and then a detective comes and starts interviewing people, but Alison is doing something much more complex than that. You’ll be reading a scene about Kelly in high school, and you’ll hear a stray detail that you won’t realize was significant until much later. I think the structure of this book is so clever. In some mysteries I read, there will be a this really clunky dump of exposition—like someone will be folding laundry, and then they’ll remember something for three pages. In this novel, the scenes unfold seamlessly, and yet they contain so much information. I’m so glad you suggested this title. I’ve always meant to read Gaylin’s The Collective, but now I want to go back and binge everything she’s written. The Collective is amazing. The title refers to this group of people who have had horrible things happen to them and their family and never got justice, and they find each other and start working together. I think she wrote that during a time when we were all becoming aware of the collective anger among women about people getting away with bad behavior and never facing consequences. Her most recent book, We Are Watching You, has kind of a similar set-up to What Remains of Me, where the main character has something happen to her as a child that affects her current life, and she ends up as a target of this group of online conspiracy theorists. It’s very scary and creepy because it shows the allure and the danger of these online groups. It’s very timely. Is there anything else you’ve learned from this novel that you might apply in your own work? Rereading this book reminded me that you really can’t detach character from plot, and also that experimentations with structure can pay off. It’s not just the switches of point of view—she includes chapters of a true-crime book written by one of the characters, and news articles. It reminds me that a reader will go along with you with those experiments if you do them well. It’s so intricate. I would love to see what her plot board looks like. Laura Lippman does that really well too, and I think she’s even posted pictures of, like, different-colored Post It notes in lines on the floor. I’m a whiteboard person and an index card person myself, but right now, my board is pretty empty. Are the early stages a fun part of the process for you? No, it’s horrible. I have a very hard time starting because I’m always convinced I don’t know enough. And I had to literally write a note to myself yesterday saying, You knew less than this when you started The Wife. I have to remind myself that sometimes it helps if you don’t know too much going in, because your characters don’t know too much either. Most of the writers I know say that it always feels the same way—like, “How did I ever do this?” But Harlan Coben always says it’s easier to fix it than it is to write it the first time. You can always make it better. View the full article

Season 2 of Poker Face is coming to Peacock on May 8th! And we have more good news: we now have a clip from one of the episodes… and not just an episode, but the episode in which Cynthia Erivo plays sextuplets (or quintuplets… I’m not yet clear). The episode is titled “The Game is a Foot” (love that), and Natasha Lyonne released a clip of it to her Instagram and X accounts. Rian Johnson also spoke with The Independent about how they filmed the multiple Cynthia Erivos onscreen together without the use of CGI. Here at CrimeReads, we love practical effects! Just one more month, and then we’re there! View the full article

Sharon Derrick drove an hour north on Interstate 45 through the Houston suburban sprawl and the piney woods of Sam Houston National Forest to a prison in a rural county north of Huntsville. On the way, she found herself tuning her audio system to a 1970s channel on Sirius XM. In 1972, the year when Mark Scott was abducted and murdered, Roberta Flack had climbed the charts with the love song “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face,” America was singing about a trip through the desert on “A Horse with No Name,” and Neil Young was searching for a “Heart of Gold.” The forensic anthropologist rarely visited prisoners as part of her ID work. She had prepared for this interview by rereading 1973 statements Henley, Corll’s teenaged accomplice, had already given police and journalists. She’d even located cryptic notes made from a session when Henley had agreed to undergo hypnosis in the 1980s and record mumbled recollections into a microphone for Dr. Joe, Harris County’s legendary ME. Derrick had a mission. She wanted to know everything that Wayne Henley recalled about the Lost Boys, the remaining unidentified victims, no matter how small. “I wanted to see if we had other mistaken IDs,” she said. “And I wanted to know what else he had to tell me so I could try to track people.” Derrick parked her BMW in the lot outside the prison, leaving her cellphone inside her car as required. She went through the prison ID check and X-­ray machine, passed through two sets of autolocking electronic doors topped with razor wire, and then was greeted by an official who ushered her into a windowless office stripped of any adornment. She’d been allowed to bring in blank pieces of paper, a pen, and her files, but no tape recorder. She’d barely taken a seat at a swivel chair behind the desk when a guard brought in Henley. Once he was inside, the guard departed, leaving Derrick alone in a locked room with a convicted killer serving six life sentences. Henley attempted to break the ice with a joke. “When I first got here, other prisoners kept dumping boxes of cereal on my chair in the mess hall,” he said, grinning. “Since I was a serial killer.” Derrick smiled but didn’t laugh. In preparation for this meeting, she had donned the same kind of mental armor she used to stomach particularly troubling cases in an autopsy suite. This was Derrick’s third visit to a Texas prison on this case. She’d sparred with Corll’s other accomplice – David Brooks – in two prior interviews. But Henley spoke freely. Henley’s voice took on the folksy tone of a practiced Texas story-teller as he launched into the gory tale of how he’d murdered teens he’d known, including childhood playmates and junior high friends. Derrick struggled to keep up, scribbling facts in longhand on blank sheets of paper and tried to maintain eye contact. “I wanted to show him that I was interested in him, because that’s part of the game. He wants people to be interested in him,” she recalls. Derrick jotted down the notes on victims’ names, forms of homicidal violence, and burial sites. She would later compare his statements to autopsy reports and other records in her growing collections and look for inconsistencies that could be clues to unidentified persons or mistakes. Derrick’s take was that Henley had been nothing but a punk “with acne and a bad mustache” until Corll boosted his sense of self-importance. “He was part of something—­ part of something secret, and part of him embraced that,” she later observed. Henley admitted he knew Mark Scott , a boy he’d named as a murder vicitim in August 1973, better than most others. Mark was Henley’s neighbor and former schoolmate. And Mark had attended plenty of parties at Corll’s ever-changing addresses, Henley said. Corll ­really liked Mark, but he turned against him in April 1972 for reasons Henley did not explain. “Dean wanted him out of the way,” Henley told Derrick. For whatever reason, Corll thought Mark had been “talking too much,” Henley said. On command, Henley went to pick up Mark, who went willingly to a place Corll was renting that year. Derrick knew horrible things happened in the apartment on Schuler Street, Inside the apartment, Mark was quickly overpowered and hand-cuffed. Then Corll took Mark to a bedroom and bound his feet and wrists to the torture board. Corll kept the seventeen-­ year-­old captive for two nights and one long day, to torment and repeatedly rape him, Henley said. On Corll’s command, Henley and Brooks both got high and participated in the sessions. “Mark Scott was messed with. He was beaten and burned with cigarettes. All three of us did it. Dean hated him,” Henley said. Henley, knowing that Mark was particularly proud of his long blond hair, decided to shave his head, letting the locks slowly drift to the floor. Derrick thought she finally spotted a smidgeon of regret when Henley spoke about Mark Scott’s murder. “You could tell it ­really bothered him,” Derrick remembered. The story was “gut-­wrenching.” On the last night of his life, when the rest were sleeping, Mark Scott somehow managed to contort his long muscular frame, gradually loosen the ropes that bound him to the plywood, and free one hand. In this moment of mortal peril, he managed to reach the rotary phone to dial a friend, but he mumbled into the receiver, likely with a gag still in his mouth, and couldn’t make himself understood. Later, he pocketed a small knife that his captors had used to cut him. Mark hid the weapon and made one last desperate attempt at self-­defense when the rest returned. “I grabbed it and then he kind of gave up,” Henley said. After that, all three took turns shooting Scott with a pellet gun, and Corll raped Scott again. It may have seemed like a crazy dream to Wayne Henley, who’d been high on paint fumes and pot, until Corll decreed that Henley needed to “pop his cherry” and make the kill. At that point in their conversation, Wayne Henley fidgeted in his bench seat and looked pained as he provided vivid details of how he’d tried to strangle and then shot Mark, as his friend begged for his life. After that, Wayne came to like killing. “I killed them because Dean said to. I guess I enjoyed it or just didn’t care anymore or I was just trying to please Dean. It was not something I was forced to do.” Derrick had observed many horrible souvenirs of human suffering in autopsy suites and in graves, but the dead didn’t speak of their pain. Her rare encounters with killers typically involved only a fleeting glance at a defendant in a courtroom whenever she testified as an impartial expert witness. As Henley retold the intimate and horrifying story of Mark Scott’s murder, she felt flashes of terror, anger, and disgust. Then Wayne Henley repeated a different story Derrick had read about. Two days after killing Dean Corll, he spent hours searching for graves amid sand dunes with David Brooks, In 1973, Henley had insisted that officials called off the search too soon – before all the bodies were recovered. He told Derrick the same thing. Mark Scott’s body had never been found. “You don’t have him,” he said. ___________________________________ Excerpted from The Scientist and the Serial Killer by Lise Olsen Copyright © 2025 by Lise Olsen. Excerpted by permission of Random House. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher. View the full article