Reading
Thrillers Where Natural Disaster Looms Large
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It’s a perennial question at readings and signings: Where do you get the ideas for your books? I usually mumble something that amounts to (phrased politely), “I pull them…
Kenneth Branagh and De-Poiroting Hercule Poirot
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A man with his back to the world waits for two impossible and perfect eggs. He follows an officer to the transport as a dream-generated locomotive leaves the story….
An Argument for the Unintentional Villain
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A good villain is essential to a good mystery. He or she is the author of the crime, the driver of the plot, and the key to solving the…
Healing Through Horror
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Oh, the Horror! It doesn’t often come up but when it does, people are often surprised when I tell them I never set out to be a horror writer….
Inside the Early Days of Investigating the Murdaugh Family
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Before Mandy Matney was the award-winning host of the #1 Murdaugh Murders Podcast, she was a local Hilton Head reporter practiced in viral stories about sharks and tornados. Was…
Storm Warning: Excerpt and Cover Reveal
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5:44 PM Rain smacks my windshield. The wipers fight a losing battle. The Elantra’s on its last legs, and there’s so much water I can barely see the nearly…
How the True (and Still Unsolved) 1986 Assassination of the Swedish Prime Minister Inspired My Nordic Noir Novel
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The movie was a spur-of-the-moment idea. The prime minister had had a stressful week. Seeing a comedy with his wife and son and his son’s girlfriend was just the…
A Journey Into the Heart of the Everglades, and the Alligator Poacher Sting that Divided a Community
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In January 2020, I drove down from Orlando to the easternmost edge of the Everglades and booked a room in the neon-dazzled Miccosukee Casino & Resort, a hotel in…
What Spy Fiction Taught Me About Breaking the Rules
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As a kid, I broke what I like to think was a normal amount of rules. There was the time in kindergarten when we were sitting on the rug…
Difficult Women In Historical Fiction: A Reading List
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I try to be good but fail every day. My natural state is lazy, self-indulgent, resentful, and dangerously avoidant. The damage I’ve done in life has mainly come from…