crime
(Un)Safe Harbor: Thrillers Set in Remote Island Locations
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I have spent a lot of summer weekends on an island in Lake Huron’s Georgian Bay. It’s a beautiful, wild, windswept place that can, as Gull Island does in my book, feel utterly remote. When Jude makes her way there, it’s early April, cold, and lonely. Her mother, now suffering from dementia, has asked her…
An Appreciation of Gardening Detectives
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Gardening detectives, both professional and amateur, abound in crime fiction and they appeared early on. Wilkie Collins introduced the first horticulturally inclined investigator in The Moonstone. The serialized story first appeared in the United Kingdom in January 1868 in Charles Dickens’s periodical All the Year Round and simultaneously in Harper’s Weekly in the United States….
Cozy Mysteries with Furry Sidekicks
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I have a confession to make. I have a mad crush on my neighbor. Whenever I see him sprinting in my direction, my heart swells and I can’t hold back a smile. His eyes are as blue as a cloudless day, and his gleaming coat…Oh—did I neglect to mention something? My neighbor, Benzo, is a…
7 Crime Novels Set in Sin City
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Like many of my books, it started with a seed of an idea: a businessman wakes up in a hotel room that isn’t his to find a dead woman in the bathtub. From there, bits and pieces began to materialize—who the businessman was, who the woman was, etc.—but the one thing that took a while…
Writing a Domestic Survival Thriller
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I’ve always been obsessed with survival stories—people braving the elements, or out-scheming malevolent captors or striving to survive the end of the world. The apocalyptic trope might be my favorite of the bunch, as I never grow tired of the unique ways writers imagine the unwinding of modern society, and how those at the end…
The Hike
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Liz strode across the valley, sun on her face, long grass brushing her lower legs. The air smelled of ozone and pine. She smiled: they were out here, the four of them, hiking beneath a wide, blue Norwegian sky, tents on their backs! She felt strong and fit, her hiking boots sturdy on the even,…
On Crime and Its Discontents
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The first crime was the most defining moment in the history of the human. It was not Cain’s murder. That was defining too. But the first crime began in the realm of the numinous. It could only be deemed an act of spirit. Philosophers and religionists and mystics struggle to define it. The closest anyone…
When True Crime Meets Police Brutality
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In 2016, journalist Amelia McDonell-Parry and I were asked to look into the death of Freddie Gray for the Undisclosed podcast, a series that focused on wrongful convictions. Gray had been killed in Baltimore police custody the year before, which led to mass protests and riots and became a national news story. State’s Attorney Marilyn…
Celebrating the Iconic Suspense of Lois Duncan
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I still own three of Lois Duncan’s books. Growing up, I read so many, but these are the three I have left: Daughters of Eve, Stranger with My Face, and Summer of Fear. The covers are creased and falling apart, and the pages are so fragile that they tear when I try to turn them,…
My First Thriller: Jeneva Rose Is in Her Own World
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Jeneva Rose is a whirlwind. When the publishing world didn’t work for her, she created her own. Like most aspiring authors, she first took the conventional route to hoped-for literary success. For her efforts, agents and publishers turned her down a combined 500 times. After she finally connected, she fired her agent before she found…