Features
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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,…
Some Conspiracy Theories Surrounding the Royal House of Windsor
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One of the joys of writing historical fiction as opposed to non-fiction is that the author can take a well-reasoned conspiracy theory and run with it, imagining how such…
The Girl and the Faun: Eden Phillpotts, His Crime Fiction and His Strange Relationship with His Daughter Adelaide
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“No biography or autobiography is true, because no one in his senses tells the truth about himself….Whoever wants to know me can find me in my work.” –Eden Phillpotts…
The Gilded Age: On Invention and Excess
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“We don’t have a choice in the matter, Mr. McAllistar, we must go where history takes us.” In the HBO Gilded Age series, these were Bertha Russell’s brave words…