Features
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…
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…
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…
Shakespeare’s First Folio has been Stolen Many, Many Times
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Late at night on July 13th, 1972, an unknown person entered the University of Manchester’s Library and violently smashed the plate glass top of an exhibition case, stealing the…
What To Read While You’re Waiting for the Next Season of Yellowjackets
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How do you know someone just finished binging both seasons of Yellowjackets? A. They roam around in a daze grabbing random people and asking, “Who is pit girl? Who…