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The Backlist: Revisiting Vicki Hendricks’ ‘Miami Purity’ with Alex Segura
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I didn’t know what to expect from a novel called Miami Purity. Was it about nuns, or one of those creepy abstinence-only pledges for teens? I had no idea that the novel was a neo-noir cult classic, one that Megan Abbott in her introduction lauds for “its audacious and subversive play with a tradition it…
Bigfoot Is in the Woods, Our Hearts and Our Nightmares
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What pop culture figure of the 1970s had his own board game, guest-starred on “The Six Million Dollar Man” and terrorized backwoods campers with his screams in the night and his skunky smell? You know him, you love him … Bigfoot. In the 1970s, Bigfoot was a pop culture thing that kids were unduly worried…
A Lovely Place to Die: Favorite Settings for a Charming Murder
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A twitching curtain conceals a pair of prying eyes. A friendly smile belies a litany of terrible sins. And eventually, someone is going to find a dead body on their well-manicured lawn. The small town is a mainstay of cozy mysteries, and for good reason. Readers flock to the genre precisely because of the juxtaposition…
Texas: Home to Bizarre True Crimes (And So Many Serial Killers)
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True crime writers hold the state of Texas in special regard, not so much for the volume, or even variety, of newsworthy crimes committed there, but for the often strange character of Texas lawbreakers, their quirks, their gruesome excesses and the sometimes striking originality of their offenses. “Texas doesn’t have more crime than other places,”…