novel
Books In Which Rich People (Think They Can) Get Away With Murder
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Having money offers many privileges. Beautiful clothes, houses, and spouses. Glossy lives, glossy hair, and the odd glossy-coated pony. Better healthcare and a better diet full of perfectly balanced macro and micronutrients. The rich may live longer, but they are not immortals. They are not untouchable. The Other Half, my debut novel, features a love-to-loathe…
Fall’s Best International Fiction
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Sorry, folks—we got a little behind with the column, but there’s been so many wonderful new novels in translation coming out this fall, I had to do at least one more new release roundup before the end of the year. Below, you’ll find an eclectic melange of mystery, thriller, and horror, with plenty of cross-overs…
Learning to Be Lost (and Found) in Fiction and in Life
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It’s 1986, and I’m lost in the forest. I’m ten years old, huddled at the base of a Ponderosa pine at the far reaches of Silver Lake, California, one of innumerous small, high Alpine lakes strewn across the Sierra Nevada mountains like blue-green jewels in a tangled necklace. It’s getting dark, and I haven’t seen…
Brave Women in Mysterious Circumstances: A Reading List
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When I was 12 or 13, I read a book called The Other Side of Dark by Joan Lowery Nixon. There wasn’t a ton of YA in those days (this was before cell phones and streaming music, back when we had to look up information in encyclopedias and dinosaurs roamed the earth) so whenever a…
The Backlist: Alex Finlay and Polly Stewart Revisit ‘I Am Pilgrim,’ by Terry Hayes
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Everyone who has ever tried to write crime fiction understands the importance of pacing. It’s not enough to have a plot that sounds exciting on the jacket copy—getting the plot to move in a way that keeps the reader breathlessly turning pages is another matter altogether. When I first read Alex Finlay’s work, I understood…
Queen of the Supermarket
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There’s a wonderful world where all you desire And everything you’ve longed for is at your fingertips Where the bittersweet taste of life is at your lips Where aisles and aisles of dreams await you –Queen of the Supermarket, Bruce Springsteen, 2009 Last year crime writer Duane Swierczynski, author of the forthcoming California Bear, mentioned…
Why New Zealand Noir?
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Several years ago, I was sitting in a café with a group of fellow New Zealand writers, discussing books we’d recently read. With several of us, me included, working on thriller or suspense projects, we meandered onto the subject of thrillers and mysteries set in Iceland, as well as Norway and neighboring countries. And it…
Five Books With Righteous Female Rage
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I didn’t intend to write a book about an angry woman. After all, furious, embittered characters—despite much progress—often remained the province of men. To write an angry woman was to risk her becoming Unlikeable, a nebulous state of being still somehow able to deliver the killing blow to reader enjoyment. This character, however, emerged with…
5 New Books Coming Out This Week
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Femi Kayode, Gaslight (Mulholland) “Kayode delivers another ensnaring, vividly realized, suspenseful, and witty tale of a reluctant yet gifted investigator who susses out the truth about people trapped within entrenched criminality and injustice.” –Booklist Nalini Singh, There Should Have Been Eight…