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The Many Words for Yakuza
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“It seems fairly evident that the selection of such simple terms must to a certain extent depend upon the chief interests of a people; and where it is necessary to distinguish a certain phenomenon in many aspects, which in the life of the people play each an entirely independent role, many independent words may develop,…
Peril in Paradise: A List Of Thrillers In Which Bad Things Happen In Beautiful Places
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Conflict lies at the heart of all mystery and suspense, and what could be more conflicting than taking a trip to paradise only to get caught up in the dark and deadly underbelly you didn’t know was there? Imagine your favorite or most desired vacation mecca, somewhere beautiful, maybe even exotic, somewhere you feel relaxed…
‘UNSUB’ Is Mostly Forgotten, But It Launched a New Era of Crime Procedurals
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Back when I was a newspaper reporter, I was hanging around our local prosecutor’s office when an investigator for the prosecutor was fondly recalling his days as a police officer and how cops would interrogate someone by holding their head underwater in the toilet in a police holding cell. I thought of that moment when…
Mystical Threads: Spirit Mediums and Psychics in Crime and Suspense Fiction
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I never met my paternal grandmother. She died before I was born, but from a few family photos, I formed a picture of a smartly turned-out woman with warm brown eyes, a wavy, blunt-cut bob and a weakness for silk scarves. Deeply respected in her small north-eastern England mining town, she was a pillar of…
A Supernatural Survival Horror Reading List
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Have you read Dan Simmons’s The Terror – and are you looking for more reads which combine gruesome survival horror with a creepy supernatural element? Have you been binge-watching Yellowjackets, and looking for something to tide you over until the next season? Well, this just so happens to be my favourite genre, so let’s dive…
Dark Academia: YA Edition
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If you’re anything like me, you’ll find the winter evenings perfect for immersing yourself in a little dark academia. Whether you enjoy the prestigious school settings, the thrown-together friendships that shouldn’t work but do, or simply the higher education of it all, there is one thing in particular that brings readers to this genre in…
Memory, Place, and Hauntings: On Toronto’s Seedy Seventies-Era “Sin Strip”
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In the late 70s my family emigrated to Toronto and stayed for two years. In those days, downtown was notorious for its Sin Strip. Four blocks concentrated on Yonge between Gerrard and Dundas. They were loaded with strip joints, adult bookstores, rub ‘n’ tugs and movie theatres which, according to The Globe and Mail, made…