Reading Lists
The Best Hotels – and Hotel Bars – in Espionage Fiction
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Bars in grand hotels figure prominently in the canon of spy literature. One of the pleasures I get from reading the novels of Joseph Kanon, Graham Greene and other…
Nine Crime Novels Featuring Found Families
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My historical novel published in 2021, Death at Greenway, used research on the real people who had lived on the estate of Agatha Christie’s holiday home in the English…
Crime and the City: Hamburg
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I think it’s fair to say that, in general, Hamburg is a rather underrated German city. Berlin and Munich get the crowds, Frankfurt the money, and Hamburg gets a…
A Brief History of Circus in Fiction
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The history of travelling carnivals, or circuses, is complex. The form is steeped in tradition, but the people who live and make their living in modern circuses are a…
6 Creepy Novels Featuring Murder Houses
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There’s something beautiful about ugliness. We all have it simmering under the surface. But we make damn sure not to show it. Why? In my debut, The Stranger Upstairs,…
Five Novels About War That Bear Re/Reading
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A crime as large as a war may exceed the definition of crime in the usual sense. Crime is bad enough when it’s one or a few victims and…
A Reading List of Badass Covens
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I’ve always been enamored with witches. Be it Roald Dahl’s child-hating witches, the Wicked Witch of the West, or Bony Legs with her iron teeth, the ferocity and power…
The Art of Writing Mysteries Featuring Real-Life Figures
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My objective is to list the six best mysteries that feature real people. Quite a challenge given all the published stories meeting this criterion. There are, for example, several…