Reading Lists
5 International Action Thrillers from Afghanistan to Shanghai
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I wrote my newly released Lily Wong novel, The Ninja’s Oath, during the pandemic when my newborn granddaughter was in lockdown in Shanghai. Twenty-three months would pass before I could hold her in my arms. Writing this book helped me feel as if I were there, not in lockdown Shanghai, but in the extraordinary city…
(Un)Safe Harbor: Thrillers Set in Remote Island Locations
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I have spent a lot of summer weekends on an island in Lake Huron’s Georgian Bay. It’s a beautiful, wild, windswept place that can, as Gull Island does in my book, feel utterly remote. When Jude makes her way there, it’s early April, cold, and lonely. Her mother, now suffering from dementia, has asked her…
Cozy Mysteries with Furry Sidekicks
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I have a confession to make. I have a mad crush on my neighbor. Whenever I see him sprinting in my direction, my heart swells and I can’t hold back a smile. His eyes are as blue as a cloudless day, and his gleaming coat…Oh—did I neglect to mention something? My neighbor, Benzo, is a…
7 Crime Novels Set in Sin City
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Like many of my books, it started with a seed of an idea: a businessman wakes up in a hotel room that isn’t his to find a dead woman in the bathtub. From there, bits and pieces began to materialize—who the businessman was, who the woman was, etc.—but the one thing that took a while…
10 New Books Coming Out This Week
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Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Tod Goldberg, Gangsters Dont Die (Counterpoint) “As ever, Goldberg is adept at writing about mob hits, explosions, corpses and other cases of criminal bad news with a smirking, noirish tone. But he writes with sensitivity too, from painterly depictions of the…
Yasmin Angoe on Morally Gray Action Thrillers and the Heroes Nena Knight Can Spar
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I’ve thought long and hard about this particular topic—characters, or heroes that Nena Knight, elite Ghanaian assassin from my Nena Knight trilogy, could spar with. As I worked on the newest book in the series, It Ends with Knight, I wondered who Nena could go toe-to-toe with either physically or intellectually. Now, you’re probably wondering…
Island Vacations Can Be Murder
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Sure, island vacations can be fun, relaxing, and restorative. But that’s if you’re reading a book in a different genre. In the world of crime, island vacations can be murder. Ever since Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley headed to Italy to bring Dickie Greenleaf back home, the allure of something sinister taking place on an island…
Joyce Carol Oates on Women and the Roots of Body Horror
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Of mythological figures of antiquity, none are more monstrous than harpies, furies, gorgons—Scylla and Charybdis, Lamia, Chimera, Sphinx—nightmare creatures representing, to the affronted male gaze, the perversion of “femininity”: the female who in her physical being repulses sexual desire, rather than arousing it; the female who has repudiated the traditional role of submission, subordination, maternal…