reading
How Should Fiction Talk About War
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“Does your novel speak to Hamas’s attack on Israel?” I got the question during a podcast interview I was giving to support the launch of my new novel, which…
5 Christmas Mysteries To Get You Ready for the Holiday Season
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It’s a rare crime fiction reader who doesn’t love curling up with a mystery during the winter months, especially if that mystery is one of the many Christmas-themed puzzles…
James Reich on Indie Publishing, Taking Risks, and the Beauty of Melancholy
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In 2017, I read the novel Patricide, by D. Foy. It’s a brutal and challenging book, full of ungodly sorrow and heartbreak. It’s the kind of book you can’t…
How the Intensity of Female Relationships Leaves the Door Open for Horror
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Picture it: Woodstock, Georgia, 1988. I’m at a sleepover party. We’re eating pizza and watching The Amityville Horror and probably drinking Ecto Cooler and jumping around on Pogo Balls…
Every Picture Tells a Story: Cinema Speculation, The Getaway and Me
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Every picture tells a story. If you don’t believe me, just ask Rod Stewart. Sir Rod practically coined the phrase in 1971. He liked it so much he used…
A Murder of Poets: Or, the Inescapable Connections Between Crime Fiction and Poetry
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“Murder will out…” –Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales Poetry and pathology. Verse and victim. Meter and murder and mayhem. Poetry and crime fiction seem to go together like,…
Bluebeard’s Castle
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Being inside a church always made her feel good, and her anxious brow relaxed as she absorbed the peaceful and uplifting atmosphere. A few people were milling around admiring…
The Political Assassination That Transformed Africa, the UN, and the CIA
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Nothing much happens in Mélin, a picturesque village of little over a thousand people about an hour’s drive from Brussels. If the sleepy town has a claim to fame,…
8 Cozy Mysteries Featuring BFFs and Women Supporting Women
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So often in books and movies, women are put against one another. There is some sort of competitive spirit or revived childhood rivalry over social status, a job promotion,…