Interview with Caleb Carr (Excerpts) It’s not every day that a novel comes along that has the power to reinvigorate and influence an entire genre, and become a timeless classic along the way. In the world of historical mysteries, only a handful of authors have managed to pull that off—Umberto Eco with The Name of The […]
Five Ways That Being An Engineer Has Made Me a Better Writer People always want to know how I made the career shift from my work as an environmental engineer into a career as a crime novelist that is now in its fifteenth year. Truthfully, it has never felt like such a big jump to […]
DVD Review: The Night Of The Night Of is an HBO miniseries based upon the British series Criminal Justice. While the basic plot and many pertinent storyline details remain the same, the Americanized version comes into its own as a commentary on the U.S. justice system. The Night Of succeeds in Americanizing the source material while […]
Stranger than Fiction One morning last summer, seemingly everyone I’d ever met in my life got in touch to tell me the same thing: the plot I’d made up for my debut thriller had just happened in real life. I’d written about an Irishman who discovers that his girlfriend has gone missing from a cruise […]
Going Deep: Five Tips for Getting Into the Mind of Your Villain Suspense has always been one of my favorite genres. There’s not much I like more than spending a quiet evening sipping tea and reading a good suspense novel. If there’s a thunderstorm outside and rain pattering on the roof, a little scene-setting […]
Ten Mathematical Mystery-Suspense Novels If mathematics is a universal language—“the language God talks,” as physicist Richard Feynman said—it’s not surprising that these ten mathematical stories should come from a culturally far-flung group. This list includes British, American, Argentinian, Japanese, and Greek authors; mathematicians and laypeople; contemporary and period fiction. Of course, we all know that […]
Book Review of the Week: Parting Shot by Linwood Barclay Parting Shot is Linwood Barclay’s seventeenth novel. Among them is the chilling Promise Falls trilogy—Broken Promise (2015), Far From True (2016), and The Twenty–three (2016). Though technically not a sequel to that trilogy, this is a worthy standalone follow-up novel. It brings back many of […]
TOP TEN YA MYSTERIES One of Us Is Lying by Karen M. McManus. Five teenagers with little or nothing in common are forced to serve detention together after school, but only four of them survive the experience. It’s a brilliant set-up—The Breakfast Club with a murderous twist—and you quickly find yourself in the awkward […]
Six Reasons Near-History Creates Great Mystery The majority of contemporary thrillers are set in the present day. But there are valid reasons to forgo that convention and set the story in an earlier timeframe, such as near-history (roughly defined as the middle part of the twentieth century). A few advantages of near-history mystery: 1) Technology […]
A Mid-Winter’s Reading List I live in Honolulu, where it occasionally dips below 80 degrees in the wintertime. Unless I’m traveling, I have to experience seasons vicariously by reading Icelandic noir and the kind of nonfiction in which the narrator inevitably loses either his fingers or his nose to the cold. But it occurs to […]