The Strand Magazine’s Top 25 Books of 2017 These are the Strand Magazine’s pick for the Top 25 Books of 2017, amongst many others. 1. The Fifth Petal by Brunonia Barry (Crown) 2. Two Days Gone by Randall Silvis (Sourcebooks Landmark) 3. Follow Me Down by Sherri Smith (Forge Books) 4. Where Dead Men Meet […]
Barclay takes a “Parting Shot” at his Promise Falls series As a kid, New York Times best-selling author Linwood Barclay loved The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and Mission: Impossible. He loved them so much, he couldn’t wait for the next episode, so he wrote his own. “By the time I was in seventh grade, I was […]
The Best Books About Unreliable Memories (That I Can Recall) A few years ago, I attended an event run by an ex-detective-turned-author. He asked for two volunteers, people who had come to the event together, so my mom and I went up. We know each other well, of course, and we’d spent the whole […]
The Best American Mystery Stories 2017 edited by John Sandford and Otto Penzler (Trade Paperback) “Fans of such notables as C.J. Box, Peter Straub, and Joyce Carol Oates chiefly known for their novels will be pleased to see how well they write at shorter length.”–Publishers Weekly “Some people might tell you that crime short stories, […]
The Allure of the Serial Killer Hero Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley novels never fail to lure me into rooting for the murderous hero. It seems that I am far from alone. There is a proliferation of articles with titles such as The New American Hero: Dexter, Serial Killer for the Masses. Nonetheless, I can’t help but […]
THE RISK OF “THE REVEAL” (Part I) Tampering With or Augmenting the Legend of Sherlock Holmes Sherlockians are a picky lot. And there are degrees of Sherlock Holmes fandom fastidiousness ranging from “I love Holmes in all his incarnations” to “How dare you mess even one iota with Conan Doyle!” For those in the […]
Unquiet Spirits by Bonnie MacBird (Hardcover) The new novel from the author of Art in the Blood. December 1889. Fresh from debunking a “ghostly” hound in Dartmoor, Sherlock Holmes has returned to London, only to find himself the target of a deadly vendetta. A beautiful client arrives with a tale of ghosts, kidnapping and dynamite […]
Soho Press: Independent and Flourishing When many people picture an independent publisher, they envision a small startup hoping to be acquired by a bigger firm. That’s not the case with Soho Press—quite the opposite, in fact. Proudly independent for over three decades, Soho aims to discover new voices and bring them to the literary […]
Ten of the Greatest Aussie Mysteries The Australian landscape is known for being unforgiving. It’s vast, and a person can feel mighty isolated in some of the more regional areas. Plus, there’s the weather—from the relentless heat up north to the cool chill of Victoria and Tasmania—the large island country has it all. With all […]
Six Best Suspense Duos In a lot of my favorite suspense and detective fiction, there is one main protagonist around whom the whole story revolves. Right now, I’m reading the latest Sue Grafton book. Kinsey Millhone is a great example—she does it all. But as much as I like the lone wolf, the hard-driving […]