Tana French and Heather Young win Strand Critics Awards for Best Novel and Best Debut Novel and the Legendary Clive Cussler Accepts the Lifetime Achievement Award On Wednesday, July 12, at an invitation-only cocktail party in Manhattan, Tana French won the Strand Critics Award for Best Novel for The Trespasser (Viking Penguin). Heather Young won […]
Category Archives: Blog Article
Top 10 Mysteries Set in the British Countryside
Top 10 Mysteries Set in the British Countryside The British countryside is such a peaceful, bucolic place. Who on earth would want to kill anyone there? Yet we’ve been doing it for years. From Wuthering Heights onward, the landscape has become one of the biggest, baddest characters in British fiction, and crime fiction especially. […]
Ten Thrillers with Transportive Settings
Ten Thrillers with Transportive Settings I am never happier than when I’m traveling with a notebook: traveling and writing are my two favorite things, and the fact that I’m able to combine them makes me very happy indeed. There is no feeling quite as wonderful as being in a new place with a story in […]
Thirst: On Writing, Harry, & Flying Jumbo Jets by Jo Nesbø (Excerpts)
What am I thinking when I set out to write a book? First of all, I think it’s impossible. It’s impossible to transform my thoughts and feelings into letters that can convey them to a reader without losing most of—and the most important parts of—their meaning. And it’s definitely impossible for these vague, sound-mimicking symbols to […]
How to Make the Most of Summer Reading
How to Make the Most of Summer Reading I live for summer reading. Live for it. There is just something about spending a long, lazy summer day curled up with a good book—that activity is a pure dream for me. Nothing is as relaxing as reading a book—and getting lost in a new adventure. You […]
What Can Sherlock Holmes Teach you about Writing? It’s all in the Clues…
What makes a Great Clue? Writing Lessons from Masters of Mystery Before I turned ten, I devoured The Complete Sherlock Holmes. Sometimes I read by myself but often I read out loud with my father, who loved Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories and recited passages from memory with great dramatic flair. His favorite, and mine, was […]
Nine Indies To Die For
Nine Indies To Die For In the opening chapter of my debut novel, a distraught customer hangs himself in an independent bookstore in Lower Downtown Denver. It takes very little effort to see that the fictional bookstore in the novel is a thinly veiled version of the Tattered Cover, the celebrated Denver indie where I […]
FIVE AMISH MYSTERY WRITERS WORTH INVESTIGATING
FIVE AMISH MYSTERY WRITERS WORTH INVESTIGATING I’ve learned that there’s a lot more to writing an Amish suspense or mystery than simply adding a couple of buggies and setting the novel in the country. The Amish are complex and faithful, secretive, and find humor in just about anything. Whenever I’m on the hunt for an […]
Ten of the Best On-Screen Villains
Ten of the Best On-Screen Villains For me, one of the great joys in reading fiction is meeting new people. Even the crazy ones. Okay, especially the crazy ones. The challenge of casting literary villains in film is that quite often readers have their own ideas about who should play the parts. Add to this […]
Top Ten Northern Irish Crime Novels
My Top Ten Northern Irish Crime Novels There has been an explosion in crime writing from Northern Ireland over the past decade or so. An element of this certainly has been as part of the wider growth of Irish crime writing, but in Northern Ireland there is also the specific role the peace process has […]
Top ten mystery or crime novels set in the country
Top ten mystery or crime novels set in the country I would like to talk about my top ten novels set in the country or in small towns surrounded by the country because I love the country, because I think country is the ideal setup for mystery. Most of my novels, including Boundary, take […]
Top Nine Books with “Girl” in the Title
Top Nine Books with “Girl” in the Title The Girl in the title is a publishing phenomenon. Whether you think it’s a great way to give visibility to women in suspense or find that it’s patronizing and infantilizing, the fact is, for the last five years, you can’t walk into a bookstore without running […]
