Writing across several genres—women’s fiction, romance and domestic thrillers—can be challenging and a question I’m often asked is ‘what is a domestic thriller?’ For me, it’s women’s fiction with a killer twist…or many. Domestic thrillers are also labelled as domestic suspense, domestic noir and psychological thrillers, when in fact they’re a subgenre of the […]
Category Archives: Blog Article
The Writer Inside Me
Jim Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me (1952) established him as one of the preeminent practitioners of hardboiled crime fiction. A first-person confession of a small town deputy sheriff going on a murder spree, it is a frightening and gripping novel that earned Thompson the sobriquet “Dimestore Dostoevsky.” Stanley Kubrick, who directed two Jim […]
THE 6 BOOKS KEEPING ME SANE DURING THE PANDEMIC
I was gazing over at my bedside table the other morning and noticed that the content and size of my ‘currently reading’ pile has changed over the last few months. In the world before Covid, there was always a judicious mix of business books and literary novels—literature and business being two of my great […]
Write Like A Picker
Write Like A Picker by Lindsay K. Bandy Anyone who enjoys historical fiction knows it’s all about the details—but not just any details. Writers who enjoy the rabbit trails of research sometimes lose their way and end up in a confusing plot-maze that leads nowhere. Others collect facts like a flea market dealer—you know, the […]
Hooked on the Drug War
Seized as we are by dysfunction in our political and social institutions, it might well be time to cut our losses. We must fix certain problems—health care, the environment, education—but fifty years is long enough for the War on Drugs. And America lost. Of course America lost. The fighting is the loss. As […]
English Domestic Thrillers
The most difficult part of writing this article was deciding which books to recommend. English domestic thrillers have long been popular and perhaps never more so than in the past decade when the choice of suspenseful, chilling reads feels as if it has never been more plentiful. The current market for domestic thrillers […]
Those Meddling Kids: A History of Our Favorite Young Detectives
No doubt about it, we love our amateur sleuths. We delight in watching the unassuming and underestimated outsmart the bad guys—and the pros. We want to root for the little guy. Or the little girl. Literally. Young detectives have been solving their share of fictional crimes as long as we’ve been reading mysteries. […]
Cluefinders
By Martin Edwards ‘Fair play’ is a defining principle of the traditional detective story. The author makes an implicit promise that readers will be given a reasonable opportunity to unravel the mystery for themselves before all is revealed at the end. Clues will be given to the solution – and they need to be […]
ANOTHER KIND OF LOVE
I’ve done it again. I just finished another book that features an animal as one of my main characters. I had no intention of doing it when I was planning CHAOS. I was going to have a razzle-dazzle plot with lots of dynamite adventures and terrible villains for my characters to triumph over. […]
The Man behind Merlin
The historical figure who inspired a legend. By Signe Pike Nearly 1,500 years ago, a man stood on top of a hill fort in Scotland knowing he was about to die. He was not alone, though he might as well have been, given the size of the army marching to lay siege upon the fortress. […]
Sophie Hannah’s Top Ten Favorite Agatha Christie Novels
Sophie Hannah’s Favorite Agatha Christie Novel I like to approach the choice of favorite Agatha Christie novels (a question I’m asked rather a lot) in the same way that I approach any search for a new home. Some people, if they want to buy a house, start out with a list of requirements that they […]
Seven Essential Native American Crime Novels
By David Heska Wanbli Weiden The genre of Native American crime fiction remains popular among mystery fans, yet few would be able to name writers in this field beyond the wildly successful Tony Hillerman, Thomas Perry, James Doss, and perhaps a few others. For those who’ve enjoyed the work of these non-Native writers, it […]