Top 10 Audiobooks Guaranteed to Blow Your Mind By Lisa Regan What makes an outstanding audiobook? It’s the combination of a great story and a narrator who can deliver every line of the book in the perfect tone, at the perfect pace, and sometimes even in the perfect accent. A narrator can make or break […]

10 Undervalued Golden Age Mysteries   Anyone who enjoys classic crime is well aware of the merits of books like Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd and Anthony Berkeley’s The Poisoned Chocolates Case. But there are plenty of novels, by these authors and others, that in my opinion deserve to be much better known, […]

 GO FIGURE: FIGURING OUT YOUR CHARACTERS AS THEY FIGURE THINGS OUT FOR YOU  As a writer of thrillers and mysteries, my job is, in part, to have my protagonists figure stuff out under tense, suspenseful circumstances, usually with life-or-death consequences. If I’m working on a cozy, my hero or heroine might be trying to solve […]

CONFESSIONS OF A STORY-TELLER I can’t say for certain when the urge to tell a story first came to me, but I suspect it was when I read Kipling’s The Jungle Book. It wasn’t a mystery, of course, like the books I was later to write, but I can remember to this day how the […]

Nelson DeMille and Alex DeMille’s Top 5 Espionage Novels   Nelson: The Spy Who Came in from the Cold by John Le Carré This is a successful blend of popular fiction and fine English literature. The post-war world of the book is mostly bleak, but true to the times. Le Carré is a master of […]

Ten Ways to De-Stress during the holidays… Like everything, the holidays will pass, learn to enjoy them! And you’ll need to take a few moments amid the rush and the madness of buying gifts, hurrying to get to holiday parties, and making sure nobody is forgotten to realize that a day after Christmas, you’ll be […]

Spreading the joy of reading and literature by designing apparel   How It All Started Founded in 2009, Out of Print Clothing is dedicated to spreading the joy of reading and literature by designing apparel and accessories such as bags, bookmarks, and bottles. Jeff LeBlanc and Todd Lawton are the co-founders of this one-of-a-kind business. […]

SEVEN MYSTERIOUS TALES WITH SKEWED (& CONFUSED) NARRATION   By Vivan Barz, author of Forgotten Bones   Celebrating her debut novel, Forgotten Bones, a police procedural featuring a schizophrenic college professor who sees ghostly visions that mirror details of an open murder case, Vivian Barz creates a list of her favorite mysteries with skewed (and […]

CONFESSIONS OF A SCREENER: SIX THINGS WRITERS SHOULD KNOW ABOUT MYSTERY AWARDS By Michael Bowen In early 1993 I got a message to return a call from someone at the Mystery Writers of America.  Gut-flutter.  A mystery of mine had come out the previous year.  Could this possibly be . . . . ?  Uh, […]

6 Books to Buddy-Read with your Teen or Twentyish Daughter by Kelly Simmons   I have three daughters in their early twenties, and I honestly believe I’ve experienced every type of bored teenager and college student mood imaginable.  There’s nothing to do, no one’s home, there’s nothing to eat, why couldn’t we go to Europe […]

From Mary Shelley to Horace Walpole, why Gothic novels have stood the test of time   Crisp fall weather calls for chill-inducing reads, and there’s nothing better for that than a good gothic novel. In more than 250 years, the gothic has never been out of style, though it’s undergone transformations and has had more […]