100 books like Killers Of A Certain Age

My passion for historical adventure and Texas history stems from my heritage: I’m a native Texan related to one of the Alamo defenders. My great-great-great-great-great-granduncle, Isaac Millsaps, was one of the Immortal 32, the reinforcements from Gonzales who answered William Barret Travis's call for help, rode to San Antonio, and died in the Alamo on March 6, 1836. My relationship with words began in elementary school, where I read Beowulf and Dracula by the time I was 10 years old (probably explains a lot about me). I began writing for newspapers in 1975 and have been writing professionally ever since.

There's something about broken people trying to do good that has always resonated with me. In basic training, a drill sergeant with debilitating PTSD told us what combat would be like through a storm of choking sobs and a haze of tears. He needed us to know. Even if it broke him. Working as an investigator in Denver and Washington, I watched people with complicated pasts and uncertain futures fight tooth and nail (sometimes literally) to put human traffickers behind bars. Literature has always been a bridle for that wildness I saw in the world. A tool for taking the ghashing, stomping, unruliness of the human experience and making it rideable, relatable, survivable.

I was fascinated by American True Crime magazines from an early age. I used to buy them with my pocket money from a second-hand bookstore near my home. I graduated to reading novels by the age of ten, sneaking my father’s book collection into my bedroom one at a time to read after lights out. His books covered everything from The Carpetbaggers by Harold Robbins to The Devil Rides Out by Dennis Wheatley. By seventeen, I promised myself I’d write a novel one day. Most of my books are crime themed with a supernatural flavour. My debut, The Sister was published in 2013 and since then I’ve completed three more novels and several short stories.

I’ve loved jazz ever since I learned to play the clarinet as a child. My two great loves in life have been music and books, so it made sense to combine the two things and write novels with a link to jazz. These books are some of my favourites with a jazz theme. I promise that even if you’re not a jazz fan, these are all excellent novels, to be enjoyed with or without music playing in the background!

I love to see complicated characters rising to the occasion. People in real life generally have a lot going on just handling the day-to-day, and they aren’t waiting around for adventure, romance, or mystery to find them. It feels very human to me to see characters struggling with more mundane things like social situations, worrying about their appearance, or holding down a job, rather than only focusing on the plot arc, and that’s the type of character I also focus on as a writer. My latest protagonist, Simon, definitely has enough problems without a missing-person case to solve, so he may be what got me thinking of this topic. 

Growing up in a snowy, rural mountain town of less than 500 people, I became fascinated with humanity's will to survive the elements at an early age because I often had to do so myself. Add in a mysterious force or an escaped killer wandering through the hills outside a secluded cabin, and you've got my favorite thriller subgenre: Trapped and secluded. It wasn't until my third novel, The Excursion, that I realized my longtime dream of writing a survival thriller influenced by dozens of books and movies. Today, I live in a suburb of Denver, Colorado, but the mountains are close. And so are the secluded cabins.

The uncanny slips into the gaps between the objective world and the world of human experience with all its dreams, apprehensions, and intuitions. This intermediate space is the habitat of ghosts and also the zone where my mind does its wanderings. It's where my books come, and explorations of that space in other peoples' books draw me in, deeply and inescapably.

It took years of being an undercover writer turned book blogger for me to realize just how much of what's considered African fiction is Western publishers' profiteering efforts to churn out novels centered on colonial trauma after postcolonial trauma tailored to white audiences. When does the African reader get a break? When do we read books that aren't geared towards African pain? When I set out to write my book, I wanted to write a novel that documented the rot in publishing and how commercialisation of the post-colonial trauma trend has been to the detriment of not just the African reader but African writers as well. 

As a former journalist, I was trained to look at all sides of a story. When I read, I am drawn to books that have multiple characters with their own narratives. Sometimes the stories intersect with an “aha!” moment, and sometimes they’re told side-by-side inside each character’s head. Either way, it’s intriguing to have different perspectives—especially in a mystery or thriller. That’s why I use the points of view of three wives in An Inconvenient Wife to give my readers insight into each of these fascinating women.

I have loved crime fiction since encountering it in college. After seeing the Bogart-Bacall version of The Big Sleep, I read the underlying Raymond Chandler novel and was hooked. I devoured Chandler’s other works and moved on to James M. Cain, Jim Thompson, John D. MacDonald, and others. Later I discovered the crime novels of Charles Williams, Day Keene, Gil Brewer, and other “pulp masters.” Loving those novels led me to try my hand at writing crime fiction, and Stark House Press has now published five of my novels with another on the way. My crime-writing career is an unusual path for someone whose M.A. thesis is on Jane Austen!