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Growing up, my mother often shared stories of her evacuation to a small Wiltshire village during World War Two. Far from a warm welcome, the local children viewed the newcomers with suspicion, and they were made to feel unwanted. My mother did, however, form one lifelong friendship that was very important to her. Her tales inspired me to write a novel about an evacuee’s experience for my Creative Writing MA. Living in Dorset at the time, I set my story there. The research was fascinating, allowing me to weave together historical insights with my own memories and experiences of today’s rural life.
The thought of walking around an occupied town in France during WWII terrifies me. The prospect of running into Nazis, looking for any excuse to arrest me, is the thing of nightmares.
But my fears shrink to nothing compared to the experience of blind sixteen-year-old Marie-Laure attempting to navigate war-torn Saint-Malo from the memory of a handmade tabletop model. The strength of courage she shows in this story has never left me.
WINNER OF THE 2015 PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER WINNER OF THE CARNEGIE MEDAL FOR FICTION
A beautiful, stunningly ambitious novel about a blind French girl and a German boy whose paths collide in occupied France as both try to survive the devastation of World War II
Open your eyes and see what you can with them before they close forever.'
For Marie-Laure, blind since the age of six, the world is full of mazes. The miniature of a Paris neighbourhood, made by her father to teach her the way home. The microscopic…
Growing up in Alberta, Canada, I spent many summer days at the Calgary Stampede, where I became familiar with the idea of the Wild West. We would don our cowboy hats and trek to the fairgrounds to watch bucking horses and chuckwagon races. Thus began my obsession with popular westerns. I wrote my Ph.D. dissertation on the subject, and I still teach courses and write books about various aspects of the popular West. As a bit of an outsider myself, I especially love Westerns by folks on the margins, without a lot of power. Their takes on the West are always quirky and surprising. I hope you agree!
This is a Rubik’s cube of a Western. It feels so familiar in terms of its Western iconography and stock characters and motifs, but McCarthy twists the familiar tropes of the popular Western into bizarre and inscrutable patterns.
It’s a book I want to figure out but can’t quite, and that’s why I have re-read it several times. With each read, I’m confronted with a new puzzle just when I thought I had cracked its code.
Llewelyn Moss, hunting antelope near the Rio Grande, instead finds men shot dead, a load of heroin, and more than $2 million in cash. Packing the money out, he knows, will change everything. But only after two more men are murdered does a victim's burning car lead Sheriff Bell to the carnage out in the desert, and he soon realizes that Moss and his young wife are in desperate need of protection. One party in the failed transaction hires an ex-Special Forces officer to defend his interests against a mesmerizing freelancer, while on either side are men accustomed to spectacular…
I've been a lawyer for 30 years, 20 of them as an elected district attorney, and writing relieves stress for me. Real crime is messy and irrational; crime fiction restores order. But literary fiction is too slow—a novel must compel the reader to turn the page. Good thrillers tackle major issues, revealing themes that deepen our understanding of humanity. I've witnessed courage during grief and stress, but I'd never betray that trust by writing nonfiction accounts. I deliberately jumbled character traits and real events and combined them with my understanding of modern police techniques like geofencing and DNA.
This book, by Joe R. Lansdale, tells a coming-of-age story. A world where evil prevails, testing the hero’s Christian faith. His morals are inconsistent with the norms of society.
It presents more of a moral forest far more than the real Big Thicket described in greater detail in my novel.
In The Thicket, award-winning novelist Joe R. Lansdale lets loose like never before, in a rip-roaring adventure set at the dark dawn of the East Texas oil boom, the perfect introduction to an acclaimed writer whose work has been called "as funny and frightening as anything that could have been dreamed up by the Brothers Grimm -- or Mark Twain" (New York Times Book Review)
Jack Parker thought he'd already seen his fair share of tragedy. His grandmother was killed in a farm accident when he was barely five years old. His parents have just succumbed to the smallpox epidemic…
I’m of the opinion that good writers draw from life experience. Here are the broad strokes: a Boy Scout reporter at the 1964 national Jamboree, a drummer in country, rock, and jazz bands, a SCUBA instructor, a commercial real estate developer, a drug addict, and an inmate in the penal system. I’ve been reading and writing almost from day one. Most of my early work is crap. I’ve learned the hard way what makes a story worth telling and how best to tell it. Read my recommendations and decide for yourself. After all, it’s your opinion that counts.
I love things that go punch in the dark. This book is another fine example of breaking the mold. Some would label it a “crime novel,” some “noir,” others “thriller,” and others still “hardboiled.” Bottomline, this is one kickass novel.
I had to put down one of King's long-winded tales and a Koontz self-absorbed Oddity because I didn't want to stop reading this book. I'll get back to those guys later. This pick is a fast dirt bike in a sandstorm—way more fun.
Mr. Swierczynski (try to type that 3 times fast) crafts one hell of a novel. His bizarre twists are the stuff of nose bleeds, all done with gritty characters in a fast-paced style that grabs you by the eyeballs and won't let go. He initially reminded me of one of my all-time dark writing faves, Charlie Huston. Unique beyond comparison, The Wheelman checks all the boxes for…
Meet Lennon, a mute Irish getaway driver who has fallen in with the wrong heist team on the wrong day at the wrong bank. Betrayed, his money stolen and his battered carcass left for dead, Lennon is on a one-way mission to find out who is responsible--and to get back his loot. But the robbery has sent a violent ripple effect through the streets of Philadelphia. And now a dirty cop, the Russian and Italian mobs, the mayor's hired gun, and a keyboard player in a college rock band maneuver for position as this adrenaline-fueled novel twists and turns its…
Janet and I have traveled extensively and found inspiration and story ideas at every destination. As writers for more than 10 years and as fans of classic detective stories, we feel qualified to tackle this genre.
Mickey Spillane created Mike Hammer, a hard-boiled detective who was (according to the books) quite the lady’s man. This detective story involves millionaires, organized crime, and revenge, which makes for a great read. Hammer is depicted as a hard-drinking, hard-fighting guy that has acted as a prototype for many imitators.
One night, a blonde jumps out in front of PI Mike Hammer's car. She's so scared he doesn't have much choice but to give her a ride. At a police roadblock, he discovers she's on the run from a sanatorium, but he passes her off as his wife. Other people besides the police are after the blonde, and these people play rough. Real rough.
The blonde turns out to be the star witness against some big-time mobsters. Mike has blundered into something unimaginably big, but the Feds don't want him…
I love good stories and I like to learn about other cities even if it is in a work of fiction. With few exceptions, every story I’ve written is in a location I’ve visited. When you can’t visit a place, then reading about a city in modern-day fiction is a close substitute. How many readers feel like they know the English countryside after reading multiple British mysteries? Or feel like you know Boston when reading the Robert Parker Spenser series? That’s the point of a good mystery – to take you someplace you’re not.
With this book, we get to visit Venice which might be my favorite Italian city. Ms. Leon has written a long-running series always set in Venice. It features an Italian detective (Commissario Guido Brunetti), his professorial wife, two children, an incompetent supervisor, and a secretary that is an IT geek. I like the series as I can feel myself walking down the streets of Venice Island over bridges, and in boats on the canals. The inspector goes home for lunch most days, something that you don’t find in America. She does a good job of describing a way of life in Venice beyond the mystery story.
In the landmark thirtieth installment of the bestselling series the New Yorker has called “an unusually potent cocktail of atmosphere and event,” Guido Brunetti is forced to confront an unimaginable crime
In his many years as a commissario, Guido Brunetti has seen all manner of crime and known intuitively how to navigate the various pathways in his native city, Venice, to discover the person responsible. Now, in Transient Desires, the thirtieth novel in Donna Leon’s masterful series, he faces a heinous crime committed outside his jurisdiction. He is drawn in innocently enough: two young American women have been badly injured…
When I was twelve, my family moved to Brazil for a year because of my father’s work. I’ve been fascinated by the country and it has been always been the focal point of my research. Initially, my focus was how neighborhood associations in Rio’s favelas took advantage of new political opportunities during the transition to democracy in the mid-1980s. By the mid-1990s, however, the neighborhoods had all been occupied by heavily armed and occasionally violent drug gangs. Since then, I've tried to figure out the dynamics of this process, from the involved actors’ points of view. Including the voices of participants in drug gang life and those, like Bruno, who bring drugs to market.
This tremendous little book is about who has the right to discipline and kill. In an ideal world, the author argues, this right is monopolized by territorial entities we know as states. This is not the case in Brazil, however. In Brazil, or rather in metropolitan São Paulo, the right to discipline and kill is shared—hence the book’s title—between the various agents of the public security state and an extremely well-organized and powerful criminal faction known as the Primeiro Comando do Capital or PCC.
We hold many assumptions about police work that it is the responsibility of the state, or that police officers are given the right to kill in the name of public safety or self-defense. But in The Killing Consensus, Graham Denyer Willis shows how in Sao Paulo, Brazil, killing and the arbitration of normal killing in the name of social order are actually conducted by two groups the police and organized crime both operating according to parallel logics of murder. Based on three years of ethnographic fieldwork, Willis' book traces how homicide detectives categorize two types of killing: the first resulting…
I’ve loved mystery novels since picking up my older sister’s Agatha Christie collection as a pre-teen. Over the years I’ve come to love novels with badass women detectives, especially when the world-building pulls you into a place and time that is almost an additional character, where you can feel the weather, smell the buildings, and taste the fear. And it certainly doesn’t hurt to add a social justice angle. Having read so many, I finally decided to write my own mystery set in the East Los Angeles neighborhood of Boyle Heights where I grew up, not anywhere near the Hollywood version.
I love Sarah Paretsky’s novels because her private investigator V.I. Warshawski is a vulnerable badass. This 21st installment is classic Warshawski who, like me, is now a woman of a certain age. She may be a bit slower to recover from physical challenges, but her passion for justice is as strong as ever as she confronts Chicago corruption and mobsters from the cold waters of Lake Michigan to her childhood Southside neighborhood, one we’ve come to love as much as she does.
On her way home from an all-night surveillance job, V.I. Warshawski's dogs lead her on a mad chase that ends when they find a badly injured teen hiding in the rocks along Lake Michigan. The girl only regains consciousness long enough to utter one enigmatic word. V.I. helps bring her to a hospital, but not long after, she vanishes before anyone can discover her identity.
As V.I. attempts to find her, the detective uncovers an ugly consortium of Chicago power brokers and mobsters who are prepared to kill the girl. before VI can save her. And now V.I.'s own life…
I don’t warm to crime novels where the only point is to find whodunnit. Those that resonate with me are the ones that have an extra dimension. It may be taking me into a world I am unfamiliar with, like bell-ringing or a theatre troupe. Or it could be a richly-evoked setting, like Donna Fletcher Crow’s Celtic Christian background. Or a character whose very flaws make them more gripping, such as Rebus or Wallender. I want to come away feeling enriched and not just pleased that I guessed that it was the butler with the candlestick.
This novel is enriched by being set in the theatre and based on a real dance troupe. We are caught up in an authentically realized experience of a stage company. It is set in Ngaio Marsh’s home country of New Zealand. Her knowledge of the Maori fertility symbol, the tiki, plays a significant role in the plot.
Her detective, Roderick Alleyn. Is also a gentleman, like Lord Peter Wimsey, but this time a professional policeman, who looks like a cross "between a monk and a grandee."
As with Dorothy Sayers, an extra interest is added in later books, with Alleyn’s edgy love affair with the artist Agatha Troy.
The leading lady of a theater company touring New Zealand was stunningly beautiful. No one-including her lover-understood why she married the company's pudgy producer. But did she rig a huge jeroboam of champagne to kill her husband during a cast party?
Did her sweetheart? Or was another villain waiting in the wings? On a holiday down under, Inspector Roderick Alleyn must uncork this mystery and uncover a devious killer...
I have always had a strong, long-lived interest in all things Italian (including Italian food and wine). I spent my third year of university at a campus in Rome and travelled all over Italy during my year there. I’ve been back to Italy as a tourist and researcher numerous times, as five of my ten award-winning novels are set there (in Venice, Rome, Cremona, etc.). I have many Italian friends and my most recent novel,The Artist and the Assassin, is being translated into Italian and will be published by Les Flaneurs Edizioni, an Italian publisher in Bari, Italy.
Another in Donna Leon’s series set in Venice with a focus on Commissario Guido Brunetti, a totally believable detective with all the skills any good detective would need to have while meeting up against all the difficulties any detective would encounter in a society (Italy) where the nature of bureaucracy is extremely problematic. So problematic that Brunetti is forced to take a break on a nearby island where he runs into other crimes and difficulties.
'When she's writing about her beloved Venice, Donna Leon can do no wrong. And Earthly Remains, her new mystery featuring Commissario Guido Brunetti, is one of her best. It's also one of her saddest, dealing as it does with the seemingly unstoppable polluting of the great lagoon . . . Leon dares to try, once again earning the gratitude of her devoted readers.' New York Times
A New York Times Bestseller A New York Times Top Ten Crime Novel of 2017 A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice An Amazon Best Book of the Month (Mystery) __________________________________
