It’s been four years since a Jake Hinkson novel appeared in the United States, but now the wait for a new book is finally over. His newest, Dry County, explores terrain familiar to Hinkson readers, rural Arkansas, while at the same time going places Hinkson hasn’t gone before. The story takes place in 2016, just…

The Dead Beat Scroll by Mark Coggins is the seventh book in the August Riordan series, where Riordan must work with old allies and enemies to untangle the case before time runs out. The Dead Beat Scroll owes a great deal to Humphrey Bogart’s famous film noir, The Maltese Falcon. It is set in contemporary…

Bloomland opens during finals week at a fictional southern university, when a student walks into the library with his roommate’s semi-automatic rifle and opens fire. When he stops shooting, twelve people are dead. During our historical moment of political, social, and environmental instability, Bloomland by John Englehardt is a book covering topics tough to face…

The Sculptress is the first book I’ve read by Minette Walters, but it certainly won’t be the last. I was surprised to learn that it’s only the second book she’d written, quickly following on the tail of her 1992 debut novel, The Ice House. Walters’ writing draws you in at once. It’s clear when you…

Winner of the Daily Mail First Novel Competition, A Girl Named Anna by Lizzy Barber is a psychologically riveting read that introduces Lizzy Barber as an outstanding new voice in suspense fiction. British author Lizzy Barber makes her fiction debut with the suspenseful novel A Girl Named Anna. Barber, a former English major from Cambridge University, had concentrated…

In One Night Gone by Tara Laskowski, Allison Simpson is offered a job house-sitting a beachfront home, but she never expects to embark on a search for a missing woman from 30 years ago…

I’m constantly on the hunt for interesting baking trends to work into my mystery series. I want readers to feel fully immersed in the sensory world of an artisan kitchen when they step into the pages of my books. I want you to be able to smell herbaceous rosemary flatbread charring in a wood-fired oven,…

If you look up the literal translation for ‘the Fifth Column’ the resulting definition is: ‘a group of people who undermine a larger group from within’.  Taken within the confines of the latest release by author Andrew Gross we are talking about German operatives and Nazi sympathizers operating within the United States during World War…

I’ve read quite a few books from Jenn McKinlay’s Cupcake Bakery mystery series for this column, but this has been my first of her Library Lover’s, and I have to say that I was completely blown away. Perhaps it’s just the subject matter, or perhaps it’s the slightly more serious tone of this series, but…

Here is my not-so-secret secret guilty pleasure: I love the television show Supernatural. In 2013, our older daughter was home on holiday break from college, and one night she wondered if I’d like to stay up and watch a show I’d never heard of—Supernatural—though by then the show had been on television for eight years.…