I recently had the pleasure of speaking with Mark Westmoreland. He is a talented up-and-coming noir author. His debut book, A Violent Gospel, is available now from Shotgun Honey Books. About A Violent Gospel, the author writes: “The book is about two brothers, Mack and Marshall Dooley, who steal money from a snake-handling Pentecostal cult…

Summer camp, boarding school, college—interesting places for many reasons, not least of which is the fact that they have as one of their founding principles the idea that you will, absolutely, leave them. In fact, leaving them is one of the main points. You will come to them as a stranger, bright, shiny, and anxious.…

Tea garden owner Daisy Swanson is thrilled to be donating her time to a social event meant to promote the building of a new homeless shelter in her small town of Willow Creek, Pennsylvania. With reports of homelessness in their area on the rise, kind-hearted Daisy wants to make sure that anyone who wants a…

  A Note from Sena Desai Gopal The 86th Village takes place in a southern Indian village doomed to drown in the backwaters of a dam. The story and characters are fictitious, but the setting is autobiographical. My ancestral village, Yadahalli, will drown in one of India’s biggest dams—The Upper Krishna Project—across the 900-mile long…

All These Bodies by Kendare Blake is an edge-of-your-seat YA mystery involving 16 bloodless bodies, two teenagers, and one impossible explanation that proves the truth is as hard to believe as it is to find. In the summer of 1958, a gruesome string of murders reshaped ordinary life in the Midwest. Corpses were found entirely…

It’s fair to say we’ve both read or watched the best thrillers during the last thirty years. In our opinion, obviously! And there’s one thing we always agree on: what scares us the most is serial killer with clear motives and a detailed plan. A relentless murderer who won’t stop until they’ve realized their grand…

In December 1957 and January 1958, nineteen-year-old Charlie Starkweather embarked on a killing spree through Nebraska and Wyoming. Most of the murders took place in just over a week, an eight-day rampage of shootings and stabbings that confounded authorities and terrorized the general public. With his even younger girlfriend in tow, Charlie killed eleven people,…

A Most Clever Girl is based on the life of the American communist spy Elizabeth Bentley. She was recruited in New York City at the beginning of World War II to fight against fascism. Elizabeth was a well-educated loner working in dead-end jobs. On a personal level, becoming a communist meant she suddenly had a…

Author Peter Blauner discusses Christ in Concrete, an often-overlooked novel about the life of Italian immigrants on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in the 1920s and a twelve-year-old boy who must support his family after his father’s untimely death. Most crime novels try to hook you on the first page, or even the first…

The Mad Women’s Ball by Victoria Mas is a critically acclaimed French novel of historical fiction, translated by Frank Wynne, that follows the mistreatment and dehumanization of women deemed “mad” and forced into imprisonment within a women’s asylum.  The Belle Epoque was a riot of culture and prosperity for the French Republic, with innovations in…