In the second Detective Betty mystery, Kathleen Kent’s protagonist Det. Betty Rhyzyk goes rogue, leading her into the dark underworld of the Dallas drug cartel.  Dallas native Kathleen Kent began her career in publishing by writing bestselling, award-winning historical novels—The Heretic’s Daughter, The Traitor’s Wife, and The Outcasts. She made her crime fiction debut with…

Thank you again to everyone who participated in our Q&A with Olen Steinhauer. We were thrilled with all of your questions, and we tried to choose 10 of them that Olen will answer next week on the site. If your question/username appears below, congratulations on being selected to win an early copy of The Last…

I remember when I was younger and firmly convinced that any media adaptation of a novel must always be inferior to its source material. In recent years, I’ve been gladly disabused of this notion and nowhere more intriguingly so than with the second season of You on Netflix, based loosely on Caroline Kepnes’ sophomore novel,…

A Reasonable Doubt by Phillip Margolin is the third book in the Robin Lockwood series, where a magician linked to three murders and suspicious deaths years ago disappears in the middle of his new act—take a visual tour with GIFnotes! Robin Lockwood is a young criminal defense attorney and partner in a prominent law firm…

The Only Child by Mi-Ae Seo is an eerie and absorbing novel following a criminal psychologist who has discovered shocking and possibly dangerous connections between a serial killer and her stepdaughter. Yi Seonkyeong is a young criminal psychologist who’s just wrapping up her first semester of teaching when she receives a curious request. A convicted serial killer named…

Mo Hayder’s Gone reads like two novels wrapped together by the same case. There are two characters that could qualify as main characters and their narratives contain enough action, tension, and drama to count as two novellas. However, Hayder weaved them together under the umbrella of a case that begins with what seemed like a…

The supernatural thriller, to me, has always been a small sliver of a genre, one that takes a careful hand. Some books tip into straight horror, while others bury their scary happenings in innuendo and the feeling that something bad—really bad—is going to happen. Some read like mysteries, while others are psychological portraits of haunted…

Hannah Capin’s terrific debut novel, The Dead Queens Club, was a YA thriller that re-examined the legacy of Henry VIII via transplantation to a present-day Indiana high school. With her sophomore effort, Foul Is Fair, she continues her quest to reclaim the role and agency of women in history and literature via a devastating adaptation…

Death in the Family introduces Senior Investigator Shana Merchant as she attempts to solve a murder on a small, storm-struck island. The setting for a Death in the Family is privately-owned Tern Island, one of the Thousand Islands. The Sinclair family owns it lock, stock, and baronial-splendor barrel. Senior Investigator Shana Merchant and her colleague,…

After enjoying the latest two of Sharon Farrow’s terrific Berry Basket Mystery series, I decided to go back to the beginning and see where it all started for Marlee Jacob and her eclectic crew of family and friends. As Dying for Strawberries begins, town booster Piper Lyall-Pierce is busy, as usual, organizing a festival to…