What better way to gear up for Halloween than with a culinary cozy mystery that amps up the spooky? Things have always been a little kooky in San Nicholas, California, especially given that pie-maker Val Harris’s best friend is the elderly if sprightly Charlene McCree, a woman who firmly believes that a local pastor is…

The Girl in the Mirror by Rose Carlyle is a chilling, twisty suspense novel and a seductive debut thriller about greed, lust, secrets, and deadly lies involving identical twin sisters. Cases of mistaken identity and murderous doppelgängers are a dime a dozen in the crime genre, but Rose Carlyle has written something truly fresh and…

When I was developing ideas for writing a Gilded Age Manhattan mystery series, I knew that I wanted to set in in the first decade of the Twentieth Century. My protagonist Lady Dunbridge would be one of the “new” women. I would blend history with the popular imagination of the era. An adventure story that…

In the third installment in Tamara Berry’s cozy mystery series, Eleanor Wilde is summoned to a remote Scottish castle for an unusual assignment to locate a haunted trove of treasure that will threaten Eleanor’s budding romance, her livelihood…and her life! Tamara Berry continues to go from strength to strength in this third installment of her…

It’s easy to panic when you realize that a five-foot rattlesnake is swimming a few feet away from you. My wife and I had agreed to let a good friend of ours take us on a hike through the wilds of eastern Oregon. The hike itself, we’d been assured as we loaded up the SUV…

Meg Langslow, the eponymous heroine of Donna Andrew’s long-running series, embodies Lucille Ball’s old chestnut, “If you want something done, ask a busy person to do it.” Meg runs Caerphilly’s Helping Hands for the Holidays project, a program where neighbors help each other with things they can’t do or can’t afford to have done. With…

Excerpt On the three-hour drive to Boise, we said little, our attention locked on the radio crackling news reports every twenty minutes. No word of famous people disappearing, or shootouts in the woods. During the hunt, we had set part of an abandoned town on fire, and I supposed that smoke from the inferno would…

Everyone loves twins. When parents of twins set out for their first walk with their new babies bundled up in a double stroller, they quickly learn just how popular twins are. Passers-by comment that they are “doubly blessed” and that twins will be “twice the fun.” Yet in fiction, a more sinister view of twins…

Many of my favorite novels are not easily classified and often fall under that nebulous term “Literary Fiction.” But I value my origins. As a teenager, I learned to love reading through the Horror genre, and I knew just where to go in the stacks to find Stephen King and Anne Rice. When I later…

Hosted by Christopher Golden and actor and bestselling author Amber Benson (Buffy the Vampire Slayer), Once Upon A Halloween Night featured St. Martin’s Press and Tor Nightfire authors teaming up to write a horror short story in real-time. The end result was “HACK.” A special thank you goes out to all of the participating authors (in…