About The Last Orphan by Gregg Hurwitz: As a child, Evan Smoak was plucked out of a group home, raised and trained as an off-the-books assassin for the government as part of the Orphan program. When he broke with the program and went deep underground, he left with a lot of secrets in his head…

Laura Griffin is an expert guide to the uncomfortable tension between doing one’s job and having a personal life. In the island community of Lost Beach, Texas, navigating tricky conflicts of interest comes with the territory. It’s another gritty and imaginative romantic thriller in the Griffin canon.   Midnight Dunes is the third in Laura Griffin’s…

Hilary Davidson: Writers are often told to write what they know, and Secret Identity is set in the world of comic book publishing. That’s a world you know intimately, having worked for DC, Archie Comics, and now Oni Press. You’ve also written a number of comic books, including the superhero noir The Black Ghost. But…

I deeply regret that I have waited this long to get acquainted with Kerry Greenwood’s Phryne Fisher mystery novels. I knew of them, of course, from the entertaining Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries TV series, but had never had the time to investigate the source material until this book landed on my desk (or in my…

Lee Barrett, program director of Salem, Massachusetts’ WICH-TV, is excited to finally be marrying her fiancé, Detective Pete Mondello. In the lead-up to their wedding, they’ve been house hunting for the perfect place in which to start married life. One important consideration for their prospective new home is proximity to where Lee currently lives in…

Callie Padget is still feeling emotionally fragile about her return to Cattail Island, where she grew up on North Carolina’s Outer Banks. Alas, after being let go as a journalist from the Charlotte newspaper she’d worked for, she has few other options. Her Uncle Hudson welcomes her home with open arms, readying her old bedroom…

Chris Holm is the author of six critically acclaimed novels and numerous works of short fiction. His books include the genre-bending Collector trilogy (Dead Harvest, The Wrong Goodbye, and The Big Reap) and, more recently, two thrillers featuring hitman Michael Hendricks, The Killing Kind and Red Right Hand; the former won the 2016 Anthony Award…

Safiya Mirza is a high school senior looking forward to enrolling at Northwestern University and subsequently pursuing a career in journalism. As editor-in-chief of her private school’s newspaper, she’s already had run-ins with Principal Hardy, who doesn’t like how her paper insists on bringing up issues he regards as controversial. But then her online column…

After the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979, the Americans were panicked. They had lost Vietnam to Communism, and they were desperate to make sure the same thing didn’t happen to Afghanistan. While doing research for Jameela Green Ruins Everything, I came across fascinating research about the extent the U.S. would go to make sure the…

I love reading a haunted house novel where the haunted house is actually scary. The title hacienda of Isabel Cañas’ debut novel delivers on that in spades, in this eerie cross between Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca and Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting Of Hill House. Even more absorbingly, the story is set amidst the turmoil immediately…