It’s bad enough that Mia Malone has had to put her catering company on the back burner in order to accept a job as the catering director at the Lodge, the biggest ski resort in Magic Springs, Idaho. Her new boss, Frank Hines, is a nightmare, and the stress of working with him while still…
I absolutely adored Clare Mackintosh’s last novel, The Last Party, so I was champing at the bit to dive into its sequel, featuring the headstrong DC Ffion Morgan as she deals with policing her small Welsh village of Cwm Coed. In this sophomore installment of her namesake series, Ffion is ready to cheer on her…
“You don’t mean to say that you seriously believe that Life imitates Art, that Life in fact is the mirror, and Art the reality?”—Oscar Wilde, “The Decay of Lying” Art imitates life, said Aristotle, but Oscar Wilde allowed as he’d gotten it backward: life imitates art. These days, we’re worried that machines imitate art…
The advertisements are hard to miss. If you live in North Jersey, in Paterson or quite a few other cities, you are familiar with the phrase CALL JIM! It’s on billboards, benches, bus stops, and everywhere else that can contain an ad. The all-caps bold type, as well as the exclamation point, unsubtly convey the…
Some years back I saw a meme going around social media, about being a good enough friend to help someone hide a dead body. It got me thinking. Who would I help? And why? The result was my Suspense novel A FRIEND INDEED, out May 14th. As a kid, I moved around non-stop. When I…
Baker Chloe Barnes is thrilled to finally open her cannabis cafe, serving food and drinks infused with the medicinal properties of legally grown and sold marijuana. She’s even more thrilled that–despite some mostly emailed resistance from anonymous protesters–her cafe is proving to be a resounding success. Success gets a bit overwhelming, though, when the annual…
There’s no two ways about it: Claire is a serial killer. She tries to keep her victim list confined to those she deems worthy of killing, but when worthiness generally correlates to how much her victim has personally annoyed her, it’s not hard to see that she’s not being at all altruistic with her murders. …
In a highly plausible near-future North America, the Farmer-Bowen family is struggling to survive in what remains of New York City. There was no singular precipitating event for the decline of a once thriving society, no apocalypse to identify as a turning point. While everyone has their theories as to why things have come to…
In a small dusty corner of southeast Texas, three generations of Evans women run the only funeral parlor in town. Unsurprisingly, this does not make them the most popular of the area’s inhabitants, particularly in 1999, with feminism still having a long way to go despite the movement’s continuing strides. A friendly hairdresser contracted to…
The death of Annie Shaw’s mother sends the middle-aged artist reeling. Mẹ had fled the Vietnam War and made a home for herself and young Annie in America. Their ongoing struggle for survival wound up acutely damaging the mental health of both, as Mẹ became a hoarder who emotionally manipulated her daughter in extreme ways.…
