Is it urban legend that a mother can find the superhuman strength to lift a car in order to save her trapped child? Or is it apocryphal? Most would agree that it’s a rare circumstance. Unless you’re retired CIA agent Helen Warwick, from Cindy Dee’s brilliant debut thriller Second Shot. Fifty-five-year-old Helen Warwick is as…
Reader, how I gasped! I go through a lot of mystery novels and thrillers, so very few plot twists truly surprise me anymore. The Return Of Ellie Black, however, had me almost completely wrong-footed throughout. I can hardly believe that this is Emiko Jean’s debut thriller. It’s so perfectly plotted and seeded, and I fell…
Mallory Atkinson used to be a homicide detective here in the 21st century. Accidentally traveling back through time to Victorian Edinburgh was, to say the least, completely unexpected. She doesn’t know what kind of magic or scientific anomaly allows her to inhabit the body of housemaid Catriona Mitchell, but she’s slowly gotten comfortable living in…
Tom Straw is no stranger to being a ghost. Following the publication of his debut suspense novel, 2007’s Trigger Episode, he secretly assumed the identity of television’s fictional scribe Richard Castle, penning seven New York Times bestselling tie-in books before reasserting his authorial independence with Buzz Killer (2017). This May, Straw—also an Emmy and Writers…
Sage Caplin is newly engaged and ready for the next big step in her professional life: opening an honest-to-goodness cafe in the newly constructed Button Building. Back when she first opened her coffee cart, she had only dreamed of owning her own cafe. Now, with two carts, a roastery, and distribution deals under her belt,…
Jo-Lynn Kirby is not like other girls. Part of this is by design, as her mother had her competing in beauty pageants from a young age and wanted to make sure she stood out from the crowd. But a lot of it is by accident, as Jo grows up hanging out with boys, whom she…
Alex Brangwen is not your typical police detective. Once upon a time, the Englishman was a celebrated author with a novel shortlisted for the Booker Prize, a cultural cachet that was a large part of his appeal to his then-wife Morgana. At his American bride’s urging, the couple moved from London to Maine while she…
Reporter Lucy Stone is looking forward to covering the grand opening of a state-of-the-art community center in Tinker’s Cove, Maine, and not just because the building’s central air provides a welcome relief from the blistering heatwave outside. Lucy believes that the services the new taxpayer-funded facility offer will do a lot to benefit their town,…
Alex Brangwen, the protagonist/detective of my new novel, Granite Harbor, is a single parent to a teenage daughter—and a failed novelist. He lives in a small town in Maine, where a serial killer has struck, targeting teenage children. Some years ago—never mind how many—I was living in Tucson, Arizona, where my young son’s mother had…
May and Gemma Chow have been struggling to keep their family’s flower selling business afloat in 1930s Los Angeles, after doctors send the teenaged girls’ beloved father to recuperate from tuberculosis in the dry desert climate of San Bernardino. Business has never been particularly booming, and the girls have had to resort to increasingly ingenious…
