Character-driven and evocative, The Lonely Witness by William Boyle brings Brooklyn to life in a way only a native can and opens readers’ eyes to the harsh realities of crime and punishment on the city streets. When a writer has a good premise for a novel, they can develop that premise in various ways. Should plot construction—complete…
A page-turning whodunit set in the wilds of a remote movie ranch, Bottom Feeders by John Shepphird describes the hapless Hollywood cast and crew that eke out a living working on low-budget fare. The biographical information on the back of John Shepphird’s Bottom Feeders states that the author is the director of nine feature films and hours…
The Devil at Your Door by Eric Beetner is the third volume in the Lars and Shaine series. Eric Beetner’s The Devil at Your Door is the third and presumably final entry in his Lars and Shaine series. It follows The Devil Doesn’t Want Me and When the Devil Comes to Call in chronicling the…
Jack Waters by Scott Adlerberg is a historical thriller set in 1904 about an American guy from New Orleans—a poker player and fugitive murderer—who joins a Caribbean island revolution for utterly non-political reasons. He has his own reasons for joining the rebellion, based on revenge against someone high up in the country (available January 17,…
The Student by Iain Ryan is high-paced, hardboiled regional noir: fresh, gritty, unnerving, with a stark and lonely beauty. University campus novels involving crime date back to at least Dorothy L. Sayers’s Gaudy Night (1935), in which Lord Peter Wimsey and his mystery writer friend Harriet Vane investigate vandalism, poison-pen messages, and threats of murder at Oxford…
American Static by Tom Pitts is a fast-paced crime thriller set against the backdrop of Northern California's wine country, Oakland's mean streets, and San Francisco's peaks and alleys, written by a man who knows the underbelly of the city like no one else. In classic noir stories—fiction or film—it only takes one bad decision or…
Proving Ground by Peter Blauner is a sweeping crime novel, an intricate story about the quest for redemption, and a vibrant portrait of contemporary New York City. Proving Ground is Peter Blauner’s first novel in eleven years. Since his last, Slipping Into Darkness, he has been writing for television shows such as Law & Order: SVU…
Daphne du Maurier published her story “The Birds” in her 1952 collection called The Apple Tree. Several years later, Alfred Hitchcock bought the rights to the story, and in 1963 he released it as a film with a script by novelist Evan Hunter. Hitchcock had already filmed two du Maurier works, Jamaica Inn in 1939…
In January, 1993, right after airing Super Bowl XXVII, NBC premiered the series Homicide: Life on the Street. I remember watching the first episode then because I had seen the promo spots for it during the game, and it appeared to be an intriguing enough police show to give it a try. It’s amusing now…
Last winter, the two films I was most eager to see were Westerns: The Revenant and The Hateful Eight. In the case of The Revenant, the trailer made the film look spectacular. Knowing that the director was Alejandro González Iñárritu—much of whose earlier work (in particular 21 Grams) I quite liked—excited me all the more. As for Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful…
