Green-Eyed Lady by Chuck Greaves is the second legal mystery featuring wise-cracking L.A. attorney Jack MacTaggart (available June 25, 2013). Back in 1987, over a year before the 1988 presidential election, front-runner Gary Hart dared the reporters to follow him after reports surfaced that he was having an extra-marital affair. They did and he was…
Seven Wonders by Adam Christopher is set in alternate reality complete with superheroes and battling supervillains (available August 28, 2012). Let’s be honest: superheroes work better on paper than they do in the movies. Gorgeous, four-colored comic book splash pages reel you into their imaginary world. In the panels of a comic book, men and…
Evil Dark by Justin Gustainis is a crime noir-paranormal hybrid (available April 24, 2012). All fiction is a journey into the fantastic. Whether it is the fog-shrouded streets of Sherlock Holmes’s London or the magical world of NBC’s paranormal police procedural, Grimm, a tinge of unreality surrounds the tale. These worlds, after all, do not…
From the start, Batman was the anti-Superman. Think back to 1939, the year Batman debuted in Detective Comics #27, and a year after Superman made his big splash. The Great Depression still bogged down the world, war clouds formed on the horizon, and the little guy seemed adrift. Superman, for all of his early adventures…
In the pantheon of deaths, being locked in the trunk of a car and then having said car drive off a pier has got to rank somewhere in the top 25. Think about it: you know you can’t get out, you feel the water seeping into the space, you don’t have any cell phone coverage…
Last spring, when I wrote about the Season 3 finale of Castle, I spoke of Kate Beckett’s heart and how it is her journey that has the most traction in this series, that, from a certain point of view, the show about a writer who tags along with New York City detectives is really about…
Do we really need bookstores? With the growth of Internet retailers over the last fifteen years and the convenience of click-and-buy, you might legitimately question the place of a bookstore in our lives. Once Amazon hit the big time, more and more people I knew simply surfed the Internet, performed specific searches, bought books online,…
This Christmas, we get to see the second Sherlock Holmes film featuring Robert Downey, Jr. as the great detective. I know many people disliked the first film for all of its modernization of the character. I wasn’t one of them. I enjoyed Downey’s take on Holmes (and Jude Law’s version of Watson) and look forward…
If Ed McBain wrote a comic book, it probably would have been a lot like Gotham Central. You recognize the city name, of course. It’s Batman’s stomping grounds. It’s the town where all the wackos come out to play, wreak havoc, and then go home to Arkham Asylum. And, aside from Commissioner James Gordon or…
Normal people are boring, even in comics. For the last seventy years, comic books have been the playground of super-heroes and super-villains. Nearly all of theme wear colorful costumes and wreak havoc on the lives of normal people. There have been some notable titles where “normal” people interact with meta-humans, namely Marvels from Marvel Comics…
