Jay Desmarteaux raised a whole lot of hell in New Jersey after he was released from prison after 25 years for the murder of a rapist bully at his school. Now he’s on the run in his home state of Louisiana, where he traces his roots to an evil family tree that’s grown large and…
The Night Will Find Us by Matthew Lyons is a haunting thriller set in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey that follows four friends on a camping trip that turns deadly as they all struggle to survive, find help, and avoid the killer who is still loose in the woods. Teens go into the woods.…
Heist novels are a staple of the genre but often they are few and far between. Robin Hood thieves have taken hold, and often when I read fictional criminals, they are less like Richard Stark’s Parker and Wallace Stroby’s Crissa Stone and more like a shadowy justice department where the important thing is to steal…
Lawrence Block has been writing for over sixty years, and he’s written everything from parlor mysteries solved by an affable burglar to the hardest of hard-boiled detective fiction starring Matt Scudder. Additionally, he has published a few bushels of memorable short stories including an Edgar winner only a few years ago, and a series about…
The world of academia has always been ripe fruit for the fictional plucking, as it often leaves a mark everyone who endures it, as student and teacher. And as it serves as the day job for many writers, they have a fresh perspective. Lawrence Block’s latest anthology, the fifth—at least—since he announced his retirement, is…
Join Thomas Pluck for a chat with Don Winslow as they discuss his latest book, Broken, and then continue reading for a full review! Don Winslow is the bestselling author of the blockbuster epic Cartel trilogy, the NYPD cop saga The Force, the thriller Savages which was made into a movie directed by Oliver Stone, the…
In a post-Sopranos world, Italian-American stories have dried up like a Cucuzza left on the vine. An agent even told me she was sick of Italian mobster stories, and I agreed with her because in the hands of medium talents they descend into caricature; dumb, inarticulate brutes who our hero private eye—despite that he’s a…
Themed anthologies are hit or miss; sometimes the concept creates a cohesive whole (and other times an incoherent hole). So far, Lawrence Block has edited three anthologies of stories inspired by art, and the newest—as people who’ve never stepped foot on a horse track say—is the Trifecta. The first, In Sunlight or in Shadow, focused…
The Butterfly Girl by Rene Denfeld follows Naomi, an investigator searching for her missing sister in a city where young, homeless girls have been going missing and turning up dead. A year ago, Naomi, the investigator with an uncanny ability for finding missing children, made a promise that she would not take another case until…
The Butterfly Girl by Rene Denfeld is the second book in the Naomi Cottle series—the investigator with an uncanny ability for finding missing children—and a riveting novel that ripples with truth, exploring the depths of love and sacrifice in the face of a past that cannot be left dead and buried. Writing about child abuse…
