There’s something magical about finding a novel someone left behind at a summer beach house—the idea that people who will likely never cross paths sharing something meaningful, a great book, in the temporary break from their lives. That was how I came across my first C. J. Box novel, Blue Heaven. Re-reading the novel ten…
When some readers hear the word “literary,” they begin thinking “boring.” Slow-paced. Low-stakes. Unexciting. And sometimes that’s true. In the quest for artistic expression and resonance, it can be easy for a writer to value style over substance and create a novel that’s simultaneously beautiful but somehow dull. There’s a sweet spot, I think, in…
An Introduction from the Author The idea of a Tourist as a kind of intelligence agent sprang out of my own lifestyle in 2007. I’d never been a spy, committed murder, or smuggled state secrets across borders, but for the previous six years I’d lived as a novelist in Budapest, existing in that tenuous non-place…
The 2008 Edgar Awards were not exactly a banner year for diversity, with no nominees being women or writers of color, but it was a year of heavy-hitters nevertheless, with John Hart, Benjamin Black (Christine Falls), Ken Bruen (Priest), Reed Farrel Coleman (Soul Patch), and Michael Chabon (The Yiddish Policemen’s Union) vying for the honor.…
The detective will see you now. He can read minds, see through walls, and guess your desires from a facial scan. He knows when you’re lying before you do. He never sleeps and his brain’s in the cloud. You have nothing to worry about. In the world of crime and punishment, never has the double-edged…
Ever since I discarded the Hardy Boys in favor of H.G. Wells’s War of the Worlds as a grade-schooler, I have embraced the dark. From Ahab in Moby Dick to Alex in A Clockwork Orange to Sophie and Nathan in Sophie’s Choice, I gravitate toward stories that show humans at their most depraved and immoral.…
Not long after I completed the final draft of The Widows—the debut title of my Kinship Mystery Series, inspired by Ohio’s true first female sheriff in 1925—my husband and I were enjoying a Friday night like the introverts we are: reading. (But in the same room.) My husband happened to be reading an article online…
In his marvelous introduction to the Istanbul of the 1860s in The Janissary Tree, Jason Goodwin invites the reader into a city poised between worlds—in the process of modernizing, but clinging to the rites and traditions of the past; hungry, hustling, magnificent, yet quick to betray even the city’s most impervious elites. The Sublime Porte…
Forensics shows are a ball, right? Not if you’re us. If you’re forensic pathologist Dr. Judy Melinek, you throw things at the screen while screaming about the parade of absurdities and inaccuracies marching across it. If you’re her husband, writer T.J. Mitchell, you have to dodge the things being thrown. We have co-authored a nonfiction…
Once I read a review in the New York Times about a book called Winter’s Tale by Mark Helprin, a book that turned out to be one of my favorite books ever. And the reviewer, I don’t remember who, was clearly apprehensive about writing it. The reviewer said something like: I’m worried, writing this, that…
