I first dipped my toe into the pool of writing with romance. It was 2010, and I had never even thought about being an author. I found a site called Wattpad while scrolling through the App Store. Wattpad is a platform where amateur writers post their stories online for anyone to read. At first I…
Not to brag, but I know more about rejection than most writers do. One might go so far as to say I’m an expert on the subject. Now, a lot of you may be thinking, Who the hell IS this guy? Exactly. Many of you have never heard of me or read any of my work—unless,…
William Kent Krueger’s Ordinary Grace is one of those crime novels in which crime is just one of the elements of the story. While there is murder in its pages, this book is a celebration of language, a brilliant and nostalgic study of life in small-town America in the 1960s, a look at the complex…
On the morning of November 20, 1960, author Norman Mailer almost murdered his wife. His second wife, that is: Adele Morales Mailer. The oft-married Mailer (he tallied up six wives in all) is both famous and infamous for so many reasons that too often, Adele’s name goes missing. She’s often written off, at best, as…
Most of the ideas for my books come in dribs and drabs. A premise will occur to me, then stick in my brain for a couple of months before another idea joins that first one. More often than not, these imagined novels wither on the vine. But sometimes they flower. It can take a year,…
As a Boston native and crime fiction lover since childhood, I always felt like I got on the Dennis Lehane train early, with his superb first entry in the Kenzie and Gennaro PI series, A Drink Before the War. Then he started producing other powerhouse novels like Shutter Island and Mystic River—books that brought alive…
Regardless of characters, setting, or storyline, a single word always comes to mind when I read a Michael Connelly novel: authenticity. The details of how Harry Bosch, Mickey Haller, and Renée Ballard investigate crimes, identify suspects, and interact with their colleagues always withstand scrutiny. In a recent review of Connelly’s newest book The Night Fire,…
Thank you again to everyone who participated in our Q&A with Olen Steinhauer. We were thrilled with all of your questions, and we tried to choose 10 of them that Olen will answer next week on the site. If your question/username appears below, congratulations on being selected to win an early copy of The Last…
Mo Hayder’s Gone reads like two novels wrapped together by the same case. There are two characters that could qualify as main characters and their narratives contain enough action, tension, and drama to count as two novellas. However, Hayder weaved them together under the umbrella of a case that begins with what seemed like a…
The supernatural thriller, to me, has always been a small sliver of a genre, one that takes a careful hand. Some books tip into straight horror, while others bury their scary happenings in innuendo and the feeling that something bad—really bad—is going to happen. Some read like mysteries, while others are psychological portraits of haunted…
