Late on the night of May 29, 1997, a talented young musician named Jeff Buckley walked into a tributary channel of the Mississippi River near Memphis, and disappeared. At the time, his star was in the ascendancy—his first album had received widespread acclaim. He was 30 years old, dark-haired and beautiful, with a voice that…
The books you read shape the books you write, and nothing has influenced me more than mysteries, right from the very start. The first books I remember reading—after the Madeline and Winnie-the-Pooh years—were mysteries. Encyclopedia Brown and Jupiter Jones were the gateway adventures leading to Trixie Belden and Nancy Drew. I loved them for the…
If you are wondering why crime is such a big genre that doesn’t appeal to you because you prefer fantasy, romance, period drama or because you tried a Poirot once and didn’t get it (this was me, too), these might change your mind. They’re not just crime books—they’re good books. Best Book for Romance Readers…
From Queen of Suspense, Agatha Christie, The Last Séance is an all-new collection of her spookiest and most sinister stories, including the never-before-published in the USA, “The Wife of Kenite!” With Halloween just around the corner, what better time to delve into a collection of spooky and mysterious tales written by the Queen of Suspense…
There’s something inherently interesting about a mystery set on an island. There are those that are set on small islands: ones that are remote, wind-swept, and hopefully facing a devastating storm. The threat of isolation without the possibility of outside assistance makes for great storytelling. Then there are the ones that explore those tiny close-knit…
My thriller, The Escape Room, set in an elevator, is a 21st-century twist to the locked-room mystery genre of crime novels. The locked-room mystery novel developed in the late 19th century and the early 20th century when readers were invited to solve the murder mystery using clues in the story, and they’ve been popular ever…
As we filed in, there at the head of this class was someone who could best be described as an older gentleman, in the truest sense of both words. En verité, his head was not egg-shaped, and it was thinly covered with white hair. He was easily in his 60s, had a thin white mustache,…
I love the combination of cinema and literature. I studied English Literature and was a screenwriter before writing my first novel, The Silent Patient—a psychological thriller about a woman who shoots her husband five times and then never speaks again. I’ve been reading mystery writers like Agatha Christie since my childhood and I’ve always been…
A country house, a dead body, a pack of suspects—sounds like Agatha Christie, no? Of course, it does. It’s said that Dame Agatha named 1958’s Ordeal by Innocence as one of her two favorite novels (Crooked House being the other), though she was known to change her answer to that particular question, as would any…
Since today is Halloween, let’s give a spooky classic the GIFnotes treatment—take a visual tour of Agatha Christie’s Hallowe’en Party! At a Halloween party… Joyce—a hostile thirteen-year-old—boasts that she once witnessed a murder. When no one believes her… She storms off home. But within hours, her body is found, still in the house, drowned in…
