Maya is just starting to get her life back on track when she sees a viral video, and learns that the man who got away with killing her best friend Aubrey when they were teenagers has done it again. The video itself seems fairly innocuous. Grainy security footage shows a man and a woman walking…
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…
World Enough is an intriguing, hard-hitting, intricately-plotted mystery set in Boston’s clubland and marks an exciting new departure for cozy author Clea Simon. It's only rock 'n roll, but I like it. Clea Simon brings us back to the '80s Boston rock club scene with her newest mystery, World Enough. A journalist by trade, she…
Robert B. Parker's Slow Burn by Ace Atkins is the newest Spenser novel, where Boston PI Spenser faces a hot case and a personal crisis (Available today!). An assessment of a new Spenser novel requires this reviewer to reveal a bit of my adoration for series creator, Robert B. Parker, and why I was initially…
Pam Wechsler spent several years as a criminal prosecutor in Boston, MA before moving to Los Angeles to write for television—most notably Law & Order, Law & Order: Criminal Intent, and Law & Order: Trial by Jury. Now, Ms. Wechsler is trying her hand at crime fiction with her first novel, Mission Hill. She was…
Mission Hill by Pamela Wechsler is the debut novel from this former criminal prosecutor and television writer (Law and Order) (Available May 3, 2016). Abby Endicott is chief of the District Attorney’s homicide unit in Boston, where she investigates and prosecutes the city’s most dangerous killers. A member of Beacon Hill’s elite, and a graduate…
What You See by Hank Phillippi Ryan is the 4th thriller in the Jane Ryland and Jake Brogan series (available October 27, 2015). Why would a father abduct his own child? A wedding is planned in Jane Ryland's family, but there's a disaster instead. Nine-year-old Gracie-supposed to be the flower girl-has been taken by her…
If there's anyone who typifies the if you can't beat 'em, join 'em mantra, it's Whitey Bulger, the infamous mafia boss who terrorized South Boston in the 1970s. Bulger became an FBI informant in order to help take down a rival mafia family who was trying to overtake his territory. Black Mass is the story…
Not everyone is deserving of the nickname he or she receives, but for Boston mafioso Joseph Barboza, “The Animal” was quite apt. Linked to the murders of over 30 people, some for business and some for fun, Barboza was only one member of a fearsome mafia that terrorized people up and down the East Coast.…
Truth Be Told by Hank Phillippi Ryan is the third novel featuring Jane Ryland and Jake Brogan, a Boston journalist and cop, whose new investigations of murder amid shady foreclosures and the cold case of the Lilac Sunday murder become as complicatedly intertwined as their relationship (available October 7, 2014). The novel begins on an unseasonably…
