Introduction by Author: For a long time, I have been deeply fascinated by female friendships. Not least, I suppose, because of my own. The peculiar emphasis that little girls have on finding their ‘best friend’ is, at times, as intense as the pursuit of a romantic relationship in teenage years. The desire for someone to…
A Note from Author Wendy Church I wrote Murder on the Spanish Seas during the first year of the pandemic lockdown—like everyone else, we were pretty isolated, and I was thinking about places I’d been, and places I wished I could go. The Basque Country has been on my travel list for a while, and the more…
Prologue Jesus, thought Joey, stopping to catch his breath while simultaneously chastising himself for using the Lord’s name in vain. They’d said the hike was challenging, even by hardy Norwegian mountaineering standards. But he didn’t realize “challenging” was code for “your lungs will be bleeding.” Probably not too demanding for a younger person, but he…
A Note from William Martin I like to write on a broad canvas, about high stakes, with a big idea driving me on from the first scene to the climax. For December ’41, I found them all at the movies. I was watching the World War II film, Darkest Hour. About halfway through, Churchill…
Chapter One JUNE 2019 Week One: THURSDAY It took him four minutes to circle the block. He drove slowly, looking for a parking space on Jenna’s street while keeping one eye out for surveillance cameras. He’d read somewhere that Midtown had more security cameras per block than any other neighborhood in the city. It made…
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…
A Note from Sena Desai Gopal The 86th Village takes place in a southern Indian village doomed to drown in the backwaters of a dam. The story and characters are fictitious, but the setting is autobiographical. My ancestral village, Yadahalli, will drown in one of India’s biggest dams—The Upper Krishna Project—across the 900-mile long…
Now Friday, May 3 Leah The key is to go to a few different stores. I used to always go to Jerry’s Liquors on Bonifant Avenue. I was a regular. Too regular. Jerry’s mouth started to form a thin line when I’d come in. I could see the conflict on his face. He was glad…
A Note from Wayne Johnson Would that it were so simple, that I could claim I spun The Red Canoe whole cloth out of nothing. Only that’s not the way I work now, nor have I ever worked that way. No, The Red Canoe came into being through a joining of two characters (amalgams,…
01| Begin / End The last thing I remember is noise. Images are hazy, and they only come in flashes. Most of them are dark, dripping with night, and impossible to make sense of—a glimpse of a tree branch here, a wiry crack in the glass there. Bloodstained fingers. Fragmented pieces of my reflection gazing…
