I love reading a haunted house novel where the haunted house is actually scary. The title hacienda of Isabel Cañas’ debut novel delivers on that in spades, in this eerie cross between Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca and Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting Of Hill House. Even more absorbingly, the story is set amidst the turmoil immediately…
Dane Behr’s debut marks a notable new entry into the still nascent Midwestern Gothic genre, evoking a sense of place as unforgettable as the cat and mouse relationship between the detective and killer in this atmospheric novel of hard rain and small towns in mid 20th century America. Oscar, Iowa in the 1960s is a…
I recently had the pleasure of speaking with Mark Westmoreland. He is a talented up-and-coming noir author. His debut book, A Violent Gospel, is available now from Shotgun Honey Books. About A Violent Gospel, the author writes: “The book is about two brothers, Mack and Marshall Dooley, who steal money from a snake-handling Pentecostal cult…
When Paloma was growing up in the Little Miracles Girls’ Home in Sri Lanka, all she wanted was to be adopted. She could hardly believe it when rich and beautiful Mr. and Mrs. Evans from San Francisco took an interest in her and wanted to take her home as their daughter. It felt like a…
Mary thought that getting accepted to Cornell University would help her blow off the dust of the Minnesota hometown where she’d grown up so miserably. Her local paper even did a feature on “Ivy League Mary,” as she was nicknamed right before she left. Her college acceptance gave her a social cachet that she’d never…
When I started writing a psychological thriller, it was inevitable that a lot of psychology would be baked into it. I have a PhD in Social Psychology and spent six years (ten, if you count undergrad) steeped in the study of human minds. I started out as a writer of literary fiction who often dabbled…
If life gave you the chance to start over, would you take it? What if that chance wasn’t a choice, but forced upon you? The Other Me, Sarah Zachrich Jeng’s debut novel, follows the unsettling experience of a woman named Kelly Holter whose life is turned upside down when she steps into the bathroom at…
Falling by T. J. Newman is a fast-paced thriller aboard a commercial airplane where the pilot and his crew must quickly devise a plan to avoid disaster when he is blackmailed to crash the plane in exchange for the safety of his kidnapped family. Captain Bill Hoffman is an upstanding family guy, but he can’t…
From the very first page, Suburban Dicks flies out of the gate at top speed: Satkunanathan Sasmal would have been the first to admit he’d had worse nights working the midnight shift at his uncle’s Valero station. There was the old lady who fell asleep while driving and plowed into the first island. Satkunanathan…
Shutter by Melissa Larsen is a chilling debut novel about a young woman who agrees to star in a filmmaker’s latest project but soon realizes the movie is not what she expected. Betty Roux is a young woman running from her recent past. Sleeping on her friends’ couch in New York City, she has vague…
