Before I dove into Silent Joe, T. Jefferson Parker was one of those names alongside Michael Connelly, Robert Parker, Sue Grafton, and dozens of others on a mental list titled “Authors I Should Probably Read One of These Days.” Thanks to this reread, I can finally cross him off, though if I’m being honest, I’m…
I’d like to start this review of Joe R. Lansdale’s The Bottoms by admitting that my only exposure to his work prior to this 2001 Edgar Award winner was a love of the film adaptation of Bubba Ho-Tep (which I only recently learned was based on a Lansdale short story) and a general understanding of…
Jan Burke wrote what would become the first of ten crime novels featuring journalist Irene Kelly in the evening hours after work. That manuscript, Goodnight, Irene (1993), sold to Simon & Schuster without the benefit of an agent or solicitation—and readers took note when then-President Bill Clinton mentioned it during his first White House interview…
Some things just never go out of style. Like nostalgia. And the further we get, the more people like to look back. Folks will always love to romanticize the past; put it up on a pedestal as if it was better or more exciting than the turbulent, messy present. Since the past is an open…
But my confidence was cosmetic. Neither I nor anyone I knew in Deaf Smith had any influence over Vernon Smothers. He believed intransigence was a virtue, a laconic and mean-spirited demeanor was strength, reason was a tool the rich used to keep the poor satisfied with their lot, and education amounted to reading books full…
There are two kinds of readers, as far as I can tell, when it comes to 1997’s Edgar Award-winner, The Chatham School Affair by Thomas H. Cook. There are those utterly perplexed by a crime novel that moves at what they deem a glacial pace and bears contents as literary as they are mysterious, and…
“Grief can be dangerous.” Sid Halley, one of author Dick Francis’ few recurring investigators and the protagonist of the 1996 novel, Come to Grief, says this just after having his arm broken by a vengeful widower armed with a length of pipe. It’s something Halley knows all too well. By the events of Come to…
What’s the worst thing that could possibly happen to a reporter? Professionally at least, that’s easy to answer. The worst thing is to make a mistake. And that is what Mary Willis Walker has captured so beautifully in The Red Scream: the anguish of a reporter—possibly—having made a devastating and career-ending error. At first, this…
At the 1993 Edgar Awards banquet, the best first novel award went to a new author named Michael Connelly, whose debut Harry Bosch novel The Black Echo had been published the previous year. The promise of that first book has clearly been fulfilled, with Connelly going on to become one of the most prolific and…
Over nearly a decade as a bookseller at Barnes & Noble, I came to know the big names in every genre. Even if I’d never read one of their books myself, I could recommend them to customers based on the author’s reputation and the reader’s interests. Margaret Maron was one of those big names. I…
