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…
Mo Hayder’s Gone reads like two novels wrapped together by the same case. There are two characters that could qualify as main characters and their narratives contain enough action, tension, and drama to count as two novellas. However, Hayder weaved them together under the umbrella of a case that begins with what seemed like a…
You may remember me. Think back. The summer of 1990. I know that’s a while ago, but the wire services picked up the story and I was in every newspaper in the country… I stayed in the news for two or three days, but even when the cameras and the reporters moved on to…
Grief. Despair. Depression. Hope. One unspeakable tragedy has the ability to affect countless individuals in varying ways. And while everyone effected reacts in their own way, it’s ultimately how one responds and recovers from the trials and tribulations of tragedy that shapes themselves and their future. Do you give up and run away? Sink so…
There’s something magical about finding a novel someone left behind at a summer beach house—the idea that people who will likely never cross paths sharing something meaningful, a great book, in the temporary break from their lives. That was how I came across my first C. J. Box novel, Blue Heaven. Re-reading the novel ten…
The 2008 Edgar Awards were not exactly a banner year for diversity, with no nominees being women or writers of color, but it was a year of heavy-hitters nevertheless, with John Hart, Benjamin Black (Christine Falls), Ken Bruen (Priest), Reed Farrel Coleman (Soul Patch), and Michael Chabon (The Yiddish Policemen’s Union) vying for the honor.…
In his marvelous introduction to the Istanbul of the 1860s in The Janissary Tree, Jason Goodwin invites the reader into a city poised between worlds—in the process of modernizing, but clinging to the rites and traditions of the past; hungry, hustling, magnificent, yet quick to betray even the city’s most impervious elites. The Sublime Porte…
Once I read a review in the New York Times about a book called Winter’s Tale by Mark Helprin, a book that turned out to be one of my favorite books ever. And the reviewer, I don’t remember who, was clearly apprehensive about writing it. The reviewer said something like: I’m worried, writing this, that…
The 2005 Edgar Award winner for best novel, California Girl by T. Jefferson Parker, is part police procedural and part family saga focused on the lives of the three Becker brothers caught up in a tangled web of love, betrayal, and murder. I was excited to review this novel because Parker’s other Edgar Award winner,…
2004 was a strange year. At least in terms of awards, if nothing else. Clocks by Coldplay picked up Record of the Year at the Grammy’s, inexplicably beating Hey Ya! by OutKast. Across town, at the Oscars, Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King won Best Picture instead of Mystic River. (Peter Jackson…
