The detective will see you now. He can read minds, see through walls, and guess your desires from a facial scan. He knows when you’re lying before you do. He never sleeps and his brain’s in the cloud. You have nothing to worry about. In the world of crime and punishment, never has the double-edged…
Ever since I discarded the Hardy Boys in favor of H.G. Wells’s War of the Worlds as a grade-schooler, I have embraced the dark. From Ahab in Moby Dick to Alex in A Clockwork Orange to Sophie and Nathan in Sophie’s Choice, I gravitate toward stories that show humans at their most depraved and immoral.…
Not long after I completed the final draft of The Widows—the debut title of my Kinship Mystery Series, inspired by Ohio’s true first female sheriff in 1925—my husband and I were enjoying a Friday night like the introverts we are: reading. (But in the same room.) My husband happened to be reading an article online…
Forensics shows are a ball, right? Not if you’re us. If you’re forensic pathologist Dr. Judy Melinek, you throw things at the screen while screaming about the parade of absurdities and inaccuracies marching across it. If you’re her husband, writer T.J. Mitchell, you have to dodge the things being thrown. We have co-authored a nonfiction…
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…
I picked up The Stranger Beside Me at a garage sale in the spring of 1983. Thirteen years old, I was deep in my V. C. Andrews phase and searching for books that awoke that same forbidden thrill.
Sticking It To The Man: Revolution and Counterculture in Pulp and Popular Fiction, 1950 to 1980, edited by myself and Iain McIntyre, is the first comprehensive account of the ways in which the changing politics and culture of the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s were reflected in pulp, crime and popular fiction in the UK, United…
Though it has been over four hundred years since William Shakespeare’s death, his works continue to inspire new generations of authors. There’s just something about the Bard, isn’t there? The tragic love of Romeo and Juliet, the darkness of King Lear’s psyche . . . Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets are rife with possibilities for retelling…
Eudora Welty once said, “Fiction depends for its life on place,” and perhaps nowhere is that truer than fiction set in Maine. What is it about this sprawling, forested, mostly empty state with its craggy coastline and innumerable lakes and ponds? Mention Maine and associations seem to go off like flashbulbs. Whether that’s due to…
I’ve always loved reading mysteries, from dark Nordic Noir to faster contemporary stories. I’ve inhaled everything from Jo Nesbo’s Harry Hole books to Jonathan Kellerman’s Alex Delaware mysteries, to Ann Cleeves’ stories set in the remote Shetland islands, and J.D. Robb’s mysteries set in a futuristic New York.
