On the morning of November 20, 1960, author Norman Mailer almost murdered his wife. His second wife, that is: Adele Morales Mailer. The oft-married Mailer (he tallied up six wives in all) is both famous and infamous for so many reasons that too often, Adele’s name goes missing. She’s often written off, at best, as…
Most of the ideas for my books come in dribs and drabs. A premise will occur to me, then stick in my brain for a couple of months before another idea joins that first one. More often than not, these imagined novels wither on the vine. But sometimes they flower. It can take a year,…
Regardless of characters, setting, or storyline, a single word always comes to mind when I read a Michael Connelly novel: authenticity. The details of how Harry Bosch, Mickey Haller, and Renée Ballard investigate crimes, identify suspects, and interact with their colleagues always withstand scrutiny. In a recent review of Connelly’s newest book The Night Fire,…
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…
The supernatural thriller, to me, has always been a small sliver of a genre, one that takes a careful hand. Some books tip into straight horror, while others bury their scary happenings in innuendo and the feeling that something bad—really bad—is going to happen. Some read like mysteries, while others are psychological portraits of haunted…
Though this list could run many pages (even just focusing on films of the seventies), I’m sharing a few films that, whether I intended it or not, certainly informed my approach to The Last Tourist with their deft and entertaining critiques of the intersection of politics and business. The Parallax View (1974) For a…
We all know that moment, when you get to the last act of an insanely readable thriller and then the rug is pulled out from under you! The plot twist revealed. It is that moment that turns the story completely on its head and makes you question everything. The moment in a novel that makes…
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…
It’s not an exaggeration to say that my heart broke a bit with the news that Mary Higgins Clark, America’s “Queen of Suspense,” died last Friday at the age of 92. Any time a person passes who has been part of your life for as long as she was mine, the loss is profound. And…
When I first began writing about Milo Weaver in 2007, I was attempting to change course creatively. My earlier writing—five novels set in Eastern Europe during the Cold War—had begun to feel like a kind of escape from the messy, post-9/11 world unfolding around me. Instead of dealing with the world I was living in,…
