What’s Left of Me Is Yours is a gripping debut set in modern-day Tokyo and inspired by a true crime that charts a young woman’s search for the truth about her mother’s life—and her murder. Stephanie Scott’s What’s Left of Me Is Yours is an outstanding novel that occupies the interstitial space between crime and…
In the third Isaiah Coleridge novel from Laird Barron, Isaiah finds himself entangled with a rich and powerful cult while looking into a mysterious death and a shady real-estate deal worth billions. There’s a secret to creating something great and then consistently making it even better, and Laird Barron possesses that arcane knowledge. With Worse…
Brian Panowich’s Hard Cash Valley is a violent crime narrative with an undeniable sense of place and a series of unlikely protagonists that somehow coalesces into a tense, fast-paced slice of Southern grit. Dane Kirby has a decent job and a loving girlfriend, but he’s a broken man haunted by the ghosts of his dead…
Take Me Apart by Sara Sligar is a spellbinding debut novel of psychological suspense and a chilling, thought-provoking take on art, illness, and power that follows a young archivist’s obsession with her subject’s mysterious death as it threatens to destroy her fragile grasp on sanity. Sara Sligar’s Take Me Apart is a fascinating narrative that…
All it takes to unravel a life is one little secret… In Jennifer Hillier’s riveting new thriller, a woman desperately tries to save her marriage in the face of overwhelming tragedy. Jennifer Hillier is one of the best in the business. The elements that make her one of the best are clear and present in every…
K. Ferrari’s Like Flies from Afar does not feature your average protagonist. Luis Machi has a cocaine habit, an affinity for women who are not his wife, millions of dollars in the bank, and a bloody corpse in the trunk of his BMW… but as far as the body goes, he’s completely innocent. Like Flies…
William Kent Krueger’s Ordinary Grace is one of those crime novels in which crime is just one of the elements of the story. While there is murder in its pages, this book is a celebration of language, a brilliant and nostalgic study of life in small-town America in the 1960s, a look at the complex…
To read Donald E. Westlake at the top of his game is to attend a master class in fun, fast-paced pulp. In Double Feature, the latest Westlake release from Hard Case Crime, we get two chances of seeing Westlake in action. While one the narratives is superior to the other, both showcase the wit, knack…
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…
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.…
