2014 promises to be chock full of wonderful mystery conventions and conferences ranging from Bouchercon— the world’s largest crime fiction convention—to more tightly-focused conferences like Malice Domestic, which specializes in traditional and cozy mysteries. Thrillerfest is, of course, primarily about thrillers, and Left Coast Crime is regional, but also offers the year's only humorous mystery…
Who is Killing the Great Capes of Heropa by Andrez Bergen depicts murders within a virtual city of heroes and adoring masses—now isolated from the rest of dystopian reality—as a stylistic homage to 1940s detective noir and the 1960s Marvel age of comics (available September 27, 2013). This story is, quite simply, a love letter…
If you love books, what could be better than reading books about books, or books about being inside books or people who get to hang around books. (That was a statement, not a question.) Here are some of my favorite bibliophile mysteries and thrillers. The Shadow of the Wind and The Angel’s Game by Carlos…
Seriously. Scientists at Cornell University have created a real hole in time, a temporal cloak of sorts, just like the invisibility cloak in Harry Potter. It’s a place where objects are invisible and events are un-recorded. Sure, no humans went in the hole and it only lasted 50 trillionths of a second, which isn’t long…
Recently, I overheard two women in the mystery section in a bookstore: “Oh my gawd, I can’t believe it, they have this in the mysteries! It has spells and magic and everything!!!” “Oh gawd, that’s so stupid!!!” I moved away before my inner librarian erupted to explain to the shocked duo that the books had…
Finding something new to read can be a tiresome and treacherous ordeal. I use a method that has served me well for many years, a sort of hunter-gatherer approach: I stalk the bookstore aisles, searching for something ripe and fresh enough to tempt me. Hunting. And there it is; the cover art attracts me, the…
