What is it about a cold case that quickens the imagination? Grocery store manager Grace Harper is a leading member of an amateur sleuth group called the Grave Diggers. Their mission is to solve “dead cases, gone cold so long that most others have forgotten about them or given up.” Grace believes the Lovelorn Killer…
For a serial killer who enjoys provoking headlines, the greatest irony is that true fame requires being caught, and make no mistake—they do not wish to be caught. A few killers have managed to capture public imagination anyway. Jack the Ripper and the Zodiac Killer have each inspired numerous books and movies. Theories about their…
Prologue GRACE NOTES Journal Entry #441 DO YOU REMEMBER THE MOMENT YOU REALIZED YOU WERE GOING TO DIE? I was five years old, lying in my princess bed with its canopy and pink dust ruffles. My mother had sent me there after I put her expensive brassiere on Louie, our beagle. I might’ve gotten away…
If you can’t decide on what to read, the Minotaur Spring Sampler is the perfect way to choose. Whether you want to start a series or read a standalone novel, the Sampler has you covered. With five books to choose from, the Sampler contains the beginnings of five different mysteries. Just download for free on…
Chapter 1 Wait, you’re just going to leave us here? Alone?” Ellery Hathaway had faced down serial killers and lived to tell about it, but she felt a cold trickle of fear as she glanced at the lone child playing nearby on the grass. “I believe your ex-wife specifically forbade this proposition. In writing.…
Describe the first time you pictured Ellery Hathaway in your head. Ellery Hathaway came into being twenty years ago with the first draft of what would eventually be The Vanishing Season. I’m a linear writer, so Ellery’s first appearance would have been in the prologue, when she’s fourteen years old and riding her bike alone…
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…
In No Mercy by Joanna Schaffhausen, Police Officer Ellery Hathaway has been suspended from the force for killing a man in cold blood. Ellery feels no remorse. Take down the monster when you have a clean shot because you might not get a second one. This philosophy had landed her in hot water now, but…
Have you ever met a murderer? I’ve brushed up against three infamous murder cases—each lurid enough to be fictionalized on programs like Law and Order and Cold Case. In the first one, I lived in the same dorm with Gina Grant, a young woman convicted at age fourteen of murdering her mother. In Gina’s telling, her mother was an…
