Mixed Signals is the second novel in the Grace Street cozy mystery series (available October 2, 2012). Mixed Signals is a cozy novel that has a heavier focus on characters than on crime. Yes, there is some mystery, a murder, and a few robberies, but it’s the people that keep the story going—people who are…
The Other Woman by Hank Phillippi Ryan is the first book in the Jane Ryland and Jake Brogan thriller series about a journalist and cop in Boston (available September 4, 2012). Jane Ryland had thrown up after the verdict. She’d twisted her damp hair away from her face, avoided the mirror, and contemplated how long…
No question, the renegade doctor was looking at my chest. And that presented a major problem. I was wearing thick glasses instead of my usual contacts. My on-air hair had never looked so disheveled. Even my friends wouldn’t recognize me without my usual television makeup. I was undercover and in disguise. But the doctor’s wandering…
An excerpt of False Negative, a noir thriller by Joseph Koenig (available June 5, 2012). CLICK HERE TO ENTER for a chance to win a trade-paperback copy of False Negative by Joseph Koenig. Adam Jordan wrote the best and worst articles of his journalistic career on the same day. The worst was bad enough to…
At Criminal Element, we like our memes. We also happen to like Ryan Gosling in Gangster Squad, so what’s a Crime HQ agent to do but make our own “Hey Girl, Ryan Gosling” memes, of course! We’re big fedora fans, and the new Gangster Squad trailer is filled with ’em. Plus we’re loving the story…
Hey…why does the bad guy look like he’s the one with the halo? Because it’s Chinatown. At least the time and place and stink of corruption are about right. Gangster Squad is an upcoming movie about an LAPD squad assembled and working off the books from 1946 through the 1950s to prevent the incursion of…
An excerpt of Cliff Walk, a Liam Mulligan thriller by Bruce DeSilva (available May 22, 2012). Prostitution has been legal in Rhode Island for more than a decade; Liam Mulligan, an old-school investigative reporter at a dying Providence newspaper, suspects the governor has been taking payoffs to keep it that way. But this isn’t the…
An excerpt from A Killing Winter by Wayne Arthurson (available April 10, 2012). Leo Desroches, a half-Cree, half-French-Canadian reporter in Edmonton, returns in A Killing Winter, the sequel to Wayne Arthurson’s lauded debut murder mystery Fall from Grace. Undercover as a homeless man, Leo’s got his hands full both on the job and in his…
The corruption trial of Cuyahoga County Commissioner Jimmy Dimora is a big deal, but it’s also rich in absurdity. Recognizing that, rather than flashing up a bunch of pastel drawings from the trial, one Cleveland TV station began airing testimony and wiretap transcripts from the courtroom with the visual aid of puppets and started a…
Horace McCoy led a life so interesting it seems almost comic. He was a fighter pilot in WW1 (shot down and awarded the French equivalent of the Medal of Honor, of course). He was reputedly a pretty good actor and helped create a theater in Dallas. He wrote war and adventure tales as well as…
