Dream Girl by Laura Lippman is chilling and compulsively readable, a superb blend of psychological suspense and horror that reveals the mind and soul of a writer and touches on timely issues that include power, agency, appropriation, and creation. This was my first time reading Laura Lippman, and I wasn’t quite sure what to expect…
The late great Donald B. Westlake once said, “New York as a character in a mystery would not be the detective, would not be the murderer. It would be the enigmatic suspect who knows the real story but isn’t going to tell it.” Westlake, a Mystery Writers of America Grand Master and three-times Edgar Award…
Our book, I Got A Monster: The Rise and Fall of America’s Most Corrupt Police Squad, explores the Baltimore Police Department’s Gun Trace Task Force (GTTF), a gun-seizing unit praised for getting guns off the streets and supposedly stopping crime while simultaneously creating crime and running what one cop later called a “criminal enterprise” within…
I picked up The Stranger Beside Me at a garage sale in the spring of 1983. Thirteen years old, I was deep in my V. C. Andrews phase and searching for books that awoke that same forbidden thrill.
Like any writer, I live to procrastinate. If I don’t get my thousand words in between five-thirty and seven in the morning—when I am not fully conscious and therefore don’t yet know to be scared of the page—I will try to talk myself out of it. And while I should encourage you to sit your…
Every Wednesday, we here at Criminal Element will put together a list of Staff Picks of the books that published the day before—sharing the ones that we are looking forward to reading the most! This week, the first in a new series from Walter Mosley and a prequel Charles Lenox story from Charles Finch highlight…
Bibliomysteries, edited by Otto Penzler, is a specially commissioned anthology featuring original stories by the mystery genre’s most distinguished authors: John Connolly, Ken Bruen, Loren D. Estleman, Nelson DeMille, Anne Perry, Jeffery Deaver, C. J. Box, Thomas H. Cook, Laura Lippman, and more! I always know that when I’ve got a book with Otto Penzler’s name…
The Mystery Readers International have announced the nominees for the 2017 Macavity Awards. The Macavity Award—named for the “mystery cat” of T. S. Eliot's Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats—is an annual award celebrating the year's best in the mystery genre.
The Barry Awards, which began in 1997, are presented at the annual Bouchercon World Mystery Convention. Voted on by the readers of Deadly Pleasures, the award is named in honor of Barry Gardner, a well-known fan reviewer and American critic.
I’m a fan of all kinds of crime novels, but a lot of my favorites tend to be linked by one thing: unexplained disappearances. The idea of somebody vanishing fascinates me because it throws up so many intriguing questions: How and why do people disappear? Where do they go? How do they stay lost? What…
