It is a truth universally acknowledged that mystery readers crave a little holiday homicide along with their eggnog. The holiday puzzler first caught on in 1936 with Mavis Doriel Hayes’s The Santa Klaus Murder. By 1938 Agatha Christie had jumped in with her hugely popular Hercule Poirot’s Christmas, which Robert Barnard called a “welcome interruption…
In 1993, Deborah Crombie published A Share in Death, her first Kincaid and James mystery. In October 2019, she released her 18th in the series, A Bitter Feast. As I discuss why this series is utterly compelling, beware of spoilers! Review: A Bitter Feast A Share in Death, set in a “luxurious Yorkshire time-share,” felt…
A Better Man by Louise Penny is the latest addition to the #1 New York Times bestselling series starring Armand Gamache. She has done it again. With a vengeance. Take the same backwater in Québec, the same core of main characters, and write fifteen crime stories with that. You will probably end up with predictable…
The first Canadian winner of the Edgar for Best Novel features, perhaps stereotypically, features a Mountie and a librarian politely declining to discuss a murder where they both know whodunnit. The Mountie is Staff Sergeant Karl Alberg, a divorced forty-something who misses his daughters back in Calgary but has no intention of leaving his posting…
A Great Reckoning by #1 New York Times-bestselling author Louise Penny is the 12th book in the Chief Inspector Gamache series. Get a digital copy of A Great Reckoning for only $4.99 through the month of October! When an intricate old map is found stuffed into the walls of the bistro in Three Pines, it at first seems…
Can a single book change the course of your life? Bestselling author Will Schwalbe explores the magic of books by inviting notable guests to tell the stories of the books and moments that impacted their lives. On this week’s But That’s Another Story, novelist Louis Penny sits down with Will Schwalbe to talk about E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web,…
To celebrate Louise Penny’s seventh Agatha Award win at the recent Malice Domestic convention, as well as the paperback publication of Glass Houses, we’re giving away a Louise Penny prize pack to ten lucky winners! A limited edition Louise Penny/Malice Domestic tote bag A Louise Penny leather bookmark A paperback copy of Glass Houses A…
At CrimeHQ, we're dedicated to bringing you the best in crime and mystery. And now, the site you know and love will be getting an upgrade! So for the next week or so, we'll be busy getting everything in order and moving our great content over to our new site. But, in the meantime, we…
Malice Domestic—an annual convention held in Washington, D.C., honoring the best of the traditional/cozy mystery genre—has announced the nominees for 2018's Agatha Awards. Loosely defined as “mysteries which contain no explicit sex or excessive gore or violence,” the Agatha Award salutes the books best typified by the works of Agatha Christie. This year, the annual…
