In Bleak Harbor by Bryan Gruley, on the day before a much-awaited and equally chaotic lakeside festival, Danny Peters, the youngest member of the town’s founding family, disappears. Bryan Gruley’s Bleak Harbor is an elaborate, intricately plotted novel that pulls the best elements of crime fiction, thrillers, and mysteries into a dreary, tense narrative that explores…
Bryan Gruley is a lifelong journalist who shared in the Pulitzer Prize awarded to the Wall Street Journal in 2002 for its coverage of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Formerly the Chicago bureau chief of WSJ, Gruley is now a staff reporter for Bloomberg News and Bloomberg Businessweek. He also authored the popular Starvation Lake trilogy:…
Berried Secrets by Peg Cochran is the debut cozy in the Cranberry Cove Mystery Series featuring Monica Albertson, who discovers a dead body floating in the farm's lake (available August 4, 2015). When Monica Albertson comes to Cranberry Cove—a charming town on the eastern shore of Lake Michigan—to help her half-brother Jeff on his cranberry…
My fifteen-year-old son is reading Ernest Hemingway’s Nick Adams stories for his high-school English class. He started with “Indian Camp,” the story in which Nick and his father leave their summer cottage in the Michigan woods and row across Walloon Lake to help a Native American woman give birth. My son could easily picture their…
J. Frank Norris was a fundamentalist preacher who believed in the literal interpretation of scripture, but he was a little lax on the whole “turn the other cheek” injunction. On July 17, 1926 a man named D.E. Chipps stormed into Norris’s office at the massive First Baptist Church of Fort Worth and threatened to kill…
The Midnight Plan of the Repo Man by W. Bruce Cameron is the debut mystery featuring the perennially-disappointing repo man Ruddy McCann who begins to hear the voice of a murder victim in his head (available October 28, 2014). I am deeply committed to a road to nowhere and can’t reverse course save by driving…
Tunnel Vision is the second book to feature Nickel, Aric Davis’s teenage sleuth and anti-hero (available October 1, 2014). Nickel – no last name – was twelve in his last book-length case and while I’ve known twelve-year-old thieves and drug dealers, I can imagine why a few people found the character’s age a tad hard…
