When floodwaters sweep through Minnesota’s Red River Valley, Cash Blackbear is mostly worried about how they’ll affect her ability to pick up work on the now-waterlogged local farmsteads. The college classes that her mentor, County Sheriff Wheaton, insists she take don’t fill up enough of her time. Neither do her ace pool-shooting abilities, nor her…
Jesse Cooper is your average computer science student at American University. Perhaps the most unusual thing about him is that he lives with his double-first-cousin twice-removed, the redoubtable Ethel Crestwater. Now in her seventies, Ethel essentially runs a boarding house for federal agents and other law enforcement officers in her Arlington, Virginia home. Since Jesse…
Perspective can be difficult to maintain in general, let alone in times of a pandemic. Covid found many of us—readers and writers—craving comfort in the familiar to counter fear of the unknown. Consequently, #1 New York Times bestselling author Patricia Cornwell was unexpectedly inspired to revisit her iconic sleuth, forensic pathologist Dr. Kay Scarpetta, in…
Not every story that opens with a sense of “Once upon a time” has a happy ending. Many Grimm fairy tales are indeed grim and make readers uncomfortable, which is not necessarily a bad thing. Jackal is set in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, a booming steel town in the 1800s. Seventy miles to the east of Pittsburgh,…
I confess: I’m a bit biased when it comes to Marcia Clark. While much of the world—or at least much of the non-reading world—continues to base their opinions of her on what they saw or heard during “The Trial of the Century,” those of us who’ve discovered her crime fiction (also) recognize her as a…
Chapter 1 I met Brendan Kaiser, the owner of my TV station Channel 10 and about a zillion other properties, for lunch on a sunny spring day at a restaurant called Tri-Bar in lower Manhattan. Tri-Bar is what’s known in New York as a celebrity restaurant. In other words, whenever you read the gossip columns,…
The penultimate installment of the Department Q Scandinoir procedural series starts off with a bang, as a freak lightning strike kills six people standing outside a Danish university. One woman survives the direct strike, and responds to the paramedic attending to her with questions expected and reactions less so: “Yes, we were together. Are they…
Chapter 1 Lynnel feels the sun cutting into her skin, a harsh reminder of her own mortality. She rolls forward onto her toes and holds her hand up against the sun. The motion puts an old scar on her forearm in her direct line of sight. Her stomach clenches and she steps back into the…
Loni Mae Murrow is happy in her job as a bird artist for the Smithsonian up in the nation’s capital. When she gets an urgent message from Philip, her younger brother by a dozen years, to come home for a few weeks, she isn’t thrilled she’ll have to leave the comforts of DC in order…
Good crime-fiction writers don’t learn their craft in school or via online programs. We learn from other good crime-fiction writers—that is, from their books and public comments. We learn to write fiction the way we learned to tie our shoes: by watching and then doing. It’s always more difficult than we expect, but there’s no…
