Author Peter Blauner discusses Christ in Concrete, an often-overlooked novel about the life of Italian immigrants on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in the 1920s and a twelve-year-old boy who must support his family after his father’s untimely death. Most crime novels try to hook you on the first page, or even the first…
On the morning of November 20, 1960, author Norman Mailer almost murdered his wife. His second wife, that is: Adele Morales Mailer. The oft-married Mailer (he tallied up six wives in all) is both famous and infamous for so many reasons that too often, Adele’s name goes missing. She’s often written off, at best, as…
Lawrence Block published A Dance at the Slaughterhouse, the ninth book featuring his iconic detective Matthew Scudder, in 1991 (it won the Edgar in 1992). It takes place in an increasingly unfamiliar world to modern readers. Scudder, a recovering alcoholic and former cop, regularly stalks the “Duce,” as they used to call the pre-gentrified stretch…
A Dangerous Engagement is the stylish, charming sixth novel in the Edgar-nominated Amory Ames mystery series by Ashley Weaver, set in 1930s New York. There were four or five shots fired in rapid succession followed by a moment of deafening silence. I jumped up from the bed, but Milo had beaten me to it,…
Devotion by Madeline Stevens is a debut novel about a woman who falls into an overwhelming mutual obsession with the Upper East Side mother who hires her as a nanny.
During the worst blizzard in memory, an FBI agent in a moving SUV in New York City is killed by a nearly impossible sniper shot. Unable to pinpoint where the shot came from, the FBI turns to the one man who might be able to help them—former FBI agent Lucas Page. The Summer of 2019…
In the tradition of Jeffery Deaver’s Lincoln Rhyme and David Baldacci’s Amos Decker, Robert Pobi’s City of Windows introduces Lucas Page, a brilliant, reluctant investigator, matching wits with a skilled, invisible killer. During the worst blizzard in memory, an FBI agent in a moving SUV in New York City is killed by a nearly impossible sniper shot.…
A killer is on the loose. Soaring through the skies above Manhattan, one of nature’s most deadly predators, a peregrine falcon, eyes its potential prey on the sidewalks below. A flash of reflective light on the ground marks the target and signals the moment to strike. A beautiful ice skater is attacked from the sky…
Right from the very title, William H. Hallahan has written a book of juxtapositions, a novel that relentlessly compares and contrasts its two main protagonists and the situations and societies in which they find themselves. Ostensibly a spy thriller, Catch Me: Kill Me follows two men who never meet, and whose interests in the case…
When we conceived our Revisiting the Edgar Awards series, our goal was to hopefully shine some light on a list of (possibly lesser-known) books deserving of praise while also treating these books like time capsules: once-buried containers full of bygone ideals and preconceptions reflective of the time in which they were published. So when looking…
