Maggie D’arcy’s life was shaped by her relationship with her cousin Erin Flaherty. They were as close as sisters: Erin lived with Maggie’s family on and off for years. Erin’s dad, Danny, owns Flaherty’s, an Irish bar on Long Island. Sarah Stewart Taylor has a dab hand in bringing locales to life, like Flaherty’s bar…
Lawrence Block has been writing for over sixty years, and he’s written everything from parlor mysteries solved by an affable burglar to the hardest of hard-boiled detective fiction starring Matt Scudder. Additionally, he has published a few bushels of memorable short stories including an Edgar winner only a few years ago, and a series about…
Lost River by J. Todd Scott is a blistering crime novel on the opioid epidemic—featuring its cops, villains, and victims—written by a 25-year veteran of the DEA. As a crime-fiction aficionado, have you ever hoped Don Winslow and James Ellroy read Hillbilly Elegy and then decided to co-write a police procedural that is an exposé…
Who Did You Tell? is set in the imaginary seaside town of Flinstead, also the setting for Lesley Kara’s first book, The Rumor, a psychological thriller. Flinstead is not a salubrious seaside resort. It’s a bit down-at-the-heels, but twenty-something-year-old Astrid doesn’t have a choice. After living in London for years, she’s newly sober and back…
Lady Cecilia Bates of Danby Hall is a delightful heroine, level-headed, curious, persistent, and kind. Cecilia had a taste of being of service, someone of value, when she solved a murder in her own home but that was months ago. After the excitement at Danby last spring, investigating a terrible murder in her own dining…
Dark, disturbing, and full of twists and turns, Seven Years of Darkness by You-Jeong Jeong is a riveting new novel about a son forced to deal with punishments resulting from the sins of his father. Sowon is the son of a convicted murderer, the man responsible for “The Seryong Lake Disaster.” He was 11-years-old when his…
“COVID-19 promises to alter us all in strange ways. It’s a paradigm-shifting event that divides lives and cultures into a before and after. We will emerge changed, though how those changes will manifest is far from certain. The sensory details of this outbreak—the masks, the faces of doctors and nurses creased with worry and fatigue,…
Tom Clancy Firing Point by Mike Maden is the 29th book in the Jack Ryan Universe, where Jack Ryan Jr is out to avenge the murder of an old friend, but the vein of evil he’s tapped into may run too deep for him to handle. I’ve been reading Tom Clancy novels on and off…
Author Lucy Foley does everything possible to not only channel Dame Agatha Christie but to also create a setting for a psychological thriller/murder mystery that is simply ideal. A remote island just off the coast of Ireland at a Mansion run by a young couple for special occasions. The wife, Aoife is a wedding/party planner…
In the third Isaiah Coleridge novel from Laird Barron, Isaiah finds himself entangled with a rich and powerful cult while looking into a mysterious death and a shady real-estate deal worth billions. There’s a secret to creating something great and then consistently making it even better, and Laird Barron possesses that arcane knowledge. With Worse…
