Grace Bernard has known for a long time that her father abandoned her mother and herself to eke out a hardscrabble London living on their own. But she’s a teenager when she realizes exactly the breadth of his neglect, and how callously his wealthy family has consigned her to the ash heap. After her mother…
Part of why Philip K. Dick’s novels are so effective is how the daring, game-changing sci-fi author juxtaposed the extraordinary with the relatable. Take his 1970 novel A Maze of Death, for instance. The main thrust of that story involves fourteen humans who come to inhabit a mysterious space colony which proves to be treacherous…
Jamie Gehring has the uniquely unsettling distinction of having grown up sharing a backyard with Ted Kaczynski in Lincoln, Montana—which she recounts in her new true crime memoir, Madman in the Woods: Life Next Door to the Unabomber. The book is an expansion of the story she shared in Netflix’s popular mini-series, Unabomber—In His Own…
4 Pamela enjoys the loose ice crystals that form when the snow starts to melt on the slopes. They make the skis’ grip almost frighteningly sharp. She and her daughter, Alice, have been using sunscreen, but they still both have a bit of color on their cheeks. Martin, on the other hand, burned his nose…
It’s fair to say we’ve both read or watched the best thrillers during the last thirty years. In our opinion, obviously! And there’s one thing we always agree on: what scares us the most is serial killer with clear motives and a detailed plan. A relentless murderer who won’t stop until they’ve realized their grand…
Like any kind of writing, literary criticism must strive to find the most precise words to communicate what it wants readers to see as it deconstructs a narrative. That’s why vague words like “special” and “unique” are frowned upon; they fail to be specific. That said, both of them apply perfectly to Richard Chizmar’s Chasing…
For a serial killer who enjoys provoking headlines, the greatest irony is that true fame requires being caught, and make no mistake—they do not wish to be caught. A few killers have managed to capture public imagination anyway. Jack the Ripper and the Zodiac Killer have each inspired numerous books and movies. Theories about their…
The 22 Murders of Madison May by Max Barry is a mind-bending speculative psychological suspense thriller about a serial killer pursuing his victim across time and space and the woman who is determined to stop him, even if it upends her own reality. Felicity Staples is a journalist who mostly likes her New York City…
“The lies we tell ourselves during stable hours—like I’m a good person or I don’t deserve this—become the lies we bury deep down, too far to access, in times of pain.” These thoughts are from the mind of protagonist Claire Lou a.k.a. Marissa Mo who is one of the more troubled narrators you will come…
Peter Vronsky’s American Serial Killers is a brutal, engaging, meticulously researched account of the start, development, and conclusion of the fifty-year period knows as the “golden age” of serial killers in the United States. While the book focuses on serial killers, Vronsky digs deep into the psychology that shapes them, tracing the development of the…
