It’s 1968, the height of the Cold War, and we are in Mexico City. Filiberto Garcia is a sixty year old Mexican policeman. Over the course of his life he has killed people: men, women, a priest. As a young man, he fought in the Mexican Revolution, serving under Pancho Villa, his killing backed by…
Broadly speaking, there are two types of mystery stories: whodunnits and whydunnits. We read a mystery story to find out who committed the crime (with the why, the motive, often serving to help the investigator find the culprit), or we read knowing from early on who the guilty party is as the story lays out…
Thief by Mark Sullivan is the 3rd book in the Robin Monarch series about a world-class thief who may have stumbled onto the secret to immortality (available December 16, 2014). Robin Monarch is a man with a complicated past and dangerous present. He’s been a soldier, a CIA agent, a freelance operative but first and…
Night of the Jaguar is the debut thriller from Joe Gannon about a a former Sandinista guerrilla comandante turned cop who investigates a string of political executions (available September 9, 2014). Jaguars are extremely difficult animals to hunt, which as an animal lover, I find satisfying. I hear the good old boys out at night…
The Isle of Youth: Stories by Laura van den Berg is a short fiction collection exploring the diverse lives of women with deep secrets (available November 5, 2013). There are seven stories comprising Laura van den Berg’s new collection, Isle of Youth, and each is more fearsome than the last. Broken, struggling relationships between husbands…
An excerpt of The Wild Beasts of Wuhan, the second book in the Ava Lee mystery series by Ian Hamilton (available June 25, 2013). Meet Ava Lee, alluring but deadly, with a mind like a steel trap, as she chases millions of dollars and dangerous criminals around the globe in this exotic and fast-paced new…
Oops! Please link to Peruvian Mummies Still Talk.
Peruvian mummies refuse to play dead. In fact, despite their now empty craniums and lifeblood that has long drained from their bodies, their hushed demands or whispers of love can still be heard by those who carry within them the mummies’ inherited DNA. But it is only a handful of their descendants who still honor…
Blood Makes Noise, the debut novel by Gregory Widen, is an action-packed thriller based on the events before and after the death of Eva Perón (available April 30, 2013). It’s hard to articulate the effect Eva Perón had on Argentina. Her combination of charisma and chutzpah took her from what we could gently call an…
We’re still marveling over the recent announcement about the Redemption Through Reading program that would give prison inmates in Brazil a chance to reduce their sentences by reading books. They’d have to choose books from a recommended reading list (makes sense), and they’d have to write book reports on what they read (all right), and…
