Tenacity by J.S. Law is a military thriller where a suicide aboard a nuclear submarine turns out to be anything but (available November 3, 2015). An officer hangs himself in the engine room of naval submarine HMS Tenacity. A woman's murder bears disturbing similarities to an old case. Lieutenant Danielle “Dan” Lewis grasps for the…
A Death in the Family by Michael Stanley is the 5th procedural mystery featuring Detective Kubu of the Botswana police department (available October 27, 2015). “There's no easy way to say this, Kubu. Your father's dead. I'm afraid he's been murdered.” Faced with the violent death of his own father, Assistant Superintendent David 'Kubu' Bengu,…
In Bitter Chill by Sarah Ward is a standalone thriller about a 30-year-old kidnapping that is once again relevant today (available September 29, 2015). The deepest secrets are the ones we keep from ourselves in this richly atmospheric, compellingly written, and expertly constructed crime debut from an emerging talent. Derbyshire, 1978: a small town in…
The Child Garden by Catriona McPherson is a standalone mystery about a care home with a dark and deadly past (available September 8, 2015). Eden was its name. “An alternative school for happy children.” But it closed in disgrace after a student’s suicide. Now it’s a care home, the grounds neglected and overgrown. Gloria Harkness…
In the vast criminal menagerie that Margaret Millar created over the course of her long career, there is a special place for the “woman in distress” plot. She wrote many different kinds of stories — and her novels were as likely to feature male protagonists as female — but one of the things that she…
I just watched Monte Hellman’s moody 1971 road movie Two-Lane Blacktop for maybe the fifth time. After being dazzled by the film once again, I asked myself, because there are numerous qualities that make the movie such a keeper for me, via which winning aspect do I begin? Makes sense to start with the storyline,…
Note: This post kicks off a series celebrating the career of one of mystery fiction’s true giants, beginning with the novel Do Evil in Return. This month marks the centennial of the great Margaret Millar. At her peak, Millar was about as successful as a mystery writer could be. She published 27 books, won the…
A couple of years ago, two Van Gogh biographers asserted that the artist's famous suicide was, most likely, murder. Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith published a book about their findings after a decade of research and met lots of opposition to their conclusions. You can read about that first announcement and resistance to it…
Wink of an Eye is the debut mystery by Lynn Chandler Willis about a Los Angeles private eye who returns home to a small town in Texas (available November 18, 2014). Wink of an Eye is a modern mystery set in the small town of Wink, Texas. That small town life and the integration of…
“The theme of The Eye is the pursuit of an investigation which leads the protagonist through a hell of mirrors and ends in the merging of twin images.” That plot description is from Vladimir Nabokov’s own foreword to the 1965 English publication of The Eye. The protagonist Mr. Nabokov spoke of is a Russian émigré…
