Early in Before the Fall, Noah Hawley’s 2017 Edgar Award-winner, protagonist Scott Burroughs describes himself as a “disaster survivor in that he had survived the disaster that was his life.” A middle-aged painter and recovering alcoholic, Scott lives on Martha’s Vineyard in a beach shack with a three-legged dog. After years of struggling, his newest…
Let Me Die in His Footsteps, the 2016 Edgar Award winner written by Lori Roy, had been on my TBR list ever since I first saw the original hardcover jacket. It depicts a young woman in a white dress, lying in a field of vibrant purple lavender. The paperback cover image also features rows and…
Stephen King was my first favorite author. Growing up in the 1970s, there were very few YA books. (I’m honestly jealous of my kids who have these HUGE young adult sections and lots of great books across all genres to choose from.) So I read all the Trixie Belden and Nancy Drew and even Agatha…
William Kent Krueger’s Ordinary Grace is one of those crime novels in which crime is just one of the elements of the story. While there is murder in its pages, this book is a celebration of language, a brilliant and nostalgic study of life in small-town America in the 1960s, a look at the complex…
As a Boston native and crime fiction lover since childhood, I always felt like I got on the Dennis Lehane train early, with his superb first entry in the Kenzie and Gennaro PI series, A Drink Before the War. Then he started producing other powerhouse novels like Shutter Island and Mystic River—books that brought alive…
Mo Hayder’s Gone reads like two novels wrapped together by the same case. There are two characters that could qualify as main characters and their narratives contain enough action, tension, and drama to count as two novellas. However, Hayder weaved them together under the umbrella of a case that begins with what seemed like a…
You may remember me. Think back. The summer of 1990. I know that’s a while ago, but the wire services picked up the story and I was in every newspaper in the country… I stayed in the news for two or three days, but even when the cameras and the reporters moved on to…
Grief. Despair. Depression. Hope. One unspeakable tragedy has the ability to affect countless individuals in varying ways. And while everyone effected reacts in their own way, it’s ultimately how one responds and recovers from the trials and tribulations of tragedy that shapes themselves and their future. Do you give up and run away? Sink so…
The 2008 Edgar Awards were not exactly a banner year for diversity, with no nominees being women or writers of color, but it was a year of heavy-hitters nevertheless, with John Hart, Benjamin Black (Christine Falls), Ken Bruen (Priest), Reed Farrel Coleman (Soul Patch), and Michael Chabon (The Yiddish Policemen’s Union) vying for the honor.…
In his marvelous introduction to the Istanbul of the 1860s in The Janissary Tree, Jason Goodwin invites the reader into a city poised between worlds—in the process of modernizing, but clinging to the rites and traditions of the past; hungry, hustling, magnificent, yet quick to betray even the city’s most impervious elites. The Sublime Porte…
