Prologue EARLY SUMMER, 1939 The light was positioned to simulate ten in the morning. The urban canyons of the capital of the German Empire shimmered blindingly white. But nothing moved, everything seemed suspended, frozen solid in an eternal winter. It would be a while until the daily chaos of Berlin reached those corners. At this…
Guadalcanal Island, The Solomons August 1942 Rain. Pounding, tropical rain. Not comforting; more like scary. Sounding like a waterfall on my steel shipping-box home. My brain telling me: It’s just rain. Go back to sleep. But it wasn’t just rain: someone or thing was also pounding on the side of the box. Go away! I…
This Storm by James Ellroy is a massive novel of World War II Los Angeles—when torrential rainstorms hit the city, a body is unearthed in Griffith Park. The cops rate it a routine dead-man job. They’re grievously wrong. I’ve been reading the Demon Dog of American Literature since I stumbled across The Black Dahlia in…
Craig Russell’s new historical thriller The Devil Aspect centers around an asylum for the criminally insane in Prague, 1935. As a new serial killer emerges in the city, a young psychiatrist works with the asylum’s serial killer-patients to research whether they exhibit an archetype of evil called “The Devil Aspect.” Dread hangs heavy over the Hrad Orlů…
Hushed in Death by Stephen Kelly is the third book in the Inspector Lamb series set in the spring of 1942 at a hospital for veterans in rural England that leaves Lamb with a village full of suspects. Hushed in Death opens very somberly. The Elton House’s gardener Joseph Lee is discovered floating in the pond,…
The Iceman by P. T. Deutermann is an action-packed World War II military thriller featuring a daring United States Navy submarine commander during the Pacific war in 1942-43. In 1942, off the port city of St. Nazaire in occupied France, a United States Navy S-class submarine assigned to the Royal Navy lurks just outside the borders…
Bursting with compelling characters and tense storylines, The One Man by New York Times-bestseller Andrew Gross is a deeply affecting, unputdownable series of twists and turns through a landscape at times horrifyingly familiar but still completely new and compelling. Get a digital copy of The One Man for only $2.99 through the month of August! Poland. 1944. Alfred…
Clint Eastwood’s movie persona has long projected strength, brute force, and outsider roles in what would otherwise be traditional authority figures: police officers, cowboys, and what we are looking at here, soldiers in war films. Intriguingly, his first foray into boots and bayonets began high in the sky with the campy Tarantula (1954), where he…
What do you do when you've foiled a Nazi plan and changed the outcome of the war? Celebrate with this week's Pick Your Poison—where we create a cocktail inspired by a recently published mystery, thriller, or crime novel—“The Allied Sour” cocktail, inspired by Andrew Gross's WWII thriller The Saboteur!
Every Wednesday, we here at Criminal Element will put together a list of Staff Picks of the books that published the day before—sharing the ones that we are looking forward to reading the most! What a powerhouse pub day! New Allison Brennan, Andrew Gross, and Sue Grafton novels highlight an incredible week of books! See what else…
