Aimée Leduc is back in Murder at the Porte de Versailles, the 20th installment in Cara Black’s arrondissement-specific series that takes place in November 2001, in a fraught post-9/11 Paris. This time Aimée is racing around the 15th arrondissement, a residential part of Paris that, Cara explains, is where you move after you finish your… Read more »
Posts By: Nancie Clare
Episode 233: Jess Montgomery
In The Echos, Jess Montgomery’s fourth installment of the Kinship mystery series, Sheriff Lily Ross has an unimaginable amount on her plate. Or should we say, plates? It’s July 4th, 1928, and Lily is dealing with the security for the new amusement park when a murder of a young woman, who may or may not,… Read more »
Episode 232: Stewart O’Nan
Is there any location riper for noir than a small town high school? Except maybe the heart of a teenager? Stewart O’Nan’s new noir novel Ocean State, isn’t so much a “whodunit” as a “why-dunit” story of the murder of a teenage girl and the ripples the crime and its aftermath cause in a small… Read more »
Episode 231: P.J. Tracy
From the lush improbability of the Hotel Bel-Air’s Swan Lake to the wild and weird of Death Valley, it’s no wonder LAPD Detective Margaret Nolan is feeling both personal and professional whiplash. People are turning up dead in L.A. and secrets are escaping from the desert and it’s her job—along with fellow LAPD Detective Remy… Read more »
Episode 230: Abir Mukherjee
Captain Sam Wyndham and Sergeant Suran Banerjee are back in The Shadows of Men, the fifth installment in Abir Mukherjee’s series set in post-World-War I Calcutta. Banerjee has found himself in a spot of bother, in that he’s been accused of murdering a Hindu scholar in a same-as-it-ever-was story of political and religious tension as… Read more »
Episode 229: Alison Gaylin
Alison Gaylin opens The Collective, her latest thriller, with a quote from Euripides’ Medea, “Hate is a bottomless cup; I will pour and pour.” Meet Camille Gardner who, five years after the death of her daughter as the result of a violent sexual assault, is living at the intersection of grief, anger and vengeance. It… Read more »
Episode 228: David McCloskey
Syria isn’t the only thing aflame in Damascus Station, David McCloskey’s debut thriller set against the ongoing conflict: McCloskey’s protagonist, CIA officer Sam Joseph, has fallen for a source, strictly forbidden, but the heart wants what the heart wants. Only, when it comes to the CIA “F-ups happen to good officers. Deception does not. You… Read more »
Episode 227: James R. Benn
In Road of Bones, James R. Benn’s 16th installment of his Billy Boyle series of World War II mysteries, Billy is off to the USSR, where gaslighting is a way of life, a map cannot be found for love or money, and Night Witches take to the skies to silently rain terror on Germans fighting… Read more »
Episode 226: Amanda Jayatissa
From the outside looking in, Paloma’s life in My Sweet Girl—Amanda Jayatissa’s debut thriller—seems charmed. Adopted from a Sri Lankan orphanage at age twelve, Paloma has grown up with loving parents surrounded by affluence in San Francisco. Now, at 30, Paloma is grappling with events from her past and dealing with ghosts, some more real than… Read more »
Episode 225: Margaret Mizushima
In Striking Range, Margaret Mizushima’s seventh installment in her Timber Creek K-9 mystery series, Timber Creek County Deputy Mattie Cobb braves ice storms and murderers while looking into the death of a young woman and the kidnappers of the woman’s newborn
