Episode 248: Alma Katsu

Posted by & filed under Podcast.

Part domestic suspense, part espionage thriller, Alma Katsu’s Red London—the follow-up to Red Widow—is all tension. Mildly disgraced CIA agent Lyndsey Duncan is working to rehabilitate her reputation by taking an assignment in London sussing out a potential Russian defector, until she’s loaned out to MI6 in an effort to befriend the wife of a Russian oligarch and convince her to flip on her husband. The clock is ticking though, Putin’s successor in the Kremlin might have a more permanent solution

 

 

Photo of Alma Katsu ©Steve Parke Photography

 

Play

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

Episode 247: Cara Black

Posted by & filed under Podcast.

Cara Black took a break from her book tour to talk about Night Flight to Paris, the follow up novel to Three Hours in Paris, which introduced us to Kate Rees, the Oregonian sharpshooter whose considerable skills are put to work by England during World War Two. Clandestine work can often go sideways as it does in Night Flight to Paris—all the way to the other side of the Mediterranean to Cairo

 

 

 

Play

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

Episode 246: Margaret Mizushima

Posted by & filed under Podcast.

While some things have changed for Margaret Mizushima’s protagonist Sheriff Deputy Mattie Wray—for one thing, Mattie has changed her last name from Cobb, the name of the man who kidnapped her, to that of her birth father—in Standing Dead, other things remain the same. People are turning up dead in the mountain forests surrounding Timber Creek—one in particular is found tied upright to a dead tree—and someone is leaving decidedly creepy handwritten notes addressed to Mattie

 

 

 

 

Play

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

Episode 245: Iris Yamashita

Posted by & filed under Podcast.

There is a decided “down the rabbit hole” sensation to City Under One Roof, Academy Award-nominated screenwriter Iris Yamashita’s debut crime fiction novel. When body parts wash up on the shore adjacent to the city-in-one-building, three female narrators—with varying degrees of unreliability—escort us over, under, sideways and down through the Davidson Condominiums, the one-stop shop, home, school and recreational loci for the residents of Point Mettier, Alaska

 

Photo of Iris Yamashita ©Anthony Mongiello

Play

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

Episode 244: Elly Griffiths

Posted by & filed under Podcast.

There’s nothing like a high school reunion to trigger buried memories—and make you question them. For example, did Cassie Fitzherbert—now a London police officer—kill a fellow student in high school? Bleeding Heart Yard, Elly Griffith’s newly published crime fiction novel, opens with Cassie asking herself if it’s possible to forget if you killed someone…Three unreliable narrators ask that same question and the answers can be quite deadly

 

 

Play

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

Episode 243: Susan Elia MacNeal

Posted by & filed under Podcast.

In her just-published stand-alone thriller,  Mother, Daughter, Traitor, Spy, Susan Elia MacNeal transforms the very real story of mother and daughter Grace and Sylvia Comfort—who risked their lives to infiltrate Nazi strongholds in Los Angeles during World War Two—into a story of treason and sedition that is as chilling as it is prescient

 

 

Photo of Susan Elia MacNeal ©Noel MacNeal

Play

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

Episode 242: Deanna Raybourn

Posted by & filed under Podcast.

Four women, who happen to be sixty-something professional assassins, are celebrating their recent retirement in Deanna Raybourn’s new thriller, Killers of a Certain Age.The Killers of the title—Billie, Natalie, Mary Alice and Helen—are looking forward to pursuing all the things that being on-call for “The Museum,” as they called the organization who contracted them out for hits, prevented them from doing. Except when they board a luxury ship for a celebratory cruise, they realize that someone wants to retire them—permanently. The Killers are not amused…

 

 

 

Play

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

Episode 241: Jennifer Hillier

Posted by & filed under Podcast.

All Paris Peralta wants in Things We Do in the Dark, Jennifer Hillier’s new suspense novel, is to live a quiet life. Well, as the saying goes: make a plan and the gods laugh. Paris is arrested for her husband’s murder and even she has to admit it doesn’t look good, she’s found next to her husband’s body, holding the murder weapon and covered in his blood

 

 

 

Play

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

Episode 240: Louise Welsh

Posted by & filed under Podcast.

It’s been twenty long years, but Glaswegian auctioneer extraordinaire Rilke is back with his merry band of pranksters in The Second Cut, Louise Welsh’s follow up novel to her remarkable The Cutting Room. The times may have changed—tech-savvy Rilke is now meeting men on Grindr instead of in pubs—but remarkably, Rilke, Rose, Anderson and Les, have defied the space-time continuum and are the same age. Other things are the same too, including the secrets that old houses chock-a-block with antiques hold

 

 

 

 

Play

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

Episode 239: Dan Fesperman

Posted by & filed under Podcast.

In Winter Work, Dan Fesperman’s new thriller, it’s the winter of 1990, the Berlin Wall has fallen and the fall of East Germany has ignited a feeding frenzy among competing—think C.I.A.—and complementary—think K.G.B—intelligence agencies. And for the East German operatives who will soon be out of work, it’s a matter of who is buying and how much are they paying

 

 

 

Play

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS