At the start of Karen Cleveland’s new thriller, You Can Run, it’s just a normal day for CIA reports officer Jill Bailey, who postpones approving a new intel source to take a break and log into the video stream from her son’s daycare. Only he’s not there. To get him back Jill must do “just one thing” and never speak of it to anyone…
Photo of Karen Cleveland ©Jessica Scharpf
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: RSS
Enola Holmes shares many of her much older brother Sherlock’s skills and she brings them to bear in maybe her most challenging case so far, Enola Holmes and the Black Barouche, the latest installment in Nancy Springer’s delightful series. Because back in the day in Victorian England, a husband, father, or, for that matter, a brother, could have an inconvenient woman “removed” to a sanitarium without any right of redress for such transgressions as reading a novel
Photo of Nancy Springer ©AP/Jaime F. Pinto
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: RSS
Eight volumes in, Speaking of Mysteries co-founder Les Klinger talks about the astounding series of vintage mysteries that he edited, wrote introductions for and annotated for The Library of Congress Crime Classics. The choices may not be household names—in the homes of crime fiction fans, that is—but all them are significant for the quality of the writing; the variety of sub-genres, including procedurals, amateur detectives, procedural-amateur detective mashups, legal thrillers, nascent CSI investigation and humor; and, as Les wrote in the introduction of The Rat Began to Gnaw the Rope, as “an accurate portrayal of the attitudes and behaviors of the time”
The eight books so far are: Jim Hanvey, Detective, by Octavus Roy Cohen; Final Proof, by Rodrigues Ottolengui; That Affair Next Door, by Anna Katharine Green; Last Seen Wearing, by Hillary Waugh; The Silent Bullet, by Arthur S. Reeve; The Rat Began to Gnaw the Rope, by C.W. Grafton; Case Pending, by Dell Shannon; and The Dead Letter, by Seeley Regester (not all are pictured)
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: RSS
When a young Afghani boy survives a massacre, undercover DEA Agent Garrett Kohl—the protagonist in Down Range, former CIA-analyst-turned-operative Taylor Moore’s debut thriller—takes him home to the Texas Panhandle to keep him safe. And while the Taliban may be thin on the ground in Texas, they aren’t the only threat to Kohl, Kohl’s family—and the boy
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: RSS
In Jeff Abbott’s aptly-named new crime fiction novel An Ambush of Widows, (ambush is the collective noun for widows) two men with no apparent connection to each other are shot and killed in a warehouse in Austin, Texas. Coming from two different directions—literally, philosophically, and socio-economically—their two widows, Kirsten and Flora, must join forces to find out who killed their husbands. And why
Photo of Jeff Abbott ©Leslie Abbott Photography
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: RSS
In The Hollywood Spy, the tenth installment in Susan Elia MacNeal’s World War Two-era series featuring spy-code breaker-bomb defuser, Maggie Hope, Maggie has decamped to Hollywood with her close friend Sarah Sanderson, who is going to film a movie choreographed by George Balanchine. It’s a Busman’s Holiday, however, as there are Nazis everywhere. Oh, yes, even in Hollywood; especially in Hollywood
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: RSS
As if going to the funeral of your sister—someone from whom you are occasionally estranged—isn’t bad enough, getting a posthumous email from her during the service accusing her now widower, Theo—the scion of the wealthy Thraxton family—of murdering her, is certifiably creepy. So opens Her Last Breath, Hilary Davidson’s latest mystery, for Deirdre Crawley. Secrets and lies and family dynamics…
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: RSS
In Castle Shade, Laurie R. King’s 17th Mary Russell-Sherlock Holmes crime fiction novel, the couple is asked by Queen Marie of Romania to investigate a threat made against her daughter, which requires Russell and Holmes to travel to Castle Bran in Transylvania. What could go wrong?
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: RSS
Early in Jean Hanff Korelitz’s The Plot, protagonist Jacob Finch Bonner encounters a student in his writing class who claims he has a can’t-miss story. The student was right—sort of. Upon learning of the student’s death—and determining that the book was never written—Jacob, um, appropriates the plot. What could be the harm of using an idea that never became a book? And after all who owns a plot, anyway? But then the book becomes a runaway bestseller and the person to whom the story belongs is not happy…
Photo of Jean Hanff Korelitz ©Michael Avedon
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: RSS
Being a professional thief with a skill set that includes safecracking and lock picking does not preclude you from being a patriot, or so protagonist Ellie McDonnell finds out in Ashley Weaver’s A Peculiar Combination, when she’s asked to ply her trade for Britain’s war effort in World War Two
Photo of Ashley Weaver ©Amelia Lea
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: RSS
