Reviews

A former music journalist (and musician, for that matter), Clea Simon successfully wove that milieu into her 2017 stand-alone crime novel, World Enough, set in Boston’s underground club scene. Now four years later, Simon is releasing Hold Me Down, another stand-alone...

Like all corners of the crime fiction community, the cozy mystery sub-genre has recently seen an influx of new, diverse voices creating a sense of vitality and freshness that will hopefully bring more readers to the entire breadth of this incredibly multi-faceted...

With The Mother Next Door, a novel of suburban suspense, Tara Laskowski has gifted readers with the most addictively readable book of the season. It is virtually impossible to stop reading The Mother Next Door until the entirety of it has been consumed, and even then,...

     “A metaphor walks into a bookstore…” “State of Terror by Hillary Rodham Clinton and Louise Penny is like a traditional Robert Ludlum political thriller crossed with a John le Carré character study only with women at the center of the...

When it comes to dependable writers, Lisa Unger is very near the top of the list. While it is impossible to predict what she will write next, readers can always count on it being a gripping narrative with complex characters and plenty of unexpected developments. Her...

Writers take risks every time they put pen to paper – or well, fingers to keyboard. Balancing reader expectations with the desire to grow as an artist can be tricky. Lori Rader-Day has never been an author who was content with the status quo – each of her books is...

John Copenhaver follows up the critically-acclaimed Dodging and Burning with another inimitable historical crime novel in what is becoming his signature style. For years now, noir crime fiction through the eyes of adolescent girls has been the domain of the legendary...

Every so often a book comes along that is problematic to classify, difficult to summarize, and impossible to forget. The Last House on Needless Street by Catriona Ward is just such a novel. It has been called a thriller, horror, psychological suspense, crime fiction,...

Val McDermid is a legend in the crime fiction world. She has written ground-breaking books, such as the Lindsay Gordon series featuring a lesbian lead character; the Wire in the Blood novels (her criminal profiler series that is often imitated but never duplicated);...

By now most readers know that Hank Phillippi Ryan was an Emmy Award-winning investigative reporter long before she was a multi-award-winning crime fiction author, so it only makes sense that reporters in various forms have populated almost all of her fiction work....

With The Heron’s Cry, Ann Cleeves returns to her recently launched Two Rivers series. In many ways, all of Cleeves’ books feel like ensemble pieces, but this new series in particular, celebrates all the characters equally. Yes, Matthew Venn – as the head of the...

The Missing Hours is Julia Dahl’s first stand-alone crime novel and with it she proves herself an astute chronicler of human nature – especially when in the midst of stress-fueled incidents and trauma recovery. Dahl wastes no time before throwing readers into a...

With Rock Paper Scissors, Alice Feeney and her readers take a deep dive into a trouble marriage and the lasting impact of deception. As she has done with all her previous novels, Feeney takes readers on an unexpected journey before pulling the rug out from under them...

Last year, Louise Penny took her legion of fans off to Paris with Armand Gamache and his family in the well-received All the Devils Are Here. As refreshing as it was to see these familiar characters in a new setting, loyal fans will be thrilled to know that Penny’s...

The Family Plot by Megan Collins is the story of a unique family obsessed with true crime. Think of the Lighthouse family as a blend of the Blackwoods from Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle, the Addams Family, and whatever documentary show is on the...

If a series debut rests squarely on the shoulders of the lead protagonist, Joanna Schaffhausen’s Gone for Good could hardly ask for a more worthy advocate than Detective Annalisa Vega. After four books (and counting) in her popular and well-received debut series,...

When it comes to regional crime fiction, one would be hard-pressed to find a more accomplished practitioner than William Kent Krueger. In both his Cork O’Connor series and his stand-alone literary mysteries, location is a central focus and readers can always count on...

It has been roughly three years since Megan Abbott released Give Me Your Hand, so fans are eager to snag a copy of her new novel, The Turnout. In many ways, this novel is a natural progression from her previous books looking at the culture of cheerleaders, gymnasts,...

Iceland continues to assert itself as the source of some of the strongest crime fiction being written today. Last year, Eva Björg Ægisdóttir released her award-winning debut novel, The Creak on the Stairs, during a worldwide pandemic and yet readers still discovered...

With such diverse examples such as Anne Lamott’s Bird By Bird, On Writing by Stephen King and Walter Mosley’s Elements of Fiction, it’s clear that novelists sometimes enjoy experimenting when it comes to releasing a craft book. The act of writing is so personal that...