Posts tagged Crimewave

First off, my newest Crimewave column ran in the National Post last weekend, featuring reviews of new novels by Barbara Fradkin, Robin Spano, and my colleague in crime reviewing, the Toronto Star’s Jack Batten, bringing back his wisecracking detective Crang after more than twenty years away.

Also this past weekend, I wrote about my high school experience with THE GREAT GATSBY, involving a vivid dream and 19th Century Italian Opera, for Medium.

Finally, I am spending more time building up Domestic Suspense, the companion website to the anthology, and expect to post even less here as a result. (Then again…) The response to TROUBLED DAUGHTERS, TWISTED WIVES was already amazing but then this arrived in my editor’s email inbox Monday morning:

“This fascinating collection of stories represents a long-overdue tribute to mystery writers who laid the foundation for those of us working in the field today. The remarkable range and complexity of these tales is a humbling reminder of the importance of the trailblazers whose work established psychological suspense as the backbone of crime writing both then and now.” -= Sue Grafton

If I didn’t already think Grafton was cool — and I have, for a long time — now it’s moved into a whole new stratosphere.

My newest Crimewave column appeared in the National Post this Easter Weekend, with an accidental focus on second books in series by Robert Rotenberg, Stephen Legault, and Owen Laukkanen. His thriller CRIMINAL ENTERPRISE, which brings back his duo of Minnesota state police detective Kirk Stevens and FBI special agent Carla Windermere, was the standout. (I also profiled Laukkanen for Maclean’s in advance of his debut a year or so ago.)

Speaking of Maclean’s, I reviewed three books for them in March: Becky Masterman’s first crime novel RAGE AGAINST THE DYING, and the memoirs WITH OR WITHOUT YOU by Domenica Ruta and WAVE by Sonali Deraniyagala. All of them are well worth reading for wildly divergent reasons.

My newest Crimewave column for the National Post is up, and in it I review new books by some real heavy hitters of the genre: Louise Penny, Linwood Barclay, and Peter Robinson. Enjoyed them all to varying degrees though Penny’s is the standout of the lot.

If you’re coming to the Brooklyn Book Festival and you have a hankering to hear about horror fiction, come to the 3 PM panel featuring Victor LaValle (THE DEVIL IN SILVER) J.R. Angelella (ZOMBIE) and Chase Novak, otherwise known as Scott Spencer (BREED), moderated by yours truly. We’ll be in the Borough Hall Courtroom in the Student Lounge.

Finally, I’ve heard distant rumors that the December issue of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine is circulating, and that my story, “Cog in the Wheel”, is in it. I’ll say more about the story once I’ve seen a copy of the issue, but it is a piece that I’m quite proud of.

Been a while since I collected my freelance-y stuff of late so, to wit:

At NPR.org, I wrote about HIT LIT by crime writer James W. Hall, his non-fiction treatise on the 20th Century bestseller and how 12 of them - well, eleven plus THE DA VINCI CODE — could be distilled down to 12 basic elements that are present in every megaseller past and present. I used 50 SHADES OF GREY as the peg since, as I read the book, I realized Hall explains fairly convincingly why that book is such a lightning in a bottle — even though he ruled out the possibility of another big sex-based bestseller. Which is why the book business is the way it is….

My most recent Crimewave column for the National Post ran last week and featured new releases by Robert Pobi, John McFetridge, and Stephen Legault. The next column will appear in early May, schedule permitting.

And for Maclean’s, I reviewed James Renner’s wonderfully mind-bending debut novel THE MAN FROM PRIMROSE LANE, which I think is even better now as time passes than when I first read it, and I really dug it when I hit “The End.”

Also, the 3 Grofield novels by Richard Stark for which I wrote a blanket introduction — THE DAMSEL, THE DAME, and THE BLACKBIRD — were published this week and are available at your nearest physical or digital retailer.