Month: February 2018

The Top Five Heist Novels of All Time Gary Phillips’ Picks Asphalt Jungle by W.R. Burnett Not remembered as well as he should be these days, William Riley Burnett was an agile crime fiction writer from Little Caesar to High Sierra to […]

Ten Mathematical Mystery-Suspense Novels If mathematics is a universal language—“the language God talks,” as physicist Richard Feynman said—it’s not surprising that these ten mathematical stories should come from a culturally far-flung group. This list includes […]

5 Literary Classics That Won’t Send you to Sleep (and 5 that might) I grew up in rural Dorset, England, in the 1980s and let me tell you, it was dull. The choices were: watch […]

What’s at Stake? Creating a serious edge-of-the-seat conflict in books… There’s a tongue-in-cheek saying in higher education circles that academic politics are so nasty because the stakes are so low. It’s another way of saying […]

Don’t Go Into the Woods Today: 10 Wilderness Thrillers & Why They Scare Us The great outdoors is both the subject matter and the backdrop of a lot of great fiction. What is it about […]

The Things That Scare Me  I get asked about going to dark places in my books. Or about my childhood, and what exactly happened to make me the way I am. More than a handful […]

Six Reasons Near-History Creates Great Mystery The majority of contemporary thrillers are set in the present day. But there are valid reasons to forgo that convention and set the story in an earlier timeframe, such […]

British Crime Fiction Favorites Spies, Inspectors, Historical Figures, Serial Killers, and People with Serious Issues! British crime fiction can carry some weak connotations across the pond. I mean, the police there don’t even carry guns, […]

The Execution of a Prosecutor or a little-known Historical Fact… H. Auden wrote his poem “Musee des Beaux Arts” after viewing Brueghel’s painting of the tragic death of Icarus, a mythic legend who plummeted into […]

Genre Benders 5 Books that Use Elements of Genre to Tell Big, Bold, Beautiful Human Stories  The literary world often draws a distinction between what is considered “genre” – plot-driven fiction that exists for the […]