Even though I have not lived in the Midwest for fifty years, I remain a Midwesterner. It is in how I speak (adding an ârâ to wash), what I like to eat (Cincinnati chili), and explains my favorite smell (the inside of a barn). Both as a reader and writer, I want to know where the story is âfrom.â What does this place look like? Smell like? What is the cadence of the charactersâ speech? All this translates into an immersive experience and that is something I look for both in a book I pick up and in one I write.
Hazel Micaellef, 62, a police officer in a small town in Ontario, is divorced, overweight, has back problems, and drinks too much. I am from a small town and divorced. Liquor is not my vice. I am, however, completely at home in the fictional and slightly seedy Port Dumas where locals have long memories. When human bones are found on land that formerly housed orphans, many of the townâs ugly secrets bubble up.The plot is complex and the setting immersive. I would not necessarily want to live in a place like Port DumasâŚbut I have.
The new novel in this acclaimed series is brilliantly paced, addictively suspensefulâthe author's best yet. Hazel Micallef (played by Susan Sarandon in the recent film of the series' debut, The Calling) has become one of crime writing's most memorable detectives. The Night Bell moves between the past and the present in Port Dundas, Ontario, as two mysteries converge. A discovery of the bones of murdered children is made on land that was once a county foster home. Now it's being developed as a brand new subdivision whose first residents are already railing against broken promises and corruption. But when threeâŚ
Set in the Weimar Republic of post-WWI Germany (think the musical Cabaret), Kerrâs Berlin is tawdry and raw. Bernie Gunther is a homicide detective tracking down a serial killer who is murdering maimed WWI veteransâlegless men begging on wheels called cripple-carts or klutzwagons. Told in first person, Guntherâs observations about his surroundings are harrowing. âOn summer nights, the Tiergarten sometimes looked like a stud farm, there were so many whores copulating on the grass with their clientsâŚViolent murders were commonplace.â The smells, tastes, and sounds of the place hit me full force and made a distant time and place spring to life. From the first sentence, I was pulled into this world that I knew little about.
"[Metropolis is] a perfect goodbye--and first hello--to its hero...Bernie Gunther has, at last, come home."--Washington Post
New York Times-bestselling author Philip Kerr treats readers to his beloved hero's origins, exploring Bernie Gunther's first weeks on Berlin's Murder Squad.
Summer, 1928. Berlin, a city where nothing is verboten.
In the night streets, political gangs wander, looking for fights. Daylight reveals a beleaguered populace barely recovering from the postwar inflation, often jobless, reeling from the reparations imposed by the victors. At central police HQ, the Murder Commission has its hands full. A killer is on the loose and though he scatters manyâŚ
The Victorian mansion, Evenmere, is the mechanism that runs the universe.
The lamps must be lit, or the stars die. The clocks must be wound, or Time ceases. The Balance between Order and Chaos must be preserved, or Existence crumbles.
Appointed the Steward of Evenmere, Carter Anderson must learn theâŚ
I am a total sucker for crime books that include blueprints of the house where a murder took place⌠and specifically for books about Lizzie Borden and what she did (or did not do) on August 4, 1892. I really canât explain my preoccupation. A Private Disgrace delivers on the blueprints and much more. I have read it many times over. The author was born twelve years after the murders in Fall River, Massachusetts. Lincoln heard from her parents how Lizzie Borden was tried and acquitted for butchering her father and stepmother with an axe. The author knows the town intimately and uses her insider knowledge to formulate plausible answers as to who committed the murders and why. And Lincoln thrusts us directly into the murder house with her vivid depictions. The stifling heat of the August day, the familyâs three consecutive meals of left-over mutton, the stink of the slop pails, and the claustrophobic layout of the narrow houseâall plunge the reader into this particular place and time.
~Winner of the Mystery Writers of America Edgar Award for Best Fact True Crime Novel of the Year, 1967~
A Private Disgrace is the single best account of the ghastly murders which took place in Fall River, Massachusetts on August 14, 1892.
Lizzie Andrew Borden (b.1860 â d.1927) was tried and acquitted in the 1892 axe murders of her father and stepmother in Fall River, Massachusetts. Media coverage of the case created a furor throughout the United States reminiscent of the Rosenberg, Claus von Bulow and O.J. Simpson trials. No other suspect was ever charged with the double homicide, andâŚ
This is a novel overflowing with mysterious overtones. Its tidal surge licks at the readerâs heels and lures us in. The story is told by Piranesi, who inhabits a place he calls the House. The House is composed of a series of vast rooms populated with marble statues, and, on the lower floor, an ocean is imprisoned. We are tasked with unraveling the world that guileless Piranesi inhabits. We donât know how long he has lived there and neither does he. He has devised his own calendar system and tries to number the vast rooms of the House but we sense there is a lot he is misinterpreting. Why do I love this book? It sets out a trail of clues that eventually make sense of Piranesiâs nonsensical world. It is a puzzle to solve constructed of splendid images and doesnât every mystery reader crave a juicy puzzle?
Winner of the 2021 Women's Prize for Fiction A SUNDAY TIMES & NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
The spectacular new novel from the bestselling author of JONATHAN STRANGE & MR NORRELL, 'one of our greatest living authors' NEW YORK MAGAZINE __________________________________ Piranesi lives in the House. Perhaps he always has.
In his notebooks, day after day, he makes a clear and careful record of its wonders: the labyrinth of halls, the thousands upon thousands of statues, the tides that thunder up staircases, the clouds that move in slow procession through the upper halls. On Tuesdays and Fridays Piranesi sees his friend,âŚ
Truth told, folks still ask if Saul Crabtree sold his soul for the perfect voice. If he sold it to angels or devils. A Bristol newspaper once asked: âAre his love songs closer to heaven than dying?â Others wonder how he wrote a song so sad, everyone who heard itâŚ
Can there be any bleaker setting than Leningrad during the German siege in 1942, when starving citizens lick glue from the spines of books for food? Yet, despite the bleakness, this novel brims with humor and insight. It is structured as a quest undertaken by two prisoners: 17-year-old Lev, arrested for looting, and Kolya, a Russian soldier accused of desertion. A Russian colonel promises them freedom if they can breach the siege lines and return in two weeks with a dozen eggs for his daughterâs wedding cake. Along the way the pair encounters, among others, cannibals, German soldiers, Russian partisans, young women kept as sex slaves, and a hen who turns out to be a rooster. In the end, it is a moving story of friendship, bravery, and coming of age in a time of terror and chaos. The episodic telling of the tale draws me in as does the changing nature of the cocky and unreliable Kolya who transforms into a man of courage.
From the critically acclaimed author of The 25th Hour and When the Nines Roll Over and co-creator of the HBO series Game of Thrones, a captivating novel about war, courage, survival - and a remarkable friendship that ripples across a lifetime.
During the Nazis' brutal siege of Leningrad, Lev Beniov is arrested for looting and thrown into the same cell as a handsome deserter named Kolya. Instead of being executed, Lev and Kolya are given a shot at saving their own lives by complying with an outrageous directive: secure a dozen eggs for a powerful Soviet colonel to use inâŚ
Already suffering the privations of the 1930s Dust Bowl, an Oklahoma town is further devastated when a passenger train derailsâflooding its hospital with the dead and maimed. Among the seriously wounded is Etha, wife of Sheriff Temple Jennings. Overwhelmed by worry for her, the sheriff must regain his footing to investigate the derailment which rapidly develops into a case of sabotage.
The following night, a local recluse is murdered. Temple has a hunch that this death is connected to the derailment. But as he dissects the victimâs life, he discovers a tangle of records that make a number of townsfolk suspect in the murder. Funeral Train is the second in my Dust Bowl mysteries series.
The Great West Wood is a magic realist thriller set in Westwood - a vibrant urban village set upon a hilltop, looking out across London, in an area once covered by an ancient forest.
This is a place where magic is taken for granted; where trees can talk; and childrenâŚ
We are all surrounded by darkness. And we are all drawn to the light.
The Orkney Islands north of Scotland are steeped in stories of selkies, seal folk who swim in cold ocean waters and shed their skins to sing and dance on land.
