Stigmatized properties are among the hardest to sell on the open market and do not often come up for full appraisal or inspection. However, given the tremendous increase in the cost of housing acro…

I’ve never been a violent person, except perhaps in my nearly violent love of literature.  In fact, I’m a practicing Buddhist, so I’ve taken vows to try to do as much kindness and as little harm as…

I read all types of thrillers, but the ones that tend to lure me in the most usually have a gothic layer. It’s no surprise, then, that my adult debut, Please Enjoy Your Stay, is a gothic thriller t…

Under normal circumstances (say at a watering hole sipping something gin-forward, or in a bookshop café petting the reigning cat), I would not commence a casual chat with, “Poe, Shakespeare, and Do…

Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Elizabeth Hand, Unspeakable Things (Little Brown) “A young woman learns the limits of passion in this tantalizi…

Is there any other kind? Depending on how you like your protagonist and your humans, there are faults enough for every reader. To enjoy the Golden Age of mysteries and the princely protagonists the…

If books have all the makings of a treasure (and of course they do!), the prospect of a new story from Tom Ryan is as good as X marks the spot…. This is an indisputable truth that readers you…

5 new works of true crime history and reportage out this month, as selected by the CrimeReads editors. * Matt Kessler, The Wiregrass: A Tale of Murder and Retribution in the Deep South (Grand Centr…

In the summer 1937, a fisherman spotted a giant sea monster off the coast of Nantucket. So far as we know, he was entirely sober. Returning to shore, Bill Manville did what any enterprising fellow …

Dexter: Resurrection is coming back this month, but what does that mean!? Which Dexter is THIS Dexter? Wait, HOW many Dexters are there? Well, buckle up, friends, because I’m going to take yo…

Thomas Babington “Babe” Levy has it rough. He’s poor, single, and lives in a slum. He’s mocked by the street gang on his block. He grinds through long morning runs around th…

I’m not really interested in wrestling with what defines a classic. It’s the kind of question that fills up think pieces and podcasts with bouts of teeth gnashing and hand-wringing and endless rumi…

Look, let’s get right down to it: horror movies scare me. They always have, since my initial viewing of Poltergeist in 1982 at the tender young age of seven or eight. Due to the fog of time, the re…

Love letters were far from my mind when I began researching The Case of the Autographed Corpse, my book about the wrongful murder conviction of Apache medicine man Silas John Edwards and his partne…

The title is a bit misleading as the “British” have been with us for quite some time. I doubt anyone would have anticipated the tsunami of Jane Austen’s popularity when her first film a…

The delight of an epistolary novel is the feeling of reading something you shouldn’t. Letters, yes. But take a broad definition and include emails, court filings, news clippings, archives, and it g…

Featured image credit: Ephemeral New York I was perusing my usual webpages this morning when I came across a fascinating article from Esther Crain’s wonderful blog Ephemeral New York. Today&#…

October is spooky season! But that doesn’t mean crime fans won’t have plenty to savor in the month ahead. In particular, October is positively stacked with heavy-hitters in the noir and…

Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Peter Swanson, Do You See What I See? (William Morrow) ““The case seems clear cut, but readers familiar with th…

October is spooky season! But that doesn’t mean crime fans won’t have plenty to savor in the month ahead. In particular, October is positively stacked with heavy-hitters in the noir and…

Batman wears a mask. So do Zorro and Darth Vader. All three of those characters embraced masks for very different reasons, and most of those motives still apply when a character in a suspense novel…

As a reader and a writer, I crave stories with a very strong sense of place. I love when a setting is so vivid and distinctive that it shapes the story as much as the characters do. One of the earl…

At first glance, a Jane Austen cozy crime retelling may seem like a strange, hybrid monster, but look around and you’ll find plenty of examples. From Amelia Blackwell’s time-travelling Miss Georgia…

I love when a mystery knows it’s a mystery. I mean, I love when any story knows it’s a story, but I especially love it when that story is a mystery. For me, the more meta, the more play…

I first came across the South West Coast of England on Google Earth. At the time, having young children prevented me from traveling to the places I wrote about and I turned to Google Earth, especia…

My newborn twins are finally asleep. White noise chirring, dawn beginning to hum through the bedroom’s linen curtains, and I’m studying their identical bald heads—the twins are not iden…

Here are five debut novels to check out this month, all of which are somewhere between thriller, noir, crime, and horror. Please don’t shoot the messenger if there’s too much horror her…

Australia has sold itself well to the world over the past fifty or so years. The pitch has been as consistent as it has been factual: sunlit white sand beaches as long as your barefoot legs can wal…

I used to believe that a not-guilty verdict would settle everything. I was wrong. In January 1999, after a bizarre trial with twists and turns that would not be believed except for the transcript, …

In economics 101, you may have heard of things like “lipstick indicators” or “men’s underwear index” to predict recessions and expansions. These indexes are plentiful across industries, but my favo…

I think it’s safe to say a large swath of bibliophiles out there simply love reading about psychopaths. They love them when they serve as the core component of true crime, they love them in fiction…

I first heard about Walter F. White, the spy, when I was in elementary school. I grew up in a mixed and Black family, the lightest child in every bunch. Possibly the lightest child in history, I th…

Contrary to popular wisdom, it is not necessary to write what you know. A decidedly non-exhaustive list of exhibits: Tolstoy presumably did not know how to be a woman when he wrote Anna Karenina; T…

When a crime-fiction conference recently came to San Francisco, a friend of mine issued me a challenge: since Capri Sanzio, the protagonist of my current mystery series, is a true-crime walking tou…

5 new works of true crime history and reportage out this month, as selected by the CrimeReads editors. * Anand Giridharadas, Man in the Mirror: Hope, Struggle, and Belonging in an American City (Kn…

Anyway, I recently published a new anthology (here’s a link and all that, cause commerce or whatever: theodorevanalst.com) so I’ve been doing the interview and press thing lately. During one of tho…

If you’re anything like me, you’ve awaited the film or TV adaptation of your favorite thriller with a mix of excitement and trepidation—will they do it justice? What if they miscast it or mess with…

Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Sarah Langan, Trad Wife (Atria) “[A] slick, eerie horror outing…a memorable entry in the recent slew of h…

I don’t know about you, but I read to escape. To leave the mundane world behind. To dive into a setting completely different from my own. And to me, few things are more escapist than novels set wit…

It’s getting harder and harder to tell the bounds between gothic fiction, suspense, psychological thrillers, and horror; much of what makes a good thriller is a good twist, and for me, a twis…

A missing lens cap, a mistaken headline, and a Catholic church in southern Japan: these are the pieces of the puzzle that needed to come to together for me to write my novel Officer Shimada and the…

Why? Because art is expensive. Think about it, paintings and sculptures are unique objects made by one artist over a lifetime, limited in supply, ergo valuable. Example: Leonardo da Vinci made only…

A missing lens cap, a mistaken headline, and a Catholic church in southern Japan: these are the pieces of the puzzle that needed to come to together for me to write my novel Officer Shimada and the…

After decades of watching and reading thrillers, you would think that most people would be well versed in the ins and outs of getting away with murder. Yet, time and time again, we see an alibi car…

Cozy mystery amateur sleuths always seem to stumble into solving murders with surprising results. Their day jobs may seem like ordinary professions on the surface, but once a mysterious death occur…

Incorporating real-world political or social issues into a commercial novel has always been tricky, if not questionable. Is it necessary for the story, or the character? Will a clearly defined posi…

Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. Rupert Holmes, Where the Truth Lies (Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster) “Holmes, who has won honors galore for his…

Once upon a time, there was a story that twisted the fabric of its origins, becoming more horrific, more deadly, taking tropes and beats from classic fairytales and turning them into something new.…

There have always been Australian crime novels set in remote areas, but a distinctive cluster of them has appeared in recent years, prompting reviewers to use the phrase, “outback noir.&#8221…

Chronovisor, Kevin Walker and Jack Auen’s debut feature, is an immersive, intellectual mystery in the style of Jorge Luis Borges and Umberto Eco. Taking place mostly in libraries and showcasing the…