If you're new here, why not subscribe to our email updates or follow us on Facebook? You can also add us to your Google Reader. Thanks for visiting! Last week I attended a blogger conference where two of the participants told us about how they’d been taken in by an online “friend” who turned out not to have existed at all. Or, at least, the...

At a crime writing convention I went to last year, there was a good deal of discussion on one panel about why it is that the victims in crime novels are almost always women. Needless to say, it was a heated debate, and a good many reasons were offered. Among these were the fact that it’s easier to elicit an emotional reaction when a female is...

  Spencer Seidel’s debut Dead of Wynter is your classic gritty murder mystery read–the type best read curled up on the couch with a cup of something hot (or perhaps, given the subject matter of this book, something strong). Like Adam Baker’s Outpost, which I recently reviewed, it draws heavily on setting not only as part of its plot,...

  I have to admit that I shirk from books that tend towards gratuity in their subject matter, and which are unrelenting in their approach to violence and misery. It’s not that I have a thing against dark themes (I have enough Russian classics lining my shelves to prove that), but it’s the need to wallow and gambol in this sort of stuff that...

I do love the odd cozy mystery, but I’ve found more than a few times that cozies tend to struggle from a sort of narrative insularity. Because every character is ostensibly a suspect, they typically have a narrow cast list, and these individuals are usually linked together in some way. This can have a stifling affect on both plot and character, and...

  Goodness. While the identity of the author of The Book With No Name is apparently unknown, I’ll throw my hat into the ring and assert that it’s clearly a collaboration between acclaimed guts-and-gore director Quentin Tarantino and rather less acclaimed hokey-backdrop-and-visible-strings director Ed Wood. Akitchen sink type novel, it contains...