Everyone loves a housewife; housewife here meaning not the barefoot and pregnant archetype, but a girlboss with hair extensions, implants and a whole lot of attitude who’s always willing to tussle with her “friends” for an audience of millions. But what happens when a reluctant housewife ends up dead—and she’s only the first casualty of the new season? Astrid Dahl’s The Really Dead Wives of New Jersey effectively straddles the line between dark humor and suspense, following multiple characters in front of and behind the camera as they reckon with a murderer in their spray-tanned, Botoxed midst.
Garden State Goddesses is Huzzah Network’s third most popular reality show, but, as always, the real drama is behind the scenes. Showrunner Eden has her sights on greener pastures so she can finally move out of Hoboken, New Jersey: It only takes a little finagling to bring her naive cousin Hope out of a fundamentalist California commune and into the on-camera fold to boost ratings. Meanwhile, newlywed (and newly wealthy) Hope is a fish out of water among her over-the-top costars: bisexual single mom Renee, nail salon maven and self-proclaimed “Italian supremacist” Carmela, and Carmela’s bonehead of a best friend Valerie, who’s also Hope’s sister-in-law. But when a lethal cocktail leaves one of the housewives dead—and the bodies keep dropping—Eden and the Goddesses cast and crew must crack the case, or risk cancellation of the show . . . and their lives.
Astrid Dahl is the creation of author Anna Dorn: According to Dahl’s cheeky bio, she’s the “star” of Dorn’s Perfume and Pain, a novel that’s also dark, hilarious and campy. Dahl/Dorn has crafted an exceedingly colorful cast of characters, especially Goddesses regular Birdie, a dowager of indeterminate age and bottomless wealth who just can’t seem to stay sober (much to viewers’ delight), and Birdie’s adult son and assistant, Pierre, who loves horses as much as he loathes housewives. The Really Dead Wives of New Jersey shines bright in its love for soap opera-style reality TV, where manicured nails are sharp and verbal barbs over Prosecco-fueled lunch dates even sharper. Pour a healthy glass of white wine—who cares if it’s only 2 p.m.?—don your finest faux fur and get ready for a bumpy but fabulous ride through New Jersey’s toniest, deadliest suburb.
Astrid Dahl’s The Really Dead Wives of New Jersey, a murder mystery set on a Housewives-style reality show, effectively straddles the line between dark humor and genuine suspense.
Haunting and Homicide, Ava Burke’s new cozy mystery, introduces a tour guide who sees ghosts—and helps one solve his own murder.
Tallulah “Lou” Thatcher runs a ghost tour company in New Orleans. Though she just started, her tours are gaining in popularity thanks to her knack for finding paranormal activity on late-night strolls through the Big Easy. Lou’s had the ability to see and speak to ghosts her whole life, but rival tour guide Adam Brandt is convinced that she’s faking her supernatural encounters and launches a campaign to shut down her tours for good. But when Lou stumbles upon Adam’s lifeless body, she promises his confused and angry ghost that she’ll help solve his murder. She needs to act quickly: Their feud was well known, and the murder weapon may have come from her shop, so the police zero in on Lou as a suspect. Can she work with Adam and the other neighborhood ghosts to solve his murder before she’s arrested? Or worse, targeted by his killer?
Haunting and Homicide takes readers on a delightful and atmospheric tour of New Orleans. Lou’s ghostly friends are unique and very funny, while her tours incorporate actual local history. The real-life details and paranormal elements combined make for a memorable and exciting premise for a cozy mystery series.
Lou herself is a high point of the novel: She’s smart, hardworking, loyal and extremely well-adjusted to her supernatural reality. Her relationships with the secondary characters really make the story come to life—expect heartfelt scenes with her grandmother and her younger half-brother, Bryce. And Lou has chemistry with two potential suitors, one of whom happens to be her childhood crush and best friend’s brother.
Haunting and Homicide is an entertaining introduction to Lou’s complicated and enjoyably spooky life as a sleuth in New Orleans.
Haunting and Homicide is an entertaining start to a cozy mystery series set in New Orleans starring a ghost tour guide—who can actually see and speak to spirits.
A. Rae Dunlap’s The Resurrectionist is a heartfelt yet gruesome historical thriller following two body snatchers as they fall in love and evade Burke and Hare.
A. Rae Dunlap’s The Resurrectionist is a heartfelt yet gruesome historical thriller following two body snatchers as they fall in love and evade Burke and Hare.
Paraic O’Donnell inserts touches of humor and insight without lessening the tension in his breathtaking gothic historical mystery, The Naming of the Birds.
Paraic O’Donnell inserts touches of humor and insight without lessening the tension in his breathtaking gothic historical mystery, The Naming of the Birds.
Sara Sligar’s Vantage Point is an entertaining literary companion to shows like Succession, but also a chilling warning about the rise of deepfake technology.
Sara Sligar’s Vantage Point is an entertaining literary companion to shows like Succession, but also a chilling warning about the rise of deepfake technology.
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Classic detective novels don’t need to be set in Los Angeles. The protagonist does not have to drive a vintage Corvette convertible, and they don’t necessarily require a loyal and lethal sidekick. It is not imperative that the narrative be spun in the first person. That said, it is a formula that has worked for the better part of 40 years for author Robert Crais, demonstrated ably in his latest installment in the Elvis Cole and Joe Pike series, The Big Empty. When the antique Mickey Mouse phone rings on the desk of private investigator Elvis (self-described as “the world’s greatest detective”), he picks up and finds himself in a conversation with the somewhat harried assistant of Traci Beller, a hugely popular social media influencer. Traci is too busy to meet Cole at his office, but if he comes to her, she will give him $1,000 whether he accepts the case or not. It turns out that she wants to hire him to find out what happened to her father, who disappeared 10 years ago: “He called my mom after lunch, told her he was running late, and we never heard from him again. So it was like, poof, he vanished.” Cases don’t get much colder, but Cole agrees to look into it, cautioning Traci not to expect miracles. But before long, Cole can use a miracle or two of his own, as he is savagely beaten by a gang of criminals intent on derailing his investigation at any cost. Oh, and the big finish? It was such a shock and surprise that I went back and read it again.
The Note
Alafair Burke’s latest, The Note, follows three women: May, Lauren and Kelsey, who have been lifelong friends since attending the same summer camp ages ago. They decide to do a girls trip together, a few relaxing days in an Airbnb in the Hamptons. They need it—they have been embroiled in three separate and very public scandals, and they think a seaside vacation will be both fun and cathartic. They are so wrong. As they arrive at a local lunch spot, they discover that parking is at a premium. They patiently await a person exiting a space, only to have it snagged by a driver coming from the other direction. They are annoyed to the point where one of them leaves a note on the car’s windshield that says, “He’s cheating. He always does.” It certainly seems as if it might sow a bit of disharmony between the male driver and his attractive female passenger, some minor naughty payback for the stolen parking spot. It is all fun and games, as they say, until someone turns up dead: in this case, the driver. When the police discover the existence of the note, bit by bit the investigation leads them toward the three women. As their mutual trust begins to break down, alliances shift and reshift. One character is a murderer. Good luck figuring out which one.
Invisible Helix
Keigo Higashino’s beloved character Professor Galileo (aka Manabu Yukawa) returns in Invisible Helix, the latest from Japan’s preeminent suspense author. This book relies less on Yukawa’s detecting skills than some of the previous installments in the series, but is nonetheless a compelling read loaded with Japanese scenery and culture, with a storyline chock-full of secrets past and present. It starts with a baby being left on the doorstep of an orphanage by a young mother devoid of options. By means of a very twisty path, it winds forward two generations to the present, in which people are still shaped by, and acting on, events that happened in their parents’ and grandparents’ day. Professor Galileo gets involved after a murder takes place—no surprise there—and his longtime friend Chief Inspector Kusanagi summons him to assist. Invisible Helix is a very different book than I expected given its predecessors in the series, but I quite liked it all the same. (A brief aside: I lived in Tokyo when the first Professor Galileo book, The Devotion of Suspect X, was released in English. Oddly, as I was reading, I found myself predicting what would happen next at every turn. Some time later, I realized that I had actually seen the Japanese movie based on the book, well before the book’s translation into English.)
★ The Lost House
It’s no secret among BookPage mystery and suspense readers that I am a devotee of Nordic noir, as I often wax poetic about the subgenre. But who would have thought that a superb Nordic noir novel would emanate from the pen (or more likely, keyboard) of an American writer? Melissa Larsen’s The Lost House is that book. On the 40th anniversary of a double murder that rocked Iceland, Agnes, the American granddaughter of the presumed—but not convicted—killer, goes to the small town of Bifröst to participate in a podcast about the homicide. She has always believed her grandfather to be innocent, but she is in the distinct minority. Now, after her grandfather’s slow decline and death, Agnes has decided to visit her ancestral homeland for the first time in an attempt to get some closure. Then, as if in response to the grim anniversary, a local girl goes missing in the harsh Icelandic wilderness. Suspicions of foul play abound, and the buzz around the town is that it is at least peripherally connected to the 40-year-old cold case. The characters are all conflicted and vividly drawn, the milieu is pitch-perfect and the resolution is by turns heartbreaking and strangely uplifting. The Lost House is the first must-read thriller of 2025.
Melissa Larsen’s debut thriller is a chilly masterpiece, plus new cases for Elvis Cole and Professor Galileo in this month’s Whodunit.
Pour a warm beverage and settle in with Paraic O’Donnell’s exceptional third novel, The Naming of the Birds, a thrilling gothic mystery set in Victorian London. The opening section takes readers to a dreary scene in 1872 that reads like a particularly Grimm fairy tale: A group of orphans survives a horrific fire at a place known as the Asylum, only to be secretly carted away to another horrifying institution, where they are given new names, called after birds. One of the children, a girl now called Nightingale, carries secrets from that fire, which “taught her things about the world’s secret nature and her own.” Nightingale has one friend there, a boy now called Finch, who tells her, “I talk to you because you’re the only one who might be able to make sense of it all.”
After that chilling introduction, the action fast-forwards 22 years to 1894, where Scotland Yard Inspector Henry Cutter and his young partner, Sergeant Gideon Bliss, find themselves pursuing a skilled serial killer who seems to be targeting aging civil servants, some of them of high rank. Their murders have been achieved with assassin-esque meticulousness, and the victims are left in haunting, precisely arranged scenes that include the bones of children.
Fans of O’Donnell’s previous book, The House on Vesper Sands, will welcome the return of Cutter and Bliss, along with their sidekick, Octavia Hillington, a vibrant, fearless and piercing journalist who helps them track down the killer. They form a particularly dynamic trio: Cutter is a crusty, grumpy, but determined detective; Bliss is sensitive and fearful, but equally dogged; Hillington is an undaunted Victorian change-maker.
O’Donnell writes and plots with admirable precision, leading readers down a series of intriguing labyrinths to discover what exactly happened to those children back in 1872, and how that incident may be connected to these present-day murders. He is a master of big strokes and small, inserting touches of humor and insight without lessening the tension. He uses the bird theme judiciously throughout: They appear from time to time like eerie witnesses to the unfolding action. And there is a lot of big, glorious action as Cutter, Bliss and Hillington risk their lives to uncover these frightful truths. As Cutter tells his sidekicks, “We are going to see more than mere trickery. We are going to see the performance of a lifetime.” In the end, readers are left with all that and more, including weighty questions to ponder about the nature of justice and revenge.
The Naming of the Birds is a delicious, breathtaking romp that will have readers looking over their shoulders as they quickly turn its pages.
Paraic O’Donnell inserts touches of humor and insight without lessening the tension in his breathtaking gothic historical mystery, The Naming of the Birds.
Drag queens take center stage in Holly Stars’ Murder in the Dressing Room, a fun and fierce cozy mystery.
Joe is a hotel accountant who dreams of something bigger—and they find it as Misty Divine, an up-and-comer in the London drag scene. Misty’s a regular performer at Lady’s Bar, a drag haven owned and operated by the legendary Lady Lady. But when Misty discovers Lady Lady’s lifeless body in her dressing room, she and the other drag queens and kings who perform at the venue become suspects in the murder. To clear her name and find justice for Lady Lady, Misty decides to investigate the crime. She uncovers shocking secrets about Lady Lady, her bar and her fellow drag performers—and someone is willing to kill again to stop Misty from getting to the truth.
Stars’ humor shines in Murder in the Dressing Room, a funny, engaging mystery that makes full use of the dramatic world of drag. A drag queen herself, Stars does an exceptional job of showcasing the highs and lows experienced by members of the community: Joe is empowered by their drag persona and has found a strong support system and devoted boyfriend, but they also experience misgendering and discrimination by strangers and local law enforcement. Throughout the novel, Joe transforms into Misty and de-drags several times. Some situations, like those with their employer, call for Joe to respond; others require Misty’s brashness and wardrobe. Stars does a wonderful job showing how a drag performer can live their most authentic life by embracing all aspects of their identity.
The central mystery is more than it seems, involving a cat burglary, bribery, intimidation and a stolen dress once worn by Judy Garland. Fans of fierce looks and found family will devour this book.
Fans of fierce looks and found family will devour Murder in the Dressing Room, a funny and engaging cozy mystery set in the world of drag.
In the checkout line of an upstate New York convenience store, opportunistic small-time thief Eddie Parker spots a purse overflowing with cash. As the elderly owner finishes her transaction, Eddie maneuvers himself into position to relieve her of her stash. It does not go according to plan; within arm’s reach of his prize, Eddie feels a sharp scratch on his neck and, moments later, his world goes black. He wakes up in a small deserted town that looks like a movie set: buildings with false fronts, shops filled with empty containers, no food or water in sight and Christmastime temperatures dropping below freezing. The title of this thriller by James S. Murray and Darren Wearmouth is almost prophetic: You Better Watch Out. Eddie soon discovers that a handful of other folks have met a similar fate. And although they don’t entirely trust one another, they know that their lives depend on getting out of this place, and the best means to that end is teamwork. But, in true Agatha Christie fashion, one by one they meet their untimely demise, and most graphically. Here is the funny part, though (to me, at least): Fairly early in the book, I thought I had figured out who the villain was. Turns out, I was right—but I had no inkling whatsoever of the diabolical twist that would reveal itself in the final pages.
Havoc
In Christopher Bollen’s Havoc, octogenarian and self-confessed do-gooder Maggie Burkhardt narrates a tale of obsession, deceit and worse at a riverside hotel in Luxor, Egypt, during the height of COVID-19 restrictions. Following the death of her husband, Maggie is far afield from her Wisconsin homeland. Egypt was not her first choice for her retirement, but it is one of the few places welcoming tourists, and she has grown acclimated to the heat and the easy pace of life in the Royal Karnak, a hotel that exemplifies the term “faded glory.” Over time, she has become something of a fixture there, reveling in her role as “doyenne of all she surveys.” And then Otto shows up with his mother, and quickly establishes himself as Chief Nemesis to Maggie and all she holds dear. His childish pranks escalate to blackmail after he surprises Maggie doing something she clearly should not have been doing, and his demands seem to have no end in sight. That said, Maggie is rather duplicitous herself, both in her interactions with other characters and with the reader, as she tries to play the virtuous victim. The narrative is by turns creepy, snarky, humorous and every bit as atmospheric as you would expect from a story set somewhere like the Valley of the Kings. Oh, and there are a couple of murders: nothing too graphic, but quite definitely an affectionate nod to the sweeping, international mysteries of the 1940s.
Robert B. Parker’s Hot Property
After a popular series writer passes away, they often leave legions of fans clamoring for more adventures of their fictional heroes. Ian Fleming’s James Bond and Stieg Larsson’s Lisbeth Salander jump to mind. Other writers often take up the challenge, albeit with decidedly mixed results. But when Mike Lupica took over Robert B. Parker’s Spenser series, it was a seamless transition. It’s as if he channels Parker from beyond the grave: setting, prose, dialogue—the works. In the latest installment, Robert B. Parker’s Hot Property, an attempted murder hits close to home. Ace criminal defense attorney Rita Fiore has been shot and is clinging to life but tenuously. She had been romantically involved with a young up-and-coming politician until his recent accidental (?) death, and now it appears that he may have been involved in some property shenanigans with mob overtones. For Spenser, Rita Fiore is family, as surely as if they had been related by blood, and he will leave no stone unturned in bringing her assailant to justice. Speaking of stones, another Parker protagonist, Police Chief Jesse Stone, makes a cameo appearance, and the two play off each other exceptionally well. Hot Property is a must for longtime Spenser fans and a terrific entry point for newcomers as well.
The Collaborators
If you are in the mood for a high-stakes global espionage novel, with secret agents jet-setting all over the world, you have come to the right place. Michael Idov’s The Collaborators doesn’t waste any time setting up locations or easing into the narrative. In the first sentence, a Russian MiG-29 fighter jet pulls up alongside an Antalya Airlines commercial flight from Istanbul to Riga, Latvia. They are in Belarusian airspace, and the MiG pilot clearly plans to force the Antalya 737 down or shoot it down. On board are a dissident blogger, a pair of fugitives in disguise and heaven only knows what other manner of dodgy characters. Meanwhile, in Riga, CIA agent Aria Falk waits anxiously for the blogger, initially unaware of the flight’s unplanned stop in Minsk. In other news, a financier who has been laundering Russian money for years has apparently killed himself by leaping off a yacht in the open sea, and the multibillion dollar fund he managed seems to have vanished along with him. The connection point for all these disparate events is Falk. Soon enough, he will become involved with Maya Chou, the daughter of the missing (and presumed dead) financier, and things will get very convoluted indeed. The Collaborators devotes little space to pyrotechnics, chase scenes and the like, but cleverness and subterfuge abound, followed by a believable, real-world sort of denouement. PS: Idov is a screenwriter in addition to being a novelist, and this book has silver screen written all over it.
Plus, a wicked holiday delight and a ripped-from-the-headlines espionage thriller in this month’s Whodunit column.
Fans of Jane Pek’s 2022 debut, The Verifiers, starring irrepressible, clever, bike-riding Brooklynite Claudia Lin, will be delighted to learn of Claudia’s return in The Rivals.
While she’s still reeling from the dramatic events—including murder, alas—depicted in The Verifiers, Claudia’s also proud to be a new partner in Veracity, a Tribeca-based private investigation agency that discerns whether clients’ prospective partners are being truthful on dating apps. But Claudia’s also nervous about her new role, thanks to her ongoing internal conflict about the ethics of Veracity’s work (are they background-checking, or stalking and hacking?) and her conviction that, despite her hard-won career advancement, her mother will nonetheless stick to her favorite “look at my lousy Chinese daughter topic of conversation.”
There’s the matter of her own love life, too: Sure, she’ll dutifully tail Amalia, the intelligent and gorgeous date of obnoxious new client Mason Perry (“His opinion of himself is so high, you can see it from outer space.”), but things get complicated when Claudia accidentally-on-purpose befriends her and starts wishing Amalia were her girlfriend instead. She’s also attracted to her mercurial co-worker Becks, but Claudia’s not sure if her feelings are reciprocated. Pek does an excellent job exploring the particular humor and suspense inherent in the mysteries of the human heart.
The author also delves into the gritty mysteries of the tech world as Veracity discovers a corporate conspiracy centered around dating apps, complete with manipulation via AI and the untimely demise of anyone who raises suspicions about the apps’ overlords. Even worse, Claudia’s brother, Charles, works for one of the “Big Three” matchmaking platforms, and she fears he’ll be harmed by their machinations: “He can’t even imagine how deep the deception actually goes, like a tunnel right to the molten center of the earth.”
It’s a lot for Claudia to juggle, especially on a bicycle. Anyone who appreciates a witty contemporary whodunit with a tech-y twist will enjoy the entertaining, thought-provoking goings-on in The Rivals as it explores the insidiousness of technology, the dark side of dating algorithms and the often amusingly complicated life of a dedicated amateur sleuth.
Amateur sleuth Claudia Lin delves into a dating app conspiracy in Jane Pek’s entertaining, thought-provoking The Rivals.
Food anthropologist and cooking show star Miriam Quinones-Smith is back in a delicious new installment of the Caribbean Kitchen cozy mystery series.
Miriam’s life is busier and better than ever. She and her husband, Robert, are raising two young children while sharing a home with her parents in Miami. Miriam’s so-called “Spanglish cooking show,” Abuela Approved, is thriving. And she hasn’t had to solve a murder in three years. But Miriam’s sleuthing-free streak comes to an end when her boss, Delvis, is declared a suspect in a murder that happened moments after filming the show. Then, a body is discovered at the site of Robert’s latest construction project, leading to serious disagreements between archeologists, academics and local tribal representatives. Plus, Miriam’s snobby mother-in-law recruits her to investigate a series of threatening notes sent to their family. There’s nothing Miriam takes more seriously than protecting her loved ones, so she dives into investigating the multiple mysteries.
Author Raquel V. Reyes sets the fun, fast-paced Dominoes, Danzón, and Death three years after the last book in the series (Barbacoa, Bomba, and Betrayal), allowing Miriam and her family to grow and change. Readers need not be familiar with the previous mysteries to enjoy this one, but fans of the series will enjoy seeing the characters flourish in new roles.
Miriam is a delightful character: She’s intelligent, hardworking and dedicated to her family. Between raising two young children in a bustling, intergenerational household and hosting her popular show, Miriam is a busy woman. Still, she manages to solve three mysteries with her quick thinking and determination. Reyes excels at balancing her many storylines in an engaging manner; the multiple mysteries are never overwhelming.
The novel is elevated by its engagement with Caribbean cuisine and culture, and Florida and Native American history, while Spanish speakers will appreciate how Miriam and her family communicate in an authentic blend of Spanish and English. Those who aren’t familiar with Spanish need not worry: Reyes skillfully provides context and translations for their conversations. No matter your background, there’s a lot to learn from Dominoes, Danzón, and Death—and a lot to love.
TV chef Miriam Quinones-Smith has three mysteries to solve in the engaging and endlessly interesting Dominoes, Danzón, and Death.
At the start of John Straley’s Big Breath In, 68-year-old Delphine is staying in a Seattle hotel across the street from the hospital where she is being treated for Stage 4 cancer. The marine biologist is far from everything she loves: her home in Sitka, Alaska; her son and grandson in California; and the whales she has spent a lifetime studying. She is lonely and frustrated, feeling “she had so much more work to do, more photographs to take, more data to go through, more students to foster toward their own research. She couldn’t stand ruminating about her illness.” After all, “what she loved about her life was the sensation that discovery is an unending relay race of research.”
Suddenly, however, Delphine finds herself in a very different kind of relay race. Her late husband, John, was a private investigator, and when one of his former colleagues asks Delphine to do some investigative work, she quickly becomes embroiled in a case involving an illicit infant adoption ring. Despite the danger and her exhaustion, Delphine feels alive again: “This was the opposite of dying and she drank it in.”
Straley has written 13 previous crime novels, but, as he explains in his moving acknowledgements, Big Breath In is inspired by his wife, a marine biologist who has had Parkinson’s disease for 20 years. He created Delphine in her honor, and she is a memorable, whip-smart fireball of a character—a “sickly, thin and bald” woman who carries a stun gun and doesn’t hesitate to jump on a 530-pound Sportster motorcycle that another dying cancer patient bequeaths to her.
Equally wonderful are Straley’s descriptions of whale behavior, which parallel the novel’s action throughout. Just as sperm whales “seem to foster a type of matriarchy” to care for their young, Delphine enlists the help of a group of women, including the motorcycle owner’s grieving widow and a lesbian biker gang, to hunt for the endangered babies. Despite the gruesome, gritty nature of the things Delphine sees and the characters she meets in her quest for justice, Straley’s prose shines with delightful images: “What the boys saw could have been a gathering of tribal huntresses from all the savannas of the world. In the middle of this herd sat Delphine on the Sportster.”
While this is a book about coping with serious illness and dying, it’s also about living, appreciating every moment to its fullest. BigBreath In is a nonstop, high-octane crime novel featuring an unforgettable heroine with a whale-size heart.
John Straley’s nonstop, high-octane Big Breath In introduces the unforgettable Delphine, a 68-year-old cancer patient-turned-investigator.
Shelley Burr’s gripping sophomore mystery, Murder Town, is set in rural Rainier, Australia, a fictional small town located halfway between Melbourne and Sydney. It used to be known as a nice place to take a break from that long journey, what with its pretty Fountain Park and popular local businesses like Earl Grey’s Yarn and Teashop. But then the “Rainier Ripper” came to town and murdered three people. Now, 17 years later, Fountain Park is but one sad stop on a proposed Ripper-centric tour some residents view as their last chance to return Rainier to its former prosperity. Alas, on the eve of the big vote, the potential tour guide is murdered, leaving Rainier awash in terror once again. Can teashop owner and amateur sleuth Gemma Guillory solve the mystery—perhaps with input from Lane Holland, the investigator from Burr’s bestselling debut novel, WAKE—before the killer strikes again?
Congratulations on your second novel! Your first, WAKE, won the Crime Writers’ Association Debut Dagger award in 2019 and soon after became an international bestseller. Now, here we are on the eve of Murder Town’s American debut! How has life changed for you between book one and book two? It’s been a whirlwind! The biggest life change between book one and two is that I gave up my day job in environmental policy and now write full time. Our family moved out to a rural area and I now split my time between writing and farm chores.
“I try to remember that a murder is a death, and a death leaves behind grieving people.”
Both of your books explore what life is like for survivors many years after a crime has occurred—their grief and anger, and their fear when mysteries remain unsolved and they don’t know if neighbors are friend or foe. What intrigues you about looking at these fictional cases from a longer-distance perspective, so to speak? I try to remember that a murder is a death, and a death leaves behind grieving people. It affects the person who found the body, the people who investigated the case, the people left wondering if they could have stopped it. I like to enter the story at the point where those impacts have had a chance to ripple outwards.
The challenge with a cold case is how to create a sense of urgency. If it’s been 10, 20 years, what’s the hurry to solve it now? I need to make sure I’m answering that question for the reader. Including a present-day crime changes that equation, but doesn’t solve it.
Did any real-life cases or favorite thrillers spark your desire to write crime fiction? For both WAKE and Murder Town, I had a moment where I was reading something about a real case that sparked an “I have to write this book” moment, but I wouldn’t consider either book based on the case I was reading about. When I read true crime or news stories, I’m not looking for details to add to stories, I’m looking for people in a situation that strikes a chord.
For Murder Town, that moment came while reading a news article about the South Australian town Snowtown. When I’m talking about the book at home, that’s all I have to say. At a writer’s festival, I can drop that name and watch the audience get what I mean immediately. Internationally it’s not as well known. The Snowtown murders are infamous here, both for their cruelty and for the unusual method of concealing the bodies. They were stored in barrels in a bank vault.
The article discussed the dilemma facing residents of Snowtown, a name synonymous with murder. Do they try to create distance? Change the name? Or lean into it? People stop in the town to take selfies in front of the bank. Should they capitalize on that?
I immediately empathized, and wanted to tell the story of people faced with a similar choice.
Your stories depict disturbing crimes and spend time in the minds of the people who commit them, the victims who endure them and those left reeling from grief and trauma. Is there anything in particular you do to get into the right headspace to craft these narratives, to inhabit these characters and to transition back to your real life afterward? Sunlight is my best friend. If I’m researching for a book, or if I’ve had to climb down into a dark place to write a scene, I make myself stop at lunchtime. That gives me a few hours to process it. Delving into those things in the evening and then trying to go straight to bed is a big mistake.
When I was writing my first book, I worked during the day, so I would write after my then-toddler daughter went to bed. There were some nights where I would write a sentence, go check if the window in her bedroom was locked, write a sentence, check the window . . .
You do an excellent, empathetic job of exploring the pros and cons of true crime tourism through the eyes of your characters, from victims’ disgusted families to business owners who acknowledge it’s unseemly (to say the least) but believe there are upsides. What did you hope to convey in Murder Town about “dark tourism,” as it’s been called: its popularity, its effects on survivors and more? It was important to me not to portray one side of the argument as right and the other as wrong. It’s a really difficult choice and the characters on every side have good reasons for feeling the way they do.
I did a lot of research into actual dark tourism. When I was growing up, I spent a lot of time in a town that runs on it. My grandparents lived in Glenrowan, which was the site of a shootout between police and the bushranger Ned Kelly. The town has a massive statue of Kelly, an animatronic show and just opened a new visitor’s center focused on the Kelly Gang. It’s a genuinely positive thing for the town, done with the full support of any living descendants. Another good example is the thriving industry of Jack the Ripper tours in London.
Those cases aren’t usually controversial, because the crimes were so long ago. What we tend to forget is that dark tourism and a fascination with true crime isn’t new. Ned Kelly tourism started immediately, it just survived a long time.
I don’t want to make a case for dark tourism being right or wrong, I just want people to remember that the victims are people, and their friends and family are hurting.
“We’ve always been a morbid species, and true crime has a long history.”
Money is of course on the minds of Rainier’s business owners, who’ve been struggling since a highway bypass compounded the town’s downturn after the murders and worry about descending into bankruptcy. What is it about that particular sort of financial desperation, that feeling of running out of options, that makes for compelling fiction? Money touches everything, and is very, very personal. It’s hard to imagine now, given how central money is to both books, but way back in the early drafts of WAKE, I actually tried to avoid making money a plot point. It had the opposite effect—it was distracting to early readers that the characters never seemed to worry about money or how to afford their lifestyle.
It’s easy to empathize with a character who is stressed about money, who wants to provide for their family and give their children a stable future.
It’s especially fascinating to read about Rainier locals who are parents, friends and neighbors—but also are the police officers who investigated the first murders, and must now keep everyone safe and calm while they contend with the new case. What about that particular collision of the personal and professional appeals to you? I live in a town about the same size as Rainier, and it’s impossible for the police to just be faceless uniforms. They’re behind you in line at the Country Women’s Association breakfast, they’re picking their kids up at the school gate, they’re grocery shopping at the same time as you. There’s a flipside to that as well—if you encounter the police in their professional capacity, the next CWA breakfast is going to be awkward.
In Rainier, every character is connected to every other character in at least two different ways. Every time one of them makes a decision, it echoes through that web of connections. The town’s two police officers are very much a part of that web.
You so fully paint a picture of Rainier’s landscape and how your characters move through those emotionally fraught spaces. Did you create an actual map, go on walks, etc., to help you get the physical and psychological aspects of that experience just right? The town has a significant geographical feature—it’s the exact halfway point between Australia’s two largest cities, Sydney and Melbourne. There is a real town in that location, Tarcutta.
I stopped in Tarcutta while on a road trip (I was transporting our cat to our new home), and was struck by a sign: Turn left for Sydney, turn right for Melbourne. The two cities are nine hours apart. The idea of a town that defines itself based on two other faraway places immediately fascinated me.
I don’t like to take a real town and layer a dark history over it, but my fictional towns are always based on real ones. I’m too bad at geography to invent one from whole cloth. I need to be able to look at a map, see what a realistic layout looks like: Would it have its own school, how many businesses are there, how many streets, how many police officers. But, being a fictional town, I can always tweak those details to fit what the story needs.
You grew up in Newcastle but also spent a lot of time on your grandparents’ farm. How did that experience translate into writing about remote, isolated places? Are there any other aspects of your growing-up years that tend to infuse and inform your stories and characters, whether you realized at first or not? Newcastle and Glenrowan are in different states; every handover was a 16-hour round trip, so I saw a huge number of small Australian towns growing up. Out of all the characters, the nomadic upbringing of Lane Holland feels the closest to my own. Seeing all those towns left me fascinated by how different they all were, but also by the similarities. A lot of highway towns have a “thing” that sets them apart: Holbrook has a World War II submarine installed in a park, Gundagai has the Dog on the Tucker Box. That really informed the town of Rainier.
My core memory of my time on the property (my grandfather has asked me to stop calling it a farm, as while they had livestock and orchards and acres of paddocks, they didn’t actually make a living farming) is of walking those paddocks. We’d be turned out in the morning and told to come back when we were hungry. There were moments I could look up and realize I was the only person for kilometers. I wanted to capture that feeling of isolation in WAKE.
After the events of WAKE, private investigator Lane Holland is now a resident of the Special Purpose Centre prison facility. What was it like to spend time with Lane again? What sort of research did you do to help you capture the atmosphere of the prison? What was the most surprising thing you learned? I was surprised by how easy it was to slip back into Lane’s voice. Despite his circumstances, his story is far from over.
I read and listened to a lot of first-person accounts of life in prison. As with my towns, the Special Purpose Centre is fictional, but based on a real facility used for vulnerable prisoners. I also had to do a lot of dry reading of policy papers and prison rules (much of which is redacted for security reasons) and white papers on topics like how aging and dying prisoners live.
The most surprising thing I found is a case where a convicted murderer was placed in a prison where the aunt of his victim worked as a guard. I’d assumed there had to be policies to prevent a situation that explosive. Heartbreakingly, it was the aunt who ended up vulnerable—her niece’s killer went out of his way to torment her, and she had to leave her position.
What do you think about the ever-increasing interest in true crime? Do you think the help can ever justify the harm? Why do you think there’s such an intense societal fascination? I’m not convinced that it is increasing. We’ve always been a morbid species, and true crime has a long history. I think what is increasing is access to opportunities to create it; these days anyone with the drive and a microphone can start their own podcast or video series, whereas decades ago, creating a radio show or television series was much more challenging. I think that can be a wonderful thing—where would we be without Michelle McNamara’s work on the Golden State Killer? There are a lot of cases getting attention and resources from the true crime industry with the grateful approval of the friends and family of the victims. Other cases, not so much. That lack of gatekeeping also means a lot of content being produced by people who don’t feel bound by any journalistic code of ethics.
I love true crime. Respectful, compassionate, victim-centered true crime. I love works like A Light in the Dark, written by Ted Bundy survivor Kathy Kleiner Rubin, or The Five by historian Hallie Rubenhold.
Are you a plan-things-ahead writer, especially when multiple secrets and surprises are involved, or are you more of a let’s-see-what-comes-up sort? Did anything that ended up in the book surprise even you? I’m very much a planner. I’m so impressed by writers who prefer to write crime fiction without an outline. Mine is my safety net. Any time I find myself stuck, I can go back to the outline, and every time it turns out that I left something out of a previous scene that’s essential to move forward.
But there are always surprises. Sometimes the characters develop in ways that mean they would never act the way they do in my outline. Sometimes I’ll stumble over something in the research that changes the direction of a subplot. Sometimes a character turns out more or less sympathetic than I expected and their ending feels too cruel or too lenient. That’s the fun part.
What’s up next for you—is there anything else you’d like to share with readers, in terms of upcoming books or other news? I’m hard at work on a third Lane Holland novel—we’re in the editing stage now.
Picture of Shelley Burr by Yen Eriksen Media.
In Murder Town, the acclaimed Australian author investigates the allure of so-called “dark tourism.”
The question of how best to set up a personal library has confounded many a book collector. When it comes time to arrange them, all those wonderful volumes can seem like the pieces of an unsolvable puzzle. The literature lover who’s searching for solutions will welcome Book Nooks: Inspired Ideas for Cozy Reading Corners and Stylish Book Displays by Vanessa Dina and Claire Gilhuly.
Packed with easy-to-execute design schemes and Antonis Achilleos’ fabulous photographs, Book Nooks offers tips on how to group books according to color and size, as well as strategies for using personal effects in an arrangement. For establishing a comfy reading area, there are options to suit every style, space and taste. The book also addresses the art of stacking (Yes, it can be a creative act!), suggests methods for bringing plants into the picture, organizing those prize cookbooks and integrating analog reading material into a teen’s room. With reading recs from noted authors and a look at Little Free Libraries, Book Nooks is a bibliophile’s best friend.
Hidden Libraries
DC Helmuth’s Hidden Libraries: The World’s Most Unusual Book Depositories is a perfectly on-point present for any reader, but especially one who loves to travel. This wide-ranging title profiles 50 remarkable libraries in locations across the globe. Staff stories, fascinating facts, spectacular imagery and a foreword from critic and librarian Nancy Pearl make it a winning tribute to the mission of libraries everywhere.
Hidden Libraries surveys a range of amazing physical spaces. The Kurkku Fields’ Underground Library in Kisarazu, Japan, is a book-lined grotto covered in grass, while the cocoon-shaped Heydar Aliyev International Airport Library near Baku, Azerbaijan, projects sheer architectural awesomeness. Examples of inspired resourcefulness regarding book circulation abound: In China, the Shenzhen library system distributes titles via vending machine. And Helmuth doesn’t dismiss even the most miniature of libraries. A handsome wooden cabinet filled with colorful books, the Little Free Library at the South Pole—startling against Antarctica’s unrelieved whiteness—seems to defy its frozen surroundings. Big or small, grand or humble, each library serves as a singular point of enrichment and connection, and Helmuth’s stirring volume honors these efforts.
The Rory Gilmore Reading Challenge
With its quick-witted heroine Rory Gilmore, a voracious reader with dreams of attending Harvard, Gilmore Girls could very well be classified as a TV show for bookworms. The series, which aired from 2000 to 2007, made numerous allusions (339, to be exact) to books of all genres—titles favored by Rory and her friends. In The Rory Gilmore Reading Challenge: The Official Guide to All the Books, Erika Berlin explores the novels, plays and poetry cited on the show, providing episode information and details on who read what.
Inspired by Buzzfeed’s 2014 list of all the books mentioned in Gilmore Girls, Berlin’s breezy volume takes a nostalgic look back at Rory’s world while sharing reading recommendations (Frankenstein, The Poems of Emily Dickinson, One Hundred Years of Solitude, the list goes on) and invaluable book-related advice, including approaches for becoming a more focused reader and easy ways to impose order on a chaotic book collection. Filled with photos from the show, this book is a sunny retrospective and a buoyant tribute to the reading life.
Buried Deep and Other Stories
For the fantasy fan, there’s no better gift than Buried Deep and Other Stories by Naomi Novik, bestselling author of the Scholomance trilogy, Uprooted and Spinning Silver. As this collection proves, Novik is a natural conjurer whose stories—rich with allusion and detail—feel effortlessly authentic. Each provides an escape into an alternative world that’s wholly realized.
“Dragons & Decorum”—a fantastical recasting of Pride and Prejudice, set in the Regency England of Novik’s Temeraire series—finds Elizabeth Bennet riding a winged dragon named Wollstonecraft. In “The Long Way Round,” Novik offers a taste of her next work (tentatively titled Folly) and introduces spirited protagonist Intessa Roh. “Vici,” another Temeraire tale, but this time set in ancient Rome, chronicles the unexpected camaraderie that arises between Marc Antony and a valiant dragon. Introductions from Novik accompany the anthology’s 13 stories, and readers will relish the context they give to her work. This is a transportive collection from an author who maps her narrative milieus with extraordinary precision.
The Man in Black and Other Stories
Crime fiction maven Elly Griffiths is known as a prolific writer, having penned the Ruth Galloway, Harbinder Kaur and Brighton mysteries series. But did anyone suspect she was writing short stories on the side? That’s right—Griffiths has long played around with short-form work, and her intriguing new volume, The Man in Black and Other Stories, spotlights this aspect of her artistry.
The atmospheric anthology brings together 19 pieces, in which, fans will be delighted to learn, Griffiths expands the backstories of some of her most popular characters. The volume’s eponymous story is a spooky sketch set just before Halloween that features Ruth Galloway. “Harbinger” tracks Harbinder Kaur’s all-too-eventful first day at Shoreham Criminal Investigation Department. And in “Ruth Galloway and the Ghost of Max Mephisto,” all three of Griffiths’ sleuths converge, as it were. Ingeniously plotted and leavened with humor, the pieces are brief but satisfying. From sinister tales to twisty whodunits, Griffith’s short stories deliver as much spellbinding suspense as a full-blown novel.
Got a serious bibliophile on your list? Tick that box with one of these titles.
The typically unflappable Bruno Courrèges is annoyed. While he was on medical leave, his position as chief of police was taken over by an overbearing new hire, and she has no intention of vacating it until he has been cleared to return to service. Moreover, she has lectured him regarding his general untidiness and inept record-keeping. For the time being, it is better for everyone concerned if Bruno beats a hasty retreat to somewhere else, anywhere else. So, for A Grave in the Woods, Martin Walker’s 17th installment in the popular series, Bruno is tasked with investigating (wait for it . . .) a grave in the woods. Three bodies are in the grave, all dating back to World War II: two German women and one man, an Italian submarine captain, oddly distant from his expected undersea context. Oh, and while we are on the topic of water, Bruno’s hometown of St. Denis—a sadly fictional village in the Périgord region of France—is bracing for an epic, climate change-fueled flood. The dams have held thus far, but it’s getting dicey. As Bruno digs deeper into the grave situation (sorry), questions dating back some 80 years are unearthed. Thus, there is perhaps more history than mystery in this episode of Bruno’s adventures, but there is nothing wrong with that. There is plenty of what readers come to St. Denis for: the food and wine; the camaraderie; and of course, Balzac the basset hound, surely one of the most engaging four-legged supporting characters ever to grace the pages of a mystery novel.
Midnight and Blue
Wow, you miss one book in a series, and the protagonist transforms from the number one cop in Scotland to a prison inmate. As Ian Rankin’s latest mystery, Midnight and Blue, opens, John Rebus is cooling his heels in the slammer. His crime: attempted murder, which is under appeal, but the wheels of justice are turning slowly. At first, he is incarcerated in the relatively safe Separation and Reintegration unit, where prisoners in danger (such as ex-cops) are assigned, but he is soon to be rehoused in the general prison population, in part thanks to a safe-passage guarantee from Edinburgh’s reigning crime lord, who credits Rebus for his ascent to the underworld throne. When a murder takes place in a nearby two-person cell, Rebus’ detecting instincts bubble to the surface, although he must be somewhat more circumspect than if he was out on the streets. In a parallel narrative, Rebus’ onetime colleague Detective Inspector Siobhan Clarke is investigating the disappearance of a teenage girl, a case that will come to have a tangential—or perhaps more than tangential—connection with the aforementioned prison murder. Author Rankin is in top form as he reinvents his flawed hero by having him navigate an equally flawed milieu, in what must be one of the most original locked-room mysteries ever.
Murder Takes the Stage
One of my favorite plot devices for a mystery—or really any sort of novel—is the revisiting of a familiar tale through the perspective of a different character, such as Gregory Maguire’s retelling of the Cinderella story, Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister. Colleen Cambridge has mined this vein exceptionally well with her series featuring Phyllida Bright, housekeeper to Agatha Christie. This time out, the Christie entourage moves to London for Murder Takes the Stage, in which one of the author’s stories has been made into a West End play. Unfortunately, however, an actor whose surname began with the letter A turns up dead at a theater beginning with the letter A. Then, the body of an actor playing Benvolio is discovered at a theater beginning with a B. You can see where this is going, right? It’s a clever and delicious spin on one of Christie’s better known works, The A.B.C. Murders. Exactly one year ago, I opined that Cambridge’s previous installment in the series, Murder by InvitationOnly, “straddles the line between historical fiction and intricate, Christie-esque suspense quite well, without the cloying cutesiness that can sometimes plague mysteries on the cozier side of things. And Phyllida Bright is simply a gem.” I stand by that assertion 100%.
★ The Grey Wolf
An old legend tells of two wolves that battle inside each of us: a black wolf that represents anger, greed, arrogance, resentment, envy and ego; and a gray wolf that represents kindness, generosity, compassion, empathy, love and hope. Which one will win, you may ask? The answer is simple, yet profound: The one you feed. The Grey Wolf also serves as the title of Louise Penny’s 19th entry in her critically acclaimed series featuring Chief Inspector Gamache of the Sureté du Québec. The Grey Wolf is far and away Penny’s most ambitious novel to date, landing Gamache and his team squarely into the middle of ecoterrorism on a scale hitherto unimaginable in typically tranquil Canada. But as data begins to trickle in, it becomes apparent that the plot’s tentacles are farther reaching than anyone could reasonably have predicted, involving an order of Québécois monks who have taken a vow of silence, the highest levels of the Canadian federal government and even the Vatican. Equally troubling is evidence suggesting that key members of the Sureté may have been compromised, leaving the core team of Gamache, Beauvoir and Lacoste twisting in the wind as the stopwatch ticks away the minutes. The Grey Wolf is 432 pages long, and I read it in one sitting, because I could not put it down.
Plus, Colleen Cambridge gifts readers with another clever mystery starring Phyllida Bright, housekeeper to none other than Agatha Christie.
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Maria Ressa’s book is a political history of the Philippines and an intimate memoir, but it’s also a warning to democracies everywhere: Authoritarianism is a threat to us all.
Sean Adams has dialed down the dystopian quotient from his first satirical novel, The Heap, but that element is still very much present in The Thing in the Snow.
